WASHINGTON—Until last week, I thought the Boy Scouts of America was the most unexpected entity to call out one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s false claims.

It has been replaced by the Washington National Cathedral.

Trump falsely claimed last week that his approval had been necessary for McCain’s funeral.

“I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted — which, as president, I had to approve,” he said. “I don’t care about this. I didn’t get ‘thank you.’ That’s okay. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”

Trump had to approve the use of a military plane to transport McCain’s body, but not the funeral itself. Which the Cathedral, of all places, quite forcefully pointed out.

“Washington National Cathedral was honored to host the funeral service for Senator John McCain. All funerals and memorial services at the Cathedral are organized by the family of the deceased; only a state funeral for a former president involves consultation with government officials. No funeral at the Cathedral requires the approval of the president or any other government official,” the cathedral said in a statement.

This might not even have been Trump’s most egregious lie related to McCain last week, during which he made 57 false claims in all.

Trump also claimed that “McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it” — unlike him, Trump, who got the Veterans Choice health care program passed.

In fact, the Choice program was created in 2014… and McCain, a Vietnam veteran who was imprisoned and tortured during the war, was the key Republican legislator behind the proposal.

Trump’s 57-false-claim week was the 23rd -worst week of his presidency out of 114 weeks so far. He is now up to 4,682 false claims for his first 794 days, an average of 5.9 per day.

Now you can stay on top of Donald Trump’s lies and false claims like never before with Daniel Dale’s new Trumpcheck newsletter. Sign up here.

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.

Every false claim Trump made last week:

MONDAY, MARCH 18

Twitter

The claim: “GDP growth during the four quarters of 2018 was the fastest since 2005.”

In fact: To claim 3.1 per cent growth, Trump was using an alternative growth measure that compares one quarter of the year to the same quarter of the previous year; he compared the fourth quarter of 2018 to the fourth quarter of 2017. (By the traditional measure of real GDP growth, the 2018 growth rate was 2.9 per cent.) Some economists think that is a superior measure, so Trump wasn’t objectively being deceiving by using it — but he was being deceiving by saying this was growth rate was the “fastest since 2005.” As the New York Times and Washington Post noted, this was not “the first time in 14 years” that there was 3.1 per cent growth using the quarter-to-quarter measure; in fact, it happened just four years ago, in 2015. The Post wrote: “Now that Trump is citing 4Q/4Q, that means the relevant comparison would not just be 4Q/4Q but other quarter-over-quarter calculations. The economy under Obama hit its peak in 1Q/1Q 2015, when it grew 3.8 per cent. Obama exceeded 3.1 per cent on two other occasions, as well.” If Trump wanted to say that this was the fastest fourth-quarter-to-fourth-quarter growth in 14 years, that would have been accurate, but he made a broader claim.

Twitter

The claim: “93% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. Thank you!”

In fact: We could not find any recent poll in which Trump’s approval rating with Republicans was 93 per cent, but he has consistently claimed to have this “93 per cent” Republican approval rating even as it has actually remained in the high 80s. In polls released the week prior to Trump’s tweet, for example, he was at 86 per cent with Republicans in Monmouth, 86 per cent in YouGov/The Economist, and 82 per cent in Quinnipiac. In a Fox News poll conducted the week of this tweet, including on the day he tweeted, it was 89 per cent.

Speech to Greek Independence Day event

The claim: “Thank you to Secretary Alex Azar. Where’s Alex? What a job he’s doing. First time in 51 years, prescription drug prices have come down. First time that’s happened.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.”

Tuesday, March 19

Remarks at meeting with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro

The claim: “I’m very unhappy that he (John McCain) didn’t repeal and replace Obamacare, as you know. He campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years. And then he got to a vote and he said, ‘Thumbs down.’ And our country would have saved a trillion dollars and we would have had great health care.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted: “Trump’s estimate is way off. The Senate bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that Trump is talking about would have reduced the deficit by a net $321 billion over 10 years, according to a joint analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.”

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (3 false claims)

The claim: “I had 206 to 223 in the Electoral College — 306 to 223.” And: “I got 306 electoral votes against 223.”

In fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip: it was the 21st time Trump said “223” as president.

The claim: “I know that he’s (Robert Mueller) conflicted and I know that his best friend is Comey, who’s a bad cop.”

In fact: There is no evidence that the two former FBI directors are “best friends.” Though they do know and like each other, and though it is fair for Trump to argue that it is 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.” Also, Mueller has denied that he had a “nasty business transaction’ with Trump, an apparent Trump reference to Mueller’s departure from Trump’s golf club in Virginia. “Mr. Mueller left the club in October 2011 without dispute,” a Mueller spokesperson told the Daily Mail.

The claim: “China had free reign over our country, taking out $500 billion a year for many years.”

In fact: Trump uses the phrase “taking out” to describe the U.S. trade deficit with China. The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data. The deficit was $337 billion in 2017, $375 billion if you only count trade in goods and exclude trade in services. The 2018 goods deficit with China, released earlier in the month Trump spoke, was a record $419 billion.

Speech to tank plant in Lima, Ohio (28 false claims)

The claim: “And a man who we’re very proud of because, along with Mike, he ran a great race: Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted. He ran a great race for Governor. We came in that final day — they were a little bit down, against a tough opponent, who I was not a big fan of, and I didn’t like the people that were supporting him too much — Pocahontas and others.And I came that final day, and we had a day that was incredible and they won by — what did you win by? Six or seven points, right? It was an incredible — huh? Even higher.”

In fact: Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine beat Democratic opponent Richard Cordray by 3.7 percentage points, 50.4 per cent to 46.7 per cent, not “six or seven points” or “even higher.”

The claim: “We have the best economy we’ve ever had. We have the lowest employment — unemployment that we’ve had in 51 years; soon will be the record of all time.”

In fact: The unemployment rate was not the lowest in 51 years. The latest rate at the time Trump spoke, for Jan. 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000, 18 years ago, if you don’t count earlier months during Trump’s own term. The record is 2.5 per cent in 1953.

The claim: “And then he (John McCain) went thumbs down, badly hurting the Republican Party, badly hurting our nation, and hurting many sick people who desperately wanted good, affordable health care. We would’ve had it. This would’ve saved our country over a trillion dollars in entitlements, and we would have ended up making a great health care plan, frankly, with the Democrats because they would have had no choice.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted: “Trump’s estimate is way off. The Senate bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that Trump is talking about would have reduced the deficit by a net $321 billion over 10 years, according to a joint analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.”

The claim: “McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it. That’s why, when I had my dispute with him, I had such incredible support from the vets and from the military. The vets were on my side because I got the job done. I got Choice and I got Accountability. Accountability — meaning, if somebody mistreats our vets — for 45 years they were trying — they mistreat our vets, and we say, ‘Hey, you’re fired. Get out.’ You can’t mistreat our vets. They never got it done. And Choice — for years and years, decades, they wanted to get Choice. You know what Choice is. You’re a military person. You’re one of our great people. To me, one of the great people. For many decades, they couldn’t get it done. It was never done. I got it five months ago. I got it done — Choice. Instead of waiting in line — a vet fought for us, fought in these tanks; fought for us. Instead of waiting in line for two days, two weeks, two months — people on line, they’re not very sick. By the time they see a doctor, they’re terminally ill. We gave them Choice. If you have to wait for any extended period of time, you go outside, you go to a local doctor. We pay the bill; you get yourself better. Go home to your family. And we got it passed. We got it done.”

In fact: This was an especially egregious lie. It was the 60th time Trump falsely claimed that he was the person who got the Veterans Choice health care program passed; in fact, it was passed in 2014 and signed by Barack Obama. (The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.) This time, though, Trump went further, using his Choice non-accomplishment to suggest that he had done more for veterans than McCain — when, in reality, McCain, a Vietnam veteran himself, was the key Republican legislator behind the Choice bill in 2014. That bill was a compromise measure between McCain’s proposal and a proposal put forward by left-wing independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chaired the Veterans Affairs Committee. The law Trump signed to modify the program was named for McCain: it is the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act of 2018.

The claim: “And the other thing is we’re in a war in the Middle East that McCain pushed so hard. He was calling Bush — President Bush — all the time: ‘Get into the Middle East. Get into the Middle East.’ So now we’re into that war for $7 trillion.”

In fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in November 2018, put the current total at $4.9 trillion, and the current total including estimated future health care obligations at $5.9 trillion.

The claim: “I endorsed him (John McCain) at his request, and I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted — which, as president, I had to approve. I don’t care about this. I didn’t get ‘thank you.’ That’s okay. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”

In fact: Trump did not “give” McCain a funeral, and his approval was not necessary for the funeral McCain did have. Trump approved the use of a military plane to transport McCain’s body, but not the funeral plans themselves. The Washington National Cathedral said in a statement to media outlets: “Washington National Cathedral was honored to host the funeral service for Senator John McCain. All funerals and memorial services at the Cathedral are organized by the family of the deceased; only a state funeral for a former president involves consultation with government officials. No funeral at the Cathedral requires the approval of the president or any other government official.” It is not clear whether the McCain family thanked Trump directly, but a family spokesperson, Rick Davis, thanked “the Trump administration” and “the White House” at a press conference in August: “The combined efforts of the Trump administration, the White House, Secretary [Jim] Mattis, and the Department of Defense especially, and the Military District of Washington are very experienced in these issues related to the logistics of a funeral of this magnitude. And we really thank them for coming together very quickly and pulling together all the federal resources.”

The claim: “And we just came out — another chart — we just came out with numbers — the Economic Report of the President: 3.1 per cent GDP. The first time in 14 years that we cracked 3, right? That’s pretty good — 3.1. The press tried to make it 2.9. I said, ‘It’s not 2.9.’ What they did is they took odd months. I said, ‘No, no, no. You go from January to December. You don’t take certain months and add them up.’ Because I said, ‘We’re going to break 3.’ And we did. We did 3.1. The fake news tried to change it but we caught them. I said — I said, ‘You know, we didn’t break the 3. Oh, that’s terrible.’ They said, ‘Yes, sir, you did. They just took odd months.’ I said, ‘No, no, January to December.’ 3.1 per cent, first time in 14 years. Congratulations.”

In fact: As the Washington Post and New York Times noted, there was nothing “fake” about the media’s use of a 2.9 per cent figure for GDP growth, and the media was not “caught” and did not use “odd months.” The 2.9 per cent figure uses the most commonly used measure of GDP growth, while Trump was using an alternative measure. The Post reported: “Here is what Trump’s Commerce Department (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) reported Feb. 28: ‘Real GDP increased 2.9 percent in 2018 (from the 2017 annual level to the 2018 annual level), compared with an increase of 2.2 percent in 2017.’ So the news media was reporting on an actual news release by the U.S. government, not by counting ‘odd months.’” To claim 3.1 per cent growth, Trump was citing a measure that compares the fourth quarter of one year to the fourth quarter of the previous year. Some economists think that is a superior measure, so Trump wasn’t objectively being deceiving, but he was being deceiving in claiming the media was being deceiving.

The claim: “And we just came out — another chart — we just came out with numbers — the Economic Report of the President: 3.1 per cent GDP. The first time in 14 years that we cracked 3, right? That’s pretty good — 3.1. The press tried to make it 2.9. I said, ‘It’s not 2.9.’ What they did is they took odd months. I said, ‘No, no, no. You go from January to December. You don’t take certain months and add them up.’ Because I said, ‘We’re going to break 3.’ And we did. We did 3.1. The fake news tried to change it but we caught them. I said — I said, ‘You know, we didn’t break the 3. Oh, that’s terrible.’ They said, ‘Yes, sir, you did. They just took odd months.’ I said, ‘No, no, January to December.’ 3.1 per cent, first time in 14 years. Congratulations.”

In fact: GDP growth was 2.9 per cent by the traditional measure. To claim 3.1 per cent GDP growth, Trump was using an alternative measure that compares one quarter of the year to one quarter of the previous year; he compared the fourth quarter of 2018 to the fourth quarter of 2017. As the New York Times and Washington Post noted, this was not “the first time in 14 years” that there was 3.1 per cent growth using this quarter-to-quarter measure; in fact, it happened just four years ago, in 2015. The Post wrote: “Now that Trump is citing 4Q/4Q, that means the relevant comparison would not just be 4Q/4Q but other quarter-over-quarter calculations. The economy under Obama hit its peak in 1Q/1Q 2015, when it grew 3.8 per cent. Obama exceeded 3.1 per cent on two other occasions, as well.”

The claim: “These are ‘Wages are Rising for the Workers.’ These are ‘Wages are Rising.’ 3.4 per cent — it’s one of the largest increases in 20 years. And for the most part, they were going down. They weren’t even rising. I used to campaign — I’d be in Ohio, I’d be in Pennsylvania, I’d be all over, and I’d talk about wages where people would have to work three jobs and they were making less than they did 20 years ago. You remember that, Rob? Jim? I used to do it all the time. I’d be — it was just a part of my speech. I’d say, ‘You’re working three jobs. You make less money than you did 20 years ago.’ And it was literally 21 years. And now wages are going up.”

In fact: While some individual workers’ wages had obviously been declining before the Trump era, it is not true that wages were “going down” on the whole, “weren’t even rising,” before he took office. Wages have been rising since 2014, though the pace has accelerated under Trump. 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: “Here’s a chart: ‘The American Energy.’ The United States is the largest producer — that’s happened over the last short period of time — of crude oil and natural gas in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. We’re also a net — do you think Russia is happy about this?” And: “And solar is wonderful too, but it’s not strong enough and it’s very, very expensive. So the United States is now the largest producer of crude oil and natural gas in the world. Happened all in that very short — you know, you guys are all so — — think of that. Think of that, beating out Saudi Arabia and Russia. They’re pretty good producers, right? Guess what? We do more than they do.”

In fact: The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “We approved the Keystone Pipeline. Right? I did that. Forty-eight thousand jobs between that and the Dakota Access Pipeline. I got them approved, like almost my first couple of days in office. I said, ‘They’re approved.’”

In fact: The estimate of 48,000 jobs is hotly disputed, but we try to avoid fact-checking Trump predictions. What is objectively untrue is that Trump approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in his “first couple days in office.” He issued executive orders four days into his presidency to advance the two pipelines, but they did not grant final approval then. Trump actually approved Keystone XL two months into his presidency; the government announced the approval of the Dakota Access pipeline three weeks into his presidency.

The claim: “We approved the Keystone Pipeline. Right? I did that. Forty-eight thousand jobs between that and the Dakota Access Pipeline. I got them approved, like almost my first couple of days in office. I said, ‘They’re approved.’ And what is it? It’s good environmentally. It’s underground. You’re not riding it over tracks. You’re not trucking it. It’s actually a great thing, environmentally. But President Obama, after years and years and years, they said, ‘We’re not going to approve it.’ I said, ‘We’ll approve it.’ Forty-eight thousand jobs. Think of it. It’s being built right now. They’re both being built. One just got completed — Dakota Access.”

In fact: The Keystone XL pipeline is not under construction. Just the week prior to Trump’s comments, a federal appeals court refused to overturn a judge’s injunction to prevent even many pre-construction activities until the State Department completes another environmental review.

The claim: “We’ve created more than almost 6 million jobs since the election. And if I would have said that to the fake news during the campaign, they would’ve said, ‘He exaggerates.’ I’m not exaggerating, but nobody would’ve believed that could happen.

In fact: The phrase “more than almost” is confusing, so we’re generously going to treat this claim as if he is saying “almost 6 million jobs” rather than “more than 6 million jobs,” but it is still an exaggeration. Between November 2016, the month of the election, and February 2019, the economy added 5.3 million jobs — as Trump said in his State of the Union address in early February. (Of course, by dating his claim back to the election, he is allowing himself to take credit for jobs created during the final months of Obama’s tenure.)

The claim: “We’ve created more than almost 6 million jobs since the election. And if I would have said that to the fake news during the campaign, they would’ve said, ‘He exaggerates.’ I’m not exaggerating, but nobody would’ve believed that could happen. Including almost 600,000 manufacturing jobs.”

In fact: He’s exaggerating. Between November 2016, the month of the election, and February 2019, the economy added 493,000 manufacturing jobs. That is almost 500,000 jobs, not almost 600,000. (Of course, by dating his claim back to the election, he is allowing himself to take credit for jobs created during the final months of Obama’s tenure.)

The claim: “Last year, our manufacturers reported the highest level of optimism ever recorded in a 40-year-old poll.”

In fact: The National Association of Manufacturers survey is 20 years old, not 40.

The claim: “Last year, our manufacturers reported the highest level of optimism ever recorded in a 40-year-old poll. And this year we went up again.”

In fact: There has not been an additional improvement in the National Association of Manufacturers optimism survey so far in 2019. The record set in 2018 was a 92.4 per cent average optimism score for the year; the optimism figure for the first quarter of 2019 was 89.5 per cent.

The claim: “Unemployment has recently reached the lowest rate in 51 years.”

In fact: The unemployment rate was not the lowest in 51 years. The latest rate at the time Trump spoke, for Jan. 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000, 18 years ago, if you don’t count earlier months during Trump’s own term. The record is 2.5 per cent in 1953.

The claim: “And if you look at African-American — you’ve heard me say this many times — African-American employment is at an all-time low — unemployment. Asian-American unemployment is at an all-time low. Hispanic unemployment — an all-time low.”

In fact: Trump was incorrect about Asian-Americans, whose 3.2 per cent unemployment rate in February 2019 was higher than the rate during various periods of the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. (Trump was more or less right about African-Americans, at least since the government began releasing this data: if you ignore earlier periods of the Trump presidency, the February 2019 African-American unemployment rate of 7.0 per cent was tied for the low set in April 2000.)

The claim: “Women’s unemployment — 65-year low. Soon it’ll be historic, meaning better than ever. And soon the basic number will be historic.”

In fact: The women’s unemployment rate in May 2018 and September 2018, 3.6 per cent, was the lowest since late 1953. By the time Trump spoke here, however, the rate had increased to 3.8 per cent, tying the 3.8 per cent of December 2000, just 18 years prior.

The claim: “And veteran unemployment is now at the lowest level ever, ever, ever recorded.”

In fact: As Leo Shane III, deputy editor of Military Times, noted on Twitter, the 2.7 per cent veterans unemployment rate for February 2019 was exceptionally low but not a record: it was lower for two months in 2000, when it went as low as 2.3 per cent.

The claim: “Thanks to our pro-American tax, regulatory, and trade policies — and, by the way, we’re doing great in our deal with China. They were taking out $500 billion a year for many years from our country. I consider that we’ve rebuilt China. Five hundred billion, not million. Think of what that means. Five-hundred billion dollars a year taken out of our country. And now they’re paying us. They’re paying tariffs on the products they’re sending in, and we’re negotiating and they want to make a deal.”

In fact: Trump uses the phrase “taking out” to describe the U.S. trade deficit with China. The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data. The deficit was $337 billion in 2017, $375 billion if you only count trade in goods and exclude trade in services. The 2018 goods deficit with China, released earlier in the month Trump spoke, was a record $419 billion.

The claim: “I consider that we’ve rebuilt China. Five hundred billion, not million. Think of what that means. Five-hundred billion dollars a year taken out of our country. And now they’re paying us. They’re paying tariffs on the products they’re sending in, and we’re negotiating and they want to make a deal.”

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: “And hopefully, we’ll make a deal (with China). And if we don’t, that’s fine. And if we do, that’s fine. It’s got to be a good deal. It can’t be a bad deal. We’re so far down, it’s got to be a great deal. If it’s not a great deal, we’ll never catch up. And their economy is way down. And I don’t want their economy to be down; I want their economy to be up. But their economy is down 32 to 38 per cent.”

In fact: There was no reasonable measure by which the Chinese economy was “down 32 to 38 per cent.” While its stock markets declined in 2018, when Trump launched his trade war, they had recovered in early 2019 as the two countries engaged in negotiations. On the day Trump spoke, the major Shanghai index was down only 4 per cent from its 2018 peak and 1 per cent from Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Regardless, stock performance is not the same as economic performance, and China’s economy had not contracted by 32 to 38 per cent. Rather, its growth slowed slightly: China grew by 6.6 per cent in 2018, according to its official statistics, down a little from 6.8 per cent in 2017. One of our go-to experts on Trump’s claims about Asian economies, Derek Scissors of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, said that he suspects Trump is referring to the decline of roughly one-third in China’s growth rate between 2011 (9.3 per cent) and 2018 (6.6 per cent). But we say the claim is false unless Trump specifies that he is going back eight years for the starting number in his calculation.

The claim: “But African American unemployment — the best it’s ever been. Hispanic, Asian, women, everybody — it’s all the best it’s ever been. How do you top that in a debate? What are they going to say? ‘Uh, well, it could be better’?”

In fact: Trump was correct about two of the groups in his list, incorrect about two others. Hispanic unemployment of 4.3 per cent for February 2019 was indeed a record low. Trump was also more or less right about African-American unemployment, at least since the government began releasing this data in the early 1970s: if you ignore earlier periods of the Trump presidency, the February 2019 African-American unemployment rate of 7.0 per cent was indeed tied for the low set in April 2000. But Trump was incorrect about Asians, whose 3.2 per cent rate was higher than the rate during various periods of the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies, and women, whose 3.8 per cent rate was well off the record of 2.7 per cent set in 1953.

The claim: “I had union leaders in the White House a few months ago — the biggest guys. Nice guys, but they’re Democrats no matter what. Okay? And you see where that’s taken you. That would’ve been catastrophic. But I had them in, and we explained how good it was for the car industry, for this, for that. They said, ‘Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, this is unbelievable. Thank you, sir.’ But then I see one of the guys the next day on a television show. The — I think it was called ‘Deface the Nation.’ And — ladies and gentlemen, ‘Deface the Nation.’ And he’s saying how he’s a Democrat and he wants Democrat policies — which were, by the way, putting everybody in the poorhouse. But I just left the guy. He’s hugging me, kissing me, telling him what an unbelievable deal. Nobody else could do it. And the next day, he’s on there talking about stuff. And I really said, ‘I sort of don’t want to meet these guys. I want to deal with the people in the union, not the heads of the union.’ Because the heads of the union are not honest people. They’re not honest, and they ought to lower your dues, by the way. They ought to stop with the dues. They — you’re paying too much dues. As an example, they could’ve kept General Motors. They could’ve kept it in that gorgeous plant at Lordstown. They could’ve kept it. Lower your dues. Lower your dues.”

In fact: It was unclear how the auto workers’ union could have stopped General Motors from closing its plant in Lordstown, Ohio; Trump didn’t specify. It was also unclear if the private exchange Trump described actually happened; Trump has a habit of inventing fictional exchanges involving people lavishing him with compliments and gratitude. Regardless, there was no interview with any union leader on CBS’s Face the Nation in early 2019 or in 2018, according to CBS’s transcripts archive, so the exchange Trump described while disparaging the show as “Deface the Nation” either did not happen at all or happened on some other program.

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The claim: “America’s Founders understood that to be strong and powerful as a nation, we must also be a great manufacturing nation. President Obama said, ‘You’ll never bring manufacturing back.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ It’s all about manufacturing. And we’re bringing it back in record numbers. Nobody can believe it.”

In fact: Obama did not say “you’ll never bring manufacturing back.” 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: “Right here in Ohio, Nucor has just announced an $85 million upgrade in Marion.”

In fact: Nucor made this announcement in April 2017, nearly two full years before Trump’s remarks. We give him a lot of leeway on vague claims like “just announced,” but 23-plus months ago is not “just.”

The claim: “And I just got a little news that was given to me as I was walking up. U.S. forces, in the last month, have killed the terrorists responsible for the attack in Syria that killed four Americans, the Paris theater attack in 2015, and the USS Cole bombing in 2000. We killed them all. We killed them all. We killed them all. We killed them all. They’re bad people.”

In fact: We don’t know what Trump was told, but this account is, at least, not entirely accurate, according to Trump’s own comments and media reports. As for the USS Cole bombing, Trump announced more than two months prior to these remarks, in a tweet on Jan. 6, that “we have just killed the leader of that attack, Jamal al-Badawi” — so this did not happen “in the last month.” A U.S. official said in March that people linked to the January attack in Syria that killed four Americans had been captured, not killed; CNN reported before Trump’s comments; CNN said, “A second defense official says a direct link to the Manbij attack has not yet been fully proven but the belief is the fighters are linked to terror operations in the area so they may ‘likely’ have ties to the attack.” It is not clear what Trump was referring to with regard to the Paris attack in 2015. (We will amend this item if evidence emerges to support Trump’s claims.)

THURSDAY, MARCH 21

Signing of executive order on campus speech

The claim: “And secretary of Health and Human Services, who has done a really great job — we have prescription drug prices coming down — first time in 51 years, so — Alex Azar. Thank you very much, Alex.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.”

FRIDAY, MARCH 22

Interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo (16 false claims)

The claim: “You look at what’s going on with respect to China, our deal is coming along very well; we’ll see what happens. But we’re taken in billions and billions of dollars for the first time ever against China in the form of tariffs.”

In fact: This is not the first time the U.S. has taken in billions of dollars in revenue from tariffs on China. For 2015, for example, the CNBC business network reported that revenue from tariffs on China was $14.4 billion. “Total tariffs collected came to $34 billion out of $2.2 trillion in imports, or about $100 for every person in the U.S., according to a CNBC analysis of data from the U.S. International Trade Commission. More than 40 per cent of the those tariffs already come from China,” CNBC reported.

The claim: “I think the WTO is terrible, also, by the way. I think that’s a really bad one. But we’re doing even better with WTO; we’re winning cases all of the sudden, because we never won cases, now we’re starting to win cases because they know my attitude. If they don’t treat us fairly we get out. And there’s a big difference there.”

In fact: As the publication Inside U.S. Trade reported, even Trump’s own Council of Economic Advisers acknowledges that it is not true that the U.S. “never won cases” at the WTO: “In fact, the U.S. has won the vast majority of cases it has brought at the WTO since its inception in 1995 — 86 per cent of them, according to the Council of Economic Advisers 2018 economic report, or 91 per cent, according to a Cato Institute count. The U.S. also loses at a lower rate than other members when cases are brought against it.” As is standard for the WTO, the U.S. tends to lose cases where a complaint is brought against it — but even in those cases, Trump’s advisers noted that it does better (25 per cent victory rate) than the world average (17 per cent) or China’s record (just 5 per cent). When Trump first made a version of this claim in 2018, Dan Ikenson, director of trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told the Star, “There is nothing to support the claim that the results have suddenly gotten better...The fact is that there hasn’t been any discernible changes in WTO decision making.”

The claim: “We’re doing a good job. We finished up at 3.1 GDP. Everybody — you know, that hasn’t been done in 14 years, maybe more than that, but 14 years. And I think we have tremendous momentum right now. And you’re right, the world is slowing, but we’re not slowing. And frankly, if we didn’t have somebody that would raise interest rates and do quantitative tightening, we would have been at over four instead of a 3.1.” And: “3.1 may be the best in 14 years; I’m not happy with it. We should have had much higher.”

In fact: GDP growth was 2.9 per cent by the traditional measure. To claim 3.1 per cent GDP growth, Trump was using an alternative measure that compares one quarter of the year to one quarter of the previous year; he compared the fourth quarter of 2018 to the fourth quarter of 2017. As the New York Times and Washington Post noted, this was not “the first time in 14 years” that there was 3.1 per cent growth using this quarter-to-quarter measure; in fact, it happened just four years ago, in 2015. The Post wrote: “Now that Trump is citing 4Q/4Q, that means the relevant comparison would not just be 4Q/4Q but other quarter-over-quarter calculations. The economy under Obama hit its peak in 1Q/1Q 2015, when it grew 3.8 per cent. Obama exceeded 3.1 per cent on two other occasions, as well.”

The claim: “When Germany is sending cars and we virtually don’t tax them, and yet they won’t accept our cars, namely the European Union — which frankly, treats us as badly as China.”

In fact: Though American cars tend not to be highly popular in Europe, it is not true that the European Union simply does not accept American cars. According to Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistical agency, auto imports from the U.S. to the EU peaked at €7 billion in 2016 (about $10.6 billion Canadian at current exchange rates) and were approximately €6 billion in 2017 (about $9 billion Canadian at current exchange rates). A bit later in this interview, Trump implicitly acknowledged that market demand is a major factor, saying, “The Chevrolet will never be accepted in Europe like the Mercedes is accepted here.”

The claim: “The numbers are just smaller by a lot — but you know, we lost, over the course of the last five, six, seven years, $150 billion a year with European Union.”

In fact: Ignoring Trump’s use of “lost” to describe a trade deficit, the U.S. has never had a $150 billion trade deficit with the European Union when both goods and services trade are counted. The U.S. had a $102 billion trade deficit with the European Union in 2017, according to U.S. government statistics; the $151 billion figure counts only trade in goods and ignores trade in services. The goods-only deficit increased to $169 billion for 2018, according to statistics released earlier in the month Trump spoke here, but the services data to be released later in the year are likely to bring even the 2018 deficit well below $150 billion.

The claim: “The numbers are just smaller by a lot — but you know, we lost, over the course of the last five, six, seven years, $150 billion a year with European Union. They don’t take our product.”

In fact: The U.S. does have a persistent trade deficit with the European Union, and the European Union does put up some trade barriers to U.S. products, but it is false to simply say “they don’t take our product.” The U.S. sold $319 billion worth of goods to the European Union in 2018, according to U.S. government statistics released earlier in the month Trump spoke.

The claim: “I have — the media is almost totally against me. And yet I won: 306 to 223; people can’t even believe it. I won.”

In fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip: it was the 22nd time Trump said “223” as president.

The claim: “Because I’m able to get the word out through my social media, because I have great social media — but I’ll tell you, it’s much tougher than it should be. I deal with Twitter. It’s not right the way they do it. I know exactly what they’re doing. They take people off my account. They make it very hard for people to join.”

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 very hard for people” to follow him.

The claim: Question: “But Mr. President, he’s dead, he (John McCain) can’t punch back. I know you punch back, but he’s dead.”Trump: “No. I don’t talk about it. People ask me the question. I didn’t bring this up. You just brought it up. You asked the question.” Question: “Well, you talked about it this week.” Trump: “You asked me the question. When I went out yesterday to the scrum — they asked me the question. When they ask me the question, I answer the question. But you people bring it up. I don’t bring it up.” And: “I just said, you brought up a question, Maria. I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t mention John McCain until you asked me a question about John McCain. Now I could say I have no comment, but that’s not me. But you shouldn’t have brought it up. Actually I thought you weren’t supposed to bring it up, but that’s OK. You know, fake news every once in a while.”

In fact: Trump was correct that his interviewer, Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, was the first one to bring up the late senator in this particular interview. But he was incorrect to generally claim, “I don’t talk about it. People ask me the question. I didn’t bring this up.” As reporter Maggie Haberman of the New York Times noted: “In fact, he inserted McCain in his tweetstorm on Sunday. No one had asked.” Trump had spoken at length about McCain during a speech at a tank plant in Ohio that week.

The claim: “I can tell you that a big portion of this nation is united like it’s never been united before. You look at our economy. You look at jobs. You look at African American — the lowest in the history of our country, unemployment numbers..You look at women; the best in 65 years — best numbers in 65 years.”

In fact: The women’s unemployment rate in May 2018 and September 2018, 3.6 per cent, was the lowest since late 1953. By the time Trump spoke here, however, the rate had increased to 3.8 per cent, tying the 3.8 per cent of December 2000, just 18 years prior.

The claim: “So I have a man who is a deputy, who I don’t know — who I didn’t know at all, and he appoints a man who had just left my office. I didn’t give him the job at the FBI, Comey’s his best friend...”

In fact: There is no evidence that the two former FBI directors are “best friends.” Though they do know and like each other, and though it is fair for Trump to argue that it is 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.” Also, Mueller has denied that he had a “nasty business transaction’ with Trump, an apparent Trump reference to Mueller’s departure from Trump’s golf club in Virginia. “Mr. Mueller left the club in October 2011 without dispute,” a Mueller spokesperson told the Daily Mail.

The claim: “Comey’s lying, all of the Brennan lying, the lies to Congress — and these are just absolute lies to Congress. Clapper lied to Congress. Nobody does anything. If somebody — they all say Flynn — I don’t (know) anything about what he said, but the FBI said he didn’t lie. Mueller said he did lie. So what’s that all about? And then they destroy a man who is a general and a respected man for many years. They’ve treated — we have been treated very, very unfairly.”

In fact: The Associated Press reported: “That’s not what the FBI said. And Flynn and prosecutors agree he lied to the FBI. The claim picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report this year that said Comey, in a private briefing, said that the agents who interviewed Flynn ‘discerned no physical indications of deception’ and saw ‘nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.’ But Comey described that description as a ‘garble’ in a private interview with House lawmakers last week. ‘What I recall telling the House Intelligence Committee is that the agents observed none of the common indicia of lying — physical manifestations, changes in tone, changes in pace — that would indicate the person I’m interviewing knows they’re telling me stuff that ain’t true,’ Comey said. ‘They didn’t see that here. It was a natural conversation, answered fully their questions, didn’t avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying.’”

The claim: “Now — and by the way, we’re building a lot of wall right now. You know that. We’re building the wall and it’s going up fast, big, strong, looks good, not the horrible thing that they were building before I got here. We’re building the wall now. We’re going to have a lot of wall built pretty soon. But if you don’t have that, you can’t have border security.”

In fact: None of Trump’s wall was under construction at the time. While it was true that some existing barriers had been renovated, zero new miles of barrier had been built. Construction appeared close to beginning on new wall in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, but Customs and Border Protection told us the week Trump started specifically talking about that project, the month prior to this remark, that only “vegetation clearing” had begun for that project.

The claim: “And we put up a lot of wall, like in San Diego — it’s so interesting, these California — so in San Diego, they’re begging me to do the wall. I end up doing the wall, and then I see the Governor of California criticizes me for the wall. They’re begging me to do it.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that San Diego begged him to build a border wall there. San Diego city council voted 5-3 in September 2017 to express opposition, and even the Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has stated that he is opposed: “Mayor Faulconer has been clear in his opposition to a border wall across the entirety of the U.S. southern border,” a spokesperson said in September 2017.

The claim: “You look at so many things that I’ve done for the veterans — choice, accountability; they never thought you’d have Accountability. You couldn’t fire anybody if they treated our vets badly. Now you have Accountability.”

In fact: As FactCheck.org reported: “It was possible for VA employees to be fired before Trump signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act in June 2017. That law does make it easier for the VA secretary to remove employees by shortening the firing process and expediting the appeals process for senior executives, among other things. But the VA was already terminating about 2,300 employees (for performance and disciplinary reasons) each fiscal year on average before Trump’s presidency going back to 2005.”

The claim: “I’ve been thinking about doing it (recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights) for a long time. It’s been a very hard decision for every president. No president has done it. They’ve all — this is very much like Jerusalem; moving the embassy to Jerusalem. I did that. And I fully understand why every — Clinton and Bush and Obama; everybody campaigned on Jerusalem and the embassy going to Jerusalem. I even got the embassy built, by the way, very inexpensively. But they all campaigned on it, they never did it, and I understand why. Because when I got elected, I also campaigned on it; when I got elected, I was inundated with calls from all over the world. The leaders, mostly the leaders saying, ‘Please, don’t do it. Don’t do it.’ I did it. And it’s been done and it’s fine. Golan Heights is the same thing. For years other presidents have campaigned; they said they’d do it. This is sovereignty, this is security, this is about regional security.”

In fact: It is not true that previous presidents campaigned on a promise to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which was seized by Israel from Syria in a 1967 war and effectively annexed by an act of the Israeli government in 1981. Trump was correct that previous presidents campaigned on promises to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, but not that the Golan Heights situation was similar. “It is a completely, utterly and fantastically different situation,” said Aaron David Miller, director of the Middle East program at Washington’s Wilson Center and a former longtime Middle East peace negotiator at the State Department. In fact, Miller noted, Israeli governments — including Netanyahu’s — and previous presidential administrations had long discussed the idea of Israel returning the Golan to Syria in exchange for security concessions from Syria. “It’s wrong for the president to assert that previous presidential candidates...campaigned to assert Israeli sovereignty over Golan.”

Twitter

The claim: “It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!”

In fact: The sanctions had been announced the day prior, not that day. The Treasury Department tweeted the day before: “Treasury designates two shipping companies for attempted evasion of North Korea sanctions.” Responding to that tweet, also the day before Trump’s tweet, National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted, “Important actions today from @USTreasury; the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices.”

Twitter

The claim: “3.1 GDP FOR THE YEAR, BEST NUMBER IN 14 YEARS!”

In fact: To claim 3.1 per cent growth, Trump was using an alternative growth measure that compares one quarter of the year to one quarter of the previous year; he compared the fourth quarter of 2018 to the fourth quarter of 2017. (By the traditional measure of real GDP growth, the 2018 growth rate was 2.9 per cent.) Some economists think that is a superior measure, so Trump wasn’t objectively being deceiving by using it — but he was being deceiving by saying this was the “best number in 14 years.” As the New York Times and Washington Post noted, this was not “the first time in 14 years” that there was 3.1 per cent growth using this quarter-to-quarter measure; in fact, it happened just four years ago, in 2015. The Post wrote: “Now that Trump is citing 4Q/4Q, that means the relevant comparison would not just be 4Q/4Q but other quarter-over-quarter calculations. The economy under Obama hit its peak in 1Q/1Q 2015, when it grew 3.8 per cent. Obama exceeded 3.1 per cent on two other occasions, as well.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 24

Remarks to reporters before Air Force One departure (2 false claims)

The claim: “So after a long look, after a long investigation, after so many people have been so badly hurt, after not looking at the other side — where a lot of bad things happened, a lot of horrible things happened, a lot of very bad things happened for our country — it was just announced there was no collusion with Russia. The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. There was no collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction, and none whatsoever, and it was a complete and total exoneration.”

In fact: Trump could fairly claim vindication, but he strays into inaccuracy when he claims “complete and total exoneration.” According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which had not been released in full at the time, Mueller did indeed exonerate Trump on the issue of collusion with Russia, finding that there was not evidence of involvement by Trump or his campaign in a conspiracy with the Russian government to affect the 2016 presidential election. But Barr explicitly said that Mueller declined to exonerate Trump on the issue of obstruction of justice: Barr quoted Mueller as saying that, on obstruction, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Trump could fairly argue that the absence of an explicit charge of obstruction is the same as an explicit exoneration in practical terms, but “complete and total exoneration” is clearly an exaggeration given that Mueller explicitly said he was not offering a complete and total exoneration.

The claim: “And it (the Mueller investigation or the Russia investigation more broadly) began illegally, and hopefully somebody is going to look at the other side. This was an illegal takedown that failed.”

In fact: There is simply no evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia is illegal. Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican appointed by Trump.

Twitter

The claim: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

In fact: Trump could fairly claim vindication, but he strays into inaccuracy when he claims “complete and total exoneration.” According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report, Mueller did indeed exonerate Trump on the issue of collusion with Russia, finding that there was not evidence of involvement by Trump or his campaign in a conspiracy with the Russian government to affect the 2016 presidential election. But Barr explicitly said that Mueller declined to exonerate Trump on the issue of obstruction of justice: Barr quoted Mueller as saying that, on obstruction, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Trump could fairly argue that the absence of an explicit charge of obstruction is the same as an explicit exoneration in practical terms, but “complete and total exoneration” is clearly an exaggeration given that Mueller explicitly said he was not offering a complete and total exoneration.