President Donald Trump is a creature of habit. One of those habits is uttering misleading, exaggerated or completely made-up statements.
When I ran The Washington Post Fact Checker, I compiled scores of prewritten fact checks, totaling 30,000 words, based on my familiarity with things Trump would say. When he uttered a particular claim, I would often pluck it out of my document and post the fact check on the Post’s website. Even when Trump made remarks for which there was prepared text, such as a State of the Union address, he often ad-libbed his favorite fibs. Last year, for instance, I documented 26 suspect claims.
I fact checked Trump’s addresses to Congress by drawing on this repository of pre-checked assertions.
Here, then, is a guide to the lies most likely to be uttered by the president on Tuesday night, arranged by category.
Last year, Trump jacked up tariff rates on products from virtually every nation (Russia got a pass). The president has frequently and falsely said foreign countries pay the tariffs when, in fact, economists have agreed that this is a tax that mainly falls on consumers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently confirmed that close to 90% of the tariffs were paid by Americans — and Trump’s top economist responded by saying the researchers should be fired.
Trump has also said the United States has earned trillions of dollars from tariffs — it’s actually less than $300 billion, according to Treasury Department reports — and that he’s reduced...
Iranian officials say more than 150 people were killed when an air strike struck a school in Minab, in the country's southern Hormozgan province. With investigations into the incident underway, Fac...