Trump Unloads on Washington Post: 'Fake Fact Checker'
President Donald Trump called The Washington Post “a Fact Checker only for the Democrats” on Twitter Tuesday.
“The Washington Post is a Fact Checker only for the Democrats,” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “For the Republicans, and for your all time favorite President, it is a Fake Fact Checker!”
Washington Post Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler was quick to respond on Twitter Tuesday morning.
“Reminder: Trump cites the Washington Post Fact Checker when we give Pinocchios to Democrats,” Kessler wrote, referencing a Dec. 17, 2013, tweet from Trump about fact-checking former president Barack Obama.
The Post’s “ongoing database” of what it says are “false or misleading” claims by Trump was last updated Sunday.
“In 759 days, President Trump has made 8,718 false or misleading claims,” the page’s header reads. The tally includes repeats of claims like “Building the wall,” which The Post rates as “three Pinocchios.”
The Post’s most recent fact-check post about Trump examined claims during his national emergency declaration news conference Friday.
“Where to begin with President Trump’s rambling news conference to announce he was invoking a national emergency to build a border wall? It was chock-full of false and misleading claims, many of which we’ve previously highlighted, either in our database of Trump claims or our list of Bottomless Pinocchios,” Kessler and fellow fact-checker Meg Kelly wrote in the post.
The Post’s Fact Checker said Trump’s Feb. 5 State of the Union address included nearly 30 “stretched facts and dubious figures.” The post looked into Trump’s claims like “We have created 5.3 million new jobs and importantly added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs.”
The fact-checkers wrote:
Trump often inflates the number of jobs created under his presidency by counting from Election Day, rather than when he took the oath of office. There have been almost 4.9 million jobs created since January 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of which 436,000 are manufacturing jobs, according to the BLS.
This is an impressive gain for almost two years; under President Barack Obama, about 900,000 manufacturing jobs were gained over seven years from the 2010 nadir after the Great Recession. Moreover, despite the recent gains, the number of manufacturing jobs is still nearly 1 million below the level at the start of the Great Recession in December 2007.
Other statistics Trump cited rang true. His claim that “[u]nemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low” matched with numbers showing the annual unemployment rate for disabled people was 8 percent in 2018, the lowest rate since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track about a decade ago.
Trump is joined by a politician on the opposite side of the political spectrum when it comes to hitting back against the Fact Checker. Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a meltdown in a series of tweets in early January over getting fact-checked by organizations like WaPo and PolitiFact. She also got into a Twitter spat with Kessler himself after he awarded one of her misleading claims with “three Pinocchios” in late January.
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