CNN’s Daniel Dale, doing his job:
Undeterred by the pandemic, Trump kept using a bunch of his old favorite false claims. (No, he is not the one who got the Obama-era Veterans Choice program passed; no, he has not always protected patients with pre-existing conditions.) But he also created entire new categories of pandemic-specific dishonesty.
Trump made 71 false claims about the pandemic and travel. He made 37 about coronavirus testing. This includes one of his most infamous and most egregious false claims of the crisis — his March 6 declaration that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” — and 12 renditions of perhaps his most absurd pandemic false claim, the insistence that the Obama administration left him bad or old tests for this new virus for which there could not have been a test until Trump’s presidency.
Trump also made 24 false claims about ventilators and the Strategic National Stockpile. Ten of these were versions of his claim that he was left entirely empty stockpile shelves by Obama. In reality, Obama left thousands of ventilators and various other supplies.
One indication of the brazenness of Trump’s dishonesty: he made 12 false claims about what it was he himself had said in the past — sometimes things he had said just the day prior, sometimes in the very same briefing. In theory, the daily White House coronavirus briefings gave the President a chance to inform Americans about the crisis. In practice, they became modified campaign rallies — a nearby stage on which Trump could be Trump, with all the usual boasting, rambling, and disregard for truth.T
rump made 16 false claims at the briefing on April 6, a marathon session where he appeared for more than 95 minutes. He made 14 more at the April 13 briefing, where he appeared for more than 100 minutes.
We counted 23 briefings in which the President made five or more false claims. Trump’s three most dishonest events during this 14-week period all came before he stopped traveling because of the pandemic: 21 at a January rally in Des Moines, 19 at a February rally in Las Vegas, 18 at a March Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But Trump also made 16 false claims at a pandemic-related Fox News “virtual town hall” at the Lincoln Memorial in early May.
Trump averaged about 8.5 false claims per day from July 8, 2019, when we started counting at CNN, through January 26, 2020. During this 14-week pandemic period starting on January 27, it was about 6.7 false claims per day.So that’s a decline. But 6.7 false claims is a lot, especially in a crisis. Let’s not judge Trump only against his own astonishingly high (or low) bar.
Oh, and by the way:
This thing isn’t over. And if I had to guess, we’re going to see those US numbers go up substantially over the next month for a variety of reasons…