Trump’s ‘blood bath’ threat wasn’t even the most dangerous thing he said all weekend

USA Today – Opinion

Trump’s ‘blood bath’ threat wasn’t even the most dangerous thing he said all weekend

Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – March 18, 2024

You might have heard some controversy over former President Donald Trump’s use of “blood bath” this weekend.

Here’s a quick summary: At an Ohio rally on Saturday, Trump was talking about the auto industry and said if he doesn’t get elected in November “it’s going to be a blood bath for the country,” prompting a number of news outlets to report things along the lines of “Trump predicts ‘blood bath’ if not elected,” which seemed pretty on point, but then a bunch of MAGA types got bent out of shape and said, “No, he was talking about it being a blood bath for the auto industry,” which still seems kind of bad and unnecessarily apocalyptic but … you know … whatever, and so a bunch of news outlets started writing about the possibility that the “blood bath” comment was taken out of context and all sorts of hand-wringing ensued and it was, to borrow a phrase, a bit of a blood bath.

Here’s the full quote, which came on the heels of his comments about the auto industry: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”

Here’s what matters: A number of media outlets and President Joe Biden’s campaign pounced on one unhinged Trump comment that had questionable context when there were SO MANY OTHER absolutely despicable comments to choose from.

Trump’s ‘blood bath’ line overshadowed more dangerous comments

If the media erred, it was in focusing on the “blood bath” comment rather than – (please imagine me waving my hands in all directions) – everything else.

Of greater importance, I’d argue, was the fact that Trump’s Saturday rally in Dayton began with an announcer saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages.”

I guess insurrection is now A-OK: Supreme Court sides with Donald Trump, affirming each president gets one free insurrection

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has taken to calling the charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned insurrectionist-lunkheads who attacked the U.S. Capitol in 2021 “hostages.” He referred to them as “unbelievable patriots.”

The fact that a former president of the United States is treating domestic terrorists as heroes – they are so horribly and unfairly treated! – is certainly as newsworthy as any “blood bath” comment.

Trump calling migrants ‘animals’ should alarm everyone

Trump also continued his dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, painting a wildly inaccurate picture of “hardened criminals” by the “hundred of thousands” crossing the border and “destroying our country.”

“I don’t know if you call them people, in some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left say it’s a terrible thing to say.”

Former President Donald Trump campaigns at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024, in Ohio. The state holds its Republican Senate primary on the following Tuesday.
Former President Donald Trump campaigns at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024, in Ohio. The state holds its Republican Senate primary on the following Tuesday.

That’s correct. It’s a terrible thing to say. The vast majority of migrants are people fleeing violence or economic hardship, and there’s no evidence that immigrants cause an increase in crime.

On Saturday, Trump called them “animals.” That is vile rhetoric, though not at all surprising since he has previously echoed Adolf Hitler’s language by claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

When you sound like Hitler, that’s a very bad thing

Asked about similarities between his words and Hitler’s on Fox News on Sunday, Trump said: “That’s what they say; I didn’t know that.”

Sure, buddy. He apparently missed the classes on World War II in high school history. And it seems worth noting that even “accidentally” saying something that sounds like Hitler is neither good nor normal.

Unfazed by his Fox News interviewer, Trump continued to repeat the same horrendous crap: “Our country is being poisoned.”

The presumptive Republican nominee: Want to know how weird Donald Trump is? Just read this transcript.

Predicting a ‘blood bath’ was the tip of Trump’s iceberg

Here are a few other disturbing moments from Trump’s weekend:

One weekend of Trump babble should disqualify him

To sum things up, the “blood bath” comment, whatever the context, was bad.

But beyond that, the man a majority of Republicans believe should be the next president spent the weekend: calling the sitting president a “numbskull”; calling former Republican primary candidates “terrible”; continuing to deny the results of a free-and-fair election; calling immigrants “animals” while continuing to embrace Hitlerian rhetoric, even after being reminded it’s Hitlerian rhetoric; swearing; crudely making fun of someone’s weight and another person’s name; and calling the people who quite literally attacked the U.S. Capitol and assaulted more than 100 police officers “unbelievable patriots.”

I’d say the real controversy is the media failed to point out that Trump’s “blood bath” comment, disturbing as it is, might have been the least-bad thing he said all weekend.

With the election behind him, Putin says Russia aims to set up a buffer zone inside Ukraine

Associated Press

With the election behind him, Putin says Russia aims to set up a buffer zone inside Ukraine

The Associated Press – March 18, 2024

Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are depicted in a tug-of-war game on a memorial in Izium, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Sunday, March 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are depicted in a tug-of-war game on a memorial in Izium, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Sunday, March 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Family members of Vitaliy Alimov, his mother Maria and his wife Natalia, mourn over his body before his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)
Family members of Vitaliy Alimov, his mother Maria and his wife Natalia, mourn over his body before his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)
FILE - Men in unmarked uniforms stand guard during the seizure of the Ukrainian corvette Khmelnitsky in Sevastopol, Crimea, Thursday, March 20, 2014. When Ukraine's Kremlin-friendly president was ousted in 2014 by mass protests that Moscow called a U.S.-instigated coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by sending troops to overrun Crimea and staging a plebiscite on joining Russia, which the West dismissed as illegal. (AP Photo, File)
Men in unmarked uniforms stand guard during the seizure of the Ukrainian corvette Khmelnitsky in Sevastopol, Crimea, Thursday, March 20, 2014. When Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly president was ousted in 2014 by mass protests that Moscow called a U.S.-instigated coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by sending troops to overrun Crimea and staging a plebiscite on joining Russia, which the West dismissed as illegal. (AP Photo, File)
Emergency services workers look on as Military chaplain Archpriest Ioann shovels earth into the grave of Vitaliy Alimov during his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)
Emergency services workers look on as Military chaplain Archpriest Ioann shovels earth into the grave of Vitaliy Alimov during his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said after extending his rule in an election that stifled opposition that Moscow will not relent in its invasion of Ukraine and plans to create a buffer zone to help protect against long-range Ukrainian strikes and cross-border raids.

The Kremlin’s forces have made battlefield progress as Kyiv’s troops struggle with a severe shortage of artillery shells and exhausted front-line units after more than two years of war. The front line stretches over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) across eastern and southern Ukraine.

Advances have been slow and costly, and Ukraine has increasingly used its long-range firepower to hit oil refineries and depots deep inside Russia. Also, groups claiming to be Ukraine-based Russian opponents of the Kremlin have launched cross-border incursions.

“We will be forced at some point, when we consider it necessary, to create a certain ‘sanitary zone’ on the territories controlled by the (Ukrainian government),” Putin said late Sunday.

This “security zone,” Putin said, “would be quite difficult to penetrate using the foreign-made strike assets at the enemy’s disposal.”

He spoke after the release of election returns that showed him securing a fifth six-year term in a landslide in an election devoid of any real opposition following his relentless crackdown on dissent.

Monday marks the 10th anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, which set the stage for Russia to invade its neighbor in February 2022. However, Putin has been vague about his goals in Ukraine since that full-scale invasion floundered.

Putin again warned the West against deploying troops to Ukraine. A possible conflict between Russia and NATO would put the world “a step away” from World War III, he said.

French President Emmanuel Macron recently said that sending Western troops into Ukraine should not be ruled out, though he said the current situation does not require it.

Commenting on the prospects for peace talks with Kyiv, Putin reaffirmed that Russia remains open to negotiations but won’t be lured into a truce that will allow Ukraine to rearm.

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has apparently shut the door on such talks, saying Putin should be brought to trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which last year issued an arrest warrant for Putin on war crime charges.

With crucial U.S. aid being held up in Washington, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham arrived in Kyiv on Monday, the U.S. Embassy said. Ukraine desperately needs the around $48 billion that the package of support would provide, especially artillery shells and air defense systems.

Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted 17 out of 22 Shahed drones launched by Russia over various regions of the country overnight. Russia also fired five S-300/S-400 missiles at the Kharkiv region and two Kh-59 at the Sumy region, both in northeastern Ukraine, it said.

Authorities say the intensity of ground attacks and airstrikes has increased recently in the Sumy region, prompting the evacuation of 56 people, including 26 children, from one border village over the past week.

In the past two and a half months the region has been struck more than 3,000 times, after some 8,000 strikes over all of last year, the Ukrainian regional government says. The number of aerial bomb attacks has tripled, and Russian saboteurs are highly active, according to officials.

This story corrects the name of the court to the International Criminal Court.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction

The New York Times

Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction

Adam Liptak – March 18, 2024

Justice Stephen Breyer in Washington, on Aug. 26, 2021. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
Justice Stephen Breyer in Washington, on Aug. 26, 2021. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen Breyer’s Supreme Court chambers are not quite as grand as those he occupied before he retired in 2022, but they are still pretty nice. As before, they include a working fireplace, which was crackling when I went to visit him on a temperate afternoon in late February to talk about his new book.

In earlier interviews, Breyer could be rambling and opaque. This time he was direct. He said he meant to sound an alarm about the direction of the Supreme Court.

“Something important is going on,” he said. The court has taken a wrong turn, he said, and it is not too late to turn back.

The book, “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” will be published March 26, the day the Supreme Court hears its next major abortion case, on access to pills used to terminate pregnancies.

The book devotes considerable attention to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. Breyer, who had dissented, wrote that the decision was stunningly naive in saying it was returning the question of abortion to the political process.

“The Dobbs majority’s hope that legislatures and not courts will decide the abortion question will not be realized,” he wrote.

He was more forceful during the interview. “There are too many questions,” he said. “Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that.”

The book is a sustained critique of the current court’s approach to the law, one that he said fetishizes the texts of statutes and the Constitution, reading them woodenly, without a common-sense appreciation of their purpose and consequences.

Without naming names, he seemed to call on the three members of the court appointed by President Donald Trump — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — to reconsider how they approach the role.

“Recently,” he wrote, “major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court. Major changes take time, and there are many years left for the newly appointed justices to decide whether they want to build the law using only textualism and originalism.”

He added that “they may well be concerned about the decline in trust in the court — as shown by public opinion polls.”

Textualism is a way of interpreting statutes that focuses on their words, leading to decisions that turn on grammar and punctuation. Originalism seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted, even though, Breyer said in the interview, “half the country wasn’t represented in the political process that led to the document.”

There are three large problems with originalism, he wrote in the book.

“First, it requires judges to be historians — a role for which they may not be qualified — constantly searching historical sources for the ‘answer’ where there often isn’t one there,” he wrote. “Second, it leaves no room for judges to consider the practical consequences of the constitutional rules they propound. And third, it does not take into account the ways in which our values as a society evolve over time as we learn from the mistakes of our past.”

Breyer did not accuse the justices who use those methods of being political in the partisan sense or of acting in bad faith. But he said their approach represented an abdication of the judicial role, one in which they ought to consider a problem from every angle.

In his chambers, he recalled another era, when three different Republican appointees — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy — largely shared his basic approach to the law.

“Sandra, David — I mean, the two of them, I would see eye to eye not necessarily in the result in every case, but just the way you approach it.” Breyer said. “And Tony, too, to a considerable degree.”

Breyer retired a little reluctantly, under pressure from liberals who wanted to make sure that President Joe Biden could appoint his successor and that the conservative supermajority on the court, currently at 6-3, would not get any more lopsided. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former law clerk to Breyer, now occupies his seat.

Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, has returned to Harvard Law School, where he taught before becoming a judge. But he said he missed his old job.

“When you’re a professor, you’re mostly involved in what people decided already in the past,” he said. “When you’re a judge, you’re also interested in that, but what you’re deciding is going to affect present and future. And that’s hard. Because you don’t really know how it will work out. You have to do your best there. I like that kind of job.”

He shrugged, seeming to contemplate the passage of time. “What can you do?” he asked. “It’s the human condition.”

Breyer’s critics say his approach allows judges too much freedom to turn their preferences into law. I asked him for an example of a case in which the law required him to reach a conclusion at odds with his personal views.

“What about all the capital punishment cases?” he asked. Although he urged the court in a 2015 dissent to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty, he did not adopt the practice of some earlier justices of dissenting in every capital case. “That doesn’t mean I approved,” he said.

He added, more generally, that he hoped his book would reach both a broad audience and a narrow one.

“I’d love people to read it,” he said. “I’d like for you to agree with me. So would every author. I’d like even to get the members of this court to read it and to say, ‘Oh, not a bad point. Not a bad point.’ And that’s all.”

“Honest Don” Honestly???

John Hanno – Tarbabys – March 16, 2024

“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)

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 claimed in numerous speeches 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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, that the total was “over 500 miles.”

Facts FirstTrump’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.”

Trump and the military

In speech after speech, Trump repeated a claim he had made during his presidency – saying “I fully rebuilt the US military,” “I’ve rebuilt the entire military,” or “we rebuilt our whole military.” He periodically made clear that he was talking about military equipment, saying that, before he came along and did this rebuilding, the country had “48-year-old fighter jets.”

Facts FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 subjectin 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 FirstThis 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 FirstThis 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 2018 for 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 FirstTrump 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.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The pipeline was damaged later that year in what has been described as a likely act of sabotage.

Trump and awareness of Nord Stream 2

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 FirstBoth 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 FirstTrump 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 used by various 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstIt 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 FirstTrump’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 Lebanonbetween 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 Syria throughout his presidency, even after he claimed US 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 SomaliaYemenLibya 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 FirstTrump’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 speech after speech, 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.”

Facts FirstTrump’s claims are wrong in two ways. First and most critically, this money wasn’t from China. Though the Trump administration made the payments because farmers had been hurt by his trade war with China, the aid money came from US taxpayers: Study after study, including one this year from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. (And it is US importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government.)  Second, as The Washington Post noted in a recent fact check, the payments to farmers under Trump’s program totaled $23 billion, not “$28 billion,” per the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

Previous presidents and tariffs on China

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 FirstTemporarily 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 speech after speech, 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstBoth 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 – his assertion 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 FirstTrump 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,” sometimes specifying 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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.

Trump has been making similar false claims since Election Night 2020 itself, when he wrongly claimed that he had won Georgia and won Michigan as votes continued to be counted. Trump ended up losing both states.

A film about the 2020 election

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 FirstThis is false. The film ‘2000 Mules’ has been widely 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 boxes in 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 FirstThis is all false. While elections experts 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 miniscule percentage 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 FirstThis 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstThis 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 FirstTrump’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.”

Facts FirstTrump’s specifics were wrong: the Maricopa County technology problem affected about 27% of its voting locations – and these locations were scattered around the county, in heavily Democratic areas as well as Republican areas, a Washington Post analysis found. And Trump’s suggestion that the technology problems were intentionally designed to damage Republicans is baseless. At the time, Maricopa County had a Republican-controlled board of supervisors and a Republican county recorder.

“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 FirstAll 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstIt’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 FirstIt’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.”

Facts FirstIt’s not true that “you can’t” make electric cars in the US. Electric cars are already being assembled here by various companies. And domestic electric vehicle manufacturing is expected to grow substantially: companies have made major recent investments in US factories to assemble electric vehicles and make batteries for them, spurred in part by provisions of Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Many of the recent investments have been in 
Republican-led states in the South.

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 FirstTrump’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.

The Biden administration has proposed ambitious new tailpipe emissions regulations for automakersoffered tax credits to people who buy certain electric vehiclesinvested in new electric vehicle charging stations and ordered federal entities to purchase electric vehicles, among other policies promoting the adoption of these vehicles. But there is no Biden requirement that “everybody” has to drive an electric vehicle and no Biden proposal to prohibit citizens from continuing to use gasoline-powered engines.

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 FirstThis 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 FirstThis 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 FirstThis 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 FirstTrump’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.”

You can read more here.

– CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this item.

Biden and energy production

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 FirstTrump’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.

As CNN’s Matt Egan reported in August, the federal government’s Energy Information Administration is projecting annual records for both 2023 and 2024. US production of dry natural gas also set a record in 2022 and outpaced 2022 levels in the first eight months of 2023.

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.”

Still, despite Biden’s often critical rhetoric about fossil fuel companies, some policy moves to get tougher on those companies and his major investments in initiatives to fight climate change, he certainly has not “stopped it.”

Biden has also approved some significant and controversial fossil fuel projects, including the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and the Mountain Valley gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia.

Biden and oil exports to Europe

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 FirstThis 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstIt’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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 FirstThese Trump 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 Trump as 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 FirstIt’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 MississippiLouisiana 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 FirstTrump’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.

China has made massive investments in wind and solar energy since its commitment to the Paris accord – while also drawing criticism from environmentalists for ramping up its use of coal.

Foreign affairs

Military equipment left in Afghanistan

Trump said in speech after speech 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump 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 FirstBoth 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 FirstNetanyahu 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 FirstTrump’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 imagesby 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 repeatedly claimed 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 FirstTrump 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’s narrative is thoroughly inaccurate. The judge, Faiq Zidan, head of Iraq’s Supreme 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 FirstTrump 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 FirstTrump’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 FirstTrump’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 datain 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 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.”

Facts FirstThis is false. New York Executive Law 63(12), the 1956 statute that New York Attorney General Letitia James invoked in filing the lawsuit that led to the civil trial, has been used for decades by New York attorneys general against a wide range of entities, ranging from an e-cigarette company to school bus companies to oil and gas giant ExxonMobil (which won its case). In fact, it had also been used against Trump University and the Trump Foundation, generating millions in settlements.

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.

A lawyer at the Manhattan DA’s office

In a November speech in New Hampshire, Trump claimed that Biden is behind the criminal case brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump also complained that Bragg’s office had hired a former senior official in the federal Justice Department, Matthew Colangelo.

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.”

Facts FirstThere is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s decision to join the Manhattan district attorney’s office in 2022 as senior counsel to Bragg. Regardless, Trump’s claim that Bragg’s hiring of Colangelo was “not even allowed” is wrong. Colangelo was free to get a new job.

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 FirstTrump’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 FirstThis 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.)

James filed the lawsuit that led to this trial in September 2022 – about two months before Trump launched his 2024 campaign.

Al Capone’s indictments

Trump repeatedly denounced the four criminal cases against him  as unfounded and politically motivated – and, to underscore his point, he claimed in speech after speech 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 FirstTrump’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.”

Before the landmark 1931 conviction, Capone was arrested, indicted and convicted in 1929 for carrying concealed weapons in Philadelphia. Schwartz also noted two lesser-known indictments of Capone that did not result in a conviction: a 1926 federal indictment for conspiracy to violate Prohibition laws and a 1933 county indictment for racketeering.

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.

Read and search the full database of Trump’s false or misleading claims

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.

Scroll a visual timeline of the false claims Trump made during his time in office

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.

Trump doubles down on call for Liz Cheney to be prosecuted

The Hill

Trump doubles down on call for Liz Cheney to be prosecuted

Miranda Nazzaro – March 17, 2024

Former President Trump on Sunday doubled down on his push for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to be prosecuted over allegations she and the other Jan. 6 committee members purposely withheld testimony and details from their investigation into the former president’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Trump, on Truth Social on Sunday, posted a piece from former Trump administration aide Kash Patel published in The Federalist last week, in which Patel claimed Cheney and the House Jan. 6 committee “suppressed evidence” about the former president’s authorization of National Guard troops during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

“SHE SHOULD BE PROSECUTED FOR WHAT SHE HAS DONE TO OUR COUNTRY! SHE ILLEGALLY DESTROYED THE EVIDENCE. UNREAL!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social while linking to Patel’s piece.

Cheney clapped back Sunday at Trump’s calls for her to be jailed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, writing, “Hi Donald: you know these are lies. You have had all the grand jury & J6 transcripts for many months. You’re trying to halt your 1/6 trial because your VP, WH counsel, WH aides, campaign & DOJ officials etc. will testify against you. You’re afraid of the truth and you should be.”

Cheney served as vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee and emerged as one of the most outspoken GOP critics of the former president. She has repeatedly pinned the blame on Trump for allegedly inciting the riot.

Cheney lost her seat in the House after three terms to Trump-backed challenger Rep. Harriet Hageman during the 2022 primaries in Wyoming, where Trump maintained wide support with voters.

The back-and-forth comes nearly a week after House Republicans released a new report on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack in an attempt to discredit Congress’s initial investigation into the Capitol insurrection and clear Trump of any wrongdoing as he pursues reelection.

The report, drafted by the House Administration Committee’s oversight subpanel, accuses the now-disbanded Jan. 6 select committee of embarking on a partisan witch hunt to harm the former president.

Included in the report was a detail about how the driver of Trump’s car on Jan. 6 disputed testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who previously claimed Trump tried to take control of the car and go toward the Capitol. She told the public she heard in a story from others that Trump had “lunged” for the steering wheel after his speech near the White House in an apparent attempt to go toward the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The unnamed driver told the committee, however, that Trump “never grabbed the steering wheel,” and he said he “didn’t see him … lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”

Republicans have seized on the driver’s testimony and how the committee did not release it earlier as further fuel to their argument Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should be exonerated.

A copy of the transcript of the driver’s testimony, reviewed by The New York Times, indicated the driver did back Hutchinson’s details about Trump’s insistence to join supporters at the Capitol.

Trump currently faces four felonies over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, though the trial has been delayed while the Supreme Court weighs whether the former president’s actions on Jan. 6 fall under presidential immunity. Trump has argued he cannot be prosecuted because he was working as president at the time.

Russia claims it used ‘vacuum bomb’ to kill large number of Ukrainian soldiers

CNN

Russia claims it used ‘vacuum bomb’ to kill large number of Ukrainian soldiers

Brad Lendon, Manveena Suri, Josh Pennington and Sophie Jeong – March 16, 2024

CNN

Russia says it killed large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers with a so-called “vacuum bomb”, a powerful munition that sucks in oxygen from the surroundings to sustain an explosion.

The deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces told Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a meeting that up to 300 soldiers were killed “as a result of an accurate strike by an aerial munition,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday.

CNN cannot independently verify the numbers and there has been no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Colonel General Alexei Kim did not indicate where the strike took place but described the location of the strike as the “deployment point of the ‘Kraken’ nationalist formation,” according to the ministry, referring to a special unit of the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence.

Kim said a “volumetric detonation bomb” was used in the airstrike, RIA Novosti reported Saturday.

Volumetric weapons are also known as vacuum bombs, thermobaric weapons or fuel-air explosives.

The destruction caused by a thermobaric weapon is caused by the blast wave it creates and also the vacuum resulting from the fuel-air mixture sucking in oxygen to sustain the detonation, according to the Lieber Institute for Law & Warfare at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York.

The force of such a blast is enough to collapse buildings and rupture organs. Walls or even caves don’t provide protection, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

Details of the Russian airstrike emerged during a meeting at the headquarters of the Joint Group of Forces, where Shoigu heard reports from commanders on the current situation in the “zone of the special military operation,” the ministry said, Russia’s phrase for its war in Ukraine.

Kim also did not mention when the strike was carried out but noted that “over the past week alone, as a result of effective work of reconnaissance and strike systems, three American Patriot complexes, a Vampire multiple rocket launcher, more than 10 foreign-made artillery systems and fuel and ammunition depots were destroyed,” according to the ministry.

Kim also told Shoigu during the meeting that Ukraine is “suffering significant losses in both equipment and manpower as a result of the use of high-precision weapons and strike drones,” the ministry said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The ‘authoritarian’ lessons Trump and the Republicans want to learn from Orbán’s Hungary

Independent

The ‘authoritarian’ lessons Trump and the Republicans want to learn from Orbán’s Hungary

Katie Hawkinson – March 15, 2024

Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán pictured together meeting in March 2024 (HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE)
Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán pictured together meeting in March 2024 (HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE)

As he gears up for the 2024 election, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump met with an old ally: Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary who has triggered a democratic backslide in his country.

Mr Orbán met with Mr Trump last week, bypassing any meetings with President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris despite stopping in Washington, DC — where he visited with The Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative think tank staffed by many former Trump administration officials.

Their meeting came just one week before National Hungary Day when Mr Orbán gave a speech condemning the “Western world.”

“They start wars, destroy worlds, redraw countries’ borders and graze on everything like locusts,” Mr Orbán told a crowd in Budapest, per the Associated Press. “We Hungarians live differently and want to live differently.”

The exact details of the discussion between Mr Trump and Mr Orbán are unclear. Mr Trump’s campaign released a statement describing their conversation as focused on “a wide range of issues affecting Hungary and the United States, including the paramount importance of strong and secure borders to protect the sovereignty of each nation.”

Regardless, the conversation clearly went well, with Mr Orbán calling the former president his “good friend” on Monday. The same day, the Hungarian Prime Minister also praised Mr Trump’s reported comment that he will not send any aid to Ukraine if elected. Meanwhile, Mr Trump has mentioned Mr Orbán in several remarks, including a 2023 speech in which he wrongly referred to him as the President of Turkey.

Even beyond Mr Trump, the GOP has a fixation with Hungary and Mr Orbán’s government. In 2022, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson focused on Hungary, releasing a documentary that appeared to portray the country as a model for conservatism. More recently Carlson has been singing the praises of Vladimir Putin’s Russia – both Mr Trump and Mr Orbán have a close relationship with the Russian dictator.

So, why do Mr Trump and Mr Orbán get along so well? Experts tell The Independent it’s because Mr Trump wants to learn from Mr Orbán if re-elected in 2024.

Why is Donald Trump obsessed with Viktor Orbán?

The former President and Mr Orbán have similar goals for the future world order — making them eager allies, Robert Benson, a senior policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, told The Independent.

“It’s no coincidence that someone like Viktor Orban is attempting to build a relationship with Stephen Miller, with Donald Trump, with the Maga Republicans on this side of the Atlantic,” Dr Benson said. “Because they see themselves in a civilizational battle for the future of what they call ‘Western Civilization.’ This is steeped in anti-immigrant xenophobia, in right-wing nationalism, and in tropes about the nation-state.”

Mr Trump, of course, has made his far-right, anti-immigration stance clear since day one of his 2016 presidential campaign. Similarly, Mr Orbán has expressed radical views on immigration since 2015 — and in 2022, he said he did not want Hungarians to become “peoples of mixed race.”

“I am the only politician in the EU who stands for an openly anti-immigration policy,” Mr Orbán said. “This is not a race issue for us, this is a cultural issue.”

Meanwhile, Kim Scheppele, Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, sees the Trump-Orbán relationship in a different light — rather than plotting a new future for civilization, she says the two leaders are “just opportunistic, transactionalists looking to cut a deal whenever it happens.”

“Both of them are just transactional politicians,” Dr Scheppele told The Independent. “One of the reasons why both of them love dictators — and don’t like organizations like Nato, the EU and so on — is because dictators are also transactional. They don’t expect you to be loyal forever; everything is just a deal in the moment.”

Both Mr Trump and Mr Orbán have expressed disdain for Nato and its processes. The former president has threatened to violate Nato by allowing Russia to attack member states; meanwhile, Mr Orbán delayed a vote on Sweden’s membership for 18 months. As a result, the country was not admitted until this year.

Mr Trump would not have to entirely pull out of Nato to reject their principles during a potential second presidency. As journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic, Mr Trump could simply reject Article 5, which states an attack against one Nato nation “shall be considered an attack against them all”. Though, as former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said, a second Trump presidency could certainly mean the end of US Nato membership. Though he did not outright reject it, Mr Trump did not specifically endorse Article 5 at the 2017 Nato summit.

“Trump admires lots of dictators, but I think he admires them because they stay in power forever, because they look all powerful, but that mostly because their foreign policy doesn’t tie them up in strings,” Dr Scheppele said.

Mr Trump has formerly expressed that he would be a dictator on day one of his potential second presidency.

“Orbán becomes a model for this kind of foreign policy,” Dr Scheppele continued.

Now, Hungary is in a democratic backslide. Mr Orbán has sought to undermine education, even targeting his former ally-turned-enemy George Soros, who founded Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Mr Orbán forced Mr Soros – who has become a hate figure to the hard right across the world over his support for civil society projects – to relocate the university to Vienna in 2018.

In 2022, the EU Parliament declared that Hungary could no longer be called a full democracy, labelling it an “electoral autocracy.” Lawmakers raised several concerns about the Hungarian government, including the lack of media pluralism, religious freedom and independence of the judiciary.

“Academic freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to equal treatment, including LGBTIQ rights, the rights of minorities, as well as those of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, are also problematic,” Parliament said in a statement.

Then, in 2023, Hungary passed Mr Orbán’s Defence of National Sovereignty Act, which authorized the creation of a new government authority that can gather information on any organizations or individuals that benefit from foreign funds or that can influence public debate.

Dr Scheppele called the law an “authoritarian monster.” Meanwhile, the European Commission said last month the law violated European Union law.

What could this alliance mean if Mr Trump is re-elected?

Practically, Dr Benson said a second Trump administration could bring withdrawals from international institutions.

“So, in the event that Trump were to win the presidency in 2024, he would probably withdraw from international institutions,” Dr Benson told The Independent. “He’s mentioned his disdain for NATO. This plays neatly into a playbook for Vladimir Putin, who is banking exactly on our domestic politics to be able to succeed in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, Dr Scheppele pointed to Project 2025, a conservative playbook for the next presidential administration that calls for a series of actions to bolster a potential conservative presidency come the 2024 election. Its purpose is to avoid the mistakes of 2017 when Mr Trump first took office and the GOP was woefully underprepared. Along with replacing supposedly impartial federal officials with fellow conservatives, Project 2025 also calls for several policy revisions, such as re-adding the citizenship question to the US Census and reversing the FDA approval of abortion pills.

Wes Coopersmith, the Chief of Staff for the Heritage Foundation who oversees Project 2025, told The Independent that replacing employees with GOP allies if Mr Trump is elected would be “democratic.”

“We think the most democratic way to run the administration is with folks who agree with the President, who voted for the president, who agree with his policies and want to implement that,” Mr Coopersmith said.

Mr Orbán’s success leading an “authoritarian” government relied on “decapitating” the civil service and replacing it with his extremist allies, which mirrors the Project 2025 strategy, Dr Scheppele said.

“In 2010, [Orbán] came in and decapitated the civil service, replacing with all his own loyalists, reinstated Civil Service protection for them and captured the state bureaucracy — that was a big part of how he went about locking himself into power,” Dr Scheppele told The Independent. “You see this as the blueprint for Trump.”

“There is an ideological battle at play between liberal democracy and those who espouse a kind of perverted autocracy,” Dr Benson said.

“It’s clear that this is very much part of the stakes going into 2024 here at home,” he continued.

Ukrainians living under Russian occupation are coerced to vote for Putin

Associated Press

Ukrainians living under Russian occupation are coerced to vote for Putin

Yuras Karmanau and Emma Burrows – March 14, 2024

A couple walk past billboards which promote the upcoming presidential election with words in Russian: "Your voice is important" in a street in Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine's occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is "manifestation of patriotic feeling," Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)
A couple walk past billboards which promote the upcoming presidential election with words in Russian: “Your voice is important” in a street in Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine’s occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is “manifestation of patriotic feeling,” Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)
A volunteer holds a flag reading "let's go to the elections" promoting the upcoming presidential election in a street in Donetsk, the capital of Russian-controlled Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine's occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is "manifestation of patriotic feeling," Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)
A volunteer holds a flag reading “let’s go to the elections” promoting the upcoming presidential election in a street in Donetsk, the capital of Russian-controlled Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine’s occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is “manifestation of patriotic feeling,” Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)
A woman walks past a billboard which promote the upcoming presidential election with words in Russian: "Together we are strong, we vote for Russia!" on a bus stop in Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine's occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is "manifestation of patriotic feeling," Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)
A woman walks past a billboard which promote the upcoming presidential election with words in Russian: “Together we are strong, we vote for Russia!” on a bus stop in Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday called on people in Ukraine’s occupied regions to vote, telling them and Russians that participation in the elections is “manifestation of patriotic feeling,” Presidential elections are scheduled in Russia for March 17. (AP Photo)

Ukrainians living in regions illegally annexed by Russia are being coerced to vote in the presidential election of their wartime occupierVladimir Putin — an exercise denounced by Ukraine as an illegitimate effort by Moscow to tighten control over its neighbor.

Polls don’t open in Russia until Friday, but they are open in four annexed regions of Ukraine close to the front line, some of which are not fully in Putin’s control.

The election is taking place under highly distorted and restrictive conditions. Many Ukrainians fled these regions – or were deported by Russia – after Putin’s invasion two years ago, and there are reports of people being forced to vote at gunpoint. There are no international election observers in Ukraine.

The Russian government is prodding Ukrainians with billboards and posters to vote “for their president” and to “take part in the future of our country.” It is promoting the election with a “V” symbol in the colors of the Russian flag — a letter emblazoned on Russian tanks and a clear nod to Putin’s first name.

“ The elections are an extension of military occupation and of the war itself … rather than an exercise in the democratic franchise,” said Sam Greene, a director at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.

In addition to setting up polling stations, Russia has dispatched officials with ballot boxes to people’s homes, saying it is safer for them to vote on their doorsteps.

The Kremlin views the voting in occupied regions of Ukraine as a “test of loyalty” for civilians and local elites, said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of Penta, a political think tank.

Polls are already open in Russian-occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. In Crimea, which was annexed from Ukraine by Putin in 2014, polls will open Friday.

In the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, said his city was a symbol of Russia’s “military nightmare” and of an “electoral process in ruins.” He said a woman “accompanied by two Chechen military men with machine guns” showed up at his neighbor’s apartment with a ballot box and made clear that voting was not optional.

There have been multiple reports of Russian-installed authorities forcing people to vote, and threatening to withhold medical care or other social benefits from those who do not. More than two dozen Ukrainians who refused to vote have been arrested, according to human rights activists.

Analysts say the Kremlin is eager for a high turnout — in Russia and the occupied regions of Ukraine — to signify control, silence dissent and present Putin as a legitimate leader. The Institute for the Study of War said it expects the Kremlin and Russia-installed officials in Ukraine to “fabricate” a high turnout.

The Ukrainian governor of the Zaporozhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said that — based on publicly available lists — the Kremlin has brought more than half of the election officials and activists into the region from Russia.

The Russia-installed governor of Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, said Thursday that turnout in early voting was “better than expected” and that lines were forming at polling stations.

In the eastern region of Luhansk, which has been partially occupied since 2014, some residents told The Associated Press that they were going to vote for Putin, although several said they had no idea who else was on the ballot.

“I will vote for Putin, because I don’t know anyone else,” said Veronica, a 30-year-old nurse.

Tatiana, a 20-year-old student, said of Putin: ”I trust him so much that other candidates are no longer suitable for me.”

The AP is not identifying them by their full names because of concerns for their safety.

In a video address on Thursday, Putin urged people in Ukraine’s occupied regions — and in Russia — to vote, telling them that “each of your votes is valuable and significant.”

It is unclear how many people live in the newly annexed regions of eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin has been accused of resettling Russians. Britain’s Ministry of Defense estimated Wednesday that a third of the pre-war Ukrainian population remains, and analysts said the lack of transparency makes it easy to manipulate the vote.

In February, the Russia-installed governor of Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, said in an interview that he personally ordered the deportation of pro-Ukrainian citizens, because “these were people who we could not convince and we have to deal with them more harshly.”

Balitsky said “a large number of families” were dropped off near the front line because some of them had insulted Russia’s flag, anthem and Putin.

In Mariupol, which was flattened by the Russian military early in the war, the population has dropped from just over 400,000 people to around 200,000. Half of the current population, according to Boychenko, the mayor, are not Ukrainian and include construction workers and laborers from remote Russian regions. The Kremlin, he said, is trying to repopulate Mariupol “to create a loyal majority out of poor settlers.”

At least 27 people have been arrested for refusing to vote in the occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, according to Pavlo Lysianskyi of the Eastern Human Rights Group.

“The Kremlin is demonstratively increasing pressure on local residents,” Lysianskyi said.

There are also cases, he said, of authorities forcing people to write explanations of their refusal to vote, which could become the basis for initiating criminal cases against them. That practice was also used in local Russian elections held in occupied Ukrainian regions in September.

Karmanau reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Burrows reported from London.

Using coercion, Russia has successfully imposed its citizenship in Ukraine’s occupied territories

Associated Press

Using coercion, Russia has successfully imposed its citizenship in Ukraine’s occupied territories

Lori Hinnant, Vasilisa Stepanenko, Samya Kullab and Hanna Arirova – March 15, 2024

An election commission official inspects the passport of a person who came to vote at a polling station, during a presidential election in Makiivka, Russian-controlled Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Friday, March 15, 2024. People in Moscow-controlled Ukrainian regions are voting in Russia's presidential election, which is all but certain to extend President Vladimir Putin's rule after he clamped down on dissent. (AP Photo)
An election commission official inspects the passport of a person who came to vote at a polling station, during a presidential election in Makiivka, Russian-controlled Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Friday, March 15, 2024. People in Moscow-controlled Ukrainian regions are voting in Russia’s presidential election, which is all but certain to extend President Vladimir Putin’s rule after he clamped down on dissent. (AP Photo)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, is pictured in Kolomyya, Ukraine on Feb. 13, 2024. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, is pictured in Kolomyya, Ukraine on Feb. 13, 2024. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, poses with some of her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, poses with some of her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
50-year-old Natalia Zhyvohliad, a displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, is pictured standing outside her temporary modular house in Kolomyya, Ivano-Frankivsk region on Feb. 13, 2024. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
50-year-old Natalia Zhyvohliad, a displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, is pictured standing outside her temporary modular house in Kolomyya, Ivano-Frankivsk region on Feb. 13, 2024. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, shows in Kolomyya on Feb. 13, 2024 the scars on his arms caused by Russian soldiers who cut him with a knife. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, shows in Kolomyya on Feb. 13, 2024 the scars on his arms caused by Russian soldiers who cut him with a knife. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, fries fish for her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, on Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, fries fish for her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, on Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, shows in Kolomyya on Feb. 13, 2024 the scars on his stomach caused by Russian soldiers who cut him with a knife. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
42-year-old Vyacheslav Ryabkov, an internally displaced person from Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson region of Ukraine, shows in Kolomyya on Feb. 13, 2024 the scars on his stomach caused by Russian soldiers who cut him with a knife. Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
50-year-old Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, is pictured with her children, daughter-in-law and grandson in their temporary modular house in Kolomyya, Ivano-Frankivsk region on Feb. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
50-year-old Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, is pictured with her children, daughter-in-law and grandson in their temporary modular house in Kolomyya, Ivano-Frankivsk region on Feb. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Vasilisa Stepanenko)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, fries fish for her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, on Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Natalia Zhyvohliad, an internally displaced person from Nova Petrivka in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, fries fish for her children at the IDP shelter in Kyiv, on Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — He and his parents were among the last in their village to take a Russian passport, but the pressure was becoming unbearable.

By his third beating at the hands of the Russian soldiers occupying Ukraine’s Kherson region, Vyacheslav Ryabkov caved. The soldiers broke two of his ribs, but his face was not bruised for his unsmiling passport photo, taken in September 2023.

It wasn’t enough.

In December, they caught the welder on his way home from work. Then one slammed his rifle butt down on Ryabkov’s face, smashing the bridge of his nose.

“Why don’t you fight for us? You already have a Russian passport,” they demanded. The beating continued as the 42-year-old fell unconscious.

“Let’s finish this off,” one soldier said. A friend ran for Ryabkov’s mother.

Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship ahead of elections Vladimir Putin has made certain he will win, an Associated Press investigation has found. But accepting a passport means that men living in occupied territory can be drafted to fight against the same Ukrainian army that is trying to free them.

A Russian passport is needed to prove property ownership and keep access to health care and retirement income. Refusal can result in losing custody of children, jail – or worse. A new Russian law stipulates that anyone in the occupied territories who does not have a Russian passport by July 1 is subject to imprisonment as a “foreign citizen.”

But Russia also offers incentives: a stipend to leave the occupied territory and move to Russia, humanitarian aid, pensions for retirees, and money for parents of newborns – with Russian birth certificates.

Every passport and birth certificate issued makes it harder for Ukraine to reclaim its lost land and children, and each new citizen allows Russia to claim a right – however falsely – to defend its own people against a hostile neighbor.

The AP investigation found that the Russian government has seized at least 1,785 homes and businesses in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions alone. Ukraine’s Crimean leadership in exile reported on Feb. 25 that of 694 soldiers reported dead in recent fighting for Russia, 525 were likely Ukrainian citizens who had taken Russian passports since the annexation.

AP spoke about the system to impose Russian citizenship in occupied territories to more than a dozen people from the regions, along with the activists helping them to escape and government officials trying to cope with what has become a bureaucratic and psychological nightmare for many.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said “almost 100% … of the whole population who still live on temporary occupied territories of Ukraine” now have Russian passports.

Under international law dating to 1907, it is forbidden to force people “to swear allegiance to the hostile Power.” But when Ukrainians apply for a Russian passport, they must submit biometric data and cell phone information and swear an oath of loyalty.

“People in occupied territories, these are the first soldiers to fight against Ukraine,” said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer who helped Ukraine bring a war crimes case against Putin before the International Criminal Court. “For them, it’s logical not to waste Russian people, just to use Ukrainians.”

CHANGING THE LAW

The combination of force and enticement when it comes to Russian passports dates to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russian citizenship was automatically given to permanent residents of Crimea and anyone who refused lost rights to jobs, health care and property.

Nine months into the Russian occupation of the peninsula, 1.5 million Russian passports had been issued there, according to statistics issued by the Russian government in 2015. But Ukrainians say it was still possible to function without one for years afterward.

Beginning in May 2022, Russia passed a series of laws to make it easier to obtain passports for Ukrainians, mostly by lifting the usual residency and income requirements. In April 2023 came the punishment: Anyone in the occupied territories who did not accept Russian citizenship would be considered stateless and required to register with Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry.

Russian officials threatened to withhold access to medical care for those without a Russian passport, and said one was needed to prove property ownership. Hundreds of properties deemed “abandoned” were seized by the Russian government.

“You can see it in the passport stamps: If someone got their passport in August 2022 or earlier, they are most certainly pro-Russian. If a passport was issued after that time – it was most certainly forced,” said Oleksandr Rozum, a lawyer who left the occupied city of Berdyansk and now handles the bureaucratic gray zone for Ukrainians under occupation who ask for his help, including property records, birth and death certificates and divorces.

The situation is different depending on the whims of the Russian officials in charge of a particular area, according to interviews with Ukrainians and a look at the Telegram social media accounts set up by occupation officials.

In an interview posted recently, Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-installed governor in Zaporizhzhia, said anyone who opposed the occupation was subject to expulsion. “We understood that these people could not be won over and that they would have to be dealt with even more harshly in the future,” he said. Balitsky then alluded to making “some extremely harsh decisions that I will not talk about.”

Even children are forced to take Russian passports.

A decree signed Jan. 4 by Putin allows for the fast-tracking of citizenship for Ukrainian orphans and those “without parental care,” who include children whose parents were detained in the occupied territories. Almost 20,000 Ukrainian children have disappeared into Russia or Russian-held territories, according to the Ukrainian government, where they can be given passports and be adopted as Russian citizens.

“It’s about eradication of identity,” said Rashevska, the lawyer involved in the war crimes case.

Natalia Zhyvohliad, a mother of nine from a suburb of Berdyansk, had a good idea of what was in store for her children if she stayed.

Zhyvohliad said about half her town of 3,500 people left soon after for Ukrainian-held lands, some voluntarily and some deported through the frontlines on a 40-kilometer (25-mile) walk. Others welcomed the occupation: Her goddaughter eagerly took Russian citizenship, as did some of her neighbors.

But she said plenty of people were like her – those the Russians derisively call “waiters”: People waiting for a Ukrainian liberation. She kept her younger children, who range in age from 7 to 18, home from school and did her best to teach them in Ukrainian. But then someone snitched, and she was forced to send them to the Russian school.

At all hours, she said, soldiers would pound on her door and ask why she didn’t have a passport yet. One friend gave in because she needed medicine for a chronic illness. Zhyvohliad held out through the summer, not quite believing the threats to deport her and send her brood to an orphanage in Russia or to dig trenches.

Then last fall, the school headmaster forced her 17-year-old and 18-year-old sons to register for the draft and ordered them to apply for passports in the meantime. Their alternative, the principal said, was to explain themselves to Russia’s internal security services.

By the end of 2023, at least 30,000 Crimean men had been conscripted to serve in the Russian military since the peninsula was annexed, according to a UN report. It was clear to Zhyvohliad what her boys risked.

With tears in her eyes and trembling legs, she went to the passport office.

“I kept a Ukrainian flag during the occupation,” she said. “How could I apply for this nasty thing?”

She hoped to use it just once — at the last Russian checkpoint before the crossing into Ukrainian-held territory.

When Zhyvohliad reached what is known as the filtration point at Novoazovsk, the Russians separated her and her two oldest boys from the rest of the children. They had to sign an agreement to pass a lie detector test. Then Zhyvohliad was pulled aside alone.

For 40 minutes, they went through her phone, took fingerprints and photos and questioned her, but they ultimately let her through. The children were waiting for her on the other side. She misses her home but doesn’t regret leaving.

“I waited until the last moment to be liberated,” she said. “But this thing with my kids possibly being drafted was the last straw.”

WEAPONIZING HEALTH CARE

Often the life-or-death decision is more immediate.

Russian occupation officials have said the day is coming soon when only those with Russian passports and the all-important national health insurance will be able to access care. For some, it’s already here.

The international organization Physicians for Human Rights documented at least 15 cases of people being denied vital medical care in occupied territories between February 2023 and August 2023 because they lacked a Russian passport. Some hospitals even featured a passport desk to speed the process for desperate patients. One hospital in Zaporizhzhia oblast was ordered to close because the medical staff refused to accept Russian citizenship.

Alexander Dudka, the Russian-appointed head of the village of Lazurne in the Kherson region, first threatened to withhold humanitarian aid from residents without Russian citizenship. In August, he added medicine to the list of things the “waiters” would no longer have access to.

Residents, he said in the video on the village Telegram channel, “must respect the country that ensures their safety and which is now helping them live.”

As of Jan. 1, anyone needing medical care in the occupied region must show proof they have mandatory national health insurance, which in turn is only available to Russian citizens.

Last year, “if you weren’t scared or if you weren’t coerced there were places where you could still get medical care,” said Uliana Poltavets, a PHR researcher. “Now it is impossible.”

Dina Urich, who arranges the escapes from occupied territory with the aid group Helping to Leave, said about 400 requests come in each month, but they only have the money and staff for 40 evacuations. Priority goes to those who need urgent medical care, she said. And Russian soldiers at the last checkpoints have started turning back people without the Russian passports.

“You have people constantly dying while waiting for evacuation due to a lack of health care,” she said. ““People will stay there, people will die, people will experience psychological and physical pressure, that is, some will simply die of torture and persecution, while others will live in constant fear.”

IMPORTING LOYALTY

Along with turning Ukrainians into Russians throughout the occupied territories, the Russian government is bringing in its own people. It is offering rock bottom mortgage rates for anyone from Russia who wants to move there, replacing the Ukrainian doctors, nurses, teachers, police and municipal workers who are now gone.

Half of Zhyvohliad’s village left, either at the start of the war when things looked dark for the Kherson region or after being deported across the frontline by occupation officials. The school principal’s empty home was taken over by a Russian-appointed replacement.

Artillery and airstrikes damaged thousands of homes in the port city of Mariupol, which was besieged by Russian forces for months before falling under their control. Most of the residents fled into Ukrainian-held territory or deep inside Russia. Russians often take over the property.

Russia also offered “residential certificates” and a 100,000 ruble ($1,000) stipend to Ukrainians willing to accept citizenship and live in Russia. For many people tired of listening to the daily sounds of battle and afraid of what the future might bring, it looked like a good option.

This again follows Russia’s actions after the annexation of Crimea: By populating occupied regions with Russian residents, Russia increasingly cements its hold on territories it has seized by force in what many Ukrainians describe as ethnic cleansing.

The process is only accelerating. After capturing the town of Adviivka last month, Russia swooped in with the passports in a matter of days.

The neighboring Kherson town of Oleshky essentially emptied after the flooding caused by the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam. The housing stipend in Russia looked fabulous by comparison to the shelling and rising waters, said Rima Yaremenko.

She didn’t take it, instead making her way through Russia to Latvia and then to Poland. But she believes the Russians took the opportunity to drive the “waiters” from Oleshky.

“Maybe they wanted to empty the city,” she said. “They occupied it, maybe they thought it would be theirs forever.”

Ryabkov said he was offered the housing stipend when he filled out his passport paperwork but turned it down. He knows plenty of people who accepted though.

By the time the Russian soldiers caught Ryabkov in the street, in December, everyone in his village was either gone or had Russian citizenship. When his mother arrived, he was barely recognizable beneath all the blood and the Russian guns were trained on him. She flung herself over his body.

“Shoot him through me,” she dared them.

They couldn’t bring themselves to shoot an elderly woman, and she eventually dragged him home. They started preparations to leave the next day.

It took time, but they made it out using the Russian passports.

“When I saw our yellow and blue flag, I started to cry,” he said. “I wanted to burn the Russian passport, destroy it, trample it.”

Hinnant reported from Paris. AP journalists Illia Novikov and Susie Blann contributed to this report.

Russia’s war machine is trying to turn Ukrainian teenagers into soldiers

CNN

Russia’s war machine is trying to turn Ukrainian teenagers into soldiers

Ivana Kottasová, Olga Voitovych and Svitlana Vlasova – March 15, 2024

Russian forces deported Bohdan Yermokhin from the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, flew him to Moscow on a government plane and placed him into a foster family. He was sent to a patriotic camp near the capital where flag-waving staff praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and tried to teach him nationalistic songs.

The Ukrainian teenager was given a Russian passport and sent to a Russian school. And then, in the fall of 2023, not long before his 18th birthday, he received a summons from a Russian military recruitment office.

Yermokhin, who’s now back in Ukraine and recovering from his ordeal in Kyiv, told CNN he believed this was the last step in Russia’s attempt to bully him into submission – a bid to sign him up as a soldier to fight against his own people.

“(I was told that) Ukraine was losing, that children were used for organ donations there, and that I would be sent to war right away. I told them that if I was sent to the war, at least I would fight for my own country, not for them,” he said.

Yermokhin was part of a group of children known as the “Mariupol 31,” who were taken to Russia. Ukrainian authorities estimate that 20,000 children have been forcibly transported to Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022. More than 2,100 children remain missing, according to official statistics, but the government says the real number could be much higher.

Bohdan Yermokhin, 18, in central Kyiv. - Ivana Kottasova/CNN
Bohdan Yermokhin, 18, in central Kyiv. – Ivana Kottasova/CNN

Last March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, for their alleged role in abducting and deporting Ukrainian children. Russia has publicly acknowledged the transfer of Ukrainian children without guardians, despite some having guardians or parents.

Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said his office was convinced that Russia’s efforts to turn Ukrainian teenagers deported to Russia – or living in occupied areas of the east – into soldiers were part of a wider drive by Putin to erase the Ukrainian identity. It is also an opportunity for Moscow to replenish its forces on the front lines.

“It’s not theoretical,” he said. “We now have examples of forcible mobilization of Ukrainian people. All Ukrainian teenagers held in Russia, when they turn 18, they are put on a (recruitment) list of Russian military,” told CNN.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to compel or pressure the local population to serve in its armed forces. Human Rights Watch has said Russia is committing a war crime by doing so.

But Lubinets told CNN that Ukrainian authorities have seen Russian officials do just that in occupied areas, compelling Ukrainians to serve. The conscription efforts start with the opening of regional offices for various Russian government departments, including health and social services.

“Then comes education. All schools must use new books where the message is that Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation never existed and that Ukrainian children have always been Russian children,” Lubinets told CNN.

“The next step is forcing everyone to take Russian passports. If you don’t, you can’t access any services, you can’t get medical care in hospitals, for example… and the next step is mobilization. All men in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine are put in a special recruitment database for the Russian military.”

Yermokhin said he went through the entire process described by Lubinets — although he said the Russians didn’t seem very consistent at times.

“I was always told that I was from Russia and that I was born in Russia, that there is no Ukraine, and that it simply did not exist, that Mariupol was Russia. But in my Russian passport, my place of birth was listed as ‘Ukraine, the city of Mariupol,’” he said, smirking.

Lvova-Belova herself confirmed that Yermokhin received a Russian passport and military summons. In a statement posted on her Telegram channel in November she said that the summons was not unusual, because “all citizens of Russia receive” it. She said that since Yermokhin was still a student, he would be able to defer his military service until after finishing his education.

‘We are losing these children’

Many of the children deported to Russia came from socially vulnerable Ukrainian families. Some had been orphaned or were placed in foster homes when their birth parents became unable to care for them.

It’s these children that Mykola Kuleba is most worried about. He heads Save Ukraine, a Kyiv-based non-governmental organization that specializes in bringing deported children back to Ukraine.

“We are losing these children. Many of them will never come back because they are growing up with this poison, with this horrible propaganda, they are very vulnerable to it,” he said.

Yermokhin said he saw this firsthand. He spent years living with foster families and in group homes after losing his parents as a small child and was in a boarding school in Mariupol when Russian troops took over the city in May 2022.

“Many of us were abandoned by our guardians, abandoned by foster parents during the war… and then the Russians come in and they act in this hypocritical way, offering warmth and pretending that they care, and these children see this and think, well, this is better than it was there (in Ukraine),” Yermokhin said.

He said this happened to Filip, his best friend from Mariupol, who was reportedly adopted by Lvova-Belova. “His foster parents abandoned him in Mariupol during the war and he hadn’t seen any warmth since his (birth) mother died. Now he has it… but I want him to know that we are waiting for him here.”

“Out of the four of us mates from Mariupol, three are now here (in Ukraine) and we are waiting for him,” he added.

The office of Lvova-Belova did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. However, in a statement posted to her Telegram channel in November 2022, Lvova-Belova recalled adopting a teenage boy called Filip from Mariupol.

“If you look at history, Russians have done this (before), they also took children out of Chechnya and now these children (now adults) are fighting for them,” Yermohkin said, referring to Russia’s wars to reclaim the breakaway republic of Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Kuleba said there is no doubt that the deportations are part of a wider strategy. “It’s a Russian strategy to turn Ukrainian children into Russian children and militarize them. They are kidnapping children, and they are erasing their identity, because they want to destroy the Ukrainian nation,” he said.

Singing the Russian anthem, wearing Russian uniform

Sixteen-year-old Artem’s experience is eerily similar to that of Yermokhin. He too feels like he was being groomed to become a Russian soldier.

He was one of 13 children taken by Russian soldiers from a school in the Kharkiv region in 2022. “We had no choice whether to go or not. We were told we were being evacuated, boys, girls, and small children,” he said.

CNN spoke to Artem at a Kyiv center for children who have been returned from Russian captivity. His social worker was present during the interview but did not interfere in the conversation. Save Ukraine, which runs the center, asked CNN not to release Artem’s last name due to his age.

“The Russian soldiers asked us whether we were (supporting) Ukraine or Russia. And we did not answer anything. The younger children were crying, and we tried to calm them down. We were scared ourselves, but we had to comfort the small children,” he added.

Artem said the group was taken to several locations within occupied areas of Ukraine before being brought to the city of Luhansk, where they started school.

“All the lessons were in Russian, and we were always told that Ukrainians were killing Russians,” he said.

“It was clear they wanted us to turn against Ukraine, but we made a pact (with the other children from his school) that we would not give into the attempts to turn us into Russians and we did not speak Russian,” he said, adding that the smaller children in the group were more at risk of being influenced by the propaganda and were often kept away from the older Ukrainian kids.

“We went to classes every day and were told to sing the Russian anthem. We tried to stand back and pretended to sing, but we did not sing,” he added.

The worst part, Artem said, was the uniform.

He said he and the other older children from the cohort were made to wear a uniform that was very similar to the Russian military uniform and had the letter Z — a symbol of support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — on its sleeve.

“It was made of rough material, similar in color to the uniforms of the Russian military. We were given it and told that when there were holidays, we had to wear it,” he said. “I really thought that this was it and that they gave me the uniform because I might be sent to the Russian army. It was scary.”

Artem said it was impossible to refuse — the teachers threatened the children with severe punishment if they failed to wear the uniform. Yet even then, he felt horrible about putting it on – especially when he found out he was used by Russia for propaganda machine in nationalistic videos.

In one video, Artem is seen with a group of children receiving boxes of tangerines from uniformed members of the National Guard. The children are prompted by their teacher to say, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” and give a thumbs up.

CNN has seen several images of Artem wearing uniform-like clothing at the boarding school in the occupied city of Luhansk. He is shown wearing a camouflage top and trousers with a black armband that prominently features a white letter Z in two photographs, one of which shows him sitting in a classroom during a lesson.

In another, he is in what appears to be a full replica of a Russian military uniform during what the school described as a celebration of the Russian national holiday known as “Defender of the Fatherland Day.” All the photographs were published by the school and are still publicly accessible.

“When I saw myself in the uniform in photos and videos on the Internet, I thought for myself that I was a traitor and that I betrayed Ukraine, I swapped Ukraine for Russia… even though I knew I was forced to do it,” he said.

Ultimately, both Artem and Yermokhin are among the lucky ones – they have managed to return to Ukraine.

Artem said he got hold of a cell phone and was able to reach his mother, who had spent six months not knowing what had happened to him. She was able to locate him and get him back home with the help of Save Ukraine.

Yermokhin tried to escape Russia twice, once through Belarus and once through occupied Crimea, but was caught and returned to Moscow on both occasions.

The Ukrainian authorities and his lawyer had been trying to get him out of Russia for some time before he received his Russian military summons, but those attempts were unsuccessful. He was only allowed by Russia to return to Ukraine upon his 18th birthday.

Ukrainian authorities do not reveal the details of negotiations that lead to the return of Ukrainian children. They said a number of international organizations and third countries, including Qatar, were involved in Yermokhin’s repatriation.

Thousands of Ukrainian children remain in Russia and, according to Save Ukraine, some of them have been enrolled in military and naval academies across the country. The charity says it has been able to return 251 children to Ukraine so far and is helping them to readjust.

Every Monday for more than a year, Yermokhin recalled, he was expected to sing the Russian anthem during a flag-raising ceremony at his school. He tried to avoid it but, when forced to attend, found a way to avoid listening to the anthem and the nationalistic lecture that followed.

“There is such a thing as headphones,” he said. “You put them on and sit there, and no one sees what you’re doing.”

Looking back at his experience, Yermokhin said he might not have realized at the time how much pressure he was under. “They tried to break me,” he said. “Thinking of it all now, I am shocked that I got through it.”

Victoria Butenko contributed to this report.