This Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address, and although he stayed away from explicitly mentioning his impeachment — which is slated to culminate in an acquittal from the Senate’s Republican majority this Wednesday — the speech was chock-full of plenty of grandiose Trumpian lies and misleading claims anyway. Trump attempted to depict the U.S. under his leadership as some kind of grand paradise that wasn’t achieved by other presidents, but that completely ignores the continued struggles of those who don’t happen to be financially well-off, white people in Trump’s base. The New York Times delivered one of a number of fact-checks of Trump’s remarks.
Among their notes is a callout of the moment when Trump claimed that in so-called sanctuary cities, “local officials order police to release dangerous criminal aliens to prey upon the public, instead of handing them over to ICE to be safely removed.” In reality, The Times notes, “suspects are not automatically released unless they were to make bail.” There’s no free-for-all, like Trump outrageously claims — criminal laws are still completely followed. The difference is that in those locales, authorities refuse to muddle their local police work with federal immigration enforcement.
The outrageous moments went on from there, as if Trump turned the House chamber into a campaign rally. He brazenly lied that his new North American trade agreement, which replaces NAFTA, will create 100,000 jobs in the auto industry, when in reality, even his administration’s own optimistic estimate put the figure at 75,000. During his speech, he also claimed that the U.S. has added 12,000 factories while he’s been in office, but the actual figure is fewer than 11,000, and the vast majority of those manufacturing operations employ just five people or less.
These lies mirror his other, previous lie that his administration, and his daughter and adviser Ivanka in particular, have created 15 million jobs — which is a complete and documented lie.
He also touted his southern border wall construction, but he did not mention that just recently, a portion of that wall literally fell over into Mexico and in other places, the wall has already been sawed through. Neither did he mention that most of what his administration has put up — which it’s a stretch to call a “wall” in the first place — is just replacing old fence.
He also claimed that his administration will “always protect” Medicare and Social Security and pompously insisted that he’s an ardent defender of protections for people with pre-existing conditions. In that case, the problem is that right now, the Trump administration is arguing in court that Obamacare’s pre-existing condition protections should be thrown out without any replacement plan in place.
The Times adds:
‘Not only has President Trump failed to strengthen Medicare and Social Security, but the financial outlook for both trusts has not improved or worsened. That is at least partly the result of Mr. Trump’s tax law, which has left the Treasury Department to collect fewer taxes from Americans and, in turn, invest less money into each program.’
Considering the pace of lies since he took office, Trump seems unlikely to slow them down anytime soon.
