President Donald Trump's claim that no other president has passed as much legislation in the first six months as he has is false, according to The New York Times.
"We've signed more bills — and I'm talking about through the legislature — than any president, ever," the president said Monday. "For a while, Harry Truman had us. And now, I think, we have everybody."
Trump has signed 42 bills so far. By this point in their respective terms, President Jimmy Carter had signed 70 bills and Bill Clinton had signed 50 bills. In the first 100 days of their terms, Harry S. Truman signed 55 bills and Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed 76.
The Times also notes that although Trump has signed a number of significant bills, roughly half of the 42 were "minor and inconsequential… ceremonial or routine," such as a law that renames a Nashville, Tenn. courthouse after the late actor and senator, Fred Thompson.
"Even the Republican leadership in the Senate does not count those kinds of bills when they tally their legislative achievements," The Times' Michael D. Shear and Karen Yourish write.
Trump's chief legislative adviser, Marc Short, told The Times that although this law shouldn't be considered "landmark legislation," the president isn't wrong to tout the bills he's signed.
"It's a response to a lot of media coverage that has tried to downplay what he's accomplished," he said. "There's an overarching coverage about what's not been accomplished. The president is trying to point out what we actually have done."
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