Trump’s falsehoods

Politicians lie all the time, it is sometimes said. Never before has an American politician come as close as Donald Trump has to making the saying literally true.

Syrian refugees are vetted before they enter the country.

Americans are taxed at lower rates than the citizens of many other developed countries.

Trump publicly backed the Iraq War before the invasion. His claims otherwise have been repeatedly debunked.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has not endorsed Trump.

The country’s nuclear arsenal is not “exhausted.”

The U.S. economy is growing at faster than 1 percent per year.

Trump did urge his Twitter followers to “check out” an alleged sex tape involving former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the racist “birther” campaign Trump waged against President Barack Obama.

She did not laugh at a rape victim.

The trade deficit was not $800 billion last year.

Clinton has not proposed admitting “hundreds of thousands” of Syrian refugees.

She does not favor a single-payer health-care plan.

Most health-care premiums are not spiking by “68 percent, 59 percent, 71 percent.”

The Islamic State does not control “a good chunk” of Libya’s oil.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was not a “disaster” for jobs.

Clinton did not order the deletion of State Department emails after they were under subpoena.

The United States is not “giving” Iran $150 billion as part of the nuclear deal.

Most African-Americans do not live in bombed-out inner cities.

Earlier this year, Politico subjected a week’s worth of Trump campaigning to its magazine’s fact-checking procedure and found that Trump averaged about one misstatement every five minutes. By our reckoning, he far exceeded that pace Sunday night.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 5:50 PM with the headline "Trump’s falsehoods."