The ultimate Trump factcheck: A false word every 19.4 words
We reviewed all his claims since he took office. He’s getting worse
WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump’s words are getting more dishonest over time, the Star has found in the first detailed statistical analysis of his inaccurate statements in office.
The analysis relies on some subjective judgments, which we’ll explain in detail below. But it provides the most comprehensive picture yet available of what historians say is an unprecedented avalanche of serial lying.
Trump’s dishonesty has been a central story of his presidency, a daily problem that has confounded members of Congress and foreign leaders, confused policy debates and made it difficult for many members of the American public to trust the commander-in-chief.
We’ve tried to quantify the issue. Since Trump’s inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017, we’ve fact-checked every word Trump has spoken or tweeted since his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017. Up until July1, 2018, the end date for the analysis, we had counted 1,929 false claims.
Readers wanted more than just this raw number. They asked us, for example, to explain why the number of false claims per week has increased since early 2017. The key question: is Trump just talking more or are his words denser with dishonesty than they used to be?
Thanks to never-before-released data, we can now offer an answer: it’s a bit of both, but there’s no doubt he’s getting worse per word spoken.
Our conclusions: There’s a lot of dishonesty: Of all the words Trump said and tweeted as president as of July1, 5.1 per cent were part of a false claim. Expressed differently: Trump uttered a false word every 19.4 words. Trump’s dishonesty density is increasing: The issue isn’t just that he’s talking more these days. It’s that what he’s saying is less truthful.
In weeks that started in 2017, 3.8 per cent of Trump’s words were part of a false claim. In 2018, it’s 7.3 per cent. Expressed differently: in 2017, Trump said about 26 words for every one false word. In 2018, it’s down to about 14 words per one false word. Word count aside, his raw number of false claims has spiked: Trump made 2.9 false claims per day in 2017. He’s made 5.1 false claims per day in 2018. He is talking 20 per cent more than he used to: Though it’s not the whole issue, some of the 2018 increase in false claims is indeed happening because Trump is speaking more. The number of words Trump utters in a week varies widely depending on what happens to be on his schedule — it often jumps in weeks when he holds one of his hour-long campaign rallies, for example — but it is generally increasing over time. Trump has averaged 484 more public words per day in 2018 than he did in 2017: 2,856 vs. 2,372, a 20 per cent increase.
There is a strong statistical correlation — 0.73, on a scale that goes up to 1 — between the number of words Trump speaks in a week and the number of false claims he makes in a week. The correlation is getting stronger with time: it was 0.55 in 2017, 0.89 in 2018. So: when Trump spoke more in 2017, his number of false claims increased measurably but moderately; when he spoke more in 2018, his number of false claims increased more dramatically.
We have a theory about why there is now a stronger correlation between how much Trump talks and how many false claims he makes: he appears to have started ad-libbing more frequently in recent months than he did at the beginning of his term, when he was less comfortable. We know from experience that Trump makes more false claims when he is improvising rather than reading from a staff-written speech. He’s quite dishonest in interviews: Unsurprisingly, Trump has uttered more false claims in his many speeches, 648 of the 1,925, than anywhere else.
What’s more notable about the data: Trump makes the second most false claims, 380, in interviews. This is interesting because of how few interviews he gives — it depends on how you count, but it’s under 60 — and how friendly most of the interviewers are. According to presidential tracker Mark Knoller, a CBS reporter, Trump had given 26 interviews to Fox News since taking office as of mid-June; he’d given no more than six to any other outlet. So Trump is usually not being pressured into false claims because of tough questioning, he’s just making them. How we did these calculations Basically, we weighed our own data on Trump’s false claims against a new set of data on all of Trump’s comments.
A website, Factba.se, tracks all of Trump’s public comments — interviews, rally speeches, comments to reporters and so on — as well as all of the tweets and retweets from his main Twitter account, @RealDonaldTrump. Factba.se provided us with its data on how many words Trump has uttered or retweeted in every week of his presidency.
We can’t guarantee Factba.se didn’t miss some Trump comments here or there, so their count might be slightly off. But we independently verified that their tracking is very close to comprehensive. On three occasions Factba.se chose not to include a Trump interview because a full transcript was not available, we added those words to the count ourselves. We also did our own word count of six radio interviews and two television interviews Factba.se had not included.
The grand total: Trump said 1,340,330 public words from his inauguration through July 1, 2018.
To calculate a “dishonesty density,” we wanted to judge that total against the number of words that were part of his false claims. To do that, we went back to our own false claims database.
Since Factba.se doesn’t keep track of Trump’s Facebook posts or news releases, we got rid of the four false claims Trump made in those formats. That took us down to 1,925 false claims.
Then we did a word count. The grand total there: Trump said 68,928 words as part of his false claims. With this number — 68,928 — we were able to calculate what percentage of Trump’s 1,340,330 total words were involved in a false claim. (Again, it’s 5.1 per cent.)
And since we had the numbers broken down by week, we were able to calculate a weekly dishonesty density percentage, then see what the trend was. (Again, it’s rising.)
There is a fair degree of subjectivity in these calculations: the false-claims word count depends on where we decided to start and end a given false statement.
If Trump says, “I’ve been learning about science, it’s very interesting, and I’ve learned that most experts think pigs can fly,” is the false claim three words (“pigs can fly”), six words (“most experts think pigs can fly”) or the whole 18-word sentence?
We believe we have been conservative in our quoting decisions; we won’t include an entire monologue about Mexico that came before a false claim about Mexico. But we’ve often left in some words before or after the claim when we believe they are directly connected to the claim.
For example, Trump said in June: “So, we have, through our secretary of labor, Alex Acosta, we just came out with the association plan, which is phenomenal. Millions and millions of people are signing up.” The heart of the false claim is eight words, “millions and millions of people are signing up”: nobody is allowed to sign up yet. But we included the 21-word previous sentence because it is part of the same thought and necessary to understand the false claim. Adifferent way of looking at it In order to remove some of the subjectivity, we did an alternative calculation that ignores the number of words in each false claim. Those calculations showed the same trends.
We weighed the number of total words, 1,340,330, which is objective, against the number of false claims, 1,925, rather than the number of words in these false claims. We found he had said 696 words per false claim. Then we looked at the trend here.
By this measure, too, Trump had grown less truthful.
He said 813 words per false claim in 2017. He dropped to about 561 truthful words per false claim in 2018.