Donald Trump Beats Hillary Clinton As Top Liar Of The Year

Trump Clinton

Both PolitiFact and Factcheck.org agree that Donald Trump was the biggest liar of the year. PoltiFact awarded Trump the Top Lie of the Year Award. Factcheck.org listed misstatements from multiple candidates. Trump was out in front, beating Hillary Clinton who also had a quite long list of lies.

PolitiFact couldn’t decide on a single lie of the year, with Trump telling so many, so they proclaimed the 2015 Lie of the Year: the campaign misstatements of Donald Trump. From their introduction:

Trump has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool,” said Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University who studies theories of knowledge. “He makes a clearly false or even absurdly false claim, which draws the attention of the media. He then rides that wave until it comes time to call up another one.”

PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.

In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s — his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.

To the candidate who says he’s all about winning, PolitiFact designates the many campaign misstatements of Donald Trump as our 2015 Lie of the Year.

Multiple examples of Trump’s lies were subsequently listed.

Fatcheck.org presented false statements from multiple candidates, although some of those listed were questioned on far weaker grounds than the outrageously false statements from Donald Trump, who they called King of the Whopper. From their introduction:

It’s been a banner year for political whoppers — and for one teller of tall tales in particular: Donald Trump.

In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.

He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong.

He is by no means the only one telling whoppers, of course. Once again this year there are plenty of politicians, in both parties, who hope voters will swallow their deceptive claims. Hillary Clinton, for one, said she was “transparent” about her use of a private email server, when in fact she wasn’t. That was one of the bogus claims she made about her unusual email arrangement while secretary of state.

But Trump topped them all when he claimed to have seen nonexistent television coverage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 — and then topped himself by demanding that fact-checkers apologize for exposing his claim as fantasy. And that’s only one example.

Here we’ve assembled, as we do every year at this time, a generous sampling of the most far-fetched, distorted or downright fallacious claims made during 2015.

In past years, we’ve not singled out a single claim or a single person, and have left it to readers to judge which whoppers they consider most egregious.

But this year the evidence is overwhelming and, in our judgment, conclusive. So, for the first time, we confer the title “King of Whoppers.”

In a normal campaign year, without  a character such as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton probably would have been far out in front with the most lies, with Factcheck.org listing several of them. It would be awful if these two win their party’s nominations. Ironically, the most recent highly publicized lie from Clinton was a lie about Donald Trump, after she falsely said that ISIS was using his statements in recruiting videos. Once again I question the judgment of Hillary Clinton here. There are so many things to honestly attack Trump over. Why lie about Trump and leave herself open to counter attack from Trump and other Republicans?

Besides legitimately complaining about Clinton lying about him, Trump has brought the campaign to new lows this week, between saying how Clinton “got schlonged” in her primary race against Obama last year, and in expressing disgust because Hillary Clinton went to the bathroom during a break in Saturday’s debate. Apparently such disgust is a characteristic of conservatives according to this analysis at The Washington Post.

I also hope that the networks learned something from this and in the future make sure that Clinton has convenient facilities and an adequate amount of time. With all the substantial differences over the issues which were discussed during the third debate, it is a shame that this caused a distraction which the mainstream media has wasted too much time on.

Related Post: Politico Looks At The Different Types Of Dishonesty From Clinton, Trump, & Carson

1 Comment

  1. 1
    JimZ says:

    Politicians lie?  Hmmm.  To me the difference is, what would the country look like under these two candidates?  What will be the make-up of the Supreme Court (which will almost certainly have one or more new members by the end of the next presidential term)?  Will the US do anything about climate change and other looming ecological disasters?  Will we give away the last bit of tax revenue to the corporate sector after decades of already slashing same?  Will we make further progress on universal health care?  Slaughter of innocent people by firearm?  Toning down the US reputation for destabilizing the world through our military beligerance?  Undermine or deepen Social Security?  The US is on the verge of nominating a sociopathic megalomaniac for president.  And 40% of my neighbors own guns and wouldn't hesitate to wander our streets carrying them if Trump is elected?

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