For ten years, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has had one of the strangest jobs in American journalism: keeping track of Donald Trump's false claims.
What began as what Dale thought would be a short-lived side project in 2016 turned into a decade-long assignment documenting thousands of statements from the man who would become president — twice.
And after ten years of doing it, Dale says he has reached a remarkable conclusion: Trump isn't simply another politician who occasionally bends the truth.
His dishonesty is in a category of its own.
Dale began fact-checking Trump in September 2016 while working as the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star. At the time, he assumed Trump would lose the election and the project wouldn't last very long.
He was wrong about that.
By September 2020, Dale says he had documented more than 8,500 false claims from Trump. Eventually, the sheer volume became impossible for one reporter to track individually.
Trump's departure from office in 2021 briefly changed Dale's workload. But when Trump returned to presidential politics, so did the fact-checks.
Dale says he counted more than 20 false or misleading claims in Trump's November 2022 speech announcing his third presidential campaign.
And now, after ten years of studying Trump's rhetoric, Dale says one thing stands out: this isn't normal political exaggeration.
Washington politicians of both parties make misleading statements, cherry-pick statistics and exaggerate their accomplishments. Dale acknowledges that reality.
But he argues that Trump is fundamentally different because of the frequency, range and often trivial nature of his false claims.
Some concern major issues such as elections, immigration, inflation, foreign policy and the economy.
Others are almost bizarrely insignificant.
Over the years, Trump has claimed he received a Michigan "Man of the Year" award for which no evidence has been found. He claimed to have received a phone call from the Boy Scouts that the organization said never happened. He has disputed the existence of empty seats at events where empty seats were plainly visible.
Why lie about something so easily checked — and so utterly unimportant?
That's part of what Dale says makes Trump unusual.
Then there is repetition.
Many of Trump's debunked claims don't disappear after being corrected. They come back again and again.
Dale says some have been repeated so many times that he can essentially fact-check them from memory.
The pattern continues during Trump's second presidency.
At the Republican midterm convention in September, for example, Trump claimed that food prices and "almost every other item" were rapidly declining.
They weren't.
Consumer price data showed overall food prices had risen since Trump returned to office, even though some individual products — notably eggs — had fallen.
Trump also claimed that more than $20 trillion had been invested in the United States during his second term.
CNN's review found no evidence supporting that figure. Even the White House's own published number was substantially lower, and CNN reported that the administration's total included pledges and economic agreements that could not reasonably be counted as actual investment.
Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he has ended eight wars.
Fact-checkers have found that claim substantially exaggerates his role in several conflicts and counts disputes that were not actually wars.
But Dale has noticed another pattern after a decade of watching Trump:
When Trump gets into trouble, the false claims often increase.
Rather than retreating when confronted with controversy or contradictory evidence, Trump frequently doubles down, introduces new claims or repeats the original assertion.
That creates an extraordinary challenge for journalism.
A reporter can spend hours researching and debunking a claim.
Trump can repeat it again in seconds.
And then repeat it tomorrow.
And the next day.
And a month later.
The result is something American journalism has struggled with since Trump entered national politics: how do you cover a politician whose false statements arrive faster than reporters can realistically investigate them?
After ten years, Dale doesn't claim to have solved that problem.
But he has accumulated an extraordinary record of it.
Thousands of claims. Hundreds of fact-checks. The same falsehoods repeated over and over — mixed with new ones arriving almost daily.
Dale thought his Trump fact-checking project would last a few months.
A decade later, he's still doing it.
And perhaps the most remarkable part of the story isn't simply how many Trump claims have been proven false.
It's how routine the process has become.