Abstract
In the Toronto Star November 4, 2016, issue, the daily’s Washington Bureau Chief, Daniel Dale, published a fact-checked list of 560 false claims uttered or tweeted by Donald J. Trump during his presidential campaign in the six weeks between September 15 and October 30 of that year. Star reporter Tanya Talaga added an attempt at examining the falsehoods for patterns (Dale and Talaga 2016). According to the list, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed, for instance, that
The Brexit and Trump campaigns have demonstrated that we may be on the way to mendocracy, or liars’ rule. Political Science should underwrite the exposure of patently false, illegal, or unethical claims and operations, by which politicians, parties, and governments may be attempting to deceive citizens and to thwart or subvert their constitutional responsibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
On February 21, 2017, the Washington Post published a Fact Checker team analysis, according to which Trump as President had continued making “false or misleading” statements, to the extent of making 133 such claims during his first 35 days in office. The Post concluded that “Trump ha[d] changed nothing in his approach to the truth since being elected president.” The most frequent statements—24—concerned immigration (Cillizza 2017; Kessler 2017).
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Eisfeld, R. (2019). A Determination to Blow the Whistle. In: Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_6
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