Trump's rate of lying has skyrocketed in the last two weeks

Last month, Trump told his 3,000th lie since taking office, but several reporters have noticed that he has managed to out-lie even himself since reaching that milestone.

On Thursday, Toronto Star Washington correspondent Daniel Dale noted that the pace of presidential lying has escalated over the past 14 days. His paper tracks Trump’s outright falsehoods, and does not include statements that are merely misleading.

According to Dale, Trump’s 71 lies in the last two weeks mark a nearly 50 percent increase over the previous daily average of 3.4 lies per day.

The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, whose paper tracks those lies and misleading statements, also observed this week that the lying has escalated.

“Within the past week,” Parker notes, “Trump seems to have ramped up both the volume and the intensity of his false statements” on two topics: his child separation policy and the inspector general’s report that Trump falsely insists exonerates him.

On Wednesday, he insisted that presidents dating back to Dwight Eisenhower have faced family separation crises, when his administration is the first to rip children away from their parents as a matter of official policy. And he also insisted that the IG report proved bias against him, when the report actually concluded the opposite.

His blizzard of lies may be having the desired effect on the supporters who listen to them, but the lying also seems to be reaching something of a tipping point with his defenders and allies.

For example, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been put in the extremely uncomfortable position of being grilled about lies she’s told on Trump’s behalf, most recently regarding her false assurance that Trump “certainly did not dictate” the cover story about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting in 2016 with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Sanders continued to lie in support of the administration’s child separation policy last week, but when outrage over the cruelty reached its zenith on Monday, she refused to face reporters alone, instead delaying that day’s briefing until Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen could be brought in to take the heat.

Within 48 hours, Trump made a liar out of Nielsen — as well as himself — by admitting he’d had the power to end family separations all along, after Nielsen had told reporters that only Congress could do that.

The lies aren’t getting past the conservative media, either. At that same briefing Monday, John Gizzi, a reporter for the far-right Newsmax, stumped Sanders when he called out Trump’s lies about crime and immigration in Germany.

If this presidency has taught us anything, it’s that Trump can always lie harder and faster. But those lies are backfiring on him more and more every day.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.