On Sept. 7, President Trump woke up in Billings, Mont., flew to Fargo, N.D., visited Sioux Falls, S.D., and eventually returned to Washington. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One, held a pair of fundraisers and was interviewed by three local reporters.

In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements — in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high.

The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many at a campaign rally in Montana. An anonymous op-ed article by a senior administration official had just been published in the New York Times, and news circulated about journalist Bob Woodward’s insider account of Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days — since our last update — the president has averaged 32 claims a day.

When we first […]

2 Comments

Immigrant children in an American concentrations camp.
Credit: Reuters / Daniel Becerril

Even though hundreds of children separated from their families after crossing the border have been released under court order, the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests. Some of those who work in […]

1 Comment

Credit: Paul Hamilton / Flickr

As the recent Labor Day weekend approached, the voting police at President Trump’s Justice Department and ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—picked up where his disgraced Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity left off after they disbanded.

The U.S. attorney in North Carolina, a Trump appointee, sent a storm of faxes at 5 p.m. on Friday on behalf of ICE and the DOJ seeking every record about voters and voting from 2010 to this year to 44 county Boards of Election, the statewide Board of Election and Ethics, and state Department of Motor Vehicles, which registers voters.

The move drew widespread shock—some officials even thought the request was a hoax, due to its breadth (as many as 20 million documents), timing (as they were scrambling to finalize ballot preparation and printing after a summer of voting litigation and special legislative sessions) and the blatant partisan overtones (from a White House hell-bent on over-policing immigrants and Democratic voting strongholds).

Indeed, as Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, who became a dissident member […]

2 Comments

Reverend Rick Joyner

Right-wing pastor Rick Joyner posted a video on his Facebook page yesterday in which he mocked The Washington Post for asserting that President Trump “is complicit” in Hurricane Florence, especially since everyone knows that the real cause of the hurricane is the sin of abortion.

On Tuesday, the Post published an editorial asserting the climate change is making extreme weather events more severe and destructive and that Trump’s refusal to accept this fact and take steps to address the issue is only making things worse. Joyner laughed at this idea, saying that only a lunatic would believe such a thing, since sin is the true cause of natural disasters.

“I read where The Washington Post is blaming the storm on President Trump,” Joyner said. “You gotta be kidding me. How crazy can you be? They were literally saying, ‘He has to take the blame for this storm because of his belief on climate change, or lack of belief in climate change’ … All this does is make the climate change people look like bigger nuts than ever.”

“More […]

1 Comment

U.S. President Donald Trump is applauded by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

The first of two expected official government reports showing the federal budget deficit is soaring was issued on Monday when the Congressional Budget Office published its Monthly Budget Review for August.

According to CBO, the deficit through the first 11 months of fiscal 2018 was $895 billion, a $222 billion (32.8%) increase over the same period in 2017.

Some of the increase was the result of timing shifts, that is, spending that was made at the end of August because the first two days of September were on weekend. The deficit for the 11-month period would have been only $154 billion larger than 2017 had it not been for that.

The federal government typically runs a budget surplus in September so the final deficit for 2018 may be somewhat lower than the results through August. CBO said that the total deficit for the year will be close to the $793 billion estimate it made in […]

2 Comments