WASHINGTON—During U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the Mexican border last week, he criticized a variety of people for causing what he said was a “disaster” of an immigration policy.

One of them was a judge who doesn’t exist.

“The Flores decision is a disaster, I have to tell you. Judge Flores, whoever you may be, that decision is a disaster for our country,” he said. “A disaster. And we’re working on that.”

There is no “Judge Flores.” The Flores settlement, which governs the treatment of child migrants by the U.S. government, was related to a case involving a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador, Jenny Flores, who migrated to the U.S. in the 1980s.

Ignorance? An intentional attempt to convince Americans that a Latino judge was responsible for the country’s problems? We can’t know for sure. But his 2016 campaign, in which he accused a judge of bias against him solely because the judge was “of Mexican heritage,” makes it at least a little harder to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The president’s judge-invention was part of one of his most dishonest weeks in office, during which he also falsely claimed, among other things, that wind turbines cause cancer. (He attributed the claim, as he often does, to an unnamed “they.”) He made 102 false claims in all, making it the 11th-most-dishonest week out of 116 so far.

With 34 false claims, his speech to a Republican campaign fundraiser in Washington was the third-most-dishonest single event of his presidency, behind his March speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (60 false claims) and a 2018 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (36 false claims).

Trump is now up to 4,857 false claims for his first 808 days, an average of 6.0 per day.

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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, APRIL 1

Speech at White House justice reform event (3 false claims)

The claim: “Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in more than 50 years.”

In fact: The unemployment rate was not the lowest in more than 50 years. The latest rate at the time Trump spoke, for Feb. 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: “African-American unemployment is the lowest level in the history of our country right now. And that goes for Hispanic American, Asian-American.”

In fact: Trump was correct about Hispanic unemployment. He 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 March 2019 African-American unemployment rate of 6.7 per cent was indeed a record low. But Trump was incorrect about Asian-Americans, whose 3.0 per cent rate was higher than the rate during various periods of the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. In December 2006, for example, it was 2.4 per cent.

The claim: “And it’s been incredible. African-American income, by the way, and Hispanic American income is the highest level it’s ever been in the history of our country.”

In fact: Median African-American household income was $40,258 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau, down slightly from $40,339 in 2016, the last year of the Obama era and well down from the 2000 peak of (an inflation-adjusted) $42,348, according to the Associated Press.

TUESDAY, APRIL 2

Remarks at meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (12 false claims)

The claim: “The relationship with the Secretary General has been outstanding. And I think tremendous progress has been made. If you look — in fact, you showed me this originally, yourself — if you look at the charts and the different things, if you go back 10 and 15 years, and it’s a roller coaster ride down, in terms of payment. And since I came to office, it’s a rocket ship up.”

In fact: Defence spending by NATO members was not declining for 10 or 15 years before Trump took office. (Trump’s phrase this time, “a roller coaster ride down,” was less explicit than usual, but we took his claim to mean the same thing he always says about this: spending by NATO members was declining before his presidency.) Though it did decline between 2010 and 2014, it rose by 1.84 per cent in 2015 and 3.08 per cent in 2016, official NATO figures show.

The claim: “The relationship with the Secretary General has been outstanding. And I think tremendous progress has been made. If you look — in fact, you showed me this originally, yourself — if you look at the charts and the different things, if you go back 10 and 15 years, and it’s a roller coaster ride down, in terms of payment. And since I came to office, it’s a rocket ship up. We’ve picked up over $140 billion of additional money, and we look like we’re going to have at least another $100 billion more in spending by the nations — the 28 nations. We’re going to have — and that’s exclusive of the United States. We’ll have another $100 billion more by 2020 or a little bit into 2020. So tremendous progress has been made, and NATO is much stronger because of that progress.” And: “Like the media never gives me credit, but he gave me credit. Now we’re up to way over $100 billion, and it’s going to be a lot higher than that by the end of 2020.”

In fact: Trump’s numbers were immediately corrected by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who was sitting beside him. Stoltenberg said: “Because as you just mentioned, after years of cutting defence budgets, NATO allies have now started to invest more. And by the end of next year, they will have added $100 billion more into their defence budgets since you took office.” In other words: $100 billion between Trump taking office and the end of 2020, not $140 billion at present plus $100 billion to come.

The claim: “Well, I haven’t made that intention known. And I’m ready to close it, if I have to close it. Mexico, as you know, as of yesterday, has been starting to apprehend a lot of people at their southern border coming in from Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador. And they’ve — they’re really apprehending thousands of people. And it’s the first time, really, in decades that this has taken place. And it should have taken place a long time ago.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, this is not the first time in decades Mexico has apprehended thousands of migrants: “Mexico has deported Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans more than 2 million times since 2001.” It appeared that there had been an increase in Mexico’s number of apprehensions in the week before Trump spoke, but it is false that Mexico had not been doing a large number of apprehensions before.

The claim: “You know, Mexico has the strongest immigration laws in the world. There’s nobody who has stronger. I guess some have the same, but you can’t get any stronger than what Mexico has.”

In fact: Mexico does not have even close to the strongest immigration laws in the world, experts say. For example, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told the Star, “No, current Mexican immigration law is definitely not the strictest in the world. It tries to balance enforcement with a rights-based approach to migration.” Mexico liberalized its immigration law in 2011, decriminalizing the act of illegal immigration and granting migrants various rights, including the right to a legal process and to health care.

The claim: “Every time — and you won’t even believe this, Mr. Secretary General — you catch somebody that’s coming illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court. But we can’t bring them to a court because you could never have that many judges. So they take their name, they take their information, and they release them. Now, we don’t release too many. We keep them. It’s called ‘catch and keep.’ But you don’t have facilities for that. But you have to bring them through a court system. If they touch your land — one foot on your land: ‘Welcome to being Perry Mason. You now have a big trial.’”

In fact: “Too many” is subjective, but Trump’s administration was releasing people en masse at the time; he acknowledged in his next sentence that “you don’t have facilities” to hold the majority of asylum seekers. Regardless, Trump dishonestly omitted a key piece of context here. It is not true that “you have to bring them through a court system” merely “if they touch your land — one foot on your land.” Rather, it is people who make claims for asylum in the U.S. do have a right to a legal process. People who are simply caught trying to illegally immigrate can be deported quickly without any kind of trial.

The claim: “Every time — and you won’t even believe this, Mr. Secretary General — you catch somebody that’s coming illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court. But we can’t bring them to a court because you could never have that many judges. So they take their name, they take their information, and they release them. Now, we don’t release too many. We keep them. It’s called ‘catch and keep.’ But you don’t have facilities for that. But you have to bring them through a court system. If they touch your land — one foot on your land: ‘Welcome to being Perry Mason. You now have a big trial.’ So what they’ve done over the years is they release them into the United States and they say, ‘Come back in four years for a trial.’ And nobody comes back. I guess 1 per cent — 1 to 2 per cent, on average, come back. And nobody can understand why they come back. They’re the only ones that come back.”

In fact: It is not true that “nobody comes back” for their immigration court hearing. The Justice Department says 72 per cent of people showed up for their immigration court hearings in 2017. For asylum seekers in particular, it was 89 per cent. There is no group for which it was anywhere around 2 per cent. A 2017 report released by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, concluded that 37 per cent of people who were free pending trial did not show up for hearings over the past two decades. The author of the report, a former immigration judge, said the number was 39 per cent in 2016. In other words, even according to vehement opponents of illegal immigration, most unauthorized immigrants are indeed showing up for court.

The claim: “It is the worst, dumbest immigration system in the world. The Democrats could change it with one meeting. Everybody would agree. But they don’t want to change it because they don’t want to give the Republicans a victory. They don’t want to change it because they want open borders, which means crimes — and lots of other things coming in, including drugs. So we’ll see what happens. I think the Democrats — today, I spoke to a couple of them and they — all of a sudden, they’re changing because they’re seeing it really is a crisis.”

In fact: There was no evidence any Democrat had suddenly changed their mind on immigration; Trump has a habit of declaring that people had made dramatic confessions to him in private settings. Regardless, Democrats do not support open borders. They have backed various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “But, you know, we pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador as a combination. And what do they do? They don’t do anything for us...And they arrange — I mean, the thing that bothers me more than anything: They arrange these caravans and they don’t put their best people in those caravans. They put people in there that you don’t want to have in the United States. And we’re not going to have them in the United States. It’s very simple.”

In fact: Trump has presented no evidence that “the money doesn’t get there”; the State Department has previously touted the effectiveness of the U.S. aid money. Regardless, it is simply false that the governments of these countries “arrange” migrant caravans and that they deliberately put their countries’ bad apples into these caravans to dump them on the United States.

The claim: Question: “Why are you happy with Stoltenberg as the leader of NATO?” Trump: “I think he’s been a terrific leader. And I can just say, during my time — so it’s already amazing, two and half years — but we get along really well. And he made — his first statement was — we had our first meeting, and I think I got them to put up — the other countries, respectfully — 27 countries; put up the other 27 — $64 billion. Sixty-four billion. That’s a lot of money. And he went out and he said what a great job he did. A lot of people don’t like giving credit. Like the media never gives me credit, but he gave me credit.”

In fact: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in 2018 that the increase was $41 billion, not $64 billion, since Trump took office: “In fact, since President Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added an additional $41 billion to their defence spending.” Trump had previously claimed Stoltenberg had said $44 billion.

The claim: “Obamacare has been such a catastrophe because it’s far too expensive. It costs the people so much; they can’t afford it. And, of course, the premiums are very high: seven to eight thousand dollars on average. So you have to spend over $8,000 before you even hit. So, Obamacare has been bad.”

In fact: The average Obamacare premium is not “seven to eight thousand dollars” or “over $8,000.” According to Trump’s own administration, premiums declined in 2019 to an average of $406 per month, under $5,000 per year, for the benchmark second-lowest cost silver plan (SLCSP). Some individuals have premiums higher than $7,000, and the average for Wyoming was higher than $7,000, but it is not true that this is the overall average.

The claim: “My father is German. Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany.”

In fact: Trump’s father, Fred, was born in New York City, in the Bronx, in 1905. Fred’s father, Frederick, was born in what is now Germany.

The claim: “...so I have a great feeling for Germany. But they’re not paying what they should be paying. They’re paying close to 1 per cent, and they’re supposed to be paying 2 per cent. And the United States, over the years, got to a point where it’s paying 4.3 per cent, which is very unfair. And the U.S. GDP, especially under me — because the GDP has gone up so much, because it’s 4.3 of a much larger GDP. So we’re paying for a big proportion of NATO, which basically is protecting Europe.”

In fact: The U.S. does not spend 4.3 per cent of GDP on defence. It spent 3.5 per cent in 2017, according to an official NATO estimate issued in July 2018, and 3.4 per cent in 2018, according to the estimate released in March 2019, the month before Trump spoke here.

Remarks at expanded bilateral meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (2 false claims)

The claim: Over $100 billion in new defence spending by the end of, actually, I think, this year, but it could be 220 [sic]. But I think, by 2020, I think we’ll have at least another $100 billion spent by the allies, the other countries, the 27 countries outside of ourselves.”

In fact: We sometimes let Trump get away with “I think” statements, since they are expressions of opinion, but this one is different: he had just been told by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that there would be $100 billion in additional defence spending by NATO allies over the period from when he took office in 2017 through the end of 2020. That is what his prepared text appeared to say. Instead, he ad-libbed — stumbling a little — that he thought the $100 billion increase would happen by the end of this year. There was no basis for this assertion.

The claim: “So I just want to thank you very much for being here, Mr. Secretary General. It’s been an honor to work with you. I would like you to extend my thanks to all of the allies. They have really put up a lot more money than they have in the past. I was explaining inside that, if you looked at a chart — prior to our getting here — NATO’s spending was going way, way down. It was just a one-way road down. And since I became president, and with the help of Mike Pence and everybody — a lot of the people at this table — the difference has been tremendous. It’s been a rocket ship up, and we have to keep it that way. So thank you very much. And I will say — you mentioned Afghanistan. I think we’ve made a lot of great strides recently in Afghanistan. It’s — we call it the ‘endless war.’ Nineteen years. The real number is 19 years. It’s unfortunate. It’s ridiculous.”

In fact: The war in Afghanistan had lasted 17 years and 6 months at the time Trump spoke.

Speech to National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner (34 false claims)

The claim: “I did something for a man named Scooter Libby, who was not treated fairly in the eyes of many. I’ve heard this for many years, was not treated fairly. And Liz (Cheney) and her father — and they came out early for me. Actually, her father came out like almost immediately for me, and it was interesting because I didn’t know him. I liked him, I respected him, but I didn’t know him really. But he came out very early. It was a very important moment, actually, for me because who the hell was supporting me? Everyone thought I was just playing games, right? They said, ‘He doesn’t really mean this. He’s just having fun.’ You call this fun?”

In fact: Dick Cheney did not “almost immediately” endorse Trump. Trump launched his campaign in June 2015. Cheney declined to endorse Trump in a CNN interview aired at the beginning of September 2015, saying “I don’t know the man” and that he didn’t want to “be in the business of rating candidates.” In February 2016, Cheney said Trump sounded like a “liberal Democrat” with his criticism of the Bush administration over the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War. Cheney did endorse Trump just days after Trump informally secured the nomination in May 2016, but that, of course, was long after “everyone thought I was just playing games.”

The claim: “The stock market’s up almost 50 per cent. We’ve gotten rid of the great regulations.” And: “China is down 38 per cent, Kevin, because of tariffs, okay. See, look at Kevin. You’re not unhappy about that. And we’re up 50 per cent. And the world is not doing well. Europe is not doing well. Asia is not doing well. But we’re doing well. We’re setting records. We should have another record very shortly in the stock market. I think we have 22 Records, 22, where the stock market hit new highs, 22, 100 percent hours.”

In fact: Almost 50 per cent is a at least a slight exaggeration.The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up about 43 per cent from Trump’s inauguration day, the S&P 500 about 34 per cent.

The claim: “The stock market’s up almost 50 per cent. We’ve gotten rid of the great regulations.” And: “China is down 38 per cent, Kevin, because of tariffs, okay. See, look at Kevin. You’re not unhappy about that. And we’re up 50 per cent. And the world is not doing well. Europe is not doing well. Asia is not doing well. But we’re doing well. We’re setting records. We should have another record very shortly in the stock market. I think we have 22 Records, 22, where the stock market hit new highs, 22, 100 percent hours.”

In fact: From the date of Trump’s inauguration, China’s primary stock market, in Shanghai, was down a mere 1 per cent. From its Trump-era peak in January 2018, it was down about 13 per cent per cent. The Shenzhen index was even from Trump’s inauguration, 15 per cent from its Trump-era peak in November 2017.

The claim: “You know, we ran on a theme, ‘Make America Great Again.’ And a lot of people are saying that may have been the greatest theme ever in politics. I think it is that. And it wasn’t — Ronald Reagan had a small thing called, ‘Let’s Make America Great.’ That was good. I don’t like it as much. And he sure as hell didn’t use it as much.” And: “You know, Hillary had a thing like ‘Stay Together’ or some crap like that. I think she paid $1.9 million for the genius that gave her the line. I can honestly tell you I didn’t pay. That was made up by me. That was made up by me.”

In fact: Trump claimed he “made up” the slogan “Make America Great” again shortly after acknowledging that Ronald Reagan had a near-identical slogan. Even the Reagan part was inaccurate: Reagan used “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump omitted the “Again.”

The claim: “We doubled the Child Tax Credit and we virtually ended the unfair Estate Tax, also known as the Death Tax on small businesses and farms. I tell people when I’m in farm country, I said, ‘You know, now if you have a farm -’ they used to leave it and the kids would have to go out and borrow a lot of money because they make an income but it’s hard. The land is sometimes worth more than the income. And they go borrow money at the end up losing it to a bank a couple of years later. It’s — not going to be worried about any longer. Now they don’t have the death tax. they don’t have what’s known as the estate tax. We got rid of it. Kevin did that with a whole group of very good people. And that’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. People are very happy.”

In fact: Trump did not eliminate the estate tax, “virtually” or otherwise. His tax law merely raised the threshold at which it must be paid. Also, it is highly misleading to suggest that the estate tax is 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: “But we really have to be strong with these nations because these nations are taking advantage, not just China, everybody has a trade surplus on us — almost every nation in the world.”

In fact: The U.S. does not have a trade deficit with “everybody.” While the U.S. has a substantial overall trade deficit — $566 billion in 2017 — 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: “But we really have to be strong with these nations because these nations are taking advantage, not just China, everybody has a trade surplus on us — almost every nation in the world. When I took over we lost eight — I said, ‘How are we doing on trade? I want to break down,’ my first meeting. They said, ‘Sir, we’re down $807 billion.’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding?’ No, seriously, I thought they were joking, right? We were down $807. We’re losing over $800 billion in trade. We’re starting to turn it.”

In fact: The U.S. trade deficit was $502 billion in 2016, counting trade in both goods and services. Counting only trade in goods, as Trump usually does, it was $751 billion (or slightly less, depending on what method you use.) There is no sign that Trump is “starting to turn it around,” though perhaps he was merely promising improvements in the future. The deficit hit a record $622 billion in 2018.

The claim: “Canada’s sending us tremendous numbers of cars. They’re practically un-taxed, and yet they don’t take our agricultural product, in many cases, and in many cases they charge 297 per cent tariffs and it’s very unfair. Canada’s very, very tough. You know, we love Canada. We think of the beautiful song and the ice hockey games, O Canada, isn’t it beautiful? But in the meantime, they knock the hell out of us on trade and they have been doing it for a long time. And they’re very tough. And they’re not at all nice about that situation. But we’ve made them nice. We’ve made them nice. And they’re not happy about what happened. But our farmers are going to be able to sell now into Canada, which they were restricted from doing and — and they’re going to be able to sell into a lot of places.”

In fact: It is not true that Canada simply doesn’t “take our agricultural product.” In fact, according to Trump’s own Department of Agriculture, Canada was the number-one market for U.S. agricultural exports in 2017, with $20.5 billion in purchases. Though Canada does indeed have major trade barriers protecting its dairy and poultry industries from U.S. products, its “supply management” of those industries is not representative of how it treats agriculture as a whole.

The claim: “And they’re (China) getting hurt badly with the — you know, they’re paying 25 per cent on $50 billion worth of technology stuff and they were going to pay 25 per cent on another $200 billion. But I started them at $10 because I’m nice. And then we were dealing well, this was three, four weeks ago. You remember. And they said, “Would it be possible for you not to raise the 10 per cent to 25 per cent?” which would automatically kick in? I said, ‘Yes,’ because you know it’s a little hard when we’re negotiating with them when we start raising it. But after that, they have $340 billion left that I haven’t even taxed, and their bullets are gone because we do $600 billion worth of purchases from them, and they do $97 billion worth of purchases from us. Not exactly great.”

In fact: Trump’s numbers were off. According to the U.S. government, China imported $120 billion worth of U.S. goods in 2018, not “$97 billion.” The U.S. imported $540 billion worth of Chinese goods, not $600 billion. (This data excludes trade in services.)

The claim: “One thing, as an example, on cars, if they (China) sold a car to us we bring it in for no tax. It’s 2.5 per cent, but basically, when you do certain paperwork and check the wrong boxes you pay nothing. It’s stupid. When we buy a car from them, and we buy a lot of them, believe it or not, it’s a 40 per cent tax. So they get 40 per cent, we get nothing, other than that it’s been a very good deal.”

In fact: Trump’s numbers are correct, but his assertion that the U.S. does not even collect its 2.5 per cent auto tariff on China is not. The U.S. has always collected the 2.5 per cent tariff on the small number of cars imported from China, two trade experts and one expert on the automotive industry told Factcheck.org.

The claim: “The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. And that all happened over the last two years.”

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: “The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. And that all happened over the last two years. Big difference. Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you — if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations your house just went down 75 per cent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You told me that one. OK.”

In fact: There is no good evidence that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. (Some people have indeed alleged that turbines cause all sorts of ailments, so Trump was not wrong when he said “they say,” but the underlying assertion is false.)

The claim: “But I told a story about CPAC, the woman, she wants to watch television and she says to her husband, ‘Is the wind blowing? I’d love to watch your show tonight, darling. The wind hasn’t blown for three days. I can’t watch television, darling. Darling, please tell the wind to blow.’ No, wind’s not so good.”

In fact: Increasing the use of wind power would not cause television outages; Clinton did not propose moving to 100 per cent wind, as Trump has repeatedly suggested. President Trump’s claim is misleading at best. No one is suggesting that the wind alone would supply all the electricity in any large electricity network,” said James Manwell, professor and director of the Wind Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It could supply a very large fraction, however, with no adverse impacts, and moreover wind could, together with solar photovoltaics and other renewables, supply increasingly larger fractions of our total energy (not just electricity supply) as we progressively modernize our electrical networks, incorporating smart load management and some energy storage, and more fully integrate renewables based electricity into the energy supply for heating, transportation and manufacturing.”

The claim: “No, wind’s not so good. And you know, you have no idea how expensive it is to make those things. They’re all made in China and Germany, by the way, just in case you — we don’t make them here, essentially. We don’t make them here.”

In fact: It is not true that “all” wind turbines are made in China and Germany. James Manwell, professor and director of the Wind Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that while “the center of manufacturing” is now indeed in Europe, “one of the major manufacturers in the world today is General Electric, which is based in the U.S. Furthermore, even in the case of wind turbines whose manufacturers are based elsewhere (Vestas, Siemens, etc.) many of the most expensive components (blades, towers, etc. ) are in fact made in the U.S.” GE, for example, has wind manufacturing plants in Arkansas and North Dakota.

The claim: “You know, highways, Elaine Chao is doing a great job, by the way, as our Secretary. Great job. But highways, in many cases, would take 20 or 21 years to get approved. Think of it. In some cases, not even a highway, it’s like a roadway. And I have a down now to two years. We got rid of so much of the waste and the stupidity. And you know, a lot of this happened because of consultants, environmental engineers, they call themselves...so we took down highways from, in many cases 20 years, till probably — we want to get it down to one year and then maybe get rejected but you’ll get it rejected quickly. You’re going to know.”

In fact: While some controversial and complicated infrastructure projects may have taken 20 or 21 years to get approved, there is no basis for Trump’s suggestion that this time frame was standard. The Treasury Department reported under Obama: “Studies conducted for the Federal Highway Administration concluded that the average time to complete a NEPA (environmental) study increased from 2.2 years in the 1970s, to 4.4 years in the 1980s, to 5.1 years in the 1995 to 2001 period, to 6.6 years in 2011.” After a change of methodology, it was 3 years and 9 months in 2015, 3 years and 8 months in 2016. Further, there is no current evidence that Trump has already succeeded in reducing the standard approval time frame to two years, although he says this is his intention. His Department of Transportation reported a median approval time of 3 years, 10 months in 2017.

The claim: “And we did something else with Greg and with everybody, we passed Choice for our military, Choice...And we pass VA Accountability. So not only VA Choice. VA Choice. They’re standing in line for weeks and weeks in many cases, weeks and weeks, think of it. And now, rather — these are great veterans. They stand on line, and now they go, they see a doctor, we pay for it. It doesn’t matter. Number one, we do save money. It doesn’t matter. We’re saving lives. People are ill. By the time they get to the doctor they are terminally ill. And we’re saving lives.”

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: “So we have in one case, Choice, we have another, Right To Try. And I don’t know if the people know what even Right To Try — I kept saying to myself, as I was a civilian — you don’t want to use it. You don’t want to use it. But I’ve had friends over the years, they’re very ill, terminally ill. And if they have money they travel all over the world looking for a cure. If they don’t have money they go home and there’s nothing they can do. And Right To Try, which Greg and everybody was so incredible with, and we got it done, right?”

In fact: Trump was exaggerating how dire the situation was before this Right to Try legislation passed. It is not true that there was “nothing they (could) do” with regard to obtaining access to experimental medications. Rather, they simply had to ask the Food and Drug Administration for approval first. While many patients objected to this requirement, which the Trump-backed new legislation removed, the FDA approved 99 per cent of all patient requests, the Trump-appointed head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, testified to Congress in October 2017. The Government Accountability Office confirms: “Of the nearly 5,800 expanded access requests that were submitted to FDA from fiscal year 2012 through 2015, FDA allowed 99 per cent to proceed,” the GAO wrote in a July 2017 report. “FDA typically responded to emergency single-patient requests within hours and other types of requests within the allotted 30 days.” Further, the new law will not help the patients whose requests for experimental treatments have been rejected by drug companies themselves, which Trump himself noted was a problem. The legislation does not compel the companies to provide access. Finally, Yahoo News reported the month Trump spoke that only two patients had gained access to treatment through the legislation to date; it was not clear if either of them were “getting better.”

The claim: “And Right To Try, which Greg and everybody was so incredible with, and we got it done, right?...We have saved lives already and this is only seven months ago that we signed it.”

In fact: Trump signed the Right to Try bill more than ten months prior to this speech, in March 2018.

The claim: “But Accountability is great, where if they treat our veterans badly — we have now Accountability. We say, ‘Get the hell out of here. You’re fired.’ We fire them. You couldn’t fire him. They could steal. They could be sadists. They were sadists. They were hurting our veterans. We couldn’t do anything about it.”

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: “And thanks to our bold agenda, we enacted with House Republicans, America now has the hottest economy anywhere in the world. We’re the hottest in the world.”

In fact: Hottest is subjective and vague, but there does not appear to be an objective basis for this hyperbole. The U.S. economy grew at a modest 2.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2018, and it grew by 3.0 per cent in 2018 by the measure preferred by Trump. Numerous other countries had significantly higher growth rates.

The claim: “We’ve done more things than we promised. Many more things. Like this one, African-American unemployment, Hispanic American unemployment, Asian-American unemployment, and you know this because you’ve heard me say it and other people say it, and veteran unemployment, that’s a great one, have all reached the lowest rates ever recorded in the history of our country. I mean, how do you beat that? When they talk about African-American and what they want to do, I say, ‘Well, I have not much to say, except that we’ve just hit the absolute lowest unemployment rate for African-Americans in the history of our country. That’s all I have to say. Goodbye, everybody.’ We won the debate, right? We won the debate. It should be easy.”

In fact: Trump was correct about Hispanic unemployment and 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 March 2019 African-American unemployment rate of 6.7 per cent was indeed a record low. But Trump was incorrect about Asian-Americans, whose 3.0 per cent rate was higher than the rate during various periods of the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. In December 2006, for example, it was 2.4 per cent.

The claim: “We’ve done more things than we promised. Many more things. Like this one, African-American unemployment, Hispanic American unemployment, Asian-American unemployment, and you know this because you’ve heard me say it and other people say it, and veteran unemployment, that’s a great one, have all reached the lowest rates ever recorded in the history of our country. I mean, how do you beat that?”

In fact: The 2.9 per cent veterans unemployment rate for March 2019 was exceptionally low but not a record. The rate hit 2.3 per cent in 2000.

The claim: “And I said to Mexico last week — you know, they have the strongest immigration laws in the world.”

In fact: Mexico does not have even close to the strongest immigration laws in the world, experts say. For example, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told the Star, “No, current Mexican immigration law is definitely not the strictest in the world. It tries to balance enforcement with a rights-based approach to migration.” Mexico liberalized its immigration law in 2011, decriminalizing the act of illegal immigration and granting migrants various rights, including the right to a legal process and to health care.

The claim: “Somebody touches our land, we bring them into court, you need Perry Mason to represent them. They’re here for years. They never come back for the trial. They say, ‘Let’s bring them into court. We’ll bring them in. Well, you just stepped on a property. Bring them in. Be gentle. Bring them into court.’ And it’s called catch and release. It may be the dumbest program in the history of the world. You catch them and you release them. Oh, wonderful. We’ve done a great job. And then, ‘You’re going to come back, sir, in four years from now. January 14th, you’re going to come back and we’re going to give you a trial to see whether or not you can stay. But in the meantime, we’re releasing you into our country.’ Now, only two per cent come back for the trial. OK. And those are not the smartest ones, to be honest with you. The ones that come back or not the smartest ones. The 98 per cent are much more than the two per cent that come back. It’s terrible.”

In fact: It is not true that only “two per cent come back” for their immigration court hearings. The Justice Department says 72 per cent of people showed up for their immigration court hearings in 2017. For asylum seekers in particular, it was 89 per cent. There is no group for which it was anywhere around 2 per cent. A 2017 report released by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, concluded that 37 per cent of people who were free pending trial did not show up for hearings over the past two decades. The author of the report, a former immigration judge, said the number was 39 per cent in 2016. In other words, even according to vehement opponents of illegal immigration, most unauthorized immigrants are indeed showing up for court.

The claim: “They (Mexico) don’t have visa lottery, a lottery. You pick a lottery. ‘Oh, you’re going to the United States. Congratulations.’ The country does this. Do you think they put their best people in those lotteries? What the hell were you people thinking when you approved these deals? They say in all fairness, it is purely — that’s a Chuck Schumer deal. That was when they had enough muscle. They got this stuff passed. It’s incredible. Think of it. They put names and you pick a name. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to announce so and so’ — I don’t want to use names because I’ll get in trouble because it’s always somebody going to leak this whole damn speech to the media — to the fake news — so I won’t use the name that I’m thinking about. ‘Congratulations.’ And then you find out he’s a stone-cold killer, served many years in — these are the people they give us. What do you think? Do you think they’re going to give us their finest? They don’t give us — and we take them in, ‘Congratulations.’”

In fact: This is, as usual, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s claim that foreign countries “put” unwanted citizens into the U.S. lottery, would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will, because they want to immigrate. The people whose names are picked are subjected to an extensive background check, and the U.S. government does not accept anyone with convictions for serious violence, let alone “stone-cold killers.”

The claim: “Crazy CNN, they had a reporter, they’re walking up — I mean, how bad — I mean, how bad. Now they’re saying, ‘We were never against him with respect to collusion. We were just reporting the news.’ Did you see that? That’s their new theory? You know, that they weren’t — in other words, that they were fair. Yeah, they were fair. But they’re interviewing this group of people, ‘And what are you coming to the United States for?’ A woman says, ‘Well, I’m coming for my daughter.’ ‘Okay, that’s fair.’ ‘What are you coming -’ Then they go to this man, a little rough looking, ‘And what are you coming for?’ ‘Asylum.’ ‘Ah. Why?’ ‘I murdered someone.’ ‘Oh.’ The woman goes like, ‘What? You murdered.’ Did anybody see that? ‘I murdered someone,’ he said. Right? You saw it. And she’s like, ‘Oh, man. Okay, back to headquarters, please.’ You know, because they’re trying to say how good everybody is, that these are wonderful people.”

In fact: We could not find evidence of any such interview on CNN. Trump appeared to be twisting a Fox News interview to which he had previously referred, in which a member of a migrant caravan told a reporter that he had previously been convicted of attempted murder.

The claim: “Now, I’m only afraid that we’re going to be too hard on the Green New Deal and they’re not going to do it, because I want them to do it. We don’t want to have them knock it out before we get to run against it so let’s take it easy. I’m — I’m actually saying, ‘It’s a wonderful thing.’ The Green New Deal, done by a young bartender, 29 years old. A young bartender, wonderful young woman, the Green New Deal. You know, but it’s crazy. You know, the first time I heard I said, ‘That’s the craziest thing.’ You have senators that are professionals that you guys know that have been there for a long time, white hair, everything perfect, and they’re standing behind her and they’re shaking, they’re petrified of her, ‘We support the Green New Deal.’ How about the woman from Hawaii, the senator from Hawaii — highly nice woman, right? Oh, I’m glad I didn’t say it. I’m going to get great points from my wife for not saying that — but she was so angry to men, right? Remember, she was screaming at men? And — and then they asked her about the Green New Deal. ‘I love it.’ They said, ‘Yeah, but you don’t allow airplanes anymore so you can’t get to Hawaii.’ ‘Oh, we have to work on something.’ So somebody jokingly said, ‘We’ll build a train to Hawaii,’ and she actually thought it was a decent idea. So now she supports it because she thinks they’re going to build a train to Hawaii.”

In fact: This is not at all what happened. It is not true that Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono thought or thinks that there might be a train to Hawaii. 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: “It’s true. And just to finish up, and — and this is so important, and — and you know, I’m doing this almost as let’s get together and talk because we have to win. We have to take back the House. We have to. There’s no reason to have lost it. And what really lost it and really helped us lose it was health care because we didn’t have an alternative. We just said, ‘Well, let’s not talk — ‘ Somebody came out the other day, they asked a Republican, two weeks ago, health care and he turned off the mic, “Well, I’m going home now.” You can’t do that. You got to confront it. We’ll be the party of health care. Republicans should not run away from health care.”

In fact: We couldn’t find any evidence that there was an interview “two weeks ago” in which a Republican was asked about health care and he “turned off the mic” and declared he was going home. We’ll amend this item if we get new information.

The claim: “But now it’s gotten worse. Because this maniac, the governor from Virginia, he comes up and says, ‘Now the baby is born. And you wrap the baby gently and then you talk to the mother and dependent on what the mother says you execute the baby.’ Can you imagine, whoever heard of it? I never even heard of this one. I’ve heard of ninth month, which is horrible. I’ve heard of fifth month and fourth month, but this is the baby is now born and the mother will make a decision as to whether or not that baby will be, essentially, executed. And he said that. He said that.”

In fact: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam did not say that; 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 say he would execute a baby.

The claim: “Democrats are the party of high taxes, open borders...”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have backed various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “I went to Iraq. I stayed in the White House for almost four months. The only time I left was to go to Iraq. I’ll tell you, if you have to get cabin fever, getting cabin fever in the White House is still a good place.”

In fact: Trump did not remain in the White House for “almost four months” before his trip to Iraq in December 2018. Earlier in December, he gave a speech in Kansas City, Missouri and went to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy football game. He was in Argentina on November 30 and December 1 for a G20 summit in Argentina. Also in late November, he held two campaign rallies in Mississippi. Earlier in November, he spent nearly a week at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Just before that, he visited California in response to wildfires there. He traversed the country in October and early November to campaign in the midterm election.

The claim: “And we flew over with brand new F-18s, Super Hornets, and they’re going 2,000 miles an hour over and over for two days. And I said, ‘Do these people (ISIS) ever like wave the flag? Do they ever surrender?’”

In fact: The F/A-18F Super Hornet has a top speed of about 1,400 miles per hour.

The claim: “When I first came here, Iran was going to take over the Middle East and there was no stopping him. And I took out of that deal. I terminated that deal and they have gone to hell. That’s a different country. They have riots. Their economy is collapsed. It was a horrible, stupid deal. We gave them $150 billion and they used it to fight us.”

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: “And I recognized the capital of Israel and we opened the American embassy in Jerusalem for a $1 billion under budget: $1 billion under budget. We were going to spend $1 billion to build it. I got it done for $400,000. Think of that. So I saved $1 billion.”

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.”

THURSDAY, APRIL 4

Meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (3 false claims)

The claim: “Well, I think a trade deal with China is good for the world. It’s good for us and China, but it’s good, also, for the world. I think it’s very important. And we’ll see if it happens. We’ve never done a deal like this with China. And it’s a very unique set of circumstances. But it’s a massive deal. It could be one of the — I guess it is, if you think about it, the biggest deal ever made. There can’t be a deal like this — no matter where you look, there can’t be a deal like this. This is — this is the granddaddy of them all.”

In fact: A Trump trade agreement with China would not be even close to the biggest trade deal ever made. (Even if you ignore the fact that the two countries are not negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, merely trying to resolve particular areas of dispute.) The U.S. did more than $1.5 trillion in trade with the countries that were part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership signed under Barack Obama in 2016; according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. does about half that with China, with $710 billion in total two-way trade in 2017.

The claim: “We’re not going to allow it. What’s happened on our southern border is a disgrace. And Mexico has brought people back. They’ve told people, ‘You can’t come in.’ And that’s happened, really, over — they’ve done, as I understand it, over a thousand today, over a thousand people yesterday, over a thousand people the day before. Before that, they never did anything. So if we don’t — and they have the strongest immigration laws — as strong as there is anywhere in the world.”

In fact: Mexico does not have even close to the strongest immigration laws in the world, experts say. For example, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told the Star, “No, current Mexican immigration law is definitely not the strictest in the world. It tries to balance enforcement with a rights-based approach to migration.” Mexico liberalized its immigration law in 2011, decriminalizing the act of illegal immigration and granting migrants various rights, including the right to a legal process and to health care.

The claim: “We’re not going to allow it. What’s happened on our southern border is a disgrace. And Mexico has brought people back. They’ve told people, ‘You can’t come in.’ And that’s happened, really, over — they’ve done, as I understand it, over a thousand today, over a thousand people yesterday, over a thousand people the day before. Before that, they never did anything.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, this is not the first time in decades Mexico has apprehended thousands of migrants: “Mexico has deported Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans more than 2 million times since 2001.” It appeared that there had been an increase in Mexico’s number of apprehensions in the week before Trump spoke, but it is false that Mexico had not been doing a large number of apprehensions before.

Remarks at meeting of Opportunity and Revitalization Council (5 false claims)

The claim: “It’s got to be great. Look, we’ve been losing, over many years, four, five, six hundred billion dollars a year. We’re losing, a few years ago, two hundred, routinely, to China. We can’t do that. We’re going to turn it around. It’s got to be a great deal. If it’s not a great deal, we’re not doing it. But it’s going very well. Top officials are here. And, you know, we’re very well along on the deal. It’s a very complex deal. It’s a very big deal. It’s one of the biggest deals ever made. Maybe the biggest deal ever made.”

In fact: A Trump trade agreement with China would not be even close to the biggest trade deal ever made. (Even if you ignore the fact that the two countries are not negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, merely trying to resolve particular areas of dispute.) The U.S. did more than $1.5 trillion in trade with the countries that were part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership signed under Barack Obama in 2016; according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. does about half that with China, with $710 billion in total two-way trade in 2017.

The claim: “...Mexico has the strongest immigration laws anywhere in the world.”

In fact: Mexico does not have even close to the strongest immigration laws in the world, experts say. For example, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told the Star, “No, current Mexican immigration law is definitely not the strictest in the world. It tries to balance enforcement with a rights-based approach to migration.” Mexico liberalized its immigration law in 2011, decriminalizing the act of illegal immigration and granting migrants various rights, including the right to a legal process and to health care.

The claim: “We have a stupid system of courts. It’s the craziest thing in the world. We could be the only country that has it. If you put a foot on the property, you put a foot into the United States: ‘Congratulations. Go get Perry Mason to represent you.’ You end up with a court case. And then they release you, and you come back four, five years later but nobody comes back. Two per cent come back. The not-so-smart ones come back. It’s the most ridiculous system anyone has ever seen.”

In fact: It is not true that only “two per cent come back” for their immigration court hearings. The Justice Department says 72 per cent of people showed up for their immigration court hearings in 2017. For asylum seekers in particular, it was 89 per cent. There is no group for which it was anywhere around 2 per cent. A 2017 report released by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, concluded that 37 per cent of people who were free pending trial did not show up for hearings over the past two decades. The author of the report, a former immigration judge, said the number was 39 per cent in 2016. In other words, even according to vehement opponents of illegal immigration, most unauthorized immigrants are indeed showing up for court. Also, while no country has a system precisely like the American one, it is not true, of course, that the U.S. is the only country that affords due process to asylum seekers. 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.”

The claim: “The wall is under construction, by the way — large sections. We’re going to be meeting, I think, on Friday at a piece of the wall that we’ve completed, a big piece. A lot of it is being built right now. A lot of it is being signed up right now by different contractors. It’s moving along very nicely. But we need the wall, but we need lots of other things.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, nor was Trump visiting new wall that Friday. Trump was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

The claim: “Mexico has the strongest immigration laws anywhere in the world.” And: “They can stop them right at their southern border, right where they come into Mexico. And they have unbelievable immigration laws where they have the right to do it. The most powerful in the world. As good as you can have. And they’re going 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.

Twitter

The claim: “According to polling, few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax, but some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive. They should focus on legislation or, even better, an investigation of how the ridiculous Collusion Delusion got started — so illegal!”

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.

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Twitter

The claim: “The New York Times had no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal, concerning the Mueller Report. In fact, they probably had no sources at all! They are a Fake News paper who have already been forced to apologize for their incorrect and very bad reporting on me!”

In fact: There was no evidence that the Times invented its sources. In addition, the Times was not “forced to apologize” to Trump, nor did it apologize at all. 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.”

FRIDAY, APRIL 5

Twitter

The claim: “Heading to the Southern Border to show a section of the new Wall being built! Leaving now!”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time. Trump was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

Twitter

The claim: “Will soon be landing in Calexico, California to look at a portion of the new WALL being built on our Southern Border.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time. Trump was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

Twitter

The claim: “Just checked out the new Wall on the Border — GREAT! Leaving now for L.A.”

In fact: Trump visited a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

Remarks at visit to border fencing in Calexico, California (2 false claims)

The claim: “So, behind us is the wall. That’s the new wall. We’ve done a lot of it, and we’re doing a lot more. You see it over here. This is, unfortunately, a protection that I guess you need, because you don’t know who’s on the other side of the border. I hope it works. This is just a concrete protector. But the wall behind it — and you see it all the way down, and we’re going to be building — we’ve already built a lot of it. It looks great.”

In fact: Trump was not standing near “new wall.” He was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

The claim: “No, no. No, you know what’s interesting about California: They’re begging me for the wall in San Diego. You know what. Because the people were pouring through in San Diego, going over the front lawns, going into people’s houses. So they want the wall done in San Diego. And we did it, and then you hear they don’t want the wall. They want the wall. If you ever took it down — they wanted that one so badly, and we did it. We did a great job. We stopped everybody virtually — actually, everybody from coming over. It was a tremendous success. But California is always the first one to complain. And I don’t mean the people of California; they’re fantastic...But when the wall — they want the wall in San Diego but then they’re always — they’re always the first one. So they were the first one to pull the National Guard, and they need the National Guard, especially in California.”

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.

Remarks at border roundtable on visit to California (7 false claims)

The claim: “Thank you all very much. It’s a great honor. And I’ll be here many times. We’re building a lot of wall. We’re going to look at a piece of it today. And I was just told it had a tremendous — it’s had a tremendous impact already — the piece that we’re going to be looking at. But we have — under contract and under construction — we have a lot of things happening.” And: “We’re now going over to look at the new section of wall. And we have a lot of it going up.” And: “And I think what I’d like to do is — while we’re on that subject, General, if you could just give a little detail of the wall that’s under construction, what we’ve built, where we’re going, because the press never likes to talk about it. They don’t like to talk about what we’ve done. It doesn’t fit their narrative, but we’ve done a lot. We’ve renovated a lot and we’re building a lot. And maybe you could give a little summation of that now.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, nor was Trump looking at new wall that day. Trump was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

The claim: “I just want to thank everybody for being here. We have some of our great, great people from the state. And of all places, it’s California. And we love California. But those people wanted us to build wall and we got it built — including the wall in San Diego, which is pretty much completed and it’s had a tremendous impact.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that San Diego asked or 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. Both the former California governor, Jerry Brown, and the current governor, Gavin Newsom, are Democrats who oppose the wall, and polls suggest California residents have been overwhelmingly opposed. A September 2017 poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, for example, found that 73 per cent of California adults were opposed.

The claim: “And I’ll tell you, we’re really making progress in letting people know that this is an absolute emergency. I see that some of our biggest opponents, over the last two days, have said, ‘You know what? It really is an emergency.’ They can’t believe what’s happening.”

In fact: There was no evidence that any of Trump’s “biggest opponents” had just had a sudden epiphany and come over to his position.

The claim: “I also want to state that there is indeed an emergency on our southern border. It’s been loud and clear. We’re in court and a lot of people aren’t even bringing too many of the suits anymore. A lot of people are going to bring the suit; pretty hard of them to say there’s not an emergency. We have a big emergency at our southern border.”

In fact: Trump’s claim was confusing, but it is not true that there are not multiple lawsuits against Trump’s emergency declaration. In mid-March, two weeks before Trump spoke, CNN reported, “So far, at least seven lawsuits have been filed challenging the declaration. The argument at the core of each lawsuit is similar: Trump exceeded his authority and circumvented Congress in an attempt to achieve his signature campaign promise for an emergency that, plaintiffs argue, doesn’t exist.” One suit was filed by 16 states, one by El Paso County, Texas, one by the Sierra Club and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The claim: “So, as I say, and this is our new statement: The system is full. Can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, it’s illegal immigration. We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around. That’s the way it is.”

In fact: Trump could make a reasonable argument that the U.S. asylum system is full; U.S. immigration authorities report that their facilities and capabilities have been swamped by the recent surge of families and unaccompanied minors. But it is obviously false that the United States as a whole is “full.” As the New York Times noted: “Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.”

The claim: “If you look at our southern border, the number of people and the number of the amount of drugs, human trafficking — the human trafficking is something that nobody used to talk about. I talk about it. It’s a terrible thing. It’s ancient and it’s never been bigger than it is — modern, right now, today. All over the world, by the way, not just here. All over the world. Human trafficking — a terrible thing. And they come into the areas of the border where you don’t have the wall. They don’t come through your points of entry. They come into areas where you don’t have the wall. And they make a left, or they make a right. They come right into the country — loaded up with people, in many cases. And it’s pretty sad.”

In fact: Experts say many human trafficking victims do enter the U.S. through legal ports of entry, on visas, after being deceived into thinking they are coming to a good job or loving relationship in the U.S. “It is far easier to lure victims with false promises of a better life in the United States,” said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center. “Why kidnap someone when you can convince them to travel willingly?” FactCheck.org reported: “The United Nations’ International Organization on Migration has found that ‘nearly 80% of international human trafficking journeys cross through official border points, such as airports and land border control points,’ based on 10 years’ worth of cases on which the IOM has assisted.”

The claim: “The Flores decision is a disaster, I have to tell you. Judge Flores, whoever you may be, that decision is a disaster for our country. A disaster. And we’re working on that.”

In fact: There is no “Judge Flores.” The Flores settlement, which governs the treatment of child migrants by the U.S. government, was related to a case involving a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador, Jenny Flores, who migrated to the U.S. in the 1980s.

Interview with Fox News’s Griff Jenkins (9 false claims)

The claim: “Oh Griff, we can change these laws in 15 minutes. I could change them. Catch and release. You know what that is. Democrats you catch the person you take their name and you release them. OK? And we’re not doing that anymore. And it’s just a horrible thing.”

In fact: It is not true that the government is, under Trump, “not doing release” of people who cross the border without authorization. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, responding to the Star on behalf of the agency, said that approximately 84,500 migrants from “family units” were released between December 21, 2018 and March 5, 2019: 37,500 in San Antonio, 24,000 in El Paso, 14,500 in Phoenix, 8,500 in San Diego. The official said, “The current volume of family units crossing the border combined with limited transportation resources, time restrictions on families in government custody, and finite space at family residential centers have all contributed to the current state of events.” The official added: “ICE is releasing families to NGOs that provide assistance with immediate basic needs such as temporary shelter, food, water, clothing and transportation services.” As ICE explained, the U.S. government cannot simply detain families indefinitely; Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, noted that about 60 per cent of the people crossing in the first five months of this fiscal year were families or unaccompanied minors. “Basically, the U.S. is compelled by U.S. law and court decisions to release a lot of immigrants who are coming these days,” she said. Trump himself said earlier in March that “we want to end catch-and-release,” not that he had already ended it.

The claim: “Chain migration. where you come in and you have hundreds. You have a lot of people come in with you: your mother your father your uncle your aunt your grandmother your grandfather your brothers and sisters and I mean we had a case where somebody that as you know, radical Islam, he ran somebody, ran many people down on the West Side Highway in New York. You know it well. And killed eight people, wounded, horribly injured 12 people. I mean missing arms and legs. And he has many people under chain migration, many of his relatives have come in with him. It’s crazy.”

In fact: Trump has not shown any evidence that Sayfullo Saipov brought in anybody at all through the family-based “chain” system. Saipov was a legal permanent resident (a green card holder) who could have brought in a spouse and children under 21 years old, but he did not have any to bring in; he got married to a woman already in the U.S. and had children in the country.

The claim: “Chain migration. where you come in and you have hundreds. You have a lot of people come in with you: your mother your father your uncle your aunt your grandmother your grandfather your brothers and sisters and I mean we had a case where somebody that as you know, radical Islam, he ran somebody, ran many people down on the West Side Highway in New York. You know it well. And killed eight people, wounded, horribly injured 12 people. I mean missing arms and legs.”

In fact: Nobody lost an arm in the attack; the Associated Press reported that one woman, a Belgian tourist, lost two legs. The commissioner of New York’s fire department offered corroboration, saying the attack led to one double amputation.

The claim: “And then of course you have the lottery, visa lottery, where they pick them and they pick people. And these countries aren’t giving us their finest, OK. They’re not giving us their finest. I’m not going to say they give us their worst, but you know, why wouldn’t they.”

In fact: “Why wouldn’t they” give us their worst people is nonsensical; foreign governments make no decision at all. Contrary to Trump’s claim that they”give us” people through the U.S. visa lottery, would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will, because they want to immigrate.

The claim: “So we have to get rid of these things and we can have it so easy. What has happened though and you’ve seen it is Mexico now, for the first time, is apprehending people and bringing them back.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, this was not the first time Mexico had apprehended migrants: “Mexico has deported Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans more than 2 million times since 2001.” It appeared that there had been an increase in Mexico’s number of apprehensions in the week before Trump spoke, but it is false that Mexico had not been doing a large number of apprehensions before, let alone that Mexico had never done apprehensions at all.

The claim: Question: “So let’s address that. How would you put a tariff (on Mexican-made cars) when your own agreement precludes that?” Trump: “We haven’t finished our agreement yet. So I’ll put that in there. I’m going to put it in there.”

In fact: It was not true that “we haven’t finished our agreement yet.” As Griff Jenkins, Trump’s interviewer from Fox News, told him, Trump’s administration had already entered into an agreement with Mexico that effectively exempts Mexico from any future auto tariffs (by exempting the first 2.6 million cars from tariffs even though the U.S. imports fewer than 2 million). The agreement came into force in 2018.

The claim: “I’ve already stopped the money: we pay them over $500 million. Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and others. We stopped the money. Some people would say, ‘Oh you should give them more money.’ The Democrats say give more money. They’re forming caravans to get people out...And you know what they’re not putting the best people in those caravans, OK? But they’re forming caravans, they’re putting people in, they’re sending ‘em up. You know it better than anybody. You know what’s going on.”

In fact: There was no evidence for Trump’s repeated conspiracy theory that the governments of these three countries are “forming caravans, they’re putting people in, they’re sending ‘em up” in order to get rid of unwanted citizens. Migrants decide on their own to leave their home countries.

The claim: “The country is full. We have — our system is full. We can’t do it anymore.”

In fact: Trump could make a reasonable argument that the U.S. asylum system is full; U.S. immigration authorities report that their facilities and capabilities have been swamped by the recent surge of families and unaccompanied minors. But it is obviously false that the United States as a whole is “full.” As the New York Times noted: “Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.”

The claim: “Well I think what happened is I’ve proven to be right. If we were able to build the wall — now I’ve gotten the money for the wall. And you take a look at this, I hope you’re covering it, because we have miles and miles of it being built right now. Hundreds of miles are under construction.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time. Trump was visiting a 2-mile stretch of replacement fencing in Calexico, California, 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 deserves some flexibility on the concrete part, we say, but not on the where-there-had-not-previously-been-barriers.) Trump began claiming in 2018 that replacement fences are “new wall” and part of his broader wall project, but even the Border Patrol originally said this Calexico project was not part of Trump’s wall. David Kim, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the El Centro sector, pointedly told the Desert Sun newspaper in February 2018 that the Border Patrol proposed the replacement project in 2009. He explained: “We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time” — so that, he said, “there is no confusion about whether... this is tied to some of the bigger immigration debates that are currently going on.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 6

Twitter

The claim: “’The lowest average jobs number for any President since 1951, 4.1%. Economy doing great. If the Democrats win, it is all over.’ @Varneyco @foxandfriends I agree!”

In fact: As noted by Matthew Gertz of the liberal media-watchdog group Media Matters for America, Trump was combining and misstating separate quotes uttered on this Fox News show. Jedediah Bila said that the new March jobs report “brings the average unemployment rate for the first 26 months of Trump’s presidency to 4.1%, the lowest average rate of any president dating back to 1953 when the data was first consistently recorded.” That’s 1953, not 1951. Later, Stuart Varney said, “ If the Democrats win in 2020 this is all over.”

Speech to Republican Jewish Coalition (19 false claims)

The claim: “We won in Georgia, great Governor Brian Kemp. They had President Obama, they had Oprah, they had Michelle Obama. They were going for their new star, their new star of the party, and I was going for Brian. All he had was Trump. You know what, Brian won.”

In fact: Michelle Obama did not visit Georgia to campaign for Kemp’s opponent Stacey Abrams. She did not campaign for Abrams at all, a spokesperson for Barack Obama said.

The claim: “And the governor of a great state, known as Ohio, you have a great governor. He was not expected to win. He campaigned brilliantly. We did some incredible rallies. He won by almost seven points, he won easily. So Mike is great.”

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 “almost seven points.”

The claim: “America’s economy is the hottest anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.”

In fact: Hottest is subjective and vague, but there does not appear to be an objective basis for this hyperbole. The U.S. economy grew at a modest 2.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2018, and it grew by 3.0 per cent in 2018 by the measure preferred by Trump. Numerous other countries had significantly higher growth rates.

The claim: “Since the election, we’ve created more than 5.5 million new jobs, including 600,000 manufacturing jobs.”

In fact: More than 5.5 million new jobs since the election? Yes, though Trump was taking credit for the final months of Obama’s presidency. Six hundred thousand manufacturing jobs? No. Between November 2016, the month of the election, and March 2019, the economy added 480,000 manufacturing jobs.

The claim: “After years of stagnation, wages are rising fast. Think of it, people had one job 21 years ago. They made more money in real dollars than they did two years ago, with three jobs, and two jobs, and now, for the first time, they have a choice, our economy so strong. They can have a choice of jobs and wages are going up, first time in many, many years.”

In fact: While some individual workers’ wages had obviously been declining before the Trump era, average 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: “Our unemployment has reached the lowest level in more than 50 years and we will be breaking that record, I believe, pretty soon.”

In fact: The unemployment rate was not the lowest in more than 50 years. The latest rate at the time Trump spoke, for Feb. 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: “We have so much stupid trade. We lost, for many years now, $800 billion a year on trade. Who the hell makes these deals?”

In fact: The U.S. trade deficit was $621 billion in 2018 and $566 billion in 2017, and it had never previously been $800 billion for a year. (Trump habitually ignores trade in services when he talks about trade deficits, choosing the number that refers only to trade in goods. The U.S. had a goods-trade deficit of $810 billion in 2017, $891 billion in 2018.)

The claim: “We’ve ended the war on American energy and the United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world, bigger than Russia and bigger than Saudi Arabia, can you believe that? Can you believe that? Three years. Thank you very much.”

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: “And we’ve confirmed more than 100 new federal judges to interpret the Constitution as written.”

In fact: It was 91 judges as of that date, said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointment

The claim: “We always have to be in the lead and thanks to our focus on burden sharing, 100 billion more dollars, will be coming this year to NATO, think of that.”

In fact: This exaggeration was contradicted earlier in the week by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, while sitting beside Trump, “Because as you just mentioned, after years of cutting defence budgets, NATO allies have now started to invest more. And by the end of next year, they will have added $100 billion more into their defence budgets since you took office.” In other words: $100 billion between 2017 and the end of 2020, not $100 billion “this year.”

The claim: “We always have to be in the lead and thanks to our focus on burden sharing, One hundred billion more dollars will be coming this year to NATO, think of that. Other countries, in certain instances, were getting an almost free ride. We protect them and they’re delinquent. You know, I used a real estate term for George Klein. He understands it. He understands. We were delinquent. They were delinquent. I said, ‘You got to pay.’ President Obama got — made a nice speech, but he forgot to mention you got to pay. President Bush was wonderful, they didn’t mention, you got to pay and you got to meet it, not just mentioned you got to mean it. I said you got to pay, because we’re in a position.”

In fact: Both Obama and Bush pushed NATO allies to spend more on defence. As CNBC reported: “In 2006, then-president Bush used a NATO summit in Latvia to pressure allies to increase their defense spending at the height of the U.S.-led NATO military campaign in Afghanistan. Two years later, he used his final NATO summit to do the same thing. ‘At this summit, I will encourage our European partners to increase their defense investments to support both NATO and EU operations,’ Bush said at the opening of the 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania. ‘America believes if Europeans invest in their own defense, they will also be stronger and more capable when we deploy together,’ he said. And despite the many differences between Bush’s foreign policy and that of Obama, his successor, one thing the two leaders agreed upon was the need for more defense spending from NATO allies. For Obama, the issue of NATO defense spending became especially important during his second term, when Russia’s arming of separatists in Ukraine and subsequent annexation of Crimea in 2014 stunned the West. ‘If we’ve got collective defense, it means that everybody’s got to chip in, and I have had some concerns about a diminished level of defense spending among some of our partners in NATO. Not all, but many,’ Obama said at a press conference in Brussels in March 2014, less than a week after Russia declared that Crimea was now a Russian state.” Obama also pressed Canada to increase it spending. In a 2016 speech to Parliament, he said, “ As your ally and as your friend, let me say that we’ll be more secure when every NATO member, including Canada, contributes its full share to our common security. Because the Canadian armed forces are really good — and if I can borrow a phrase, the world needs more Canada. NATO needs more Canada. We need you. We need you.”

The claim: “The $100 trillion Green New Deal, proposed by a wonderful young bartender, 29 years old, 29. No, I like her, she’s 29 years old. ‘We take trains to Europe, Hawaii and Australia.’ That’s a problem. The farming business is in big trouble, right. The auto business: you get one car. Somehow Detroit et cetera, you know, I’m bringin’ so many car companies in. I don’t think they’re going to be thrilled to hear that.”

In fact: Nothing in Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal, of which 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a leading proponent, said that people would be limited to “one car” or that there would be “trains to Europe, Hawaii and Australia.” Trump appeared to invent the “one car” claim out of thin air; the text of the Green New Deal resolution merely called 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.” Trump’s jab about air travel had at least some basis: a Green New Deal “FAQ” page posted on Ocasio-Cortez’s website called 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 (which Ocasio-Cortez’s office quickly deleted), just the official resolution, which said nothing of the sort.

The claim: “We’re built — I tell you what, when you look at what’s happening with the car companies, they’re opening up in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and South Carolina, it’s amazing, what’s happening, we want to keep it going.”

In fact: There are no automotive assembly plants in Pennsylvania at all.

The claim: “They have a visa lottery, Democrats, a visa lottery, a lottery, countries, a lottery. You pick out a name. Do you think they’re putting their finest? Do you think they’re putting their great people there? No, and then people come in and you see what happens with the crime and murders.”

In fact: This is, as usual, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s claim that foreign countries “put” unwanted citizens into the U.S. lottery, would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will, because they want to immigrate. The people whose names are picked are subjected to an extensive background check.

The claim: “Catch and release: you catch ‘em and you release ‘em. Oh, that’s wonderful. If they put one foot on our territory, if they start climbing a fence and they’re on the Mexico side. ‘Welcome to the United States.’”

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. We say Trump strays into falsehood when he makes it sound as if anyone attempting to illegally immigrate must be welcomed into the country.

The claim: “We’ve started building walls — actually, a while ago, from the first $1.6 billion and renovation of a lot of walls, we can do that a lot cheaper. We had walls that were potentially very good, but they were in very bad shape, they were old, we renovated it. We have got a tremendous amount, we’re going to put out list, but we will have hundreds of miles before the end of next year. Hundreds of miles. And yesterday I traveled to the border in Calexico, California, and I saw a section of brand new 30-foot high steel wall, you want to be able to see through it. Got to see through it, got to see who’s on the other side, beautiful wall, looks great, looks great. Walls build good neighbours, right.”

In fact: Construction on Trump’s border wall had not started. It is true that some existing fences have been renovated, but not that new wall has been built. The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 was not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump had long proposed: spending on that kind of wall was expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction. What Trump saw in Calexico 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 deserves some flexibility on the 