Trump speaks bluntly, touts his leadership: PolitiFact reports from New Hampshire
By Jon Greenberg, PolitiFact Staff Writer
Portsmouth, NH — This was a crowd ready to cheer Donald Trump. They roared their approval with each warm-up speaker, with each mention of building a wall on the Mexican border, with each call to make America great again, with each vow to put a Republican in the White House.
But when Trump took the podium in the Great Bay Community College auditorium in Portsmouth on Thursday, the cheers grew even louder. And Trump delivered pure Trump.
He invoked the story of a woman “killed by an illegal immigrant. Raped, sodomized, killed.”
“Some people say ‘You’re very divisive,’ ” Trump said. “What’s divisive? They want me to be politically correct. They don’t want me to talk about it.”
Trump wove in and out of topics, linking them less by substance than by a theme of those who take unfair advantage of America.
He said, “ISIS and others are using our Internet. We invented the Internet and ISIS is using it to radicalize our kids.”
“I’m going to bring jobs back from China and all sorts of countries that have taken our jobs,” Trump said. “They have stripped us, like we were babies, taking candy from a baby, they have stripped us.”
Trump berated the practice of corporate inversion, a financial move in which a large American firm is, on paper at least, bought by a smaller foreign firm with a base in a low-tax country.
“It’s unbelievable,” Trump said. “Pfizer, a great company. They’re very good at taking care of politicians. Remember this. The drug companies have a lot of power,whether it’s Pfizer or Johnson and Johnson. The interesting thing is, Pfizer is leaving with all their power. And they are leaving thousands of great jobs behind.”
Trump blamed this practice on U.S. tax rates, saying “we are the highest taxed country in the world.”
He warned that nothing would change if people voted in any of “these politicians” and that he is doing this because he wants to be the leader who can make America great.
From a fact-checking perspective, there are several ways to look at that assertion. In terms of the nominal corporate tax rate, we’ve found that to be Mostly True. It’s a different story if you compare effective tax rates. The tax rate American companies actually pay is lower. It might be above average relative to other nations, but it isn’t the highest.
But you could also look at the tax burden across the board. In that respect, we’ve found Trump’s statement on tax rates to be False. Compared to other advanced industrialized countries, America falls in the middle of the pack or at the low end, depending on the measurement.
Trump repeated the False claim that the prisoners swapped in the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are back on the battlefield.
Trump said that while America is ranked 30th in education outcomes, it ranks first in cost per pupil. When we looked at U.S. spending, we found that four countries — Austria, Norway, Luxembourg and Switzerland — spend more.
Trump told the crowd on trade that when he’s president, the country will have the “greatest negotiators in the world” working on its behalf.
As he ended, he urged his supporters not to take a victory in New Hampshire for granted. While he might be leading in the polls, he said it won’t matter if people don’t take the time to actually vote.