hello and welcome to the five hundred and thirty eight politics podcast, I'm gay landruk. Here at five hundred and thirty eight, we love a good data set and the folks at the Washington Post fact. Checker recently passed a data collection milestone according to their count as of late last month, President Trump had more than ten thousand false or misleading. Claim since taking office. They tallied ten thousand one hundred and eleven claims in eight hundred and twenty eight days and that's around twelve per day, the fact

began its work during the two thousand and eight election cycle. With the goal of verifying statements made by politicians, interest groups and the media, and during the Trump presidency it's had its work cut out for it. Of course, it's hard to turn someone's level of truthfulness into an exact science, and we don't have real time fact checking for every president, but it's probably fair to say that President Trump is uniquely untruthful. In fact, in polls of Trump's characteristics, he routinely scores among lowest for honesty and trustworthiness, meaning that even some people who approve of his overall performance don't always believe him. So today we're going to dig into the Washington Post's data set and talk about the job of fact checking. President, and here with me to do. That is the fact checker himself Glenn Kessler Glenn the editor and chief writer of the Washington Post fact checker and has reported on domestic and foreign policy for over thirty years. Hey Glenn thanks for joining me glad to be with you. So,

two thousand false or misleading claims in two years and three months sounds like a lot, but people often think of politicians as being both. Basically. So, how do you put that number in untaxed. Well, you know I've covered every president since Ronald Reagan, and I have never encountered a president, let alone a politician like Donald Trump, I should note that I also covered Donald Trump when he was a business executive in ten, and I was a business reporter, so I was used to his loose relationship to the truth. In the case of Donald Trump, while we did not, for instance, you have kind of database with Barack Obama. It's really different order of magnitude mean Obama obviously made false or misleading statements. We collected a fair number of four Pinocchio claims for him, which is our worst. Dean, but in general a lot of his

Can she made were not off the chart? wrong? He would end up with four pinocchios when he got off the script, but he tended to stick very closely to vetted statements that he or his staff had written, and they had worked hard to actually check those facts before he's at them. It was similar to George W Bush might remember it was uh deal when he got something wrong and stated the union address. It was a new story for weeks. Lead eventually to the indictment of his aides, but that was signally rare example in the overall context of the statements that Bush made worse Trump Twelve a day. You just can't find a president has done that and I have to ask before we go too much further. Why don't you use? The word lie in classifying what the President

How do you make that decision? Well, we have used the word why I should note we did that last year, but we tend to shy away from it, because I can't get into a person's head and necessarily determine whether they knowingly said something was wrong in the case of Donald. When we label something a lie that had to do with his statements about the payments to Stormy Daniels, and the other woman who alleged adultery, and in that case there was a actual tape. Recording that Michael Cohen, has aid An attorney had was able to produce, and you could say, ok. Well, he knowingly said something was wrong. I mean there are in bonds to the to phenomenon. We have created something also called the bottomless Pinocchio when we've rated something is three or four pinocchios false and a politician repeats of twenty or more times

you know at that point you can say what they really know that this is wrong, and so we created that and Trump is now earned, off hand. I think the number of hours about twenty of those yeah It's taken. A lie is a kind of a conversation stopper, and I don't really like to use it very much alright. So this all amounts to a pretty big data sat. What kind of conclusions can we come to at this point about what the president is untruthful about or when he's untruthful you know, I urge readers to listeners who are Mobley, also readers to actually go to the database and play around with it, because it's actually a very fast search engine and you can do all sorts of things with it, So there's two distinct things you can see that overtime. The statements he's made about immigration has emerged as the thing that he tends to miss

the most about, and that is actually one of the animating issues of his presidency The other thing you will see is that there was a crash the sharp jump in the number of false or misleading claims made by the president after July of last year, which is when the He essentially became his own press secretary, the White House. Having regular briefings and instead Trump came out and will have these goggles with reporters and speak to them at on the issues of the day and That really shifted things to words. We have twelve on average today, since he became president. In the last year or so it's now. It's now about twenty two claims today and I think it was about a year ago that I gave an interview like this at I made the bold prediction that, might reach ten thousand by the end,

four years 'cause at that point, he was at three thousand and it seemed to kind of a in position to take, but I figured I'd gamble and say he might reach ten thousand by the end of his first term and here we are just a year later and we've already exceeded that milestone. You mentioned but immigration is the thing that Trump tends to mislead the most about, and I'm looking at this database right now on some of the other things that rank up there at the top are characterizations of the trade deficit, the size of the tax cut that he signed the health of the economy, it sure of the mall or investigation and NATO spending. I have to ask, though, what is the data collection process like? Do you track every single piece of content that comes from the president? Is it possible that these false are misleading statements are coming just because you realize the more or readers point them out to you more. We look at

everything he says or tweets. You know the White House this, can White House has made it somewhat difficult to track the transcripts of the president's statements and they don't post transcripts of his rallies, which is a huge source, false or misleading information, but there is, there is actually a very good database called fact base. That's f, a c t p a dot s t which collects every statement the president has made every every interview. Every rally every off the cuff remark- it's there I mean if he gives even an interview to a newspaper and there were like six quotes from the interview. They'll put that into that database and it also has all his tweets, including the tweets he's deleted.

And it actually has they've actually gone back in time and collected everything he did. Does he said going back since he became a public figure that is available so there's been a huge help for us and we there are three of us on the fact checker a man, so we've kind of randomly divvy up the days by month and each of us takes a day and go. Through line by line sentence by sentence every interview. Every rally every statement, every news conference we identify things that look like they could be false or misleading? Some of them are ones that we've previously identified. So it's easy to tell others. We have looks kind of strange. He used a number. Where did it? What is that correct?

You know I was just before I was came up to talk to you. I was deep into his speech ray made some comments about number of police officers who were ambushed and he gave some numbers, so I was digging into the into the numbers for ambushes, see if he got that right or not? You know this is a kind of a sideline. It's not the main part of our job. We write, you know full fledged fact checks. So I determined that doing ten thousand claims added one hundred and fifteen eight hour days for myself and my team. Beyond our regular jobs, oh wow, so this is actually a database of every statement, piece of content, tweet utterance from the president going back to January of two seventeen for the nerds in our audience. If I wanted to download all of this data, do you know how big it is?

I don't know I mean yeah. We do make it available to academic tions. People would know overseas, who want to do research on it, and you know it's. I mean it's at least ten, cells and it has all the quotes and everything like that, and I mean One thing I should note, because otherwise it would be even larger. This is a decision we made at the beginning to the President to be somewhat repetitive when he speaks so from Raleigh. He might three, I'm say something that is false. The same thing will only count one of them Some people might disagree with that decision, but I just felt like it was more like thinking about the audience the people sitting there listening to him it did they hear this false thing set a three times the same thing in a rally to me that it would be overkill say we're going to count all three of those things you mentioned that image

and is one of the things that he's at least truthful about. I mean is that just like he says more things about immigration because he talks about immigration more than any other issue. Well, No, I think Duration was a big part of his clothes. Argument before the midterm elections. He was talk, the caravans hordes of people coming to the border. Then he shut down the government in order to try to win funding for his promise border wall. No, he is. He has purposely put immigration at the top of the issues that he talks about, and he is particularly misleading when he about immigration. I mean is misleading about many many issues, but immigration is one where he consistently gets many facts and figures wrong and says things that are patently

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I've been doing this now for more than eight years so. I know that we are internally consistent with the way that what view. Art is as to Pinocchios, which is more like something half true and three and four yeah, it's pretty easy to see a one. That's pretty easy to see a four though Dividing line between two hundred and three hundred gets a little fuzzy in difficult and we might sit there myself and my staff, that at some length is this a two slash three cuz. It's a big leap. I think to go from two to three and all the times your fact checking the consequences of policies. Right, like you know who will have health insurance out of this particular policy or what you can on the growth will look like and even honest policy. Wonks will tell you that they don't know exactly how policies will interact with the real world, so how you deal with those kinds of unknowns. What sources do you roll?

Well, we try not to fact check. You know predictions. If some, if a politician promises something will happen, we you know we might try to fact check how how possible that might be, but it really in order where to get a Pinocchio rating. It really has to be in the realm of the we can we can? I mean there's it. This is nothing we fact checked, but I know a story of when John Mccain was going around the country running for president. He would promise to build a hundred nuclear power plants in this, first term and apparently his staff came to me and said you know, we've calculated this there's no way. Possibly build more than thirty in four years and in a barely looked at them and said, but that's fine and he went out and continued to say a hundred so that's something we had. We would at We could say you experts, say there's no way you can build a hundred and four and that would have been worthy of Pinocchio's. You know that

so that's it has to be related to a number, and it has to be something where they're saying something or claiming something that doesn't add up right. Like often during the two. Sixteen election people would look at Trump's economic plan that level of growth would not be possible unless immigration increases by accident rates. So people make these kinds of judgments based on. You know the data that we have from history and kind of making projections. So what kind of like sources are you comfortable using in terms of determining Israel, what is misleading what's totally false. Well, you know the lead rely, a lot on government sources. Chronic at all. I guess No, I mean you know it's a lot of those things: the Census Bureau, at the bureau, of labor statistics or organizations like that, the congressional Budget Office are, you know good, valid sources of information. You have to be, you know did notice that Hhs

during the Obama years was not a particularly good source on data having to the affordable care act because they were kind of turn the dials bits to make things look better. So you have to be careful with that and the way they would frame things it's the same thing with the Trump administration and some of immigration statistics they put out, or things like that. So you have to be careful, but in terms of the data about you know, the unemployment rate Trump in sixteen election used to say. The unemployment rate was forty five percent, but that you could prove was of Pinocchio claim because you could just data eighty, what he what he was doing was he was counting every. The person in the country that did not have a job which included people that were retired people that were in school people that chose to stay at home to take care of their kids or, and

love one. So these were people that chose not to be in the workforce and thus, when not it is part of the official employment statistics and if there's no way that that kind of claim would make sense, and of course, once he became president. He no longer said it was forty five percent. He said it was four and a half percent, an even lower. Looking through this database of false or misleading claims. It looks like the most common fall, some claim is about the border wall with Mexico being built and part of the reason. This is classified as a falsehood is because, where it is being built, it's a bollard fence and not a all, and so I'm into you know, maybe some just casual observers or politics or like a steel barrier that people can't get through a wall like what's the difference, what is the thought and philosophy behind how you fact check something like that

Well, I mean a lot of it has to do with the way a politician had described what they were going to do. President Trump described in great detail what his border wall, what would look like and be? It was going to be a forty foot tall, concrete barrier and in this particular issue in the case of the bollard fencing a lot of it is Richmond fencing. It was already fencing there So these are restrictions that were put into the money that Congress gave. They specifically said none of the border port prototypes to Trump talked about can be used for building this barrier along the wall. So specific act of Congress nullified the thing he had talked about, because in a there was a point there, but a so go where he actually toured border Wall prototypes, said

what my wall is going to look like and Congress reacted and said: no, it's not going to. That you can only spend the money for the for board. Fencing and again was also replacement fencing. There were very few areas that were new areas now, that is beginning to change, and we have to actually re evaluate an exam and- and we have to see what that does, Beria's look like and if he's actually getting close to building the thing that he talked about, it sounds like it depends a lot on the contacts and I'm curious or their unique challenges to fact checking President Trump that you haven't encountered before. Yes, I mean there are a number of things of is the sheer volume of words he says or produces producers? Are you know most presidents

Jimbo points were actually Obama step back. His his staff felt he was being over exposed and he was talking too much in this, but that was during the economic crisis. Wears Trump just keeps talking and talking and talking he he's he's the most. He said the most interactions with the media, I think of any president- that's been in recent history as it's been tracked, as a result of that the volume of how much she talks and the volume of how many false or misleading. Even start. Do people just have less of a reaction I mean in the beginning. Did people react more, or did the press react more to things that were false or misleading verses now? Well, I do, I do think, he's I can't say specifically: I do think that it's probably less of an outrage factor to things that he says or does because he's done so much of that.

The reason we decided to do this database was because we face the challenge. We could he repetitive and doesn't drop claims that have been deemed as false or misleading Obama would do that. He would not repeat something after I, four four pinocchios he tended not to but trump saying it. He, undeterred by any fact. Checking, though, he's clearly aware of the Pinocchio's concern about a dozen occasions, he's complained about how he doesn't like to get Pinocchio's, but he just plows forward and we Didn't want to be in a position of read, constantly repeating things that we had already fact checked, because it is a hard it's a column about policy and demystifying policy issues, and we can just keep doing this some stuff, so we said well, we'll put it in a database and that way people will have

able to find it, and we don't have to keep repeating ourselves. We just didn't expect that it would become such an all consuming effort because he has said lately exceeded the, but what we thought he would be capable of doing in terms of speaking in false and misleading ways in the work that you do have you noticed in covering other politicians or issue at okay see groups that other people feel more free to say things that are false or misleading in an environment where the president is saying false or misleading things no I noticed the opposite, particularly with the Democrats running for president which actually not surprising. You know every has a reaction so if you're running for president now, what is the best way to distinguish yourself from a guy, who appears to have earned also,

criticism for not telling the truth you're going to try to be more careful with your facts and figures. Now we've given a fair number Tokyo's to a variety of democratic candidates running for president but we've also encountered many. This is where they are prepared, with all sorts of documentation to back up what they said. Where we've thought something would was fact. Checkable is false and it turns out it was correct. Or they got got it pretty close, not enough to warrant a Pinocchio hey where they weave come to on to them and said, there's a problem with the way this is being phrased and the next thing we know it's taken out of the stump speech, so the democratic candidates, definitely for the most part, are trying their best not to be labeled. As a habitual, miss either like the president, and I think that's says it's a reminds me a little bit of when Jimmy Carr

who is running for president after Richard Nixon an went around saying, I will not lie to you. He was trying distinguish himself from the previous occupant. Is there any aspect of you notice? Amongst fellow Republicans, don't think the interesting thing is you know most tensions are like you know, use because salesman, mender DE trying to sell your product, a policy, and you have to check under under the hood sure. Everything is okay, but I and say that This is that, because Donald Trump is so consistently false and misleading that I've noticed that other Republicans have said well hey. If he gets away with it, I going to do this too, because I argue that Trump is not getting away with

he has the lowest consistently the lowest approval ratings of any modern president, and he does particularly poorly in terms of being rated for his honesty and trustworthiness. You know we did a poll last year at the post, where we wanted to see if his statements actually, if people believe in what he was saying, and so we just said about a dozen of his most consistent, false and misleading statements. We asked people, you know we gave the statement and then they polar opposite and said, which is more true, which is true, which is. We did not identify that Donald Trump was the source of this information and what we found.

Is that most people said Trump statements were not true. Even people that were supporters of Trump and the other interesting fact in that survey was that we could. We do it's been a question about ten years ago people were asked: what was it important for a president be honest and trustworthy? and Democrats Republicans independents all the same result about seventy one percent said it was important when we asked the same question as part of this poll. Democrats in independence were still at seven thousand, and seventy one percent republicans had dropped to forty percent, which to me indicates that they realized that Donald Trump is not telling the truth, but they just decided. It was not that important to them anymore. As we wrap up here. We focused a lot on Trump and, of course you look at as we met

the politicians and interest groups and the media. What is the overall philosophy behind the project of the fact checker at the Washington Post and do you feel like you're significance, has changed at all or your philosophy has changed at all. In recent years. I don't think it is changed. As I said and heart, the fact checker is is about demystifying, difficult policy issues. The hope is that if you a regular reader of the fact checker, you will get a understanding of tax policy, healthcare policy, foreign policy. You know we used a quote that we are fact checking as an entree into a way to have a detailed discussion about the complex policy issue. Is politicians speak in code words try to you know, and they try to shade the truth in order to advance their policy objectives and that

he has not changed, I mean with the as said we started this database in part because we felt Trump so many of the things he says could be so quickly and easily fact checked, and they were so repetitive. It was taking us off our core mission. So at our core mission remains the same, which is to try to dispassionately, explain policy issues in in interesting and entertaining way make that information sensible to ordinary Americans who might be puzzled by the complex issues that often debated in Washington, because I I what I have found is the more complex in issue is the more susceptible it is to misleading statements by politicians. What effects do you think dishonesty from politicians have on our politics in our country? Is that something that you think about in the work that you do of course, yeah dishonesty is

you know, it undermines public trust in politicians and institutions. And I think one of the pernicious effects of the Trump error is that he has tried very hard undermine trust, not only in institutions like the Justice Department, the FBI, but in particular in the news media and to say he everything these Organizations which are professional organizations is either tainted by bias or tainted by corruption or tainted by falsehoods. You know it's it's I mean it's a serious problem. I often tell auditions that you know if you have to your sell your policy with misleading facts and figures, this may be a problem with your policy yeah, because we really want to. We all start from the same set of facts and and decide what the best policy is is supposed to gushing up the the facts in order to sell

see that is not supported by the facts, all right. Well, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you so much sharing your time with me gone you're, welcome. Glenn Kessler is the. And chief writer of the Washington Post fact checker and has reported on domestic and foreign policy for over thirty years. As always, if you have any questions or comments get in touch by emailing us at podcasts, at five hundred and thirty eight dot com- or you can also tweet us with any or comments my name is given droop Tony Chau is in the control room thanks so much for listening, and we will see you soon