Donald Trump’s ‘Campaign Misstatements’ Named the ‘2015 Lie of the Year’
Out of 77 statements PolitiFact analyzed, 76% were found to be “mostly false, false, or pants on fire”
Fact checking websitePolitiFact announced its annual “Lie of the Year” on Monday, and it found the “only real contenders” were statements made by leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump throughout his campaign.
“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,” authors of this year’s post wrote. “No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.”
Some “pants on fire” statements include Trump’s widely denounced claim that he saw “thousands and thousands” of people cheering in New Jersey as the World Trade Center fell on September 11 and his insistence that the Mexican government sends “the bad ones over.”
Trump has been largely unapologetic when reporters and critics have pointed out the inaccuracy of some of his statements. When the candidate retweeted an inaccurate statistic about crime in the U.S., he defended his actions by saying that a retweet is not an endorsement.
“Am I gonna check every statistic?” Trump said when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly challenged the tweet. “I get millions and millions of people … @RealDonaldTrump, by the way.”
Source: Time