We’re doing something new today: Analyzing every factual claim from President Trump’s campaign rally in Montana on July 5.
According to The Fact Checker’s database[1], the president had made 3,251 false or misleading claims at the end of May, and his average daily rate was climbing.
This side of Trump really comes alive during campaign rallies, so we wanted to do the math and find out whether the president speaks more fictions or facts in front of his crowds.
We focused only on Trump’s statements of material fact at the Montana rally, avoiding trivialities and opinions. We didn’t double-count statements when the president repeated himself.
According to our analysis, the truth took a beating in Montana. From a grand total of 98 factual statements we identified, 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.
Here’s a breakdown: 46 false or mostly false statements, 23 misleading statements and five unsupported claims. We also counted 24 accurate or mostly accurate statements. False or mostly false statements alone accounted for 47 percent of all claims.
Trump’s rallies draw huge crowds — an estimated 6,500 people attended the July 5 rally — and they usually provide days of fodder for TV networks. Three-quarters of the president’s claims in Montana were false, misleading or unsupported, which underscores the need for fact-checking these events.
Here’s our analysis of all 98 claims:
It’s time to retire liberal Democrat Jon Tester.
Misleading. Tester has voted with President Trump 36.5 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight[2], and is more on the moderate side of the Democratic Party than the liberal side.
