Toronto Star Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Dale has made it a habit of compiling lists of lies that Donald Trump tells on the campaign trail. And now with the election days away, Dale compiled all the false statements into one handy “unauthorized database of false things.” The 494 falsehoods are sorted into 20 categories and analyzed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the category that has the most falsehoods is “Clinton’s policies,” followed by “Clinton’s corruption,” and then polls. But in a close fourth place is a “WTF” category, illustrating how some of the lies that Trump tells on the trail “remain hard to explain.” Although some lies clearly fit into Trump’s skewed worldview, others really have no evident purpose and fit into “an unusual category of Trump falsehoods: Ones that are ridiculous, and ridiculously obvious.” And it’s not that he says them because he is trying to appeal to a certain group, or tell a larger story. “There seems no benefit to such outlandish statements,” writes Tanya Talaga. “Trump just seems unable to not say them.”
The Toronto Star’s epic compilation comes on the heels of other publications trying to put some perspective on how much of a ridiculous candidate Trump has been during the campaign. The New York Times, for example, recently published a two-page spread of Trump’s insults.
