Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth
The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
In perilous times, facts, expertise, and truth are indispensable. President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald-faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff.
Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is based on the only comprehensive compilation and analysis of the more than 16,000 fallacious statements that Trump has uttered since the day of his inauguration. He has repeated many of his most outrageous claims dozens or even hundreds of times as he has sought to bend reality to his political fantasy and personal whim.
Drawing on Trump’s tweets, press conferences, political rallies, and TV appearances, The Washington Post identifies his most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions. This book unpacks his errant statements about the economy, immigration, the impeachment hearings, foreign policy, and, of critical concern now, the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded.
Fascinating, startling, and even grimly funny, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post is the essential, authoritative record of Trump’s shocking disregard for facts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
President Trump made 16,241 "false or misleading" statements between taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2020, according to the staff of the Washington Post's Fact Checker. In this comprehensive yet stultifying survey, Fact Checker editor Glenn Kessler and reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly document Trump's "most egregious and important false claims" (Mexico will pay for the border wall), as well as more obscure distortions (he negotiated peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea), explain why they're off-base, and look for patterns to understand why and how he twists the truth and how it's affected his presidency. The authors also discuss the difficulties of applying the Fact Checker's "Pinocchio scale" (one Pinocchio for "selective telling of the truth"; four for "a whopper"), which was created in 2007 to evaluate specific claims made in order to advance policy agendas, to a president whose supporters seem unperturbed by his "constant stream" of falsehoods and exaggerations. Though illustrated with insightful sidebars and graphs, the book's analysis doesn't go far beyond noting that Trump's mendacity has roots in his real estate and entertainment careers, and is not the liability it would be for other politicians. Readers will be more exhausted than enlightened.
