I’ll stop after a few. There are too many. He lies about simple things like where a tornado will land, releasing his taxes, his medical health (no one healthy ends up with pupil dilation), and ridiculous lies like “Wind. If you — if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value. And they say the noise causes cancer.” They are wind turbines, and, no, there is no known case of noise-cancer. All politicians exaggerate. He just… makes numbers and facts up to suit his ego. The erosion of truth will be his legacy. One of them, at least.
Lie: “I disagree with John McCain on the way he handled the vets, because I said you got to get Choice. He was never able to get Choice. I got Choice.”
Truth: this whopper is a bizarre twofer: President Barack Obama signed Veterans Choice into law in 2014 & McCain was, in fact, was a key author of the Choice bill.
Lie: “I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all, the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule. …That was the rule that basically took your property away from you. I will never forget at the White House signing I had. Probably 30–35 people …People that haven’t cried in many years. Some of them were so tough they never cried, they didn’t cry when they were babies, and they were crying. We gave them their life back.”
Truth. There is Video of the signing ceremony shows that no one is crying. Why does he always say someone is crying? It’s very bizarre.
Lie: “95% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, A Record. Thank You!”
Truth: 5 Republican presidents have had higher approval rating among Republicans at some point than Trump in the Gallup poll. That puts Trump in sixth place among GOP presidents since World War II. (Only Gerald Ford is lower.) Yet Trump keeps falsely claiming he has the all-time high. (Usually he says he hit 94 or 95 percent.)
Lie: ”Under this landmark agreement, China will now be purchasing $40 billion to $50 billion of agricultural products every single year, tripling our agricultural exports to China.”-
Truth: there is no actual agreement with China outlining this, and, in fact, many farms were forced to file Ch. 12 farm bankruptcies totaled 580 filings, up 24% from last year.
Lie: ”To help you keep your family farm and keep it in the family, we virtually eliminated the deeply unfair estate tax or death tax.”
Truth: This is an enormous stretch. Trump often claims he saved family farms and small businesses by gradually reducing the federal estate tax. (It was not fully eliminated.) Reducing the estate tax primarily benefits the wealthy. The estate tax rarely falls on farms or small businesses, since only those leaving behind more than $5 million pay it. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million — were subject to the tax. Of those, only 80 taxable estates would be farms and small businesses.
Lie: “Our manufacturing numbers are fantastic…. We have almost 600,000 jobs.”
Fact: Manufacturers have added about 480,000 jobs since Trump took office. Since his election in 2016, the job gain is about 525,000. Manufacturing jobs growth slumped badly in 2019, adding only 46,000 jobs during the year. U.S. manufacturing was in a mild recession for all of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Reserve.
Lie “I remember, 2016, the election, the fake news, they said Trump was going to have hard time winning Texas.”
Truth: C’mon. Who said that? No one thought he’d lose Texas, ffs.
Lie: “We persuaded Japan to slash tariffs on $7 billion of U.S. agricultural products. …It’s a $40 billion deal, by the way.”
Truth: completely misleading Trump signed a deal with Japan that returns benefits American farmers lost when he pulled out of a broader Asia-Pacific pact his first week in office, as Japan went ahead with the agreement with 11 other nations, putting U.S. farmers at a disadvantage. The deal did not resolve differences over trade in autos, but tariffs will be cut on $7 billion worth of agricultural products and markets will be opened on about $40 billion worth of digital trade between the two countries. Trump started to describe it correctly, perhaps reading from a text, but then apparently ad-libbed, as he often does, that this is $40 billion coming in the bank.
Lie: “They want open borders …essentially what they are saying is they want crime. Now they say they don’t want crime but that’s what you get with open borders.”
Truth: This is the most dangerous and disheartening of all the lies he spreads.
Most independent research contradicts the idea that illegal immigrants bring more crime. A 2018 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Criminology, led by Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, examined whether places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of violent crime such as murder or rape. The answer: States with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014. Similar results were found in another peer-reviewed study by the same researchers that looked at nonviolent crime, such as drug arrests and driving under the influence (DUI) arrests. Similarly, the libertarian Cato Institute in 2018 looked at 2015 criminal conviction data among undocumented immigrants in Texas — one of the few states to record whether a person who has been arrested is in the country illegally or not. Researcher Alex Nowrasteh found that criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas for undocumented immigrants were lower than those of native-born Americans for homicide, sexual assault and larceny.
