CHECK OUT THESE “FOUR-PINOCCHINO” LIES FROM DONALD TRUMP

…The liar himself, Donald J. Trump

 

From his false unemployment rate to his tax plan, just more of Trump’s vivid imagination.

 

Once more, the Washington Post Fact Checkers are continuing their overtime efforts in deciphering Donald Trump’s bizarre statements.

 

There has never been a presidential candidate like Trump.  A man that will never admit his errors, and who expresses little or no desire to back up his statements with any real evidence.  Trump’s campaign rarely engages with any reporter’s request for an explanation of his statements.  When presented with contradictory evidence, the current Republican frontrunner insists even more that he was right all along, and he is always personally impressed with his so called “ability” to be factually correct.

 

Take this Trump statement: “It is amazing how often I am right, only to be criticized by the media.  Illegal immigration, take the oil, build the wall, NATO!”

 

The Washington Post’s Fact Checking team has now fact-checked 27 of Trump’s so called statements of fact.

 

At last count, nearly 65% (17 of 27) of their rulings of his statements turned out to be Four Pinocchio total lies. Most of his remaining ratings are Three Pinocchio lies.  For context, most US politicians tend to earn Four Pinocchio’s only 10% to 20% of the time.

 

Trump likes to repeat his Four Pinocchio claims. So as a reader service, the Fact Checkers have compiled all of Donald Trump’s Four Pinocchio ratings in one place. They will continue updating this list throughout the campaign. Below are some of the fact-check summaries.

 

·       Trump’s absurd claim that the ‘real’ unemployment rate is 42%.

 

Trump’s made a ridiculous leap in logic to come up with his claim that the “real” unemployment rate was 42% at a time when the official rate was 5.3%.  Trump took an estimate for the number of people not working — 93 million — and he assumed they were all unemployed.

 

The vast majority of those people do not want to work. Most are retired or simply not interested in working, such as stay-at-home parents. Even a President Trump would be unable to make much of a dent in this supposed 42% unemployment rate, given that most of the Americans he is counting as “unemployed” are not in the labor force by choice.

 

·       Trump’s dubious claim that his border wall would cost $8 billion.

 

After Trump put a price tag on the wall he wants to build on the 2,000-mile border with Mexico — $8 billion — they investigated whether this figure was in the realm of possibility.  It was concluded that it was not — and after the fact check appeared, Trump then increased the projected cost to $12 billion. That is still too low.  A reasonable estimate is $25 billion. (This fact-check was featured on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight.”)

 

·       Trump’s repeated claim that Obama is accepting 200,000 Syrian refugees

 

Like a broken record, businessman Donald J. Trump keeps repeating a statistic with no basis in fact — that the Obama administration wants to accept 200,000 refugees from Syria. The lie appears to be based on a misunderstanding he refuses to correct.  The Obama administration says it planned to admit 185,000 refugees over two years “from all countries”. For Syria, Obama has only directed the United States to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. Ironically, that’s a number that Trump has said was fine.

 

·       Trump’s false claim he built his empire with a ‘small loan’ from his father

 

Trump often says he started his business empire with just a $1 million loan from his father. But that is simply not credible. He appears to have inherited about $40 million. He also benefited from numerous loans and loan guarantees, as well as his father’s connections, to make the move into Manhattan. His father set up lucrative trusts to provide steady income. When Trump became overextended in the casino business, his father bailed him out with a shady casino-chip loan — and Trump also borrowed $9 million against his future inheritance. While Trump asserts “it has not been easy for me,” he glosses over the fact that his father paved the way for his success — and that his father bailed him out when he got into trouble.

 

·       Trump’s outrageous claim that ‘thousands’ of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks

 

GOP presidential hopeful Trump falsely and repeatedly asserted that he saw TV clips of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. Despite an army of fact checks, including ours, and repeated debunking, Trump continued to assert he was correct, even though he could produce no evidence except a handful of news stories that made brief mentions of alleged celebrations, which never could be confirmed. He earned Four Pinocchios. Ben Carson, another GOP aspirant, briefly said he, too, had seen such a video. But to his credit, he withdrew the statement after realizing it was of Palestinians in Gaza, not New Jersey.

 

·       Trump’s false claim that the 9/11 hijackers’ wives ‘knew exactly what was going to happen

 

In the wake of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., involving a Muslim couple, Trump has emerged with the claim that the 9/11 hijackers sent their wives home before the attacks — and those wives knew “exactly what was going to happen.” But there is no support for Trump’s claims, as the exhaustive 9/11 Commission report states that virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried.  The report includes a number of references to the hijackers cutting off communication with their families: “The other operatives had broken off regular contact with their families. …The majority of these Saudi recruits began to break with their families in late 1999 and early 2000. …The ringleader complained that some of the hijackers wanted to contact their families to say goodbye, something he had forbidden.”

 

·       Trump’s baseless claim that the Bush White House tried to ‘silence’ his Iraq War opposition in 2003

 

Trump brags that he had the vision and foresight to oppose the Iraq War ahead of the invasion in 2003. He says his opposition was so vocal, and his reach so great, that the White House approached him and asked him to tone it down. There is scant media coverage of his supposed opposition ahead of the Iraq War. (They later compiled a complete timeline of Trump’s comments in 2002 and 2003 about the Iraq invasion, which showed he was not vocal about his opposition prior to the invasion, and they didn’t make headlines.) Trump ignored the request for the names of White House officials he supposedly met with, so they checked with former senior White House officials. None of the dozen people contacted directly or through former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer could recall a meeting with Trump, concerns about his opposition, or even Trump’s views being on their radar prior to 2004.

 

·       Donald Trump’s false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime

 

Donald Trump repeatedly defended his claim that the Mexican government is sending criminals and rapists to the United States. But a range of studies shows there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. Moreover, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants in prison do not belong in the category that fit Trump’s description: aggravated felons, whose crimes include murder, drug trafficking or illegal trafficking of firearms.

 

·       Trump’s bogus claim that he never said ‘some of the things’ claimed by Megyn Kelly

 

Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Donald Trump a pointed question about his verbal treatment of women. On the Sunday shows, Trump refused to apologize — and further asserted that Kelly lists things he did not say. But there is ample evidence for each of the slurs against women uttered or tweeted by Trump.  There is little doubt that the over-the-top language cited by Kelly was correct.

 

·       Trump’s zombie claim that Obama spent $4 million to conceal school and passport records

 

Trump, one of the most high-profile “birthers” during the 2012 presidential campaign, resurfaced this zombie claim that President Obama spent $4 million in legal fees to conceal records that would indicate his true citizenship. There is no proof that Obama spent $4 million in legal fees (personally or through his campaign) to keep his school application or passport application records away from the public. Federal campaign finance records show from 2008 through 2012, the Obama for America campaign paid more than $4 million in legal services to Perkins Coie, the law firm that defended the campaign in some of the eligibility lawsuits. But campaigns have in-house and outside counsel to vet a wide range of issues, not just those related to lawsuits.

 

·       Trump’s tax plan and his claim that ‘it’s going to cost me a fortune’

 

Trump pitched his tax plan as being tough on the wealthy, saying “it’s going to cost me a fortune.” Trump has not released his tax forms — though he claims he made $604 million in 2014. In going through the details of his plan, it appears clear that it would significantly reduce his taxes — and the taxes of his heirs. This was later confirmed by an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

 

·       Trump’s claim that he ‘predicted Osama bin Laden’

 

In various speeches and interviews, Trump has claimed that two years before the 9/11 attacks, he warned that Osama bin Laden was a threat — going to “do damage” to the United States — and even predicted the rise of terrorism. This claim rests on some vague references in a book he published in 2000. The references he lists have little relationship to how Trump portrays them now — and he ignores the fact that well before 9/11, experts, news organizations and even bin Laden himself said he planned to attack the United States.

 

·       Trump’s latest claim that the unemployment rate is 23%

 

After falsely asserting the “real” unemployment rate was 42%, Trump suddenly tossed out a new estimate of “22 to 23%.” But this was also wrong. His figure is still more than double the most expansive rate published by the US government, which at the time was 9.9%. That means there are about 35 million “unemployed” who Trump has not accounted for — and as usual the Trump campaign refused to explain how he came up with his estimate.

 

·       Trump’s truly absurd claim he would save $300 billion a year on prescription drugs

 

Trump said that he would allow Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies, thus saving $300 billion a year. This made little sense, given that the prescription drug portion of the Medicare program costs only $78 billion a year. Total annual spending on prescription drugs in the United States is between $298 and $423 billion, which suggests Trump thinks he can eliminate virtually any cost to prescription drugs. Once again, we are confronted with a nonsense figure from the mouth of Donald Trump

 

·       Trump’s false claim that John Kasich ‘helped’ Lehman Brothers ‘destroy the world economy’

 

Trump blamed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for the collapse of the investment banking firm and helping start a global financial crisis, but it was a preposterous claim. Kasich was one of about 700 managing directors at Lehman Brothers and largely played a facilitator role, using his experience in government regulations and contacts in various sectors. He gave strategic financial advice to other companies and generated business by using his contacts in various sectors — not making risky mortgage investments. Kasich’s former boss at Lehman equated this attack by Trump to blaming a pilot for the failure of Trump Airlines.

 

·       Trump’s trade rhetoric is stuck in a time warp

 

The Fact Checkers examined a series of Trump statements on trade, manufacturing and currency manipulation, in essence fact checking the economic world that he depicts in his speeches — a world in which the United States never wins at trade and is flooded by imports because China and Japan keep their currencies low, a world in which high tariffs would bring manufacturing back to Michigan and other states. Without going into the details, it was concluded that Trump has little understanding of the economic reality of today’s interconnected world and how it works.  He is totally unable to justify virtually any of his statements on trade.

 

Obviously, there will be more Four Pinocchio Trump lies in the future which we will bring you.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016