Veteran fact-checker Glenn Kessler says Trump made it ‘acceptable for politicians to lie with impunity’

The Washington Post Fact Checker is leaving the field. After close to 15 years of fact-checking, Glenn Kessler took a buyout as part of the Post’s recent newsroom overhaul. Kessler’s work helped rejuvenate fact-checking journalism in the United States, along with organizations like PolitiFact (owned by Poynter) and FactCheck.org. Kessler elevated fact-checking to a regular feature of the Post’s political culture with his signature “Pinocchio” rating system as a fun shorthand for measuring political dishonesty.

During his tenure, Kessler became best known for his meticulous tracking of President Donald Trump’s false and misleading claims, documenting more than 30,000 statements during Trump’s first term — a count that became a widely repeated metric of Trump’s relationship to truth. That work culminated in the 2020 book “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth,” co-authored with Post colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.