section_path: Political practice and rhetoric/False or misleading statements
section_name: False or misleading statements
paragraph_text: False or misleading statements
  
  Trump frequently makes false statements in public remarks to an extent unprecedented in American politics. His falsehoods are a distinctive part of his political identity and have been described as firehosing. His false and misleading statements were documented by fact-checkers, including at The Washington Post, which tallied 30,573 false or misleading statements made by him during his first presidency, increasing in frequency over time.
  
  Some of Trump's falsehoods were inconsequential, while others had more far-reaching effects, such as his unproven promotion of antimalarial drugs as a treatment for COVID-19, causing a U.S. shortage of these drugs and panic-buying in Africa and South Asia. Other misinformation, such as misattributing a rise in crime in England and Wales to the "spread of radical Islamic terror", served his domestic political purposes. His attacks on mail-in ballots and other election practices weakened public faith in the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, while his disinformation about the pandemic delayed and weakened the national response to it. He habitually does not apologize for his falsehoods. Until 2018, the media rarely referred to his falsehoods as lies, including when he repeated demonstrably false statements.