If there’s one thing we can say about Trump’s presidency, it’s that it foments lies – blatant, continuous, and unsubstantiated lies. Advance forward through his first 100 days, and his most recent AP interview and here are 16 falsehoods he perpetrated on the interviewer:
- “I saved $725 Million on the 90 planes. Just 90. Now there are 3,000 planes that are going to be ordered. On 90 planes, I saved $725 million, It’s actually a little bit more than that, but it’s $725 million … And the reason they cut — same planes, same everything — was because of me. I mean, because that’s what I do.”
This remains untrue: Trump was NOT responsible for these savings. Lockheed Martin had been moving to cut the price well before Trump was elected, multiple aviation and defense experts say. Just a week after Trump’s election the head of the F-35 program announced a reduction of 6-7% — which was in the $600-700 million range.
- “Sombody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan.”
Yes indeed. That would have been Trump himself when he put out his “Contract with the American Voter.” It even includes his signature. While he counts as a “somebody,” this is so misleading that it’s worth declaring it as a false statement.
- “Well, I’m mostly there on most items.”
He is nowhere close to fulfilling the terms of his “Contract.” The AP writes in it’s own fact check: “Of 38 specific promises Trump made in his 100-day ‘contract’ with voters, he’s accomplished 10 mostly through executive orders that don’t require legislation … Of the 10 pieces of legislation he promised, none has been achieved and most have not been introduced.” NPR has done a wonderful annotated article regarding his non-progress in fulfilling his contract. - “I’ve done more than any other president in the first 100 days.”
No. See #2 and #3 above. That statement is nowhere even close to being true. If he meant that he’s issued more executive orders than any other President … well, there just might be some truth in that assertion. Ironic how the GOP hasn’t chosen to label him Mr. Dictator yet for his excessive use of Executive Orders signed both publicly and in private:
- “But President Xi, from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators. Because there’s a certain respect because he knew I would do something or whatever.”
China stopped devaluing its currency and started spending billions attempting to prop up its currency before Trump took office, while he was still wrongly claiming that it was attempting devaluation. - “The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the electoral college. Bit, big, big advantage … The electoral college is very difficult for a Republican to win.” And … “The election has, you know, look, the Democrats had a tremendous opportunity because the electoral college, as I said is so skewed to them. You start off by losing in New York and California, no matter who it is … The Electoral College is so skewed in favor of a Democrat that is’s very, very hard.”
The existence of Democratic-leaning states does NOT mean the Electoral College is skewed in favor of Democrats. By the same token, Republican candidates currently “start off” by near-automatically-winning most of the states in the south. To the extent there is a “skew,” though, it is toward smaller states that currently lean Republican. Republican-leaning Wyoming, with just 586,000 people, gets 3 electoral votes, one per 195,000 people; Democratic-leaning California, with 37 million people, gets 55 electoral votes, one per 673,000 people. - “They had a quote from me that NATO’s obsolete. But they didn’t say why it was obsolete. I was on Wolf Blitzer, very fair interview, the first time I was ever asked about NATO, because I wasn’t in government…So they asked me, Wolf … asked me about NATO … “
Trump did not tell CNN’s Blitzer that NATO was obsolete. He made the “obsolete” remark the next day, in an interview with Bloomberg. Then he kept repeating it in other interviews and on Twitter. - “You know, back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism.”
Terrorism long predates NATO‘s founding in 1949. - “You saw what happened yesterday in my statements, because if you look at the dairy farmers in Wisconsin and upstate New York, they are getting killed by NAFTA.”
The Canada-U.S. dairy dispute Trump complained about, over ultra filtered milk, is not one in which anyone is getting killed by NAFTA: Canadian dairy is not included in NAFTA. - “When WlkiLeaks came out … never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.”
Trump had heard of WikiLeaks years before the organization published emails that had been hacked from Democratic Party officials in 2016. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski discovered a 2010 interview in which Trump had described WlkiLeaks as “disgraceful.” - “Look, he turned down many coal ships. These massive coal ships are coming where they get a lot of their income. They’re coming Into China and they’re being turned away. That’s never happened before.”
China has turned away coal ships before. Though the Chinese government denied media reports that it was doing so in February and March of 2016, it officially announced in December 2016 that it would block the ships for about a month to support U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at curbing the North Korean nuclear program. - “So she (Clinton) had this massive advantage, she spent hundrecls of millions of dollars more money than I spent. Hundreds of millions … Yeah. Or more, actually because we were $375 she was at $2..2 billion. But whatever.”
Clinton vastly outspent Trump, but not by nearly as much as he claimed. As of Dec. 9, a month after the election, reported that Clinton had spent $969 million, Trump $531; million; Clinton-supporting “Super PACs”‘ had spent $215 million, Trump-supporting Super PACs $86 million. All together, then, the total was about $1.2 billion to $o.6 billion. - “I mean, here’s a judge (Neil Gorsuch) who is #1 at Columbia, #1 at Harvard and an Oxford scholar. And he got three votes.”
Gorsuch was NOT tops in his class at Harvard; in fact he was not even in the top 10%. He graduated from Columbia “cum laude,” failing to qualify for “magna cum laude” or “summa cum laude.” Similarly, he graduated from Harvard Law “cum laude.” - “He (Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings) said you will be the greatest president. He said you will he, in front of five, six people he said you will be the greatest president in the history of this country.”
This is a claim on “‘which we can only judge the dueling accounts of the two men involved; there‘s no hard proof either way. But Trump‘s claim is so nonsensical that it is obviously inaccurate: Cummings has been a sharp critic of Trump. He explained that he told Trump that “he could be a great president if, if, if he takes steps to truly represent ALL Americans rather than continuing on the divisive and harmful path he is currently on.” - “I have, seem to get very high ratings. I definitely. You know Chris Wallace had 9.3 million people, it’s the highest in the history of the show. I have all the ratings for all those morning shows. When I go, they go double, triple. Chris Wallace, look back during the Army-Navy football game, I did his show that morning. It had 9.2 million people. It’s the highest they’ve ever had.”
The show drew 2.4 million viewers, so Trump was off by 6.9 million. He drew the second-highest ratings in the history of Fox News Sunday, not the highest.