Trump is and always has been nothing but a big lie. And nothing will change the support of his cult followers but others can see and are probably interested in knowing that everything about Trump is a lie including how rich and successful he is. And there will be no escape from exposing those lies.



MSNBC's Jen Psaki Points Out Donald Trump's Most 'Flagrant' Lie
Lee Moran
Updated Mon, October 2, 2023 at 6:36 AM MDT·1 min read
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MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Sunday examined

’s routine exaggeration of his fortune ahead of the former president’s civil fraud trial, which begins Monday.

“Of all the lies that Donald Trump has told during his time in public life, and there have been many, many, none have been more prolific and more flagrant than his lies about his personal wealth,” began Psaki, the former Biden White House press secretary.

Trump’s spin on his worth has for years been “the core” of the former president’s business, reality TV, and political brand, she continued.

“But it was all built on a myth,” she explained, recalling how Trump’s fabrications and suggestion he was self-made saw him placed on rich lists ― even though he actually inherited his initial wealth from his father.

Last week, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that Trump was liable for fraud when he overvalued his properties on financial statements as he sought to secure loans.

Six other allegations of conspiracy, falsifying business records and insurance fraud are yet to be decided in the non-jury trial. Trump has vowed to attend the first day of the trial in New York.

Watch Psaki’s analysis here:




https://www.yahoo.com/news/msnbcs-jen-psaki-points-donald-084813134.html

 

Rep. Jared Moskowitz calls for Palm Beach County to tax Mar-a-Lago at the rate Trump claims it's worth
Trump has claimed his Florida resort is worth as much as $1.5 billion, but the Palm Beach County property appraiser valued it far lower.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz.Michael Brochstein / Sipa via AP file

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Oct. 5, 2023, 11:47 AM MDT
By Sahil Kapur and Summer Concepcion
A Democratic House member is asking Palm Beach County, Florida, to tax Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property at the rate the former president claims it is worth amid his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York.

In a letter first provided to NBC News, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., issued the request to Dorothy Jacks, Palm Beach County's property appraiser.


Moskowitz noted New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling last week saying that Trump repeatedly committed acts of fraud for years. Engoron ruled that Trump lied to banks and insurers by overvaluing and undervaluing his assets while exaggerating his net worth to billions of dollars.

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Trump has raged against Engoron’s ruling, insisting that his Florida resort is worth “50 to 100 times” what prosecutors in the New York civil case have said, or “closer to $1.5 billion.”

“Between 2011 and 2021, you value the Mar-a-Lago property between $18 million and $28 million,” Moskowitz wrote in the letter to the Palm Beach County appraiser.

“Mar-a-Lago was listed as worth $490 million in financial documents given to banks,” he wrote. “If the property value of Mar-a-Lago is so much higher than it was appraised, will you be amending the property value in line with the Trump family’s belief that the property is worth well over a billion dollars?”


Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2022.Steve Helber / AP file
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Moskowitz, first elected in 2022, is a moderate Democrat who represents a district in Florida that includes parts of Palm Beach County. He is also a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

With Trump’s civil fraud trial in the national conversation, the letter is an attempt by the first-term congressman to highlight the disconnect between Trump’s claims that his property is worth far more than the value set by appraisers, as cited by the judge in his case.



https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/do...-county-tax-mar-lago-rate-trump-cl-rcna119042

 

Trump spews falsehoods about classified docs case after Biden speaks to investigators

Travis Gettys
October 10, 2023 8:56AM ET



Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


Donald Trump lobbed a dishonest attack against President Joe Biden over their respective handling of classified materials on Tuesday.

The White House confirmed the president had been voluntarily interviewed by special counsel Robert Hur's team over the weekend about classified materials found at his former Washington, DC, office and his Wilmington, Delaware, home, and the ex-president claimed the allegations against Biden were much worse than his own conduct, which resulted in 40 criminal charges.

"I see that Crooked Joe Biden is working on his documents situation," Trump posted on Truth Social. "He moved documents, many classified, all over the place, for years, including to CHINATOWN. He even took documents as a Senator, an absolute no, no! I come under the Presidential Records Act, he doesn’t - A big difference!!! I did nothing wrong, he did, and so did many others!"

Biden has said he was not aware the documents, which included intelligence memos and briefing materials, were in either location until notified by his personal attorneys, who also notified the White House counsel's office and the National Archives right away.



Trump, by contrast, knowingly took sensitive government documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office and refused to return them when asked by the National Archives, and the indictment alleges that he instructed employees to hinder efforts by the Department of Justice to recover them.

"The [Presidential Records Act] requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to [NARA] at the end of their administrations," the National Archives stated in response to Trump claims shortly after his indictment, and which he and his attorneys have continued to make.



https://www.rawstory.com/biden-classified-documents-2665870263/

 

Can you imagine if President Biden or any Democrat for that matter were saying something like this? But you know hey its Trump. So if he wants to attack Netanyahu, criticize Israel and praise Hezbollah that's fine with treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans. Trump is their Chosen One and can do no wrong.


Trump mischaracterized Israeli role in Soleimani killing, say ex-U.S. officials
Courtney Kube and Katherine Doyle
Fri, October 13, 2023 at 6:00 PM MDT·2 min read
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WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump falsely characterized Israel’s role in his administration’s assassination of Iran’s top general during remarks this week, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning of the operation.

Trump said Wednesday that Israel planned to be part of the January 2020 operation that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani but abruptly backed out the night before it was to take place. In his remarks, delivered before an audience at his Mar-a-Lago club in South Florida, Trump sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister

for that decision after months of working with the U.S. on the operation.

But the U.S. officials familiar with the planning said Trump’s comments are entirely false. “They were never on board with it," said a former senior White House official, referring to the Israelis. "They always thought it was a dangerous and destabilizing idea.”


One former Trump administration official familiar with the planning said that in Washington, when Trump made the decision to go ahead with the Soleimani strike, the generals who were present seemed to collectively take a deep breath.

The CIA declined to comment. The Trump campaign, the U.S. military’s Central Command and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

If the former president’s comments were accurate, it would have been a significant — and classified — revelation.


“Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months,” Trump said Wednesday. “We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack.”

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump added, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.

“That was a very terrible thing,” he said. “And then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good.”

Israeli intelligence helped confirm Soleimani’s location for American intelligence officials, NBC News first reported at the time. The U.S. subsequently killed Soleimani with a drone strike in Baghdad.

Israel was never part of the operation, the U.S. officials involved in the planning said.

Trump is facing federal charges over his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.

Trump’s comments on Wednesday were part of a series of sharply critical remarks about Netanyahu in the days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. On Wednesday, Trump also called Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-mischaracterized-israeli-role-soleimani-000000066.html

 

Part of Trump's FORMS of mental illness is he can't bear to be told no. And so if someone tells Trump he can't do something he has a compulsion to do it. But this is a different ballgame because its courts and judges telling Trump what he can and cannot do. And they do have power over him. So this is going to be fun to watch.


Trump's latest furious rant against fraud trial destroyed by fact-checker

Matthew Chapman
October 17, 2023 10:21AM ET



Donald Trump (Photo by Joshua Lott for AFP)


Former President Donald Trump was soundly fact-checked on Tuesday morning by legal reporter Adam Klasfeld following a Truth Social rant about the civil fraud case that's ongoing against himself and his adult sons in New York State.

"I will be attending the trial in Manhattan this morning," wrote Trump. "I greatly appreciate all of the legal professors and scholars that are saying I DID NOTHING WRONG. I can’t have a JURY and am being viciously tried under a Statute that has never been used before. The Radical Left Democrat Judge, WHO IS HIGHLY POLITICAL, serves as Judge, Jury, and everything else. America cannot let this happen. Our legal system is corrupt and broken! Everything emanates from Washington, 'GET TRUMP.'"

Klasfeld, a senior legal correspondent for The Messenger, was quick to point out in a post on X that several of Trump's claims were incorrect.



For one thing, Klasfeld noted, Trump doesn't name any of the "legal professors and scholars" who are supposedly proclaiming his innocence. And more importantly, "Executive Law 63(12) has, in fact, 'been used before' — at least half a dozen times in the last few years," including one case brought against e-cigarette company Juul Labs.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is arguing in her case that Trump and his sons committed civil fraud by systematically misstating the value of the Trump Organization's properties in order to obtain better loan terms. Trump has denied this, arguing that his valuations are subjective and that there was no actual injury because all the loans were repaid as agreed.

Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled on the merits for James in summary judgment, and the current trial is purely about determining damages. James is seeking $250 million in fines and a ban on Trump from doing any business in the state.



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-fraud-trial-2665987656/

 

Trump Insists He ‘Has’ to Attend Trial—Then Admits He’ll Skip It for Golf

Donald Trump openly made a false statement outside the courtroom of his fraud trial on Wednesday and then contradicted himself just minutes later. The former president claimed that his New York trial was preventing him from campaigning for the 2024 election. “I have to be here instead of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, lots of other great places,” Trump complained. “They want me to be here.” But in actuality, Trump is voluntarily attending his trial. To make matters worse, he then told reporters that he would skip court on Thursday because he had “a very big professional golf tournament at Doral”—meaning the only person keeping Trump off the campaign trail is the former president himself. New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused Trump of overvaluing his assets in order to get better deals on loans and insurance. Judge Arthur Engoron, who has given Trump a gag order for attacking a clerk on social media, ruled late last month that Trump had committed fraud. The trial is now focused on allegations of falsifying business documents.



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Trump: They want to keep me here instead of campaigning in Iowa… They want me to be here *3 minutes later* Reporter: Will you be back tomorrow? Trump: Probably not. We’re having a very big professional golf tournament at Doral, so probably not












3:50 PM · Oct 18, 2023


https://www.thedailybeast.com/donal...dmits-hell-skip-it-for-golf?ref=home?ref=home

 

Trump’s Denial That Sidney Powell Was Ever His Lawyer Prompts Internet Sleuths to Post Clip of Giuliani Calling Her Exactly That
Phillip NietoOct 22nd, 2023, 4:39 pm
582 comments




After former President Donald Trump claimed Sidney Powell was never his lawyer following her guilty plea, the progressive watchdog MeidasTouch and others online posted a clip of Rudy Giuliani identifying her as his lawyer back in in November 2020.

Trump reacted to Powell’s guilty plea in the Georgia racketeering case by stating Powell was never his lawyer while continuing to claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.


Trump along with 17 other co-defendants faces charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. If convicted, Trump could face years behind bars.

However a clip back in November 2020 shows the former mayor of New York City introducing Powell as Trump’s attorney as well as a legal representative of his campaign. During a press conference at this time, Giuliani along with Powell, Jenna Ellis, and others claimed the 2020 election was stolen via election fraud.

“This is representative of our legal team. We’re representing President Trump and we’re representing the Trump campaign. When I finish Sidney Powell and then and then Jenna Ellis will follow me and we will present in brief the evidence that we’ve collected over the last I guess it is two weeks,” he noted.


Watch below:




Moreover, Trump himself on Nov. 14th, 2020, identified Powell as being part of his legal team by tweeting, “I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS! Rudy Giuliani, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!”‘

After taking the plea deal, Powell will be forced to testify at future trial and may provide damaging evidence against Trump as his former legal adviser.


https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump...st-clip-of-giuliani-calling-her-exactly-that/

 

The scary thing is that Trump might win in 2024. He is ahead in all of the polls.

This is why he must be put in prison is quickly as possible. Poorly educated whites must not be permitted to elect him dictator.

 

Trump's lies are often interesting because they actually tell us what he is most afraid of. He suddenly doesn't even know the Kraken and she was never his lawyer. When there is plenty of video that proves that's a lie. So why lie. Because the Kraken has cracked pleaded guilty in Georgia and will probably testify against him.

And now he doesn't even know the red haired weirdo Anthony Pratt and blames the revelations on Jack Smith. There's photos of them together so again why lie? Because he knows Pratt has met with Smith and will probably also testify against him.


Trump Claims He Never Spoke to Billionaire ‘Red Haired Weirdo’ About Nuke Subs
Dan Ladden-Hall
Mon, October 23, 2023 at 3:22 AM MDT·1 min read
992



Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

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Donald Trump lashed out at explosive reports Sunday alleging that he had discussed sensitive information concerning U.S. nuclear submarines and conversations with world leaders with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt. Details of Trump’s relationship with Pratt—a Mar-a-Lago member and one of Australia’s wealthiest men—emerged over the weekend in the Australian media and the Times, with secret recordings appearing to capture Pratt discussing Trump’s indiscretions, which allegedly included Trump telling Pratt about military operations. “The Failing New York Times story, leaked by Deranged Jack Smith and the Biden ‘Political Opponent Abuser’ DOJ, about a red haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I never spoke to him about Submarines,” the former president added, going on to claim that Times journalists “never called me for a comment.” The Times story included a statement from both a Trump spokesman and Trump himself.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-claims-never-spoke-billionaire-092245642.html

 

The more fearful and panicked Trump is the more he lies. And he must be shitting his Depends again.



Fact check: Trump falsely claims the US had no terrorist attacks during his presidency
Daniel Dale, CNN
Mon, October 23, 2023 at 6:15 PM MDT·4 min read
259



Charles Krupa/AP

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Former President Donald Trump made numerous false claims in a campaign speech Monday in New Hampshire.

Trump falsely claimed that the United States had no terrorist attacks during his presidency. He falsely claimed that Republican presidential rival Nikki Haley had initially proposed “to flood” the US with refugees from Gaza.

He repeated his frequent lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen.” He wrongly described an exchange he had withPresident Joe Biden and a moderator during a 2020 presidential debate.


And he repeated a variety of familiar false claims from his presidency. Those included his regular assertion that no previous president had secured any revenue from tariffs on China – in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese goods for more than two centuries and was taking in billions per year under his predecessor – and his old story about approving a policy that supposedly gave 10 years in jail to anyone who damaged a monument; that’s not what his executive order did.

Trump also claimed with no evidence that Biden has received money from China.

Below are more detailed fact checks of Trump’s inaccurate claims about terrorist attacks under his watch and Haley’s stance on accepting refugees from Gaza.

Trump’s false claim about terrorist attacks during his presidency
While criticizing Biden for his handling of Iran and national security matters, Trump made a significant false claim about his own national security record in office – wrongly declaring that there were no terrorist attacks in the US during his presidency.

“If you notice, all of the problems, all of the big problems, they all stopped. And I never talked about it during my four years, but look what happened: we didn’t have any attacks in the United States for four years,” Trump said in a campaign speech in New Hampshire.

Trump touted his ban on travel from “horrendous, dangerous nations,” most of which were Muslim-majority countries. Then he repeated, “But we didn’t have an attack for four years.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that “we didn’t have an attack for four years” isn’t true. The claim is inaccurate even if he was referring specifically to attacks by Islamic extremists.

Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to prominent Democratic officials, CNN and other people in 2018.

In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.

Trump’s false claim about Haley and refugees from Gaza
Trump claimed that Nikki Haley, his Republican presidential rival and his former US ambassador to the United Nations, had proposed the US to take in a large number of refugees from Gaza.

“But she flip-flopped – last week, you saw that disaster – after proposing to flood America with refugees from Gaza. Oh, that sounds like a wonderful idea, doesn’t it,” Trump said in a speech in New Hampshire.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is wrong. Haley did not propose taking in a large number of refugees from Gaza. Trump was falsely portraying her October 15 response to a question from CNN anchor Jake Tapper that was not even about US refugee policy toward Gaza.

Similar claims about Haley’s remarks to Tapper have been made by the campaign of another Republican candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Trump also criticized in his Monday speech. CNN fact-checked the DeSantis camp’s claims last week.

As CNN explained in that previous fact check, Haley never said anywhere in her comments to Tapper that she wanted the US to take in refugees from Gaza.

Rather, the former South Carolina governor was asked by Tapper for her thoughts about DeSantis having said that while the people of Gaza are not all Hamas, “they are all antisemitic” and “none of them” believes Israel has the right to exist. Haley responded that many Gazans don’t want to be ruled by Hamas, just as many Iranians oppose the regime that governs them, and the US should continue to distinguish between terrorists and civilians.

She did not say the US should take in any of these Gaza civilians as refugees. And in subsequent remarks, Haley has expressed firm opposition to the US accepting refugees from Gaza. She argued on Fox last Tuesday that “Hamas-sympathizing” Middle Eastern countries should take in these refugees instead.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-trump-falsely-claims-001507573.html

 

The will of the people is the will of the people. Trump and trumptards don't understand that concept. That's why I want Trump to run in 2024. It's the only way to rid ourselves of him.

 

What would have happened if Pence followed Trump's call to not accept the results of the last election?

If Trump DOES effectively continue to run for the next presidency, what if he tries to pull a similar stunt, but this time is successful?

I appreciate that the hope is he would run, and lose, and the margins wouldn't even be close, and he'd be humiliated... but that's not in his gamebook. His method is to win by whatever means necessary.

There already seems to be such a divide amongst Americans...

 

Again in order to be a treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republican you have to suspend all disbelief. There is no past and no future. You cannot look at Trump constantly changing his lies. You can only believe what the Chosen One, Traitor Trump says when he says it.


Notice how Trump's Big Lie just keeps getting bigger and bigger.




Trump claims he won all 50 states in the 2020 election
Kelly McClure
Sun, November 5, 2023 at 8:27 AM MST·1 min read
102



Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images

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During a campaign event held in Florida on Saturday, Donald Trump continued with his usual deal of crediting himself for unearned victories, claiming to have won all 50 states during the 2020 election, although Biden took Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia for 74 electoral college votes.

"We won, the last time, 50 states, think of it, 50 states," he told the Freedom Summit, outside Orlando, Florida. "We won every state. We then did great in the election. We got 12 million more votes or so … 12 million more votes than we got the first time."


As ABC News points out, Trump "faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, two of which are related to election interference," but that doesn't seem to be slowing him down much when it comes to consistently refusing to admit that Biden took the win against him, and will likely do it again in 2024.


"The whole thing is a lie … the whole election is a lie," Trump continued on Saturday.

Earlier in the evening, former state governors Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie did their best to offer alternatives to Trump, with Hutchinson reminding that "There is a significant likelihood that Donald Trump will be found guilty by a jury on a felony offense next year."


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-claims-won-50-states-152719454.html

 

Yep and Trump actually won every state in 2016 too.

 

I have always wondered if the reason Daniel Dale is the best Trump fact checker in existence is because he's from Canada and started put working at the Toronto Star. That might have given him a higher standard for accuracy and better worth ethic than US reporters. When Dale was at the star he would fact check Trump in real time. In other words watch his speeches and press gaggles and fact check Trump's lies just about as fast as he could tell them. Which is nearly impossible and amazing to watch. And then Dale went to CNN. And there's still no one like Dale.



Trump’s avalanche of dishonesty: Fact-checking 102 of his false claims from this fall
Daniel Dale, CNN
Fri, December 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM MST·75 min read
59



Scott Olson/Getty Images


For the third straight presidential election, Donald Trump is campaigning on an avalanche of dishonesty.

CNN fact-checked 12 of the former president’s October and November speeches. We found, as we did during his 2016 campaign and his presidency, that Trump’s fall remarks were teeming with false claims – a staggering quantity and variety of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies that made sheer wrongness a central feature of each of his addresses.

As in the past, Trump is in a league of his own. The frequency of his mendacity vastly exceeds that of either President Joe Biden or any of Trump’s rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.


In the October and November speeches, Trump was serially untruthful on the subject of his record in office. He continued to tell long-debunked lies about the 2020 election he lost and the integrity of elections more broadly. He repeatedly fabricated and embellished on the subjects of energy, the environment, foreign affairs and the economy.

He launched incorrect attacks against Biden, other Democrats and Republican presidential rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. He deployed various fictions to support his denunciations of the criminal and civil court cases against him. And he continued his traditional practice of wildly exaggerating statistics, this time on topics ranging from the price of bacon to the cost of an aircraft carrier to the size of his rally crowds.

Below is a fact check of 102 of Trump’s false claims from the 12 speeches. He repeated many of the false claims on multiple occasions.

This is not intended as a comprehensive list. And it does not include gaffes that were clearly unintentional, claims that were misleading but not outright wrong, or claims for which there was no public evidence but which we could not definitively declare incorrect.

Trump’s record
Terrorist attacks under Trump

Trump claimed in numerous speeches that there were no terrorist attacks during his time as president. “We didn’t have an attack for four years,” he said in an October speech in New Hampshire while touting his ban on travel from a group of (mostly Muslim-majority) countries he described as “horrendous, dangerous nations.” “We didn’t have one incident in four years, because we kept bad people the hell out of our country,” he said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Facts First: Trump’s claim that “we didn’t have an attack for four years” isn’t true.

Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018.

In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.

Trump’s wall promise

In an October speech in Iowa, Trump claimed he had run in 2016 on a promise that Mexico would pay for “a piece” of a new border wall. He repeated the claim in a November speech in Florida, saying, “I said Mexico’s gonna pay for a piece of the wall.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims about what he said in the past are false. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised over and over again in his public remarks, with no qualifications, that Mexico would pay for the entire wall, not for only “a piece” of it. (In the end, Mexico didn’t pay for any of it.) You can read a longer fact check on this claim here.

Mexico and the cost of the wall

In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump tried to respond to critics who have noted that he did not get Mexico to pay for the wall as he had promised. Pointing out that Mexico did deploy thousands of its own troops during his presidency to deter migrants heading toward the US, Trump said, “Then they say, ‘Oh, Mexico didn’t pay.’ Mexico paid a fortune for that wall. When they tell you, ‘Trump didn’t get the money.’ Remember, I used to say Mexico will pay for it. Well, that’s what I did.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that he “did” get Mexico to pay for the wall and that “Mexico paid a fortune for that wall” are false. Mexico deploying troops simply isn’t the same as Mexico paying for a construction project; even with the Mexican deployment, the US had to pay for the wall with its own money. The Trump administration directed more than $16 billion toward the project – including about $6 billion directly appropriated by Congress and about $10 billion the administration repurposed from the Defense Department – before Biden halted construction upon taking office in 2021.

The final bill for the project is unclear; more than $4.7 billion of the former Defense Department money had not been spent at the time Trump left office. Regardless, it is clear that Mexico spent nothing at all on the project.

“The US government paid for what was built of Trump’s wall out of our own treasury. Mexico did not directly pay for any portion of the wall,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration and border policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said in a July email.

The size of the wall

Touting his wall on the border with Mexico, Trump claimed in speech after speech that he had built “561 miles of wall” or, more vaguely, that the total was “over 500 miles.”

Facts First: Trump’s “561 miles” and “over 500 miles” claims are false, both exaggerations. An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office and subsequently obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said the total number built under Trump was 458 miles (including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers). Even in his recent speeches, Trump sometimes put the figure, more correctly, at “nearly 500 miles.”

For example, in one October speech in Iowa, Trump said, “We built 561 – they said 460, 460. But no, it’s 561.” Later in the speech, though, when he appeared to be reading from his prepared text, he said, “Built nearly 500 miles.”

Trump and the military

In speech after speech, Trump repeated a claim he had made during his presidency – saying “I fully rebuilt the US military,” “I’ve rebuilt the entire military,” or “we rebuilt our whole military.” He periodically made clear that he was talking about military equipment, saying that, before he came along and did this rebuilding, the country had “48-year-old fighter jets.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim to have rebuilt the entire military is false. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” said Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Harrison said in a November email: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F-15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”

Trump’s policy on damage to monuments

In an October speech in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump claimed that, as president, he had found and “signed” an “old law” or “old statute” to impose a severe penalty – an automatic 10 years in jail – for people who damage monuments.

“It said if you so much as touch one of our statues or memorials, you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything – you go for 10 years. And you all remember that,” he said in the Florida speech.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. He didn’t sign any “law” on damage to monuments, and he did not impose automatic 10-year sentences for monument damage. In fact, he issued an executive order on the subject, in 2020, that did not mandate any increase in sentences.

Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law – including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property if the damage exceeds $100. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

Trump and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

As he has on multiple previous occasions, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that “we filled up the national reserve, strategic reserves.” He went into more detail in a November speech in Houston, saying of the reserve, “We filled that thing and nobody ever saw anything like it.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that he filled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are false.
While he did propose to buy 77 million barrels for the reserve in 2020 as oil prices cratered because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Democratic-controlled Congress rejected the $3 billion in funding that would have paid for the purchase, describing it as a subsidy to big oil companies, so it didn’t happen. The reserve contained fewer barrels when Trump left office in early 2021 (about 638 million) than when he took office in early 2017 (about 695 million).

That’s in large part because of oil sales that Congress had mandated by law. But nonetheless, Trump’s claims about how he “filled up” the reserve are meritless.

“It would have been a smart policy to refill the SPR at very low prices, but it didn’t happen because Congress did not approve that purchase. I suppose Trump can take credit for a good idea, but not for execution,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told CNN earlier this year when Trump made a similar claim.

Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 1

Trump claimed in a November speech in Texas: “We created an incredible 1.2 million new manufacturing jobs. Nobody said that was possible.” He repeated the number a bit later and said, “Everybody said that was impossible.”

Facts First: Trump’s number is false. The US actually lost 170,000 manufacturing jobs during Trump’s presidency, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even if you were to stop the count in February 2020, before the pandemic crash, the US would have gained 419,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of Trump’s presidency in January 2017, not the 1.2 million he claimed here.

In speeches in late 2019 and early 2020, Trump claimed that the US had created 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs during his tenure. That would still be true today if you stopped the clock in February 2020. But Trump didn’t mention construction jobs in this speech; his omission made his performance with manufacturing jobs sound much better than it was.

Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 2

Trump vowed in the same speech in Texas to “accelerate our manufacturing resurgence,” then said, “We were setting records – not only were we building and doing it, we were setting records at doing manufacturing jobs.”

Facts First: This is false. Trump did not come close to setting records for the creation of manufacturing jobs. Again, US manufacturing employment actually declined by 170,000 jobs during his presidency. While that’s largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was not even setting records before that; the country lost manufacturing jobs in 2019, before the pandemic hit.

And while the US did see a 430,000-job gain in manufacturing employment under Trump in 2017 and 2018, that was nowhere near a record increase. For example, there were more than 1.5 million manufacturing jobs added in 1977 and 1978, Jimmy Carter’s first two calendar years as president.


Household income under Trump

Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Under President Trump, real family income increased over $6,000 a year.” He had made a similar claim in a speech in Iowa that month, saying real family income “went up by more than $6,000 a year.”

Facts First: This is false. Real median household income actually increased by $5,820 in total over Trump’s four years in office, from $70,840 in 2016 to $76,660 in 2020 – so not $6,000 “a year” as he claimed here.

Trump’s campaign has previously confirmed he was referring to real median household income when making such claims. The increase in real median household is over $6,000 if you just look at the period from 2016 to 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but Trump’s presidency includes 2020 as well.

Trump and the defeat of ISIS

As he has in the past, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “I defeated ISIS. I defeated ISIS. Three weeks, I defeated ISIS.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has sometimes suggested, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said “I defeated ISIS” with no caveats or credit to anyone else: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

The cost of an embassy move

In October speeches to the Republican Jewish Coalition and at a campaign event in Florida, Trump repeated a story he used to tell during his presidency about how moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was supposed to cost $1 billion or $2 billion but that he “got it done for $500,000” by using an existing US diplomatic facility in Jerusalem.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. While the final cost of the embassy move isn’t publicly known, it is clear that the cost was much more than $500,000. The State Department awarded a $21.2 million contract in 2018 for a company to design and build “compound security upgrades” related to Trump’s decision to turn the existing Jerusalem facility into an embassy. The initial modification that allowed the building to open as an embassy cost just under $400,000, but that was not the final total.

Trump and the construction of Nord Stream 2

Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, after he “stopped” Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany, “it was totally dead” before Biden allowed it to proceed.

Facts First: Trump did not render Nord Stream 2 “totally dead.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The pipeline was damaged later that year in what has been described as a likely act of sabotage.

Trump and awareness of Nord Stream 2

In a November speech in Houston, Trump said of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: “Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. Nobody knew they were building the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen, I guess – covering all of Europe.”

Facts First: Both parts of this claim are wrong.

It’s not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before Trump began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. And Nord Stream 2 was nowhere close to “the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen.”

Trump and deportations to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador

In a November speech in Florida, Trump talked about how his administration was able to deport gang members to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and repeated his familiar false claim about how the Obama administration was supposedly unable to do so: “Under the Obama administration, they wouldn’t take anybody back. They put airplanes, big commercial planes on the runways, so we’d put them in a plane, we’d fly, we couldn’t land, came back. And this went on for years; never took ‘em back.”

Facts First: This claim remains false. In 2016, Obama’s last calendar year in office, none of these three countries was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant” (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.

The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted to CNN in 2019 that in the 2016 fiscal year, ICE reported that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranked second, third and fourth for the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. The same was true in the 2017 fiscal year, which encompassed the end of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s. ICE did not identify any widespread problems with deportations to these countries.

ICE officials said there were some exceptions to the three countries’ general cooperativeness, but Trump’s general declaration that the countries were uncooperative was never true.

Trump and the word ‘caravan’

In November speeches in Texas and Florida, Trump spoke of migrant caravans – and claimed, as he has in the past, that he was the one to come up with the name “caravan.”

In Florida, he said caravan is “a name I came up with.” In Texas, he said, “I came up with the name. I believe. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really you, it’s somebody,’ but I believe I came up with the name.”

Facts First: Trump did not come up with the word “caravan,” either in general or to describe groups of migrants traveling together toward the US border during his presidency.

Merriam-Webster says the word caravan “came to English in the late 16th century, from the Italian caravana, which itself came from the Persian kārvān.”

Trump first publicly used a variation of the word as president in a tweet on April 1, 2018 (he wrote, in a tweet about immigration, “’caravans’ coming”). The word had been used by various others in the same context in the days and weeks prior, including in a BuzzFeed News feature article, two days prior to Trump’s tweet, that was headlined, “A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Dares To Stop Them.”

Trump’s claims about Covid-19

Talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Once Covid came in from China – Wuhan. Remember I said it came in from Wuhan. Everyone said, ‘Why would he say that? It came in from caves.’ First they said it came in from Italy, which was not nice. Then they said it came in from France. Then they said the American soldiers brought it in, and then they admitted it came in from China – but it came in from Wuhan.”

Facts First: Trump’s recounting is inaccurate. It’s not true that, when he said Covid-19 came from Wuhan, “everyone said, ‘Why would he say that?’” In reality, when Trump first used the word “Wuhan” as president in March 2020, saying the virus came from there was not at all controversial; Trump’s comments came more than two months after Chinese authorities publicly identified Wuhan as the first place it had an outbreak of the novel coronavirus. And in January and February 2020, before Trump started speaking about Wuhan, major media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times referred to the virus as “the Wuhan coronavirus.”

The situation before Right to Try

In a November speech in Texas, Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 to give terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration. As he did during his presidency, though, Trump also painted an inaccurate picture of the situation prior to the Right to Try era.

He said, “People would be terminally ill. They’d try to get a medicine; they couldn’t get it in this country. It’s totally illegal. If they had money, they’d go to Europe or they’d go to China, go to some of the places where they supposedly had cures. It never worked, by the way, almost never. And they’d end up dying. Sometimes they’d die in foreign lands. If you didn’t have money, you’d go home and you’d die.”

Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.

“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.

The Middle East under Trump

Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Less than four years ago, we had peace in the Middle East with the historic Abraham Accords. Today we have an all-out war in Israel and it’s gonna spread very quickly. What a difference a president makes, isn’t it amazing though?” He said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “The experts said our pro-Israel policies would produce terror and chaos, but I knew the opposite was true. I turned out to be right.
We got the historic Abraham Accords and peace in the Middle East. Peace in the Middle East.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that there was “peace in the Middle East” during his presidency and that his administration “got” peace in the Middle East are both false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East – notably including the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Miller called “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.”

“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” said Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Miller also noted that various Middle Eastern states were in “varying phases of dysfunction or failure” at the end of the Trump presidency. As Trump left office, civil wars in Syria and Yemen were ongoing, Libya was precariously emerging from its own civil war, and US forces and diplomats in Iraq continued to be attacked.

Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called Trump’s claim “false.” She said in an email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”

Trump and wars

Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that while there are “all of these wars” today under Biden, during the Trump presidency, “We had no wars. I got out of every war. We defeated ISIS, we got out.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “got out of every war” is false. At the end of his presidency, US troops remained in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he had reduced the size of the US presence in all three. And Trump kept a contingent of troops in Syria throughout his presidency, even after he claimed US troops were “out” (other than to protect oil sites, he added); in fact, two US troops died in vehicle rollovers in Syria in 2020.

Trump was also commander-in-chief for US airstrikes, including drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.

Trump and Veterans Choice

In a November speech in New Hampshire, Trump claimed, “I also signed – about 59 years they’ve been trying to get this one – VA Choice, which made it permanent, so that veterans can get medical care at the private health care provider of their choice.”

Facts First: Trump’s “59 years they’ve been trying to get it” claim is false. The Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama, and, as Trump said, made the initiative permanent. But contrary to Trump’s claim, it’s not true that people had been attempting for decades to create such an initiative.

During Trump’s presidency, he falsely took credit for the Choice law more than 150 times.


Trump’s aid to farmers

In speech after speech, Trump claimed that he had given US farmers $28 billion from China. For example, he claimed in a November speech in New Hampshire, “How can the farmers vote against me? I got them $28 billion from China.” He added, “I got the money from China out of the tariffs that I got.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are wrong in two ways. First and most critically, this money wasn’t from China. Though the Trump administration made the payments because farmers had been hurt by his trade war with China, the aid money came from US taxpayers: Study after study, including one this year from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. (And it is US importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government.) Second, as The Washington Post noted in a recent fact check, the payments to farmers under Trump’s program totaled $23 billion, not “$28 billion,” per the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

Previous presidents and tariffs on China

In October speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump boasted of the revenue produced by his tariffs on China and repeated his familiar claim that not a single previous president had gotten China to pay the US “10 cents.”

Facts First: Temporarily leaving aside the fact that Americans, not China, overwhelmingly paid for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, it’s not true no previous president had generated “10 cents” from tariffs on China. The US has had tariffs on goods from China since the late 1700s; Obama imposed new tariffs on goods from China; FactCheck.org reported that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”

Trump’s aid to the lobster industry

Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire that, of the money he supposedly secured from China, he “gave the farmers and New England lobstermen $28 billion. You know, I gave your lobstermen $28 billion.”

Facts First: This is false. Trump’s trade-aid package for the seafood industry was a $530 million program covering the entire country. So while it’s not clear how much New England lobstermen in particular ended up receiving, the total was clearly far less than the “$28 billion” he claimed he gave to farmers or the $23 billion he actually did give to farmers. (Lobstermen were not eligible for money from the trade-aid package for farmers.) And it’s worth noting that the money for the seafood industry, like the money for farmers, was compensation for losses incurred because of Trump’s own policies.

China’s oil purchases from Iran under Trump

In speech after speech, Trump told a story about how he supposedly got China to completely stop buying oil from Iran by telling China that if they bought any, the US would no longer do business with China. For example, he said in an October speech in Florida: “I said, ‘If you buy oil, any oil, from Iran, we’re never doing business. You have all the stuff that you take out of this country and rip us off. We’re not going to do any more business with China.’ They stopped immediately. No more oil.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that China completely stopped buying oil from Iran during his presidency is false. China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president. “The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, said in November.

China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran. Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”

Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)

Iran’s oil sales under Trump and Biden

Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that Biden’s soft approach to sanctions on Iran “allowed them to sell massive amounts of oil, making them $80 billion a year. Congratulations; they were making nothing with us.”

Facts First: Both of Trump’s claims – that Iran is making $80 billion a year from oil sales under Biden and that it was making “nothing” from these sales under Trump – are false.

The federal government’s Energy Information Administration reported that Iran generated an approximate total of $110 billion in net oil export revenues in 2021, 2022 and the first five months of 2023. The 2021 figure was $37 billion and the 2022 figure was $54 billion. That’s not “$80 billion a year.”

Similarly, the conservative Washington Free Beacon reported in October that the group United Against a Nuclear Iran had calculated that Iran had generated about $80 billion in oil sales over the course of the Biden administration. The group confirmed to CNN in November that this $80 billion was for the period from February 2021 to September 2023, not for a single year alone.

And Iran made money from oil exports under Trump as well. Data provided to CNN by the Energy Information Administration shows that Iran had $55 billion in net oil export revenues in 2017, $66 billion in 2018, $29 billion in 2019 and $16 billion in 2020.

Elections, campaigns and voting
Groceries and identification

In an October speech in Iowa, Trump reprised a claim for which he was widely mocked during his presidency – his assertion that Americans are required to show identification to buy groceries. “If you buy a loaf of bread, you gotta have your ID out, but for voting, you don’t,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump remains wrong. Americans do not need to show identification to buy bread or other foods.

Grocery stores generally require identification for purchases of alcohol or tobacco, for purchases of certain medications and for the small percentage of purchases made with a check. They may sometimes ask for ID when customers are using credit cards. But those are exceptions rather than the rule. Contrary to Trump’s declarations, Americans can and do purchase loaves of bread, and otherwise fill their grocery bags with food, without ever having to tell anyone who they are – much less show official proof of identity.

The legitimacy of the 2020 election

In speech after speech, Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” sometimes specifying that “radical left Democrats” rigged the election and once saying “they cheated like a bunch of dogs.”

Facts First: These claims are all false. The 2020 election was not rigged, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.

The 2020 vote count

In October and November speeches in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump rejected the legitimacy of the vote count in the 2020 presidential election He said in New Hampshire in November: “I got 75 million votes, I got – and that’s their count, OK, which is a phony count.” He said in Florida in November: “I went from 63 million to, I believe, over 75 million – and that’s been recorded by them, not by me. How about the real number?”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of a “phony count” is false, as is his suggestion that the official numbers are not the “real number.” The vote count was legitimate and accurate.

A minor side note: Trump got 74,223,975 votes, not “over 75 million”; Biden got 81,283,501.

Election Night in 2020

Falsely claiming that he watched the 2020 election get “stolen,” Trump said in a November speech in Florida that, on Election Night, “at 9 o’clock it was over, 10 o’clock it was really over” – suggesting, as he has repeatedly before, that he had been shown to be the winner at those times. He added, “And then…’We have found some additional votes.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The 2020 election was not “over” at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. on November 3, when millions of legitimate votes still needed to be counted – and it was widely known in the lead-up to Election Day that some states’ early results might create the illusion that Trump had big leads, since it would take time to count the mail-in votes that tended to heavily favor Biden (in part because Trump had spent months disparaging mail-in voting). Some populous urban areas, which also tended to support Biden, also took a while to finish their counting simply because they had so many votes.

Trump has been making similar false claims since Election Night 2020 itself, when he wrongly claimed that he had won Georgia and won Michigan as votes continued to be counted. Trump ended up losing both states.

A film about the 2020 election

Repeating his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump claimed in a November speech in Iowa: “We don’t even have to go into all of the ballot-stuffing that is on tape from the ‘2000 Mules.’ You look at ‘2000 Mules’ and you see thousands and thousands – hundreds of thousands actually – of votes being stuffed into ballot boxes.”

Facts First: This is false. The film ‘2000 Mules’ has been widely debunked, and it doesn’t show thousands of votes, let alone hundreds of thousands, “being stuffed into ballot boxes.”

The film, which is filled with misleading claims and dubious analysis, focuses on footage of ballots being submitted into drop boxes in public places (after which they are put through various verification measures to make sure they are legitimate), not into ballot boxes at in-person voting centers where ballots are placed for final counting – and, regardless, the film fails to prove any widespread wrongdoing even involving the drop boxes.

The security of mail-in ballots

Trump said in a November speech in Florida, “Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you have corrupt elections. I don’t care what it is. Anybody that wants it, they’re corrupt. And that includes Republicans, by the way. Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you are going to have really corrupt elections.”

Facts First: This is all false. While elections experts say the occurrence of fraud is relatively higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person voting, they also say that fraud of any kind in American state and federal elections represents a miniscule percentage of total votes cast. Voters have been casting ballots by mail for decades, including in Republican-dominated states; there is nothing inherently corrupt about supporting the use of such ballots.

‘Fake ballots’

In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said the only way he can be beaten in the November 2024 election is “if they cheat.” He added moments later, “The biggest problem is they make fake ballots. Okay? That’s the biggest problem. And a lot of Republicans are very naive when they don’t say that. They say, ‘Oh, vote early. Vote early. We want to build…’ No, no: the big problem we have to do, we gotta stop fake ballots from being made.”

Facts First: This is entirely baseless. Federal elections do not have any “big problem” with “fake ballots.” Every state has numerous safeguards in place to ensure that someone who tries to manufacture and use a phony ballot will be caught.

What a Jimmy Carter commission said

Criticizing the use of mail-in ballots, Trump invoked a commission on election reform that was co-chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Trump said in a November speech in Florida that Carter “had a commission with some other prominent senators, and they came to one conclusion: you can’t do mail-in ballots.” Trump said in a November speech in New Hampshire: “Even Jimmy Carter, he had a commission. He said if you have mail-in ballots, you’re going to have massive corruption.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims significantly exaggerated what Carter’s commission said.
Though the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in ballots, it did not say “you can’t do mail-in ballots” or that “massive corruption” is inevitable with the use of mail-in ballots; in fact, it highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections.

The commission’s 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” It also said mail-in voting increases the risks of fraud and that absentee ballots are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”

But it did not say all mail-in voting should be prohibited. It said that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.” The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail (as well as early voting).

Fifteen years after the release of the report, Carter said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.” His organization, The Carter Center, said in a 2020 statement: “Fortunately, since 2005, many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”



Democrats and elections

Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that Democrats can’t win legitimately, given their policy preferences, and “the only way they know how to win is by cheating.”

Facts First: This is false. Just like Republicans, Democrats have won elections around the country – including the 2020 presidential election – fair and square. There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim.

Trump’s 2016 margin in Alabama

In a November speech in Florida, Trump spoke of how some of his opponents claimed that the 2016 election he won was rigged. He then said, “In 2016, they even tried to get me on Alabama and I won it by like 45 points. They said, ‘He cheated on Alabama.’ I said, ‘I won it by 45 points, I must have cheated by a lot.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he won Alabama by 45 percentage points in 2016 is false – a major exaggeration. His margin over Hillary Clinton was big, but it was about 27.8 points (62.08% to 34.36%), not 45 points.

It’s not clear who he was claiming had accused him of cheating to win Alabama.

Maricopa County in 2022

In a November speech in Florida, Trump mentioned Kari Lake, a Republican US Senate candidate in Arizona who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor in 2022. He made reference to a technology problem that marred Election Day 2022 in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa County, saying that “unfortunately over 50% of the machines, in the Republican areas only, didn’t work. So they always find something.”

Facts First: Trump’s specifics were wrong: the Maricopa County technology problem affected about 27% of its voting locations – and these locations were scattered around the county, in heavily Democratic areas as well as Republican areas, a Washington Post analysis found. And Trump’s suggestion that the technology problems were intentionally designed to damage Republicans is baseless. At the time, Maricopa County had a Republican-controlled board of supervisors and a Republican county recorder.

“We were having these issues coming up around Maricopa County,” Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, told reporters at the time. Noting the Republican affiliations of the recorder and the majority of the board, Gates said, “So there was no partisan bias in what happened here. This was a technical issue.”

Chris Wallace and a 2020 debate

In two October speeches in New Hampshire and October and November speeches in Florida, Trump told a story in which he claimed that 2020 presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace, who was then a host for Fox News and is now a host for CNN, had tried to stop him from asking Biden a question about a supposed payment from the wife of the mayor of Moscow to Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

“Chris Wallace said, ‘He’s not allowed to answer that question,‘” Trump said in one of the New Hampshire speeches; in the other, he said Wallace said “you’re not allowed to ask that question” and told him “it’s inappropriate.” In Florida in November, Trump said, “Biden couldn’t answer the question, but Chris Wallace came in and helped him. ‘You’re not allowed to ask that question.’”

Facts First: All of these Trump claims are false. Wallace did not tell him that he was not allowed to ask the question or that Biden was not allowed to answer it.
Rather, as the transcript shows, Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer the question after Trump had asked it, rather than continue to speak when Biden tried to offer a response. Wallace never said the question was “inappropriate.”

Rather, Wallace made comments like, “Sir, you’ve asked him a question, let him answer it” and, “Well, you have raised an issue, let the vice president answer.”

Energy and the environment
Climate change and sea levels

In a November speech in Florida, Trump delivered another version of a familiar claim he has used to minimize the threat of climate change. He said that others, rather than talk about the potentially catastrophic threat of nuclear weapons, instead “talk about global warming – because in 250 years our ocean’s gonna be a hundredth of an inch higher.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the ocean will be just a hundredth of an inch higher “in 250 years” is false. As the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noted, the global sea level is currently rising at a rate of about an eighth of an inch per year. In other words, the sea level rise Trump claimed will happen “in 250 years” is already being vastly exceeded on an annual basis. NOAA says that, along the US coastline in particular, sea level rise is expected to average a total of 10 to 12 inches between 2020 and 2050 alone.

Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump criticized Biden for canceling Trump-era oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He said, “Can you believe that? It was so much work to get that approved. We got it approved. They were ready to start drilling.”

Facts First: It’s not true that anybody was “ready to start drilling” in the refuge, either before the Biden administration suspended leases there in 2021 or before the administration canceled leases in 2023. There is no drilling infrastructure in place in the refuge, major oil companies have shown little interest in the site, and the seven leases the Biden administration canceled were all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state entity that is not an oil company. “To quote our friends at PolitiFact, what Trump said in this case qualifies as ‘pants on fire,’” Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, said in a November email. He said, “No one was ready to start drilling there, in 2017 or at any other point in time.”

Molchanov explained that the idea of drilling in the refuge would be a textbook example of “frontier exploration,” drilling in an area that has no previous activity by the oil industry. “This means there is no first-hand knowledge of how to go about drilling there. Everything would have to be learned along the way. This translates into lengthy time for preparation and elevated costs for actual drilling, if and when it were to take place. Also, there is no infrastructure – it would have to be developed from scratch.”

Tim Woody, communications manager for the Alaska regional office of The Wilderness Society conservation group, also called Trump’s claim false and noted “there is no infrastructure in place” in the refuge. And Woody said that no company had “gone through any of the steps that occur between acquiring a lease and actually beginning development,” including conducting seismic analysis and obtaining permits.

Demand for electric cars

In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said, “Can you believe what we’re doing with the electric cars? All electric. Nobody wants them.”

Facts First: It’s not true that “nobody wants” electric cars. US purchases of electric vehicles continue to set records; Cox Automotive reported in October that “EV sales have now increased for 13 straight quarters” in the US and were “firmly on track to surpass 1 million for the first time ever” in a year. Electric vehicle sales also make up a growing share of total US vehicle sales; Cox Automotive reported that they accounted for a record 7.9% of total sales in the third quarter of 2023, up from 6.1% a year prior and up from 7.2% in the second quarter of this year.

A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 38% of Americans said they are very likely or somewhat likely to seriously consider an electric vehicle for their next vehicle purchase. Even if the poll result is off, it’s clear that Trump’s claim that “nobody wants them” is not true.

The US and electric car manufacturing

Trump, saying he thinks he will earn the support of union autoworkers, claimed in a November speech in Iowa that it is “preposterous” for the US move to all electric cars – and then said, “You can’t make them here, because we don’t have the minerals, we don’t have the materials for it. We have a thing called gasoline, that’s what we have.”

Facts First: It’s not true that “you can’t” make electric cars in the US. Electric cars are already being assembled here by various companies. And domestic electric vehicle manufacturing is expected to grow substantially: companies have made major recent investments in US factories to assemble electric vehicles and make batteries for them, spurred in part by provisions of Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Many of the recent investments have been in Republican-led states in the South.

While the US does need to import some critical minerals and materials for electric vehicle manufacturing, that clearly doesn’t mean domestic production of the vehicles is impossible. There are global supply chains for all sorts of products whose final assembly is done in this country.

- CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this item.

Biden and electric vehicles

Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “On day one, I will repeal Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate. ‘Everybody has to have an electric car.’” He said that, in a second Trump administration, “gasoline-powered engines will be allowed.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden has not mandated that “everybody has to have an electric car” or outlawed cars powered by gasoline, though his administration has made an aggressive push to try to get automakers and consumers to move toward electric vehicles.

The Biden administration has proposed ambitious new tailpipe emissions regulations for automakers, offered tax credits to people who buy certain electric vehicles, invested in new electric vehicle charging stations and ordered federal entities to purchase electric vehicles, among other policies promoting the adoption of these vehicles. But there is no Biden requirement that “everybody” has to drive an electric vehicle and no Biden proposal to prohibit citizens from continuing to use gasoline-powered engines.

Depending on how automakers were to respond, the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new tailpipe rules could, if adopted, require electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032.

Electric vehicles and the military

In a November speech in Texas, Trump criticized the Biden administration for imposing “insane mandates” and lamented that “Army tanks have to go electric, OK?…Because the tanks, if they’re electric, you’re going into a country blasting the hell out of it, but at least we’re doing it in an environmentally friendly way.”

Facts First: This is false. The Biden administration is not requiring tanks to be all-electric, as FactCheck.org pointed out in its own November fact check.
The Army released a climate strategy in 2022 that called for a move toward various kinds of electric vehicles, including “fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050,” but that would not include tanks. And, regardless, a strategy is not a mandate.

Biden and boats

During the same part of the Texas speech, Trump also claimed that “all boats have to go electric.”

Facts First: This is false. There is no Biden mandate requiring boats to be powered by electricity, as The New York Times noted in its own fact check of this Trump speech.



A federal boat speed limit

After complaining in an October speech in New Hampshire about offshore wind turbines, and alleging without evidence that these turbines are killing whales, Trump added, “Then they say that, for boat manufacturers, the boat can’t go more than two miles an hour because we don’t want to hurt the whales.”

Facts First: This claim is false in two ways.

To try to protect whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed to require a greater number of boats to abide by a speed limit in certain areas of the East Coast during certain months of the year; the expansion would apply the speed limit to boats at least 35 feet long rather than the current minimum of 65 feet long.

But Trump’s “two miles an hour” claim is not true. The speed limit involved is 10 knots, or roughly 11.5 miles per hour. Second, the speed limit applies to people operating boats, not to “boat manufacturers” as Trump said. In other words, the government is not trying to force companies to make boats that cannot go faster than this speed limit.

In other recent speeches, Trump has attributed his two-miles-per-hour claim to something he said he was told while visiting a boat company in South Carolina in September. That company and South Carolina’s boating industry advocacy group did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

California and electricity

Criticizing Democrats’ push for the adoption of electric vehicles, Trump repeatedly claimed that California already has constant blackouts because it has insufficient power to serve its population.

He said in a November speech in Texas: “Did you see, they had blackouts all over the place this summer?” He said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “In California, they want to go with all-electric, but they can’t even – every weekend, they have a blackout. They don’t have enough electricity.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that California “had blackouts all over the place this summer” and has a blackout “every weekend” are false. California has been able to meet its electricity demand throughout the year, including during the peak-demand summer season.

“California didn’t experience any outages this year because of a load imbalance. We haven’t since 2020,” Erin Mellon, spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in an email earlier in November. Mellon added, “We’ve drastically expanded our clean energy portfolio, and recently CA hit 6,600 MW of battery storage – enough for 6.6 million homes for 4 hours.”

Vonette Fontaine, spokesperson for the California Independent System Operator, which manages the power grid for about 80% of the state, said in an email earlier in November: “The California Independent System Operator did not experience any grid emergencies this summer requiring electricity outages.”

You can read more here.

- CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this item.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-avalanche-dishonesty-fact-checking-120032416.html

 

What a marvelous tribute to the ability of pundits to twist here or there and come up with the conclusion that fits their narrative.
Shooter wonders if they believe their own lies or snicker a bit when they publish them.

 

So shooter, was Trump lying about the 2020 election being stolen? And what evidence did the GOP give for supporting Trump's claims?

Enlighten us