Say what you will about Donald Trump, but you’d have a really tough time arguing that he’s particularly good at saying things that are true. It’s bad enough that fact checkers have been working overtime lately trying to keep track of all the not-true things he’s been saying — a report from the Washington Post on Wednesday put Trump at 4,229 false claims since his inauguration last year, with nearly a quarter of those coming just in the past two months. I wasn’t the only one who read that report Wednesday — Jimmy Kimmel did too.
And it struck enough of a chord with him that he devoted a portion of his monologue to this, complete with a video montage.
“The truth really is on the endangered list. President Trump in his second year as president, he has almost doubled the number of lies he told in the first year. In June and July, the president was averaging 16 lies a day. That doesn’t even count the one he tells his wife,” Kimmel said. “And here’s the thing about the press — they never say ‘lie.’ They never say he lies. They keep using words like ‘falsehood,’ or ‘misleading.’
“There’s another term for those words: it’s called ‘lying.’ He’s not misleading, he’s lying. You know how you can tell he’s lying? Because he’s always telling us it’s true.”
And then “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” presented a montage that begins as a series of clips in which Trump says something that isn’t true, like, “Trump is one of the only people ever that actually accomplished more than he promised,” followed by him saying “it’s true.” But after a few moments, it devolves simply into a quick-cutting series of clips of Trump just saying “it’s true.”
It’s a lot for any mind to take in, but if you want to see it, you can watch the montage in full in the video embedded at the top of this post.