In September 2020, I had to abandon my effort to produce a comprehensive count of the false claims: Trump was doing so much lying during the campaign that I physically could not keep up. By then, I'd tallied about 9,000 false claims since September 2016.
Trump never lashed out at me that whole time. (He did block me on Twitter in 2017.) And unlike aides to other politicians I've fact checked, Trump's White House underlings never got in touch to try to scold me or to spin me out of a finding that he had been inaccurate.
I thought this was telling.
Whatever the Trump officials said publicly, they likely knew, too, that Trump lied a whole lot. They also knew that, whatever some guy wrote for a Canadian paper or said on CNN, they could get his lies to his base unchallenged through social media and friendly outlets like Fox News, One America News and Breitbart.