I don't think he's an outrageous liar though.
Politifact's hard hitting fact checking involves saying that he's half lying even when he's totally not lying at all:
Is Donald Trump right that the Great Wall of China is 2,000 years old and 13,000 miles long?
"Well, it’s 2,000 miles but we really need 1,000 miles. The Great Wall of China, built 2,000 years ago, is 13,000 miles, folks, and they didn’t have Caterpillar tractors, because I only want to use Caterpillar, if you want to know the truth, or John Deere. … We can do that so beautifully. And this is going to be a serious wall.
He has repeated two figures that are widely cited and, superficially at least, seem credible. But when we ran them by several experts in Chinese history, we found that the reality is more nuanced.
Major unifications of early portions of the wall did occur about 2,200 years ago. However, the wall was built over the course of many centuries, and the best preserved, most iconic portions of the wall are a lot younger -- roughly 500 years old.
Oh no, Trump just the exact numbers that China itself gives and repeated them.
Not only that, IDGAF. The entire point of the conversation was that China could build a much longer wall with manpower, so if we wanted to build a border wall we physically could. I mean, wtf are we having this conversatin?! But is a lie because some fucking China Wall experts say the most commonly cited numbers are more "nuanced"?
Or here:
Fact-checking Trump's claim that thousands in New Jersey cheered when World Trade Center tumbled
Politifact Specifically cited Trump's Pants on Fire rating when they named him liar of the year for saying that people in New Jersey celebrated 9/11
And yet... Here's a CBS news report saying just that....
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3auKMHkZJnQ
Or here Trump uses the
Trump says real unemployment is much higher than the 5% and could be as high as 25, 28 and that even heard recently one measure as high as 42%.
Politifact then acknowledges the 42 percent source and how to calculate it:
The source of Trump’s 42 percent figure appears to be a column by David Stockman, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s budget director.
Stockman calculated that there are currently 210 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 68 -- what he calls a "plausible measure of the potential workforce." If you assume that each of those people is able to hold down a full-time job, he wrote, they would offer a total of 420 billion potential working hours. However, during 2014, Stockman noted, only 240 billion working hours were actually recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If you run the numbers, "the real unemployment rate was 42.9 percent," Stockman wrote.
Economists say Stockman’s way of looking at the question -- using actual hours worked divided by a theoretical maximum that could have been worked, rather than determining whether individual people are employed or unemployed -- is provocative. But they say this raw measurement has serious flaws.
Indeed, in his column, Stockman acknowledges that this figure is imperfect, even though his tone is flip when he does so.
"Yes, we have to allow for non-working wives, students, the disabled, early retirees and coupon clippers," he wrote. "We also have drifters, grifters, welfare cheats, bums and people between jobs, enrolled in training programs, on sabbaticals and much else."
Snark aside, economists say this caveat is crucial.
Stockman’s calculation "treats people voluntarily working part-time hours as partly unemployed, even if they have excellent reasons for wanting to hold only a part-time job, such as rearing children, attending school or college, being disabled, or transitioning into retirement," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. "A lot of the shortfall between full-time and part-time employment is perfectly reasonable, as is a potential worker’s decision not to work or look for paid work at all."
In other words, Trump’s faith in the accuracy of the 42 percent figure is misplaced.
Then they call him a liar. "Pants on Fire" rating.
Sure 42% at the limit and they ignore his 25% and 28% comments. They imply all the part-time work is VOLUNTARY while ignoring the entire national fucking epidemic and conversation of INVOLUNTARY part-time work that was even worsened by the affordable care act requiring insurance provisions.
No matter how much we want to argue over methodology, he didn't lie. He did recently hear that and he didn't just pull it out of his ass.
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