Cohen: Fact in the age of Pinocchio

Samuel Johnson has James Boswell. Lyndon Johnson has Robert Caro. Donald Trump has Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, but Kessler's more nemesis than amanuensis.

Every untruth Trump utters, Kessler chronicles. At the beginning of this month, the running total was 4,229 false or misleading statements since the president took office, or more than 7.5 a day. This will be remembered. Historians will examine how an American presidency parted company with facts, and will assess the toll.

Kessler is a dapper, mild-mannered guy who says he's “pretty even-keeled,” even as Trump messes hourly with his head. The son of Dutch immigrants, he meets me for lunch with his right hand bandaged from a collision with a wineglass while he was washing the dishes. He covered “every building in D.C.,” as he puts it, before editors persuaded him seven years ago to write “The Fact Checker,” awarding “Pinocchios” on a scale of one (for the shading of facts) to four (for a whopper). Over the years, a Pinocchio has entered the Washington political lexicon as a unit of dishonesty. Now it defines the zeitgeist.

Trump is well known to Kessler. As a reporter at Newsday, Kessler covered Trump's real estate business shenanigans, finding him “boastful” and given to “laxity about the truth.” Banks tended not to trumpet Trump's falsehoods; they just declined further loans. What has changed is his world more than his behavior.

“Most politicians, I find they may exaggerate or stretch, but they don't want to out-and-out mislead people,” Kessler tells me. “The difference with Trump is that he doesn't really change what he says because you fact-check him. He'll double down and keep saying it.”

So the trade deficit, per Trump, declined $52 billion in the second quarter. It didn't (four Pinocchios). A proper calculation would be a decline, unlikely sustainable, of about $20 billion. Yet the president repeats the false claim four times.

He repeats, more than 80 times, the falsehood that his administration passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history. “The standard way to measure it is as a measure of GDP, and it ranks eighth,” Kessler says.

Trump's falsehoods, or misleading statements, increase in intensity: They averaged 16 a day in June and July. Unauthorized immigrants fuel the crime rate, the president insists. There is no convincing evidence of this. “We have the longest positive job growth streak in history,” he says - but 76 of the 94 straight months were under President Barack Obama.

“Collusion is not a crime,” Trump tweets, “but that doesn't matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!” The Fact Checker's response: “Trump long maintained there was no collusion, but now he claims collusion is not even a crime. He's playing games with words. Conspiracy to defraud the government is certainly a crime. No evidence has emerged of any collusion between the Democrats and Russia.”

Trump said last year, “I don't like Pinocchios,” but Kessler says it would be “patting myself on the back too much” to believe that Trump worries about him. The president's lying (the Fact Checker does not use the word “lie” under a policy set by Marty Baron, the Post's editor) is so deeply ingrained (Kessler found that when Trump was running for president, “nearly 65 percent of the claims we looked at resulted in four Pinocchios”) that Trump and untruth are synonymous.

It's easy to shrug. It's easy to lose your bearings. It's easy to blur the lines, to say, “Oh, he's semi-close to an actual fact!” so no Pinocchio. It's easy to experience an “unbearable lightness of being,” in Milan Kundera's phrase, when the anchor of truth disappears. What was Trump's Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader? Theater? Farce? Should we run away? Should we care? Should we scream? Who would hear us? Is journalism remotely adequate to describe the moral decay and mind-bending corruption, material and spiritual, of the Trump administration?

Many Americans pose such questions, even as many Americans believe that Trump is the most honest president ever because he “tells it like it is.” I sought out Kessler because I believe he's doing the critical work that might save the country. Trump, he says, is “in another realm completely.”

“Are you going to go on doing this?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Indefinitely?”

“Yeah, I have the best job in journalism.”

“The best?”

“I write what I want, and I piss people off.”

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, addressing a totalitarian leader “who wronged a simple man,” wrote this:

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.

Kessler is doing the poet's work. Honor him. The database he compiles with his colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, listing every one of Trump's untruths, will become a reference, a talisman.

Washingtonians know it. When Kessler went to the hospital last week to get stitches in his hand after the run-in with the wineglass, the physician assistant recognized the Fact Checker and said: “Oh, we have to make sure you're able to type!”

Roger is a columnist for the New York Times.

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