GOP frontrunner Donald Trump accelerated just about everything last week. He amped up his violent rhetoric and his denials that his rhetoric has anything to do with the violence at his rallies (or violence against people of color in his name just in general). You could say he put his pedal to the metal in terms of his rate of telling lies, half-truths and distortions. Notably, he also lied about being a "truthful" man, "maybe truthful to a fault," he whined at a North Carolina rally.
Don't worry, Donald. You're not too truthful. You're not at all truthful, actually. Politico decided to do a little fact-check on the Trumpster's statements over the course of the week, the kind of vetting that magazines at least try to do with their articles, and found this startling number: "More than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false." Politico politely called these "misstatements." We're not sure why, since that connotes that they were somehow accidental. Trump "misstates" things on purpose, consistent with his true identity as a salesman, to put it charitably, or con artist as people like Marco Rubio have pointed out.
Distortions from the mouth of Trump include statements about the imminent death of Christianity, the outright lie that he is not taking money from donors, and exaggerations of his business success. And those are the relatively harmless ones. Some other areas that Trump distorts per Politico:
Many were straight-up wrong, such as his claim that the United States has a “$500 billion a year trade deficit with China,” which has been debunked over and over by fact checkers, and his statement that he never settles lawsuits, when in fact he has.
In other instances, Trump stretches the limits of reality to distort the records of his rivals. Marco Rubio was a main target last week and saw Trump twist the truth about his immigration position to warn voters that the senator is “totally in favor of amnesty.”
Then there are the seemingly small falsehoods, piled one atop another. Trump misstates the timing of things – an omnibus spending bill, for example, was called “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen six weeks ago” when in fact it was a spending package passed in December. He exaggerates polls and rankings of other things – such as his position among Hispanics and how he performs in Wall Street Journal polls. He even claims ownership of a successful winery that denies any ownership tie to the GOP front-runner.
Of course, there was also Trump's egregious lie that the Sanders campaign was sending portestors to Trump rallies to disrupt them, which Bernie thoroughly debunked on Sunday.
Sadly, the fact that Trump is a compulsive liar is far from the most dangerous or scary thing about him anymore as he continues to revel in the violent atmosphere he is perfectly happy to perpetuate to his own benefit.
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