In May and the first week of June, President Donald Trump proceeded his bombardment of pandemic-related false claims — and, as usual, made dozens of false claims about a wide range of other subjects. Between 4 May to 7 June Trump made 192 false statements over the five weeks. Sixty-one of them dealt with the coronavirus or pandemic problem, by far the bulk of any subject matter.
Trump’s average of about 5.5 false claims per day during the five-week period was below his overall average of about 7.7 false claims per day since July 8, 2019, when we began our tracking at CNN. It was also down from his average of seven a day over the previous 14-week stretch we’ve written about it. But still: 192 false assertions, 5.5 per day. This is a lot of dishonesty on the part of the US President.
Trump had made 42 of Twitter’s 192 false statements. He added 14 to Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo in a May interview, 10 to “ABC World News Tonight” anchor David Muir in a rare network news interview in May, nine in a rambling June speech about a shockingly positive job study, and eight bits in two interviews and one reporter’s exchange.
Trump’s False Accusation on Pandemic
Perhaps his most repeated distortion of the entire pandemic was Trump’s single most frequent false argument. It is over the five-week period: his statement that he banned travel from China. Over the five-week period, he made variants of the argument. It is over 15 times and is now up to 58 times in total. Trump issued 13 additional renditions of his misleading assertion. There are no ventilators or an unused national arsenal was left to his administration. He has now made variations of this assertion 23 times in total. On 10 occasions he inaccurately asserted that voting by mail is rife with widespread fraud.
Fourth on the list was also one of Trump’s most repeated lies. It is of his entire presidency: that he was the one who succeeded in establishing the Veterans Choice Healthcare System. It established under President Barack Obama in 2014, in reality.
