President Trump’s lengthy post-election news conference broke little ground in terms of facts. Many of his assertions are repeats that we have covered extensively in our database of his false or misleading statements, which as of Oct. 30 totaled 6,420. But some of these things may appear new or fresh to readers, so here’s a quick tour of some of them.
The president also opened with a series of statistics to suggest he actually earned a “big victory” at the polls, despite Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives. We will start with those.
“Fifty-five is the largest number of Republican senators in the last 100 years.”
False. Republicans had a 55-seat majority in the Senate from 1997 to 2000 and from 2005 to 2006, according to the Senate Historian’s office. From 1921 to 1927, Republicans held 59, 53 and 54 seats — when the Senate only had 96 seats. (Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states.) Republicans thus represented more than 55 percent of the body in each of those two-year sessions.
View the November 8 article by Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.