Donald Trump held a press conference this week. A handful of highlights:
Helicopter adventures
Trump told of a near-death helicopter ride with California's former Speaker of the Assembly, Willie Brown. And he reported that Brown (the self-described Ayatollah of the Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco) said "terrible things" about Kamala Harris. But Willie Brown disputed the story: he had never been in a helicopter with Trump. (When this was reported, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times.) Willie Brown's denial led to speculation that the former president had confused one Brown for another, Jerry Brown, who had flown in a helicopter with Trump and Gavin Newsom -- but there had been no mechanical trouble on that flight.
Finally, another black man (though not named 'Brown') corrected the history. Former California state senator and Los Angeles city councilman, Nate Holden, revealed that in 1990 he and Trump had shared a rough helicopter flight that had to make an emergency landing. This account was confirmed by former executive in the Trump organization, Barbara Res (who had written about it in her book in 2020).
The 78-year old Trump appears to be confused. And the "terrible things" said about Kamala Harris? Trump either made that up or he is more confused than ever.
Crowd sizes
In answer to a question about January 6, Trump insisted that the biggest crowd he had ever spoken to was that day at the National Mall. He elaborated [initial question at 39:48 on PBS video link]:
I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours -- same real estate, same everything: same number of people. If not, we had more.
And they said, he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture -- and everything's the same because there was the fountains, the whole thing, all the way back from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it. And you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd -- we actually had more people. They said I had 25,000 and he had a million people.
And I'm okay with it, 'cause I like Dr. Martin Luther King.
Estimates of the crowd at the 1963 March on Washington generally range from 200,000 to 300,000. The number often cited is 250,000. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said that law enforcement estimates for the January 6, 2021 crowd "were all over the board," ranging from 2,000 to 80,000. The January 6 Committee placed the number at 53,000.
No credible source believes that Trump's crowd on January 6 exceeded King's on August 28, 1963.
Overview
NPR did a fact check of Trump's remarks during his 64-minute news conference ("162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump"):
There were a host of false things that Donald Trump said during his hour-long news conference Thursday that have gotten attention.
A glaring example is his helicopter emergency landing story, which has not stood up to scrutiny.
But there was so much more. A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.
Problematic indeed.
Colossal liar
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this. During Trump's four years in the White House, the Washington Post kept a tally of his false or misleading claims. He established quite a record.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.
What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.
Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Frightening, not funny
Tom Nichols is unnerved by Trump's incoherence. He writes that, "so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the 'bias toward coherence,' and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines."
Nichols reviews a selection of Trump's false and wacky claims and compares the headlines atop the reports of the press conference.
All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Watch just a few minutes of Trump's press conference. What we see is remarkable. The volume of lies, of strange stuff, of utter nonsense is overwhelming. And Nichols (and Goldberg) are right: the press picks out items here and there to piece a coherent story together, something that makes Trump more like "a normal person."
But he isn't. This man shouldn't be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again. Let us hope that we are not going back.