Rick Santorum says Trump ‘has a problem’ with lying

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Former Pennsylvania senator and CNN commentator Rick Santorum said on Wednesday that President Trump “has a problem” with lying, during an interview with CNN’s New Day.

“The president says things that don’t comport with the facts,” Santorum told host Chris Cuomo. “I don’t like calling people liars, but the reality is this president has a problem. And I have said that over and over again. I wish he wouldn’t go out and say things that don’t comport with the facts.”

Santorum’s admission came in response to analysis released by Washington Post fact-checkers this week, which showed that, since taking office in January 2017, President Trump has made 3,001 “false or misleading claims…an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.”

“We have never seen a record like this,” Cuomo said. “…How do you justify this data from the Washington Post?”

Santorum initially responded by claiming President Obama lied about the Affordable Care Act when he said people would be able to keep their doctor and current insurance if they liked them. He also claimed Obama had lied about a $400 million cash payment to Iran in January 2016, which Trump himself has argued should’ve been investigated. That payment was essentially part of a larger settlement for past military purchases that the United States still owed to Iran ($1.7 billion total), over a failed arms deal first made in 1979.

“‘You can keep your doctor, you can keep your insurance, we didn’t pay off the Iranians’…. I think the substance of the previous president’s lies were much more important than the substance of what the crowd size was at the [inauguration],” he said. “I mean, those are the things I really care about.”

After Cuomo accused Santorum of “moral relativism” and noted he had refused to answer questions about Trump’s lies up front, however, Santorum eventually changed gears.

“Look I’m not being–I’ll say it right here. You have seen me criticize President Trump for his hyperbole,” he said. “…I’m not saying he is not subject to hyperbole and exaggeration and other things. He is.”

The Washington Post’s analysis, published on Tuesday, reveals Trump’s tendency to not only skew the truth but shows his habit of repeating some of those lies at an astounding rate.

Trump has repeated 113 of those 3,001 false claims at least three times each, according to the study, including claiming he passed the largest tax cut in history (72 times), claiming the Russia investigation is made up or a “witch hunt” (53 times), claiming a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border will stop illegal drugs from flowing into the United States (34 times), and claiming that the border wall is already under construction, even though it isn’t (13 times in the past five weeks alone).

On one day last year — July 25, 2017 — Trump made 53 separate “misleading claims.” The second-highest day, in terms of the number of falsehoods the president made publicly, came on November 29, 2017, when Trump made at least 49 inaccurate statements or outright lies.

Notwithstanding Santorum’s comments on Wednesday, many Republicans appear willing — if not eager — to ignore the frequency with which Trump makes up statements or distorts the facts. At least one prominent Republican recently argued that it’s also not the business of the press to report those lies.

During an interview with CNN Monday, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp claimed that journalists were the cause of many political rifts, and that reporters should aim to let the public decide what’s true and what isn’t.

“We have political disagreements in this country, and I think it’s wrong for journalists to take that next step,” he said. “Just present the facts. Let the American people decide if they think someone is lying. The journalist shouldn’t be the one to say the president or his spokesperson is lying, because what that does is to 50 percent of the country, is it makes them feel like they aren’t credible to listen to anymore.”