A Quick Project That Lasted Ten Years

Daniel Dale thought he would be fact-checking Donald Trump for a few weeks. He was wrong.

Ten years ago this month, Dale was working as the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star when he started what he believed would be a quick side project. Trump was running for president as an underdog candidate. He was telling what Dale called a remarkable number of lies. Most of them went uncorrected in real time.

Like many people at the time, Dale thought Trump would lose the 2016 election.

That did not happen. And Trump kept being wrong about a wide range of subjects for the next decade.

I read Dale’s reflection on this anniversary with a quiet sense of recognition. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that comes when you realize you have been watching the same pattern for so long that it starts to feel normal. That is the worry here. Not the lies themselves, though those matter. The worry is how easily we adjust to them.

Dale joined CNN in 2019 as a fact-check reporter. Since then, he has spent most of his time separating fact from fiction in Trump’s statements. The work grew beyond what one person could reasonably track. Two months before the 2020 election, he had to stop checking every single Trump claim. The volume had become too large to verify while living something like a healthy life.

By that point, he had recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016.

That number is hard to hold in your head. It is not just a statistic. It represents hours of work, day after day, checking statements about everything from the economy to awards that never existed to phone calls that never happened. Some lies required debunking for the tenth time. Others for the hundredth.

What strikes me most is not the dishonesty itself. Politicians have bent the truth for as long as there have been politicians. What feels different here is the scale and the persistence. Trump repeats some false statements year after year. He invents stories about small things. He uses incorrect numbers even when the real ones would help his case.

This is not a new observation. But seeing it laid out across ten years makes something clear that daily coverage can obscure. The lying is not a bug in the system. It is a feature. It has become a central part of how American politics works now.

Dale took a brief break from Trump fact-checking when Trump left office in 2021. Joe Biden had his own accuracy problems, but nowhere near the volume or variety of Trump’s falsehoods. Then Trump returned to the White House, and the work resumed.

I find myself wondering what this does to people who consume this news every day. Not analysts or journalists. Ordinary voters. Parents checking headlines between school drop-off and work. People trying to make sense of what their government is telling them.

At some point, constant correction starts to feel like shouting into a storm. You know you are right. You have the evidence. But the statement keeps spreading anyway. The false version becomes the one people remember.

This is not an argument for giving up on fact-checking. The opposite. Work like Dale’s matters precisely because the alternative is worse. Without it, there would be no shared record of what was actually said and what was not true. There would be no way to push back when false claims become the basis for policy or public belief.

But it is exhausting work. And it raises a question that does not have a clean answer. How do you maintain a fact-based public conversation when one side of politics operates with such disregard for basic accuracy?

Dale’s answer, after ten years, is sober. The lies cause real harm. American democracy has suffered. Voters, members of Congress, allies, adversaries, CEOs, and investors all have to figure out how to read a man whose words are so frequently not true.

That is the quiet cost. Not the drama of any single false claim. The cumulative effect on how people make decisions about their lives and their country.

I do not know what comes next. Ten years is a long time to track one person’s relationship with the truth. But I know this. The work does not end because it feels tiring. It ends when the lying stops. And that has not happened.

Dale is still at it. So are others. The record matters. Not because it changes minds in the moment. Often it does not. But because it exists. Because someone is keeping track. Because ten years from now, there will still be a clear account of what was said and what was false.

That is not a satisfying ending. It is not a victory. It is just the work. And it continues.