With Donald Trump’s presidency in the rear-view mirror, there’s a natural human tendency to sort of forget about what he did to the nation’s highest office. Let’s look to the future — and all that.
But it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of the various ways in which Trump sough to fundamentally undermine and redefine the presidency. Or put more simply: How incredibly abnormal the last four years were when compared to, well, every other modern presidency. Which brings me to a new analysis from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog — breaking down the false and misleading claims made by both Trump and current President Joe Biden in their first 100 days in office. The contrast is striking. Biden made 67 false or misleading claims in that period as compared to Trump’s 511, according to the Post’s tally. Which, if you do the math, means that Trump said more than seven times as many misleading or outright false things than Biden did during the critical first 100 days of each of their presidencies. SEVEN times! “After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard,” concluded the Post’s Glenn Kessler, Adrian Blanco and Tyler Remmel.
