Donald Trump Made 30,573 False or Misleading Claims, Averaging 21 Lies Per Day in Just the First Four Years

This week he announced a “breakthrough” with a country that says no talks happened — and bragged about a “gift” from Iran that Iran says doesn’t exist

The Washington Post fact-checker database documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump’s first term.

21 false claims per day

That is the average across four years. Not the bad weeks. The average. For context, the average American sends about 32 texts per day. Trump was making 21 verified false or misleading public statements for every 32 texts a normal person sends. Every single day, including weekends, holidays, and the days he was playing golf, which were many.

39 false claims per day by his final year

The pace nearly doubled from his first year to his last. Most people, when repeatedly told they are wrong about something, adjust. Trump’s response to being fact-checked approximately 30,000 times was to go faster.

503 false claims in a single day

On November 2nd, 2020 — the day before the election — fact-checkers logged 503 false or misleading claims in one day. That is one false claim every two minutes and fifty-one seconds, if he slept eight hours. He probably did not sleep eight hours.

492 false claims in just the first 100 days

He did not ease into it. 492 false or misleading claims in the first hundred days of the first term. Nearly five per day before the administration had unpacked its boxes. This is relevant because one popular theory at the time was that he would become more measured once in office. He did not become more measured once in office.

The growth curve: 1,999 → 5,689 → 8,155

• 2017: 1,999 false or misleading claims

• 2018: 5,689

• 2019: 8,155

Each year was not just more than the last. Each year was substantially more than the last. The trendline was not flattening. It was bending upward.

27 months to reach 10,000. Then 5 months to go from 20,000 to 30,000.

The last ten thousand came in less than a fifth of the time of the first ten thousand. The Washington Post fact-checkers, having spent four years on this, explained why they were not doing it again for the second term: “We needed to get back our lives.”

78% of fact-checked statements rated false or worse

According to early PolitiFact analysis, when fact-checkers specifically selected a Trump claim to examine, 78% did not hold up. To be clear about methodology: fact-checkers do not check every statement a politician makes. They check the ones that seem worth checking. Seventy-eight percent of the ones that seemed worth checking turned out to be false or worse.

The Bottomless Pinocchio

In 2018, the Washington Post introduced a new rating called the Bottomless Pinocchio — for claims that had been rated false and then repeated more than twenty times anyway. Trump immediately qualified for fourteen of them. The category was invented specifically because the existing system had no way to account for what was happening. Some of the repeated claims had been corrected hundreds of times. He kept saying them. This is the part that is hard to convey with statistics alone.

57% of Americans said his claims were “rarely” or “never” based on facts

A majority of Americans concluded, while watching this unfold in real time, that what they were hearing did not match reality. This is the most bipartisan finding in the dataset.

A few specific examples, since numbers only go so far

The inauguration crowd. On his first full day in office, Trump told CIA employees he had seen a crowd of a million, maybe a million and a half people at his inauguration. His press secretary went to the briefing room and told reporters it was the largest inauguration audience in history. Aerial photographs showed attendance was roughly one-third the size of Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Spicer later said he regretted it. Trump did not say this.

Windmill cancer. Trump claimed across multiple speeches over multiple years that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. There is no scientific evidence for this. It became one of his fourteen immediate Bottomless Pinocchios. He kept saying it.

The stolen election. After losing in 2020, Trump claimed the election had been stolen through massive fraud. More than 60 courts found no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to change the outcome. His own Attorney General said the same. His own election security officials called it the most secure election in American history. He has never stopped making the claim.

And now: Iran

This brings us to the present, which has given the database a strong start to the second term.

The US and Israel have been at war with Iran since late February. On Monday, facing an expiring 48-hour ultimatum he had issued to Iran and an imminent market open, Trump posted on Truth Social in all capitals that the two sides had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” and that he was therefore pausing any planned strikes. Oil prices fell. Markets opened calmly.

Iran said no such conversations had taken place. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s parliament, called Trump’s claims “fake news intended to manipulate financial and oil markets.” A senior Iranian official told Drop Site News there were no new developments. Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan said “no direct or indirect negotiations have taken place between the two countries.” Iran’s military said the US was “negotiating with itself.”

Trump then told reporters the US was talking to “the right people” in Iran and that Iran had sent him a “very big present” involving oil and gas. Iran has not publicly acknowledged any such offer. An Axios source with knowledge of the discussions said there did not appear to have been any direct talks at all. NPR reported that Pakistan had been relaying messages between the two sides — which is a different thing from direct talks, and a very different thing from Iran sending presents.

Trump explained that Iran’s denials were the result of miscommunication within the Iranian leadership.

Iranian academic Seyed Mohammad Marandi, closely linked to the government, offered a different explanation on X: “Every week, when markets open, Trump makes these kinds of statements to drive down oil prices. Even his five-day deadline aligns with the closure of the energy market.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published this week found 61 percent of Americans disapprove of the attacks on Iran. The war continues. The talks that may not have happened continue to be discussed. The present has not been produced.

The Washington Post fact-checkers are on sabbatical. Someone else will have to count this one.

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