Glenn Kessler

When 2018 began, the President Donald Trump had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the President. By the end of the year, President Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency — averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before. President Trump began 2018 on a similar pace as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false claims a month.

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.” The second came in January of 2018, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that President Trump denied all the allegations and any payments.

There have been a number of instances in which the President or his surrogates have flatly denied something — only to have that denial contradicted weeks or months later by new documents or statements. Often, by then the media coverage has moved on to a new controversy. The release of the tape recording between Donald Trump and his former fixer, Michael Cohen, is only the most recent example of this dynamic. Here’s a sampling of White House denials that eventually unraveled after new information was disclosed.

"When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” -- White House budget director Mick Mulvaney.

Mulvaney may be the WH budget director, but these comments suggest little understanding of the taxes paid by single mothers or coal miners. Single mothers in Detroit, most of whom are living in poverty, likely pay no taxes at all and instead would be receiving funds from the U.S. government via the Earned Income Tax Credit. Coal miners also do not earn a lot of money, but in many cases may pay at least some taxes. The biggest part of the federal budget is entitlement programs — especially Social Security and Medicare — but President Trump has pledged to leave those untouched. That’s where the real money is, whereas programs like the CPB are a relative pittance.