I categorized the most recent 400 lies that The Post had documented through mid-November in the same way my colleagues and I had categorized the lies of the participants in our study.
The college students in
our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. A
more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.
In Trump's first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post's tally. That's about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump's false statements
— the ones he makes publicly
— so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.
That rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post's tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research.
