Source: "The Scariest Part of the Trump-Ukraine Scandal? He Really Believes His Own Conspiracy Theories." by David Corn - 10/2/19 - MotherJones.com
“I’m leading in the polls and they have no idea how to stop me,” Mr. Trump said, though the president trails the leading Democratic candidates in most polls. “The only way they can try is through impeachment.”
Source: "Trump, at U.N., Blames Europe for His Delay of Ukraine Aid" By Michael Crowley - NY Times - Sept. 24, 2019
{N}ever have we had {a President} who went to such lengths to cover up an inaccurate weather forecast. Alabama being hit by a hurricane? Friends, this is not rational behavior.
Trump also canceled a meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. The meeting was to have been secret. It was scheduled for the week of the anniversary of 9/11. He cancelled it by tweet.
Before that, Trump canceled a state visit to Denmark because Denmark wouldn’t sell Greenland to the U.S. Hello? Greenland wasn’t for sale. The U.S. no longer buys populated countries. The state visit had been planned for months.
He has repeatedly told senior officials to explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes hitting the U.S. He believes video games cause mass shootings. He blames light bulbs for his orange hue.
Trump thinks climate change is no big deal. He says trade wars are “good and easy to win.” He insists it’s Chinese rather than U.S. consumers who pay his tariffs. He “orders” American firms to stop doing business in China.
He calls the chairman of the Federal Reserve an “enemy.” He retweets a comedian’s sick suggestion that the Clintons were responsible for the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The president of the United States is seriously, frighteningly, dangerously unstable. And he’s getting worse by the day.
Source: "Trump Is a Clear and Present Danger to Us All" by Robert Reich - University of California at Berkeley - 9/19/19
{A} false tweet promoted by President Donald Trump {. . .} purports to show Rep. Ilhan Omar “partying” and “celebrating” on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The tweet the president retweeted to his tens of millions of followers came from conservative commentator Terrence K. Williams, who showed a brief video clip of Omar dancing and then commented, “Ilhan Omar partied on the anniversary of 9/11 because she believes ‘Some People Just Did Somethings.'”
The video was actually from { . . . } a Congressional Black Caucus event, “Breaking Concrete Ceilings,” hosted by freshmen Congressional Black Caucus women on Sept. 13. It did not take place on the anniversary of 9/11, and had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.
Source: "Tapper on Trump’s Smear of Omar" By Robert Farley - FactCheck.org - September 20, 2019
"If you look at our facilities, they were virtually closed up. There was crabgrass growing on the runways. And now they’re vital and we’re — we’re doing — we’re going to Mars. We’re stopping at the moon."
In fact, NASA for years has been aiming for a trip to Mars.
In 2004, President George W. Bush proposed a return to the moon as a springboard to Mars.
During the Obama administration, the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, the New Horizons spacecraft captured images of Pluto and the Juno spacecraft successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit.
While NASA’s annual budget is a fraction of what it was during the heyday of the space race, it has hovered between $16 billion and $21 billion for the past decade. Mr. Trump proposed cutting NASA’s funding in his budgets for the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years, though Congress ignored those suggestions.
Source: "Fact-Checking Trump’s Latest Claims About Space and Iran" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Sept. 21, 2019
{O}fficials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reportedly were threatened with termination for contradicting Trump’s claim — he tried to prove it by marking a map with a Sharpie — that Alabama was menaced by a killer storm.
Source: "If democracy’s guardrails don’t hold, America’s going over the cliff" BY LEONARD PITTS JR. - Miami Herald - SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
My favorite moment in Donald Trump’s trip to France came when our president was doing a little riff about North Korea and Kim Jong-un. Not only had he come to know Kim well, Trump told reporters, “the first lady has gotten to know Kim Jong-un and I think she’d agree with me, he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential.”
Melania Trump has never met Kim Jong-un.
We know, of course, that he makes things up and doesn’t try to correct himself even when the whole world knows he’s wrong. But he did seem even more befuddled and confused than usual.
His talks with reporters were a good example. He claimed he had personally gotten many important “high-level calls” from Chinese officials who wanted to “make a deal,” something the Chinese seemed to know nothing whatsoever about.
Back in April, after talking with NATO officials in Washington, he said that despite his complaints about Germany, he had “great respect” for the country from which his father emigrated. “My father is German … born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”
Fred Trump was born in the Bronx. “To mental health professionals like me, the red flags are waving wildly,” wrote the psychologist John Gartner.
So what do you think? Mental deterioration or just Trump as usual? No fair saying they’re both the same.
Source: "Is Trump, Um, Slipping? Even More?" By Gail Collins - NY Times - 8/28/2019
President Trump came to New Mexico Monday night for a rally aimed at demonstrating his support among Hispanic voters
The waves of cheers came again when the president claimed without evidence that San Diego residents had “begged” him for a border wall. (No organized or documented request came from San Diego, and the Republican mayor there has opposed the wall.)
“It’s our culture under attack, the American way of life,” said Ralph Medina, 77 {a Hispanic Trump supporter who frequents Trump rallies},
When asked if he saw any connection between the president’s rhetoric, racial divisiveness and the shooting in his hometown {El Paso}, Mr. Medina scoffed, calling it a “frenzy made by the media.”
“It’s silly,” he added. “How do you blame someone else for sick people who have been raised on video games?” (Mr. Trump and his supporters have made similar arguments, though there is no proven link between violent video games and mass shootings.)
“El Paso has become a sanctuary city and now we’ve got all these people who don’t contribute, but they use our school system and they take our jobs,” he said, though research has shown that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and largely fill low-wage jobs that American citizens are unwilling to perform.
Source: "Most Latinos Don’t Back Trump. But Some Wear Their Support Proudly." By Jennifer Medina - NY Times - 9/18/19
{Trump's} tweets {regarding his interactions with the other world leaders at the 2019 G7 summit in France} suggested he felt himself among kindred spirits. “The question I was asked most today by fellow World Leaders, who think the USA is doing so well and is stronger than ever before, happens to be, ‘Mr. President, why does the American media hate your Country so much? Why are they rooting for it to fail?’”
Unless one of the World Leaders confesses to saying this, it is probably another lie.
Source: "Group of 7, Minus Trump" - NY Times Editorial Board - 8/26/19
“In the meantime, the United States, which has never collected 10 cents from China, will in a fairly short period of time be over $100 billion in tariffs.”
Tariffs imposed on imports of foreign goods do not mean another country is paying the bill. The costs are largely passed on to American companies and consumers, as recent studies from economists at Princeton University and Columbia University, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund have shown.
Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, put in place in July 2018, had raised $26.3 billion as of Aug. 21, according to Customs and Border Protection. (At the same time, he has promised $28 billion in relief to American farmers hurt by his trade war.)
It is also not true that the United States had never before imposed tariffs on Chinese imports. In the decade before Mr. Trump took office, the United States collected $8 billion to $14 billion per year from duties on Chinese imports.
Source: "Fact-Checking Trump’s G7 Remarks" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Aug. 26, 2019
“This year, for the first time in 50 years, drug prices went down.”
An Associated Press analysis found that from January to July 2018, drug companies raised prices on more than 4,400 products, with a median increase of 5.2 percent in June and July 2018. Rx Savings Solutions, a company that advises employers on how to reduce drug costs, found that drug companies increased prices on more than 2,800 medicines in the first quarter of 2019. The average increase was 8.6 percent, compared with 11.3 percent in the same period last year.
The index also showed declines in several months in recent years before Donald J. Trump took office — contradicting his claim that prices had fallen for the first time in five decades.
“We will have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year.”
Mr. Trump is once again mixing projects to replace existing barriers with construction of entirely new sectors of a wall along the southwestern border — and inflating the mileage. {T}hat’s about 258 miles — 142 miles under what Mr. Trump promoted — and that relies on counting replacement projects as new wall, contracts that have yet to be awarded, as well as funding that is tenuous.
“The asylum — where rough, tough MS-13 gang members come in, you don’t want to meet with these people, but ICE doesn’t mind because ICE is throwing them out of our country by the thousands.”
In the 2019 fiscal year thus far, border officials apprehended more than 360,000 people trying to illegally cross the border. Of those people, 221, or 0.06 percent, were MS-13 members.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement deported over 1,300 MS-13 members in the 2018 fiscal year — more than 1,000, but not quite “thousands.”
“In the last administration, President Obama signed the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. {. . . } Under my administration, we will never surrender American sovereignty to anyone. We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedom.”
The treaty aims to establish international norms for regulating arms sales between countries and addressing illegal arms sales. It prohibits selling weapons to nations that are under arms embargoes or will use them to commit genocide, terrorism, war crimes or attacks against civilians.
In the preamble, the treaty explicitly reaffirms “the sovereign right of any state to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system.”
“It has absolutely no effect on U.S. domestic gun laws,” said Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, which supports the treaty.
Source: "Fact-Checking Trump’s Speech to the N.R.A." By Linda Qiu - NY Times - April 26, 2019
Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency claiming “the world is laughing at us.” Now it really is laughing — at him.
Apparently mistaking the United Nations General Assembly for a campaign stop on Tuesday, Mr. Trump opened his annual address — usually a somber occasion for a president to assess the state of the world — by boasting that his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
That’s when the other world leaders started chuckling.
“Didn’t expect that reaction,” Mr. Trump said, like a comic in a roomful of hecklers, “but that’s O.K.”
Actually, it’s not O.K. America’s president is now openly derided in the most important international forum.
Source: "President Trump Addresses the United Nations (laughter)" - NY Times - 9/26/2018
On the planet’s biggest stage, with more than 100 world leaders gathered with their ministers, ambassadors and dignitaries of every stripe, while news cameras from as many countries broadcast the speech in as many languages, they laughed.
President Trump seemed surprised when he heard it. Attendees of the United Nations General Assembly, normally a scripted annual gathering of presidents, prime ministers and wizened diplomats, do not typically break decorum, let alone laugh at the most powerful man in the room.
[The president doubled down on his “America First” foreign policy.]
But there it was, soon after Mr. Trump commenced his highly anticipated speech on Tuesday, as he bragged about how much his administration had accomplished in two years, “more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
For Mr. Trump it was little more than a minor boast, a well-worn line trotted out frequently at rallies with ardent supporters across America that rarely warrants special mention anymore. But for some reason, at the United Nations on Tuesday, it resonated.
By the end of the day, there was no escaping it. The laughter eclipsed Mr. Trump’s criticism of the “corrupt dictatorship” in Iran and the “human tragedy” in Venezuela.
“We need a President who isn’t a laughingstock to the entire World,” Mr. Trump tweeted about President Obama in 2014.
Before the 2016 election, he complained that Mexico was “laughing at our dumb immigration laws,” Vladimir V. Putin was “laughing at Obama” over the leak of classified NSA documents, and the world was laughing “at what fools our leaders have been” on trade.
The laughter was supposed to have stopped when Mr. Trump took the presidency.
“The world respects our country now,” he told a local television journalist in North Dakota on the sidelines of a rally there this month, calling his performance superior to that of Mr. Obama. “They didn’t respect our country when he was running it. They were laughing at our country.”
Source: "Deliberate or Not, Trump’s Speech Draws Laughter at the U.N." By Michael Schwirtz - NY Times - Sept. 25, 2018
President Trump is accustomed to telling blatant lies and having the people around him — many of whom work for him — pretend he’s speaking the truth. But when he went to the United Nations yesterday {9/25/18} and told an obvious lie in front of the leaders of the world, they had a much more appropriate response than sycophancy. They laughed at him.
Source: "Trump lies once again, and the leaders of the world laugh at him." By David Leonhardt - NY Times - Sept. 26, 2018
United States businesses have complained about Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which are raising costs for companies that import materials from overseas, disrupting supply chains and making it more difficult to sell American goods in China. But Mr. Trump continues to incorrectly assert that China is paying the tariffs and depositing money into the United States Treasury.
“We have tariffs on $250 billion worth of goods and these are — we are talking about billions and billions of dollars a month will flow into our country and already started flowing in. It comes from China,” he said.
{Tarrifs are taxes that are added to the price of imported goods, so they are actually paid by American consumers. -- SpinShield}
Source: "Trump Calls China’s List of Trade Concessions ‘Not Acceptable’" By Alan Rappeport - NY Times - Nov. 16, 2018
Tester joined every other Senate Democrat in supporting open-borders legislation from the now-legendary Dianne Feinstein.
The bill does not prevent deportations, as the president has said, nor does it halt prosecution of migrants for illegally entering the country. It also does not prevent family members from being detained together.
It was heading down when I took over. They like to say, “Well, Obama helped.” He didn’t help. We were going down.
Regardless of which president deserves more credit for the healthy economy, Mr. Trump is wrong that the economy was declining until he took over.
Since the peak of the Great Recession, metrics show the economy had steadily improved under President Barack Obama’s second term. Unemployment declined to 4.8 percent in January 2017, when Mr. Trump took office, from 10 percent in October 2009. Gross domestic product has risen every year for the past nine years. And the stock market climbed steadily, too.
Source: "Fact-Checking Trump’s Montana Rally" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - 11/3/18
“We’re not letting them into our country. And then they never show up, almost, it’s like a level of 3 percent. They never show up for the trial. So by the time their trial comes, they’re gone, nobody knows where they are.”
President Trump was referring to the rate that migrants show up to immigration court proceedings after being apprehended and released into the United States. Data from the Justice Department shows that most immigrants do, in fact, show up to their court hearings.
In the 2017 fiscal year, about 28 percent of immigrants failed to attend their court hearings — not the 97 percent Mr. Trump estimated.
Among asylum seekers, only 11 percent did not show up for legal proceedings. Of the asylum seekers who participated in a pilot program tested as an alternative to detention, 99 percent attended Immigration and Custom Enforcement check-ins and appointments. And 100 percent turned up for court hearings.
“And once that control is set and standardized and made very strong, including the building of the wall, which we’ve already started. $1.6 billion spent last year, $1.6 billion this year. We have another $1.6 that will be coming, but we want to build it at one time.”
A spending bill signed by Mr. Trump in March allotted $1.6 billion for projects to replace old barriers along the border with new ones. But that bill did not allow spending funds on a new border wall.
Mr. Trump signed another spending bill in late September, which did not include any money for his border wall — a fact he seemed aware of, given his criticisms over the lack of funding.
Source: "Trump’s Falsehood-Laden Speech on Immigration" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - 1/1/18
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Mr. Trump told Axios during an interview that was released in part on Tuesday. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
In fact, dozens of other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship
Source: "Trump Wants to Use Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship" By Julie Hirschfeld Davis - NY Times - Oct. 30, 2018
Republicans will protect people with pre-existing conditions far better than the Dems!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018
The recent history of health care politics in the United States suggests that the president has things backward. It is Democrats, by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, who introduced meaningful protections for Americans with prior illnesses.
And Republican officeholders have taken numerous actions that would tend to weaken those protections — in Congress, in states and in courts. The Trump administration introduced a sweeping new policy just last week that would allow states to sidestep Obamacare’s requirement to cover pre-existing conditions.
Last year, Republicans in Congress led an extended but ultimately unsuccessful effort to, in their words, “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. The House bill, called the American Health Care Act, had provisions that would have weakened current protections for people with pre-existing illnesses.
Had this bill become law, the precise results would have depended on the choices by individual states. But the Congressional Budget Office estimated {. . .} coverage that was unaffordable to many with pre-existing illnesses, along with holes in coverage for many serious conditions.
Under Obamacare’s rules, health plans cannot discriminate against customers who have been sick in the past. They can’t charge them higher prices than they would a healthy person in the same place and of the same age.
Source: "Republicans Say They Will Protect Pre-existing Conditions. Their Records Say Something Else. " By Margot Sanger-Katz - NY Times - 11/2/18
{At} a campaign rally mere hours after 11 people were shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Trump said that the New York Stock Exchange reopened the day after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
Trump’s version of history sounds pretty incredible. But it just isn’t true. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were closed until Monday, Sept. 17, which marked the longest closing of the markets since 1933.
“With what happened early today, that horrible, horrible attack in Pittsburgh, I was saying maybe I should cancel both this and that. And then I said to myself, I remembered Dick Russell, a friend of mine, great guy, he headed up the New York Stock Exchange on September 11th, and the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day,”
It isn’t just dates that Trump got wrong in his little tale, but also names. While the president referenced “Dick Russell, a friend of mine,” the head of the NYSE at the time was actually named Dick Grasso. Dick Russell was a senator from Georgia who defended segregation.
Although his story wasn’t as detailed, Trump also seemed to suggest something about baseball games after Sept. 11 that simply doesn’t line up with what actually happened. “Remember the teams, the Yankees, George Steinbrenner, He said we have got to play, even if nobody comes, nobody shows up, we have got to play.” Although he doesn’t actually say it, the implication of Trump’s statement is that baseball didn’t put its games on pause after the attacks. But, in fact professional baseball also didn’t start up again until Sept. 17.
Trump, of course, has a history of misremembering events around the Sept. 11 attacks. During his presidential campaign, Trump infamously said he saw “thousands and thousands of people” celebrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in an area of New Jersey that has a “large Arab” community.
Source: "Trump Lies About Sept. 11 to Justify Holding Campaign Rally After Synagogue Shooting" By Daniel Politi - Slate - Oct 28, 2018•
“The Democrat agenda is radical socialism and open borders. The new platform of the Democrat Party is to abolish ICE.” Oct. 9, Council Bluffs, Iowa
Mr. Trump claims to have direct evidence of this Democratic strategy. On Saturday, at a rally in Topeka, Kan., he cited legislation “called the Open Borders Bill,” which he said was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and supported by every other Democratic senator.
No such bill exists. Mr. Trump was probably referring to a bill called the Keep Families Together Act, which was sponsored by Ms. Feinstein and has the support of all Democratic senators. The bill seeks to prevent migrant children from being separated from their families at the United States border, except when officials suspect abuse or trafficking.
“Republicans want to protect Medicare. Democrats want to raid Medicare to pay their socialism.”Sept. 21, Springfield, MO.
The financial outlook for Medicare, the health care program for older Americans, has worsened under Mr. Trump’s watch, in part because of his tax law.
His claim about the Democrats’ strategy refers to — and distorts — progressive proposals to expand “Medicare for all.” None of the “Medicare for all” bills offered by Democratic lawmakers would reduce benefits or cut dollars from the insurance program; in fact, current beneficiaries would receive more health coverage for lower costs.
“We will always protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. We’re going to take care of them. Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions.” Oct. 4, Rochester, Minn.
Mr. Trump’s promise to “always protect” Americans who have pre-existing medical conditions contradicts actions that have been taken by his own administration and political party.
In June, the Justice Department told a federal court that it would no longer defend provisions in the Affordable Care Act that protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Legislatively, Mr. Trump has supported bills that would have undermined those protections.
There is no evidence that Democrats have suggested taking away protections for pre-existing conditions. Efforts to preserve those safeguards were central to Democrats’ campaign to maintain the Affordable Care Act and the party’s midterm message.
“Since the election, we have created over four million new jobs. The media will tell you there was no way we could have said that during the campaign. Nobody would have believed it.”Oct. 4, Rochester, Minn.
While Mr. Trump’s figure is accurate, his suggestion that the number would have been unbelievable is not. The economy added more jobs in a comparable period before his election.
In the 22 months from December 2016 to September 2018, the economy added over 4.2 million jobs. In the 22 months before Mr. Trump’s election, the economy added 4.7 million jobs.
“Republicans passed the biggest tax cuts in reform in American history.”Aug. 4, Lewis Center, Ohio
This is one of Mr. Trump’s most repeated talking points and it remains false after dozens of repetitions. Tax cuts signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and President Barack Obama in 2012 would rank higher than the $1.5 trillion tax law Mr. Trump signed in December by several metrics.
“We’ve started the wall. Everybody wants the wall. We’ve spent $3.2 billion on the wall.” Sept. 6, Billings, Mont
Prototypes for a wall along the United States border with Mexico were unveiled in October 2017. But construction based on those prototypes has not begun, nor has the wall been funded.
Source: "A Guide to Trump’s Stump Speeches for the Midterm Campaigns" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Oct. 12, 2018
Donald Trump’s claim that he is a self-made man, and that he’s worth $10 billion—these claims are complete and utter nonsense. They’ve been demolished now by the Times. That second story, however, isn’t getting through. Forbes magazine just came out saying Donald Trump’s wealth has fallen from four billion dollars to three billion, and every day on TV and on the radio, I hear news people talking about “the billionaire president.” But there is not now, nor has there ever been, a scintilla of verifiable evidence that Trump has a billion-dollar net worth. During the campaign he told us all he was worth more than $10 billion. I kept saying, that’s nonsense, it’s not true.
Once he became president, Trump had to file his financial-disclosure form. As I report in It’s Even Worse Than You Think, his lawyers asked to file that statement without signing it under penalty of perjury. The Office of Government Ethics said “No. You have to sign that statement.” Everybody has to sign, under penalty of perjury. So he did. The statement shows a net worth not of $10 billion, but of $1.4 billion. What more do you need to know to understand that Trump just makes this stuff up? And even the $1.4 billion is not to be believed. For example, he says his two Scottish golf courses are each worth more than $50 million. But we just got their new financial reports. Yet again, for another year, they’ve lost millions of dollars. They’re not worth $50 million. They may be literally worthless, except for the real-estate value—if you get permission to redevelop them. His businesses are losing money all over the place. And the rules for the presidential disclosure do not require Trump to disclose all sorts of loans that he is obligated for. If we had a real net worth statement on Donald Trump, it would probably show he’s worth a few hundred million dollars. That’s all.
Just keep this in mind: In the 1970s, we had two crooks at the head of our government. Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew resigned and pled guilty to a tax charge over what were basically bags of groceries that he didn’t report on his tax return as bribes. Bags of groceries. There was more to it, but that’s what he pled to. Richard Nixon, who famously said, “I am not a crook,” was an unindicted co-conspirator, and his tax lawyer served time in prison for backdating documents so that Nixon could take a deduction for donating his papers. Those are pebbles compared to the mountain of tax cheating by the Trumps. We have a criminal in the White House. So people need to vote. We need to make sure that the votes are honestly counted. And we need to support a thorough, professional, detailed congressional investigation. And if it warrants it, Donald Trump needs to not only be removed from office; he needs to be indicted, prosecuted, and if convicted, sent to prison.
Source: "Donald Trump Is a Criminal Tax Cheat - David Cay Johnston on the financial crimes of President Trump." By Jon Wiener - The Nation - 10/12/2018
“I will always fight for and always protect patients with pre-existing conditions,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in West Virginia on Sept. 29 {2018}. “On pre-existing conditions,” he said two days later in Tennessee, “a lot of people think it’s not a very Republican thing. It is now, and it has been for me. I want to take care of people with pre-existing conditions.”
And a crowd in Mississippi applauded on Tuesday when the president declared, “Pre-existing conditions will always be taken care of by us.”
These statements are misleading.
Mr. Trump spent much of last year trying to persuade Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the main source of protections for people with pre-existing conditions. He supported numerous Republican proposals that would have rolled back or weakened the protections.
He celebrated when the House passed a bill allowing states to obtain waivers from federal insurance standards. Under such waivers, the Congressional Budget Office said, people with pre-existing conditions could have faced “extremely high premiums.”
In June, the administration joined an attack on the Affordable Care Act by 20 states and urged a federal court in Texas to throw out popular provisions of the law that protect sick people from being denied insurance or charged higher rates. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department was taking this position “with the approval of the president.”
With a new rule issued in August, Mr. Trump has also opened the door to the sale of many more short-term insurance plans that explicitly exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions. “A pregnancy existing on the effective date of coverage will also be considered a pre-existing condition,” say brochures for short-term plans offered by UnitedHealth and other companies.
Source: "Fact-Checking the President: Has He Saved or Sabotaged Obamacare?" By Robert Pear - NY Times - Oct. 6, 2018
Mr. Trump spent most of his private remarks to the group {of evangelical leaders} bragging about having gotten “rid of” the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 provision of tax law that threatened religious organizations, like churches, with the loss of tax-exempt status if they endorse or oppose political candidates.
Under that amendment, Mr. Trump said, religious leaders had been prevented from speaking their minds.
The president recalled how he first learned about the Johnson Amendment at a meeting during the 2016 campaign, when several dozen pastors and ministers came to see him at Trump Tower in New York. He said he was pleased by the meeting because the religious leaders seemed to like him.
“We were in the 68th floor of Trump Tower and we looked down on the sidewalks and there were thousands and thousands of people,” he said.
In fact, Trump Tower has only 58 stories, but Mr. Trump frequently adds 10 stories to its height {.}
In fact, the president has fallen short of that promise.
Eliminating the provision in the law would require Congress to act.
Mr. Trump ignored that reality Monday night. He urged religious leaders to use what he described as their newfound freedom of speech to campaign from the pulpit on behalf of Republican candidates.
Source: "If G.O.P. Loses Hold on Congress, Trump Warns, Democrats Will Enact Change ‘Quickly and Violently’" By Michael D. Shear - NY Times - Aug. 28, 2018
“There’s nobody on the campaign that saw anybody from Russia.”
— Interview with The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2017
Mr. Trump has flat out denied, at least three times, that several people in the Trump campaign met with or spoke to people associated with Russia.
Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, discussed lifting sanctions with the Russian ambassador in December 2016, and resigned for misleading White House officials about those conversations. Mr. Trump’s son, son-in-law and former campaign chairman — Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort — met with a Russian lawyer who had connections to the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. And two foreign policy advisers to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, met with people linked to the Kremlin before the 2016 vote. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump and advised him during the campaign, met with the Russian ambassador at least twice in 2016.
(Repetitions in 2018: July 16 | Repetitions in 2017: May 13)
“Russia was against Trump in the 2016 Election”
— Twitter post, July 29, 2017
Mr. Trump has repeatedly asserted that Mr. Putin’s government did not want him to win the American presidential election. He once claimed that Russia “spent a lot of money on fighting me” and another time asserted that Mr. Putin “wants Hillary.”
Not only does this contradict various American intelligence reports, Mr. Putin himself said both before and after the November 2016 vote that he wanted Mr. Trump to win because of Mr. Trump’s desire to restore Russian-American relations.
(Repetitions in 2018: Aug. 2 | July 24 | July 13 | Repetitions in 2017: Nov. 15 | Aug. 10 | July 12)
“Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign.”
— News conference at the White House, June 15, 2018.
Mr. Manafort was the Trump campaign chairman during the last stretch of the Republican primary campaign. He worked for the campaign for 144 days — not 49 days or three and a half months, as Mr. Trump alternately has claimed.
(Repetitions in 2018: June 3 | Dec. 28 | Repetitions in 2017: Nov. 5 | Oct. 30).
“Collusion is not a crime”
— Twitter post, July 31, 2017
This is Mr. Trump’s latest defense.
This is misleading.
Mr. Trump is playing a semantics game. “Collusion” is not a crime in the federal code of criminal procedure, but a potential conspiracy between a campaign and a foreign government that violates American election laws is indeed illegal.
The Mueller investigation “was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC.”
— Twitter post, March 17, 2018
Mr. Trump has claimed repeatedly that the special counsel investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III was opened because of the information in Mr. Steele’s dossier.
Republicans who hold the majority vote on the House Intelligence Committee have confirmed that the investigation was the result of Mr. Papadopoulos telling an Australian ambassador in May 2016 that the Russians had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.
(Repetitions: Aug. 9 | Aug. 1 | July 29 | July 29 | July 23 | May 21 | May 1 | April 28)
Source: "Truth-Testing Trump’s 250-Plus Attacks on the Russia Inquiry" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Aug. 18, 2018
Mr. Trump . . . offered his own, inaccurate explanation — one rejected by state officials and firefighting experts — for the scourge of wildfires ravaging California. He said they were the result of water being diverted into the Pacific Ocean to save fish.
“We’re spending a fortune in California because of poor maintenance and because, frankly, they’re sending a lot of water out to the Pacific to protect the smelt,” Mr. Trump said.
He called on Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, to repeat an argument he had made earlier in the day on television — that climate change was not to blame for the deadly blazes. “Ryan was saying it’s not a global warming thing, it’s a management situation,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Zinke obliged, blaming Canadian lumber imports — one of Mr. Trump’s favorite trade villains — for what he called displacing American-grown lumber on the market, leaving fallen trees to rot and become combustible. “So ridiculous,” Mr. Trump said with a nod.
He asked Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, how American farmers are faring. “The farmers like Trump,” the president said.
“They’re selling the corn, and they’re selling the soybean, and they’re selling everything at levels that are soon going to be pretty good levels,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m hearing it’s starting to really pick up.”
Prices for agricultural exports fell last month by the largest percentage in seven years, driven in large part by a major drop for soybeans.
Source: "Once Dry Discussions, Cabinet Meetings Are Now Part of the Trump Show" By Julie Hirschfeld Davis - NY Times - Aug. 16, 2018
“Last year, we secured a historic $700 billion to rebuild our military. And now the National Defense Authorization Act paves the way for 1,700 — listen to this now. So we’ve been trying to get money. They never gave us money for the military for years and years. And it was depleted. We got $700 billion. And next year, already approved, we have $716 billion to give you the finest planes and ships and tanks and missiles anywhere on earth.”
— President Trump, speaking to Army soldiers at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Monday {8/13/18}
Mr. Trump’s claim is wrong on two fronts: that the approved funding levels are “historic” and that the military “never” had money “for years and years.” It’s also not clear what he was referring to when he said the act “paves the way for 1,700.”
The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019, which Mr. Trump signed on Monday, provides $716 billion for the Pentagon’s basic operations and war spending, as well as the Department of Energy’s national security programs.
That’s not the largest military budget in recent history, let alone all of American history. Even if inflation is not taken into account, President Barack Obama signed a $726 billion National Defense Authorization Act for the 2011 fiscal year.
Adjusted for inflation, Congress authorized more money for the Pentagon every fiscal year between 2007 and 2012, during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump may have been referring to the sequester, in which Congress placed limits on military spending in 2011; they were effectively lifted in February. But his statement — that the Pentagon “never” received money during that time — is patently wrong. As The New York Times has previously reported:
From 2012 to 2017, the Pentagon’s annual budget had decreased as a percent of the economy. But it still hovered around $600 billion — a far cry from “no money” at all.
The United States’ military spending has consistently outstripped the rest of the world’s. In fact, it has been higher than the next seven to 11 countries combined since 2012, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
After the signing of the bill, Mr. Trump made several more inaccurate claims at a fund-raiser in Utica, N.Y.
•He misleadingly claimed “nobody would have believed” the number of jobs added to the economy in the 20 months since his election. (More were added in the 20 months prior.)
•He hyperbolically claimed the unemployment rate for women was at its lowest in 65 years. (The rate for July, which has risen from a few months ago, is otherwise the lowest in 18 years.)
•He falsely claimed the unemployment rate for Asian-Americans is the lowest ever recorded. (The rate for July is higher than a few months ago and also higher than it was in December 2016.)
•He falsely claimed his tax cuts were the largest in history. (Several rank higher by various metrics.)
•He exaggerated the amount of untaxed corporate earnings held abroad that businesses would repatriate as $4 trillion. (Estimates range from $2.3 trillion to $2.8 trillion.)
•He falsely claimed United States Steel “is opening up eight plants.” (It has not announced a single new plant.)
•He misleadingly claimed to have begun building his proposed border wall. (Construction has not begun.)
Source: "Trump Goes for Broke on Claim Military Received No Money Before His Watch. (He’s Still Wrong.)" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Aug. 13, 2018
“Highways would take 21 years to get approved. We have it down to two years, and it’s going to be one year very shortly.”
— President Trump, at a campaign rally on Thursday night in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Mr. Trump has doubled a previously exaggerated claim about the permitting process for roads and infrastructure taking a decade. Average wait times for a permit ranged from three to six years from the fiscal years 1999 to 2016, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
In the 2017 fiscal year, the average wait time was three years and 10 months, almost double Mr. Trump’s claim of a two-year period. (Data for the 2018 fiscal year, which ends in September, is not yet available.)
“Chain migration. And this was a Schumer deal. Schumer wanted this.”
Mr. Trump is likely confusing the diversity lottery program with “chain migration” or family-based immigration. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate minority leader, sponsored what became the diversity visa lottery in 1990, but family-based immigration has been a facet of American immigration policy long before Mr. Schumer’s political career began.
Family relationships have been a basis for admitting new immigrants since the 1920s, according to the Congressional Research Service, and the United States began promoting family reunification in 1952, which established a hierarchy that prioritized family members like spouses and children over siblings.
Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen “were drawing crowds smaller than my crowds.”
This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has compared crowd size to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s, though it appears to be the first time he has brought the Boss into the mix.
Mr. Trump has claimed 20,000 to 49,000 people attended his biggest rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign. Even taking Mr. Trump at his word, those figures pale in comparison to audiences that have assembled to hear Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Mr. Springsteen perform.
For example, Mr. Springsteen sold out a two-night show in May 2016 in Dublin, drawing an average of 80,000 people to each show. This June, Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed for a crowd of over 57,000 in Berlin. (In addition, it should be noted that fans purchase tickets to hear the musicians in question, while Mr. Trump’s rallies are free.)
Mr. Trump also repeated several other claims {at a rally in Pennsylvania on 8/2/18} The Times has previously debunked:
•He falsely claimed the United States Steel Corporation “is opening up seven plants.” (It has not announced a single new plant.)
•He falsely claimed “Russia is very unhappy that Trump won.” (Intelligence agencies have said — and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has confirmed — that he preferred Mr. Trump to Hillary Clinton.)
•He mischaracterized NATO members as “delinquent” on payments to the alliance. (He is referring to a pledge each member set for spending on its own military.)
•He falsely claimed “NATO funding was going down” before he raised the issue. (Military spending from members has been increasing since 2015.)
•He claimed, with no evidence, that the man charged in the Manhattan truck attack in October brought in “22 relatives.” (This is not possible.)
•He hyperbolically said immigrants arrested on suspicion of crossing the border illegally “never come back” for court dates. (Most do.)
•He exaggerated the number of jobs the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines would bring, estimating 48,000 jobs. (A vast majority are temporary.)
•He misleadingly claimed that “nobody would have believed” how many jobs have been added since his election. (The number added in a comparable period before his election was larger.)
•He falsely claimed to have signed the “biggest tax cuts in the history of our country.” (Several were larger,)
•He misleadingly claimed to have “saved our family farms from the estate tax.” (About 80 family farms and small businesses were affected.)
•He took credit for passing the Veterans Choice Act, which he said other presidents had been trying to pass for 40 years. (It passed in 2014, though he did sign new overhauls,)
Source: "Trump’s Inaccurate Claims About Highways, Immigration and Beyoncé From a Pennsylvania Rally" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - Aug. 2, 2018
CNN obtained on Tuesday {7/24/18} a secret recording between Trump and his then-attorney Michael Cohen made two months before the election in 2016 in which the two men discussed setting up a company to funnel a payment to American Media to make sure it continued to keep silent about the story of former Playboy model Karen McDougal, a woman who claims to have had an affair with Trump.
The White House had previously denied any knowledge that McDougal had even sold her story. That clearly was a lie. Trump not only knew; he was discussing buying it from the seller.
This would have been a lethal revelation for any other president, but in these maddening Trump days, it becomes just another breach of faith, protocol, custom and possibly the law to toss on top of the ever-growing mound.
Source: "What Doesn’t Kill Him Makes Him Stronger - The more Trump lies, the more he is empowered to lie." By Charles M. Blow - NY Times - 7/27/2018
The president, in a speech in Illinois, escalated his misguided notion that a trade deficit means “lost” wealth into a claim an expert says “defies the most basic of economics.”
•He falsely claimed United States Steel was opening seven new plants (it has not announced any, though it has restarted parts of a plant).
•He falsely claimed China’s economy “flatlined for decades” before its entry into the World Trade Organization (the Chinese economy was growing before 2001).
•He falsely claimed the United States is “rated No. 1 in the world for growth” (it’s not).
•He falsely claimed the United States “couldn’t sell cars into” the European Union (it exports billions of dollars’ worth of cars to the European Union).
•He hyperbolically claimed military spending by NATO allies was “going down” before he raised the issue (spending has been rising since before Mr. Trump took office).
Source: "Trump Claims the U.S. Would Save Money Without Trade. That’s Not What a Trade Deficit Represents. " By Linda Qiu - NY Times - July 26, 2018
For example, he declared that the head of U.S. Steel called him to say that the company was opening six new plants. It isn’t, and as far as we can tell the phone call never happened.
Meanwhile, reports say that the Council of Economic Advisers did an internal report concluding that Trump trade policy will cost jobs, not create them; Kevin Hassett, the chairman, pressed on these reports, said that he could neither confirm nor deny them; in other words, they’re true. But meanwhile Hassett is declaring that last year’s corporate tax cut has led to a “massive amount of activity coming home” — which is just false. Some companies are rearranging their accounting, producing what looks on paper like money coming back to the U.S., but this has no real effect on investment or employment.
But the most Potemkinesque story of the past week was the declaration by Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economic official, that the budget deficit is “coming down rapidly” as “those revenues come rolling in.” Actually, the deficit is rising fast, mainly because of a plunge in corporate tax receipts — the direct result of the tax cut:
The administration later tried to walk back Kudlow’s claim, saying that he was talking about great things that will happen in the future, not current events. Right.
We’re talking about an administration that’s taking children away from their parents and putting them in cages in response to a wave of violent immigrant crime that doesn’t, you know, actually exist. Trade policy itself is being driven by claims about the massive tariffs U.S. products face from, say, the European Union — tariffs that, like the immigrant crime wave, don’t actually exist.
And the early phase of the trade war that was supposed to be “good, and easy to win” isn’t generating the kinds of headlines Trump wanted. Instead, we’re hearing about production shifting overseas to escape both U.S. tariffs on imported inputs and foreign retaliation against U.S. products.
Given what we’ve seen the past few days, they’ll respond to plant closings and economic disruption with fantasies of triumph, while Trump will dismiss reports of problems as fake news. Reality will take a long time to break through, if it ever does. And by then the world trading system may be broken beyond repair.
Source: "Trump’s Potemkin Economy" by Paul Krugman - NY Times - June 30, 2018
{O}n Wednesday {6/27/18}, the president sent an all-caps tweet that did exactly what he claimed he never did. “
"HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL, KNOWN AS GOODLATTE II, IN THEIR AFTERNOON VOTE TODAY, EVEN THOUGH THE DEMS WON’T LET IT PASS IN THE SENATE,” Trump wrote on June 27.
“I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold,” Trump tweeted {on 6/30/18}.
Trump’s Wednesday plea didn’t do much to help the bill’s survival, of course, considering the measure was rejected by a whopping 121–301 vote.
Source: "Trump vs. Trump: President Claims He Never Said Something He Tweeted Three Days Ago" By Daniel Politi - Slate.com - June 30, 2018•
He said the Obama administration “granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians — including to government officials.”
There is no evidence that such a side deal to the nuclear accord existed. Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama at the time the Iran nuclear deal was reached, called the visa report as “just a big lie. It’s not true.” Additionally, American government data show no spike in naturalizations of Iranians or huge increase in green cards given to Iranians in 2015 when compared to the two previous years.
“Harley customers are not happy with their move — sales are down 7 percent in 2017. The U.S. is where the Action is!” he said in the post.
The president was apparently referring to the decline in the company’s worldwide 2017 sales, which was 6.7 percent{.} But the company’s decision to move its production was made last month, so the sales drop last year could not have been a result of it. In fact, the company’s sales in the United States have been declining for several years{.}
Source: "In a Fox-Inspired Tweetstorm, Trump Offers a Medley of Falsehoods and Misstatements" By Julie Hirschfeld Davis - NY Times - July 3, 2018
In fact, while President Trump may insist that the law has been “essentially gutted,” the A.C.A. {Obamacare} market appears to be more robust than ever, according to insurance executives and analysts.
“The market is in a better position now than it has ever been since the exchanges have opened,” said Deep Banerjee, who follows insurers for S & P Global Ratings.
insurers are comfortable with the market as it has come to exist even with less federal support for the law. “The business has stabilized and we’re confident,” said Brian Lobley, an executive with Independence Blue Cross,
“We believe the market is going to be a largely stable market,” said Mario Schlosser, the chief executive of {Oscar Health, the venture-backed outfit}, which has watched its profitability improve. The company wants to nearly double the number of places where it sells policies, including entering three new states: Arizona, Florida and Michigan.
In spite of the market’s rockiness, insurers are discovering their customers were loyal. “Last time, they tried everything,” said Michael Neidorff, the chief executive for Centene {the market’s largest player with 1.6 million customers}, including eliminating the subsidies aimed at reducing people’s out-of-pocket costs if they were low income and slashing the outreach efforts. But Mr. Neidorff said the vast majority of people remained enrolled. “People want insurance,” he said.
Source: "Obamacare Is Proving Hard to Kill" By Reed Abelson - NY Times - July 3, 2018
At a rally in Montana on Thursday {7/5/18}, the president found yet another role for {Elton} John: as a foil for one of his exaggerated boasts. Alongside comments about immigration enforcement, mockery of #MeToo and the “fake news” media, Mr. Trump bragged about his crowds, saying he had “broken Elton John records.”
“And I don’t have a musical instrument,” he added, saying the only instrument had was his “mouth.”
It was unclear exactly what type of records he was referring to — the attendance of 6,500 fell far short of many Elton John concerts. But what was clear was that Mr. John, who has voiced discomfort with Mr. Trump’s use of his music, remains very much on the president’s mind.
Source: "Record Breaking or Not, Trump Crowds Get Elton John on Repeat" By Amanda Svachula - NY Times - July 6, 2018
The European Union makes it impossible for our farmers and workers and companies to do business in Europe (U.S. has a $151 Billion trade deficit), and then they want us to happily defend them through NATO, and nicely pay for it. Just doesn’t work! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2018
In fact, the 28 countries of the European Union are the United States’ fifth-largest export market for agricultural goods, like tree nuts and soybeans, totaling $11.5 billion in 2017, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Source: "Trump Falsely Claims It’s ‘Impossible’ for American Farmers to Do Business in Europe" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - July 10, 2018
Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn’t tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018
Scratch the surface of many of the president’s statements about trade, and it’s hard not to conclude that he is either trying to confuse the public or is rather confused himself.
Do you know which other country protects its dairy industry in a similar way? You guessed it: the United States. American dairy quotas and tariffs are so restrictive that the vast majority of the milk, cheese and butter families in the United States buy is made domestically. In fact, dairy producers in Wisconsin and other states sold $792 million in products to Canada in 2017, while Canadian producers sold just $149 million of dairy to the United States, according to the Brookings Institution.
And yet the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, doesn’t bellyache incessantly on Twitter about unfair American dairy tariffs.
Source: "Someone Should Tell Donald Trump About America’s High Tariffs" - NY Times editorial Board - 7/10/18
“In Germany, we have 52,000 troops.”
In its most recent report, the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center said that 34,821 American troops were stationed in Germany as of March 31.
Mr. Trump may have also been counting the number of National Guard troops, reserve troops and civilian personnel in Germany, but he would still be off by a few thousand people. An estimated 47,500 Defense Department personnel are in Germany.
“Well, if you remember, I was opening Turnberry the day before Brexit and we had an unbelievably large number of reporters there because everybody was there, I guess, because of Brexit and they all showed up on the ninth hole, overlooking the ocean, and I said what’s going on? And all they wanted to talk about was Brexit. They asked for my opinion. And I think you will agree that I said I think Brexit will happen, and it did happen.”
On June 22, the day before the Brexit vote, Mr. Trump was in New York, where he delivered a 41-minute speech criticizing Hillary Clinton. He did not mention Brexit.
•He falsely claimed that the United States has “become an oil exporter, which would not have happened under the past regime” (it has been exporting oil for decades, but is still not a net exporter).
•He falsely claimed military spending by NATO members was “going down” before he became president (spending began to increase before Mr. Trump took office).
•He misleadingly claimed that Germany imports up to 70 percent of its energy from Russia (Germany relies on Russia for natural gas, but gets just 9 percent of their total energy from Russia).
Source: "10 Falsehoods From Trump’s News Conference With Theresa May" By Linda Qiu - NY Times - July 13, 2018
A section of a wall mural in San Francisco titled "Women of the Resistance" by Lucía Gonzalez Ippolito
Source: NY Times