Donald Trump’s critics are taking to social media to denote two reported major milestones the president hit during the month of April — $100 million in taxpayer money in golf trips and 10,000 lies told over the course of his presidency.
This week, Trump got plenty of viral attention when he crossed the 10,000 barrier on The Washington Post’s list of “false or misleading claims” offered over the course of his presidency. Some have taken issue with the newspaper’s characterization over Trump’s statements, the Columbia Journalism Review noted, with some pundits pushing for news outlets to label them lies and others noting that they could only be labeled lies if there was a proven intent on Trump’s part to deceive.
Some were more open with describing Trump’s 10,000 false statements as lies as Vanity Fair noted that the full list includes some real doozies, including Trump’s recent claim that wind turbines cause cancer.
Whatever critics call them, Trump’s statements drew some tongue-in-cheek congratulations this week from pundits who noticed just how quickly Trump topped the milestone.
“After telling a mere 5,000 false and misleading statements during his first 601 days in office, the pace and frequency of the lies has accelerated such that he doubled his bulls**t in just a third of the time, telling almost 23 lies a day in the seven-month period beginning in late October, during midterm elections,” the Vanity Fair report noted.
Congrats to @RealDonaldTrump on lying more than 10,000 times. It’s true! pic.twitter.com/hHte36F7dJ
— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) April 30, 2019
601 days to get to 5,000 “false and misleading claims” (8 per day).
Then only 226 days later he’s at 10,000 (23 per day).
Why’s he speeding up? https://t.co/UwGWupTaek
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) April 29, 2019
Not long before Trump topped the 10,000 mark on reported untrue statements, he more quietly reached another major milestone — spending $100 million in taxpayer money on his nearly twice-weekly golf trips. Trump has frequently been criticized for his golf habits, especially after he regularly attacked Barack Obama for golfing during his presidency and after Trump promised repeatedly during the 2016 presidential campaign that he would be too busy for golfing if he were to win the election.
There are varying estimates of just how much each one of these trips cost taxpayers, but the Government Accountability Office noted in a recent report that these trips cost $3.4 million each in travel and security costs for the president (unlike Barack Obama, who regularly golfed at military bases at Andrews Air Force Base and Fort Belvoir, Trump chooses to golf exclusively at his company’s properties). Estimates earlier in Trump’s presidency were closer to $1 million per trip.
There are varying estimates of how much Trump has spent in taxpayer costs for his golfing trips. The website Trump Golf Count pegged his 173 total golf trips at a total taxpayer cost of $99 million. MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin (via Twitter ) pegged Trump’s total number of golf trips at 184, which would put his total cost well above $100 million.
Trump spends $3.4 million to pass yet ANOTHER weekend playing golf at his private club while complaining about the cost of the Mueller investigation, which recovered $22 million from Manafort’s apartment. Meanwhile Trump is profiting from the presidency. https://t.co/aA3CY43uKl
— Barbra Streisand (@BarbraStreisand) April 23, 2019
Even by the more conservative estimate, Donald Trump crossed the $100 million mark in taxpayer money in April, putting him on pace to approach $200 million by the end of his four years in office.
