Donald Trump 'has made more than 1,000 false claims' since becoming US President

President Donald Trump's statements are being tallied: REUTERS
President Donald Trump's statements are being tallied: REUTERS

Donald Trump has made more than 1,000 false claims since he entered the White House, it has been reported.

They included numerous suggestions that the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—was on its last legs and his repeated assertion that he played a key role in reducing the price of a batch of F-35 fighter jets.

The billionaire's bombastic style and frequent Twitter tirades have steered him into untruth a total of 1,057 times since taking office on 20 January, according to the Washington Post's fact-checking team.

It means he makes an average of nearly five incorrect statements per day, the Post said. He has repeated more than 30 misleading claims at least three times.

Famously, the President started early by claiming several times that the crowd at his inauguration was the biggest ever, when images showed it to be markedly smaller than that at Barack Obama's in 2009.

After only two days in office, Mr Trump's administration became inextricably tied to the phrase "alternative facts", which adviser Kellyanne Conway used to describe the inauguration claims Sean Spicer, then press secretary, had been ordered to make at his first briefing.

More recently, Mr Trump used Twitter to dredge up the long-debunked tale of US General John Pershing, who it was claimed executed 50 Muslim terrorists after dipping the bullets in pig's blood. "There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!" the President said.

The F-35 claim saw Mr Trump take credit for shaving hundreds of millions of dollars off the price of a batch of the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter, which is to be flown from the Royal Navy's new HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, as well as her US counterparts.

The President said: "On 90 planes I saved $725m. It's actually a little bit more than that, but it's $725m. And the reason they cut—same planes, same everything—was because of me. I mean, because that's what I do."

But a reduction in price had been announced in December 2016, a month before Mr Trump met with Lockheed chief executive Marillyn Hewson.