Showing posts with label fact check. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fact check. Show all posts

Jun 28, 2024

Fact Check


Remember now - low score wins.

For Trump:

“The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounce back jobs that bounce back from the covid.”
—Trump

This is false. Biden’s jobs record in his first three years certainly tops Trump’s performance. In the first three years of Trump’s term, about 6.5 million jobs were created — less than half the number created under Biden in the same time period. The number of jobs is now 6.2 million higher than the peak under Trump in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy.

Meanwhile, employment for the native-born population has increased by almost 6.8 million under Biden, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (We start from February 2021, the first full month that reflects employment under Biden.) Employment of foreign-born workers increased about 5 million from February 2021 though May, the bureau says. The agency says this figure includes more than just undocumented immigrants; it also includes legally admitted immigrants, including refugees, and temporary residents such as students and short-term workers.

“A lot of credit for the military and no wars.”
—Trump

This is not true. Trump often says he was the first president in 72 years not to have any wars, which takes us back to 1948, when Truman was elected in his own right after stepping up to finish Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final term months before the end of World War II. This is a more broad-based claim than a statement Trump made in his farewell address as president — that he had started no new wars.

Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, not only never formally declared war or sought authorization to use force from Congress during his presidency, but military records show not a single soldier died in hostile action during his presidency. Eight military personnel died during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, but the military deems those as nonhostile deaths. (A helicopter collided with another aircraft.) A Marine and an Army soldier were also killed when a mob burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.
At least 65 active-duty troops died in hostile action in Trump’s presidency, the records show, as he ramped up commitments in Iraq and Syria to fight the ISIS terrorist group while also launching airstrikes on Syria as punishment for a chemical weapons attack. Trump also escalated hostilities with Iran, including the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump said at the time the strike was carried out in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001.

“The only thing he was right about is I gave you the largest tax cut in history.”
—Trump

This is false. Trump’s tax cut amounted to nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning it was far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth-largest in the past century — and smaller than two tax cuts passed under Barack Obama. Trump’s tax cut was heavily tilted toward the wealthy and corporations.

“Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it, something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about.”
—Trump

This statement lacks context. Of the 1.2 million Americans who died of covid, about 60 percent died under Biden compared to 40 percent for Trump. But Trump was president during the pandemic for a much shorter time — about 10 months, compared with more than three years under Biden. So the monthly death toll under Trump is higher. A vaccine was created in record time, but it was left to the Biden administration to distribute it in an efficient manner.
Under Trump - Dead Per Month, 1st 11 months of COVID: 37,423
Under Biden - Dead Per Month, 1st 11 months of his term: 33,364

“We’re like a Third World nation between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation.”
—Trump

Trump refers to “weaponization,” code for Biden’s supposedly using the resources of the U.S. government to target his political opponent. There is no evidence that Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue prosecutions of Trump.

“I’d love to ask him why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”
—Trump

This is poppycock. Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries to empty their prisons and mental institutions. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered that hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.
Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison globally — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.

“He’s destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in. They’re putting them on Medicare. They’re putting them on Social Security. They’re going to destroy Social Security. This man is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security.”
—Trump

Undocumented immigrants improve the health of Social Security and Medicare by paying payroll taxes without receiving benefits.
In a fact check, we calculated the figure for Social Security payments made by undocumented immigrants is now about $27 billion. For Medicare, it should be at least $6 billion, as the Medicare tax is about 23 percent of the Social Security tax.

“Fifty-one years ago, you had Roe v. Wade and everybody wanted to get it [the power to legislate on abortion] back to the states. Everybody without exception, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders. … Every legal scholar throughout the world, the most respected, wanted it brought back to the States.”
—Trump

This is absurd. The docket for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case in which the right to abortion was overturned, is filled with briefs from legal scholars saying it would be a mistake to overturn decades of legal precedent.

“The problem they have is they’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth. If you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, we’ll put the baby aside and we’ll determine what we do with the baby, meaning we’ll kill the baby.”
—Trump

This is a common Republican talking point — that Democrats support nationwide abortion on demand up until the moment of birth. The implication is that late-term abortions are common — and that they are routinely accepted by Democrats.

The reality, according to federal and state data, is that abortions past the point of viability are extremely rare. When they do happen, they often involve painful emotional and even moral decisions.

About two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and nearly 90 percent take place in the first 12 weeks, or within most definitions of the first trimester, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights. About 5.5 percent of abortions take place after 15 weeks, with just 1.3 percent at 21 weeks or longer.
Meanwhile, Trump once again grossly mischaracterizes remarks by former Virginia governor Ralph Northam (D), a physician.

Northam told a radio show in 2019 that late-term abortion procedures are “done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s not viable. So in this particular example, if a mother’s in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” Critics suggested the governor was endorsing infanticide. His office later said Northam was referring to medical treatment, not ending the life of a baby.

“We had the safest border in history in that final couple of months of my presidency.”
—Trump

This is false. Trump’s efforts to completely shut the border did not bear fruit until the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020 and he was able to turn away migrants by citing a public health emergency — but even then apprehensions at the southern border were lower than April 2017, shortly after he took office. Then the numbers began to spike again. Apprehensions in Trump’s final two months in office were much higher than in President Barack Obama’s last two months in office. Apprehensions were 43,251 in December 2016 and 31,576 in January 2017, the last two months of the Obama presidency, compared with 71,141 and 75,316 in Trump’s last two months. The highest number of apprehensions under Obama was 67,342, in March 2009.

“I had the highest approval rating for veterans taking care of the V.A. [Veterans Affairs]. He is the worst.”
—Trump

This is a favorite falsehood of Trump’s. The approval rating — he usually cites the number of 91 percent — is based on an independent survey conducted in 2013, when Obama was in office. “Veterans strongly endorsed VA health care, with 91 percent offering positive assessments of inpatient care and 92 percent for outpatient care,” according to a news release from the Department of Veterans Affairs announcing the survey results in 2014, when Obama was still in office. A quarterly survey of veterans, obtained by Wisconsin Watch, found that trust in the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department reached a high of about 80 percent under both Trump and Biden. (The range was 55 percent to 80.2 percent under Trump and 75.8 percent to 80.4 percent under Biden.)

“There was a made-up quote, suckers and losers. They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing like many of these magazines. He made that up. He put it in commercials. We’ve notified him. We had 19 people that said, I didn’t say it.”
—Trump

Trump strongly disputes this, but elements have been corroborated.
The original source for this story was a 2020 article in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg titled: “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” Goldberg, citing “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day,” reported that Trump canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he did not believe it was important to honor American war dead.
“In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,’” Goldberg wrote. “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood [during World War I] as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

“Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter.”
—Trump

After the New York Post in 2020 said it had obtained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, more than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including five CIA chiefs, signed a letter saying the release of the emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The letter itself artfully did not say the laptop was Russian disinformation — but in the presidential debates Biden used the letter to falsely claim the laptop story was a “Russian plan,” “a bunch of garbage,” “disinformation from the Russians” and “a smear campaign.”
The emails in question have since been confirmed to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I got them [NATO] to put up hundreds of billions of dollars.”
—Trump

Throughout the 2016 campaign, his presidency and now this election, Trump has demonstrated that he has little notion of how NATO is funded and operates. He repeatedly claimed that other members of the alliance “owed” money to the United States and that they were delinquent in their payments. Then he claimed credit for the money “pouring in” as a result of his jawboning, even though much of the increase in those countries’ contributions had been set under guidelines arranged during the Obama administration.
Since 2006, NATO guidelines have asked each member country to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. In 2014, NATO decided to increase its spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, with the goal of reaching 2 percent in each country by 2024. This money does not end up in NATO’s coffers, as Trump often asserts. (Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and is adjusted regularly.)
NATO figures show that the defense expenditures for NATO countries other than the United States have been going up — in a consistent slope — since 2014. As we noted, that’s when NATO decided to boost spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea.

“The secretary general of NATO said Trump did the most incredible job I’ve ever seen.”
—Trump

When he was president, Trump often attributed quotes to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that could not be confirmed, such as: “Secretary Stoltenberg has been maybe Trump’s biggest fan, to be honest with you. He goes around telling — he made a speech the other day. He said, ‘Without Donald Trump, maybe there would be no NATO.’ ” Stoltenberg said no such thing.

“I offered her [then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] 10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down.”
—Trump

Trump and his allies have invented the claim that he requested 10,000 troops before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, twisting an offhand comment into a supposed order to the Pentagon. A Colorado judge in November considered testimony on this point and dismissed a Trump aide’s account as “incredible” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
In 2021, we explored this claim twice and debunked it, each time awarding Four Pinocchios. Then, in late 2022, the Jan. 6 committee released its report and dozens of transcribed interviews that provided new details on the meetings in which Trump claims he requested troops at the Capitol.

That report underscored how Trump has little basis to make this claim, saying that he brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and obtuse ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.

“The Unselect Committee, which is basically two horrible Republicans that are all gone now and out of office, and Democrats, all Democrats, they destroyed and deleted all of the information they found because they found out we were right.”
—Trump

This is false. Trump is seizing on House GOP claims that the Jan. 6 committee archive is missing some records. Not only is that claim rejected by the chair of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), but not even Republicans have claimed “all” of the documents are missing. Instead, we are talking about videos and some sensitive materials — and there is no indication any of these materials concerned the alleged troop order.
First, the committee did not include raw videos as part of the permanent records, but instead provided official transcripts of the video interviews. Thompson also said that some materials gathered by the committee contained “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.” That material was sent to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for archival purposes because the Jan. 6 committee dissolved before a full review of the sensitivity of this material was completed, Thompson wrote.

However, according to special counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump, those sensitive materials from the White House and the Secret Service were provided to Trump months ago as part of pretrial discovery.

“Telling the Ukrainian people that … you change the prosecutor, otherwise you’re not getting $1 billion. … That’s quid pro quo.”
—Trump

Biden’s role as vice president in Ukraine, and his son’s involvement there, make for a complex story that we have examined many times. Trump has seized on kernels of truth to build an appearance of scandal that resonated with his supporters. Trump argued that Biden had demanded a quid pro quo from the Ukrainians, but at its core, Trump’s tale was a fiction: There had been no prosecution or investigation of Biden’s son Hunter in this matter, and Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine were coordinated with the State Department and America’s European allies.

Here’s what really happened: During Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and pressure Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs.

During a 2015 visit to Ukraine, Biden privately told Poroshenko that loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced. After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided. Trump had it completely backward. Biden was thwarting corruption, not abetting it.
Meanwhile, in 2014, Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that was owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden showed questionable judgment in taking such a position while his father had a high-profile role in U.S.-Ukraine relations, and the possible conflict of interest was well-documented in news reports at the time.

Years after Biden forced the ouster of Shokin, the former prosecutor cried foul, falsely claiming he was removed because he had had Burisma in his sights — a story he peddled to Trump’s allies.

“They moved a high-ranking official, a DOJ, into the Manhattan DA’s office to start that case.”
—Trump

False. There is no evidence that Biden has anything to do with this case, which was brought by Alvin Bragg, a local Democratic prosecutor. Bragg inherited the file from a previous prosecutor, Cyrus Vance Jr. The tenuous connection cited by Trump supporters is that Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors working for Bragg, served as acting associate attorney general, the third-ranking position at the Justice Department, before joining Bragg’s office in late 2022. But prosecutors change jobs all the time — and Bragg’s office had already been working on the case.

“He caused this inflation. I gave him a country with no essentially no inflation.”
—Trump

Higher prices for goods and services would have happened no matter who was elected president in 2020. Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply-chain issues, as companies had reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe.

“I got them [NATO] to put up hundreds of billions of dollars.”
—Trump

Throughout the 2016 campaign, his presidency and now this election, Trump has demonstrated that he has little notion of how NATO is funded and operates. He repeatedly claimed that other members of the alliance “owed” money to the United States and that they were delinquent in their payments. Then he claimed credit for the money “pouring in” as a result of his jawboning, even though much of the increase in those countries’ contributions had been set under guidelines arranged during the Obama administration.

Since 2006, NATO guidelines have asked each member country to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. In 2014, NATO decided to increase its spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, with the goal of reaching 2 percent in each country by 2024. This money does not end up in NATO’s coffers, as Trump often asserts. (Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and is adjusted regularly.)

NATO figures show that the defense expenditures for NATO countries other than the United States have been going up — in a consistent slope — since 2014. As we noted, that’s when NATO decided to boost spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea.

“The secretary general of NATO said Trump did the most incredible job I’ve ever seen.”
—Trump

When he was president, Trump often attributed quotes to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that could not be confirmed, such as: “Secretary Stoltenberg has been maybe Trump’s biggest fan, to be honest with you. He goes around telling — he made a speech the other day. He said, ‘Without Donald Trump, maybe there would be no NATO.’ ” Stoltenberg said no such thing.

“It could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people.”
—Trump

Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here, he manages to take a real number — about 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it fourfold. Then he offers a prediction to make it sound even larger.
Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 9.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through April. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (more than 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.

CBP has released more than 3.2 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through April, the Department of Homeland Security said. These numbers, however, do not include “gotaways”— which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond. That figure could add an additional 2 million, bringing the total number of migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency to around 5 million.

That’s a big number, but apparently not big enough for Trump.

“What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them superpredators … in the 1990s. We can’t forget that superpredators was his name, and he called it to them for 10.”
—Trump

This is false. Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill, now seen as a source of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. But Biden never used the term “superpredators” to describe African Americans.

That was Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in 2016.

“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air. And we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever.”
—Trump

This is false. As president, Trump cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency and got rid of more than 70 environmental regulations, weakening climate protections. The United States in 2020 ranked 24th in the world, according to the authoritative Environmental Performance Index, a project of Yale and Columbia universities. It ranked 16th for air quality and 26th for water and sanitation. An analysis of EPA data released in 2020 found that after improving for the better part of a decade, air quality in the United States is worsening again — and could be associated with nearly 10,000 premature deaths. Fine particulate matter in the air that Americans breathe fell by 24 percent between 2009 and 2016. But concentrations increased by 5.5 percent in 2017 and 2018, and premature deaths associated with exposure to the dangerous particles spiked by 9,700 in 2018, the study said.

“The Paris [environmental] accord was going to cost us $1 trillion. And China, nothing, and Russia nothing, and India nothing. It was a rip-off of the United States.”
—Trump

Each country set its own commitments under the Paris accord, so Trump’s comment makes little sense. He could have unilaterally changed the commitments offered by Obama, which is technically allowed under the accord. Indeed, the agreement is nonbinding, so there was nothing in the agreement that stops the United States from building, say, coal plants or gives permission to China or India to build coal plants. Trump’s estimates of the costs came from industry-funded studies that did not consider possible benefits from reducing climate change.

“He wants to raise everybody's taxes by four times.”
—Trump

This is false. For five years, Biden has been consistent in saying he will not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, which leaves about the top 2 percent of taxpayers. Biden reiterated this pledge in the budget plan he released earlier this year.

“He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.”
—Trump

There is no evidence that Biden — who unlike Trump has released decades of tax returns — gets money from China and thus is somehow compromised in his dealings with Beijing.

“I took two tests, cognitive tests. I aced them, both of them.”
—Trump

Trump has frequently mischaracterized the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test aimed at detecting dementia or cognitive decline. He has sometimes suggested that the test included identifying drawings of three animals such as a whale or a tiger. The creator of the test told The Washington Post it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.

“Well, I shouldn’t have to say that [political violence in any form is unacceptable]. But of course I believe that it’s totally unacceptable. And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it’s one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen.”
—Trump

This is revisionist history. In reality, as documented in the House select committee report on the Jan. 6 attack and other reporting, Trump was reluctant to take action to calm the situation, even as his staff pleaded with him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Trump’s tweets were so inadequate, in the view of staff members, that many resolved to resign. Even his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. found the tweets to be inappropriate. Nearly three hours passed before Trump finally told the rioters to “go home.”
As for the video, it had its intended effect — the riot ended — but it came nearly three hours after Trump learned of the attack. The committee’s report suggests Trump issued the video only once it was clear the riot would fail to end the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Then, after a video, Trump issued one more tweet that left many aides aghast and prompted many to resign: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

And for Biden:

“All he said was is [it’s] not that serious, to inject a little bleach in your arm.”
—Biden

Trump did not say people should inject bleach in their arm. Instead, at a pandemic briefing in 2020 he spoke confusingly of an “injection inside” of lungs with a disinfectant. He made the remarks after an aide presented a study showing how bleach could kill the virus when it remained on surfaces. Trump later claimed he was speaking “sarcastically,” though he seemed serious at the time.

“We brought on in a position where we have 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.”
—Biden

The number of manufacturing jobs has rebounded since the pandemic, but growth in these jobs has essentially stalled. Only about 25,000 of the nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs were created since January 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and there has been virtually no increase at all this year.

“I changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally. That’s better than when he left office.”
—Biden


Biden’s framing is misleading. He is referring to a Department of Homeland Security estimate that the seven-day average of migrant apprehensions dropped more than 40 percent to less than 2,400 encounters per day since he issued an executive action barring asylum at the southern border. But the numbers are still higher than when Trump was president.

“We have a thousand millionaires in America, I mean billionaires. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2 percent taxes.”
—Biden


We’ve given the president two Pinocchios for this claim. He’s referring to a 2021 White House study concluding that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers paid an effective tax rate of 8 percent. But that estimate included unrealized gains in the income calculation. That’s not how the tax laws work. People are taxed on capital gains when they sell their stocks or other assets. So this is only a figure for a hypothetical tax system.

According to IRS data on the top 0.001 percent — 1,475 taxpayers with at least $77 million in adjusted gross income in 2020 — the average tax rate was 23.7 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers (income of at least $548,000) paid nearly 26 percent.

Biden  4
Trump 30

Mar 18, 2024

He Said It

Kinda funny how the gang who loves Trump because he "speaks his mind - he says what he means" is frequently going to great lengths to explain that he didn't mean it that way.


Trump says things the way he says things on purpose. He wants his army of devotees to cover his ass, but he knows there are some who'll pick up on it as a signal to start some shit. And the bonus is that it can scare some of the normies just enough to alter their behavior - to keep them on the sideline out of his way.

That's how Stochastic Terrorism works - kinda disappointing that Snopes doesn't address that.



Did Trump Say It Will Be a 'Bloodbath for the Country' If He Doesn't Get Elected?

Claim:
At a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump said: "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. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Rating:
Correct Attribution

Context:
The context of the remark suggests Trump was predicting an "economic bloodbath" for the country, not a literal one, if he loses the 2024 presidential election.

On March 16, 2024, the hashtag "#bloodbath" trended sharply on social media in the wake of a Dayton, Ohio, campaign speech earlier that day by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump stirred up controversy by claiming that if he didn't get elected for another presidential term, "It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

A video recording of the speech from C-SPAN provides proof that he said exactly those words, which many partisan observers, such as the author of the X (formerly Twitter) post below, interpreted as a threat of post-election violence:



The post above linked to an article on Occupy Democrats, a left-wing website, which pushed the "violent bloodbath" interpretation of Trump's words even as it acknowledged that, as the author put it, the context left "wiggle room" for interpretation. What was that context? Broadly speaking, it was economic. Trump was in the middle of talking about the U.S. automobile industry and the country's trade imbalance with China (emphasis added):

China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.

Let me tell you something, to China, 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, and you think you're going to get that, 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. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that's going to be the least of it, it's going to be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars, they're building massive factories.

As some social media users pointed out in lengthy threads debating what Trump really meant, popular dictionaries like Merriam-Webster include "major economic disaster" as a secondary meaning of "bloodbath."

Ultimately, however, "bloodbath for the country" is an ambiguous figure of speech, and Trump has a controversial history of using violence-tinged language in reference to political opponents, which, even if the intent was metaphorical, sarcastic or just to get media attention, makes it unsurprising that his use of the phrase "bloodbath for the country" drew instant public criticism.

Trump spoke about trade tariffs with China at a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024.

Jan 23, 2024

Today's Tweet


That wasn't Churchill, Ron. That was a copy writer for Budweiser.

Feb 8, 2023

SOTU Fact Check

There's whole big bunches of nit-picky shit in this breakdown at WaPo by Glenn Kessler - some, admittedly, a bit more than that - but the main takeaway is that Biden was mostly on the nose.



Fact-checking President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address

“I stand here tonight after we’ve created — with the help of many people in this room — 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”

“We’ve already created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years.”

“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to all we’ve done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”

“America used to make nearly 40 percent of the world’s chips. But in the last few decades, we lost our edge and we’re down to producing only 10 percent.”

“We used to be number one in the world in infrastructure. We’ve sunk to 13th in the world.

“It’s not fair the idea that in 2020, 55 of the biggest companies in America, the Fortune 500, made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes? Zero.”

“Because of the law I signed, billion-dollar companies have to pay a minimum of 15 percent.”

“Pass my proposal for a billionaire minimum tax. … Because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher or a firefighter.”

“In the last two years, my administration cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.”

“Under the previous administration, America’s deficit went up four years in a row. Because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt in any four years than my predecessor. Nearly 25 percent of the entire national debt, a debt that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by that administration alone.”

“Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority. … Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I’ll give you a copy.”

“While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people and the ingenuity of medicine, we have broken covid’s grip on us. Covid deaths are down nearly 90 percent.”

“Ban assault weapons once and for all. We did it before. I led the fight to ban them in 1994. In the 10 years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”

Aug 31, 2021

Fact Check

Knowing what we know about the GOP's War On Smarts, there will be a lot more weird shit that we have to either ignore (at our obvious peril) or spend scarce resources in terms of time and energy chasing down and debunking.


No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons

“ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, Aug 30

We don’t normally pay much attention to claims made by the former president, as he mostly just riffs golden oldies. But this is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)

The $83 billion number is not invented out of whole cloth. But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. At this point, no one really knows the value of the equipment that was seized by the Taliban.

The Facts

The $83 billion figure — technically, $82.9 billion — comes from an estimate in the July 30 quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for all spending on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

In recent years, the spending has decreased. For fiscal 2021, about $3 billion was spent on security forces, which was similar to 2020.

Separately, the U.S. government spent about $36 billion on shoring up the Afghan government. The total bill for the Afghan project added up to more than $144 billion.

In any case, the $83 billion spent on the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) goes back two decades, including almost $19 billion spent between 2002 and 2009.

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report estimated that about 29 percent of the funds spent on the Afghan security forces between 2005 and 2016 went to equipment and transportation. (The transportation costs related to transporting equipment and for contracted pilots and airplanes for transporting officials to meetings. There appears to be no way to segregate transposition spending.)

Using that same percentage, that would mean the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry).

That’s certainly a lot of money. Between 2005 and 2016, U.S. taxpayers paid for 76,000 vehicles (such as 43,000 Ford Ranger pickup trucks, 22,000 Humvees and 900 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs), 600,000 weapons and more than 200 aircraft, according to GAO.

Of course, some of this equipment may be obsolete or destroyed — or soon may not be usable.

The SIGAR report shows that 167 aircraft out of an inventory of 211 were usable — but the Afghan Air Force (AAF) still lacked enough qualified pilots. One issue was that the Taliban targeted pilots for assassination.

Even more problematic, there were not enough maintenance crews to maintain the aircraft. “Without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months, depending on the stock of equipment parts in-country, the maintenance capability on each airframe, and the timing of contractor support withdrawal,” the report said.

With great fanfare, the Taliban has seized a number of Black Hawk helicopters, including ones that the United States had just shipped this year at the request of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. But only the first crew of Black Hawk mechanics had been trained, so the military “can field no more than one UH-60 per night for helicopter missions,” SIGAR said.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. military wound down its mission, it turned over facilities and equipment to the Afghan security forces — which may have added to the total seized by the Taliban. But Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of U.S. Central Command, said that before leaving Kabul airport on Aug. 30, the military “demilitarized” 70 MRAPs, 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft. “Those aircraft will never fly again,” he said. “They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone.” (Demilitarized is a term that means damaging in place, sometimes with explosives.)

“No one has any accounting of exactly what survived the last weeks of the collapse and fell into Taliban hands, and even before the collapse, SIGAR had publicly reported no accounting was possible in many districts,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In rough terms, however, if the ANDSF could not sustain it without foreign contractors, the Taliban will have very serious problems in operating it. That covers most aircraft and many electronics and heavier weapons.”

“One also has to be careful here,” Cordesman added. “The fact that Taliban fighters or cells of fighters get U.S. equipment does not mean it is pooled or shared. Factionalism and hoarding are the rule in Afghanistan, not the exception.”

The Pinocchio Test

U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. The value of these assets is unclear, but if the Taliban is unable to obtain spare parts, it may not be able to maintain them.

But the value of the equipment is not more than $80 billion. That’s the figure for all of the money spent on training and sustaining the Afghan military over 20 years. The equipment portion of that total is about $24 billion — certainly not small change — but the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.