The Washington Post announced on Monday that President Trump’s volcanic propensity for spouting falsehoods had prompted their fact checkers to create a special new classification — the “Bottomless Pinocchio.”
“The Bottomless Pinocchio is when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchio, keeps saying it over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda,” said Post fact checker Glenn Kessler in a video announcing the new category.
Previously, the highest measure of falsehood was the Washington Post’s feared “four Pinocchios” — a designation which in earlier eras prompted politicos to drop whatever they were saying pretty quickly.
“President Trump is an unusual politician in that he does not drop a false claim, even though it has been fact checked as false,” Kessler added. “And if he likes a particular thing that he says, he will keep saying it — not once, not twice — dozens upon dozens of times.”
So far, the paper reported that 14 Trump claims have already been awarded the “bottomless” designation, noting that each had been repeated more than 20 times. No political figure in America in either party has come close to receiving one.
In an explainer piece by Kessler, the Post fact checker noted several of the most famous whoppers, including claims from Trump that Democrats had actually colluded with Russia, and also falsely insisting that Robert Mueller had conflicts of interest which made him unfit to conduct the Special Counsel investigation into collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
President Trump’s most famous and longstanding whoppers have concerned his own personal wealth, which he has said to be in excess of ten billion dollars. Forbes annual billionaires list places the real number at about a third of that.
In his book “The Art of the Deal,” Trump openly admitted to being creative with facts as long as the spirit of what he said was correct — in a move he dubbed “truthful hyperbole.”