President Donald Trump has told nearly six times more lies in the first 10 months of his presidency than former President Barack Obama did in his entire 8-year term, according to data collected and published Thursday in the New York Times.
The “Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s” piece, featured in the opinion section of the publication, was a sequel of sorts to a list the NYT published over the summer titled “Trump’s Lies.” After the initial article’s publication, supporters pushed back against the newspaper with one common response: “if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad.”
And so newspaper set out to compare Trump and his predecessor.
The NYT says it applied the same standard to both presidents and counted “only demonstrably and substantially false statements.” It didn’t count repeated mentions of the same falsehood.
The graph, shown below, shows the end result of the data collected: Trump has told 103 separate untruths in the first 10 months of his presidency. Obama told 18 lies during his eight years in office.
After we published a list of Trump's lies this summer, some of his supporters asked us to compare Trump to other presidents. We've done so and just published the results: https://t.co/ivdTB7a7rN pic.twitter.com/SA0STVoXgv
— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) December 14, 2017
The NYT mentioned it was not able to make an comparison to former President George W. Bush because various fact-checking groups were not operating continuously when he took office in 2001. The NYT‘s study relied heavily on the work of fact-checking groups including Politifact, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Talking Points Memo, FactCheck.org, and Snopes.