Midway through Trump’s presidency, in 2018, we documented through a poll that most Americans, including Republicans, did not believe many of his most repeated claims.
A fresh Washington Post-Schar School poll shows that remains largely the case, with an average of 28 percent of Americans believing Trump’s false claims tested in the poll.
But Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially — the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”
Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes — one every 12.5 seconds.
The Post-Schar School Fact Checker survey included 10 pairs of opposing statements — one true, one false — without identifying who made the statement. Seven questions gauging belief in false claims by Trump, including four measured in 2018, were mixed among a false claim by Biden and two other factual questions.
Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans — and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters — believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office.
Relatedly, in 2018, a little more than a quarter of Republicans, 27 percent, said they believed Trump’s claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, benefiting Trump, despite substantial evidence assembled by intelligence agencies that it did interfere. Today, more Republicans, 37 percent, say they believe the false claim, despite the addition of a bipartisan Senate report concluding that Russia interfered, and criminal indictments of a dozen Russians. Overall, just about 1 in 5 Americans believe this.
Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans — and 81 percent of his strong supporters — that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this.
He has even convinced 51 percent of Republicans — and 58 percent of his most fervent supporters — that some cities tallied more votes than registered voters. This ludicrous claim is disproven simply by checking the statistics. Yet Trump has repeated it in rally after rally, often identifying Democratic strongholds like Detroit and Philadelphia.
False claims about election integrity are not the only ones that have taken hold.
While Biden has pushed forward with significant investment in green energy to combat climate change, the poll finds that Trump’s argument that global temperatures are rising mainly because of natural causes has gained traction with Republicans. Whereas one-third believed this in 2018, now nearly half (46 percent) think this is the case. As a result, the share of Americans overall saying human activity had little to do with climate change has climbed to 26 percent, from 19 percent in 2018.
Only one Trump false claim tested showed some slippage in support among Republicans — that the United States funds a majority of the NATO budget. (The United States provides 15.9 percent of the NATO budget for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity — the same percentage as Germany.) More than half of Republicans believed this in 2018 (53 percent); now the percentage ticked down to 46 percent. Just over one-third of Americans overall believe this. Trump’s rhetoric has had to contend with news reports of NATO allies rushing to send weapons to Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion, focusing new attention on the share of the load they shoulder for NATO.
As for that Russian invasion, Trump’s claim — without evidence — that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded if Trump had remained president has resonated with Republicans. Over 6 in 10 Republicans (63 percent) and 74 percent of strong Trump approvers say Putin wouldn’t have invaded if Trump was president; majorities of independents (51 percent) and Democrats (78 percent) say Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless of whether Trump or Biden was president.
One of the more striking findings in 2018 was that Republicans appeared to have grown less concerned about presidents being honest than they were a decade earlier. In 2007, an Associated Press-Yahoo poll found 71 percent of Republicans saying it was “extremely important” for presidential candidates to be honest, similar to 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents. The 2018 Post poll showed nearly identical shares of Democrats and independents prioritizing honesty in presidential candidates, but the share of Republicans who said honesty was extremely important had fallen to 49 percent, 22 points lower than what the AP-Yahoo poll showed.
The new survey finds that Republicans now align more closely with the 2007 result, with 63 percent of them saying being honest is extremely important. (Democrats are essentially unchanged.) Having a Democrat in the White House — especially one who often mangles facts and repeats dubious stories — might account for the return to the 2007 finding, but there may be a more startling reason, too.
In one of the clearest measures of how deeply Trump’s lies have pierced the public consciousness, slightly more Republicans now view Trump as more honest than they did in 2018. Asked whether Trump regularly makes misleading statements, the share of Republicans who say he does dipped by 10 percentage points, to 38 percent. The percentage of Republicans who say Trump usually makes flat-out false claims ticked down to 8 percent from 14 percent; he also made small inroads with independents, with the percentage saying he made flat-out false statements slipping by seven points, to 41 percent.
Perceptions of Biden’s honesty weren’t measured in 2018, but the survey found that 56 percent of Americans said that Democrats in Congress regularly made misleading statements — and in 2024, an identical share say the same of Biden. Overall, 66 percent of U.S. adults say Trump regularly makes misleading statements, down slightly from 71 percent in 2018 because of the shift among Republicans.
Both in 2018 and this year, respondents were asked whether unemployment was near a 50-year low. This was a true statement by Trump in 2018, when he was president — and it is true today, when Biden is president. The unemployment rate, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reached a low of 3.5 percent in 2019 under Trump and 3.4 percent in 2023 under Biden — levels not seen since 1969. The unemployment rate just before the 2018 poll was 3.8 percent; it was 3.9 percent just before the 2024 poll — both near 50-year lows at the time.
Similar percentages — about 1 in 4 — rejected this fact in both surveys, but perceptions have splintered by partisanship. The share of Democrats rejecting the claim dropped from 33 percent in 2018 to 20 percent today, while the share of Republicans rejecting it grew from 19 percent to 37 percent. Among strong Trump approvers, rejection of the claim more than doubled, from 19 percent to 45 percent.
Biden has frequently argued that Trump is a threat to democracy, citing his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his open admiration of autocrats. Trump has tried to turn the tables, claiming that Biden is the real threat to democracy. Without evidence, Trump claims Biden is responsible for the myriad criminal cases brought against the former president. About half of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” worried about threats to democracy in the United States (52 percent), including majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and independents (54 percent) and almost half of Republicans (47 percent). Nearly 6 in 10 of those who strongly approve of Trump (57 percent) are at least very worried about democracy.
Americans who say Fox News is one of their main news sources are 13 percentage points more likely to believe the average false Trump claim than the public overall (41 percent versus 28 percent of Americans overall). People who rely on Fox News as a main source of news also are more likely to say Biden won the election because of voter fraud (58 percent to 36 percent among the public overall), whereas a majority of people who rely on all other news sources with sufficient sample sizes, including social media, say Biden won fair and square.
Meanwhile, college graduates are eight percentage points less likely to believe Trump’s false claims than those without college degrees, 23 percent versus 31 percent.
Interestingly, a majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, believe a false claim about the inflation rate — that it has increased for most products over the past 12 months. The annualized consumer price index was 6.4 percent in January 2023, compared to 3.1 percent for January 2024, the last release before the poll was conducted. Yet 72 percent of adults say the inflation rate has increased over the past 12 months, compared to 18 percent who correctly identified that the rate has fallen. Among Democrats, 63 percent say the rate has increased, compared to 85 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents.
Trump’s false statements are central to some of the criminal trials he faces as the presidential election nears, but his advocates have signaled they will claim the truth doesn’t matter. In the case pending in Georgia, where Trump is accused of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, his attorney recently argued that false claims would be protected under the First Amendment. “Falsity alone is not enough,” said Trump’s lawyer, Steve Sadow. “Clearly, being president at the time, dealing with elections and campaigning, calling into question what had occurred — that’s the height of political speech.”
For many of Trump’s supporters, however, his lies aren’t just protected political speech. They are true.
Methodology
The Washington Post-Schar School poll was conducted by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The survey was administered online and by telephone March 7-12, 2024, among a random national sample of 1,017 U.S. adults through NORC at the University of Chicago’s AmeriSpeak Panel. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Sonia Vargas contributed to this report.
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