Donald Trump has been president for 41 days, and he finally put up a goose egg: no factual errors or misleading statements for a full day, midnight to midnight, according to The Washington Post's great Fact Checkers, Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee.
Trump's sudden discipline on Twitter is a big reason for the milestone. It's been four full days since he tweeted anything remotely controversial or combative — perhaps taking his own advice from his speech to Congress on Tuesday night to put “trivial fights behind us.” The president has made about one out of every five of his false or misleading claims using his thumbs.
Here's his one tweet from Wednesday. Two words.
Trump also made basically no public comments Wednesday — apparently because of the White House's desire to milk the good press from the speech. Only one pool report mentioned something Trump said, and it was at a meeting with congressional Republicans: “Thank you very much, we are here to start the process,” Trump said. “It begins as of now, and we'll have tremendous success. Thank you very much.”
It's also important to note that Trump's sudden factual restraint comes with a massive caveat: It came the day after arguably his worst factual day as president. On Tuesday, the same day in which his speech earned plaudits for its delivery and presidentiality, Trump made 26 misleading or counterfactual claims.
In other words, mere hours before his first clean sheet, Trump made or repeated more than 13 percent of all of his false or misleading claims as president in a single day. He's now up to 190 such claims in his 41-plus days as president.
And he just gave brief remarks on an aircraft carrier. We'll see if he can keep the streak alive.