Trump says US Steel is opening 6 new plants. That's news to US Steel!

Proving his commitment to pathological lies, Trump completely fabricated a phone call from the CEO for U.S. Steel, who he claimed told him the company was undergoing massive expansion.

On June 26, Trump tweeted, “U.S. Steel just announced they’re expanding or building six new facilities.”

This followed his announcement on June 20: “The head of U.S. Steel called me the other day, and he said, ‘We’re opening up six major facilities and expanding facilities that have never been expanded.’ They haven’t been opened in many, many years,”

But, as the Washington Post Fact-Checker reports, U.S. Steel won’t say any phone call took place. Their spokesperson told the Post, “To answer your question, we post all of our major operational announcements to our website and report them on earnings calls. Our most recent one pertained to our Granite City ‘A’ blast furnace restart.”

So, no, there’s no major expansion in the works.

Trump has repeatedly used claims like this as evidence that he’s responsible for reigniting some kind of wave of manufacturing jobs in America.

Now, Trump’s rate of lying has exploded, as he feels increasingly comfortable not only concocting fables of phone conversations, but also inventing new steel plant openings.

“Trump made an astonishing 103 false claims over those seven days, an average of 15 per day,” Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star reported this week. “That shatters his one-week record of 60, which he had set in early March.

He added, “To put it in perspective: he uttered fewer than 100 false claims in eight of his first ten months in office.” Now he’s throwing out a 100-plus lies in one week.

The most recent eruption of lies seemed to be tied to the outcry over Trump’s decision to rip families apart at the border.

Flailing as he tried to counter the human rights denunciations, and the drumbeat of his well-deserved negative press coverage, Trump simply made up claims at an astonishing rate.

For instance, he insisted that presidents dating back to Dwight Eisenhower have faced family separation crises. Yet we all know Trump’s administration is the first to purposefully rip children away from their parents.

Trump just can’t stop lying.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.