Trump averaged 15 falsehoods a day in 2018

Evan Vucci/AP

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after a security briefing at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2017.

• President Trump made more than 7,600 false statements this year, averaging 15 a day, according to analysis by the Washington Post.
• At the beginning of the year, Trump had made around 1,989 false statements. He tripled that by the end of 2018.
• His approach to facts may no longer be working. According to a Washington Post poll, only 3 in 10 Americans believe many of his most common false statements.

President Trump began 2018 by tweeting a thread of misleading statements and falsehoods about three of his favorite targets: Hillary Clinton, Iran, and The New York Times.

According to the Washington Post, those tweets were among the first of the president's approximately 7,600 lies, falsehoods, and mistruths of the year.

The Post's Fact Checker's database, which tracks most of Trump's statements, calculates that the president averaged 15 falsehoods a day this year, nearly tripling his rate from last year. At the beginning of 2018, Trump had accumulated almost 2,000 false statements, the Post reported. Now, on the last day of the year, he's very close to 8,000.

This approach to facts might not be working for the president anymore, according to a Post poll from this December. Fewer than three Americans out of 10 believe the president's oft-parroted statements on issues like immigration, the border wall, and the Russia Investigation.

Read more: Trump claims 'I always like to be truthful,' but his history of public statements before and after he became president prove otherwise

The Post's analysis shows that Trump began 2018 with a similar pace of false statements as in 2017, accumulating anywhere from 200 to 250 falsehoods a month. However, this output rocketed in June, when he reached 500 falsehoods a month. This escalation is attributed by the Post as the president going into campaign mode.

The Fact Checker blog at the Post, which measures the truth in statements made by politicians and other public figures with a "Pinocchio" scale, this year created the "bottomless Pinocchio," a measure used for false statements repeated over and over again. So far, Trump statements that have earned this distinction include falsehoods about his tax cut being the largest in US history and false statements about the US-Mexico border wall being under construction.