Pathological, delusional, stupid or all three?
by digby
All three. This was as of last week:
In the 592 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 4,713 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
That's an average of about eight claims a day.
When we first started this project for the president's first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing as the president nears the 600-day mark of his presidency.
In fact, in the past three months, the president averaged 15.4 claims a day, so almost one-third of the total claims made as president have come in this period. At that pace, he will top 5,000 claims in September.
On July 5, the president had reached a new daily high of 79 false and misleading claims, but he came close on Aug. 30 with 73 claims, when he held a campaign rally and had an extended interview with Bloomberg News. On a monthly basis, June and August rank in first and second place during Trump's presidency, with 534 and 469 claims, respectively. July is in third place, with 448 claims.
He can't help lying even when he doesn't need to, he is living in a Fox News induced delusion about his administration and Trump induced delusion about himself --- and he is dumb as a post. I think 5th or 6th grade level of knowledge is just about right which, when combined with his arrogant narcissism, means he also refuses to learn. All of this is obvious. It's not like he's discreet.
And all these former administration officials who obviously cooperated with Woodward are even more cowardly than that op-ed writer and the sycophants like Huckabee-Sanders. They are out. They can tell it like it is. And they are still bowing and scraping for this dishonest imbecile by saying the book isn't "accurate."
Why? What the hell does Gary Cohn have to lose by standing by his portrayal of Trump in the book which has been backed up by voluminous reporting by other reporters and what we see before our eyes every single day? Why is he groveling to get back into Trump's good graces?
Does Rob Porter think he has anything to gain by holding on to his reputation as a wife beating Trump toady? Is his future somehow secured by that?
The president's approval rating is in free-fall which indicates that a fair number of Americans are finally admitting that something is very, very wrong with him. And yet the only former staffer who has the guts to come forward to personally tell the story that is being anonymously leaked by dozens of staffers every day is the opportunistic Omarosa.
At this point I have to agree with Trump about one thing: the people who work for him are all a bunch of sniveling cowards.
Like this from yesterday:
President Donald Trump spent the morning bragging about the economy. At least one of his claims didn't come close to being true.
"The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!" the president said in a tweet.
The first two numbers are correct, although they measure completely different things, and in different ways.
The overall US economy grew at a 4.2% annual rate in the second quarter. Unemployment was between 3.8% and 4% during the quarter, and it came in at 3.9% in August.
That's all good news.
"It's definitely better when it's true than when it's not," said Justin Wolfers, professor of economics at University of Michigan. "I like high GDP growth and low unemployment."
But Trump got it wrong — way wrong — when he said it hasn't happened in a century.
In the last 70 years, it's happened in at least 62 quarters, most recently in 2006.
"He wasn't even in the neighborhood of right," Wolfers said in an interview.
Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged to reporters later in the day that the president's tweet was incorrect. He pointed out it was the first time in 10 years that GDP growth exceeded the unemployment rate.
"And at some point, somebody probably conveyed it to him, adding a zero to that, and they shouldn't have done that," he said.
Seriously???
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