Donald Trump feels he had earned a Nobel Peace Prize being the first president to step into North Korea to give Kim Jung On a handshake. Afterward, he had a few inaccuracies in his comments on Barack Obama, the economy, immigration while the Democrats spread a few inaccuracies at their first debate last week.
Straining for deals on trade and nukes in Asia, President rump hailed a meeting with North Korea’s leader that he falsely claimed President Barack Obama coveted, asserted a U.S. auto renaissance that isn’t and wrongly stated air in the U.S. is the cleanest ever as he dismissed climate change.
He also ignored the
reality in suggesting that nobody had implicated Saudi’s crown prince in the
killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s own intelligence
agencies and a U.N. investigator, in fact, have pointed a finger at the prince.
The president’s
misstatements over the weekend capped several days of extraordinary claims,
including a false one accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of a crime and
misrepresenting trade in multiple dimensions.
Democratic presidential
candidates, meantime, stepped forward for their first debates and
tripped at times on issues dear to them: climate change, health care and
immigration among them.
A closer look at his facts:
AUTOMAKERS
TRUMP: “Many, many companies — including
South Korea — but many companies are coming into the United States. … Car
companies, in particular. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio and
North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Florida. … We hadn’t had a plant built in
years — in decades, actually. And now we have many plants being built all
throughout the United States — cars.” — remarks Sunday to Korean business
leaders in Seoul.
THE FACTS: Car companies are not pouring into
the U.S. as Trump suggests, nor does he deserve all the credit for those that
have moved here. He’s also wrong in saying that auto plants haven’t been built
in decades. A number of automakers — Toyota, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz
and Volkswagen among them — opened plants in recent decades, mostly in the
South.
Government statistics show
that jobs in auto and parts manufacturing grew at a slower rate in the two-plus
years since Trump took office than in the two prior years.
Between January of 2017,
when Trump was inaugurated, and May of this year, the latest figures available,
U.S. auto and parts makers added 44,000 jobs, or a 4.6 percent increase,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But in the two years
before Trump took office, the industry added 63,600 manufacturing jobs, a 7.1
percent increase.
The only automaker
announcing plans to reopen a plant in Michigan is Fiat Chrysler, which is
restarting an old engine plant to build three-row SUVs. It’s been planning to
do so since before Trump was elected. GM is even closing two Detroit-area
factories: one that builds cars and another that builds transmissions. Toyota
is building a new factory in Alabama with Mazda, and Volvo opened a plant in
South Carolina last year, but in each case, that was in the works before Trump
took office.
Automakers have made
announcements about new models being built in Michigan, but no other factories
have been reopened. Ford stopped building the Focus compact car in the Detroit
suburb of Wayne last year, but it’s being replaced by the manufacture of a
small pickup and a new SUV. That announcement was made in December 2016, before
Trump took office.
GM, meantime, is closing
factories in Ohio and Maryland.
Trump can plausibly claim
that his policies have encouraged some activity in the domestic auto industry.
Corporate tax cuts freed more money for investment, and potential tariff
increases on imported vehicles are an incentive to build in the U.S. But when
expansion does happen, it’s not all because of him.
Fiat Chrysler has been
planning the SUVs for several years and has been looking at expansion in the
Detroit area, where it has unused building space and an abundant, trainable
automotive labor force.
Normally it takes at least
three years for an automaker to plan a new vehicle.
NORTH KOREA REDUX
TRUMP: “President Obama wanted to meet, and
Chairman Kim would not meet him. The Obama administration was begging for a
meeting. They were begging for meetings constantly. And Chairman Kim would not
meet with him.” — joint news conference Sunday with South Korea’s president in
Seoul.
THE FACTS: That’s not the case.
While Obama came into his
presidency saying he’d be willing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and
other U.S. adversaries “without preconditions,” he never publicly sought a
meeting with Kim. Obama eventually met Cuba’s President Raul Castro and spoke
to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone but took a different stance with
Kim in 2009 as North Korea was escalating missile and nuclear tests.
“This is the same kind of
pattern that we saw his father engage in, and his grandfather before that,”
Obama said in 2013. “Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about
was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior. You don’t get
to bang your — your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.”
Ben Rhodes, who was on
Obama’s national security team for both terms, tweeted: ?“Obama never sought a
meeting with Kim Jong Un.”
Trump has portrayed his
diplomacy with Kim as happening due to a special personal chemistry and
friendship, saying he’s in “no rush” to get Kim to commit fully to
denuclearization.
INCOME INEQUALITY
TRUMP: “Blue-collar workers are doing
fantastic. They’re the biggest beneficiary of the tax cuts, the blue collar.” —
news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: Wrong.
While most middle-income
taxpayers did see a tax cut this year, Trump’s tax cut clearly skewed to the
wealthy rather than lower-income groups such as manufacturing workers, according
to the nonpartisan Tax
Policy Center . It found that taxpayers making $308,000 to
$733,000 stood to benefit the most.
The Joint Committee on
Taxation separately found the tax cuts were particularly helpful
to businesses and people making more than $100,000 annually.
BOOMING ECONOMY
LARRY KUDLOW, White House economic adviser: “The
United States economy is booming. It’s running at roughly 3 percent average
since President Trump took office two and a half years ago. On this business
about bad distribution, the blue-collar workers, the nonsupervisory workers
have done the best. They’re the ones running wages at 3-1/2 percent. Their
growth and incomes and wages is exceeding the growth of their supervisors.” —
interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
THE FACTS: There’s some truth to the claim that
low-income workers have seen better wage gains than others in the workforce.
This trend predates Trump’s presidency and has continued. But the blue-collar
workforce has lagged behind lower-wage workers in pay gains.
Some of the gains reflect
higher minimum wages passed at the state and local level, not just the rate of
economic growth. The Trump administration opposes an increase to the federal
minimum wage.
With the unemployment rate
at 3.6%, the lowest since December 1969, employers are struggling to fill jobs.
They have pushed up pay for the lowest-paid one-quarter of workers more quickly
than for everyone else since 2015. In April, the poorest 25% saw their
paychecks increase 4.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3.1% for the richest
one-quarter.
BERNIE SANDERS TAXES
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: “Eighty-three percent of your tax
benefits go to the top 1%.”— Democratic presidential debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: That statistic is not close to true
now. The Vermont senator is referring to 2027, not the present day. He didn’t
include that critical context in his statement.
His figures come from an
analysis by the Tax Policy Center. That analysis found that in 2027 the top 1%
of earners would get 83% of the savings from the tax overhaul signed into law
by Trump. Why is that? Most of the tax cuts for individuals are set to expire
after 2025, so their benefits go away while cuts for corporations continue. The
2017 tax overhaul does disproportionately favor the wealthy and corporations,
but just 20.5% of the benefits went to the top 1% last year.
TIM RYAN INCOME EQUALITY
REP. TIM RYAN: “The bottom 60% haven’t seen a raise
since 1980. The top 1% control 90% of the wealth.” — Democratic presidential
debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Those figures exaggerate the state
of income and wealth inequality. While few studies single out the bottom 60%,
the Congressional Budget Office calculates that the bottom 80% of Americans
have seen their incomes rise 32% since 1979. That is certainly lower than the doubling
of income enjoyed by the top one-fifth of income earners. And the richest 1%
possess 32% of the nation’s wealth, according to data from the Federal Reserve,
not 90%.
BETO ECONOMY
BETO O’ROURKE, former U.S. representative from
Texas: “That’s how you explain an economy that is rigged to corporations and
the very wealthiest. A $2 trillion tax cut that favored corporations while they
were sitting on record piles of cash and the very wealthiest in this country at
a time of historic wealth inequality.” — debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: The tax cut wasn’t quite that big:
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that it will reduce tax revenues by
$1.5 trillion over the next decade. And individuals, not corporations, will
actually receive the bulk of those cuts — they’re getting $1.1 trillion while
businesses get $654 billion, offset by higher tax revenues from changes to
international tax law.
The tax cuts did mostly
favor richer Americans: The top one-fifth of income earners got 65% of the
benefit from the tax cuts in 2018 with just 1% going to the poorest one-fifth,
according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
KHASHOGGI DEATH
TRUMP, on the murder of Khashoggi:
“Nobody, so far, has pointed directly a finger at the future King of Saudi
Arabia.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies
and a U.N. investigator have pointed a finger at him.
U.S. intelligence agencies
have assessed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have at least
been aware of a plot to kill Khashoggi when the journalist went to the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to pick up documents to marry his Turkish fiancee.
Last month, an independent U.N. report into the killing of Khashoggi said there
was “credible evidence” to warrant further investigation into the possible role
of the crown prince, and suggested sanctions on his personal assets.
Khashoggi, who had been
living in the U.S., criticized the Saudi royal family in his writings.
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
TRUMP, playing down the need to address
climate change: “We have the cleanest air we’ve ever had.” — news conference
Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: That’s false, and air quality hasn’t
improved under the Trump administration. Dozens of nations have less smoggy air
than the U.S.
After decades of
improvement, progress in air quality has stalled. Over the last two years the
U.S. had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data
show.
There were 15% more days
with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there
were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when the U.S had its
fewest number of those days since at least 1980.
The Obama administration
set records for the fewest air polluted days.
The non-profit Health
Effects Institute’s “State of Global Air
2019” report ranked the United States 37th dirtiest out of 195
countries for ozone, also known as smog, worse than the global average for
population-weighted pollution. Countries such as Britain, Japan, Spain,
Portugal, France, Germany, Albania, Cuba, Russia, Vietnam, New Zealand and
Canada have less smoggy air. The U.S. ranks 8th cleanest on the more deadly
category of fine particles in the air. It’s still behind countries such as
Canada and New Zealand but better than the global average.
BARACK OBAMA
JOE BIDEN, on Obama’s record: “He is the first
man to bring together the entire world — 196 nations — to commit to deal with
climate change.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: Not really. The former vice
president is minimizing a major climate deal from 22 years ago, a decade before
Obama became president.
In 1997, nations across
the world met in Japan and hammered out the Kyoto Protocol to limit climate
change in a treaty that involved more than 190 countries at different points in
time. That treaty itself stemmed from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on
Climate Change.
Biden is referring to an
agreement that came out of a 2015 meeting in Paris that was the 21st climate
change convention meeting.
The Kyoto Protocol only
required specific greenhouse gas emission cuts of developed nations, fewer than
half the countries in the world. The Paris agreement, where several world
leaders pushed hard, including France’s president, has every country agreeing
to do something. But each country proposed its own goals.
CLIMATE CHANGE
JAY INSLEE, Washington’s governor: “We are the
first generation to feel the sting of climate change and we are the last that
can do something about it. … It is our last chance in an administration, next
one, to do something about it.” — debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Not quite. This answer implies that
after 2025 or 2029, when whoever is elected in 2020 leaves office, it will be
too late to fight or limit climate change.
That’s a common
misconception that stemmed from a U.N. scientific report that came out last
fall, which talked about 2030, mostly because that’s a key date in the Paris
climate agreement. The report states that with every half a degree Celsius and
with every year, global warming and its dangers get worse. However, it does not
say at some point it is too late.
“The hotter it gets the
worse it gets but there is no cliff edge,” James Skea, co-chairman of the
report and professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, told media
outlets.
The report co-author,
Swiss climate scientist Sonia I. Seneviratne this month tweeted, “Many
scientists point – rightfully – to the fact that we cannot state with certainty
that climate would suddenly go berserk in 12 years if we weren’t doing any
climate mitigation. But who can state with certainty that we would be safe
beyond that stage or even before that?”
ROBERT MUELLER
TRUMP, on communications between two FBI
employees: “Mueller terminated them illegally. He terminated the emails, he
terminated all of the stuff between Strzok and Page, you know they sung like
you’ve never seen. Robert Mueller terminated their text messages together. He
would – he terminated them. They’re gone. And that’s illegal, he — that’s a
crime.” — interview Wednesday on Fox Business Network.
THE FACTS: Not true. Mueller had no role in
deleting anti-Trump text messages traded by former FBI counterintelligence
agent Peter Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and there’s no basis for saying
he was involved in anything illegal. Also, the communications didn’t vanish.
Once Mueller learned of
the existence of the texts, which were sent before his appointment as special
counsel, he removed Strzok from his team investigating potential ties between
Russia and the Trump campaign.
The FBI, for technical
reasons, was initially unable to retrieve months of text messages between the
two officials. But the FBI was ultimately able to recover them and there’s
never been any allegation that Mueller had anything to do with that process.
RACE
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: “Vice President Biden, do you agree
today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America, then?”
BIDEN: “I did not oppose busing in America.
What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I
opposed.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: That’s hairsplitting.
Biden is claiming that he
only opposed the U.S. Education Department’s push for busing to integrate
schools because he didn’t want federal mandates forced on local school boards.
But in the early and mid-1970s, those were the fault lines in almost every U.S.
community, from New Orleans to Boston, where there was stiff opposition to busing.
If you were a politician opposing federally enforced busing, you were enabling
any local school board or city government that was fighting against it.
As a senator in the late
1970s, Biden supported several measures, including one signed by President Jimmy
Carter that restricted the federal government’s authority in forced busing.
Biden told NPR in 1975 that
he would support a constitutional amendment to ban court-ordered busing “if it
can’t be done through a piece of legislation.”
MIGRANT CHILDREN
BIDEN, on Trump’s treatment of migrant
children at the border: “The idea that he’s in court with his Justice Department
saying, children in cages do not need a bed, do not need a blanket, do not need
a toothbrush — that is outrageous.”
HARRIS: “I will release children from cages.”
JOHN HICKENLOOPER, former Colorado governor: “If you
would have ever told me any time in my life that this country would sanction
federal agents to take children from the arms of their parents, put them in
cages, actually put them up for adoption — in Colorado we call that kidnapping
— I would have told you it was unbelievable.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: They are tapping into a misleading
and common insinuation by Democrats about Trump placing “children in cages.”
The cages are chain-link
fences and the Obama-Biden administration used them, too.
Children and adults are
held behind them, inside holding Border Patrol facilities, under the Trump
administration as well.
President Barack Obama’s
administration detained large numbers of unaccompanied children inside chain
link fences in 2014. Images that circulated online of children in cages during
the height of Trump’s family separations controversy were actually from 2014
when Obama was in office.
Children are placed in
such areas by age and sex for safety reasons and are supposed to be held for no
longer than 72 hours by the Border Patrol. But as the number of migrants
continues to grow under the Trump administration, the system is clogged at
every end, so Health and Human Services, which manages the care of children in
custody, can’t come get the children in time. Officials say they are increasingly
holding children for 5 days or longer.
HHS facilities are better
equipped to manage the care of children. But, facing budget concerns, officials
cut activities such as soccer, English classes and legal aid for children in
their care.
As for Hickenlooper’s
claim about the government forcing those children into unwanted adoption, that
is not federal policy.
HEALTH CARE
SANDERS: Under “Medicare for All,” ″the vast
majority of the people in this country will be paying significantly less for
health care than they are now.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: Probably true, but that’s only part
of the equation for a family. Sanders’ plan for a government-run health care
system to replace private insurance calls for no premiums, and no copays and
deductibles. But taxes would have to go up significantly as the government
takes on trillions of dollars in health care costs now covered by employers and
individuals. Independent studies estimate the government would be spending an
additional $28 trillion to $36 trillion over 10 years, although Medicare for
All supporters say that’s overstating it.
How those tax increases
would be divvied up remains to be seen, as Sanders has not released a blueprint
for how to finance his plan.
