Donald Trump told dozens of lies at a pair of campaign rallies to close out the midterm election campaign.
The former president gave stump speeches Thursday in Sioux City, Iowa, where a Washington Post analysis found he gave at least 58 false or misleading statements, and he added at least 24 more falsehoods Saturday at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
“If I say anything that’s slightly wrong," Trump said about fact checkers, "they’ll challenge what I say."
The Post analysis found Trump misrepresented the number of border crossings, which he incorrectly described as record-breaking and unrealistically predicted would quadruple, and made it sound like government figures for migrants caught at the border was the number who successfully entered the country.
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“Biden and the radical Democrats do nothing at all to stop the death and devastation caused by this invasion into our country,” Trump told rallygoers.
Trump also exaggerated crime statistics and told inaccurate, misleading and apparently false anecdotes about crime victims, and blamed "record" crime on immigrants and insufficient support for law enforcement.
“If a policeman speaks a little bit loudly, he loses his family, he loses his house, he loses his pension,” Trump claimed. "[People's] lives would be destroyed for the mere mention of the words law enforcement.”
The former president told a series of lies blaming his 2020 election loss on fraud, many of which he's repeated for years and have been repeatedly debunked, and exaggerated price increases for bacon, ham, Thanksgiving turkeys and airline tickets, and he falsely warned of a coming diesel fuel shortage.
“We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” Trump said in both speeches.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich did not dispute any specific items in the Post analysis, which was provided to the former president's team for comment.
“The Left is failing in every way imaginable, so The Washington Post is clearly and desperately trying to run interference with some sham fact check,” Budowich said in a statement. “It’s embarrassing, but unsurprising.”
