Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s
After we published a list of President Trump’s lies this summer, we heard a common response from his supporters. They said, in effect: Yes, but if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad .
We’ve set out to make that list. Here, you will find our attempt at a comprehensive catalog of the falsehoods that Barack Obama told while he was president. (We also discuss George W. Bush below, although the lack of real-time fact-checking during his presidency made a comprehensive list impossible.)
We applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements. The result: Trump is unlike any other modern president. He seems virtually indifferent to reality, often saying whatever helps him make the case he’s trying to make.
In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.
Separately, we have updated our earlier list of Trump's lies, which also includes repeated falsehoods. This article counts only distinct falsehoods for both Trump and Obama.
If we had used a less strict standard, Trump would look even worse by comparison. He makes misleading statements and mild exaggerations – about economic statistics, his political opponents and many other subjects – far more often than Obama. We left out any statement that could be plausibly defended even if many people would disagree with the president's interpretation. We also left out modest quantitative errors, such as Trump's frequent imprecision with numbers.
We have used the word “lies” again here, as we did in our original piece. If anything, though, the word is unfair to Obama and Bush. When they became aware that they had been saying something untrue, they stopped doing it. Obama didn’t continue to claim that all Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance under Obamacare, for example, and Bush changed the way he spoke about Iraq’s weapons capability.
Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, F.B.I. or C.I.A. officials, journalists or members of Congress. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.
As for Obama: His falsehoods tended to be attempts to make his own policies look better or to overstate a problem he was trying to solve. In a few cases, they seemed to be careless exaggerations he avoided repeating.
Over all, Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president. And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.
In all, we found 18 different bald untruths from Obama during his presidency. Trump told his 18th separate untruth in his third full week in office, and his list keeps growing.
In fact, Trump tells falsehoods about Obama and his administration more often than Obama told falsehoods about all subjects. Since his inauguration, Trump has told 10 separate untruths about Obama, including false allegations of wiretapping and false descriptions of Obamacare. We counted only two falsehoods Obama told about Bush.
Note from the seeder: At this point in the Original article , there are two side-by-side lists of the two Presidents' lies. Obama's eight- year list is only a small fraction of Trump's ten- month list. The difference in length is spectacular , but "side-by-side" would be very difficult to reproduce here. You should take a look.
Postscript: George W. Bush
As we mentioned above, it was not possible to create a similar list for George W. Bush, because the various fact-checking groups – whose work we used heavily here – were not operating continuously when he became president, in 2001.
But several sources did try to evaluate some of his claims at the time. Their work suggests that Bush sometimes told falsehoods but was fundamentally different from Trump. Bush instead seems to be somewhere on the pre-Trump presidential spectrum.
In 2001, for example, Bush said significantly more stem-cell lines existed than actually did. Most infamously, Bush and his advisers justified the Iraq War by talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist. But as costly as these claims were, Bush evidently believed them at the time. And for the most part, once his statements became demonstrably false, he stopped making them.
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by DAVID LEONHARDT ,
IAN PRASAD PHILBRICK , and
STUART A. THOMPSON
There may be links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.
So... objectively... using hard data that is presented in the OA... it is proven that Trump has been lying at a rate sixty times that of Obama.
Or as a certain fence-sitting friend of mine would repeat, jaws tight and grimacing, "Both sides do it!!"
Sadly, Trump supporters prefer Trumps lies to facts and reality. They sound "truthy" to them and so they believe them even if the facts don't support their views. They all assume reality has a liberal bias so choose not to believe anything that counters Trumps claims. They work hard at excusing his lies coming up with incredible feats of mental contortions in able to claim a Trump lie wasn't really a lie. And if that doesn't work, they fall back on "whataboutism" pointing to something Hillary, Obama or Bill Clinton did or said to justify Trumps blatant lies. And all the while they are claiming the 16+ accusers of Donald Trump are the liars, not their cherubic champion of ignorance they elected.
I am no longer religious, but I remember this scripture well and it does appear to have come true.
"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires" 2 Timothy 4:3
Trump supporters love having their ears tickled by the Liar in-Chief. He tells them exactly what they want to hear. He tells them to blame all their problems on the liberals, immigrants, Democrats and the prior "black President" who's birthplace he challenged which was also what they wanted to hear. It's not their fault they are out of work, are dealing with an opioid epidemic, that coal jobs aren't viable, that manufacturing was decimated by automation, not immigration, that their minimum high school education doesn't cut it anymore in the current workplace, they don't want to hear about that, they want someone to blame because in their minds, once they can lynch whoever is responsible for their problems they can get back to making America white and great again.
This is truly hilarious:
This is a nice graphic but if you expect people to believe Obama told a mere 18 lies over the course of his two terms, you could also say little green men live on Mars and it would be just as accurate.
Politifact lists 20 one ONE page (there’s 4 pages): ..
Ultimately, it’s things like the Times publishing such egregious, eye-roll inducing editorializing as fact, that has led to conservatives and others on the Right, or simply honest critics on any side, to distrust what the media and America’s longstanding “newspaper of record.”
https://www.redstate.com/prevaila/2017/12/14/conservatives-distrust-media-new-york-times-counts-obama’s-lies/
Hi, Sean
What part of
... did you not understand?
what part of politifact's work do you not understand? Your "objective" blog undersold Obamas dishonesty by about 400% to make a silly, partisan argument that appeals to left wing simpletons. . Politifact, which goes out of its way to defend democrats, just "objectively" demonstrated your seed is a political hack job.
but by all means, go head and dispute all the statement politificat rated as false. Once your done with that, We can move to on to a comprehensive list.
i await your rebuttals of politifacts list.
Fine, go to politifact pick out a statement and prove that it's wrong. Go for it.
Why would I? If a business that operates as a left wing p.r. Firm
says obama was lying, then obama was lying,
its only the obama worshippers who take the idea that obama only lied 18 times seriously. They need to deal with the documented proof of his lies, not me.
Then you don't get to say they are full of shit then. Either prove them wrong or move on. Since you won't, (can't), then you can accept what they post as factual information. Thanks.
Skirting the CoC [ph]
I agree that the lies by obama that politifact documented are, in fact, lies. Why would you think I have some burden to disprove the facts I just posited?
Nice insult. Clearly I understand English if I am replying to you.
We are comparing the lies between trump and President Obama. Trump lies FAR...........F A R....more than Obama did... It's not even close. The fact that you are eager to point out 1 lie told by President Obama while ignoring 50 by trump shows that you are extremely BIASED.
So you want to use the list on Politifact?
Obama:
Mostly false-70
false-71
pants on fire-9
Trump:
Mostly false-101
false-157
pants on fire-73
Trumps false are over 2X and his pants on fire are over 7X Obama's. The hits will just keep on coming every day.
Thanks for the confirming data...
Interesting article. What's "interesting" is that it doesn't actually say much. The authors clearly don't like Politifact... but all told, they have no concrete arguments against the site. Lots of generalities about truth and lies... but nothing that actually demonstrates that Politifact is consistently in error.
Of course Politifact sometimes gets it wrong. Everyone who states an opinion sometimes gets it wrong. Not having any fact-checkers would be much much worse.
The Times article listed the all the quotations taken in count. A lot of work. Apparently, no one is willing or able to do the same work and come up with a different result... so the option taken by the Unthinking Faithful TM is to Swift-boat the messenger.
You are seriously using the federalist as a source? That's a joke, right?
If trump says, "believe me", he is lying.
An imperative cannot be a lie.
WHUT teh ...........?
... or any of his variations of ‘believe me’, like ‘trust me’, or ‘I can tell you that much for sure’. He is king of the morons, leading the nations morons to the promised land.
"Black homeownership just hit the highest level it has ever been in the history of our country."
— PolitiFact National on Monday, December 11th, 2017
Lie.
"Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI."
— PolitiFact National on Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
.
Lie.
Says the tax bill "is going to cost me a fortune, this thing -- believe me. Believe me, this is not good for me."
— PolitiFact National on Thursday, November 30th, 2017
.
HUGE lie. (And remember what I said about, "believe me"?)
Says the GOP plan he supports is "the biggest tax cut in U.S. history."
— PolitiFact National on Thursday, October 26th, 2017
.
Lie
Insurance companies "have made a fortune with Obamacare."
— PolitiFact National on Monday, October 23rd, 2017
.
HUGE lie.
Hey people!
The topic is comparing Trump's lies to Obama's. Please don't go too far astray.
Mr. Frost looks like he's been dead on topic the whole time.
Thanks Buddy..
Dude, i posted a link to the same story you did. How is that straying off topic?
As regards the subject of this thread.....
So what and who gives a fuck?
For the last 25 years your side has been screaming that Clinton, (and Obama), are liars. Over and over and over again....Along comes trump who lies more than any president in history and now all the sudden it's, "who gives a fuck"? LMFAO!!!!!! Another little bit of reich wing hypocrisy? You complained for 8 years that Obama golfed too much, but trump comes along and golfs more in his first 6 months than Obama did in 8 YEARS, and all the sudden it's, "who gives a fuck". Republican hypocrisy is absolutely hilarious!