On Thursday, PolitiFact published its 1,000th fact check of a claim made by Donald Trump. The publication, which usually refrains from wading into political discussions or weighing in on a politician’s overall character, took the opportunity to release an analysis of those years of work. Its finding? Trump lies a lot.

“American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” the authors wrote. “Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a firehose of claims.”

The analysis found in particular that Trump’s immigration-related claims tended toward inflammatory falsehoods and that more than 70 percent of PolitiFact’s checks on immigration, foreign policy, crime, COVID, and health care were largely false. It concluded, also, that “Trump’s falsehoods have fueled threats to democracy.”

And yet, the article made it clear PolitiFact’s ambitions are limited. “Readers sometimes ask us what our endgame is with a politician like Trump. They say our fact-checks don’t keep Trump from repeating his false claims, including lies about the 2020 election,” the authors wrote. “It’s not our job to silence Trump or force him to change his rhetoric.”

But we at Slate were interested not just in what PolitiFact found; we wanted to know, for a team so diligently committed to the cause of fighting misinformation with data and passionless expertise, how it feels to operate in a world where objective truth seems to matter so little. Is it not, we wondered, a little maddening to put out such restrained corrections when the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee perpetually just says what feels best to him?

To understand what these years of fact-checking Trump have been like, we called Louis Jacobson, one of the authors of the article and a senior correspondent who has been with PolitiFact since 2009. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: What were the big take-aways from your analysis of Trump’s 1,000 fact checks?

Louis Jacobson: Let me start by saying we have been historically pretty hesitant to jump into the question of comparing truth-telling records. We are very upfront about this not being a scientific process. But I think one of the standout findings for us was that if you look at the median rating of Trump claims that we rated, the median is False. If we do rate a statement, it’ll be rated on a 6-point scale: our Truth-O-Meter, which includes True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire. Most politicians whom we rate frequently, from both parties, typically hover around Half True for the median. There are a few politicians—Ted Cruz is one; Ron Johnson is another; Newt Gingrich, the third—who have a median rating of Mostly False. But Trump is the only one that we’ve looked at who has a median of False.

So what was the 1,000th Trump fact check?

Trump, in a speech in New Hampshire, said Democrats “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election. It is kind of appropriate, I suppose, in a sense, in that it’s about elections, which has been a huge topic for Trump in the past couple years. And it ended up with a Pants on Fire [rating]. And, you know, he’s had a Pants on Fire percentage of 18.4 percent. Which, not counting Facebook posts and stuff—back in the day, we had a category called “chain emails,” and........

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