In his first year in office, President Donald J. Trump has monopolized FactCheck.org’s list of The Whoppers of 2017, using “his bully pulpit and Twitter account to fuel conspiracy theories, level unsubstantiated accusations and issue easily debunked boasts about his accomplishments.”
In its annual list, FactCheck.org cites falsehoods, bogus claims and misstatements spread by Trump and his administration officials involving the Russia investigation, immigration, crime, terrorism, taxes, health care and the 2016 election. Without Trump and his aides, said FactCheck.org, the list would consist of a dozen or more notable falsehoods roughly equally divided between the two parties.
Among the false claims cited by FactCheck.org:
- Trump complained — without a shred of evidence — that massive voter fraud cost him the 2016 popular vote. He doubled down by creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and appointing a vice chairman who falsely claimed to have “proof” that Democrats stole a U.S. Senate seat in New Hampshire.
- Even as he mobilized the federal government to ferret out Democratic voter fraud, Trump refused to accept the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign.
- Trump disparaged the “so-called ‘Russian hacking’” as a “hoax” and a “phony Russian Witch Hunt,” and compared the conduct of U.S. intelligence agencies to “Nazi Germany.” He then falsely accused the “dishonest” news media of making it “sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
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FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters, is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Its initiatives include SciCheck, which debunks false and misleading scientific claims made by partisans to influence public policy. FactCheck.org has video partnerships with CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper” on CNN and with NBCUniversal owned television stations, and works with Facebook to fact-check and flag false viral “fake news” stories circulating on the social-media site.
