I started fact-checking Trump 10 years ago. Here are 15 things I’ve learned

Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election. I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade. His relentless dishonesty has become a central feature of US and world politics. Voters and members of Congress, allies and adversaries, CEOs and investors alike have had to try to figure out how to read a man whose words are so frequently not true. How frequently? Two months before Election Day in 2020, I had to abandon my four-year-old project of fact-checking each and every Trump statement.