Throughout the campaign there’s been lots of talk — generally pushed by Republican sources — that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and that she lies all the time. This is kind of mind-boggling. The idea that anyone who supports Donald Trump can complain about other political speakers lying is just crazy. Trump lies *all* the time. He is basically king of the liars. You can’t listen to the guy for five minutes without hearing multiple lies.
To get a better idea of this, let’s take a look at some of the fact-checking sites and how they rate Trump — and Clinton, as well as some of the other/former presidential candidates.
Here is PolitiFact’s fact-checking of the GOP candidates:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/lists/people/fact-checking-2016-gop-presidential-candidates/
At the time of writing, 314 statements by Trump have been checked; 47 were in the “True”/”Mostly True” categories, 45 “Half True”, and 222 in the “Mostly False”/”False”/”Pants on Fire” categories. That’s 222 of 314, or 70.7%!
Of course, that’s the highest among the Republican candidates — and this is the one they picked?! Gee, it’s almost like you have to lie to do well with the Republicans.
Here’s the site for the Democratic candidates:
285 statements of Clinton’s have been checked, with 145 in the “True”/”Mostly True” categories, 65 “Half True”, and 75 in the “Mostly False”/”False”/”Pants on Fire” categories. 75/285 is 26.3%. My standards are high, so I’d say that’s not good — but it’s still nowhere near as bad as Trump. And that doesn’t even convey the extent of Trump’s lying; for instance, only 7 of Clinton’s statements were “Pants on Fire”, whereas Trump had 55! 8 times as many! (For comparison, for Bernie Sanders, it’s 28.0%, 30/107, with 0 “Pants on Fire”.)
Here is another site, the “Candidate Truthfulness Comparison”:
This site has a number of settings, like dates and weights for how to combine the different categories of statements (they use PolitiFact’s data under the covers). As of this writing, and with the site’s default settings/weightings, they give Clinton a rating of 1.70 and Trump 3.19 (lower is better; I think 0 would be 100% “True” and 5 100% “Pants on Fire”).
Here’s another article, from the Tampa Bay Times, which does the PolitiFact analysis:
They have a nice chart showing the different categories for Trump and Clinton, basically matching what I outlined above:
https://infogr.am/05d33198-eeb3-4636-a8b5-fc4b3898f7f5
The article includes this nice quote:
Trump has more statements rated Pants on Fire — 30 — than the 21 other candidates for president we’ve fact-checked this cycle combined.
Here’s a post:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/politicians-lie
that’s several months old, but it’s got a nice graphic showing a compilation of ratings of statements for many politicians going back to 2007 (originally from a New York Times article by one of the PolitiFact editors). It shows Trump with the second worst rating (what would he do without Ben Carson!). Hillary Clinton comes in with the fifth best rating in this compilation. (Not so surprisingly, all of the Democratic politicians do well in this rating, taking the top 5 spots and 6 of the top 7 spots.)
Here’s a CNN article that talks about articles about Trump’s propensity to lie that came out recently in four other sources, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/25/media/newspapers-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-lies/index.html
The LA Times article says:
Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has.
The Politico article says:
The conclusion is inescapable: Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.
There’s lots more out there, from many sources, and they all come to a similar conclusion, based on analysis of actual data — Trump lies a lot more than Clinton — a lot more than pretty much any candidate, for that matter.
Trump uses the phrase “Believe me” quite often. But the evidence is in, and it’s quite overwhelming, you should absolutely *not* believe him.