Donald Trump KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images
The Trumpocene is not normal. If you accept that it is normal or otherwise become habituated to it, the neofascists and other enemies of democracy have won.
For at least the last eight years I have been writing several times a week about the rise of Trumpism and the deep cultural and societal rot that birthed the monstrosity. I view this work as a type of chronicle, an ongoing account of America’s surreal misadventure. As Hannah Arendt and other truth-tellers have shown, fascism and other forms of authoritarianism are an assault on reality, the facts, and the very idea of the truth. Chronicling and otherwise documenting these events and their meaning is a way of trying to ensure that the facts are preserved, as public memory is under assault and organized forgetting spreads rapidly.
On this, Arendt famously warned, “the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Chronicling the Trumpocene and America’s democracy crisis and other struggles in this era is also a type of witnessing, which means not just recording the facts but testifying and feeling the pain of others. As psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton teaches, “One bears witness by taking in the situation — in this case, its malignant nature — and then telling one’s story about it, in this case with the help of professional knowledge, so that we add perspective on what’s wrong, rather than being servants of the powers responsible for the malignant normality. We must be people with a conscience in a very fundamental way.”
It is not just those of us with a public platform who should be carefully chronicling and documenting the Trumpocene and these aberrant events. Everyone who claims to care about democracy and a free society should be doing the same thing. Moreover, this should be done not just online or in some other digital form but in print. The digital is so ephemeral and can easily be disappeared or otherwise altered. Paper is much more real and permanent — and thus dangerous. That is why fascists and other enemies of truth and democracy censor and burn books.
When reality and truth are under siege, doing this type of intellectual and spiritual work is a way to remain sane. As I tell many of the people who reach out to me about escaping the Trumpocene nightmare and who feel exhausted and confused, “You are not crazy, the Trumpocene (and late capitalism, the culture of cruelty, pandemic politics and trauma, environmental collapse, and future shock etc. etc.) is just making you feel that way.”
During the Trumpocene there have been many days when I feel like Charleston Heston in “Planet of the Apes” screaming “It’s a Madhouse!” or Peter Finch as Howard Beale in “Network” bellowing, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” And there have also been moments, especially as I watch Trumpism nakedly morph into some version of American Hitlerism where I truly wonder if I am Peter Weller in David Cronenberg’s film “Naked Lunch,” and if I have been exposed to that damn “bug powder.”
I know I am not alone in these feelings.
But I realized some months ago that I had made a fundamental error in my assumptions and method in how I have been chronicling these very bad times. The Trumpocene, like other forms of fascism and such malign forces do not exist in a finite space or in a linear relationship to time; it and they really have no concrete beginning and/or end. Such political formations are a type of force that is like a book or story that continues to have chapters added to it in real time. The challenge then, is how to document and intervene against such a force that is dynamic and not static.
To better orient myself, I have been returning to how the Trumpocene (the Age of Trump, the MAGAverse, TrumpWorld or whatever moniker one applies to these years) as a type of malignant normality. Focusing on that constant wrongness has ironically helped me to keep perspective and reinforced how this state of affairs cannot last forever because such systems almost always collapse inward on themselves. And of course, when the collapse takes place, it will not be without great pain and that euphemism for mass death, “collateral damage.”
When insanity becomes the norm, it ceases to be insane. As a practical matter, it is impossible for a society to spend a decade listening to an unwell man say crazy, disassociated, garbled words for hours at a time, almost daily, and maintain the position that he is unhinged. At some point, society decides that the man they once regarded as unhinged, simply is. It’s like sitting in a room that stinks of sulfur. At first the smell is intolerable; but after a while you can’t even notice it if you try. This is more than human nature: It’s how our brains are wired to adapt to environmental conditions. That’s one of my big worries about the next eight months: That it will be biologically and psychologically impossible for a crucial percentage of voters to perceive what the Republican candidate for president actually is.
At the New Yorker, Susan Glasser offers this description of Trump’s recent speech in Rome, Georgia, noting how he embodies and projects malignant normality as a type of patient zero and the main character in a twisted politics reality TV show that he is making up as he goes along:
Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. (This video compilation, circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:
“But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.”
Makes perfect sense, right?
Echoing Glasser’s concerns about Trump and his disconnect from reality, chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, Miles Taylor, who I recently spoke with here at Salon, told MSNBC last Thursday: “The man that I interacted with years ago was very visibly unwell, was observably unstable, and he was the president of the United States then. I can only imagine what’s happened to him since. We’ve witnessed it, we all see it as an American public. But I can’t imagine how unstable he’ll be behind that resolute desk again.”
In another example of how none of this is normal and America’s elites and those so-called guardians of democracy and “the system” have normalized Trump’s deviance and evil, the corrupt ex-president, traitor, Jan. 6 coup attempter, defendant who is facing hundreds of years in prison for serious felonies – which include stealing classified and other top secret documents – will soon be getting intelligence briefings. Why? Because of “tradition” as he is the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. On this perilous absurdity, Tom Nichols warns in the Atlantic:
The decision rests, as always, with the sitting president, and Joe Biden is likely to continue this practice so that he will not be accused of “politicizing” access to intelligence. Such accusations need not be taken seriously; they would only be more meaningless noise from a GOP that has already stumbled in a clumsy attempt to impeach Biden after leveling charges of corruption at both him and his son. And although denying Trump access to classified briefs would produce squawks and yowls from Republicans, it would also serve as a reminder that Trump cannot be trusted with classified information.
The risks of denying Trump these early briefings are negligible. As we learned from his presidency, Trump is fundamentally unbriefable: He doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t understand complicated national-security matters anyway. The problem with giving Trump these briefings, however, isn’t that he’s ignorant. He’s also dangerous, as his record shows.
Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building. I say this from experience: I was granted my first security clearance when I was 25 years old—Ronald Reagan was still president, which tells you how long ago that was—and I held a top-secret clearance when I advised a senior U.S. senator during the Gulf War. I then held a clearance as a Department of Defense employee for more than a quarter century.
Government employees who hold clearances have to attend annual refresher courses about a variety of issues, including some pretty obvious stuff about not writing down passwords or taking money from a friendly Chinese businessman wearing an American baseball cap. (No, really, that’s a scenario in some of the course materials.) But one area of annual training is always about “insider threats,” the people in your own organization who may pose risks to classified information. Federal workers are taken through a list of behaviors and characteristics that should trigger their concern enough to report the person involved, or at least initiate a talk with a supervisor.
Trump checks almost every box on those lists. (You can find examples of insider-threat training here and here, but every agency has particular briefs they give to their organizations.)
Continuing with this betrayal of America’s pluralistic multiracial democracy, Trump recently met with Hungary’s neofascist leader, Viktor Orban. This meeting is part of a much larger pattern where today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement are forging an international alliance with malign actors and other enemies of democracy.
Within a 24-hour period, the 2024 presidential campaign kicked off in a way that could not present the choice before the American public more starkly.
Joe Biden stood before the Congress and, in his State of the Union address, made a powerful case that he would fight with every fiber of his being to preserve American democracy and the fundamental freedoms of all Americans.
Then, late Friday, Donald Trump hosted Hungary’s authoritarian ruler, Viktor Orbán, in the kind of pro-Putin, anti-democracy summit that perfectly captured the true nature of today’s MAGA Republican Party. The dinner reception was so important that even Melania Trump made one of her rare appearances at her husband’s side. Trump said, “There’s nobody smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s the boss. He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be and that’s the end of it.’ He’s the boss. He’s a great leader.”
A day earlier, Orbán—Vladimir Putin’s man in Europe, his acolyte and champion—met behind closed doors with the leaders of the new American right at the Heritage Foundation.
There it is, America. Biden is running to preserve America’s traditional values and institutions. Trump and the GOP have openly embraced autocracy, celebrating the virtues of “strong man” government.
If Donald Trump had actually been put on trial, and properly punished for the crimes of Jan. 6 and his other violations of American democracy, civil society and the law, the Trumpocene and this state of malignant normality would be closer to dissipating. Of course, and in an anti-climax because it confirms what has long been obvious, the Washington Post is reporting that Attorney General Merrick Garland delayed investigating Trump for his obvious crimes of Jan. 6 and the larger coup plot for more than a year. The result of that choice is that Trump will likely not be tried and sentenced before the 2024 Election. If he defeats President Biden, Trump will then ignore the verdicts against him and seek revenge on all people who dared to hold him accountable for his crime spree.
Investigative reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis detail how:
Hours after he was sworn in as attorney general, Merrick Garland and his deputies gathered in a wood-paneled conference room in the Justice Department for a private briefing on the investigation he had promised to make his highest priority: bringing to justice those responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the two months since the siege, federal agents had conducted 709 searches, charged 278 rioters and identified 885 likely suspects, said Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, ticking through a slide presentation. Garland and some of his deputies nodded approvingly at the stats, and the new attorney general called the progress “remarkable,” according to people in the room.
Congressional staffers barricade doors while taking cover during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
Sherwin’s office, with the help of the FBI, was responsible for prosecuting all crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. He had made headlines the day after by refusing to rule out the possibility that President Donald Trump himself could be culpable. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Sherwin said in response to a reporter’s question about Trump. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”
But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.
A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.
A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.
Ultimately, malignant normality through Trumpism, neofascism, white supremac(ies) racism(s) or whatever other type of vessel it uses to inject its poison is a threat to a humane society and a real social democracy. The language and labels we use to describe this reactionary revolutionary project must not distract us from that basic and foundational truth.
The cruel language and practices of human degradation and destructiveness now feed a growing fascist politics in the U.S. Fascist demagogues now boast about their racial fantasies, unchecked adoration of violence, and their aggressive lawlessness. What Ingmar Bergman once called “The Serpent’s Egg,” a metaphor for the birth of fascism, is about to hatch.
In a world shaped increasingly by emerging authoritarianism, it has become increasingly difficult to remember what a purposeful and substantive democracy looks like, or for that matter, what the idea of democracy might suggest. Democracy as an ideal, promise, and working practice is under assault, just as a number of far-right educational, market, military, and religious fundamentalisms are gaining ascendancy in American society. Increasingly, it becomes more challenging to inhabit those public spheres where politics thrives—where thinking, speaking, and acting subjects engage and critically address the major forces and problems bearing down on their lives. In this new moment in history, which too often resembles the nightmares of a fascist past with its banning of books, erasing of history, attack on trans people, and support of white nationalism and supremacy, the question of how society should imagine itself or what its future might hold has become more demanding given the eradication of social formations that place an emphasis on truth, social justice, freedom, equality, and compassion.
Historical and social amnesia have become the organizing principles of U.S. society. Lies morph into the celebration of violence, and language becomes part of the machinery of social death, relegated to the sphere of consumer culture, and devoid of an ethical grammar that is banished to zones of political and social abandonment.
Here, Giroux focuses in on how malignant normality reflects a failure of imagination:
What’s happening in this country is a failure of imagination.
Many of us take our freedoms for granted. We can’t envision a day when our rights would disappear, leaving us at the mercy of a dictatorship that’s accountable to no one.
Human beings are basically optimistic, and many of us haven’t considered the possibility that 248 years of democracy could end on a single election day. But they can, and they might.
Today I’m asking you to be alarmed – to be deeply afraid. But not crippled by that fear. I’m pleading with you to become motivated to avert a national disaster….
That’s right. The Nazi agenda was inconceivable to decent people – and that’s part of the reason it became a reality.
There was a failure of imagination.
But with today’s MAGA fascism, we don’t have to exercise our imagination very much. We just have to fight the temptation to downplay the dangers that Trump and his gang display in public, for all of us to see….
Whatever you do, don’t ignore what’s happening. Be part of the patriotic rescue of your country – something you can take pride in for the rest of your days. Consider it your gift to your children, your grandchildren, and future generations that you’ll never know.
Fight fascism now, while you can. Be a hero to your country.
I often use therapeutic language to describe the Trumpocene because fascism and other such evil forces are not “just” about politics but are an attack on our collective mental, spiritual, and physical – and intellectual – health. Applying that framework, Donald Trump is abusing the American people.
In an abusive relationship, the horrible and wrong becomes normalized and the victim often ends up celebrating those days when there is no abuse. In essence, what should be every day and a baseline becomes something special and “proof” that the relationship can somehow work or is “healthy.” Unfortunately, too many Americans have internalized the abuse, believe they deserve it, and as shown by public opinion polls want Donald Trump back in the White House to punish them (and the people they hate) some more.
Factbox-‘Bloodbath,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘animals’: Trump’s rhetoric on the trail
Gram Slattery – March 22, 2024
FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. President Trump hosts a campaign rally, in Rome, Georgia
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made a series of inflammatory and racist statements on the U.S. campaign trail since declaring his candidacy in November 2022.
In some cases, he has used violent imagery to lambaste immigrants and opponents. He has warned that the United States is on the verge of collapse, and his rhetoric has raised concerns that he might flout democratic norms by using the power of the state to target perceived enemies if he is elected.
Here are some of Trump’s more controversial statements to date:
BLOOD POISONING
Trump has said on several occasions that immigrants in the United States illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt called the language “racist, xenophobic and despicable.” The campaign of Democratic President Joe Biden compared Trump’s comments to those of Adolf Hitler, who used the phrase “blood poisoning” in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.”
Public opinion polls show that illegal immigration is a leading concern for voters, and Trump has consistently portrayed immigration as a major driver of violent crime and economic decay.
In past statements, Trump has suggested that Democrats are purposefully allowing migrants into the country to grow their political support.
This is a key element of the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which asserts that leftist and Jewish elites are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with immigrants of color that will lead to a “white genocide.”
The debate over the economic effects of immigration is decades-long, though most researchers say immigration broadly boosts economic growth.
Some 33% of Republicans in a February Reuters/Ipsos poll cited immigration as their top issue, while 6% of Democrats said the same.
VERMIN
Trump pledged at a November rally in New Hampshire that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Those comments drew rebukes from congressional Democrats and some moderate Republicans. Some historians have traced the use of the word “vermin” to Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.
Political historians say the use of dehumanizing rhetoric – including words like “vermin” – makes it easier to strip away rights from residents and citizens as they are seen as less worthy of democratic or constitutional protections. Nazis, for instance, frequently referred to Jews as lice, rats and vermin.
The Trump campaign has dismissed those comparisons.
BLOODBATH
During a March appearance alongside a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump warned of a “bloodbath” if he fails to unseat Biden in November’s election.
At the time Trump was discussing the need to protect the U.S. auto industry from overseas competition, and Trump and allies later said he was referring to the auto industry when he used the term.
Trump’s campaign has sought to portray Biden as a threat to automaking jobs in Michigan, a key swing state, due to the Biden administration’s promotion of electric vehicles.
Biden’s campaign team rejected that characterization and condemned what it called Trump’s “extremism,” “his thirst for revenge” and his “threats of political violence.”
IMMIGRANTS ARE ‘ANIMALS,’ ‘NOT PEOPLE’
Trump has frequently referred to immigrants in the country illegally in subhuman terms, for example referring to them as animals who are prone to violence.
“In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said during his March appearance in Ohio. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical Left says that’s a terrible thing to say. “These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it,” he said.
During stump speeches, Trump frequently claims that immigrants crossing the border illegally have escaped from prisons and asylums in their home countries and are fueling violent crime in the United States.
While available data on criminals’ immigration status is sparse, researchers say people in the country illegally do not commit violent crimes at a higher rate than native-born citizens.
BLACK AMERICANS AND CRIME
Trump drew the ire of Biden’s campaign and civil rights leaders and groups in February when he suggested Black voters were more drawn to him because of his criminal indictments. He also said Black voters had come to “embrace” his mugshots.
“And then I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time. And a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against,” Trump said while speaking to a Black conservative group in South Carolina before the state’s primary election, which he went on to win.
Trump’s legal challenges, including federal charges over his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents, among other state charges and civil lawsuits, differ greatly from the historic inequities Black Americans have experienced in the criminal justice system.
Trump has also described at least two Black prosecutors – Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James – as “animals.” He has repeatedly referred to James as “Peekaboo,” which rhymes with a racial slur.
Trump allies say his attacks are referring to prosecutors’ conduct, not their race, and they say he is working hard to win the support of Black voters.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Trump frequently leans into apocalyptic imagery on the campaign trail, telling supporters that if he does not win in November – or if he does not otherwise get his way – the country will enter into terminal decline.
At a March campaign event in North Carolina, Trump said Biden’s immigration policies amounted to a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” through lax security policies that had allowed millions of migrants to stream across the U.S. border with Mexico.
Biden’s administration, Trump contended, seeks “to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
In response, Biden’s campaign pointed to a border security bill in Congress that Trump helped torpedo in February by urging Republicans to vote against it.
DICTATOR ON ‘DAY ONE’
During a televised town hall in December, Trump said he would not be a dictator “other than (on) Day One” of a potential second term. He said he would close the southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling during the first day of his administration.
Biden’s campaign said the comments were explicit proof that he wants to be an autocrat, while Trump’s allies said he was joking.
Biden has centered his campaign on the contention that stopping Trump from returning to office is crucial, as Trump represents a threat to democracy.
Trump argues that Biden is a more serious threat to democracy, as federal law enforcement agencies under him are prosecuting prominent Republicans, himself included.
Some 44% of Democrats said extremism is their top election issue, according to the February Reuters/Ipsos poll, while 13% of Republicans said the same.
GRAPHIC: Where Biden and Trump stand on the issues.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery, editing by Ross Colvin, Kieran Murray and Howard Goller)
Leonard Leo, Koch networks pour millions into prep for potential second Trump administration
Katherine Doyle – March 21, 2024
WASHINGTON — Huge funding from influential conservative donor networks is flowing into a conservative venture aimed at creating a Republican “government-in-waiting,” including over $55 million from groups linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo and the Koch network, according to an Accountable.US review shared exclusively with NBC News.
Launched by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, Project 2025 is a two-pronged initiative to develop staunch conservative policy recommendations and grow a roster of thousands of right-wing personnel ready to fill the next Republican administration. With former President Donald Trump now the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee, the effort is essentially laying the groundwork for a potential Trump transition if he wins the election in November.
With contributions from former high-level Trump administration appointees and an advisory board that has grown to over 100 conservative organizations, proponents describe Project 2025 as the most sophisticated transition effort that has existed for conservatives. The initiative includes a manifesto devising a policy agenda for every department, numerous agencies and scores of offices throughout the federal government.
In this Nov. 16, 2016 file photo, Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo speaks to media at Trump Tower in New York. Leo is advising President Donald Trump on his Supreme Court nominee. (Carolyn Kaster / AP file)
Since 2021, Leo’s network has funneled over $50.7 million to the groups advising the 2025 Presidential Transition Project as part of its “Project 2025 advisory board,” according to tax documents reviewed as part of the analysis by Accountable.US, a progressive advocacy group. That sum includes donationsfrom The 85 Fund, a donor-advised nonprofit group that funnels money from wealthy financiers to other groups, and the Concord Fund, a public-facing organization.
In 2022, the donor-advised fund DonorsTrust, which received more than $181 million from Leo-backed groups from 2019 to 2022, contributed over $21.1 million to 40 organizations advising Project 2025. It contributed nearly $20 million to 36 nonprofit organizations advising Project 2025 in 2021.
Leo, a top conservative megadonor, has worked to shift the American judiciary further to the right, having previously advised Trump on judicial picks while he was in office and helping to build the current conservative Supreme Court majority.
In addition to Leo’s funding to organizations advising Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s own donations surged in 2022. It contributed $1,025,000 to nine of the advisory groups, up from a total of $174,000 in grants to other nonprofit groups a year earlier.
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The review by Accountable.US also found that oil billionaire Charles Koch’s network directed over $4.4 million in 2022 to organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board via its donor conduit, Stand Together Trust.
Project 2025’s vision for the next conservative administration’s energy agenda would rapidly increase oil and gas leases and production through the Interior Department to focus on energy security, and proposals include reforming offices of the Energy Department to end focus on climate change and green subsidies.
The Environmental Protection Agency would cut its environmental justice and public engagement functions, “eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights,” according to a proposal drafted by Mandy Gunasekara, a former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.
The advisory board for Project 2025 includes representatives from conservative groups led by veterans of the Trump administration, such as America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America and the Conservative Partnership Institute, as well as conservative mainstays like the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council and the Independent Women’s Forum.
Accountable. US executive director Tony Carrk warned that Project 2025’s stark conservative program and its advisory groups are made possible by funding from right-wing donors’ funneling tens of millions of dollars to the effort.
“The ‘MAGA blueprint’ isn’t a one-off project — it’s backed by the same far-right figures who have long dictated the conservative agenda,” Carrk said. “Leo, Koch and others should be held to account for propping up a policy platform that puts special interests over everyday Americans and poses an existential threat to our democracy.”
While the groups advising Project 2025 haven’t been supporting a candidate outright, many of the people leading them or with longtime affiliations have close ties to Trump after having served in his administration. NBC News projects that Trump has now clinched the delegate majority for the Republican nomination, setting up a rematch with President Joe Biden in November.
Meet the wealthy boomer Americans fleeing to Portugal, Spain, and Italy out of fear of a Donald Trump presidency: ‘This country of mine has become intolerant’
Ryan Hogg – March 20, 2024
Fortune· Gabriel Mello—Getty Images
For years, aging Americans have looked south to Florida for their ideal retirement home to escape into retirement from their four-decade grinds in the U.S. workforce.
But wealthy citizens are increasingly considering a life across the Atlantic, with an unappealing showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump being labeled as the reason.
‘This country of mine has become intolerant’
David, a 65-year-old lawyer from Chicago, is going to Portugal on a scouting trip next month with a $500,000 budget in the hopes of finding a new second home on the Silver Coast, between Lisbon and Porto.
The lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns he might be harassed, said the political climate had turned so toxic that he was driven to seek peace across the Atlantic.
As the grandson of four immigrants who landed on Ellis Island, David has become particularly perturbed by debate in the U.S. around immigration.
“This country of mine has become intolerant,” David says.
“This country has always vilified people who are not like them. So we see these pictures of people on the south of the border, and they’re just people, but both sides use them for political reasons, and that’s just one example of the absolute intolerance, and it’s sad.”
The lawyer is also moving to escape the looming threat of gun violence.
“I told my wife about 15 years ago that I had made peace with the fact that I could be shot dead at any moment in time in this country,” David said.
David is hoping to close a deal before the U.S. elections in November, because he believes that if Trump secures a second term as President, demand for homes abroad could skyrocket.
Americans rushing abroad
The lawyer isn’t just going on a scouting trip for himself next month. He and his wife intend to earmark locations and properties for five of their other friends.
David’s and his friend’s politically motivated decision to start uncoupling themselves from their home country isn’t uncommon, according to Kylie Adamec, a real estate consultant for Casa Azul who is advising David and other Americans on their moves.
“People are not caring so much about the tax situation, they’re more concerned with what’s going to happen in the United States in the next couple of months. Come November with the election, people just want to have options set up,” Adamec told Fortune.
Last week, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were confirmed as the respective Republican and Democrat nominees for the U.S. presidency in a rematch of 2020.
If this year’s battle is anything like the last one, voters can expect an incredibly toxic election battle, something Adamec’s clients are well aware of.
“From what I can see, it’s, this is a first-time thing in terms of the decision of an election really being a determining factor in whether or not someone moves abroad, be it full-time or part-time.”
Adamec says it’s a mix of American buyers looking at property options in Portugal, but they are more left-leaning.
According to Marco Permunian, you can get a good sense of political instability in the U.S. simply by observing the number of people applying for Italian passports through his company, Italian Citizenship Assistance (ICA), at any given time.
Inquiries began to spike in 2016 following Trump’s election to the White House. They did so again in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic and instability stoked by protests and riots following the murder of George Floyd, as well as after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
As the U.S. gears up for a second gruesome showdown between Trump and Biden, it’s no surprise that ICA has seen inquiries triple since the end of last year.
The latest spike, though, is attributable to exhaustion on both sides of the political spectrum, Permunian says.
The majority of his clients are from the East Coast areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and Boston, but there are more dotted across the country in places like California and Texas.
He says demand for passports is often the first move for many in a long-term plan to seek a new home in Italy or elsewhere in the European Union, rather than a sign of imminent emigration.
“The majority is still not ready to move but is getting ready, just in case,” Permunian told Fortune.
The company mainly works with people between the ages of 35 and 65 who are looking for extra citizenship options.
That chimes with the latest data. The latest USA Wealth Report found a record number of Americans were looking abroad for residency and citizenship options as the political environment frayed.
Christopher Willis, managing director of citizenship and residency advisor Latitude Consultancy, is experiencing a 300% increase in client inquiries.
It means the smart money is going toward getting exit plans in place now before demand jumps further later in the year. Portugal and Spain are proving to be particularly popular European locations for Willis’s clients.
“People are not waiting for November. They’re getting their affairs in order now,” Willis says.
“So if things go sideways, they’ve already got the option to act on it as opposed to scrambling once the election is completed.”
Steven, who is also is also using a pseudonym as he is awaiting visa approval, is a New Yorker making the move to Portugal through Casa Azul. Having grown sick of New York City, he and his Brazilian wife are giving up their $3,500 rent in the Big Apple for a $2,100 per month three-bedroom home in Lisbon.
“It’s a great city if you have to still have ambition and drive,” Steven says of New York. “But if you want to downshift a little, it will just steamroll you.”
While the political climate isn’t the main reason for his move, Steven acknowledged that the U.S. political system had become “crazy.”
“Being back here is horrifying,” Steven said.
Europe’s own political toxicity
Americans escaping the U.S. in the event of a Trump presidency may find the grass isn’t necessarily greener across the pond.
Europe may appear a haven for U.S. expats tired of their polarized climate and growing threats of violence, but the continent is no longer the safe or mild-mannered haven it has been for so much of the post-World War Two era.
Trump has threatened to pull out of NATO if he is re-elected if “delinquent” European nations don’t pay an agreed 2% of their GDP towards membership in the bloc.
That leaves Europe strategically exposed, as leading figures from the Airbus CEO to European Commission chief Christine Lagarde have warned.
It is also more complicated than it once was for Americans to buy their place on the continent.
Portugal scrapped its golden visa program last year, which allowed foreigners to acquire residency and eventually citizenship in the country through the purchase of property. This set off a scramble to secure visas in the country before the scheme closed.
A higher level of investment, crucially not in real estate, is now the best option for wealthy foreigners.
There are fears that the elevation of right-wing parties into the country’s parliament could further intensify harmful rhetoric against immigrants, aping the kind of polarization that has become commonplace in the U.S.
In Italy, the ruling far-right party has made sweeping changes to the country’s cultural landscape and clamped down on immigration.
Casa Azul’s Adamec, though, said despite expecting inquiries about residency in Portugal to nosedive following the closure of the golden visa program, applications have remained steady, probably fueled by the U.S. election.
As for Europe’s own political toxicity, David isn’t feeling anywhere near as anxious as events in the U.S. have made him.
“They’re all kind of like baby Trumps, so I’m not going to worry about it,” David says of Europe’s intensifying political cauldron.
“Portugal’s always been a pretty liberal place. I’m not overly concerned.”
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.”
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.
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.”
He mocked Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker: “You have this guy Pritzker … he’s too busy eating. He wants to eat all the time. Would you like a hamburger? How many do you want? Five. … Who the hell orders five burgers?”
Of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, who’s prosecuting one of the many criminal cases against the former president, Trump said of her name: “It’s spelled ‘fanny,’ like your a–.”
Speaking of his former competitors in the GOP primary, Trump said advisers told him to to go easy on them: “They said, ‘Sir, please don’t talk about these people that way, they’re Republicans.’ … I don’t give a sh–, they’re terrible.”
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.
“Honest Don” just threw down the debate gauntlet for President Biden to chuckle at. During trump’s 6-year long reign of deceit, disinformation and disdain for the truth, media organizations from far and wide, created whole departments just to keep track of trump’s lies. After tallying more than 40,000, most gave up. The Washington Post made a valiant attempt 3 years ago, (“Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year.”) (article attached below). Why would President Biden even consider debating someone who isn’t remotely capable of rational discussions of policy or governance? trump refused to debate any of his republican primary opponents, especially Nicki Haley, who would have beaten him like a rented mule.
It’s crystal clear to anyone who has successfully passed the age of reason; trump’s dishonesty and lies, his criminal activity of all sorts, nor his conspiracies to destroy our Democracy and Democratic institutions, has had a miniscule effect on trump’s MAGA core of sheeple. Critical thinking folks know full well, who trump is, the carnage he’s capable of invoking and where his patriotic loyalties lie. He will conspire with any person, group or country, hostile or otherwise, foreign or domestic, in order to get back into the White House, in order to dismiss or pardon any conviction in the 91 felony counts, in his criminal cases pending in 4 different jurisdictions. Just as he’s done to anyone stupid enough to throw in with this sociopathic, moronic human being, trump is fully capable of throwing his country and our Democracy under the bus, in order to inflate his ego and his cratering business reputation and wealth. Anyone foolish enough to get entangled in the trump mystique, has regretted their gamble at fame and fortune.
“Honest Don” “honestly” believes, that the majority of American’s he’s slandered and persecuted since sailing down that escalator in 2016, including women, people of color and naturalized immigrants, will somehow embrace his march to a trumpian Kleptocratic Autocracy. Why shouldn’t he, the MAGA republicans in congress, and more than half of our Supreme Court have acquiesced, hook-line-and sinker.
But how can you agree to a political debate with someone who doesn’t believe in the notions of political compromise, Democratic governance or even presenting a platform designed to help solve America’s and the world’s myriad of complicated and urgent problems. Any debate will only reinforce MAGAnians maniacal devotion, no matter the outcome. President Biden should present his case directly to voters who are still able to ascertain the truth.
Related:
CNN – Facts First
Trump’s avalanche of dishonesty: Fact-checking 102 of his false claims from this fall
By Daniel Dale, CNN – December 1, 2023
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA – OCTOBER 07: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives for a rally on October 07, 2023 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
For the third straight presidential election, Donald Trump is campaigning on an avalanche of dishonesty.
CNN fact-checked 12 of the former president’s October and November speeches. We found, as we did during his 2016 campaign and his presidency, that Trump’s fall remarks were teeming with false claims – a staggering quantity and variety of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies that made sheer wrongness a central feature of each of his addresses.
As in the past, Trump is in a league of his own. The frequency of his mendacity vastly exceeds that of either President Joe Biden or any of Trump’s rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
In the October and November speeches, Trump was serially untruthful on the subject of his record in office. He continued to tell long-debunked lies about the 2020 election he lost and the integrity of elections more broadly. He repeatedly fabricated and embellished on the subjects of energy, the environment, foreign affairs and the economy.
He launched incorrect attacks against Biden, other Democrats and Republican presidential rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. He deployed various fictions to support his denunciations of the criminal and civil court cases against him. And he continued his traditional practice of wildly exaggerating statistics, this time on topics ranging from the price of bacon to the cost of an aircraft carrier to the size of his rally crowds.
Below is a fact check of 102 of Trump’s false claims from the 12 speeches. He repeated many of the false claims on multiple occasions.
This is not intended as a comprehensive list. And it does not include gaffes that were clearly unintentional, claims that were misleading but not outright wrong, or claims for which there was no public evidence but which we could not definitively declare incorrect.
Trump’s record
Terrorist attacks under Trump
Trump claimedinnumerousspeeches that there were no terrorist attacks during his time as president. “We didn’t have an attack for four years,” he said in an October speech in New Hampshire while touting his ban on travel from a group of (mostly Muslim-majority) countries he described as “horrendous, dangerous nations.” “We didn’t have one incident in four years, because we kept bad people the hell out of our country,” he said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “we didn’t have an attack for four years” isn’t true.
Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.
In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018.
In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.
Trump’s wall promise
In an October speech in Iowa, Trump claimed he had run in 2016 on a promise that Mexico would pay for “a piece” of a new border wall. He repeated the claim in a November speech in Florida, saying, “I said Mexico’s gonna pay for a piece of the wall.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims about what he said in the past are false. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised over and over again in his public remarks, with no qualifications, that Mexico would pay for the entire wall, not for only “a piece” of it. (In the end, Mexico didn’t pay for any of it.) You can read a longer fact check on this claim here.
Mexico and the cost of the wall
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump tried to respond to critics who have noted that he did not get Mexico to pay for the wall as he had promised. Pointing out that Mexico did deploy thousands of its own troops during his presidency to deter migrants heading toward the US, Trump said, “Then they say, ‘Oh, Mexico didn’t pay.’ Mexico paid a fortune for that wall. When they tell you, ‘Trump didn’t get the money.’ Remember, I used to say Mexico will pay for it. Well, that’s what I did.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that he “did” get Mexico to pay for the wall and that “Mexico paid a fortune for that wall” are false. Mexico deploying troops simply isn’t the same as Mexico paying for a construction project; even with the Mexican deployment, the US had to pay for the wall with its own money. The Trump administration directed more than $16 billion toward the project – including about $6 billion directly appropriated by Congress and about $10 billion the administration repurposed from the Defense Department – before Biden halted construction upon taking office in 2021.
The final bill for the project is unclear; more than $4.7 billion of the former Defense Department money had not been spent at the time Trump left office. Regardless, it is clear that Mexico spent nothing at all on the project.
“The US government paid for what was built of Trump’s wall out of our own treasury. Mexico did not directly pay for any portion of the wall,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration and border policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said in a July email.
The size of the wall
Touting his wall on the border with Mexico, Trump claimed in speech after speech that he had built “561 miles of wall” or, more vaguely, thatthe total was “over 500 miles.”
Facts First: Trump’s “561 miles” and “over 500 miles” claims are false, both exaggerations. An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office and subsequently obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said the total number built under Trump was 458 miles (including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers). Even in his recent speeches, Trump sometimes put the figure, more correctly, at “nearly 500 miles.”
For example, in one October speech in Iowa, Trump said, “We built 561 – they said 460, 460. But no, it’s 561.” Later in the speech, though, when he appeared to be reading from his prepared text, he said, “Built nearly 500 miles.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim to have rebuilt the entire military is false. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” said Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Harrison said in a November email: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F-15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”
Trump’s policy on damage to monuments
In an October speech in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump claimed that, as president, he had found and “signed” an “old law” or “old statute” to impose a severe penalty – an automatic 10 years in jail – for people who damage monuments.
“It said if you so much as touch one of our statues or memorials, you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything – you go for 10 years. And you all remember that,” he said in the Florida speech.
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. He didn’t sign any “law” on damage to monuments, and he did not impose automatic 10-year sentences for monument damage. In fact, he issued an executive order on the subject, in 2020, that did not mandate any increase in sentences.
Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law – including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property if the damage exceeds $100. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.
Trump and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
As he has on multiple previous occasions, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that “we filled up the national reserve, strategic reserves.” He went into more detail in a November speech in Houston, saying of the reserve, “We filled that thing and nobody ever saw anything like it.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that he filled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are false. While he did propose to buy 77 million barrels for the reserve in 2020 as oil prices cratered because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Democratic-controlled Congress rejected the $3 billion in funding that would have paid for the purchase, describing it as a subsidy to big oil companies, so it didn’t happen. The reserve contained fewer barrels when Trump left office in early 2021 (about 638 million) than when he took office in early 2017 (about 695 million).
That’s in large part because of oil sales that Congress had mandated by law. But nonetheless, Trump’s claims about how he “filled up” the reserve are meritless.
“It would have been a smart policy to refill the SPR at very low prices, but it didn’t happen because Congress did not approve that purchase. I suppose Trump can take credit for a good idea, but not for execution,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told CNN earlier this year when Trump made a similar claim.
Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 1
Trump claimed in a November speech in Texas: “We created an incredible 1.2 million new manufacturing jobs. Nobody said that was possible.” He repeated the number a bit later and said, “Everybody said that was impossible.”
Facts First: Trump’s number is false. The US actually lost 170,000 manufacturing jobs during Trump’s presidency, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even if you were to stop the count in February 2020, before the pandemic crash, the US would have gained 419,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of Trump’s presidency in January 2017, not the 1.2 million he claimed here.
In speeches in late 2019 and early 2020, Trump claimed that the US had created 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs during his tenure. That would still be true today if you stopped the clock in February 2020. But Trump didn’t mention construction jobs in this speech; his omission made his performance with manufacturing jobs sound much better than it was.
Trump and manufacturing jobs, part 2
Trump vowed in the same speech in Texas to “accelerate our manufacturing resurgence,” then said, “We were setting records – not only were we building and doing it, we were setting records at doing manufacturing jobs.”
Facts First: This is false. Trump did not come close to setting records for the creation of manufacturing jobs. Again, US manufacturing employment actually declined by 170,000 jobs during his presidency. While that’s largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was not even setting records before that; the country lost manufacturing jobs in 2019, before the pandemic hit.
And while the US did see a 430,000-job gain in manufacturing employment under Trump in 2017 and 2018, that was nowhere near a record increase. For example, there were more than 1.5 million manufacturing jobs added in 1977 and 1978, Jimmy Carter’s first two calendar years as president.
Household income under Trump
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Under President Trump, real family income increased over $6,000 a year.” He had made a similar claim in a speech in Iowa that month, saying real family income “went up by more than $6,000 a year.”
Facts First: This is false. Real median household income actually increased by $5,820 in total over Trump’s four years in office, from $70,840 in 2016 to $76,660 in 2020 – so not $6,000 “a year” as he claimed here.
Trump’s campaign has previously confirmed he was referring to real median household income when making such claims. The increase in real median household is over $6,000 if you just look at the period from 2016 to 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but Trump’s presidency includes 2020 as well.
Trump and the defeat of ISIS
As he has in the past, Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “I defeated ISIS. I defeated ISIS. Three weeks, I defeated ISIS.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has sometimes suggested, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said “I defeated ISIS” with no caveats or credit to anyone else: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.
IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.
The cost of an embassy move
In October speeches to the Republican Jewish Coalition and at a campaign event in Florida, Trump repeated a story he used to tell during his presidency about how moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was supposed to cost $1 billion or $2 billion but that he “got it done for $500,000” by using an existing US diplomatic facility in Jerusalem.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. While the final cost of the embassy move isn’t publicly known, it is clear that the cost was much more than $500,000. The State Department awarded a $21.2 million contract in 2018for a company to design and build “compound security upgrades” related to Trump’s decision to turn the existing Jerusalem facility into an embassy. The initial modification that allowed the building to open as an embassy cost just under $400,000, but that was not the final total.
Trump and the construction of Nord Stream 2
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, after he “stopped” Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany, “it was totally dead” before Biden allowed it to proceed.
Facts First: Trump did not render Nord Stream 2 “totally dead.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.
In a November speech in Houston, Trump said of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: “Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. Nobody knew they were building the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen, I guess – covering all of Europe.”
Facts First: Both parts of this claim are wrong.
It’s not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before Trump began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. And Nord Stream 2 was nowhere close to “the biggest pipeline anyone’s ever seen.”
Trump and deportations to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador
In a November speech in Florida, Trump talked about how his administration was able to deport gang members to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and repeated his familiar false claim about how the Obama administration was supposedly unable to do so: “Under the Obama administration, they wouldn’t take anybody back. They put airplanes, big commercial planes on the runways, so we’d put them in a plane, we’d fly, we couldn’t land, came back. And this went on for years; never took ‘em back.”
Facts First:This claim remains false. In 2016, Obama’s last calendar year in office, none of these three countries was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant” (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted to CNN in 2019 that in the 2016 fiscal year, ICE reported that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranked second, third and fourth for the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. The same was true in the 2017 fiscal year, which encompassed the end of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s. ICE did not identify any widespread problems with deportations to these countries.
ICE officials said there were some exceptions to the three countries’ general cooperativeness, but Trump’s general declaration that the countries were uncooperative was never true.
Trump and the word ‘caravan’
In November speeches in Texas and Florida, Trump spoke of migrant caravans – and claimed, as he has in the past, that he was the one to come up with the name “caravan.”
In Florida, he said caravan is “a name I came up with.” In Texas, he said, “I came up with the name. I believe. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really you, it’s somebody,’ but I believe I came up with the name.”
Facts First: Trump did not come up with the word “caravan,” either in general or to describe groups of migrants traveling together toward the US border during his presidency.
Merriam-Webster says the word caravan “came to English in the late 16th century, from the Italian caravana, which itself came from the Persian kārvān.”
Trump first publicly used a variation of the word as president in a tweet on April 1, 2018 (he wrote, in a tweet about immigration, “’caravans’ coming”). The word had been usedbyvarious others in the same context in the days and weeks prior, including in a BuzzFeed News feature article, two days prior to Trump’s tweet, that was headlined, “A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Dares To Stop Them.”
Trump’s claims about Covid-19
Talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Once Covid came in from China – Wuhan. Remember I said it came in from Wuhan. Everyone said, ‘Why would he say that? It came in from caves.’ First they said it came in from Italy, which was not nice. Then they said it came in from France. Then they said the American soldiers brought it in, and then they admitted it came in from China – but it came in from Wuhan.”
Facts First: Trump’s recounting is inaccurate. It’s not true that, when he said Covid-19 came from Wuhan, “everyone said, ‘Why would he say that?’” In reality, when Trump first used the word “Wuhan” as president in March 2020, saying the virus came from there was not at all controversial; Trump’s comments came more than two months after Chinese authorities publicly identified Wuhan as the first place it had an outbreak of the novel coronavirus. And in January and February 2020, before Trump started speaking about Wuhan, major media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times referred to the virus as “the Wuhan coronavirus.”
The situation before Right to Try
In a November speech in Texas, Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 to give terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration. As he did during his presidency, though, Trump also painted an inaccurate picture of the situation prior to the Right to Try era.
He said, “People would be terminally ill. They’d try to get a medicine; they couldn’t get it in this country. It’s totally illegal. If they had money, they’d go to Europe or they’d go to China, go to some of the places where they supposedly had cures. It never worked, by the way, almost never. And they’d end up dying. Sometimes they’d die in foreign lands. If you didn’t have money, you’d go home and you’d die.”
Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.
Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.
“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.
The Middle East under Trump
Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “Less than four years ago, we had peace in the Middle East with the historic Abraham Accords. Today we have an all-out war in Israel and it’s gonna spread very quickly. What a difference a president makes, isn’t it amazing though?” He said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “The experts said our pro-Israel policies would produce terror and chaos, but I knew the opposite was true. I turned out to be right. We got the historic Abraham Accords and peace in the Middle East. Peace in the Middle East.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that there was “peace in the Middle East” during his presidency and that his administration “got” peace in the Middle East are both false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East – notably including the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Miller called “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.”
“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” said Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Miller also noted that various Middle Eastern states were in “varying phases of dysfunction or failure” at the end of the Trump presidency. As Trump left office, civil wars in Syria and Yemen were ongoing, Libya was precariously emerging from its own civil war, and US forces and diplomats in Iraq continued to be attacked.
Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called Trump’s claim “false.” She said in an email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”
Trump and wars
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that while there are “all of these wars” today under Biden, during the Trump presidency, “We had no wars. I got out of every war. We defeated ISIS, we got out.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “got out of every war” is false. At the end of his presidency, US troops remained in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he had reduced the size of the US presence in all three. And Trump kept a contingent of troops in Syriathroughout his presidency, even afterheclaimedUS troops were “out” (other than to protect oil sites, he added); in fact, two US troops died in vehicle rollovers in Syria in 2020.
Trump was also commander-in-chief for US airstrikes, including drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.
Trump and Veterans Choice
In a November speech in New Hampshire, Trump claimed, “I also signed – about 59 years they’ve been trying to get this one – VA Choice, which made it permanent, so that veterans can get medical care at the private health care provider of their choice.”
Facts First: Trump’s “59 years they’ve been trying to get it” claim is false. The Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama, and, as Trump said, made the initiative permanent. But contrary to Trump’s claim, it’s not true that people had been attempting for decades to create such an initiative.
During Trump’s presidency, he falsely took credit for the Choice law more than 150 times.
Trump’s aid to farmers
In speechafterspeech, Trump claimed that he had given US farmers $28 billion from China. For example, he claimed in a November speech in New Hampshire, “How can the farmers vote against me? I got them $28 billion from China.” He added, “I got the money from China out of the tariffs that I got.”
In October speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump boasted of the revenue produced by his tariffs on China and repeated his familiar claim that not a single previous president had gotten China to pay the US “10 cents.”
Facts First: Temporarily leaving aside the fact that Americans, not China, overwhelmingly paid for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, it’s not true no previous president had generated “10 cents” from tariffs on China. The US has had tariffs on goods from China since the late 1700s; Obama imposed new tariffs on goods from China; FactCheck.org reported that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”
Trump’s aid to the lobster industry
Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire that, of the money he supposedly secured from China, he “gave the farmers and New England lobstermen $28 billion. You know, I gave your lobstermen $28 billion.”
Facts First: This is false. Trump’s trade-aid package for the seafood industry was a $530 million program covering the entire country. So while it’s not clear how much New England lobstermen in particular ended up receiving, the total was clearly far less than the “$28 billion” he claimed he gave to farmers or the $23 billion he actually did give to farmers. (Lobstermen were not eligible for money from the trade-aid package for farmers.) And it’s worth noting that the money for the seafood industry, like the money for farmers, was compensation for losses incurred because of Trump’s own policies.
China’s oil purchases from Iran under Trump
In speechafterspeech, Trump told a story about how he supposedly got China to completely stop buying oil from Iran by telling China that if they bought any, the US would no longer do business with China. For example, he said in an October speech in Florida: “I said, ‘If you buy oil, any oil, from Iran, we’re never doing business. You have all the stuff that you take out of this country and rip us off. We’re not going to do any more business with China.’ They stopped immediately. No more oil.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that China completely stopped buying oil from Iran during his presidency is false. China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president. “The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith,lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, said in November.
China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran. Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”
Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)
Iran’s oil sales under Trump and Biden
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that Biden’s soft approach to sanctions on Iran “allowed them to sell massive amounts of oil, making them $80 billion a year. Congratulations; they were making nothing with us.”
Facts First: Both of Trump’s claims – that Iran is making $80 billion a year from oil sales under Biden and that it was making “nothing” from these sales under Trump – are false.
The federal government’s Energy Information Administration reported that Iran generated an approximate total of $110 billion in net oil export revenues in 2021, 2022 and the first five months of 2023. The 2021 figure was $37 billion and the 2022 figure was $54 billion. That’s not “$80 billion a year.”
Similarly, the conservative Washington Free Beacon reported in October that the group United Against a Nuclear Iran had calculated that Iran had generated about $80 billion in oil sales over the course of the Biden administration. The group confirmed to CNN in November that this $80 billion was for the period from February 2021 to September 2023, not for a single year alone.
And Iran made money from oil exports under Trump as well. Data provided to CNN by the Energy Information Administration shows that Iran had $55 billion in net oil export revenues in 2017, $66 billion in 2018, $29 billion in 2019 and $16 billion in 2020.
Elections, campaigns and voting
Groceries and identification
In an October speech in Iowa, Trump reprised a claim for which he was widely mocked during his presidency – hisassertion that Americans are required to show identification to buy groceries. “If you buy a loaf of bread, you gotta have your ID out, but for voting, you don’t,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump remains wrong. Americans do not need to show identification to buy bread or other foods.
Grocery stores generally require identification for purchases of alcohol or tobacco, for purchases of certain medications and for the small percentage of purchases made with a check. They may sometimes ask for ID when customers are using credit cards. But those are exceptions rather than the rule. Contrary to Trump’s declarations, Americans can and do purchase loaves of bread, and otherwise fill their grocery bags with food, without ever having to tell anyone who they are – much less show official proof of identity.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election
In speech after speech, Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” sometimesspecifying that “radical left Democrats” rigged the election and once saying “they cheated like a bunch of dogs.”
Facts First:These claims are all false. The 2020 election was not rigged, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.
The 2020 vote count
In October and November speeches in New Hampshire and a November speech in Florida, Trump rejected the legitimacy of the vote count in the 2020 presidential election He said in New Hampshire in November: “I got 75 million votes, I got – and that’s their count, OK, which is a phony count.” He said in Florida in November: “I went from 63 million to, I believe, over 75 million – and that’s been recorded by them, not by me. How about the real number?”
Facts First: Trump’s claim of a “phony count” is false, as is his suggestion that the official numbers are not the “real number.” The vote count was legitimate and accurate.
A minor side note: Trump got 74,223,975 votes, not “over 75 million”; Biden got 81,283,501.
Election Night in 2020
Falsely claiming that he watched the 2020 election get “stolen,” Trump said in a November speech in Florida that, on Election Night, “at 9 o’clock it was over, 10 o’clock it was really over” – suggesting, as he has repeatedly before, that he had been shown to be the winner at those times. He added, “And then…’We have found some additional votes.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The 2020 election was not “over” at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. on November 3, when millions of legitimate votes still needed to be counted – and it was widely known in the lead-up to Election Day that some states’ early results might create the illusion that Trump had big leads, since it would take time to count the mail-in votes that tended to heavily favor Biden (in part because Trump had spent months disparaging mail-in voting). Some populous urban areas, which also tended to support Biden, also took a while to finish their counting simply because they had so many votes.
Repeating his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump claimed in a November speech in Iowa: “We don’t even have to go into all of the ballot-stuffing that is on tape from the ‘2000 Mules.’ You look at ‘2000 Mules’ and you see thousands and thousands – hundreds of thousands actually – of votes being stuffed into ballot boxes.”
Facts First: This is false. The film ‘2000 Mules’ hasbeenwidely debunked, and it doesn’t show thousands of votes, let alone hundreds of thousands, “being stuffed into ballot boxes.”
The film, which is filled with misleading claims and dubious analysis, focuses on footage of ballots being submitted into drop boxesin public places (after which they are put through various verification measures to make sure they are legitimate), not into ballot boxes at in-person voting centers where ballots are placed for final counting – and, regardless, the film fails to prove any widespread wrongdoing even involving the drop boxes.
The security of mail-in ballots
Trump said in a November speech in Florida, “Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you have corrupt elections. I don’t care what it is. Anybody that wants it, they’re corrupt. And that includes Republicans, by the way. Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you are going to have really corrupt elections.”
Facts First: This is all false. While electionsexperts say the occurrence of fraud is relatively higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person voting, they also say that fraud of any kind in American state and federal elections represents a minisculepercentage of total votes cast. Voters have been casting ballots by mail for decades, including in Republican-dominated states; there is nothing inherently corrupt about supporting the use of such ballots.
‘Fake ballots’
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said the only way he can be beaten in the November 2024 election is “if they cheat.” He added moments later, “The biggest problem is they make fake ballots. Okay? That’s the biggest problem. And a lot of Republicans are very naive when they don’t say that. They say, ‘Oh, vote early. Vote early. We want to build…’ No, no: the big problem we have to do, we gotta stop fake ballots from being made.”
Facts First: This is entirely baseless. Federal elections do not have any “big problem” with “fake ballots.” Every state has numerous safeguards in place to ensure that someone who tries to manufacture and use a phony ballot will be caught.
What a Jimmy Carter commission said
Criticizing the use of mail-in ballots, Trump invoked a commission on election reform that was co-chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Trump said in a November speech in Florida that Carter “had a commission with some other prominent senators, and they came to one conclusion: you can’t do mail-in ballots.” Trump said in a November speech in New Hampshire: “Even Jimmy Carter, he had a commission. He said if you have mail-in ballots, you’re going to have massive corruption.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims significantly exaggerated what Carter’s commission said. Though the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in ballots, it did not say “you can’t do mail-in ballots” or that “massive corruption” is inevitable with the use of mail-in ballots; in fact, it highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections.
The commission’s 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” It also said mail-in voting increases the risks of fraud and that absentee ballots are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”
But it did not say all mail-in voting should be prohibited. It said that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.” The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail (as well as early voting).
Fifteen years after the release of the report, Carter said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.” His organization, The Carter Center, said in a 2020 statement: “Fortunately, since 2005, many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”
Democrats and elections
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that Democrats can’t win legitimately, given their policy preferences, and “the only way they know how to win is by cheating.”
Facts First: This is false. Just like Republicans, Democrats have won elections around the country – including the 2020 presidential election – fair and square. There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim.
Trump’s 2016 margin in Alabama
In a November speech in Florida, Trump spoke of how some of his opponents claimed that the 2016 election he won was rigged. He then said, “In 2016, they even tried to get me on Alabama and I won it by like 45 points. They said, ‘He cheated on Alabama.’ I said, ‘I won it by 45 points, I must have cheated by a lot.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that he won Alabama by 45 percentage points in 2016 is false – a major exaggeration. His margin over Hillary Clinton was big, but it was about 27.8 points (62.08% to 34.36%), not 45 points.
It’s not clear who he was claiming had accused him of cheating to win Alabama.
Maricopa County in 2022
In a November speech in Florida, Trump mentioned Kari Lake, a Republican US Senate candidate in Arizona who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor in 2022. He made reference to a technology problem that marred Election Day 2022 in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa County, saying that “unfortunately over 50% of the machines, in the Republican areas only, didn’t work. So they always find something.”
“We were having these issues coming up around Maricopa County,” Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, told reporters at the time. Noting the Republican affiliations of the recorder and the majority of the board, Gates said, “So there was no partisan bias in what happened here. This was a technical issue.”
Chris Wallace and a 2020 debate
In two October speeches in New Hampshire and October and November speeches in Florida, Trump told a story in which he claimed that 2020 presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace, who was then a host for Fox News and is now a host for CNN, had tried to stop him from asking Biden a question about a supposed payment from the wife of the mayor of Moscow to Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“Chris Wallace said, ‘He’s not allowed to answer that question,‘” Trump said in one of the New Hampshire speeches; in the other, he said Wallace said “you’re not allowed to ask that question” and told him “it’s inappropriate.” In Florida in November, Trump said, “Biden couldn’t answer the question, but Chris Wallace came in and helped him. ‘You’re not allowed to ask that question.’”
Facts First: All of these Trump claims are false. Wallace did not tell him that he was not allowed to ask the question or that Biden was not allowed to answer it. Rather, as the transcript shows,Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer the question after Trump had asked it, rather than continue to speak when Biden tried to offer a response. Wallace never said the question was “inappropriate.”
Rather, Wallace made comments like, “Sir, you’ve asked him a question, let him answer it” and, “Well, you have raised an issue, let the vice president answer.”
Energy and the environment
Climate change and sea levels
In a November speech in Florida, Trump delivered another version of a familiar claim he has used to minimize the threat of climate change. He said that others, rather than talk about the potentially catastrophic threat of nuclear weapons, instead “talk about global warming – because in 250 years our ocean’s gonna be a hundredth of an inch higher.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that the ocean will be just a hundredth of an inch higher “in 250 years” is false. As the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noted, the global sea level is currently rising at a rate of about an eighth of an inch per year. In other words, the sea level rise Trump claimed will happen “in 250 years” is already being vastly exceeded on an annual basis. NOAA says that, along the US coastline in particular, sea level rise is expected to average a total of 10 to 12 inches between 2020 and 2050 alone.
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump criticized Biden for canceling Trump-era oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He said, “Can you believe that? It was so much work to get that approved. We got it approved. They were ready to start drilling.”
Facts First: It’s not true that anybody was “ready to start drilling” in the refuge, either before the Biden administration suspended leases there in 2021 or before the administration canceled leases in 2023. There is no drilling infrastructure in place in the refuge, major oil companies have shown little interest in the site, and the seven leases the Biden administration canceled were all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state entity that is not an oil company. “To quote our friends at PolitiFact, what Trump said in this case qualifies as ‘pants on fire,’” Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, said in a November email. He said, “No one was ready to start drilling there, in 2017 or at any other point in time.”
Molchanov explained that the idea of drilling in the refuge would be a textbook example of “frontier exploration,” drilling in an area that has no previous activity by the oil industry. “This means there is no first-hand knowledge of how to go about drilling there. Everything would have to be learned along the way. This translates into lengthy time for preparation and elevated costs for actual drilling, if and when it were to take place. Also, there is no infrastructure – it would have to be developed from scratch.”
Tim Woody, communications manager for the Alaska regional office of The Wilderness Society conservation group, also called Trump’s claim false and noted “there is no infrastructure in place” in the refuge. And Woody said that no company had “gone through any of the steps that occur between acquiring a lease and actually beginning development,” including conducting seismic analysis and obtaining permits.
Demand for electric cars
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said, “Can you believe what we’re doing with the electric cars? All electric. Nobody wants them.”
Facts First: It’s not true that “nobody wants” electric cars. US purchases of electric vehicles continue to set records; Cox Automotive reported in October that “EV sales have now increased for 13 straight quarters” in the US and were “firmly on track to surpass 1 million for the first time ever” in a year. Electric vehicle sales also make up a growing share of total US vehicle sales; Cox Automotive reported that they accounted for a record 7.9% of total sales in the third quarter of 2023, up from 6.1% a year prior and up from 7.2% in the second quarter of this year.
A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 38% of Americans said they are very likely or somewhat likely to seriously consider an electric vehicle for their next vehicle purchase. Even if the poll result is off, it’s clear that Trump’s claim that “nobody wants them” is not true.
The US and electric car manufacturing
Trump, saying he thinks he will earn the support of union autoworkers, claimed in a November speech in Iowa that it is “preposterous” for the US move to all electric cars – and then said, “You can’t make them here, because we don’t have the minerals, we don’t have the materials for it. We have a thing called gasoline, that’s what we have.”
While the US does need to import some critical minerals and materials for electric vehicle manufacturing, that clearly doesn’t mean domestic production of the vehicles is impossible. There are global supply chains for all sorts of products whose final assembly is done in this country.
– CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this item.
Biden and electric vehicles
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire: “On day one, I will repeal Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate. ‘Everybody has to have an electric car.’” He said that, in a second Trump administration, “gasoline-powered engines will be allowed.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden has not mandated that “everybody has to have an electric car” or outlawed cars powered by gasoline, though his administration has made an aggressive push to try to get automakers and consumers to move toward electric vehicles.
Depending on how automakers were to respond, the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new tailpipe rules could, if adopted, require electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032.
Electric vehicles and the military
In a November speech in Texas, Trump criticized the Biden administration for imposing “insane mandates” and lamented that “Army tanks have to go electric, OK?…Because the tanks, if they’re electric, you’re going into a country blasting the hell out of it, but at least we’re doing it in an environmentally friendly way.”
Facts First: This is false. The Biden administration is not requiring tanks to be all-electric, as FactCheck.org pointed out in its own November fact check. The Army released a climate strategy in 2022 that called for a move toward various kinds of electric vehicles, including “fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050,” but that would not include tanks. And, regardless, a strategy is not a mandate.
Biden and boats
During the same part of the Texas speech, Trump also claimed that “all boats have to go electric.”
Facts First: This is false. There is no Biden mandate requiring boats to be powered by electricity, as The New York Times noted in its own fact check of this Trump speech.
A federal boat speed limit
After complaining in an October speech in New Hampshire about offshore wind turbines, and alleging without evidence that these turbines are killing whales, Trump added, “Then they say that, for boat manufacturers, the boat can’t go more than two miles an hour because we don’t want to hurt the whales.”
Facts First: This claim is false in two ways.
To try to protect whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed to require a greater number of boats to abide by a speed limit in certain areas of the East Coast during certain months of the year; the expansion would apply the speed limit to boats at least 35 feet long rather than the current minimum of 65 feet long.
But Trump’s “two miles an hour” claim is not true. The speed limit involved is 10 knots, or roughly 11.5 miles per hour. Second, the speed limit applies to people operating boats, not to “boat manufacturers” as Trump said. In other words, the government is not trying to force companies to make boats that cannot go faster than this speed limit.
In other recent speeches, Trump has attributed his two-miles-per-hour claim to something he said he was told while visiting a boat company in South Carolina in September. That company and South Carolina’s boating industry advocacy group did not respond to CNN requests for comment.
California and electricity
Criticizing Democrats’ push for the adoption of electric vehicles, Trump repeatedly claimed that California already has constant blackouts because it has insufficient power to serve its population.
He said in a November speech in Texas: “Did you see, they had blackouts all over the place this summer?” He said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “In California, they want to go with all-electric, but they can’t even – every weekend, they have a blackout. They don’t have enough electricity.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that California “had blackouts all over the place this summer” and has a blackout “every weekend” are false. California has been able to meet its electricity demand throughout the year, including during the peak-demand summer season.
“California didn’t experience any outages this year because of a load imbalance. We haven’t since 2020,” Erin Mellon, spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in an email earlier in November. Mellon added, “We’ve drastically expanded our clean energy portfolio, and recently CA hit 6,600 MW of battery storage – enough for 6.6 million homes for 4 hours.”
Vonette Fontaine, spokesperson for the California Independent System Operator, which manages the power grid for about 80% of the state, said in an email earlier in November: “The California Independent System Operator did not experience any grid emergencies this summer requiring electricity outages.”
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, with regard to US energy production, Biden “stopped it – just no more.” In an October speech in Iowa, he more specifically accused Biden of stopping energy production from fossil fuels, saying, “Biden – by stopping all the energy coming out – you know, he wants to put windmills all over the place and he wants to do things that are very expensive, but he doesn’t want any petroleum, he doesn’t want any petroleum product, and he doesn’t want oil and gas.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Biden has not stopped US production of oil and gas, which has continued to boom under Biden. US crude oil production in 2022 was the second-highest year on record, behind only Trump-era 2019, and domestic crude production in the first eight months of 2023, the most recent data that is currently available, was the highest on record for the first eight months of any year.
None of this is to say that Biden is the reason that domestic production has increased; market factors are the key driver of companies’ investment and production decisions. (“It’s perhaps less about the administration in power and more about the entrepreneurial nature of the oil industry,” Matt Smith, Kpler’s lead oil analyst for the Americas, told Egan.) And Egan wrote: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”
Trump said in a November speech in Texas: “We’re going to supply Europe, all over the world. We were going to send our oil and gas. And then they ended it, they ended it.”
Facts First: This is false. Biden did not end oil and gas exports to Europe or the rest of the world. In fact, the federal government’s Energy Information Administration reported in October that US crude oil exports in the first half of 2023 were the highest on record since the ban on these exports was repealed in 2015 – and that “Europe was the largest regional destination for U.S. crude oil exports by volume, at 1.75 million” barrels per day. Also, the Energy Information Administration reported in September that European Union countries and the United Kingdom “remained the main destination” for US exports of liquefied natural gas after reaching that status in 2022.
Oil prices
Talking about oil prices, Trump claimed in an October 9 speech in New Hampshire: “Now it’s $100 and going higher.” He claimed in a speech in Florida two days later: “We’re hitting $100 now, and we’re going to probably hit $115 a barrel.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that “now it’s $100” and that “we’re hitting $100 now” are false, both exaggerations. On the days he spoke, West Texas Intermediate crude did not exceed $87.24 per barrel and Brent crude did not exceed $89 per barrel. While Brent crude briefly passed $97 per barrel in late September, it had fallen substantially by the time Trump made this claim.
Some analysts have said in recent months that oil could potentially exceed the $100 per barrel mark next year. But Trump used the word “now,” twice, and that’s not true.
Energy costs
Trump claimed in a November speech in Florida: “We’re gonna bring down your costs. We are bringing down your energy costs. We have the highest energy costs anywhere now.”
Facts First: It’s not true that the US now has the highest energy costs “anywhere.” Even with an increase in the Biden era, US household electricity prices have remained substantially lower than prices in many European countries, plus a variety of other nations. Pavel Molchanov, the Raymond James energy analyst, said in an email that Trump’s claim is not even close to correct; citing data you can see here, he said, “U.S. electricity prices are lower than in practically every other industrialized economy.” (US household prices for natural gas are also nowhere near the world’s highest.)
The state of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Criticizing Biden for releasing a large quantity of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022, Trump said, “Now it’s at the lowest level…the lowest level in history. There’s almost nothing there.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “there’s almost nothing there” is false. Though the reserve is at its lowest level since the early 1980s, it still has more than 351 million barrels of crude and is still the world’s largest national oil reserve. Three-hundred-fifty-one million barrels is just not “almost nothing” by any reasonable standard. (Trump has previously claimed this year that the reserve is now “totally empty.”)
Wind turbines and house values
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump railed once more against wind turbines, a longtime subject of his criticism. This time, he said, “If you have one near your house, your house is worthless, because you can’t sell it. Between the noise and the look, you can’t sell it.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that “your house is worthless” if a wind turbine is nearby is not true, though there may be some cases where people have more trouble selling their house because of a nearby wind turbine. Various US studies have found either no statistically significant impact on house values or even an increase in house values related to the proximity of wind power.
Even if there was a decline in house values in some neighborhoods or counties because of nearby wind turbines, that wouldn’t justify Trump’s categorical claim that a nearby wind turbine makes your house “worthless.”
Gas prices
Trump made repeated false claims in October and November about how much gas cost at the time.
For example, he said in an October 16 speech in Iowa that gasoline “just hit $5.50 a gallon” after being $1.87 or lower under Trump. He also made the claim about having had gas at $1.87 in an October 11 speech in Florida – and said that “today, you have $5, $6 and $7.” In a November 11 speech in New Hampshire, Trump again boasted of low gas prices during his tenure and said, “And now you have $5 gasoline.” And in the October 16 speech in Iowa, Trump also said that, in California, gasoline is “up to $7 and $8” per gallon.
Facts First: TheseTrump claims are all false.
On the day he spoke in Iowa and said prices had “just hit $5.50 a gallon,” the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in Iowa was about $3.29, and the national average was about $3.60, per data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at the firm GasBuddy, said that, on the day Trump spoke, GasBuddy did not see gas being sold for $5 or more per gallon at any of the 2,036 stations it tracks in Iowa.
On the day he spoke in Florida and said that today’s prices were $5, $6 and $7, the state’s average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.42 per gallon, and the national average was about $3.66 per gallon, according to data provided by AAA. De Haan said none of the 8,237 Florida stations tracked by GasBuddy were selling for $5 or higher that day.
On the day he spoke in New Hampshire and said that “now you have $5 gasoline,” the state’s average for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.34, while the national average was about $3.38, according to data provided by AAA. De Haan said none of the 875 New Hampshire stations tracked by GasBuddy were selling for $5 or higher that day.
And when he made the claim about California prices going up to $7 and $8, the state’s average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $5.62; De Haan said that, of 10,526 California stations tracked by GasBuddy, the firm did not see a single station selling that day at $8 per gallon or higher, with only four, well known for their high prices, at $7 or higher. Just four stations in California – two rural, two in Los Angeles – were selling for over $7 per gallon that day.
Also, Trump’s claim about having had gas at $1.87 is misleading. While the national average did go that low and lower after gasoline demand crashed in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the national average was $2.393 per gallon on the day Trump left office in January 2021.
Venezuelan oil and US refineries
In October speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire and in a November speech in Houston, Trump spoke of the US importing heavy, sour crude oil from Venezuela under Biden after imports stopped under Trumpas a result of his sanctions. He claimed in Iowa that Houston has “the only refineries in the entire world” that can refine the oil, and claimed in New Hampshire that Houston has “the only refinery in the world that can do it.” In the speech in Houston, he claimed the city has the “only one refinery in the country that can refine” it.
Facts First: It’s not true that Houston has the only refinery or refineries – in the US or the world – that can refine oil from Venezuela. Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, provided CNN with a chart of US refineries that have taken Venezuelan crude this year; they include facilities in Mississippi, Louisiana and elsewhere in Texas.
– CNN’s Matt Egan contributed to this item.
The Keystone XL pipeline and jobs
Criticizing Biden for canceling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada in 2021, Trump said in a November speech in Texas, “Forty-eight thousand jobs, 48,000 people. They gave their life for that, and they never really sort of recovered. That’s what they wanted to do.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that 48,000 people “gave their life” for Keystone XL jobs is false. The company behind the pipeline said after Biden’s cancellation decision that it would cut 1,000 unionized jobs in Canada and the US as a result.
A 2014 report from the Obama administration’s State Department had estimated that “a total of 42,100 jobs throughout the United States would be supported by construction of the proposed Project.” But that’s still not 48,000, and it doesn’t mean that 42,100 people were actually working on the project in 2021.
The key word is “supported.” The 42,100-jobs estimate wasn’t an estimate of people who would actually be devoting their workdays to the pipeline. It included an estimated 26,000 jobs that would supposedly have resulted “from indirect and induced spending” by people connected to the project, like spending by employees of construction contractors or suppliers.
China and the Paris climate accord
In a November speech in Texas, Trump criticized the Paris climate accord, calling it “one of the greatest rip-offs.” As he did as president, he also made false claims about China in relation to the accord – saying this time that “China was exempt” from the accord. He added, “China didn’t have to do anything until 2035, think of it.”
Facts First:Trump’s claims are false.
China was not “exempt” from the Paris accord; the agreement came into effect for all participating countries, including China, in November 2016. The accord simply allowed each nation to set its own targets for reducing carbon emissions.
And though China picked approximately 2030 as the time by which it planned to have carbon emissions peak (later saying the goal was to hit the peak before 2030), that did not mean China didn’t have to do anything until 2030, much less not do anything until 2035. Similarly, when the Obama administration set a target of reducing US emissions by 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025, that did not mean that the US was exempt or didn’t have to do anything until 2025.
Trump said in speechafterspeech that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.
Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.
As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.
Guns and Afghanistan
Trump claimed in a November speech in New Hampshire that the US had left “700,000 rifles” to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In an October speech in Florida, he said it was “700,000 guns and rifles.”
Facts First: Trump’s “700,000” figure is inaccurate, an exaggeration. An inspector general report to Congress in 2022 said: “Since 2005, the DoD procured 427,300 weapons worth $612 million for the Afghan military and security forces, including 258,300 rifles, 6,300 sniper rifles, 64,300 pistols, 56,155 machine guns, 31,000 rocket propelled grenade launchers, and 224 howitzers. [The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] noted that 316,260 of these weapons, worth $511.8 million, were in the Afghan forces’ stocks when the former government fell, but their operational condition was unknown.”
China and Taiwan
In a November speech in Florida, Trump claimed of China: “The day I left, they flew 28 bombers right over the middle of Taiwan, because that was a signal.”
Facts First: Trump was wrong about key details of this incident. On the third and fourth days of the Biden presidency, not the very day Trump left office, China sent military planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over the Taiwan Strait – not “right over the middle of Taiwan,” a major difference. And the incident involved 28 Chinese planes but not “28 bombers”; The New York Times reported at the time that the Taiwanese military said eight Chinese bombers were involved; the other planes were fighters, anti-submarine aircraft and a reconnaissance plane.
It’s worth noting that China also sent planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone during Trump’s presidency. In early 2021, Taiwan News reported that, according to a recent report funded by Taiwan’s government, “In 2020, the Chinese military violated Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) more times than in any year since 1996.”
US alliances under Biden
Trump claimed in an October speech in New Hampshire that, under Biden, “Relations with other countries – we’ve lost every country; we don’t even have any allies anymore, they don’t respect us. I mean, we don’t have any. We have nothing going. You take a look, and China is our best ally, I think, with him.”
Facts First: Both of these Trump claims are false. The US continues to have numerous allies around the world and continues to have numerous points of friction with China. There is simply no basis for claiming that China, which Biden describes as a competitor to the US, has become the closest US ally under Biden. “China is a strong trading partner with the US, but it is as far from an ally a country can be,” said Krista Wiegand, director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs.
Wiegand said: “From the beginning of his administration, Biden has worked hard to repair relations with US allies that were weekend under the Trump administration. US relations with its allies are closer than they have been in years especially in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Netanyahu and the assassination of an Iranian general
In an October speech in Florida, Trump criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supposedly pulling Israel out from its planned involvement in the Trump-ordered 2020 assassination of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Then, using Netanyahu’s nickname, Trump said: “And then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That wasn’t good. That didn’t make me feel too good. But that’s alright.”
Facts First: Netanyahu did not try to take credit for the 2020 assassination of Soleimani. In fact, he explicitly said the day of the assassination that “President Trump deserves all the credit” – emphasizing the “all” – “for acting swiftly, forcefully, decisively.”
NBC News reported in 2020 that Israeli intelligence had played a role in the killing; the former head of Israeli military intelligence said the same in 2021. But Netanyahu has not made such comments himself, let alone take credit for the killing itself. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2022 that “although NBC News and Yahoo News had published detailed pieces about Israel’s role, all official Israeli echelons had been mum on the issue” until the former intelligence chief spoke out.
Iran’s retaliation for Soleimani’s death
In various speeches, Trump hinted or explicitly claimed that Iran intentionally avoided hitting a base that housed US troops in Iraq when Iran launched missiles toward the base in January 2020 in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani.
In an October speech in New Hampshire, Trump said the missiles “all landed a little outside the base” and that Iran “needed some kind of reply, I guess, but they didn’t hit us.” In a November speech in Houston, he claimed that Iran had called the US to assure them that none of the missiles would strike the base, and indeed all of the missiles either blew up before arrival or landed “outside the base area.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that all of Iran’s missiles landed outside the base are false. As The Washington Post noted in its own recent fact check, 11 Iranian missiles hit the al-Asad base Iran had targeted in the retaliatory attack. The fact that missiles hit the base was confirmed by satellite images, by the Pentagon, and by a CNN visit to the base days after the attack. CNN reported from the scene: “Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military’s side.” CNN reported that “the Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators’ housing unit.”
While no US troops were killed, more than 100 were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries. Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, told reporters that he believed Iran’s intent was to kill; he credited “the defensive techniques that our forces used” for the absence of deaths.
Trump has provided no substantiation for the claim that Iran called the US to telegraph the strike and offer reassurance; as the Post reported, Iraq’s prime minister said he received a general warning from Iran that it was about to begin its response and target US troops.
Trump’s claim that Israel had abandoned the assassination operation has also been disputed.
What the Biden administration said about Israel and Hezbollah
Trump repeatedlyclaimed that a top Biden national security official, or multiple officials, had foolishly said that they hoped Hezbollah did not attack Israel from the north because Israel is especially “vulnerable” there.
For example, Trump said in an October speech in New Hampshire: “How about the person, the security person, top security person for Biden, said, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north because that’s where we’re most vulnerable.’ Can you believe it? The following morning, we get attacked from the north. No, can you believe the guy, he’s a national security advisor. ‘I hope that Hezbollah doesn’t attack Israel from the north because that’s where we’re the most vulnerable.’ The following morning they got attacked. But this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with stupid people.”
Facts First: Trump was misstating what Biden administration officials said. They did urge Hezbollah to refrain from attacking Israel from Lebanon after Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, and expressed “concern” about the possibility of a Hezbollah attack – but contrary to a central component of Trump’s stories, they did not say Israel is “most vulnerable” in the north.
Asked what Trump was referring to when he made these claims, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to October comments from National Security Council spokesman John Kirby and a senior defense official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. But neither of them said what Trump claimed.
Cheung pointed to this comment from Kirby at an October 11 press briefing: “And, you know, we’ve been watching with concern some of the rocket attacks that have come across the northern border of Israel from Lebanon, which obviously were coming from – from Hezbollah. So we’re – we’re clearly concerned about that.”
But Kirby said nothing there about the north being a particular vulnerability for Israel. Similarly, the anonymous senior defense official told reporters on October 9: “We are deeply concerned about Hezbollah making the wrong decision and choosing to open a second front to this conflict.” The official did not point to the north as a special vulnerability.
The size of Iran’s military
Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida: “You know, Iran’s got close to a 3 million person army, military. That’s big stuff. You know, that’s no longer the minor leagues.”
Facts First: Trump’s “3 million” figure is false. “Iran’s army is about a million strong, with 1/3 of that number comprised of reservists,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group think tank, said in an email. In 2019, the US government’s Defense Intelligence Agency used similar numbers in a report on Iran’s military power, estimating that Iran’s military had a total of 1.06 million people, including 610,000 active personnel.
Singapore and drugs
Promoting his proposal to give the death penalty to drug dealers, Trump said in a November speech in New Hampshire, “Why wouldn’t you do it as Singapore does, the death penalty. They have no drugs whatsoever, no drugs whatsoever.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Singapore has “no drugs whatsoever” is false. Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau said in an official report on the local drug situation in 2022: “Methamphetamine, heroin, and cannabis were the three most commonly abused drugs in 2022, with 95% of drug abusers arrested abusing at least one of these three drugs.” The report also noted that the bureau had made seizures of heroin, methamphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and various other drugs, and it said that “in Singapore, the rise of cannabis abuse is of major concern.”
In the same speech, Trump claimed that China, which also executes some drug dealers, has “no drug problem” as a result. Joseph Amon, director of the Office of Global Health at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, said in a November email: “There is no specific definition of what is a drug ‘problem,’ but both in both China and Singapore there are people who use illicit drugs and in both countries illicit drug use is seen as a significant concern requiring government resources in terms of policing, surveillance, prevention and treatment.”
An Iraqi judge
In an October speech in Florida, Trump claimed that the Justice Department recently invited an Iraqi judge to visit Washington – and “after that, the foreign judge issued a warrant for my arrest for blowing up the number one terrorist in the world, Soleimani. So he came in, he was invited by this incompetent president. ‘Please come in.’ And he ended up issuing an arrest for my – he wanted to arrest me because I killed the number one terrorist in the world.”
Facts First: Trump’s narrative is thoroughly inaccurate. The judge, Faiq Zidan, head of Iraq’sSupreme Judicial Council, did not issue a warrant for Trump’s arrest over the Soleimani assassination “after” he visited Washington – and, in fact, Zidan’s spokesperson told Fox News in October that Zidan’s planned visit to Washington had been postponed. What actually happened was that in early 2023, while marking the third anniversary of the assassination, Zidan gave public remarks in which he discussed how Trump was already wanted for the assassination (which took place in Iraq and also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces). An Iraqi court had issued an arrest warrant for Trump in 2021.
There is no indication that Biden himself had invited Zidan to Washington. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about the matter.) Regardless, Trump’s claim that Zidan visited Washington and then issued an arrest warrant isn’t true.
A memo about migrants
Trump said in an October speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “Just days ago, Customs and Border [Protection] – who are incredible people by the way – distributed a memo warning that Hamas, Hezbollah fighters and jihadists are infiltrating across our wide-open border. They’re all over the place.”
Facts First: Trump inaccurately described this memo, which was produced by the intelligence unit at the Customs and Border Protection office in San Diego. The memo, a “situational awareness” brief for employees that was obtained by right-wing media outlets, suggested that foreign fighters affiliated with Middle East militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah “may” try to enter the US across the Mexican border. Contrary to Trump’s claim, the memo did not say these fighters “are” coming across the border or are “all over the place.”
Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington subsequently issued an official statement to media outlets saying, “CBP has seen no indication of Hamas-directed foreign fighters seeking to make entry into the United States.”
The San Diego memo warned that people “inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border.” The memo mentioned the possibility of attempted entry by “foreign fighters motivated by ideology or mercenary soldiers of fortune.”
Migration from China
Trump spoke in a November speech in Florida about young male migrants crossing the border into the US. He said, “And they’re coming from China – 16% come from China.”
Facts First: Trump’s “16%” figure is inaccurate. Official data from US Customs and Border Protection shows that Chinese nationals were involved in about 1.6% of nationwide border encounters in the 2023 fiscal year, an increase from 1% in the 2022 fiscal year but nowhere near Trump’s claim. At the southwest border in particular, Chinese nationals made up just under 1% of encounters in fiscal 2023 – a spike from fiscal 2022, when they made up less than 0.1% of encounters, but again far from what Trump said.
The federal data is not broken down by sex.
US and European aid to Ukraine
Trump said in an October speech in Iowa that although “everybody feels badly for Ukraine,” he has a “problem with” Europe’s level of assistance to Ukraine compared to US assistance to Ukraine: “So if you look at it, Europe – so they’re at $25 billion and we’re $200 billion. Only a stupid person would make that deal.”
Facts First: Trump’s figures are grossly inaccurate. Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks aid to Ukraine, found that, through July 31, the European Union was the largest contributor of aid to Ukraine since late January 2022 (including military, humanitarian and financial aid), at $85.1 billion in direct commitments, while the US was second at $76.8 billion – and the total for Europe is even higher if you add in contributions by individual EU member states directly and through EU institutions. For example, Germany had made $23.1 billion in its own commitments, per the Kiel Institute data, in addition to providing another $19.2 billion via EU institutions.
The US was the largest contributor of military aid in particular, at $46.6 billion in commitments compared to about $18.9 billion for Germany.
Trump’s legal cases
Trump’s New York civil case
Criticizing the civil fraud trial against him in New York, Trump claimed in an October speech in Florida that “it’s the first time they’ve ever used the statute” and that “they used the statute that’s never been used before.”
The law gives the state attorney general broad powers against people thought to be engaged in alleged “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts” or who have otherwise shown “persistent fraud or illegality.” Some experts have said that this James lawsuit against Trump over business fraud (as opposed to consumer fraud) is a novel use of the statute, but Trump’s claim was that the statute had never been used before, period.
Speaking of Biden, Trump said, “He took his top person from the Department of Justice and put him into the local New York, Manhattan DA’s office – running it. You’re not even allowed to do that. But they took the top person, as you know; I believe the name is Colangelo. They took the top person and put him into the Manhattan DA’s office.”
Colangelo and Bragg knew each other before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney. They worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general – where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and Trump’s financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Colangelo served as acting associate attorney general in the first months of the Biden administration in early 2021 and then as principal deputy associate attorney general. As acting associate attorney general, he was third in command of the Justice Department.
Trump’s federal gag order
Trump criticized the gag order imposed on him by US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over his federal election subversion case. Before Trump noted that the gag order was put on hold by an appeals court in early November (pending oral arguments later in November), he said in a November speech in New Hampshire: “I mean, I have a judge in Washington DC who put a gag order on me – I cannot speak. So if the fake news asked me a question about, like, something, I cannot speak. ‘I’m sorry.’ How do you think that would be in a campaign?…‘Uh what do you think about the campaign?’ ‘I’m sorry, I can’t comment.’”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Even before the gag order was put on hold, it’s not true that the order meant Trump couldn’t comment on the election campaign or that it meant he “cannot speak” in general. The gag order was limited, tailored to restrict speech the judge believed could jeopardize the integrity of the case. It clearly permitted Trump to opine on the campaign.
The order explicitly said that Trump was free to assert his innocence on the charges against him and to criticize the government, the Biden administration, the Justice Department, and the platforms and policies of his “current political rivals.”
The order specifically prohibited all “interested parties” in the case, which include Trump, from making statements (or directing others to make statements) targeting special counsel Jack Smith or his staff, court staff and supporting personnel, defense counsel or their staff, or “any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.”
The Presidential Records Act
Trump, who has been charged with illegally retaining classified documents after his presidency, claimed in an October speech in Florida that, as a former president, “I come under the Presidential Records Act” and so “I can do whatever I want.”
Facts First: This is false. The Presidential Records Act does not say a president can do whatever they want with official documents. Rather, it says that all presidential records belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. By having official records at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, Trump was in clear contravention of the law.
The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”
Trump didn’t mention it in the October speech, but he has previously claimed that a district court decision in a civil case related to former President Bill Clinton gave Trump the right to do whatever he wants with presidential records. That’s not true.
Trump’s New York civil trial
Trump claimed in a November speech in Florida that Biden is behind his civil fraud trial in New York: “Even that stupid trial going on in New York which has been totally discredited – everybody’s been discredited – that all comes out of the White House; that’s to discourage people from voting.”
Facts First: There is no basis for the claim that Biden or the Biden White House is behind the civil trial. The case was brought by New York state Attorney General Letitia James – after an investigation she began in 2019, roughly two years before Biden became president. As Trump has repeatedly noted, James, a Democrat, campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to pursue Trump. (Also, federal agencies do not have jurisdiction over state cases like this.)
Trump repeatedly denounced the four criminal cases against him as unfounded and politically motivated – and, to underscore his point, he claimed inspeechafterspeech that he has been indicted four times while the legendary gangster Al Capone only got indicted once.
For example, Trump said in an October speech in Florida: “Did anybody ever hear of Al Capone? The greatest of all time, right. The greatest gangster of all time. If you look at him wrong, he’d kill you, and he’d kill you with his hands. He was a tough guy. He got indicted one time. I got indicted four times.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Capone was indicted only one time is false. Capone was indicted at least six times, as A. Brad Schwartz, the co-author of a book on Capone, told CNN.
And that doesn’t include various criminal charges against Capone that did not involve an indictment, such as some misdemeanors, or obscure Capone cases for which CNN couldn’t immediately determine whether there was an indictment, which you can read more about here.
Capone was indicted three times in 1931 alone, the year he was famously convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. Schwartz, co-author of the book “Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago,” explained that these three indictments were: “A secret indictment for tax evasion handed down in March 1931 (before the statute of limitations ran out for charges from the year 1924)”; a larger indictment in June 1931, with more than 20 counts, for tax evasion in the period from 1925 to 1929; “and a bootlegging conspiracy indictment, based on the work of Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, later that same month.”
Trump faces 91 total counts over his two federal indictments and two local indictments in Georgia and New York. Schwartz said: “This isn’t a race, of course, but it may be worth noting that Capone is also way ahead in individual counts (the 1931 Prohibition indictment alone added up to five thousand conspiracy charges).”
Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years
Washington Post
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly – January 24, 2021
Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year.
The Fact Checker counted a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims made by President Trump during his White House tenure. Here’s what we learned.
He overstated the “carnage” he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his “massive” crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the “all-time record” for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.
And so it went, day after day, week after week, claim after claim, from the most mundane of topics to the most pressing issues.
Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen — the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment.
The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.
For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.
The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.
Whether such a tracker will be necessary for future presidents is unclear. Nonetheless, the impact of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate for years.
“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.
Trump speaks during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on July 28. By the end of 2020, he had made more than 2,500 false or misleading claims related to the virus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Trump made false claims about just about everything, big and small, so the Fact Checker database provides a window into his obsessions (and the news cycle) at the time. When he felt under siege or in trouble, he responded by trying to craft an alternative reality for his supporters — and to viciously attack his foes. Nearly half of the false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies or via his now-suspended Twitter account.
Trump arrives to speak at a rally in Washington, Mich., on Nov. 1. Many of his false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Claims about immigration spiked just before the 2018 midterm elections, as Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep the House of Representatives in GOP hands with exaggerated claims about “caravans” of undocumented immigrants approaching the border. Then in late 2019 he responded to the uproar over a phone call in which he urged Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden with more than 1,000 false and misleading claims on the issue in just four months.
False and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, so that by year’s end he had made more than 2,500 coronavirus-related claims — more than all of his trade claims over four years, even though trade has been one of the animating features of his presidency. Trump touted phony metrics to claim he successfully defeated the virus, pitched ineffective “cures” and constantly attacked former president Barack Obama for alleged failures, such as leaving a “bare cupboard” of ventilators (there were almost 17,000) and bungling the response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009-2010 (the response was considered a success).
In October, Trump was largely quiet for six days as he recovered from his own bout with covid-19. But even so, he made nearly 4,000 false or misleading claims that month, an average of 150 a day on the days he was not ill.
In speech after speech, he laid the groundwork for challenging the election, making baseless claims of potential election fraud, while attacking Biden as a mental incompetent — and a “grimy, sleazy and corrupt career politician” — who could not possibly emerge as the victor.
“It’s going to be a fraud,” Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News a month before voters went to the polls. “This is a terrible thing that’s happening to our country.”
After his election defeat, Trump spoke or tweeted about little except to offer lies about a stolen election, even as he or his supporters lost more than 60 court cases as judges repeatedly rejected his claims as bogus. After Nov. 3, he made more than 800 false or misleading claims about election fraud, including 76 times offering some variation of “rigged election.”
At his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse, in which he incited the attack on the Capitol, Trump made 107 false or misleading claims, almost all about the election.
The aftermath of what Biden and other Democrats now call the “big lie” hovers over Washington as both parties figure out whether there can be a return to a shared set of facts undergirding national debate, or whether one of the major political parties will remain captive to the sorts of conspiracy theories that marked so many of Trump’s final year of claims.
The events of Trump’s final weeks demonstrated the extent to which his alternate reality became woven into the fabric of the Republican Party, with the majority of GOP lawmakers voting against certifying Biden’s victory even after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
One hallmark of Trump’s fibs was his willingness to constantly repeat the same claims, no matter how often they had been debunked. One-fifth of his nearly 2,500 claims about the economy was the same falsehood — that he was responsible for creating the greatest economy in U.S. history. After the coronavirus outbreak tanked the economy, he amped up the rhetoric to say he had created the greatest economy in world history. Neither claim is true; under just about every metric, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton had more robust economies during their presidencies. Even before the pandemic, Trump’s economy was already faltering because of his trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in a technical recession.
During his presidency, Trump made nearly 2,500 false or misleading claims about the economy. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Nearly 300 times Trump falsely said that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised that it would be the biggest in U.S. history — bigger than President Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years.
Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded about 750 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.
The Fact Checker also tracked Three- or Four-Pinocchio claims that Trump has said at least 20 times, earning him a Bottomless Pinocchio. Trump completed his term with 56 of those entries, including three — about the “rigged election,” allegations that Dominion voting machines changed votes and the falsehood that GOP poll watchers were denied access to vote-counting — that only emerged in the final months of his presidency.
The Bottomless Pinocchio list gives a rough approximation of the types of major falsehoods Trump said during his presidency. Roughly 25 percent exaggerated about his accomplishments, and 15 percent misled about his policies. Another 15 percent dissembled about the Russia investigation or the probe into the Ukraine phone call. Roughly 10 percent each were fibs made out of whole cloth, attacks on people he considered foes, falsehoods about the coronavirus, phony claims about the election, or false statements about Biden and his proposals.
As the 2020 election neared, Trump nearly 50 times falsely reassured his supporters that Mexico was footing the $15 billion bill for his barrier along the southern border. U.S. taxpayers are paying, mostly via money Trump diverted from authorized military construction projects. This was perhaps Trump’s most famous campaign promise — during the 2016 campaign, he said more than 200 times that Mexico would pay for the wall — so he simply pretended he had fulfilled it in an effort to reassure his base that he had succeeded.
Many repeated claims just barely missed the cutoff for a Bottomless Pinocchio, such as the claim that he repealed a provision of the U.S. tax code that prohibits religious organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. (All he did was issue a toothless executive order, but he obviously thought it was so important to evangelical groups that he falsely claimed he achieved one of their key political objectives.)
Rain falls at the White House on Nov. 30. One of Trump’s false claims early on as president was when he disputed that it rained during his inauguration. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Trump rarely abandons his falsehoods, so as he neared the end of his presidency his campaign rallies became longer and longer. Each speech had a familiar pattern. He would cycle through various grievances about the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the impeachment over his Ukraine call. He trashed Obama, various Democrats and of course Biden. He falsely extolled his achievements in trade, foreign policy, the economy and immigration. He offered false assurances about the pandemic and warned darkly about fraud in the upcoming election.
The growth of falsehoods over the course of Trump’s presidency is illustrated by one remarkable statistic.
The Fact Checker team recorded 492 suspect claims in Trump’s first 100 days. Just on Nov. 2, the day before the 2020 election, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to save his presidency.
The database website has a search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements made by Trump. Readers can also isolate claims by time period, subject or venue.
Maintaining the database over four years required detailed examination of every Trump speech, news conference, press gaggle, campaign rally and interview, as well as more than 25,000 tweets. The fact checks of Trump’s statements in the database amount to about 5 million words.
The database includes any statement that might merit two or more Pinocchios under The Fact Checker’s rating scale. Trump often would repeat the same falsehood two or more times in a speech but only one instance of a claim per venue would be counted. The database did not include Facebook posts because they were often duplicative of tweets and likely staff-generated. The tally also generally did not count retweets, except for retweets of false or misleading videos.
The fact checks in the Trump database were written by a team that also included Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly and Michelle Ye Hee Lee. Graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro created the database website.
Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election
Emma Barnett and Jillian Frankel – March 17, 2024
VANDALIA, Ohio — Former President Donald Trump vowed on Saturday that there would be a “bloodbath” if he’s not re-elected in November.
The comments came at a rally here as Trump discussed the possibility of an increasing trade war with China over auto manufacturing. The rally was intended to get out the vote for Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, whom Trump endorsed in December, ahead of Ohio’s primary on Tuesday.
“If you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends — but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now … you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected,” Trump said.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024 in Vandalia, Ohio. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it,” he added. “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.”
Later, he added, “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”
In response to the former president’s comments, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told NBC News, “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”
James Singer, a spokesman for President Joe Biden’s campaign, issued a statement following Trump’s remarks, noting that former Vice President Mike Pence announced he will not endorse Trump’s re-election bid.
“This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience doubles down on his threats of political violence,” Singer said. “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”
Before he began speaking, the former president stood and saluted next to the lectern as “Justice for All,” by the “J6 choir” of inmates awaiting trial for their roles in the insurrection, played on the loudspeakers.
He again referred to the people who are in prison for crimes committed in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack as “hostages.”
“They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that and everybody knows that,” Trump said at the beginning of his speech. “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”
At the event, Trump also said that some undocumented immigrants were “not people,” although he added that he was “not allowed to say that because the radical left says it’s a terrible thing to say.” He also told Catholics not to vote for Biden.
“Any Catholic that votes for this numbskull is crazy, because you are being persecuted,” Trump said.
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)
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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)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)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)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)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)
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.
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 electionsVladimir 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
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
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.”
