Trump’s early presidency began with a pattern of easily verifiable false claims

Evidence

After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, Trump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high (when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low). — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 25

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Trump brought conspiratorial claims into the White House presidency itself — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 157; Republicans in the Trump era regularly issued accusations they knew might be untrue. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 107

Broader Connections

• Republicans in the Trump era regularly issued accusations they knew might be untrue. #corroborates (0.75) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 107