Donald Trump and his campaign lie so frequently that a headline reporting “the latest” is likely to be out of date by the time it’s posted. But it is still somewhat remarkable that the campaign tells unnecessary lies that are so easily refuted by publicly available facts—a phenomenon we have noted about other right-wing leaders we monitor like “historian” David Barton.
In a Friday morning email from the Trump campaign, which begins, “I’m amazed at the lies the liberal media spews day after day,” Trump lists a number of accomplishments that he says show that “we continue to prove them wrong.” One of the bullet points is this:
- Pulling off an incredible Republican National Convention, with much higher viewership than the Democrats’ disastrous convention
Some aspects of this might be debatable. Many would agree that the Republican convention was “incredible,” though I suspect not for the same reasons as Trump.
The post-convention polls, which have moved solidly toward Hillary Clinton, seem to undermine the idea that the Democrats’ convention was “disastrous.” In fact, as the Washington Post reported, “A majority of respondents, 51 percent, said they were less likely to vote for Trump after seeing his convention”—the only time that’s ever happened according to data going back to 1984.
What is indisputably false is the claim that the Republican convention had “much higher viewership” than the Democrats. In fact, as it has been widely reported, Democrats drew millions more viewers than Republicans on three out of the four nights, and overall. It’s true that more people watched Trump’s final-night speech than Clinton’s, but that wasn’t good news for Trump, because more people disliked the speech than liked it.
