WASHINGTON—It took Donald Trump 343 days to utter 1,000 false claims as president.

Then his dishonesty accelerated. It took him just 197 days to get to 2,000 false claims.

Then it got worse again: it took 93 days to get to 3,000. And then it got worse once more: it took him 75 days to hit 4,000.

There’s been a slight improvement since Christmas, found Star editor Ed Tubb, the number-cruncher for these fact-checks. It took him 125 days to get to 5,000 false claims — a mere, for him, 8 per day over that period.

But 8 per day is a lot. It’s all a lot. Through Sunday, Trump has made an astonishing 5,276 false claims in office, an overall average of 6.1 per day.

This week’s update is actually an update for six weeks. (I took some time off work and fell hopelessly behind). Three of those weeks were among the worst 25 of Trump’s 125 so far.

He made 86 false claims the week ending April 28 (14th-worst), 72 false claims the week ending May 19 (22nd-worst), and 69 false claims the week ending May 26 (23rd-worst).

I’ve also added some repeated false claims I missed in weeks prior — Trump’s claim that Puerto Rico has received $91 billion in hurricane assistance, which is not close to true, and Trump’s claim that China has lost $15 trillion, $20 trillion, $24 trillion or $25 trillion during his presidency. (He has used different numbers for no apparent reason.)

On a personal note: this will be my last weekly update for the Star. I’ll be continuing the fact-checking at CNN beginning on June 17. Thank you for reading all this time.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

All 351 false things Trump said since Daniel Dale took time off:

MONDAY, APRIL 22

Twitter

The claim: “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach. It was the Democrats that committed the crimes, not your Republican President! Tables are finally turning on the Witch Hunt!”

In fact: At the time Trump tweeted, a single Democrat, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, had been charged with crimes related to Mueller’s work. There was no apparent basis for Trump’s broader claim that “the Democrats committed the crimes,” which suggested there was broad Russia-related criminal wrongdoing by his Democratic opponents. Also, Trump misleadingly omitted the convictions of several people in his orbit. Mueller secured convictions from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy chairman Rick Gates, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in a case that grew out of Mueller’s work.

Twitter

The claim: “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach. It was the Democrats that committed the crimes, not your Republican President! Tables are finally turning on the Witch Hunt!”

In fact: Even if we accept Trump’s premise that he has not committed crimes: you can indeed impeach a president who has not committed crimes. “High crimes and misdemeanors” do not have to be actual crimes; the phrase can cover such non-criminal matters such as actions unbecoming a president or non-criminally abusive of the office. Congress gets to decide what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

TUESDAY, APRIL 23

Twitter

The claim: “I wonder if the New York Times will apologize to me a second time, as they did after the 2016 Election. But this one will have to be a far bigger & better apology.”

In fact: The Times did not apologize to Trump after the election. Trump was referring to a post-election letter, a kind of sales pitch, in which Times leaders thanked readers and said they planned to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”

Twitter

The claim: “’The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump.’ @MariaBartiromo So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list.”

In fact: While Twitter did conduct a widespread purge of fake accounts in 2018, which resulted in many users including Trump losing some so-called “followers,” there is no evidence Twitter has done anything to make it “hard for people to sign on” to follow or read him.

Twitter

The claim: “In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism. Remember, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ Today I have, as President, perhaps the greatest economy in history...and to the Mainstream Media, it means NOTHING. But it will!”

In fact: As Bill Clinton could tell Trump, a strong economy does not make a president immune from criticism. “The economy, stupid” was a piece of messaging advice to Clinton for the 1992 campaign — before he was president — not a statement about immunity from criticism.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (2 false claims)

The claim: “Unemployment numbers are the best they’ve ever been by far.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not “the best they’ve ever been by far”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “We just went through the Mueller witch hunt, where you had, really, 18 angry Democrats that hate President Trump. They hate him with a passion. They were contributors, in many cases, to Hillary Clinton. Hate him with a passion. How they picked this panel, I don’t know. And they came up with no collusion and they actually also came up with no obstruction. But our attorney general ruled, based on the information, there was no obstruction. So you have no collusion, no obstruction.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not “(come) up with no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. Trump was correct about the attorney general, William Barr, who declared that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.

Twitter

The claim: “Mexico’s Soldiers recently pulled guns on our National Guard Soldiers, probably as a diversionary tactic for drug smugglers on the Border. Better not happen again!”

In fact: There was no evidence that the Mexican soldiers were intending to create a diversion for drug smugglers; the U.S. military itself said the incident was a misunderstanding by the Mexicans, who mistakenly believed that U.S. soldiers sitting in an unmarked vehicle near the border in Texas were in Mexican territory. Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a U.S. military spokeswoman, told the Washington Post: “An inquiry by (Customs and Border Protection) and (the Department of Defense) revealed that the Mexican military members mistakenly believed the U.S. Army soldiers were south of the border with Mexico. However, the U.S. soldiers were appropriately in U.S. territory. Though they were south of the border fence, U.S. soldiers remained in U.S. territory, north of the actual border.” Kunze continued: “We believe this brief exchange was a misunderstanding concerning the location of the unmarked U.S. surveillance vehicle and an honest mistake by the Mexican soldiers. The Mexican military has been and continues to be a great partner with the United States military.”

Twitter

The claim: “I didn’t call Bob Costa of the Washington Post, he called me (Returned his call)! Just more Fake News.”

In fact: This is nonsensical. Returning a call counts as calling someone. And there was nothing “fake” about the news account of the call: Costa had tweeted that he contacted Trump first. “President Trump called me this evening, in response to my request for comment on a profile story on a Trump World figure,” Costa wrote.

Twitter

The claim: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct, the VA is not broken, it is doing great. But that is only because of the Trump Administration. We got Veterans Choice & Accountability passed.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law by Obama in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

Speech to summit on prescription drug and heroin abuse summit (7 false claims)

The claim: “And, by the way, for the veterans, 45 years they’ve been trying to get it. As you know, just recently, I signed Veterans Choice, where a veteran can go, and if the wait is going to be days or weeks or months — which it used to be — they go out and see a private doctor. Take immediate care. We pay for it. We take care of it. And it’s been an incredible — it’s new and it’s been incredible, the difference it’s made.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “And criminal justice reform — I have to say, people are getting out of prison. And since our founding, they were having an impossible time getting a job. But because our economy is doing so well, perhaps the best it’s ever been in our history — best unemployment numbers in history, best everything. Because of this — because of this, prisoners getting out are signing in; they’re getting jobs.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “And these newly employed citizens are joining 5.5 million more workers who have found jobs since the election, driving our national unemployment rate to its lowest level in 51 years.”

In fact: Trump was at least a little off. The latest published unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke in April 2019, for March 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000 — 19 years prior, if you don’t count earlier parts of Trump’s own term. In May 2019, it was announced that the April rate was 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “You probably saw the numbers today. We are detaining, capturing — call it anything you want — more people than ever before.”

In fact: U.S. authorities were indeed apprehending high numbers of people at the Mexican border at the time: 109,144 in April 2019, a new one-month high for the Trump era. But it was not even close to a record. In 2000, 180,050 people were apprehended in April. In 2001, it was 142,813 in April. In 2002, it was 121,921. In 2004, it was 135,468. In 2005, it was 140,062.

The claim: “Soon, we’re going to have a wall that’s going to be a very powerful wall. It’s under construction. The media doesn’t like talking about it. The media doesn’t like talking about it. It’s one of many things we’re doing. But when that wall is finished, we intend to have almost 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “You know, we had billions of dollars of military equipment, which the previous administration, for their own reason, was not willing to give up to law enforcement. And I decided that we will. This was beautiful, great, strong, powerful equipment, safety equipment. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And we gave billions and billions of dollars throughout the United States to law enforcement.”

In fact: The Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the “1033” program in which surplus military equipment is transferred to police forces, told us that the total value of the transfers during the Trump era is much less than “billions and billions of dollars.” As of May 23, 2019, it was $154 million in the 2019 fiscal year, $276 million in the 2018 fiscal year, and $504 million in the 2017 fiscal year, a total of under $1 billion. It was $516 million in the Obama-era 2016 fiscal year, $418 million in the 2015 fiscal year.

The claim: “We’re also working very strong on drug pricing. It’s coming way down. For the first time — for the first time in 54 years, drug prices went down this year. They went down a little below even. That’s a big thing. First time in 54 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “54 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

Twitter

The claim: “All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops — and we caught them in the act! We waited for Mueller and WON, so now the Dems look to Congress as last hope!”

In fact: There is no evidence that crimes were committed by the Democrats or the people who investigated the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.

THURSDAY, APRIL 25

Interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity (12 false claims)

The claim: “But these were the two that talked about the insurance policy just in case Hillary loses. If she loses, we’ve got an insurance policy. Well, that was the insurance policy. Now, she lost and now they are trying to infiltrate the administration to — really, it’s a coup.”And: “So, I really say, now we have to get down because this was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. We had people coming out to vote from all over this country that are in love with what we are doing. It’s called Make America Great Again. That’s what we have done and we are doing. And this was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing. And I don’t — I think it’s far bigger than Watergate.”And: “...the greatest political scandal in the history of our country, again, bigger than Watergate, because it means so much. This was a coup. This wasn’t stealing information from an office in the Watergate apartments. This was an attempted coup. And it’s inconceiv — like a third world country — and inconceivable.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: Trump: “I remember the young sailor. In fact, I helped him out with his family -” Question: “Kristian Saucier.” Trump: “- because I thought he was so unfairly treated as you know. I remember he had confidential information which is a much, much lower standard than classified. And they put him in jail for a long time. They took away his life.”

In fact: Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, whom Trump pardoned, was convicted of illegally retaining national defense information after he took and kept cellphone photos of restricted areas of a submarine. The information was classified as “confidential.” That is the lowest level of classification, but it still counts as classified.

The claim: “And then you look at what Hillary Clinton did with 33,000 emails and hundreds of thousands of text messages or emails going through the Weiner server or computer. Hundreds of thousands of which many were classified. And nothing happens to her. And, yet, they put a young sailor on for doing something innocent, showing his mother and his friend what the desk looked like, the desk in a 40-year-old submarine. I think Russia and China would have had that picture many years ago.”

In fact: Navy sailor Kristian Saucier was charged in 2015 for illegally taking and retaining classified photos, in 2009, of the nuclear-powered attack submarine he worked on. The submarine, launched in 1990, was less than 20 years old, not 40. According to the charging document, the photos were not of “the desk”; they showed the nuclear reactor compartment within the engine room, the auxiliary steam propulsion control panel, and significant control panels. According to the U.S. government in court filings: “According to the U.S. Navy, the photographs captured the nerve center of the submarine and would cause damage to national security if disclosed. An examination of the photographs, as well as the dates and times when they were taken, indicate that the photographs were not taken at random, but rather increased in both sensitivity and level of detail and methodically documented the entire propulsion system of the submarine.” Saucier was not charged for showing the photos to his mother and friend; they were discovered on a phone he had discarded at a local garbage dump. And Saucier was accused of intentionally trying to destroy evidence.

The claim: “We are doing numbers that nobody has ever believed. Probably the best economy we’ve ever had. Best unemployment numbers we’ve ever had. It’s been incredible.” And: “We have had the biggest cut in regulations which is one of the things creating all these great jobs because we have the best unemployment numbers that we’ve ever had. Today, we have the most people working literally today, just came out. We have the most people working than we have ever had in the history of our country. Almost 160 million people are working...”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.) Though there have been sporadic blips, the total number of employed people tends to simply rise as the population grows, and it is not considered a good measure of unemployment.

The claim: “And everything they did was so dishonest. And then, we really started looking into a lot of things like her deleted emails and acid washed emails which is unheard of because of the expense of doing it, and how she got away with it, how her lawyer got away with it, how all of these things happened.”

In fact: “Acid washed” is a nonsensical Trump invention. Clinton’s team deleted emails using a free computer software program called BleachBit. Trump seized on the phrase “bleach,” though the program does not involve actual bleach, and transformed it into “acid.”

The claim: “Well, it was, as I call them, 13 angry Democrats. They were supplanted by five more, five more were added. And you got up to 18, 19, 20, they are all Democrats, many of them made major contributions to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And they had one of them was one of the top people at the Clinton Foundation, Jeannie Rhee.”

In fact: The Robert Mueller investigation was, of course, run by a Republican, Mueller himself. We’ll ignore Trump’s characterization of the others on the team as “angry Democrats,” but it is false that Rhee was “one of the top people at the Clinton Foundation.” Rhee represented the Clinton Foundation, as an outside counsel, in its defence against a 2015 lawsuit. She was not involved in the management of the foundation.

The claim: “And, you know, Bob Mueller, I turned him down to run the FBI, the next day, he was appointed to be this — special counsel as they call it. It’s a really much tougher word than that I won’t use it. And it was a terrible thing. He was conflicted for that reason. He also was conflicted because of the fact that Comey and him are best friends. So, if not best, very close to best. But I would say best friends. You look at pictures of the two of them in the past.”

In fact: There is no evidence, including photo evidence, that the two former FBI directors are “best friends” or even “close to best.” (Trump previously made a false claim that “I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other”; zero such photos have been provided or unearthed.) Though they do know and like each other, and though it is fair for Trump to argue that it was inappropriate for Mueller to conduct an investigation involving Comey, nobody has produced any kind of proof that they were more than professional associates when both were at the FBI. Comey’s lawyer has said: “Jim and Bob are friends in the sense that co-workers are friends. They don’t really have a personal relationship. Jim has never been to Bob’s house and Bob has never been to Jim’s house.”

The claim: “Well, I don’t know who it is going to be. Maybe Sanders or maybe Biden. I think, you know, when you look at Joe — I have known Joe over the years. He is not the brightest light bulb in the group, I don’t think, but he has a name that they know. He is coming on with some little cute statements about me that he talked about the way the world is today. Well, I will tell you the way the world is today is we have a strong military. We have Choice for our veterans. They have choice now instead of waiting in line all day long, all week long, all month long. They have choice. They can go out to a private doctor. We pay the bill and they don’t have to die waiting in line.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually created under the Obama-Biden administration, in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “No, the whole thing is crazy. The New Green Deal, OK, and it’s got to be some kind of a joke. It’s got to be — they have to be kidding but, you know, I saw the senator from Hawaii who was so nasty to Judge Kavanaugh...But she was so nasty to now judge, Justice Kavanaugh, so horrible. And they asked her about it, the New Green Deal. They said, how about that? And she goes, ‘Well, I’m in Hawaii and I understand they won’t allow airplanes.’ And she said, ‘It’s hard for me but I will approve it anyway. Even though there is no way to -’ Somebody said they will build a train to Hawaii. No, it’s a crazy thing. I can’t believe they are really serious.”

In fact: This is not at all what happened. It is not true that Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono thought or thinks that air travel to Hawaii would be outlawed by the Green New Deal proposal put forward by a group of Democratic legislators. When asked by a reporter about the suggestion of eliminating air travel, Hirono said that would be “pretty hard for Hawaii,” then laughed: the Green New Deal resolution Hirono endorsed does not call for the elimination of air travel. Rather, it calls for “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail.”(When Trump first made a version of this claim in February, Hirono told HawaiiNewsNow: “As usual, climate change denier Donald Trump makes things up and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. While the Green New Deal is an ambitious plan to combat climate change, it does not call for the elimination of air travel. I will continue to fight against this president’s lies.”) Trump did not make up this entire claim out of thin air: a “FAQ” page posted by a leading Green New Deal proponent, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the 29-year-old Trump was deriding — calls for the government to “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” But other Democrats did not endorse the FAQ, just the official resolution, and Ocasio-Cortez’s office quickly deleted it.

The claim: “But we’re up for a bid — we are building many sections of wall right now that’s under construction right now.And I intend to have by the end of next year over 400 miles of wall which renovated a lot of wall already. A lot of the wall was, you know, I’m good at this stuff. That’s what I do. We renovated a lot. We had wall that was falling down but structurally strong or can be strong. So we saved a lot of money. We renovated. We fixed it and it’s much quicker and frankly much less expensive. So, we have renovated a lot and we built a lot. We built a lot of new wall. In some cases, we have ripped all wall down because it was in too bad of shape and we built brand new wall. But we are building a lot of sections. And actually, over the next two to three weeks, we are giving out at lot of different sections.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “I fired nobody other than Comey, and very interesting and that was early and people don’t talk about that, but the very interesting thing about firing Comey is that everybody wanted him fired, all the Democrats. I mean, virtually everybody, the Democrats thought he was horrible. The Republicans thought he was horrible. And I said, you know, this is going to be wonderful. I’m going to fire this guy. When he gets fired, I think it would be popular. It thought it was go going to be bipartisan firing. And he got fired and the Democrats sat back and they though, and the same people that two days earlier saying how horrible he was, were saying, oh, this is a terrible thing.”

In fact: It is not true that “all the Democrats” wanted Comey fired, much less “virtually everybody” in general. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, current Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

The claim: “I’ll show you how dishonest the press was. I went down to El Paso. We did a tremendous rally, I guess we had 35,000 people between inside and out, at least. And he had 502 people, and the press said, ‘They both had big rallies. They both had big rallies.’ I said, wait a minute, one has close to 40,000 people, one has 500 people, and they were very much comparing them.”

In fact: Both of Trump’s numbers were inaccurate. His competitor, former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, obviously drew more than “502 people” to his event; Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg reported at the time: “El Paso police estimate a crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 for the anti-Trump, anti-wall, pro-O’Rourke march and rally tonight.” The Texas Tribune reported that “about 7,000 people went to see O’Rourke speak at the park (after the march), according to an aide, who cited law enforcement.” Even if both estimates were too high, the real number was clearly in the thousands. In addition, there were not “35,000 people” at Trump’s rally, even if you count people outside. El Paso’s fire department issued a rough estimate of up to 3,500, though it said it did not closely track the number outside; local journalist Bob Moore tweeted, “El Paso County Coliseum officials tell me about 6,000 people watched the @realDonaldTrump rally on screens outside, on top of the 7,000 inside.” Trump’s venue, the El Paso County Coliseum, had an official capacity of 6,500 people, not 8,000. El Paso Fire Department spokesperson Enrique Aguilar told U.S. news outlets, including the El Paso Times, that Trump was incorrect when he claimed at the time that the fire department had let in extra people. Aguilar said “no special permission was given by the Fire Department, and the Coliseum had about 6,500 people in it during the president’s rally — at capacity, but well within its standard allowance,” the El Paso Times reported.

Twitter

The claim: “.....Despite the fact that the Mueller Report was ‘composed’ by Trump Haters and Angry Democrats, who had unlimited funds and human resources, the end result was No Collusion, No Obstruction. Amazing!”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Twitter

The claim: “...Mueller was NOT fired and was respectfully allowed to finish his work on what I, and many others, say was an illegal investigation (there was no crime), headed by a Trump hater who was highly conflicted, and a group of 18 VERY ANGRY Democrats. DRAIN THE SWAMP!”

In fact: There is simply no evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia was illegal. An investigation does not need to find a crime to be a legal investigation. Plus, there were crimes. Mueller secured convictions from former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy chairman Rick Gates, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in a case that grew out of Mueller’s work.

FRIDAY, APRIL 26

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (2 false claims)

The claim: “What we’re doing in this country, financially, with the military, with our veterans — if you look at veterans, we now have Veterans Choice. Nobody has ever done what I’ve done in their first two years.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law by Obama in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “We did not pay money for our great Otto. There was no money paid. That was a fake news report that money was paid. I haven’t paid money for any hostage.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, its story never said the U.S. paid any money to secure the return of Otto Warmbier from North Korea. The Post wrote: “The Washington Post never reported that Trump paid the bill. The Post reported that North Korea submitted a $2 million bill for the hospice care of American Otto Warmbier, the comatose University of Virginia student sent home from Pyongyang in 2017. The main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from Trump, according to The Post article. The bill went to the Treasury Department, where it remained — unpaid — throughout 2017. The report did not speculate about whether any payment was made since then as Trump has met twice with North Korea’s leader. National Security Advisor John Bolton later confirmed The Post report.”

Speech to the National Rifle Association (8 false claims)

The claim: “Every day of my administration, we are taking power out of Washington, D.C. and returning it to the American people, where it belongs. And you see it now better than ever, with all of the resignations of all of the bad apples. They’re bad apples. They tried for a coup; didn’t work out so well. And I didn’t need a gun for that one, did I? All was taking place at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. You’ve been watching, you’ve been seeing. You’ve been looking at things that you wouldn’t have believed possible in our country. Corruption at the highest level — a disgrace. Spying, surveillance, trying for an overthrow. And we caught them. We caught them. Who would have thought in our country?”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: “Unemployment recently achieved its lowest rate in 51 years, and very shortly, it should be its lowest rate in the history of our country.”

In fact: Trump was at least a little off. The latest published unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke in April 2019, for March 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000 — 19 years prior, if you don’t count earlier parts of Trump’s own term. In May 2019, it was announced that the April rate was 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “So, in the last administration, President Obama signed the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. And in his waning days in office, he sent the treaty to the Senate to begin the ratification process. This treaty threatened your subjugate — and you know exactly what’s going on here — your rights and your constitutional and international rules and restrictions and regulations.”

In fact: Trump stumbled over this sentence, which appeared to be an attempt to say that the treaty threatened to subjugate gun owners’ rights to international rules, regulations and restrictions. That is false. The treaty addresses the international trade in weapons and seeks to eradicate illicit international trade, but it does not hinder the rights of gun owners in individual countries, as the non-partisan Congressional Research Service noted in a March 2019 report: “The ATT regulates trade in conventional weapons between and among countries. It does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country.” The research service also noted: “Because the United States already has strong export control laws in place, the ATT would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations, or law.” The treaty’s very preamble says it 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,” and it says the treaty is “mindful of the legitimate trade and lawful ownership, and use of certain conventional arms for recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities, where such trade, ownership and use are permitted or protected by law.”

The claim: “The Democrats are also working hard to block the wall, but we are building the wall. They’re not happy about it. And we will have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. We’re building a lot of wall, and I want to thank Border Patrol. I want to thank our great military...So we’ll have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. It’s going up rapidly. Rapidly. We’re also renovating tremendous stretches of wall. We have wall that’s in bad shape but it’s structurally sound. And rather than building new, we renovate it. We make it as good as new, save a lot of money, and we gain a lot of territory. So we have a lot of great things going.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “If we kept the same interest rates and the same quantitative easing that the previous administration had, that 3.2 per cent would have been much higher than that. But they hadn’t hit these numbers in 16 years.”

In fact: Trump’s “hadn’t hit these numbers in 16 years” is incorrect even if he was only talking about first-quarter growth. The economy grew by 3.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

The claim: “Today, I want to give a few of these brave citizens the chance to share their stories directly with the American people. A lot of television back there. Of course, when I start going after them, you watch those red lights go off. They don’t want any part of it. They turn those lights. Then they come back. They need the ratings. They come back.”

In fact: Though somebody may have done it at some point, there is no evidence for Trump’s regular claim that media outlets regularly turn off their cameras or stop broadcasting live when he is criticizing the media, then resume televising the speech when he is finished the criticism.

The claim: “But I want to thank you all for your courage, because you’re really living proof that law-abiding gun owners make a tremendous, tremendous difference. Tremendous difference. You know, Paris, France, they say, has the strongest gun laws in the world. And you remember those maniacs, when they went into the nightclub. I use this example. There are many examples. But they shot one person, another person, another person, another person. Hundreds of people dead and horribly wounded to this day. That was five years ago. If there was one gun being carried by one person on the other side, it very well could have been a whole different result. The shooting went on so long and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. ‘Get over here.’ Boom. ‘Get over here.’ Boom. And then they left. They were captured later. If there was only one gun. If there were two, three, four, it wouldn’t have happened. Tiny percentage, by comparison. But it probably wouldn’t have happened because the cowards would’ve known there are people in there having guns. Wouldn’t have happened.”

In fact: “Hundreds dead” is a slight exaggeration: 130 people died in the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. Also, France does not have the strongest gun laws in the world. Philip Alpers, director of GunPolicy.org at the Sydney School of Public Health, said in an email, “This is a claim made by (and for) a range of countries, but it can never be true. Singapore has the death penalty for firearm trafficking, China and several others prohibit all private possession, the U.K. has banned all handguns. All of these go way beyond the toughest equivalents in France, or even Australia.”

The claim: “And, by the way — and Mueller finished out his report: no collusion and no obstruction.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Interview with Mark Levin (4 false claims)

The claim: “And don’t forget the 600,000 text messages from — that went through the server of Weiner — of Weiner, that’s a beauty, not a word in there about any of this.”

In fact: More than 600,000 total emails were allegedly found by the FBI on disgraced former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They were not text messages — Trump might have confused the story with Weiner’s sexting scandals — and we do not know how many were related to Clinton or the 2016 campaign in any way.

The claim: “And President Obama knew all about Russia in September just before the election and didn’t do a thing about it because he thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So he didn’t do a thing about it. He only got upset about it after the results were very conclusive, 306 to 223.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he “didn’t do anything.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “And President Obama knew all about Russia in September just before the election and didn’t do a thing about it because he thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So he didn’t do a thing about it. He only got upset about it after the results were very conclusive, 306 to 223.”

In fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip: it was the 24th time Trump said “223” as president.

The claim: “...that didn’t start with Mueller that started long before Mueller, that was a coup. They were really — there was a coup that started long before Mueller.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

Meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2 false claims)

https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-shinzo-abe-japan-bilat-april-26-2019

The claim: “We’ll be discussing, very strongly, agriculture. Because, as the Prime Minister knows, Japan puts very massive tariffs on agriculture — our agriculture — going for many years, going into Japan. And we want to get rid of those tariffs. Because we don’t tariff their cars, so I think that that will — something we’ll work out.”

In fact: The U.S. imposes a 2.5 per cent tariff on imported Japanese cars.

The claim: “The fact is that Japanese car companies are coming in at a level that we haven’t seen in many decades. Toyota is investing $14 billion over a short period of time, and others too. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky.”

In fact: There are no assembly plants in Pennsylvania at all, noted Bernard Swiecki, director of the Automotive Communities Partnership at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, and there are no known plans to bring one there. (Trump might perhaps have been speaking about some smaller kind of company in the broader auto industry.)

SATURDAY, APRIL 27

Campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin (35 false claims)

The claim: “And Prime Minister Abe, we’re negotiating trade deals because every country has been ripping us off for years. And I really like the prime minister, he’s a friend of mine, but I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, we’ve got to do something.’ “For so many decades we’ve been losing tens of billions of dollars to China and Japan, and India, and name any country and we lost, but we’re not losing anymore. And I said, ‘Listen, we got to do something.’” Sixty-eight billion in trade losses over the last four, five years a year. So we’re renegotiating, and I think you’ll be fair, I think you’ll be fair.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods, but, as always, Trump did not specify that he was doing so.

The claim: “For so many decades we’ve been losing tens of billions of dollars to China and Japan, and India, and name any country and we lost, but we’re not losing anymore. And I said, ‘Listen, we got to do something.’”

In fact: The U.S. does not have a trade deficit with every country. It had surpluses in 2017 with more than half of its trading partners, according to data from the U.S. government’s own International Trade Commission, including Hong Kong, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Kuwait and dozens more countries and territories.

The claim: “I think Pocahontas, she’s finished, she’s out, she’s gone. Now, when it was found that I had more Indian blood in me than she did. And then it was determined that I had none, but I still had more.”

In fact: A Stanford University professor who conducted a DNA test on Warren concluded that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor” six to 10 generations in the past. The analysis found that almost all of Warren’s ancestors were European, and many Native Americans reject the suggestion that a distant Native ancestor can qualify a person as any part Native. But it is not true that Warren has “no Indian blood.”

The claim: “And I have to say, I was saying on the way over, they told me about bad weather, by the way, we may have to cancel tonight. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ Now can you imagine? I learned this morning, they thought you could have a big snowstorm, right? A big, big snowstorm. The people that get it wrong, the most are the weather forecasters and the political analysts. Now they said there’s a big, big storm, it’s going to be hitting Green Bay. we may have to cancel. I said, ‘Like hell, we’re going to cancel. People are standing out.’”

In fact: As the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang pointed out, nobody had forecast a storm for Green Bay. The Post wrote: “Green Bay was never under a winter storm warning, winter storm watch or even a winter weather advisory. The ‘big, big’ snow totals the president referenced simply were never predicted by any commercial or government weather agency.” The Post explained: “...the forecast wasn’t wrong. There was a storm, but hundreds of miles to the south. Wet snow blanketed southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, including Chicago. The system was not expected to hit northern Wisconsin.”

The claim: “I told President Xi, he’s a friend of mine. I said, ‘Listen, this can’t be like a good deal for both. This has to be a deal -’ because we have been losing to China for many years, $500 billion a year. We have rebuilt China. We’ve given them so much. Well think of it. Let’s cash, you know, they can say it’s surplus, they can say it’s deficit, call it whatever it is, we will lose it cash. We’re giving them five hundred, how the hell can you do it.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “And as Prime Minister Abe said to me today, he said nobody’s ever talked to me this way from our country. It’s true. No, he said it friendly. He — he said it friendly, he’s a friend of mine, but he said nobody from this country, no president has ever said this. You know, nobody ever even talked about it. We lose $75 billion a year.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods.

The claim: “Japan, as an example, sells us their cars, the cars come in, no tax. They don’t take our cars. Other than that it’s a very fair deal. So the cars come in. Essentially, it’s two and a half per cent, but essentially it’s not tax.”

In fact: The U.S. indeed has a 2.5 per cent tariff on cars imported from Japan. There is no basis for saying “essentially it’s not tax.”

The claim: “Japan, as an example, sells us their cars, the cars come in, no tax. They don’t take our cars. Other than that it’s a very fair deal. So the cars come in. Essentially, it’s two and a half per cent, but essentially it’s not tax. Our agriculture, they don’t want it. We want to sell the agriculture. So they sell cars, we sell practically nothing. That’s how we have these massive imbalances with so many countries.”

In fact: Japan was the fourth-largest market for U.S. agricultural exports in 2018, buying $12.9 billion worth of product, according to Trump’s Department of Agriculture.

The claim: “I really believe that it’s been said, but make America Great Again. Ronald Reagan used, seldom, Let’s Make America Great, close but not the same. Let’s, apostrophe S, you don’t want the apostrophe, it’s too complicated, doesn’t work. But Ronald Reagan was good. He said Let’s Make, but he didn’t use it and we use it a little bit. We seriously used it, right? MAGA.”

In fact: Reagan used the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump omitted the “Again.”

The claim: “Six hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. Remember, President Obama said, ‘Manufacturing jobs are gone. You need a wand, a magic wand.’ We found the magic wand , because they’re coming and they’re coming fast, and those are great jobs.”

In fact: Obama did not say “manufacturing jobs are gone.” At a televised PBS town hall in Elkhart, Indiana in 2016, Obama did say that a certain subset of manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back” — but he boasted that some manufacturers are indeed “coming back to the United States,” that “we’ve seen more manufacturing jobs created since I’ve been president than any time since the 1990s,” and that “we actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today, than we’ve had in most of our history.” Obama did mock Trump for Trump’s campaign claims that he was going to bring back manufacturing jobs that had been outsourced to Mexico, saying: “And when somebody says — like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for — that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.” But, again, Obama made clear that he was talking about a certain segment of manufacturing jobs, not all of them.

The claim: “And after years and years of declining wages, wages are rising for the first time in 21 years.”

In fact: Wages have been rising since 2014. As PolitiFact reported: “For much of the time between 2012 and 2014, median weekly earnings were lower than they were in 1979 — a frustrating disappearance of any wage growth for 35 years. But that began changing in 2014. After hitting a low of $330 a week in early 2014, wages have risen to $354 a week by early 2017. That’s an increase of 7.3 percent over a roughly three-year period.” FactCheck.org reported: “For all private workers, average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose 4% during Obama’s last four years in office.”

The claim: “And people that are now able to go out, you know, we got Veterans Choice.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “And you know something that is very important to me and very important to — because of you, to keep family farms, ranches, and small businesses together in the family. When you pass on and go to heaven so you can look down at these great children and you don’t like your children, don’t listen to what I’m going to say. Probably a couple of you out there just say, you know, ‘I don’t like a kid. I’m not leaving them my damn farm, right?’ Anybody in here like that, raise your hand. No don’t. But on the assumption that you love your kids, and you love your family, and you want to leave the farm, you remember what used to happen. The estate tax was 45, 50, 55 per cent. They had to go out and borrow money and sometimes the land is worth more than the income and they couldn’t do it in the banks end up in the banks fight them, and that’s not what they do for a living, the kids, and they lose the farm, they lose the ranch, they lose the small business, right? Well, we have eliminated the unfair estate tax or death tax on all of those things. Zero. Zero, that’s a good one.”

In fact: The top estate tax rate prior to Trump taking office was 40 per cent, not “45, 50, 55.” More significantly, Trump has not “eliminated” the estate tax, let alone ensured “you don’t have to pay any estate taxes”: his tax law merely raised the threshold at which the tax must be paid. Also, it is highly misleading to suggest that the estate tax was a major burden on family farms and small businesses: very few of them were paying the tax even before Trump’s tax law was passed. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses were among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017, before Trump’s tax law. The Center wrote on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 of the total estate tax revenue.”

The claim: “You remember that I used to do it when I was a civilian when I had no idea, I was going to be running for president, right? I had no idea. I used to say what the hell is going on in Michigan. They gave me an award six years, seven years ago. I had no idea. It was the man of the year in Michigan.”

In fact: The Star and other fact-checkers looked into this claim when Trump began making it during the 2016 campaign. None of us could find any evidence that Trump had been given such an award. We will update this item if any evidence emerges.

The claim: “I also ended up another one, you know, the great Paris Accord. How — how’s Paris doing lately? How’s Paris? How’s Paris doing? Send all the money to countries that the people never heard of and raised their taxes. I ended that one too. I thought I was going to take a lot of heat on that one. Saved a lot of money, saved a lot of jobs, saved a lot of businesses. I said, you know when I end this Paris Accord, I’m going to take heat. I didn’t even take heat. My people understood it, it was a ripoff. It didn’t allow us to use our wealth, would have stolen our jobs, but just take a look at what’s happening to other places where they’re trying to do it. And we had something we would have never ever been able to adhere to the rules, they were so strict on us. You know, China can sign rule. They’re not going to be sued by Greenpeace. If Greenpeace goes to China, that’s the end of Greenpeace, you never see them again. So China doesn’t care if they violate Greenpeace and some of these other wonderful environmental groups. But the United States get sued and we adhere to these things. It’s a little bit different. We would have lost our ass on that deal.”

In fact: As usual, Trump’s description of the Paris climate accord was comprehensively inaccurate. It did not set strict “rules” on the U.S., and it would not have “stolen our jobs.” Rather, it simply allowed each nation to set its own voluntary targets for reducing emissions. If Trump thought Obama’s voluntary targets — reducing emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent by 2025 — were too burdensome on its economy, he could simply have changed them;

The claim: “””The poverty rate for Wisconsin families has reached the lowest rate in 22 years.””

In fact: PolitiFact looked at this claim in detail and found it false: “Trump said Wisconsin’s poverty rate for families is at the lowest level in 22 years. Three measurements used by experts say that’s not the case. Indeed, the Census survey that goes back as far as Trump’s claim shows 2017 was just the fifth-lowest rate for individuals in the last 22 years. And a Wisconsin-specific measure looking more comprehensively at poverty by factoring in government aid shows the most recent year of data — 2016 in that case — is right around the average from the last decade.

The claim: “As one example, we charge other countries zero tariffs on foreign paper products, but when Wisconsin paper companies export it abroad, they sent their product abroad, China charged us big tariffs, India charged us big tariffs, Vietnam charge(d) us massive tariffs. Unfair.”

In fact: Daowei Zhang, a professor of forest economics at Auburn University, said Trump is correct that other countries’ tariffs on paper products are higher than those of the U.S., “but he’s not right that the U.S. has no tariff.” Overall, he said, U.S. paper tariffs are around 1 per cent or slightly higher.

The claim: “Look at Harley-Davidson. Look at Harley-Davidson. I met with them three years ago, one of my first meetings, Harley-Davidson. And I said to the people, they’re very nice. They would tell me, tough to do business in certain countries — ‘How you’re doing in India?’ and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t do any business.’ They weren’t even complaining, because — so many years. So India charged a 100 per cent tariff on a Harley-Davidson, but when they send their motorcycles, and they make ‘em, us, we charge them nothing.”

In fact: We obviously weren’t in this meeting, but it is inconceivable that Harley-Davidson executives told Trump that they “don’t do any business” in India. Harley-Davidson has had an Indian subsidiary, Harley-Davidson India, since 2009, and it runs a factory in India. According to Indian business newspaper Business Daily, the company sold 4,708 units in India in 2015-2016, 3,680 in 2016-2017.

The claim: “Look at Harley-Davidson. Look at Harley-Davidson. I met with them three years ago, one of my first meetings, Harley-Davidson. And I said to the people, they’re very nice. They would tell me, tough to do business in certain countries — ‘How you’re doing in India?’ and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t do any business.’ They weren’t even complaining, because — so many years. So India charged a 100 per cent tariff on a Harley-Davidson, but when they send their motorcycles, and they make ‘em, us, we charge them nothing.”

In fact: “Nothing” is incorrect. As Trump himself said at a trade meeting with Republican lawmakers in January 2019, the U.S. has a 2.4 per cent tariff on Indian-made motorcycles. In an opinion piece for Fox Business in February 2019, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross wrote, “For example, our 2.5 percent tariff on cars is far less than China’s 15 percent and Europe’s 10 percent; our 2.4 percent tariff on motorcycles pales in comparison to India’s 50 percent.”

The claim: “It’s almost like habit, it’s more habit than anything else. Nobody does anything about it, but we do. There’s one country we lose $5 billion. I won’t say it. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. The last thing I want to do is embarrass somebody, but they lose. We spend $5 billion a year defending them, right. So I said to the generals, ‘How much do we spend?’ they say, ‘Sir, we spent $5 billion.’ Very wealthy country. I said, ‘How much do they pay?’ ‘Sir, they pay $500 million.’ I said, ‘You mean we lose four and a half billion dollars to defend it?’ And they’re rich. So I called the country, right, I called the country. So we lose four and a half billion for the privilege of defending a country. That’s very tough on us on trade and various other things. So I called, I said, ‘Listen, no good.’ Now that we’re in a state of shock because they never got a call like this in twenty five years. So I said, ‘It’s no good. We’re losing four and a half billion dollars. It’s no good. We can’t do this anymore, this is crazy.’ And he got very upset. Angry. ‘This is not fair.’ I said, ‘Of course it’s fair.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll give you 500 million more because the budget you see had already been set, there’s only a month left.’ So you know, I said, ‘You know what, I want more.’ We argued. So they paid us more than $500 million for one phone call. It took me one call. Now I’m not bragging, I hate the deal. No no, for one call. Ron knows. One call. First call they’ve had in 35 years. I don’t think they’ve ever had a call. One-sided horrible deal. So I said, ‘It’s OK. You know, I understand you have budgets. You know you go through a budget, but next year, which now turns out to be in about two weeks, I said we’re going to call you for much more. You got to pay, you got to pay, not fair. We’re defending you and you’re rich. You know, we can defend people. They’re not rich and they’re being horribly treated and human rights and all the sudden, that’s different. These are rich countries, but think of it, one phone call, we pick up $500 million, that’s not terrible, but now we’re going to pick up a lot more and we have that with many countries.”

In fact: Trump did not name the country — but he was clearly referring to South Korea, since this was almost precisely the story he has previously told about securing additional money from South Korea. However, his figures were wrong. South Korea previously paid about $850 million per year for the U.S. troop presence in the country; after Trump pressure, South Korea agreed to a one-year deal in which it would pay about $925 million — an increase of less than $100 million, not $500 million. The New York Times reported upon a previous version of this Trump claim: “South Koreans were left flustered on Wednesday after President Trump asserted that he had made their government pay $500 million more to help cover the cost of maintaining American troops in the country. The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal South Korea and the United States signed on Sunday after months of contentious negotiations. Under the one-year deal, this year South Korea will pay 1.04 trillion won, or $925 million, an increase of $70 million from last year’s $855 million.”

The claim: “Look, Saudi Arabia, very rich country, we defend them. We subsidize Saudi Arabia. They have nothing but cash, right? We subsidize and they buy a lot from us, $450 billion they bought, you know you had people wanting to cut off Saudi Arabia, they bought $450 billion, I don’t want to lose them.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that Saudi Arabia has agreed to make $450 billion in purchases from the U.S. The White House has never explained what Trump is talking about; PolitiFact reported: “Hossein Askari, a business professor at George Washington University, analyzes international trade in the Middle East. He knows of no tally of contracts to back up Trump’s assertion. ‘There is absolutely no such number that could support the $450 billion,’ Askari said.” Trump had previously claimed that Saudi Arabia was making $110 billion in military orders, which also appeared baseless; the Associated Press wrote: “Trump’s wrong to suggest that he has $110 billion in military orders from Saudi Arabia. A far smaller amount in sales has actually been signed...Details of the $110 billion arms package, partly negotiated under the Obama administration and agreed upon in May 2017, have been sketchy. At the time the Trump administration provided only a broad description of the defense equipment that would be sold. There was no public breakdown of exactly what was being offered for sale and for how much...The Pentagon said this month that Saudi Arabia has signed ‘letters of offer and acceptance’ for only $14.5 billion in sales, including helicopters, tanks, ships, weapons and training. Those letters, issued after the U.S. government has approved a proposed sale, specify its terms...Trump’s repeated claims that he’s signed $110 billion worth of new arms sales to Riyadh are ‘just not true,’ said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former CIA and Defense Department official.”

The claim: “So we’re getting ripped off on trade, we’re getting ripped off on military, by NATO, I’m all for NATO, but you know we’re paying for almost 100 per cent of defending Europe and they’re killing us on trade.”

In fact: The U.S. is not paying for “almost 100 per cent” of the cost of defending Europe. According to NATO’s 2018 annual report, U.S. defence spending — on everything, not just protecting Europe — represented 72 per cent of alliance members’ total defence spending in 2017. Of NATO’s own organizational budget, the U.S. contributes a much smaller agreed-upon percentage: 22 per cent

The claim: “The European Union, the EU is killing us. We lost $181 billion and we’re defending them for peanuts, it does — does it — does this make sense to you what I’m saying?”

In fact: The U.S. had a $110 billion trade deficit with the European Union in 2018 when both goods trade and services trade are included, according to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which uses a different method, the deficit in goods trade alone was $169 billion, still not $181 billion even if Trump had been more specific about what he was discussing.

The claim: “We’re building the wall by the way. We’re gonna have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. You know, we can get money for anything. They were willing to give me money for every single thing, more money than I wanted. I said, I don’t need that much money, give me money for the wall.We’re not giving you anything for the wall. You know why? Because politically they don’t like it. So I went out and did it a different way and we have the money for the wall and we’re building the wall...”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “...their entire party has been taken over by far left radicals, who want to nullify and erase American borders. They want open borders. They want open borders. They want people to pour in and they think that’s going to be votes ultimately for them. These left wing extremists don’t believe America has the right to enforce our immigration laws or decide who gets to enter and remain in our country, not going to be that way...Democrats want to allow totally unlimited, uncontrolled, and unchecked migration all paid for by you, the American taxpayer.” And: “So Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, hoaxes, and delusions.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders or uncontrolled, unlimited migration. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Last month alone, 100,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders, placing a massive strain on communities, and schools, and hospitals, and public resources like nobody’s ever seen before. Now we’re sending many of them to sanctuary cities, thank you very much. They’re not too happy about it. I’m proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea, by the way. No. Hey, hey, what did they say? ‘We want ‘em.’ I said, ‘We’ll give ‘em to you. Thank you.’ They said, ‘We don’t want ‘em.’”

In fact: While Trump had publicly proposed sending migrants to sanctuary cities, this did not actually happen, his acting homeland security secretary, Kevin McAleenan, said on CBS in May.

The claim: “To confront the border crisis, I declared a national emergency. The good news is everybody agrees. Everybody agrees. Now, everybody’s in.”

In fact: Not “everybody agrees” or “everybody’s in”; Trump’s “national emergency” declaration was still highly controversial at the time, widely opposed by Democrats in particular.

The claim: “But your Democrat governor here in Wisconsin shockingly stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive, born alive. The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby. I don’t think so. Incredible. No, it’s incredible. Until this crazy man in Virginia said it, nobody even thought of that, right? Did anyone even think of that? Yeah, late-term. But this is where the baby is actually born, it came out, it’s there, it’s wrapped and that’s it. Who believes it?”

In fact: That is not what Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the man Trump was calling “crazy,” actually said; his comments were far less clear and more nuanced. He told a radio station: “You know when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labour, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” The comments prompted an uproar from pro-life conservatives, who accused him of endorsing infanticide. Northam’s spokesperson, however, said he was speaking only about the rare cases where a woman with a non-viable pregnancy goes into labour. Regardless, Northam clearly did not talk about “executing” babies.

The claim: “Last year prescription drug prices went down for the first time in 51 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “Just yesterday, I announced that my administration is unsigning the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. We’re unsigning it, we’re pulling it back out of the United Nations. We’re pulling it back out of Congress. All of you Second Amendment people, you know you know what it is. You’ll be very happy with it because we will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on America’s freedom. We’re not going to allow it. That was a President Obama disaster.”

In fact: The treaty would not have trampled on American gun owners’ freedoms. The treaty addresses the international trade in weapons and seeks to eradicate illicit international trade, but it does not hinder the rights of gun owners in individual countries, as the non-partisan Congressional Research Service noted in a March 2019 report: “The ATT regulates trade in conventional weapons between and among countries. It does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country.” The research service also noted: “Because the United States already has strong export control laws in place, the ATT would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations, or law.” The treaty’s very preamble says it 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,” and it says the treaty is “mindful of the legitimate trade and lawful ownership, and use of certain conventional arms for recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities, where such trade, ownership and use are permitted or protected by law.”

The claim: “And we’ll always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. The Republicans are always going to protect pre-existing conditions.”

In fact: This claim is belied by Republicans’ actions. The party tried repeatedly during Trump’s early presidency to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, Trump’s administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

The claim: “I withdrew from that horrible deal where they paid $150 billion to Iran.”

In fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.” It is also an exaggeration to say Iran was “taking over the Middle East” before Trump took office, though it exerted significant influence in several countries.

The claim: “I recognized Israel’s capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem and it would have opened in 25 years. What I said to our great ambassador, David Friedman, one of the most successful lawyers in New York, who became ambassador to Israel. I said, ‘David, they want to spend $1.1 billion, we could do it cheaper.’ They want to buy this piece of land in Jerusalem, top dollar. I said, ‘David, what can we do?’ And he called me back, he said, ‘Sir, we have a piece of land that’s much better, and on that piece of land, we have an old building. We’re not using the building very much and we can renovate the building for $400,000 and we’ll have a beautiful embassy and a better location, and we can have it done and so we can have it done in four months instead of 25 years.’ So here’s your alternative, a building at a great location in four months for $400,000 or a building that will probably never get built, but let’s say 20 years. For $1.1 billion today, meaning $3, $4 billion in a lousy location. That won’t be as good as what we built and it’s the first time I’ve had ever done this. He said four hundred thousand. I said, ‘David, it’s too cheap.’ We have to make it. It’s true. I said, ‘Make it $500,000.’ It’s true. It’s True. And it’s open. We opened it like almost a year ago. And you know in New York I have a friend who’s a very successful guy. He’s very proud of his office because he used to think, oh, Jerusalem stone. This is stone from Jerusalem, it’s one of the most expensive. He considers it a treasure. And every time I go in he says, oh, look at my beautiful stone, it’s from Jerusalem. So we’re building a building in Jerusalem. I said, ‘David, do me a favor, buy Jerusalem stone. You’re right there.’ We got it so cheap, you wouldn’t believe it. And the whole damn building is made practically of Jerusalem stone. It’s true. It’s beautiful. So we got it open it for months instead of 20 or 25 years. And we saved at least $1.1 billion and it’s a great embassy right now. It’s a great, great thing. It’s great.”

In fact: The renovations required by Trump’s quick move of the U.S. embassy to an existing U.S. diplomatic facility will cost far more than $400,000. ABC News reported in July: “Documents filed with the official database of federal spending show that the State Department awarded the Maryland-based company Desbuild Limak D&K a contract for $21.2 million to design and build an ‘addition and compound security upgrades’ at the embassy. These updates will be made to the former consular building in Jerusalem — the embassy’s temporary location.” The ABC article continued: “A State Department official told ABC News today that President Trump’s estimates only factored in that first phase of modifications to the former consular building, not this second round of renovation.”

The claim: “It’s incredible what’s happened to the United States, and I’m not just talking about economically, which is tremendous. We’ve created $12 trillion of value since the election, $12 trillion and our primary competitor, very big, powerful competitor (China) has lost $17 trillion since our election. They were catching us. If somebody else were in this position, they would have caught us already, they’re not catching us now, we’re way out in front.”

In fact: There was no apparent basis for Trump’s $17 trillion figure. Trump has sometimes specified that he is talking about losses in the Chinese stock market, but these are nowhere near $17 trillion. George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, said “I can’t really make those numbers add up to anything I’m aware of” and “I don’t think it’s a realistic figure.” Magnus noted that the entire market capitalization of the Shanghai index was just over $5 trillion (U.S.) at the time. “So where the number ‘17’ comes from, I have no idea,” he said. Derek Scissors, an expert on U.S. economic relations with Asia at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, also said a $17 trillion drop in Chinese wealth would be a “catastrophic loss” that is “not in evidence.”

The claim: “They are pushing a $100 trillion government takeover of the U.S. economy, known as the Green New Deal. ‘We’re going to rip down every single building in Manhattan and build a new building in it’s place.’”

In fact: Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal doesn’t require every single building in Manhattan to be torn down. The resolution calls for upgrading, not demolishing, every building in the country: “...Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 28

Interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo (3 false claims)

The claim: “When — when they used to separate children, which was done during the Obama administration, with Bush, with us, with everybody, far fewer people would come and we’ve been on a humane basis, was pretty bad. We — we go out and we stop the separation. The problem is you have 10 times more people coming up with their families. It’s like Disneyland now. You know, before you’d get separated so people would say let’s not go up. Now you don’t get separated and, you know, while that sounds nice and all, what happens is you have — literally you have 10 times more families coming up because they’re not going to be separated from their children.”

In fact: Family separation was not a known deterrent to migration during the Bush and Obama eras. Families were only separated in rare and exceptional circumstances under presidents prior to Trump, and the subject received minimal if any media coverage; Trump is the one who made it a routine and high-profile policy before reversing course.

The claim: “We’re building a lot of wall. We’re going to have 400 miles of wall up by the end of next year. So the wall is going to be — it’s going to be great.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “We’re the only country in the world that I know of that has a courts system and it’s a — it’s a mobile court system, I mean it is on the border and with all of these cases, 900,000 cases, you need to do 900,000 — you’d need 100,000 lawyers. I mean it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.”

In fact: Unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. do not get the right to a trial if they are caught after merely touching U.S. land; in cases where they are caught near the border, they are subject to rapid deportation, known as expedited removal, without seeing a judge. If migrants declare that they are seeking asylum, they do have a right to a legal process — but the U.S. is far from the only country to afford them this right. “This statement is patently false,” James Hathaway, law professor and director of the refugee and asylum law program at the University of Michigan, said in an email in response to a previous version of Trump’s claim. “It is completely routine in other countries that, like the U.S., have signed the UN refugee treaties for asylum-seekers to have access to the domestic legal system to make a protection claim (and to be allowed in while the claim is pending). If anything, the U.S. is aberrational in the opposite direction: U.S. domestic law falsely treats the granting of protection to refugees as a matter of discretion, whereas international law *requires* a grant of protection to anyone who meets the refugee definition. This doesn’t mean that refugees have a right to stay in the U.S. or anywhere else forever — but they *do* have a right to stay for the duration of the persecutory risk, unless another safe country that has also signed the refugee treaties agrees to take them in.”

MONDAY, APRIL 29

Twitter

The claim: “People are fleeing New York State because of high taxes and yes, even oppression of sorts. They didn’t even put up a fight against SALT — could have won. So much litigation.”

In fact: By “SALT,” Trump was referring to a change included in his 2017 tax law that limited deductions for state and local taxes (S-A-L-T) to $10,000. It is not true that New York did not fight the change; leaders of its state government and many of its members of Congress aggressively opposed it. PolitiFact reported: “(Gov. Andrew) Cuomo’s response to the cap goes back to 2017, when it was proposed. Shortly before it became law, he called the SALT cap provision an ‘economic dagger directed at this state’ and ‘a gross injustice.’ In 2018 he launched a campaign against the provision using legal and legislative tools. Cuomo even met with Trump at the White House in February to discuss changes to the cap after Trump indicated he would be open to them. Cuomo has continued to publicly criticize the cap, and following his meeting with Trump, he announced he had enlisted other governors in the effort. ‘As governor of the state of New York today, my top priority is repealing SALT. Period,’ Cuomo told reporters in March.” Democratic New York Rep. Nita Lowey wrote on Twitter: “Is he living under a rock?! We fought tooth and nail against the Republican elimination of the SALT deduction.”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

Speech at National Day of Prayer dinner

The claim: “On the very top of the tallest structure in our nation’s capital, facing the rising sun each morning, two Latin words are prescribed and inscribed. It’s called praise be to God, very important. And by the way, you’re seeing it more and more. You’re seeing people prouder and prouder. It’s happening. We remember — we remember when we started our campaign. I was saying we’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again. Now everyone’s very proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. There was a time when we went shopping and you wouldn’t see Merry Christmas on the stores. You’d see a red wall and it wouldn’t say that. It would say happy holidays or something, but it wouldn’t say Merry Christmas. We’re back to saying Merry Christmas again in this country, and that something that I consider a great achievement because it really spells out what’s happening.”

In fact: There is no evidence that big department stores and other businesses that said Happy Holidays before Trump’s presidency are now saying Merry Christmas. (Even Trump’s own family members continued to say “Happy Holidays” during Trump’s presidency: daughter and aide Ivanka Trump and son Eric Trump both used that phrase instead of “Merry Christmas” on Twitter in December 2017.)

Interview with Fox Business’s Trish Regan (11 false claims)

The claim: “Well we’re not going to need it, because we have it from other sources, we’re building the wall, and by next year — the end of next year we will have probably around 400 miles of wall up. We’re building a lot of it now, we’ve given out a lot of contracts, we have a lot of contracts that have been left. And we’re building a lot of wall, and unfortunately you know it’s a massive area that we have — that we’re talking about...We’re adding that on to some of the things that we’ve already renovated. And we’ve actually done a lot of work, and we’re doing it — would’ve been a lot easier if we had the money...We’ve cut it down — I’ve actually gotten a better wall for much less money. And we’re getting great speed out of it too. But we have it from different sources, different parts of government, including the military. The Army Corps of engineers has done a really good job, and — [crosstalk]...Yeah it’s being built — it’s being built right now. I mean, as we speak it’s being built, and a lot of it.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “I have the companies coming back in to the United States like you wouldn’t believe. You’ve reported it. I mean Toyota’s coming in with $14 billion, and many of the car companies are going in to Michigan and going in to all of the different — Ohio, and Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida. They’re coming into all of these states, and they’re coming in tremendously. I mean, it’s going to be — it’s incredible what’s happening, we need people, to be honest.”

In fact: Trump was slightly off on Toyota, which announced in March 2019 that it would increase its planned investment to “nearly $13 billion” (it originally said $10 billion in 2017), He was also wrong that car companies are moving into Pennsylvania and Florida. There are no assembly plants in Pennsylvania or Florida at all, noted Bernard Swiecki, director of the Automotive Communities Partnership at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, and there are no known plans to bring one to either state.

The claim: “We have a lot of — you know we have a very low unemployment rate. We have the lowest rate we’ve had in 51 years. We’re going to soon set the record.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000, 19 years prior. The rate dropped again in April 2019, to 3.6 per cent, to the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior. We’d obviously let Trump round to “50 years,” but “51 years” is incorrect.

The claim: “Well look at what happened, we just did 3.2 and frankly if we would have had the Obama interest rates — you know, where they kept them very low, which is not necessarily good, but if we would have had those low interest rates we could have been much higher than that. But 3.2 is a number that they haven’t hit in 14 years.”

In fact: Trump’s “haven’t hit in 14 years” is incorrect even if he was only talking about first-quarter growth. The economy grew by 3.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

The claim: “And you look at all the Democrats; they all wanted to fire Comey until I fired him. You know Schumer, every one of them — I would say practically every one of them, they wanted him out, and then as soon as I — as soon as he’s gone they were all holier than thou. Oh, that’s such a terrible thing to do. Look, it’s all politics...”

In fact: It is not true that “all the Democrats,” “practically every one of them” or even Schumer in particular wanted Comey fired. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

The claim: Question: “They (Russia) couldn’t get close to you guys.” Trump: “They tried to. I know they probably tried for her campaign too. And if you look at Obama — President Obama in September, he learned a lot about things, he didn’t do anything and nobody likes to talk about it.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he “didn’t do anything.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “Now we’re negotiating with China, we’re negotiating with Japan, we’re negotiating with all of these countries that have just ripped off our country for years, and years...We lose $500 billion with China.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “Now we’re negotiating with China, we’re negotiating with Japan, we’re negotiating with all of these countries that have just ripped off our country for years, and years. We lose $68 billion with Japan.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods, but, as always, Trump did not specify that he was doing so.

The claim: “You know, I put tariffs on China. They’re paying us billions and billions of dollars.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “You’re seeing the deals we’re making, including South Korea. We made a great deal with South Korea. That was the deal made by Hillary Clinton. It was a horrible deal. She said it’s going to produce 250,000 jobs, and it did, for South Korea. Not for us, OK, for South Korea.”

In fact: Clinton did not claim that the trade deal with South Korea would “produce 250,000 jobs.” Neither did anyone else in the Obama administration. Obama said that the deal would “support at least 70,000 American jobs.” (It is also probably a stretch to say the deal was “done by Hillary Clinton.” George W. Bush’s administration negotiated the original version of the deal. When Congress refused to ratify it, it was revised by the Obama administration when Clinton was secretary of state.)

The claim: “That’s good. We have — all options are on the table. We’ll see. We want to help people. We’re not interested in anything else, other than helping people. Look, Trish, they’re dying. They’re dying. They’re starving. They have no water; they have nothing. It’s incredible. If you would’ve looked 20 years ago, as you said, if you would’ve looked 25 years ago, this (Venezuela) was one of the wealthiest countries. And now they’re all dying of starvation and things that wouldn’t even believe possible today.”

In fact: Venezuela was not one of the world’s wealthiest countries 20 years ago. The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook put Venezuela 56th in the world in 1999 by GDP per capita — above average, but nowhere near the top. Fifty-fifth was Croatia, 57th was Poland. “Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world 60 years ago. The richest in Latin America 40 years ago. But not 20 years ago,” said Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard University professor of economic development who was chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1994 to 2000 and previously served as Venezuela’s planning minister and a member of the board of the country’s central bank.

Twitter

The claim: “Why didn’t President Obama do something about Russia in September (before November Election) when told by the FBI? He did NOTHING, and had no intention of doing anything!”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of 