The Fake President Amidst Realities

By my count, the current POTUS has offered several hundred lies during his first three months in office. Relentlessly, he continues to make allegations and accusations without citing any evidence, nor has anyone else.

Consider these ten (of 82) untruths provided by Taylor Gee, Brent Griffiths, and Ruairí Arrieta-Kennan in an article published in January (2017) Politico magazine:

1. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million. … But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.” (November 13 interview with 60 Minutes)

Trump is likely referring to a Department of Homeland Security report that states there are 1.9 million non-citizen immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and could be deported. But “non-citizen immigrants” include both immigrants who are here illegally and immigrants who are here legally but do not have citizenship. For undocumented immigrants alone, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are about 820,000 with criminal records.

2. “Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena’” (November 13 on Twitter)

The Times told Politico that between Election Day and Trump’s tweet, the paper added four times the average number of net new digital and print subscriptions. A Times spokeswoman said the paper had seen “far more starts than stops” during that period.

3. “The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me.” (November 13 on Twitter)

The New York Times’ publisher and executive editor sent a letter to the paper’s subscribers promising to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.” It also asked the question, “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” But the letter did not apologize to its readers, nor did it suggest its coverage of Trump was bad.

4. “The @nytimes states today that DJT believes ‘more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.’ How dishonest are they. I never said this!” (November 13 on Twitter)

In a May 4, 2016 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Donald Trump was asked if he is ready to let Japan and South Korea become nuclear powers. Trump responded, “I am prepared to, if they’re not going to take care of us properly, we cannot afford to be the military and police for the world.” On March 29, 2016, Anderson Cooper asked Trump, “Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?” Trump replied, “Saudi Arabia, absolutely.” And two days before that, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump said: “Would I rather have North Korea have them with Japan sitting there having them also? You may very well be better off if that’s the case.”

5. “Just got a call from my friend Bill Ford, Chairman of Ford, who advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky – no Mexico […] I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!” (November 17 on Twitter)

Ford never had any plans to move its Kentucky plant or fire any of its employees there. According to a Reuters report, the plan was to move its production line of Lincoln SUVs from a Kentucky facility to Mexico, and then to direct the workers at that Kentucky plant to begin building Ford Escapes. At no point were American jobs at risk.

6-7. “The last [campaign rally] ended at 1 o’clock in the morning in Michigan. And we had 31,000 people, 17,000 or 18,000 inside and the rest outside.” (November 20 during an interview with the New York Times, and at least one other time)

Police told Breitbart News that they estimated 6,000 people attended Trump’s final campaign rally at the DeVos Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

8. “We ended up close to 15 points [of the African American vote], as you know.” (November 20 during an interview with the New York Times)

Donald Trump received approximately 8 percent of the black vote, according to polling data. Clinton won approximately 88 percent of the black vote.

9. “They say they have science [supporting human-caused climate change] on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about.” (November 20 during an interview with the New York Times)

Trump is referring to a 2009 hack in which emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were stolen and published. Those who reject the scientific consensus on climate science claimed the emails revealed a conspiracy among scientists to skew evidence to artificially inflate of global temperatures. The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Commerce Inspector General—in addition to four independent reviews—have all investigated the emails and found no evidence of data manipulation.

10. “I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity [between human activity and climate change]. There is some, something. It depends on how much.” (November 20 during an interview with the New York Times)

Climate studies nearly unanimously conclude that human activity is responsible for the majority of measurable climate change. For example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a 2013 assessment that it is “extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase” in global temperatures between 1950 and 2010.

“As everyone knows,” there is substantial and increasing evidence that a Pinocchio President in now in the Oval Office.

Here is a direct link to the complete article and the remaining 72 untruths it cites, as of January 17, 2020.

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