The Washington Post Fact Checker, Glen Kessler and his team (it takes a team), has written a book about Trump’s lies.

James Hohmann of the WaPo writes about it here:

President Trump has made 19,127 false or misleading claims since taking office, according to a database maintained by our Fact Checker team, including more than 800 related to the novel coronavirus.

A fresh Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that only 35 percent of Americans say Trump is honest and trustworthy, compared to 62 percent who say he is not.

In addition to the worst public health crisis since 1918 and the worst economic crisis since 1933, Trump now faces the worst civil unrest since 1968. One week after George Floyd’s death in police custody on Memorial Day triggered a wave of protests, more cities have imposed curfews and more states have deployed the National Guard to restore order than at any time since immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

As much as any other moment of his presidency, now is a time when Trump would benefit from being able to draw upon a reservoir of public trust or goodwill. But he has squandered the benefit of the doubt. A new 384-page book from the Fact Checker staff of The Washington Post, which goes on sale Tuesday, tells the story of how Trump became “the most mendacious president in U.S. history.”

“Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies,” by Glenn Kessler, Sal Rizzo and Meg Kelly, presents not just a catalog of false claims but a thematic guide to Trump’s assault on the very existence of objective reality. There are chapters on the president’s false claims related to the economy, immigration, the Ukraine affair and foreign policy. One chapter lays out Trump’s 10 most egregious and important false claims, including his denials that he knew about hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

One of the central insights of the book is that Trump’s whoppers have become bigger and more frequent since he took office. Originally, The Post planned to track all of Trump’s falsehoods in a database during only his first 100 days in office. The Fact Checker team documented 492 false claims in that stretch, about six a day. Editors decided to continue the project as a public service and because of popular demand. It’s become more and more time-consuming for the full-time team of four journalists: The president’s speeches got longer, he tweeted more frequently and he gave more interviews to friendly right-wing outlets that rarely challenged him. Now, they often lose nights and weekends to what they describe as “the depressing task of wading through the president’s forest of falsehoods.”

So far this year, Trump is averaging 22 false claims a day in the Fact Checker database. He’s on track to make nearly 25,000 false statements by the end of the term. Whether he gets there will depend partly on how many campaign rallies he holds this fall. A 56-page appendix of the book is an anatomical investigation of a single Trump rally from last December in Battle Creek, Mich., during which the president made 120 statements of fact that were either false, mostly false or unsupported by evidence. That was two-thirds of all the claims the president made during a two-hour monologue.

Another insight from the book is that October is the most dangerous month for the truth vis-à-vis Trump. In October 2018, before the midterm elections, the president tallied 1,205 claims. It stands to reason that this fall, when his own name will be on the ballot, the fact checkers will be as busy as ever.