100 Days of Whoppers

Summary

Donald Trump — whom we crowned the “King of Whoppers” when he was a long-shot candidate in 2015 — has held true to form during his first 100 days as president of the United States.

In his first hour as president, he painted a dark portrait of a crime-ridden America with a dismal economy. The next day he falsely denied that he had been feuding with the intelligence agencies, which days earlier he had compared to Nazi Germany’s.

He grandly boasted that his inaugural crowd was larger than Obama’s, and said his Electoral College majority was larger than those of any president since Ronald Reagan. Neither claim was close to the truth.

He doubled down on his baseless claim that massive voter fraud gave Hillary Clinton her popular vote plurality last year. Then he made a new and equally groundless claim that President Barack Obama had ordered his phones tapped during the campaign — and called for Congress to investigate, even though he could produce no evidence. He has claimed credit for jobs created (or saved) before he took office, and for getting China to stop currency manipulation that actually stopped years earlier.

And he has adamantly refused to admit error, sometimes piling new falsehoods upon old. When photos showed his inaugural crowd, though respectable, was far smaller than the one for Obama’s 2009 swearing-in, his press secretary recited bogus statistics on subway ridership as evidence that Trump was right. And when those statistics were quickly shown to be incorrect, another aide blithely dubbed the falsehoods as merely “alternative facts” — a phrase that has now entered the language as a euphemism for blatant and unrepentant falsehoods.

Analysis

Here’s a chronological listing of the whoppers Trump has told during his first 100 days:

Inaugural Whoppers

• In , President Trump spoke darkly of “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives,” and promised: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” In fact, the U.S. violent crime rate in 2015 (the most recent full year on record) was less than half what it was at, based on preliminary reports. Trump also painted a dismal picture of the economy, saying other countries were “destroying our jobs.” Actually, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics would soon report, the economy had just added 216,000 jobs in January — the , which was the longest on record to date. That included a gain of 12,000 manufacturing jobs for the month. (Trump would later , even though all of it occurred before he was sworn in.)