This trumpusk administration is first of all, not civilized. And if it were, it wouldn’t make any difference. vladimir putin and the money laundering trump aligned russian oligharchs, want to destroy America’s Constitutional Democracy, just at they’ve destroyed their own nation. And trump and a large number of MAGANAZI republi-cons in our congress are paid operatives of this fascist, evil, autocratic cabal. WTFU merica www.tarbabys.com
John Hanno: trump, musk, vance and their billionaire cabinet are rewarding the ultra rich, and predatory investors and corporations who elected them and who are pushing for a deep recession so they can buy up homes and businesses for pennies on the dollar. Protect your homes and savings. Curtail spending to the very basics. Pay down credit cards. Start a victory garden this spring. And protest, protest, protest, when they try to turn our National Parks and public lands, over to fossil fuel interests and when they allow them to pollute our air and water. WTFU America. www.tarbabys.com
trump, musk and the republi-cons couldn’t care less about American’s jobs
John Jerome – March 4, 2025
Today’s challenge.. access the major trade bills and let me know which party advocated for offshoring.. which party said Americans aren’t entitled to a job, simply because they’re American’.. I’ll wait patiently….oh, by the way.. the vast majority of manufacturing sectors that have been destroyed by the race to the bottom..? They aren’t coming back.. just be prepared to pay more.. The time to deal with the disparity with tariffs has passed.. strategic tariffs are not broad based tariffs.. let’s hope this trade war will be short lived
I lived through 5 manufacturing plant closings. The only ones fighting for us were the Democrats. John Hanno
The long and winding political campaign road is ending (we hope) on the doorsteps of the 60th U.S. Presidential Election. This is only my 16th, my first was just after I joined the Army. But I would wager no other election in our history will compare to 2024’s, in length, breadth, cost or more importantly, historical consequence.
Most clear thinking voters refuse to believe pollsters, who claim this is way, way, too close to predict. They insist it will again come down to the smallest percentage of voters in a handful of states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada they say, hold the keys to the White House, and the fate of the Republic.
The residents of those swing states have suffered the brunt of the $16 billion onslaught of political ads. Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance floodgates sprung wide open to Corporate and special interest quid pro quo. This judicial abomination of the First Amendment has inflicted America with endless campaigning, astronomical expenditures and a potentially violent polarization. Too many MAGA faithful predict a Civil War on steroids, unless Trump is returned to his ordained position as their White Christian Savior and President.
But I’m not ready to give up on the American Experiment. I honestly and reasonably believe Kamala Harris could get between 6 and 15 million more popular votes that trump. The electoral congress is a bit uncertain, but the Dem’s should prevail; by how much depends on disaffected true Conservative Republicans. I believe the Democrats could take back the House of Representatives, and have an even chance at retaining the U.S. Senate. Hope springs eternal. Polling yesterday revealed a three point lead for V.P Harris, in Iowa of all states. And I like Colin Allred’s chances in Texas at last. The Democrats as usual, have enlisted highly qualified, intelligent, committed and honorable candidates across the country. The republi-cons have insisted on election denying, unthinking, dimwitted, sycophantic cult followers of trump Inc. Inquiring minds have to wonder why people who hate government and governing principles, run for positions running the government. I guess the answer is obvious.
OnSeptember 29, 2023 – Sarah Pruitt, a writer and editor based in New Hampshire wrote:
“The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart”
“Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.”
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
‘“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”’
“George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamiltononce called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”’
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
“In George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation, Washington and Hamilton worked closely together on the address, which took the form of a public letter to the American people. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. The letter included three main principles:”
1. Importance of Unity:
“After opening with an explanation of his choice not to seek a third term, Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole. “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,” Washington declared. “The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.”
“Regions such as North, South, East and West should see their common interests rather than their differences, he continued. “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty and…the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
“According to Washington, one of the chief dangers of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism, or the development of competing political parties. When Americans voted according to party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, Washington feared it would foster a “spirit of revenge,” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“In fact, political parties had already begun to emerge by the time Washington stepped aside. Federalists, who drew their support largely from New England, advocated a strong national government and the fiscal programs created by Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Republicans (later Democratic-Republicans) led by Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, opposed Hamilton’s economic policies. They also split with the Federalists in foreign policy, favoring a closer relationship with France over Great Britain.”
“Washington supported Hamilton’s financial programs and sided with the Federalists in supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain. By the end of his presidency, Washington was weathering increasingly bitter attacks from his Republican critics, and his farewell address represented his response to such attacks, as well as a more general statement of his principles.”
3. Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
“Just as regionalism would lead to the formation of political parties, Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially in commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
“Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergencies, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Sarah Pruitt, Updated July 6, 2023
Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be stunned and appalled at the current state of our multi-billion dollar campaigns and political divide.
“Consider, for example, that after a wealthy 25-year-old man named George Washington, in 1757, bought “$195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election,” the Virginia Legislature enacted a law prohibiting candidates, “or persons on their behalf,” from giving voters “money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision . . . any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.”
That historic guard rail hasn’t dissuaded Elon Musk from pledging to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, just for signing on the dotted line, and purportedly to vote for his BF Trump.
“Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole.”
But Trump’s first and foremost principle, is to divide America into MAGA’s and everyone else. To pit his faithful against the others. To demonize immigrants, in spite of two of his wives and in-laws being recent immigrants. And most recently, to scare the bejesus out of as many American’s as possible, on the dangers of immigration from non-Christians.
Washington warned:The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
It’s blaringly obvious that Trump and his myriad of sycophantic MAGAnians, are not loyal to the Republic or to our Democratic institutions, they’re government hating bomb throwers.
Washington feared:Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
But in this ever dangerous and fractured world, with growing numbers of anti-Democratic, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic and fascist regimes, NATO, the Indo-Pacific Alliance and other international pacts are necessarily more important than ever.
Unfortunately, trump and his followers are more aligned with leaders he admires and is clearly envious of; trump regards Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, and Nicolás Maduro as great world leaders to be applauded and emulated.
Trump, cowardly and treasonous Republi-cons in Congress, Musk and other billionaire MAGA benefactors, and the millions of MAGA, hate filled sheeple, and most importantly, a majority of extreme right supreme court justices, have failed American Democracy on all three of Washington’s governing principles.
The MAGA Republi-cons in the U.S. Senate could have stopped trump, at any time in his 5 year reign of Anti-American terrorism, and then failed to convict him at his two impeachments. The supreme court could have reigned in trump, instead, they gave him free rein to subvert the Department of Justice’s attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes and also ruled to allow him to commit even more consequential malfeasances if he’s returned to the White House.
Numerous journalists and news organizations have attempted to shine a light through the trump smoke-screen of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and countless lies he used to subvert, the Grand Old Party, the conservative movement and MAGA-ward Christians. We know what trump accomplished in his first term. Above all, he attempted to overthrow our Democracy and Democratic institutions, and hired government hating, self-serving like-minded operatives to turn over federal and state power to the rich and powerful, to fossil fuel and extractive benefactors and to enemies foreign and domestic. No opportunity to enrich himself and his friends and family was left untapped. And we know what trump and the MAGA republi-cons in congress would inflict on America and the world if they get control of the White House and the congress. More on the order of massive budget busting tax cuts for the ultra-rich and tax dodging corporations, 80% of which will go, as before, to the top 1%.
But a second trump administration will be operating in “Katie bar the door” territory, thanks to the SCOTUS.
MAGA operatives published their plans in a 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides.
FactCheck.org®A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center enlightens: “Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”
“It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”
“The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.”
“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.
Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)
“The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.”
“As for other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”
“One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.”
“For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.”
“For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.”
“The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.”
“Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.”
“The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.”
I would personally like to thank all the critical thinking patriots – journalists, activists, fact based news organizations and others, for helping America to think critically about who’s attempting to turn our Democratic Republic over to anti-Democratic autocrats, self-serving kleptocrats, theocrats, misogynists, white national racists and fascists. They’ve gallantly tried to help turn the page on America’s trump presidential nightmare.
Hundreds of true conservative, Eisenhower and Regan Republican party faithful, who’ve been driven out of the party, or fled for their lives, have advocated for and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this consequential election. There are Republican’s for Harris, scientists for Harris, historian’s for Harris, Puerto Rican’s for Harris, Dad’s for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Mom’s for Harris and probably dozens that I haven’t heard about.
Some, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and others, have went further and endorsed Democrats running against election denying trump apologists and January 6th sympathizers in congress. Many tens or hundreds of thousands have resigned themselves to vote against their long lost party. Virtually everyone who worked for trump in his administration have declared they would refuse to endorse or vote for trump in 2024.
trump, fearing another lost election, has become more unhinged from political reality. The MAGA rally lies and campaign promises have become more outrageous by the day. The twice impeached, 4 times indicted, thrice convicted felon, can’t help but envision himself spending time in a federal prison at the ripe old age of 80. If he loses, odds are favoring him fleeing the country before the Justice Department overcomes the $100 million dollars he’s spent trying to subvert a just reckoning. Also if he loses the election, the campaign faithful piggy-bank will dry up and he’ll be forced to spend his own dwindling wealth on his many legal defenses.
trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes darker and more ominous by the day. Aside from immigrants eating cats and dogs, something that should not even be repeated, trump blames immigrants for every crime, malady, immorality, and unfairness imposed on real white Christian citizens.
Kamala, on the other hand, preaches joy, inclusion, unity and optimism. Her message is somehow getting through the right-wing MAGA-phones, republi-con congressional treason and obfuscation, foreign interference, social media conspiracies, and trump’s fantasized, Democratic dystopian future.
Although Jeffrey Preston Bezos, American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, decided to block a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, most of the Post’s journalists have voiced their choices in the election, through their reporting and writings. “Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” It’s too bad that More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the paper. Don’t blame the messenger.
I, on the other hand, am not afraid of endorsing Kamala and Tim to bring America back from the abyss. I’m a Veteran who served my country for 3 years in the Army, in a nuclear missile artillery battalion. We had our missiles aimed at the Soviets and they had theirs aimed at us. I think I fell asleep 60 years ago, just woke up and nothing has changed. We’re still butting heads with the Russkies. We were required to have secret clearances to serve in our Pershing unit. We had monthly seminars from intelligence officers on the necessity of protecting secrets and documents, especially when we were out in public. We couldn’t even have a camera near the military Kaserne. They found a camera on one soldier and we never heard from him again. It shocks myself and fellow veterans how trump abused the national trust by illegally taking highly classified government secrets and documents from government intelligence agencies, and then refusing to turn them over when ordered by the courts, and also by recklessly storing them in a public bathroom. A president who betrays his country and his oath of office should not be returned to the White House. I can’t believe how any Veteran could vote for trump.
As a member of a dozen or so unions and working in manufacturing and construction, I vote for the folks who valiantly fought to stem the flight of manufacturing jobs offshore. Those were all Democrats, including Joe Biden, Three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats. The republi-cons in congress greased the pathways and fought for tax incentives for corporations to offshore high-paying middle class jobs.
trump and J.D. Vance have already proposed trying to overturn the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administrations Chips and Science Act. “The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion. The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China.
“When the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022, it had bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both political parties hailed the law’s importance for reviving US chip-making capacity in the face of China’s growing influence in the semiconductor sector.”
“But in the final days of this presidential election cycle, the law has become a point of contention between the political parties, putting its future in doubt.”
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who voted against the CHIPS Act, drew criticism after suggesting he would consider repealing the program under the Trump administration
“Analysts estimated that the act incentivized between 25 and 50 separate potential projects, with total projected investments of $160–200 billion and 25,000–45,000 new jobs.”
How can any laborer, union member or otherwise, vote for trump and his anti-labor supporters in congress, who overwhelmingly vote against labor issues at every chance.
President Biden, Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and the Democratic party as a whole, are strong supporters of labor and labor unions.
The Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have always, and will always fight for women’s reproductive freedom and the right to make their own healthcare decisions, and to have access to safe and legal abortions. Harris wants to restore Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion up until the time of fetal viability or about 22 weeks. The vast majority of voters agree with her; 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact.
If trump and his MAGA Christian supporters regain control of the White House, a national abortion ban will be at the top of their to-do lists.
For all these reasons, and the fact that trump is the absolute worst, most vile inhabitant of the White House in U.S. history, I believe the Democrats and Kamala Harris will prevail in this election and will be able to turn the page on this ugly and divisive period in our history. As she says, we’re not going back. I just hope that a large resounding victory, might force the republi-cons to alter their anti-Democratic mind set.
So where does that leave the MAGA republi-cons and the unholy, un Christ-like prosperity Christians who went all in on trump’s campaign of grievance, revenge and retribution? They ignored the hundreds of red flags, the habitual lies, the rampant self-serving, the crimes, the indiscretions, the flagrant immorality, and the daily un-presidential conduct. Millions of true and faithful conservative Republicans have fled the party, or the party has left them in it’s toxic wake. Are there enough influential, authentic, conservative Republican’s like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others, capable of resurrecting the Grand Old Party, or it it destined for the waste bin of history.
trump, Christian Nationalists, and MAGAnians in congress, believe scaring their faithful out of their wits, and holding together their coalition of disaffected, grievance based bro-crew faithful is enough to win trump a second term and keep him out of prison.
$170 million has already been wagered on this election, an abomination causing the founding fathers to turn over in their graves. Who will lose their political shirts.
I believe they’re wrong on all counts. The others, and especially women in every town and burb, in every corner of the nation are not settling for returning to the dark ages of female subjugation and purgatory. The women of America might just save the Republic.
Omnipotent SCOTUS bows to the Court of King Donald
John Hanno – July 4, 2024
I’m astonished, on this Independence Day 2024, the near 250th anniversary, of America’s Founding Father delegates of the Second Continental Congress declaring the original Thirteen Colonies emancipated from the Monarch of Great Britain, King George III., at having to rationalize SCOTUS’s irrational political proclamation, returning subordination of America’s Democratic experiment back to a now unfettered, kleptocratic, facist minded, autocratic King.
The Mighty Oz has spoken. Six extreme right justices of the highest court in the land have shown their true colors. They clearly believe 250 years of American jurisprudence is suspect, and that our elected legislative branch’s of government can’t be trusted to fashion unbiased laws, that large segments of our judicial branch’s of government can’t be trusted to rule fairly and without favor, that the Democratic Institutions which have served us dependably for many decades, can’t be trusted to dispense scientific and reasoned judgments, that the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees Freedom of the Press, is just more proof of a deep state conspiracy, that disaffected members of the Rockefeller, Eisenhower, Regan conservative Grand Old Party can’t be trusted to engage in bipartisan governance, and that pro choice women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, environmentalists, gun rights and labor advocates, teachers and librarians, the secular and non christians, all can’t be trusted on anything, and that large majorities of We The People, who are at loggerheads on dozens of critical issues, with this new trump conscripted MAGA cult, with the rich and powerful, and with SCOTUS itself, can’t be trusted.
The uncompromising SCOTUS answer to litigants who seek justice and reasoned deliberation from the Court, and who sometimes kneel in prayer on the steps of the Supreme Court building, begging for help, is:
“You’ve no power here! Begone, before someone drops a house on you too!”Wizard of Oz
This Court’s rulings; sometimes applying originalist or textualist interpretations, sometimes not, sometimes narrow, sometimes expansive, sometimes quick, sometimes slow, sometimes follow The Doctrine of Stare Decisis, but only if it suits them. These consequential decisions, more often than not, render unprecedented and confusing views of the U.S. Constitution, and are befuddling to common folks and legal scholars of every stripe alike.
They might advocate for Fundamental Rights, for corporations yes, but seldom for the less powerful. It’s almost as if they’re taking directives from wealthy, fawning benefactors expecting quid pro quo from justices, or from powerful political party leaders and operatives bent on undermining both the Constitution and our Democracy. Pandering to the rich and powerful, no matter how convoluted in reasoning and no matter how demented or suspect the litigant, is not beyond the courts ability to excuse the un-American and un-Democratic conduct of a demented citizen suffering a boggled mind. One would think that judges who aren’t accountable to anyone, or to any set of rules, who have lifetime jobs, would not be intimidated by the person who hired them.
“As for you, my fine friend, you’re a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You’re confusing courage with wisdom.” — The Wizard of Oz
The 6 far right Supreme Court Jesters (SCJOTUS) have now putinized the Presidency of the United States. trump was always envious of putin and Kim Jong’s luxury of ruling as Kingly monarchs unconstrained by rules, laws, precedent, integrity, equity, honesty, human decency, and above all, the truth. Toss in the express ability to break any of our mortal laws, including retribution and exacting revenge on any perceived member of one’s enemy’s list, and having been granted the capability of disappearing a political rival, and America’s Democracy is no longer the model for the world to aspire to.
“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy
Justice Sotomayor Dissented:
“Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.
“Sotomayor said that the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, invents “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.””
“Their ruling, she went on, makes three moves that she said “completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability.” Sotomayor said the court creates absolute immunity for the president’s exercise of “core constitutional powers,” creates “expansive immunity for all ‘official acts,'” and “declares that evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play no role in any criminal prosecution against him.””
“Orders are nobody can see the Great Oz! Not nobody, not nohow!”— Doorman
Sotomayor warned that the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy” and that it sends the message: “Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”
She added, “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
In her own written dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the majority’s ruling “breaks new and dangerous ground.
“Departing from the traditional model of individual accountability, the majority has concocted something entirely different: a Presidential accountability model that creates immunity—an exemption from criminal law — applicable only to the most powerful official in our Government,” she wrote.
“These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell.”Wicked Witch of the West
Jackson warned that under the majority’s “new Presidential accountability mode,” a hypothetical president “who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics…or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup…has a fair shot at getting immunity.”
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” — The Wizard of Oz
Chief Justice Roberts rebukes the 3 liberals on the court, suggesting that his three liberal colleagues had misinterpreted the majority’s opinion and were engaging in “fear mongering.” Roberts argued that they “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today.” He wrote that “like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity.”
“My goodness, what a fuss you’re making! Well naturally, when you go around picking on things weaker than you are. Why, you’re nothing but a great big coward!” Dorothy
A Biden campaign adviser, on the other hand, said that the ruling doesn’t change what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Donald Trump snapped after he lost the 2020 election and encouraged a mob to overthrow the results of a free and fair election,” the adviser said. “Trump is already running for president as a convicted felon for the very same reason he sat idly by while the mob violently attacked the Capitol: he thinks he’s above the law and is willing to do anything to gain and hold onto power for himself.”
The twice impeached ex president trump, four times indicted by grand juries, convicted on 34 felony counts, awaiting 3 additional trials on scores more felonies for attempting to overturn the 2020 election and overthrow our government, and for stealing top secret confidential documents, was found guilty of rampant fraud personally and in his business, was also found guilty of sexual assault and libel, has so far escaped being held accountable for his 6 years long crime spree. Because he’s been able to spend more than $100 million dollars of other people’s money on legal fees, in order to delay all of his pending cases, that accounting probably won’t happen before the 2024 presidential election.
“Lions, and tigers and bears! Oh my!” “Lions, and tigers and bears! Oh my!”“Lions, and tigers and bears! Oh my!” Dorothy, Tim Man and Scarecrow.
Soon after the court issued the ruling, Trump celebrated the decision on his Truth Social account, writing in all caps: “Big win for our Constitution and democracy. Proud to be an American!”
“Some people without brains do an *awful* lot of talking, don’t they?”The Scarecrow
trump’s conspirators are numerous, starting with the republi-cons in the U.S. Senate, who could have stopped him long ago. Minority Leader McConnell said the former president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. But after voting to acquit, McConnell argued that he believed it was unconstitutional to convict a president who was no longer in office.
“For 23 years, I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you, and now… well, being a Christian woman (Senator), I can’t say it!” — Auntie Em
All of the members of the MAGA republi-con congress could have held trump accountable by not condoning or endorsing every hair-brained scheme, criminal conduct, grift and assault on our Democratic institutions, our courts, the independent press and the American voters.
“Back where I come from there are men who do nothing all day but good deeds. They are called phila… er, phila… er, yes, er, Good Deed Doers.” — The Wizard of Oz
The embarrassing and comical parade of U.S. Congress men and women, dressed in their cult leader’s blue suit and red tie costume, who pontificated outside the New York court about the injustice of the American system of justice’s attempts to hold trump accountable for his one man crime wave, will be remembered in history for their un-American and treasonous butt kissing of an angry, demented megalomaniac bent on retribution and revenge.
“You’re right, I am a coward! I haven’t any courage at all. I even scare myself.”The Cowardly Lion
The U.S. Constitution establishes 3 equal branches of government. The partisan deadlocked legislative branch has proved powerless to hold trump and many of his cowardly conspirators accountable. The many courts who have ruled against and prosecuted trump for his crimes, in spite of scores of trump lawyers filing hundreds of frivolous, obfuscating briefings aimed primarily at delaying accountability until after the election, have been mostly neutered by this unjustifiable Supreme Court ruling on immunity. This rogue court has attempted to not only usurp and strip legislatures, the lower courts and our Democratic institutions of their Constitutional powers, they have empowered the executive branch and the president with a broad immunity contrary to the founding fathers intensions.
There are some hero’s in this American tragedy. Although the U.S. Senate voted 57-43 to acquit trump at his impeachment trial, for his role in inciting the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, the largest number of senators in history, voted to find a president of their own party guilty of an impeachment charge. Voting to find Trump guilty were GOP Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania.
The Republicans in the House censured and forced out Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of my home state of Illinois, for their courageous role in the January 6th Committee hearings and for referring trump’s conduct to the Justice Department. Liz Cheney has more balls than all the MAGA republi-con men in congress combined.
OnSeptember 17, 1787: Benjamin Franklin presided over the first day of the Constitutional Convention, in his home town of Philadelphia.
The day began with a prepared speech from Ben Franklin (PA) who, eighty-one years old and painfully afflicted with gout and kidney stone, was unable to read the speech himself and delegated that task to Wilson (PA).
On September 18, 1787, the final day of the Convention, this now famous quote of Benjamin Franklin was recorded in a journal kept by James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia, asked Dr. Franklin: “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
Elizabeth and Samuel Powel’s house at 244 South Third Street, Philadelphia, where the conversation between Elizabeth Powel and Benjamin Franklin might have taken place. Historic American Buildings Survey. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
It appears we must rely on another 81 year old patriot to help preserve our Democratic Republic. Although not as eloquent as Benjamin Franklin, and in spite of his word fumbles and stutters, President Joseph Biden believes he’s up to the task. I also believe he is. One very important advantage, is Joe Biden’s ability to bring people together to solve America’s and the world’s monumental problems. With the highly qualified and diverse people he’s brought into his administration (none of them indicted, resigned, fired or in prison), to the 50 countries he’s help assembled to defend Ukraine against trump’s brother from another mother, the Biden administration has more than risen to the task over the last 3 1/2 years. But Uncle Joe can’t do it himself, everyone in his administration must step up. And the voters must award the President with a big D Democratic House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Joe Biden is remarkably adept at overcoming trying times.
Frightened? Child, you’re talking to a man who’s laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe. I was petrified.” — The Wizard of Oz
trump, on the other hand, hires people not for their expertise at governing or solving problems, but for their ability to dismantle the critical Democratic institutions they’re tasked with running, for their talent at ignoring laws and regulations, for engaging in self-serving financial enrichment, and for turning a blind eye to trump’s chaotic reign of terror. During his administration, the media had flow charts of the dozens of trump appointees who were fired, resigned, indicted, tried, convicted and sent to prison. And all of them had to hire lawyers, and their lawyers had to hire lawyers, and their lawyers, lawyers had to hire lawyers.
And a Final WordFrom the Library of Congress Blog:
“Another source of Elizabeth Willing Powel’s influence was her own social and political dexterity, which she deployed to make her home a gathering place for the city’s political elite from the revolutionary period through George Washington’s presidency. Among the regulars at Powel’s dinners and parties were George and Martha Washington, with whom the Powel’s became close friends. Letters exchanged between the couples are in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress. One of these, from Elizabeth Powel to George Washington, dates from the third year of Washington’s first term as president, a time when he was hoping he would be able to resign the presidency and go home.
“May you, till the extremest old age, enjoy the pure Felicity of having employed your whole Faculties for the Prosperity of the People for whose Happiness you are responsible, for to you their Happiness is intrusted.” Elizabeth Willing Powel to George Washington, November 17, 1792, George Washington Papers, Manuscript Division.
In his 1789 inaugural address, and in many private letters as well, Washington made clear that he was longing to return to his retirement at Mount Vernon. Less than a week after his inauguration, he wrote to former military officer and South Carolina legislator Edward Rutledge that when he accepted his “duty to embark” on the presidency, which he described as “the tempestuous and uncertain Ocean of public life,” he “gave up all expectations of private happiness in this world.” In the fall of 1792, seeing the end of his first term in sight, Washington began planning his exit. Elizabeth Willing Powel was among the friends who convinced him to stay. In her letter she warned him that his political opponents would see his resignation as a sign that he believed the republican experiment had failed and, fearing for his own reputation, had “withdrawn from it that you might not be crushed under its Ruins.” She pleaded with him: “For Gods sake do not yield . . . to a Love of Ease, Retirement, rural Pursuits.”
“Honest Don” just threw down the debate gauntlet for President Biden to chuckle at. During trump’s 6-year long reign of deceit, disinformation and disdain for the truth, media organizations from far and wide, created whole departments just to keep track of trump’s lies. After tallying more than 40,000, most gave up. The Washington Post made a valiant attempt 3 years ago, (“Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year.”) (article attached below). Why would President Biden even consider debating someone who isn’t remotely capable of rational discussions of policy or governance? trump refused to debate any of his republican primary opponents, especially Nicki Haley, who would have beaten him like a rented mule.
It’s crystal clear to anyone who has successfully passed the age of reason; trump’s dishonesty and lies, his criminal activity of all sorts, nor his conspiracies to destroy our Democracy and Democratic institutions, has had a miniscule effect on trump’s MAGA core of sheeple. Critical thinking folks know full well, who trump is, the carnage he’s capable of invoking and where his patriotic loyalties lie. He will conspire with any person, group or country, hostile or otherwise, foreign or domestic, in order to get back into the White House, in order to dismiss or pardon any conviction in the 91 felony counts, in his criminal cases pending in 4 different jurisdictions. Just as he’s done to anyone stupid enough to throw in with this sociopathic, moronic human being, trump is fully capable of throwing his country and our Democracy under the bus, in order to inflate his ego and his cratering business reputation and wealth. Anyone foolish enough to get entangled in the trump mystique, has regretted their gamble at fame and fortune.
“Honest Don” “honestly” believes, that the majority of American’s he’s slandered and persecuted since sailing down that escalator in 2016, including women, people of color and naturalized immigrants, will somehow embrace his march to a trumpian Kleptocratic Autocracy. Why shouldn’t he, the MAGA republicans in congress, and more than half of our Supreme Court have acquiesced, hook-line-and sinker.
But how can you agree to a political debate with someone who doesn’t believe in the notions of political compromise, Democratic governance or even presenting a platform designed to help solve America’s and the world’s myriad of complicated and urgent problems. Any debate will only reinforce MAGAnians maniacal devotion, no matter the outcome. President Biden should present his case directly to voters who are still able to ascertain the truth.
Related:
CNN – Facts First
Trump’s avalanche of dishonesty: Fact-checking 102 of his false claims from this fall
By Daniel Dale, CNN – December 1, 2023
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA – OCTOBER 07: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives for a rally on October 07, 2023 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
For the third straight presidential election, Donald Trump is campaigning on an avalanche of dishonesty.
CNN fact-checked 12 of the former president’s October and November speeches. We found, as we did during his 2016 campaign and his presidency, that Trump’s fall remarks were teeming with false claims – a staggering quantity and variety of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies that made sheer wrongness a central feature of each of his addresses.
As in the past, Trump is in a league of his own. The frequency of his mendacity vastly exceeds that of either President Joe Biden or any of Trump’s rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
In the October and November speeches, Trump was serially untruthful on the subject of his record in office. He continued to tell long-debunked lies about the 2020 election he lost and the integrity of elections more broadly. He repeatedly fabricated and embellished on the subjects of energy, the environment, foreign affairs and the economy.
He launched incorrect attacks against Biden, other Democrats and Republican presidential rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. He deployed various fictions to support his denunciations of the criminal and civil court cases against him. And he continued his traditional practice of wildly exaggerating statistics, this time on topics ranging from the price of bacon to the cost of an aircraft carrier to the size of his rally crowds.
Below is a fact check of 102 of Trump’s false claims from the 12 speeches. He repeated many of the false claims on multiple occasions.
This is not intended as a comprehensive list. And it does not include gaffes that were clearly unintentional, claims that were misleading but not outright wrong, or claims for which there was no public evidence but which we could not definitively declare incorrect.
Trump’s record
Terrorist attacks under Trump
Trump claimedinnumerousspeeches that there were no terrorist attacks during his time as president. “We didn’t have an attack for four years,” he said in an October speech in New Hampshire while touting his ban on travel from a group of (mostly Muslim-majority) countries he described as “horrendous, dangerous nations.” “We didn’t have one incident in four years, because we kept bad people the hell out of our country,” he said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “we didn’t have an attack for four years” isn’t true.
Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.
In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018.
In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.
Trump’s wall promise
In an October speech in Iowa, Trump claimed he had run in 2016 on a promise that Mexico would pay for “a piece” of a new border wall. He repeated the claim in a November speech in Florida, saying, “I said Mexico’s gonna pay for a piece of the wall.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims about what he said in the past are false. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised over and over again in his public remarks, with no qualifications, that Mexico would pay for the entire wall, not for only “a piece” of it. (In the end, Mexico didn’t pay for any of it.) You can read a longer fact check on this claim here.
Mexico and the cost of the wall
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump tried to respond to critics who have noted that he did not get Mexico to pay for the wall as he had promised. Pointing out that Mexico did deploy thousands of its own troops during his presidency to deter migrants heading toward the US, Trump said, “Then they say, ‘Oh, Mexico didn’t pay.’ Mexico paid a fortune for that wall. When they tell you, ‘Trump didn’t get the money.’ Remember, I used to say Mexico will pay for it. Well, that’s what I did.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that he “did” get Mexico to pay for the wall and that “Mexico paid a fortune for that wall” are false. Mexico deploying troops simply isn’t the same as Mexico paying for a construction project; even with the Mexican deployment, the US had to pay for the wall with its own money. The Trump administration directed more than $16 billion toward the project – including about $6 billion directly appropriated by Congress and about $10 billion the administration repurposed from the Defense Department – before Biden halted construction upon taking office in 2021.
The final bill for the project is unclear; more than $4.7 billion of the former Defense Department money had not been spent at the time Trump left office. Regardless, it is clear that Mexico spent nothing at all on the project.
“The US government paid for what was built of Trump’s wall out of our own treasury. Mexico did not directly pay for any portion of the wall,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration and border policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said in a July email.
The size of the wall
Touting his wall on the border with Mexico, Trump claimed in speech after speech that he had built “561 miles of wall” or, more vaguely, thatthe total was “over 500 miles.”
Facts First: Trump’s “561 miles” and “over 500 miles” claims are false, both exaggerations. An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office and subsequently obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said the total number built under Trump was 458 miles (including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers). Even in his recent speeches, Trump sometimes put the figure, more correctly, at “nearly 500 miles.”
For example, in one October speech in Iowa, Trump said, “We built 561 – they said 460, 460. But no, it’s 561.” Later in the speech, though, when he appeared to be reading from his prepared text, he said, “Built nearly 500 miles.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim to have rebuilt the entire military is false. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” said Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Harrison said in a November email: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F-15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”
Trump’s policy on damage to monuments
In an October speech in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump claimed that, as president, he had found and “signed” an “old law” or “old statute” to impose a severe penalty – an automatic 10 years in jail – for people who damage monuments.
“It said if you so much as touch one of our statues or memorials, you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything – you go for 10 years. And you all remember that,” he said in the Florida speech.
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. He didn’t sign any “law” on damage to monuments, and he did not impose automatic 10-year sentences for monument damage. In fact, he issued an executive order on the subject, in 2020, that did not mandate any increase in sentences.
Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law – including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property if the damage exceeds $100. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.
Trump and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
As he has on multiple previous occasions, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that “we filled up the national reserve, strategic reserves.” He went into more detail in a November speech in Houston, saying of the reserve, “We filled that thing and nobody ever saw anything like it.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that he filled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are false. While he did propose to buy 77 million barrels for the reserve in 2020 as oil prices cratered because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Democratic-controlled Congress rejected the $3 billion in funding that would have paid for the purchase, describing it as a subsidy to big oil companies, so it didn’t happen. The reserve contained fewer barrels when Trump left office in early 2021 (about 638 million) than when he took office in early 2017 (about 695 million).
That’s in large part because of oil sales that Congress had mandated by law. But nonetheless, Trump’s claims about how he “filled up” the reserve are meritless.
“It would have been a smart policy to refill the SPR at very low prices, but it didn’t happen because Congress did not approve that purchase. I suppose Trump can take credit for a good idea, but not for execution,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told CNN earlier this year when Trump made a similar claim.
Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 1
Trump claimed in a November speech in Texas: “We created an incredible 1.2 million new manufacturing jobs. Nobody said that was possible.” He repeated the number a bit later and said, “Everybody said that was impossible.”
Facts First: Trump’s number is false. The US actually lost 170,000 manufacturing jobs during Trump’s presidency, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even if you were to stop the count in February 2020, before the pandemic crash, the US would have gained 419,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of Trump’s presidency in January 2017, not the 1.2 million he claimed here.
In speeches in late 2019 and early 2020, Trump claimed that the US had created 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs during his tenure. That would still be true today if you stopped the clock in February 2020. But Trump didn’t mention construction jobs in this speech; his omission made his performance with manufacturing jobs sound much better than it was.
Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 2
Trump vowed in the same speech in Texas to “accelerate our manufacturing resurgence,” then said, “We were setting records – not only were we building and doing it, we were setting records at doing manufacturing jobs.”
Facts First: This is false. Trump did not come close to setting records for the creation of manufacturing jobs. Again, US manufacturing employment actually declined by 170,000 jobs during his presidency. While that’s largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was not even setting records before that; the country lost manufacturing jobs in 2019, before the pandemic hit.
And while the US did see a 430,000-job gain in manufacturing employment under Trump in 2017 and 2018, that was nowhere near a record increase. For example, there were more than 1.5 million manufacturing jobs added in 1977 and 1978, Jimmy Carter’s first two calendar years as president.
Household income under Trump
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Under President Trump, real family income increased over $6,000 a year.” He had made a similar claim in a speech in Iowa that month, saying real family income “went up by more than $6,000 a year.”
Facts First: This is false. Real median household income actually increased by $5,820 in total over Trump’s four years in office, from $70,840 in 2016 to $76,660 in 2020 – so not $6,000 “a year” as he claimed here.
Trump’s campaign has previously confirmed he was referring to real median household income when making such claims. The increase in real median household is over $6,000 if you just look at the period from 2016 to 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but Trump’s presidency includes 2020 as well.
Trump and the defeat of ISIS
As he has in the past, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “I defeated ISIS. I defeated ISIS. Three weeks, I defeated ISIS.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has sometimes suggested, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said “I defeated ISIS” with no caveats or credit to anyone else: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.
IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.
The cost of an embassy move
In October speeches to the Republican Jewish Coalition and at a campaign event in Florida, Trump repeated a story he used to tell during his presidency about how moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was supposed to cost $1 billion or $2 billion but that he “got it done for $500,000” by using an existing US diplomatic facility in Jerusalem.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. While the final cost of the embassy move isn’t publicly known, it is clear that the cost was much more than $500,000. The State Department awarded a $21.2 million contract in 2018for a company to design and build “compound security upgrades” related to Trump’s decision to turn the existing Jerusalem facility into an embassy. The initial modification that allowed the building to open as an embassy cost just under $400,000, but that was not the final total.
Trump and the construction of Nord Stream 2
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, after he “stopped” Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany, “it was totally dead” before Biden allowed it to proceed.
Facts First: Trump did not render Nord Stream 2 “totally dead.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.
In a November speech in Houston, Trump said of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: “Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. Nobody knew they were building the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen, I guess – covering all of Europe.”
Facts First: Both parts of this claim are wrong.
It’s not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before Trump began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. And Nord Stream 2 was nowhere close to “the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen.”
Trump and deportations to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador
In a November speech in Florida, Trump talked about how his administration was able to deport gang members to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and repeated his familiar false claim about how the Obama administration was supposedly unable to do so: “Under the Obama administration, they wouldn’t take anybody back. They put airplanes, big commercial planes on the runways, so we’d put them in a plane, we’d fly, we couldn’t land, came back. And this went on for years; never took ‘em back.”
Facts First:This claim remains false. In 2016, Obama’s last calendar year in office, none of these three countries was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant” (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted to CNN in 2019 that in the 2016 fiscal year, ICE reported that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranked second, third and fourth for the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. The same was true in the 2017 fiscal year, which encompassed the end of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s. ICE did not identify any widespread problems with deportations to these countries.
ICE officials said there were some exceptions to the three countries’ general cooperativeness, but Trump’s general declaration that the countries were uncooperative was never true.
Trump and the word ‘caravan’
In November speeches in Texas and Florida, Trump spoke of migrant caravans – and claimed, as he has in the past, that he was the one to come up with the name “caravan.”
In Florida, he said caravan is “a name I came up with.” In Texas, he said, “I came up with the name. I believe. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really you, it’s somebody,’ but I believe I came up with the name.”
Facts First: Trump did not come up with the word “caravan,” either in general or to describe groups of migrants traveling together toward the US border during his presidency.
Merriam-Webster says the word caravan “came to English in the late 16th century, from the Italian caravana, which itself came from the Persian kārvān.”
Trump first publicly used a variation of the word as president in a tweet on April 1, 2018 (he wrote, in a tweet about immigration, “’caravans’ coming”). The word had been usedbyvarious others in the same context in the days and weeks prior, including in a BuzzFeed News feature article, two days prior to Trump’s tweet, that was headlined, “A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Dares To Stop Them.”
Trump’s claims about Covid-19
Talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Once Covid came in from China – Wuhan. Remember I said it came in from Wuhan. Everyone said, ‘Why would he say that? It came in from caves.’ First they said it came in from Italy, which was not nice. Then they said it came in from France. Then they said the American soldiers brought it in, and then they admitted it came in from China – but it came in from Wuhan.”
Facts First: Trump’s recounting is inaccurate. It’s not true that, when he said Covid-19 came from Wuhan, “everyone said, ‘Why would he say that?’” In reality, when Trump first used the word “Wuhan” as president in March 2020, saying the virus came from there was not at all controversial; Trump’s comments came more than two months after Chinese authorities publicly identified Wuhan as the first place it had an outbreak of the novel coronavirus. And in January and February 2020, before Trump started speaking about Wuhan, major media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times referred to the virus as “the Wuhan coronavirus.”
The situation before Right to Try
In a November speech in Texas, Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 to give terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration. As he did during his presidency, though, Trump also painted an inaccurate picture of the situation prior to the Right to Try era.
He said, “People would be terminally ill. They’d try to get a medicine; they couldn’t get it in this country. It’s totally illegal. If they had money, they’d go to Europe or they’d go to China, go to some of the places where they supposedly had cures. It never worked, by the way, almost never. And they’d end up dying. Sometimes they’d die in foreign lands. If you didn’t have money, you’d go home and you’d die.”
Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.
Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.
“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.
The Middle East under Trump
Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Less than four years ago, we had peace in the Middle East with the historic Abraham Accords. Today we have an all-out war in Israel and it’s gonna spread very quickly. What a difference a president makes, isn’t it amazing though?” He said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “The experts said our pro-Israel policies would produce terror and chaos, but I knew the opposite was true. I turned out to be right. We got the historic Abraham Accords and peace in the Middle East. Peace in the Middle East.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that there was “peace in the Middle East” during his presidency and that his administration “got” peace in the Middle East are both false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East – notably including the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Miller called “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.”
“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” said Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Miller also noted that various Middle Eastern states were in “varying phases of dysfunction or failure” at the end of the Trump presidency. As Trump left office, civil wars in Syria and Yemen were ongoing, Libya was precariously emerging from its own civil war, and US forces and diplomats in Iraq continued to be attacked.
Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called Trump’s claim “false.” She said in an email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”
Trump and wars
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that while there are “all of these wars” today under Biden, during the Trump presidency, “We had no wars. I got out of every war. We defeated ISIS, we got out.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “got out of every war” is false. At the end of his presidency, US troops remained in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he had reduced the size of the US presence in all three. And Trump kept a contingent of troops in Syriathroughout his presidency, even afterheclaimedUS troops were “out” (other than to protect oil sites, he added); in fact, two US troops died in vehicle rollovers in Syria in 2020.
Trump was also commander-in-chief for US airstrikes, including drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.
Trump and Veterans Choice
In a November speech in New Hampshire, Trump claimed, “I also signed – about 59 years they’ve been trying to get this one – VA Choice, which made it permanent, so that veterans can get medical care at the private health care provider of their choice.”
Facts First: Trump’s “59 years they’ve been trying to get it” claim is false. The Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama, and, as Trump said, made the initiative permanent. But contrary to Trump’s claim, it’s not true that people had been attempting for decades to create such an initiative.
During Trump’s presidency, he falsely took credit for the Choice law more than 150 times.
Trump’s aid to farmers
In speechafterspeech, Trump claimed that he had given US farmers $28 billion from China. For example, he claimed in a November speech in New Hampshire, “How can the farmers vote against me? I got them $28 billion from China.” He added, “I got the money from China out of the tariffs that I got.”
In October speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump boasted of the revenue produced by his tariffs on China and repeated his familiar claim that not a single previous president had gotten China to pay the US “10 cents.”
Facts First: Temporarily leaving aside the fact that Americans, not China, overwhelmingly paid for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, it’s not true no previous president had generated “10 cents” from tariffs on China. The US has had tariffs on goods from China since the late 1700s; Obama imposed new tariffs on goods from China; FactCheck.org reported that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”
Trump’s aid to the lobster industry
Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire that, of the money he supposedly secured from China, he “gave the farmers and New England lobstermen $28 billion. You know, I gave your lobstermen $28 billion.”
Facts First: This is false. Trump’s trade-aid package for the seafood industry was a $530 million program covering the entire country. So while it’s not clear how much New England lobstermen in particular ended up receiving, the total was clearly far less than the “$28 billion” he claimed he gave to farmers or the $23 billion he actually did give to farmers. (Lobstermen were not eligible for money from the trade-aid package for farmers.) And it’s worth noting that the money for the seafood industry, like the money for farmers, was compensation for losses incurred because of Trump’s own policies.
China’s oil purchases from Iran under Trump
In speechafterspeech, Trump told a story about how he supposedly got China to completely stop buying oil from Iran by telling China that if they bought any, the US would no longer do business with China. For example, he said in an October speech in Florida: “I said, ‘If you buy oil, any oil, from Iran, we’re never doing business. You have all the stuff that you take out of this country and rip us off. We’re not going to do any more business with China.’ They stopped immediately. No more oil.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that China completely stopped buying oil from Iran during his presidency is false. China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president. “The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith,lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, said in November.
China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran. Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”
Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)
Iran’s oil sales under Trump and Biden
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that Biden’s soft approach to sanctions on Iran “allowed them to sell massive amounts of oil, making them $80 billion a year. Congratulations; they were making nothing with us.”
Facts First: Both of Trump’s claims – that Iran is making $80 billion a year from oil sales under Biden and that it was making “nothing” from these sales under Trump – are false.
The federal government’s Energy Information Administration reported that Iran generated an approximate total of $110 billion in net oil export revenues in 2021, 2022 and the first five months of 2023. The 2021 figure was $37 billion and the 2022 figure was $54 billion. That’s not “$80 billion a year.”
Similarly, the conservative Washington Free Beacon reported in October that the group United Against a Nuclear Iran had calculated that Iran had generated about $80 billion in oil sales over the course of the Biden administration. The group confirmed to CNN in November that this $80 billion was for the period from February 2021 to September 2023, not for a single year alone.
And Iran made money from oil exports under Trump as well. Data provided to CNN by the Energy Information Administration shows that Iran had $55 billion in net oil export revenues in 2017, $66 billion in 2018, $29 billion in 2019 and $16 billion in 2020.
Elections, campaigns and voting
Groceries and identification
In an October speech in Iowa, Trump reprised a claim for which he was widely mocked during his presidency – hisassertion that Americans are required to show identification to buy groceries. “If you buy a loaf of bread, you gotta have your ID out, but for voting, you don’t,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump remains wrong. Americans do not need to show identification to buy bread or other foods.
Grocery stores generally require identification for purchases of alcohol or tobacco, for purchases of certain medications and for the small percentage of purchases made with a check. They may sometimes ask for ID when customers are using credit cards. But those are exceptions rather than the rule. Contrary to Trump’s declarations, Americans can and do purchase loaves of bread, and otherwise fill their grocery bags with food, without ever having to tell anyone who they are – much less show official proof of identity.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election
In speech after speech, Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” sometimesspecifying that “radical left Democrats” rigged the election and once saying “they cheated like a bunch of dogs.”
Facts First:These claims are all false. The 2020 election was not rigged, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.
The 2020 vote count
In October and November speeches in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump rejected the legitimacy of the vote count in the 2020 presidential election He said in New Hampshire in November: “I got 75 million votes, I got – and that’s their count, OK, which is a phony count.” He said in Florida in November: “I went from 63 million to, I believe, over 75 million – and that’s been recorded by them, not by me. How about the real number?”
Facts First: Trump’s claim of a “phony count” is false, as is his suggestion that the official numbers are not the “real number.” The vote count was legitimate and accurate.
A minor side note: Trump got 74,223,975 votes, not “over 75 million”; Biden got 81,283,501.
Election Night in 2020
Falsely claiming that he watched the 2020 election get “stolen,” Trump said in a November speech in Florida that, on Election Night, “at 9 o’clock it was over, 10 o’clock it was really over” – suggesting, as he has repeatedly before, that he had been shown to be the winner at those times. He added, “And then…’We have found some additional votes.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The 2020 election was not “over” at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. on November 3, when millions of legitimate votes still needed to be counted – and it was widely known in the lead-up to Election Day that some states’ early results might create the illusion that Trump had big leads, since it would take time to count the mail-in votes that tended to heavily favor Biden (in part because Trump had spent months disparaging mail-in voting). Some populous urban areas, which also tended to support Biden, also took a while to finish their counting simply because they had so many votes.
Repeating his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump claimed in a November speech in Iowa: “We don’t even have to go into all of the ballot-stuffing that is on tape from the ‘2000 Mules.’ You look at ‘2000 Mules’ and you see thousands and thousands – hundreds of thousands actually – of votes being stuffed into ballot boxes.”
Facts First: This is false. The film ‘2000 Mules’ hasbeenwidely debunked, and it doesn’t show thousands of votes, let alone hundreds of thousands, “being stuffed into ballot boxes.”
The film, which is filled with misleading claims and dubious analysis, focuses on footage of ballots being submitted into drop boxesin public places (after which they are put through various verification measures to make sure they are legitimate), not into ballot boxes at in-person voting centers where ballots are placed for final counting – and, regardless, the film fails to prove any widespread wrongdoing even involving the drop boxes.
The security of mail-in ballots
Trump said in a November speech in Florida, “Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you have corrupt elections. I don’t care what it is. Anybody that wants it, they’re corrupt. And that includes Republicans, by the way. Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you are going to have really corrupt elections.”
Facts First: This is all false. While electionsexperts say the occurrence of fraud is relatively higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person voting, they also say that fraud of any kind in American state and federal elections represents a minisculepercentage of total votes cast. Voters have been casting ballots by mail for decades, including in Republican-dominated states; there is nothing inherently corrupt about supporting the use of such ballots.
‘Fake ballots’
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said the only way he can be beaten in the November 2024 election is “if they cheat.” He added moments later, “The biggest problem is they make fake ballots. Okay? That’s the biggest problem. And a lot of Republicans are very naive when they don’t say that. They say, ‘Oh, vote early. Vote early. We want to build…’ No, no: the big problem we have to do, we gotta stop fake ballots from being made.”
Facts First: This is entirely baseless. Federal elections do not have any “big problem” with “fake ballots.” Every state has numerous safeguards in place to ensure that someone who tries to manufacture and use a phony ballot will be caught.
What a Jimmy Carter commission said
Criticizing the use of mail-in ballots, Trump invoked a commission on election reform that was co-chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Trump said in a November speech in Florida that Carter “had a commission with some other prominent senators, and they came to one conclusion: you can’t do mail-in ballots.” Trump said in a November speech in New Hampshire: “Even Jimmy Carter, he had a commission. He said if you have mail-in ballots, you’re going to have massive corruption.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims significantly exaggerated what Carter’s commission said. Though the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in ballots, it did not say “you can’t do mail-in ballots” or that “massive corruption” is inevitable with the use of mail-in ballots; in fact, it highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections.
The commission’s 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” It also said mail-in voting increases the risks of fraud and that absentee ballots are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”
But it did not say all mail-in voting should be prohibited. It said that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.” The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail (as well as early voting).
Fifteen years after the release of the report, Carter said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.” His organization, The Carter Center, said in a 2020 statement: “Fortunately, since 2005, many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”
Democrats and elections
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that Democrats can’t win legitimately, given their policy preferences, and “the only way they know how to win is by cheating.”
Facts First: This is false. Just like Republicans, Democrats have won elections around the country – including the 2020 presidential election – fair and square. There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim.
Trump’s 2016 margin in Alabama
In a November speech in Florida, Trump spoke of how some of his opponents claimed that the 2016 election he won was rigged. He then said, “In 2016, they even tried to get me on Alabama and I won it by like 45 points. They said, ‘He cheated on Alabama.’ I said, ‘I won it by 45 points, I must have cheated by a lot.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that he won Alabama by 45 percentage points in 2016 is false – a major exaggeration. His margin over Hillary Clinton was big, but it was about 27.8 points (62.08% to 34.36%), not 45 points.
It’s not clear who he was claiming had accused him of cheating to win Alabama.
Maricopa County in 2022
In a November speech in Florida, Trump mentioned Kari Lake, a Republican US Senate candidate in Arizona who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor in 2022. He made reference to a technology problem that marred Election Day 2022 in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa County, saying that “unfortunately over 50% of the machines, in the Republican areas only, didn’t work. So they always find something.”
“We were having these issues coming up around Maricopa County,” Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, told reporters at the time. Noting the Republican affiliations of the recorder and the majority of the board, Gates said, “So there was no partisan bias in what happened here. This was a technical issue.”
Chris Wallace and a 2020 debate
In two October speeches in New Hampshire and October and November speeches in Florida, Trump told a story in which he claimed that 2020 presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace, who was then a host for Fox News and is now a host for CNN, had tried to stop him from asking Biden a question about a supposed payment from the wife of the mayor of Moscow to Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“Chris Wallace said, ‘He’s not allowed to answer that question,‘” Trump said in one of the New Hampshire speeches; in the other, he said Wallace said “you’re not allowed to ask that question” and told him “it’s inappropriate.” In Florida in November, Trump said, “Biden couldn’t answer the question, but Chris Wallace came in and helped him. ‘You’re not allowed to ask that question.’”
Facts First: All of these Trump claims are false. Wallace did not tell him that he was not allowed to ask the question or that Biden was not allowed to answer it. Rather, as the transcript shows,Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer the question after Trump had asked it, rather than continue to speak when Biden tried to offer a response. Wallace never said the question was “inappropriate.”
Rather, Wallace made comments like, “Sir, you’ve asked him a question, let him answer it” and, “Well, you have raised an issue, let the vice president answer.”
Energy and the environment
Climate change and sea levels
In a November speech in Florida, Trump delivered another version of a familiar claim he has used to minimize the threat of climate change. He said that others, rather than talk about the potentially catastrophic threat of nuclear weapons, instead “talk about global warming – because in 250 years our ocean’s gonna be a hundredth of an inch higher.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that the ocean will be just a hundredth of an inch higher “in 250 years” is false. As the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noted, the global sea level is currently rising at a rate of about an eighth of an inch per year. In other words, the sea level rise Trump claimed will happen “in 250 years” is already being vastly exceeded on an annual basis. NOAA says that, along the US coastline in particular, sea level rise is expected to average a total of 10 to 12 inches between 2020 and 2050 alone.
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump criticized Biden for canceling Trump-era oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He said, “Can you believe that? It was so much work to get that approved. We got it approved. They were ready to start drilling.”
Facts First: It’s not true that anybody was “ready to start drilling” in the refuge, either before the Biden administration suspended leases there in 2021 or before the administration canceled leases in 2023. There is no drilling infrastructure in place in the refuge, major oil companies have shown little interest in the site, and the seven leases the Biden administration canceled were all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state entity that is not an oil company. “To quote our friends at PolitiFact, what Trump said in this case qualifies as ‘pants on fire,’” Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, said in a November email. He said, “No one was ready to start drilling there, in 2017 or at any other point in time.”
Molchanov explained that the idea of drilling in the refuge would be a textbook example of “frontier exploration,” drilling in an area that has no previous activity by the oil industry. “This means there is no first-hand knowledge of how to go about drilling there. Everything would have to be learned along the way. This translates into lengthy time for preparation and elevated costs for actual drilling, if and when it were to take place. Also, there is no infrastructure – it would have to be developed from scratch.”
Tim Woody, communications manager for the Alaska regional office of The Wilderness Society conservation group, also called Trump’s claim false and noted “there is no infrastructure in place” in the refuge. And Woody said that no company had “gone through any of the steps that occur between acquiring a lease and actually beginning development,” including conducting seismic analysis and obtaining permits.
Demand for electric cars
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said, “Can you believe what we’re doing with the electric cars? All electric. Nobody wants them.”
Facts First: It’s not true that “nobody wants” electric cars. US purchases of electric vehicles continue to set records; Cox Automotive reported in October that “EV sales have now increased for 13 straight quarters” in the US and were “firmly on track to surpass 1 million for the first time ever” in a year. Electric vehicle sales also make up a growing share of total US vehicle sales; Cox Automotive reported that they accounted for a record 7.9% of total sales in the third quarter of 2023, up from 6.1% a year prior and up from 7.2% in the second quarter of this year.
A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 38% of Americans said they are very likely or somewhat likely to seriously consider an electric vehicle for their next vehicle purchase. Even if the poll result is off, it’s clear that Trump’s claim that “nobody wants them” is not true.
The US and electric car manufacturing
Trump, saying he thinks he will earn the support of union autoworkers, claimed in a November speech in Iowa that it is “preposterous” for the US move to all electric cars – and then said, “You can’t make them here, because we don’t have the minerals, we don’t have the materials for it. We have a thing called gasoline, that’s what we have.”
While the US does need to import some critical minerals and materials for electric vehicle manufacturing, that clearly doesn’t mean domestic production of the vehicles is impossible. There are global supply chains for all sorts of products whose final assembly is done in this country.
– CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this item.
Biden and electric vehicles
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “On day one, I will repeal Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate. ‘Everybody has to have an electric car.’” He said that, in a second Trump administration, “gasoline-powered engines will be allowed.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden has not mandated that “everybody has to have an electric car” or outlawed cars powered by gasoline, though his administration has made an aggressive push to try to get automakers and consumers to move toward electric vehicles.
Depending on how automakers were to respond, the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new tailpipe rules could, if adopted, require electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032.
Electric vehicles and the military
In a November speech in Texas, Trump criticized the Biden administration for imposing “insane mandates” and lamented that “Army tanks have to go electric, OK?…Because the tanks, if they’re electric, you’re going into a country blasting the hell out of it, but at least we’re doing it in an environmentally friendly way.”
Facts First: This is false. The Biden administration is not requiring tanks to be all-electric, as FactCheck.org pointed out in its own November fact check. The Army released a climate strategy in 2022 that called for a move toward various kinds of electric vehicles, including “fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050,” but that would not include tanks. And, regardless, a strategy is not a mandate.
Biden and boats
During the same part of the Texas speech, Trump also claimed that “all boats have to go electric.”
Facts First: This is false. There is no Biden mandate requiring boats to be powered by electricity, as The New York Times noted in its own fact check of this Trump speech.
A federal boat speed limit
After complaining in an October speech in New Hampshire about offshore wind turbines, and alleging without evidence that these turbines are killing whales, Trump added, “Then they say that, for boat manufacturers, the boat can’t go more than two miles an hour because we don’t want to hurt the whales.”
Facts First: This claim is false in two ways.
To try to protect whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed to require a greater number of boats to abide by a speed limit in certain areas of the East Coast during certain months of the year; the expansion would apply the speed limit to boats at least 35 feet long rather than the current minimum of 65 feet long.
But Trump’s “two miles an hour” claim is not true. The speed limit involved is 10 knots, or roughly 11.5 miles per hour. Second, the speed limit applies to people operating boats, not to “boat manufacturers” as Trump said. In other words, the government is not trying to force companies to make boats that cannot go faster than this speed limit.
In other recent speeches, Trump has attributed his two-miles-per-hour claim to something he said he was told while visiting a boat company in South Carolina in September. That company and South Carolina’s boating industry advocacy group did not respond to CNN requests for comment.
California and electricity
Criticizing Democrats’ push for the adoption of electric vehicles, Trump repeatedly claimed that California already has constant blackouts because it has insufficient power to serve its population.
He said in a November speech in Texas: “Did you see, they had blackouts all over the place this summer?” He said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “In California, they want to go with all-electric, but they can’t even – every weekend, they have a blackout. They don’t have enough electricity.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that California “had blackouts all over the place this summer” and has a blackout “every weekend” are false. California has been able to meet its electricity demand throughout the year, including during the peak-demand summer season.
“California didn’t experience any outages this year because of a load imbalance. We haven’t since 2020,” Erin Mellon, spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in an email earlier in November. Mellon added, “We’ve drastically expanded our clean energy portfolio, and recently CA hit 6,600 MW of battery storage – enough for 6.6 million homes for 4 hours.”
Vonette Fontaine, spokesperson for the California Independent System Operator, which manages the power grid for about 80% of the state, said in an email earlier in November: “The California Independent System Operator did not experience any grid emergencies this summer requiring electricity outages.”
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, with regard to US energy production, Biden “stopped it – just no more.” In an October speech in Iowa, he more specifically accused Biden of stopping energy production from fossil fuels, saying, “Biden – by stopping all the energy coming out – you know, he wants to put windmills all over the place and he wants to do things that are very expensive, but he doesn’t want any petroleum, he doesn’t want any petroleum product, and he doesn’t want oil and gas.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Biden has not stopped US production of oil and gas, which has continued to boom under Biden. US crude oil production in 2022 was the second-highest year on record, behind only Trump-era 2019, and domestic crude production in the first eight months of 2023, the most recent data that is currently available, was the highest on record for the first eight months of any year.
None of this is to say that Biden is the reason that domestic production has increased; market factors are the key driver of companies’ investment and production decisions. (“It’s perhaps less about the administration in power and more about the entrepreneurial nature of the oil industry,” Matt Smith, Kpler’s lead oil analyst for the Americas, told Egan.) And Egan wrote: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”
Trump said in a November speech in Texas: “We’re going to supply Europe, all over the world. We were going to send our oil and gas. And then they ended it, they ended it.”
Facts First: This is false. Biden did not end oil and gas exports to Europe or the rest of the world. In fact, the federal government’s Energy Information Administration reported in October that US crude oil exports in the first half of 2023 were the highest on record since the ban on these exports was repealed in 2015 – and that “Europe was the largest regional destination for U.S. crude oil exports by volume, at 1.75 million” barrels per day. Also, the Energy Information Administration reported in September that European Union countries and the United Kingdom “remained the main destination” for US exports of liquefied natural gas after reaching that status in 2022.
Oil prices
Talking about oil prices, Trump claimed in an October 9 speech in New Hampshire: “Now it’s $100 and going higher.” He claimed in a speech in Florida two days later: “We’re hitting $100 now, and we’re going to probably hit $115 a barrel.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that “now it’s $100” and that “we’re hitting $100 now” are false, both exaggerations. On the days he spoke, West Texas Intermediate crude did not exceed $87.24 per barrel and Brent crude did not exceed $89 per barrel. While Brent crude briefly passed $97 per barrel in late September, it had fallen substantially by the time Trump made this claim.
Some analysts have said in recent months that oil could potentially exceed the $100 per barrel mark next year. But Trump used the word “now,” twice, and that’s not true.
Energy costs
Trump claimed in a November speech in Florida: “We’re gonna bring down your costs. We are bringing down your energy costs. We have the highest energy costs anywhere now.”
Facts First: It’s not true that the US now has the highest energy costs “anywhere.” Even with an increase in the Biden era, US household electricity prices have remained substantially lower than prices in many European countries, plus a variety of other nations. Pavel Molchanov, the Raymond James energy analyst, said in an email that Trump’s claim is not even close to correct; citing data you can see here, he said, “U.S. electricity prices are lower than in practically every other industrialized economy.” (US household prices for natural gas are also nowhere near the world’s highest.)
The state of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Criticizing Biden for releasing a large quantity of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022, Trump said, “Now it’s at the lowest level…the lowest level in history. There’s almost nothing there.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “there’s almost nothing there” is false. Though the reserve is at its lowest level since the early 1980s, it still has more than 351 million barrels of crude and is still the world’s largest national oil reserve. Three-hundred-fifty-one million barrels is just not “almost nothing” by any reasonable standard. (Trump has previously claimed this year that the reserve is now “totally empty.”)
Wind turbines and house values
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump railed once more against wind turbines, a longtime subject of his criticism. This time, he said, “If you have one near your house, your house is worthless, because you can’t sell it. Between the noise and the look, you can’t sell it.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “your house is worthless” if a wind turbine is nearby is not true, though there may be some cases where people have more trouble selling their house because of a nearby wind turbine. Various US studies have found either no statistically significant impact on house values or even an increase in house values related to the proximity of wind power.
Even if there was a decline in house values in some neighborhoods or counties because of nearby wind turbines, that wouldn’t justify Trump’s categorical claim that a nearby wind turbine makes your house “worthless.”
Gas prices
Trump made repeated false claims in October and November about how much gas cost at the time.
For example, he said in an October 16 speech in Iowa that gasoline “just hit $5.50 a gallon” after being $1.87 or lower under Trump. He also made the claim about having had gas at $1.87 in an October 11 speech in Florida – and said that “today, you have $5, $6 and $7.” In a November 11 speech in New Hampshire, Trump again boasted of low gas prices during his tenure and said, “And now you have $5 gasoline.” And in the October 16 speech in Iowa, Trump also said that, in California, gasoline is “up to $7 and $8” per gallon.
Facts First: TheseTrump claims are all false.
On the day he spoke in Iowa and said prices had “just hit $5.50 a gallon,” the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in Iowa was about $3.29, and the national average was about $3.60, per data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at the firm GasBuddy, said that, on the day Trump spoke, GasBuddy did not see gas being sold for $5 or more per gallon at any of the 2,036 stations it tracks in Iowa.
On the day he spoke in Florida and said that today’s prices were $5, $6 and $7, the state’s average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.42 per gallon, and the national average was about $3.66 per gallon, according to data provided by AAA. De Haan said none of the 8,237 Florida stations tracked by GasBuddy were selling for $5 or higher that day.
On the day he spoke in New Hampshire and said that “now you have $5 gasoline,” the state’s average for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.34, while the national average was about $3.38, according to data provided by AAA. De Haan said none of the 875 New Hampshire stations tracked by GasBuddy were selling for $5 or higher that day.
And when he made the claim about California prices going up to $7 and $8, the state’s average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $5.62; De Haan said that, of 10,526 California stations tracked by GasBuddy, the firm did not see a single station selling that day at $8 per gallon or higher, with only four, well known for their high prices, at $7 or higher. Just four stations in California – two rural, two in Los Angeles – were selling for over $7 per gallon that day.
Also, Trump’s claim about having had gas at $1.87 is misleading. While the national average did go that low and lower after gasoline demand crashed in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the national average was $2.393 per gallon on the day Trump left office in January 2021.
Venezuelan oil and US refineries
In October speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire and in a November speech in Houston, Trump spoke of the US importing heavy, sour crude oil from Venezuela under Biden after imports stopped under Trumpas a result of his sanctions. He claimed in Iowa that Houston has “the only refineries in the entire world” that can refine the oil, and claimed in New Hampshire that Houston has “the only refinery in the world that can do it.” In the speech in Houston, he claimed the city has the “only one refinery in the country that can refine” it.
Facts First: It’s not true that Houston has the only refinery or refineries – in the US or the world – that can refine oil from Venezuela. Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, provided CNN with a chart of US refineries that have taken Venezuelan crude this year; they include facilities in Mississippi, Louisiana and elsewhere in Texas.
– CNN’s Matt Egan contributed to this item.
The Keystone XL pipeline and jobs
Criticizing Biden for canceling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada in 2021, Trump said in a November speech in Texas, “Forty-eight thousand jobs, 48,000 people. They gave their life for that, and they never really sort of recovered. That’s what they wanted to do.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that 48,000 people “gave their life” for Keystone XL jobs is false. The company behind the pipeline said after Biden’s cancellation decision that it would cut 1,000 unionized jobs in Canada and the US as a result.
A 2014 report from the Obama administration’s State Department had estimated that “a total of 42,100 jobs throughout the United States would be supported by construction of the proposed Project.” But that’s still not 48,000, and it doesn’t mean that 42,100 people were actually working on the project in 2021.
The key word is “supported.” The 42,100-jobs estimate wasn’t an estimate of people who would actually be devoting their workdays to the pipeline. It included an estimated 26,000 jobs that would supposedly have resulted “from indirect and induced spending” by people connected to the project, like spending by employees of construction contractors or suppliers.
China and the Paris climate accord
In a November speech in Texas, Trump criticized the Paris climate accord, calling it “one of the greatest rip-offs.” As he did as president, he also made false claims about China in relation to the accord – saying this time that “China was exempt” from the accord. He added, “China didn’t have to do anything until 2035, think of it.”
Facts First:Trump’s claims are false.
China was not “exempt” from the Paris accord; the agreement came into effect for all participating countries, including China, in November 2016. The accord simply allowed each nation to set its own targets for reducing carbon emissions.
And though China picked approximately 2030 as the time by which it planned to have carbon emissions peak (later saying the goal was to hit the peak before 2030), that did not mean China didn’t have to do anything until 2030, much less not do anything until 2035. Similarly, when the Obama administration set a target of reducing US emissions by 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025, that did not mean that the US was exempt or didn’t have to do anything until 2025.
Trump said in speechafterspeech that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.
Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.
As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.
Guns and Afghanistan
Trump claimed in a November speech in New Hampshire that the US had left “700,000 rifles” to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In an October speech in Florida, he said it was “700,000 guns and rifles.”
Facts First: Trump’s “700,000” figure is inaccurate, an exaggeration. An inspector general report to Congress in 2022 said: “Since 2005, the DoD procured 427,300 weapons worth $612 million for the Afghan military and security forces, including 258,300 rifles, 6,300 sniper rifles, 64,300 pistols, 56,155 machine guns, 31,000 rocket propelled grenade launchers, and 224 howitzers. [The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] noted that 316,260 of these weapons, worth $511.8 million, were in the Afghan forces’ stocks when the former government fell, but their operational condition was unknown.”
China and Taiwan
In a November speech in Florida, Trump claimed of China: “The day I left, they flew 28 bombers right over the middle of Taiwan, because that was a signal.”
Facts First: Trump was wrong about key details of this incident. On the third and fourth days of the Biden presidency, not the very day Trump left office, China sent military planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over the Taiwan Strait – not “right over the middle of Taiwan,” a major difference. And the incident involved 28 Chinese planes but not “28 bombers”; The New York Times reported at the time that the Taiwanese military said eight Chinese bombers were involved; the other planes were fighters, anti-submarine aircraft and a reconnaissance plane.
It’s worth noting that China also sent planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone during Trump’s presidency. In early 2021, Taiwan News reported that, according to a recent report funded by Taiwan’s government, “In 2020, the Chinese military violated Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) more times than in any year since 1996.”
US alliances under Biden
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, under Biden, “Relations with other countries – we’ve lost every country; we don’t even have any allies anymore, they don’t respect us. I mean, we don’t have any. We have nothing going. You take a look, and China is our best ally, I think, with him.”
Facts First: Both of these Trump claims are false. The US continues to have numerous allies around the world and continues to have numerous points of friction with China. There is simply no basis for claiming that China, which Biden describes as a competitor to the US, has become the closest US ally under Biden. “China is a strong trading partner with the US, but it is as far from an ally a country can be,” said Krista Wiegand, director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs.
Wiegand said: “From the beginning of his administration, Biden has worked hard to repair relations with US allies that were weekend under the Trump administration. US relations with its allies are closer than they have been in years especially in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Netanyahu and the assassination of an Iranian general
In an October speech in Florida, Trump criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supposedly pulling Israel out from its planned involvement in the Trump-ordered 2020 assassination of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Then, using Netanyahu’s nickname, Trump said: “And then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That wasn’t good. That didn’t make me feel too good. But that’s alright.”
Facts First: Netanyahu did not try to take credit for the 2020 assassination of Soleimani. In fact, he explicitly said the day of the assassination that “President Trump deserves all the credit” – emphasizing the “all” – “for acting swiftly, forcefully, decisively.”
NBC News reported in 2020 that Israeli intelligence had played a role in the killing; the former head of Israeli military intelligence said the same in 2021. But Netanyahu has not made such comments himself, let alone take credit for the killing itself. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2022 that “although NBC News and Yahoo News had published detailed pieces about Israel’s role, all official Israeli echelons had been mum on the issue” until the former intelligence chief spoke out.
Iran’s retaliation for Soleimani’s death
In various speeches, Trump hinted or explicitly claimed that Iran intentionally avoided hitting a base that housed US troops in Iraq when Iran launched missiles toward the base in January 2020 in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani.
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said the missiles “all landed a little outside the base” and that Iran “needed some kind of reply, I guess, but they didn’t hit us.” In a November speech in Houston, he claimed that Iran had called the US to assure them that none of the missiles would strike the base, and indeed all of the missiles either blew up before arrival or landed “outside the base area.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that all of Iran’s missiles landed outside the base are false. As The Washington Post noted in its own recent fact check, 11 Iranian missiles hit the al-Asad base Iran had targeted in the retaliatory attack. The fact that missiles hit the base was confirmed by satellite images, by the Pentagon, and by a CNN visit to the base days after the attack. CNN reported from the scene: “Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military’s side.” CNN reported that “the Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators’ housing unit.”
While no US troops were killed, more than 100 were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries. Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, told reporters that he believed Iran’s intent was to kill; he credited “the defensive techniques that our forces used” for the absence of deaths.
Trump has provided no substantiation for the claim that Iran called the US to telegraph the strike and offer reassurance; as the Post reported, Iraq’s prime minister said he received a general warning from Iran that it was about to begin its response and target US troops.
Trump’s claim that Israel had abandoned the assassination operation has also been disputed.
What the Biden administration said about Israel and Hezbollah
Trump repeatedlyclaimed that a top Biden national security official, or multiple officials, had foolishly said that they hoped Hezbollah did not attack Israel from the north because Israel is especially “vulnerable” there.
For example, Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “How about the person, the security person, top security person for Biden, said, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north because that’s where we’re most vulnerable.’ Can you believe it? The following morning, we get attacked from the north. No, can you believe the guy, he’s a national security advisor. ‘I hope that Hezbollah doesn’t attack Israel from the north because that’s where we’re the most vulnerable.’ The following morning they got attacked. But this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with stupid people.”
Facts First: Trump was misstating what Biden administration officials said. They did urge Hezbollah to refrain from attacking Israel from Lebanon after Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, and expressed “concern” about the possibility of a Hezbollah attack – but contrary to a central component of Trump’s stories, they did not say Israel is “most vulnerable” in the north.
Asked what Trump was referring to when he made these claims, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to October comments from National Security Council spokesman John Kirby and a senior defense official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. But neither of them said what Trump claimed.
Cheung pointed to this comment from Kirby at an October 11 press briefing: “And, you know, we’ve been watching with concern some of the rocket attacks that have come across the northern border of Israel from Lebanon, which obviously were coming from – from Hezbollah. So we’re – we’re clearly concerned about that.”
But Kirby said nothing there about the north being a particular vulnerability for Israel. Similarly, the anonymous senior defense official told reporters on October 9: “We are deeply concerned about Hezbollah making the wrong decision and choosing to open a second front to this conflict.” The official did not point to the north as a special vulnerability.
The size of Iran’s military
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida: “You know, Iran’s got close to a 3 million person army, military. That’s big stuff. You know, that’s no longer the minor leagues.”
Facts First: Trump’s “3 million” figure is false. “Iran’s army is about a million strong, with 1/3 of that number comprised of reservists,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group think tank, said in an email. In 2019, the US government’s Defense Intelligence Agency used similar numbers in a report on Iran’s military power, estimating that Iran’s military had a total of 1.06 million people, including 610,000 active personnel.
Singapore and drugs
Promoting his proposal to give the death penalty to drug dealers, Trump said in a November speech in New Hampshire, “Why wouldn’t you do it as Singapore does, the death penalty. They have no drugs whatsoever, no drugs whatsoever.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Singapore has “no drugs whatsoever” is false. Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau said in an official report on the local drug situation in 2022: “Methamphetamine, heroin, and cannabis were the three most commonly abused drugs in 2022, with 95% of drug abusers arrested abusing at least one of these three drugs.” The report also noted that the bureau had made seizures of heroin, methamphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and various other drugs, and it said that “in Singapore, the rise of cannabis abuse is of major concern.”
In the same speech, Trump claimed that China, which also executes some drug dealers, has “no drug problem” as a result. Joseph Amon, director of the Office of Global Health at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, said in a November email: “There is no specific definition of what is a drug ‘problem,’ but both in both China and Singapore there are people who use illicit drugs and in both countries illicit drug use is seen as a significant concern requiring government resources in terms of policing, surveillance, prevention and treatment.”
An Iraqi judge
In an October speech in Florida, Trump claimed that the Justice Department recently invited an Iraqi judge to visit Washington – and “after that, the foreign judge issued a warrant for my arrest for blowing up the number one terrorist in the world, Soleimani. So he came in, he was invited by this incompetent president. ‘Please come in.’ And he ended up issuing an arrest for my – he wanted to arrest me because I killed the number one terrorist in the world.”
Facts First: Trump’s narrative is thoroughly inaccurate. The judge, Faiq Zidan, head of Iraq’sSupreme Judicial Council, did not issue a warrant for Trump’s arrest over the Soleimani assassination “after” he visited Washington – and, in fact, Zidan’s spokesperson told Fox News in October that Zidan’s planned visit to Washington had been postponed. What actually happened was that in early 2023, while marking the third anniversary of the assassination, Zidan gave public remarks in which he discussed how Trump was already wanted for the assassination (which took place in Iraq and also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces). An Iraqi court had issued an arrest warrant for Trump in 2021.
There is no indication that Biden himself had invited Zidan to Washington. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about the matter.) Regardless, Trump’s claim that Zidan visited Washington and then issued an arrest warrant isn’t true.
A memo about migrants
Trump said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “Just days ago, Customs and Border [Protection] – who are incredible people by the way – distributed a memo warning that Hamas, Hezbollah fighters and jihadists are infiltrating across our wide-open border. They’re all over the place.”
Facts First: Trump inaccurately described this memo, which was produced by the intelligence unit at the Customs and Border Protection office in San Diego. The memo, a “situational awareness” brief for employees that was obtained by right-wing media outlets, suggested that foreign fighters affiliated with Middle East militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah “may” try to enter the US across the Mexican border. Contrary to Trump’s claim, the memo did not say these fighters “are” coming across the border or are “all over the place.”
Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington subsequently issued an official statement to media outlets saying, “CBP has seen no indication of Hamas-directed foreign fighters seeking to make entry into the United States.”
The San Diego memo warned that people “inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border.” The memo mentioned the possibility of attempted entry by “foreign fighters motivated by ideology or mercenary soldiers of fortune.”
Migration from China
Trump spoke in a November speech in Florida about young male migrants crossing the border into the US. He said, “And they’re coming from China – 16% come from China.”
Facts First: Trump’s “16%” figure is inaccurate. Official data from US Customs and Border Protection shows that Chinese nationals were involved in about 1.6% of nationwide border encounters in the 2023 fiscal year, an increase from 1% in the 2022 fiscal year but nowhere near Trump’s claim. At the southwest border in particular, Chinese nationals made up just under 1% of encounters in fiscal 2023 – a spike from fiscal 2022, when they made up less than 0.1% of encounters, but again far from what Trump said.
The federal data is not broken down by sex.
US and European aid to Ukraine
Trump said in an October speech in Iowa that although “everybody feels badly for Ukraine,” he has a “problem with” Europe’s level of assistance to Ukraine compared to US assistance to Ukraine: “So if you look at it, Europe – so they’re at $25 billion and we’re $200 billion. Only a stupid person would make that deal.”
Facts First: Trump’s figures are grossly inaccurate. Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks aid to Ukraine, found that, through July 31, the European Union was the largest contributor of aid to Ukraine since late January 2022 (including military, humanitarian and financial aid), at $85.1 billion in direct commitments, while the US was second at $76.8 billion – and the total for Europe is even higher if you add in contributions by individual EU member states directly and through EU institutions. For example, Germany had made $23.1 billion in its own commitments, per the Kiel Institute data, in addition to providing another $19.2 billion via EU institutions.
The US was the largest contributor of military aid in particular, at $46.6 billion in commitments compared to about $18.9 billion for Germany.
Trump’s legal cases
Trump’s New York civil case
Criticizing the civil fraud trial against him in New York, Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that “it’s the first time they’ve ever used the statute” and that “they used the statute that’s never been used before.”
The law gives the state attorney general broad powers against people thought to be engaged in alleged “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts” or who have otherwise shown “persistent fraud or illegality.” Some experts have said that this James lawsuit against Trump over business fraud (as opposed to consumer fraud) is a novel use of the statute, but Trump’s claim was that the statute had never been used before, period.
Speaking of Biden, Trump said, “He took his top person from the Department of Justice and put him into the local New York, Manhattan DA’s office – running it. You’re not even allowed to do that. But they took the top person, as you know; I believe the name is Colangelo. They took the top person and put him into the Manhattan DA’s office.”
Colangelo and Bragg knew each other before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney. They worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general – where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and Trump’s financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Colangelo served as acting associate attorney general in the first months of the Biden administration in early 2021 and then as principal deputy associate attorney general. As acting associate attorney general, he was third in command of the Justice Department.
Trump’s federal gag order
Trump criticized the gag order imposed on him by US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over his federal election subversion case. Before Trump noted that the gag order was put on hold by an appeals court in early November (pending oral arguments later in November), he said in a November speech in New Hampshire: “I mean, I have a judge in Washington DC who put a gag order on me – I cannot speak. So if the fake news asked me a question about, like, something, I cannot speak. ‘I’m sorry.’ How do you think that would be in a campaign?…‘Uh what do you think about the campaign?’ ‘I’m sorry, I can’t comment.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Even before the gag order was put on hold, it’s not true that the order meant Trump couldn’t comment on the election campaign or that it meant he “cannot speak” in general. The gag order was limited, tailored to restrict speech the judge believed could jeopardize the integrity of the case. It clearly permitted Trump to opine on the campaign.
The order explicitly said that Trump was free to assert his innocence on the charges against him and to criticize the government, the Biden administration, the Justice Department, and the platforms and policies of his “current political rivals.”
The order specifically prohibited all “interested parties” in the case, which include Trump, from making statements (or directing others to make statements) targeting special counsel Jack Smith or his staff, court staff and supporting personnel, defense counsel or their staff, or “any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.”
The Presidential Records Act
Trump, who has been charged with illegally retaining classified documents after his presidency, claimed in an October speech in Florida that, as a former president, “I come under the Presidential Records Act” and so “I can do whatever I want.”
Facts First: This is false. The Presidential Records Act does not say a president can do whatever they want with official documents. Rather, it says that all presidential records belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. By having official records at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, Trump was in clear contravention of the law.
The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”
Trump didn’t mention it in the October speech, but he has previously claimed that a district court decision in a civil case related to former President Bill Clinton gave Trump the right to do whatever he wants with presidential records. That’s not true.
Trump’s New York civil trial
Trump claimed in a November speech in Florida that Biden is behind his civil fraud trial in New York: “Even that stupid trial going on in New York which has been totally discredited – everybody’s been discredited – that all comes out of the White House; that’s to discourage people from voting.”
Facts First: There is no basis for the claim that Biden or the Biden White House is behind the civil trial. The case was brought by New York state Attorney General Letitia James – after an investigation she began in 2019, roughly two years before Biden became president. As Trump has repeatedly noted, James, a Democrat, campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to pursue Trump. (Also, federal agencies do not have jurisdiction over state cases like this.)
Trump repeatedly denounced the four criminal cases against him as unfounded and politically motivated – and, to underscore his point, he claimed inspeechafterspeech that he has been indicted four times while the legendary gangster Al Capone only got indicted once.
For example, Trump said in an October speech in Florida: “Did anybody ever hear of Al Capone? The greatest of all time, right. The greatest gangster of all time. If you look at him wrong, he’d kill you, and he’d kill you with his hands. He was a tough guy. He got indicted one time. I got indicted four times.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Capone was indicted only one time is false. Capone was indicted at least six times, as A. Brad Schwartz, the co-author of a book on Capone, told CNN.
And that doesn’t include various criminal charges against Capone that did not involve an indictment, such as some misdemeanors, or obscure Capone cases for which CNN couldn’t immediately determine whether there was an indictment, which you can read more about here.
Capone was indicted three times in 1931 alone, the year he was famously convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. Schwartz, co-author of the book “Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago,” explained that these three indictments were: “A secret indictment for tax evasion handed down in March 1931 (before the statute of limitations ran out for charges from the year 1924)”; a larger indictment in June 1931, with more than 20 counts, for tax evasion in the period from 1925 to 1929; “and a bootlegging conspiracy indictment, based on the work of Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, later that same month.”
Trump faces 91 total counts over his two federal indictments and two local indictments in Georgia and New York. Schwartz said: “This isn’t a race, of course, but it may be worth noting that Capone is also way ahead in individual counts (the 1931 Prohibition indictment alone added up to five thousand conspiracy charges).”
Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years
Washington Post
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly – January 24, 2021
Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year.
The Fact Checker counted a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims made by President Trump during his White House tenure. Here’s what we learned.
He overstated the “carnage” he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his “massive” crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the “all-time record” for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.
And so it went, day after day, week after week, claim after claim, from the most mundane of topics to the most pressing issues.
Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen — the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment.
The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.
For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.
The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.
Whether such a tracker will be necessary for future presidents is unclear. Nonetheless, the impact of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate for years.
“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.
Trump speaks during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on July 28. By the end of 2020, he had made more than 2,500 false or misleading claims related to the virus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Trump made false claims about just about everything, big and small, so the Fact Checker database provides a window into his obsessions (and the news cycle) at the time. When he felt under siege or in trouble, he responded by trying to craft an alternative reality for his supporters — and to viciously attack his foes. Nearly half of the false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies or via his now-suspended Twitter account.
Trump arrives to speak at a rally in Washington, Mich., on Nov. 1. Many of his false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Claims about immigration spiked just before the 2018 midterm elections, as Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep the House of Representatives in GOP hands with exaggerated claims about “caravans” of undocumented immigrants approaching the border. Then in late 2019 he responded to the uproar over a phone call in which he urged Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden with more than 1,000 false and misleading claims on the issue in just four months.
False and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, so that by year’s end he had made more than 2,500 coronavirus-related claims — more than all of his trade claims over four years, even though trade has been one of the animating features of his presidency. Trump touted phony metrics to claim he successfully defeated the virus, pitched ineffective “cures” and constantly attacked former president Barack Obama for alleged failures, such as leaving a “bare cupboard” of ventilators (there were almost 17,000) and bungling the response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009-2010 (the response was considered a success).
In October, Trump was largely quiet for six days as he recovered from his own bout with covid-19. But even so, he made nearly 4,000 false or misleading claims that month, an average of 150 a day on the days he was not ill.
In speech after speech, he laid the groundwork for challenging the election, making baseless claims of potential election fraud, while attacking Biden as a mental incompetent — and a “grimy, sleazy and corrupt career politician” — who could not possibly emerge as the victor.
“It’s going to be a fraud,” Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News a month before voters went to the polls. “This is a terrible thing that’s happening to our country.”
After his election defeat, Trump spoke or tweeted about little except to offer lies about a stolen election, even as he or his supporters lost more than 60 court cases as judges repeatedly rejected his claims as bogus. After Nov. 3, he made more than 800 false or misleading claims about election fraud, including 76 times offering some variation of “rigged election.”
At his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse, in which he incited the attack on the Capitol, Trump made 107 false or misleading claims, almost all about the election.
The aftermath of what Biden and other Democrats now call the “big lie” hovers over Washington as both parties figure out whether there can be a return to a shared set of facts undergirding national debate, or whether one of the major political parties will remain captive to the sorts of conspiracy theories that marked so many of Trump’s final year of claims.
The events of Trump’s final weeks demonstrated the extent to which his alternate reality became woven into the fabric of the Republican Party, with the majority of GOP lawmakers voting against certifying Biden’s victory even after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
One hallmark of Trump’s fibs was his willingness to constantly repeat the same claims, no matter how often they had been debunked. One-fifth of his nearly 2,500 claims about the economy was the same falsehood — that he was responsible for creating the greatest economy in U.S. history. After the coronavirus outbreak tanked the economy, he amped up the rhetoric to say he had created the greatest economy in world history. Neither claim is true; under just about every metric, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton had more robust economies during their presidencies. Even before the pandemic, Trump’s economy was already faltering because of his trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in a technical recession.
During his presidency, Trump made nearly 2,500 false or misleading claims about the economy. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Nearly 300 times Trump falsely said that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised that it would be the biggest in U.S. history — bigger than President Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years.
Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded about 750 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.
The Fact Checker also tracked Three- or Four-Pinocchio claims that Trump has said at least 20 times, earning him a Bottomless Pinocchio. Trump completed his term with 56 of those entries, including three — about the “rigged election,” allegations that Dominion voting machines changed votes and the falsehood that GOP poll watchers were denied access to vote-counting — that only emerged in the final months of his presidency.
The Bottomless Pinocchio list gives a rough approximation of the types of major falsehoods Trump said during his presidency. Roughly 25 percent exaggerated about his accomplishments, and 15 percent misled about his policies. Another 15 percent dissembled about the Russia investigation or the probe into the Ukraine phone call. Roughly 10 percent each were fibs made out of whole cloth, attacks on people he considered foes, falsehoods about the coronavirus, phony claims about the election, or false statements about Biden and his proposals.
As the 2020 election neared, Trump nearly 50 times falsely reassured his supporters that Mexico was footing the $15 billion bill for his barrier along the southern border. U.S. taxpayers are paying, mostly via money Trump diverted from authorized military construction projects. This was perhaps Trump’s most famous campaign promise — during the 2016 campaign, he said more than 200 times that Mexico would pay for the wall — so he simply pretended he had fulfilled it in an effort to reassure his base that he had succeeded.
Many repeated claims just barely missed the cutoff for a Bottomless Pinocchio, such as the claim that he repealed a provision of the U.S. tax code that prohibits religious organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. (All he did was issue a toothless executive order, but he obviously thought it was so important to evangelical groups that he falsely claimed he achieved one of their key political objectives.)
Rain falls at the White House on Nov. 30. One of Trump’s false claims early on as president was when he disputed that it rained during his inauguration. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Trump rarely abandons his falsehoods, so as he neared the end of his presidency his campaign rallies became longer and longer. Each speech had a familiar pattern. He would cycle through various grievances about the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the impeachment over his Ukraine call. He trashed Obama, various Democrats and of course Biden. He falsely extolled his achievements in trade, foreign policy, the economy and immigration. He offered false assurances about the pandemic and warned darkly about fraud in the upcoming election.
The growth of falsehoods over the course of Trump’s presidency is illustrated by one remarkable statistic.
The Fact Checker team recorded 492 suspect claims in Trump’s first 100 days. Just on Nov. 2, the day before the 2020 election, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to save his presidency.
The database website has a search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements made by Trump. Readers can also isolate claims by time period, subject or venue.
Maintaining the database over four years required detailed examination of every Trump speech, news conference, press gaggle, campaign rally and interview, as well as more than 25,000 tweets. The fact checks of Trump’s statements in the database amount to about 5 million words.
The database includes any statement that might merit two or more Pinocchios under The Fact Checker’s rating scale. Trump often would repeat the same falsehood two or more times in a speech but only one instance of a claim per venue would be counted. The database did not include Facebook posts because they were often duplicative of tweets and likely staff-generated. The tally also generally did not count retweets, except for retweets of false or misleading videos.
The fact checks in the Trump database were written by a team that also included Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly and Michelle Ye Hee Lee. Graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro created the database website.
The opening disclaimer for NBC’s Law & Order reads, “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” Never the less, regular viewers recognize recent story lines “ripped from the headlines” on a regular basis. We can reliably predict, the “Trump indicted by New York Grand Jury; becomes the first U.S. President in history to be prosecuted” headline, will soon spark future crime-time episodes.
MAGA World quickly pounced on Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg as being, nasty, on a vendetta, a pawn of George Soros, a racist, an animal and above all, a political tool. Some on the left believe he should have waited his turn on the Trump indictment train, but they fail to appreciate the element of statute of limitations.
How often have we faithfully followed story lines from our favorite crime shows, depicting serial (killers- rapists- drug kings -abusers etc. etc.) continued week after week, with the investigative authorities assembling an elaborate white board of circumstantial evidence, but unable to quite convince the D.A. / prosecutor to bring charges on the most serious violations, before the legal clock runs out. They’re convinced the career criminal is as guilty as sin but can’t quite close the deal. That’s when they must, by hook or crook, charge the bastards with any even minor infraction, in order to take them off the streets, before they can continue their carnage and mayhem. And then just when we think all is lost, they uncover the smoking gun, the final nail in the coffin that will put them away for life.
During his half century plus of life in New York and then in the White House, Trump seems to have left no criminal enterprise untapped. Insurrection and attempts to overthrow American Democracy, conspiring with a foreign enemy during his campaigns, theft of confidential government documents, business and bank fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, obstruction of justice in multiple cases, witness intimidation, bribery, campaign violations, perjury, sexual assault, violations with his school and charities, real estate discrimination, slander etc. etc. are just some of allegations leveled against Trump and his various business enterprises. There’s no doubt a list of crimes they haven’t discovered yet.
In the Trump Organization trial, two entities were found guilty by a jury in December of a combined 17 counts related to criminal tax fraud. They were fined the maximum allowed. And his CFO Allen Weisselberg, who is currently incarcerated in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, entered a guilty plea last year and admitted to receiving more than $1.7 million in untaxed compensation. Who can forget all the fines for Trump family financial malfeasance. And who can forget all the Trump miscreants, cronies and conspirators who were hired, fired, indicted, convicted, jailed and utterly defamed.
D.A. Bragg campaigned and won his election on a platform of fairness and equity in the system of justice he’s now responsible for. He pledged to turn the page on a two tier system of justice. Both the right and the left forget that New York, New York is at the top of the list of world class banking, business and financial centers of the world. Trump and his enterprises have been a constant assault against and black eye for that reputation. Enough is enough they said.
After a two year long investigation of Trump and all of his Inc’s, they believe they have the goods and will attempt to take them off the streets of New York forever. Rumors are the good citizen street sweepers of New York have found at least 30 criminal count violations this serial criminal is guilty of. MAGA members of congress cry political persecution, and threaten to tar and feather D.A Bragg, without even seeing the sealed indictment.
The cast of Presidential contenders, previously Trump enablers, often critics, and then turned demonizers, and now turned staunch defenders can’t figure out whether to pee their pants , pray for Trump, or go dumb. Lindsey Graham, Mike Pence, DeSantis and others, must bow to the MAGA monster Trump unleased and which they and others glorified and anointed. The MAGA faithful will not be denied their perceived grievances’.
The Benghazi wing of the Republi-con House of Representatives spends their waking hours trying to out Trumpit their outraged colleagues. They have no one to blame for tomorrows karmatic political awakening but their own cowardice. They turned a blind eye to their twice impeached President’s unending assault on our American Democratic Institutions.
Trump’s entourage leaves South Florida today on a journey most American believe is long overdue. Who knows what happens when he lands in Manhattan. Too many in the MAGA cult hierarchy pray for violence and chaos. Lindsey Graham was particularly apoplectic: “They are trying to drain him dry. He’s spent more money on lawyers than most people spent on campaigns. They’re trying to bleed him dry. Donald J. Trump dot com. Go tonight. Give the president some money to fight this bullshit! This is going to destroy America!”
Wow, that’s richy rich! No doubt Trump has spent more on lawyers (billed but probably not paid) than any single entity by far, but that’s because not only is he allegedly the head of the most complex criminal enterprise in American History, legal warfare is also his primary modus operandi. Sooner or later, some news organization will attempt to add up the cost to all Federal and State Governments and to various businesses and individuals, for them to rein in and take to task, Trump Inc. and his many conspirators and enablers in congress. I’m guessing the bill is closing in on a billion dollars. This is not your Grandfathers conservative, penny pinching GOP.
Trump will try to blame everyone in sight for his legal predicaments, including D.A. Alvin Bragg and his team of prosecutors, Judge Juan Merchan , who will oversee his case, the New Yorkers who indicted him, and probably the jury of his peers who will convict him. But Trump has no one to blame but his own egomaniacal self. His rein of amateurish governing Apprenticeship is being recorded in history, as we speak, as the very biggest prime time “Loser” to ever occupy the White House.
But the biggest blame must be laid at the feet of the MAGA base of nationalistic, racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti government, anti Democratic bomb throwers. They seriously need to ask themselves what kind of a country they want to live in. Some seriously think Vladimir Putin is a better leader than Joe Biden. And that Russia and the autocratic Kremlin leaders promise a more agreeable way of life. Most of the civilized world would disagree. And since Putin unleashed a campaign of war crimes and genocide by invading their peaceful Democratic neighbor Ukraine, more than a million Russian citizens have fled the country; and still many more are trying. And as the MAGA crowd likes to point out on a daily basis, millions of folks flock to our Southern border and now to our Northern border trying to become part of this American Democratic Experience.
American’s need to allow our Justice System protect it’s citizens from serial evildoers. Serial bizzaro man, Lindsey Graham pleads with the MAGA faithful to quickly send in their rent and utility money, so billionaire Trump can mount a legal defense, and also suggests “How can President Trump avoid prosecution in New York?,” asked Graham. “On the way to the DA’s office on Tuesday, Trump should smash some windows, rob a few shops and punch a cop.” MAGA World responded with donations of $5 million within 48 hours.
I don’t believe there’s a single, reputable Fortune 50, 100, 500, 50,000 or any mom and pop business anywhere, who would employ Trump, or pay him any amount, to do any job. Isn’t there an ethical, and reasonable, true conservative Republican anywhere in America that this toxic MAGA crowd would nominate to represent the party?
This sad state of our political climate clearly represents how low, the once “Law and Order” Republican party, has sunk. Heaven help us.
Putin and Ukraine backfire by Dave Granlund, PoliticalCartoons.com
Putin has commenced blaming (firing, exiling to Siberia, jailing or who knows what else) those he believes failed his vision of a reborn Soviet Empire. Based on a keen sense of self preservation, browbeaten close advisors surely decided to refrain from trying to stop him blundering into the senseless and self destructive war/invasion of a Democratic, peaceful, industrious and successful neighbor, for merely exposing Putin and his Kleptocratic criminal enterprises tenuous hold on an emerging partially-woke Russian populace.
Putin believed Ukrainian’s would welcome his poorly trained military conscripts with open arms and kisses of gratitude for rounding-up all the Nazi’s left over from WWII. Unfortunately, no one with an ounce of authority dared remind him Ukraine was a Democratic nation led by a Democratically elected Jew, who’s great grand-parents died when the Nazis burned their village and his grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers all entered the Soviet Red Army, but only his grandfather survived.
He also believed those hoodwinked low paid conscripts would engender as much nationalistic determination as the patriotic Ukrainian’s fighting for their lives and loved ones and their nation and Democracy.
Likewise, the cowed generals seated at the block long conference table, peed their highly decorated uniforms every time they had to fend off taunts and darts fired by Putin at 60 paces. No one had the courage to stop a madman bent on destroying a peaceful neighbor, and with it their own Russian Federation.
Putin can’t blame the Russian zombie nation he keeps behind his Iron Curtain of propaganda, but the rest of the world can and will. His facade though, is showing as many cracks as the vaunted Russian war machine. In spite of Putin’s flashback to Czarist Russia, this is the 21st Century, where information grapevines steeped with minute-by-minute news and world views are influenced and possibly distorted by Facebook, Instagram, twitter, Snapchat etc. etc.
Putin’s information wack-a mole isn’t keeping pace with modern day technology. Each time he quashes another independent media source, a couple more pop up.
It could be Radio Free Europe broadcasting through the maze. It might be a courageous state sponsored news room producer dancing across the nightly news set behind an unaware spokesperson, with a sign begging viewers to open their eyes and ears.
Or Arnold Schwarzenegger using Twitter and Telegram to speak directly to his Russian followers, telling them about his fathers actions during the siege of Leningrad, which caused him a lifetime of both physical pain from a broken back and shrapnel and mental pain from guilt, for participating in an unjust war. He pleaded for the Russian soldiers to keep from making the same tragic mistakes his father made.
It might even be a few reformed self preserving oligarchs clearing their conscience and or spilling the beans in return for titles to their confiscated multimillion dollar condos, yachts and jets.
It could be the more than 200,000 Russians fleeing the country, a massive brain drain not witnessed since the worst of the Soviet Union’s dark days. It could be the growing thousands of Russian protestors courageous enough to risk a quick trip to a gulag and 15 years in prison for calling Putin’s invasion and war just what it is.
Yes, the lack of information/abundance of ignorance will be a challenge to overcome; approximately 65% of the Russian public believe Putin is acting responsibly, is standing up for and preserving the mother-land, is not a diabolical monster, is going god’s work faithfully endorsed by the State Sponsored Russian Orthodox Church Military Industrial Kleptocratic Complex, all based on what stories Putin jambs down their throat.
It’s unlikely Putin’s ultra ego will allow him to turn tail and flee back to Russia in disgrace; he will continue to pummel and plunder innocent civilians until the heavily sanctioned citizens of Russia get tired of living in terror, in financial depravation and in national disgrace. Will Putin take a bullet, fire himself, hang himself, flee the country, maybe to one of his yachts and just drift into oblivion.
During an interview, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked spokesperson for Putin, Dmitry Peskov, about his intension of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
“I need to ask you this, because the world is afraid, and I want to know whether Putin intends the world to be afraid of the nuclear option. Would he use it?” the CNN anchor asked Peskov.
Putin “intends to make the world listen to and understand our concerns” about the perceived “anti-Russia” threat from the West, said Peskov.
“I want to ask you again. Is President Putin, because, again, the Finnish president said to me that when he asked Putin directly about this, because President Putin has laid that (nuclear) card on the label, President Putin said that, if anybody tries to stop him, very bad things will happen. And I want to know whether you are convinced or confident that your boss will not use that option.”
“Well, we have a concept of domestic security, and, well, it’s public. You can read all the reasons for nuclear arms to be used,” Peskov responded. “So, if it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be used, in accordance with our concept.”
But since the only existential threat to the Russian Federation is clearly Putin himself, I guess he should nuke himself and all the cowards in the Kremlin and the Federal Assembly, who failed to stop him from blundering into his existential threat to humanity.
Putin claimed he was invading Ukraine in order to save it from Nazi overlords who disdain Russian speaking Ukrainians. But what exactly does President Putin and the Russian war mongers have to offer Ukraine, or anyone for that matter? Terrorized families, more than 10 million refugees, millions of women and children fleeing for their lives, grand parents hiding in cellars because they’re too disabled or feeble to flee. Beautiful historic cities bombed into dust. Starving innocent people dogging rockets and missiles, and mass graves when they fail that. A ruling government that commanders 85% of a nations wealth and hands it over to a handful of connected oligarchs. Leadership that invests the balance of that GDP in military weapons of war and a domestic police state apparatus that suppresses descent, choice, individualism and above all, freedom. Ukraine has clearly seen this playbook before and are determined to fight with every ounce of their battered bodies to preserve their Democracy.
Putin has no one to blame but himself, for creating this Putinopia of his own imagination and for investing in a brutally structured Kleptocratic czarism, instead of in the Russian people.
When and if Putin finally cries uncle, there must be no plausible justifications or excuses condoned and no face saving plea deals negotiated this time. Ukraine, Europe and the entire world demands long overdue justice from this Russian marauder. Only a reckoning before the World Criminal Court for the perpetrators and supporters of this conflagration will suffice, and reparations for a plundered, innocent, sovereign nation must be exacted.
This time, for the good of the world and human existence, the civilized world cannot let this megalomaniac off the hook; the businesses who pulled out of Russia must refuse to return until Putin and his lot are disposed of. A free and fair election of all government officials supervised by a United Nations tribunal could go a long way to eventually returning Russia to some semblance of respect and legitimacy.
The crippling sanctions must remain in place until Ukraine is guaranteed security, reparations and justice. The thousands of war protestors, including political prisoners like Alexis Navalny must be exonerated. I guess it’s better late than never that countries who prospered from riches stolen from Russia are finally taking international money laundering laws serious, but if they and the U.S. had done more to crack down on Russia’s ruling Kleptocrats during the last two decades of Putin’s criminal reign, maybe he wouldn’t have had the means to launch this war.
America and the West must also come to terms with it’s own failings. Access to Russia’s oil and gas can no longer justify allowing Vladman the Madman to threaten the entire world order and existence with a nuclear holocaust. And if the Russian people and their cowed institutions can’t keep Putin or his successors in check, NATO and the United Nations must.
And blindly obedient Trump cult followers, far right government haters and our right wing media must also wake up. Idolizing, enabling and refusing to hold Autocrats and tyrants like Putin and his adoring want-a-be Donald J. Trump accountable for criminal conduct encourages and enables catastrophic tragedies like we’re witnessing in Ukraine today.
The blatant lies used by Putin to invade a peaceful, sovereign Democratic nation reminds us of the 2020 election “Big Lie” Trump still propagates to delude his faithful. But as Ukraine and the world tragically now realizes, condoning lies and ignoring the truth and facts can have apocalyptic consequences. In addition to Putin’s senseless war of choice, Trump and his sheeple used lies and conspiracies to try to overturn a free and fair election and attempt to overthrow our own Democracy. Putin and Trump are one in the same when it comes to truth telling.
Fake news collaborators can’t be ignored or downplayed. The Foxification of Russia’s state run media and the Russification of our own far right wing nationalistic media, undermines democratic fundamentals and the rule of law in both countries.
The Biden administration just finally passed a $1.2 trillion long overdue infrastructure bill. If Russia stopped the war today, it would probably cost more than that to rebuild Ukraine. And how many generations will it take before the millions of tons of forever chemicals and toxic military materials can be scrubbed and leached from Ukraine’s homeland soil and water. This war has set back environmental and climate change progress in Europe for a decade or more and self serving maniacs like Putin and Trump couldn’t care less.
I’ve written about tarbabys many times and said that a certain one might be the biggest one yet, but this Ukraine tarbaby latched on by Putin might just top all those others combined. Brer Rabbit Putin thought he could just waltz into his neighbors backyard and take by force what the industrious and forward thinking Ukrainians have nurtured since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But considering the crippling lasting sanctions on Russia’s economy and Russian society, Putin’s blatant disregard for anyone but himself, the consequential damages inflicted on Ukraine and it’s defenders, the pain and grief and misery suffered by so many, this tar on Russia’s national reputation will take many generations to erase.
