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Middle-class income rose above $61,000 for the first time last year, U.S. Census Bureau says
The median U.S. household earned $61,372 in 2017, the highest recorded level and a sizable jump from the prior year, the U.S. Census reported Wednesday.

President Trump has made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims

In 601 days, the president has made 5,001 false or misleading claims. He only broke 2,000 in January, so the pace has stepped up significantly.

On Sept. 7, President Trump woke up in Billings, Montana, flew to Fargo, N.D., visited Sioux Falls and eventually returned to Washington. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One, held a pair of fundraisers and was interviewed by three local reporters.

In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements – in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high.

The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many in a campaign rally in Montana. An anonymous op-ed article by a senior administration official had just been published in the New York Times and news circulated about Bob Woodward’s insider account of Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 claims a day, but in the past nine days – since our last update – the president has averaged 32 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president's first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. He only passed the 2,000 mark on Jan. 10 – eight months ago.

Fittingly, the 5,000th claim was a tweet about the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller III: «Russian 'collusion' was just an excuse by the Democrats for having lost the Election!»

On nearly 140 occasions, the president has falsely claimed the Russia investigation was made up or a hoax. But the information on Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election was developed by the intelligence community and published in a declassified report, in which the agencies said they had “high confidence” it was correct.

One of his campaign aides has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts overseas, including one connection who disclosed the Russian had Democratic emails. The president’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager met at Trump Tower in June, 2016 with someone they thought was a representative of the Russian government and who had promised “dirt” on Clinton – and then tried to cover up that fact.

Whether additional criminal charges will be brought is unclear but the investigation continues.

The president’s 5,001st claim was another tweet: he claimed that the administration “did an unappreciated great job” dealing with Hurricane Maria in 2017 when it struck Puerto Rico.

That’s just spin that ignores a raft of official reports. A study by George Washington University estimated the death toll at between 2,658 and 3,290. Puerto Rico adopted the midpoint number, 2,975, as its official death toll. The island’s population dropped 8 percent because of the death toll and heavy outmigration after the hurricanes, according to the GWU study. A separate report by the Government Accountability Office found a litany of issues that prevented FEMA from responding quickly and efficiently to the Puerto Rican disaster. Full power was not restored to Puerto Rico for 11 months after the hurricanes.

A new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of 1,500 randomly selected adults residents of Puerto Rico found that eighty percent rate Trump’s response to Maria negatively. Many still struggle with basic necessities, with 83 percent reporting either major damage to their homes, losing power for more than three months, employment setbacks or worsening health problems, along with spotty power and dangerous, unrepaired roads.

With the new death toll of nearly 3,000 embraced by the Puerto Rican government, the president’s language when he visited Puerto Rico two weeks after the hurricane devastated the island looks tone-deaf.

“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here and what is your death count? Sixteen people, versus in the thousands,” he said on Oct. 3, 2017. “You can be very proud. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people.”

Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 1,573 — on the Fact Checker database relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his “incredible success” in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term. Almost 50 times, he has claimed the economy today is the “greatest” in U.S. history, an absurd statement not backed up by data.

In the wake of the Woodward book, Trump resurrected a claim that dates from the first 100 days – that he has accomplished more than any president in history in the same period of time. He made that statement six times in four days after news reports about the Woodward book.

Besides the tax bill, Trump has signed few noteworthy pieces of legislation, in contrast to the whirlwind of major bills passed in the first two years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson or Barack Obama. As of his 600th day, Trump has signed about the same number of bills as Obama and George W. Bush but is behind every other president since Eisenhower, according to a calculation by Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack. He noted that Trump is just behind Obama in terms of the number of pages, indicating that much of the legislation he has signed has been about increasing government spending.

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