Tag: Trump lies

Democrats ‘utterly unpersuaded’ by evidence behind Soleimani strike

The Hill logoDemocrats said Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to present evidence supporting the claim that a top Iranian general killed in a U.S. drone strike was planning an imminent attack.

The frustration boiled over after back-to-back closed-door briefings on the strike that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said the evidence represented a “far cry” from an imminent attack, while Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) called the briefing “sophomoric.”  Continue reading.

New Research Exposes Costs And Lies Of Trump’s Trade War

Two new economic working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research shared on Monday revealed the sweeping impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade war and undercut his repeated claims about his policies’ supposed benefits.

Trump has repeatedly said, for instance, that the costs of his tariffs — which are just taxes on U.S. imports — are paid entirely by foreign governments and firms, rather than by Americans. But a paper by researchers Mary Amiti of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen J. Redding of Princeton University, and David Weinstein of Columbia University directly rebuts that claim.

The authors noted that initial research had pointed to the fact that Americans were bearing the burden of the tariffs in 2018, when Trump’s aggressive trade tactics were initially enacted. But it wasn’t clear, they said, whether this would continue as the tariffs persisted. Continue reading.

Anatomy of a Trump rally: 67 percent of claims are false or lacking evidence

Washington Post logoWe’re kicking off the new year with a line-by-line fact check of President Trump’s longest rally to date.

It was the Moby Dick of fact-checking assignments, a two-hour tornado of false and bewildering claims. Trump was in rare form. The rally was held Dec. 18, just as the House was voting to impeach him.

The president surpassed 15,400 false or misleading claims as of Dec. 10, according to our database tracking all of his suspect statements. But it’s worth drilling down on his rallies. They’ve gotten longer over time, and they’re a key part of Trump’s reelection bid, drawing supporters by the thousands. Continue reading.

How Donald Trump’s perverse brand of BS took over American politics

AlterNet logoAre you tired of the limitless avalanche of B.S. from the White House, not to mention the well-oiled GOP mendacity machine? Are you worried that masses of “low-information” MAGA voters will gleefully upturn the American experiment and replace it with a racist, theocracy-infused non-stop reality show? Well, you have reason worry.

I used to be optimistic that the systemic antibodies embedded in our democratic structure would always tackle political infections like Trump. Indeed, I thought that would be enough to rid us of them. I am no longer. When a society is split into parallel universes—each with its own enclosed informational ecosystem, divergent values, and expanding mutual animus—expect the worst. If our functional democracy comes to a demise, the key catalyst will be our lacking a shared baseline of facts. Olympian liars like Trump (and his enablers) will be the handmaidens of destruction.

Of the more than 15,000 lies (about 14 per day) Donald Trump has spouted since taking the oath of office, the fact checker PolitiFact has chosen his attack against the Ukraine whistleblower as its “Lie of the Year.” The reason: It “speaks to a falsehood that proves to be of real consequence and gets repeated in a virtual campaign to undermine an accurate narrative.” Simply put, Donald Trump is a bullshitter in a class of his own. Continue reading.

BUSTED: New York Times catches Trump falsifying quotes he tweets to his 67 million Twitter followers

AlterNet logoOn the same day Columbia University busted a top Trump administration official for plagiarizing, The New York Times busted the president of the United States for tweeting false quotes to his huge Twitter following.

“Watching Fox News ahead of Wednesday’s impeachment vote, President Trump gave a Twitter call out to one of his most combative allies in the House,” Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman explained.

“In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on ‘Fox & Friends’ about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who ‘couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.’ But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress” were common practices of past administrations,” the newspaper reported.

Continue reading

From accusing Pelosi of lying about her faith to overstating his electoral college win, here are 5 absurd parts of Trump’s letter to the House speaker

AlterNet logoThis Wednesday, December 18, the two articles of impeachment that the House Judiciary Committee approved against President Donald Trump — one for abuse of power, the other for obstruction of Congress — are expected to come up for a full vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. If the Democrat-controlled House votes to indict Trump on those articles (which is likely), they would go to the U.S. Senate for consideration. Trump, the day before the expected House vote, sent a long-winded, rambling letter to House Speaker Pelosi and railed against House Democrats for pursuing impeachment.

Here are some of the most absurd things Trump said to Pelosi in his December 17 letter.

1. Trump claimed his July 25 conversation with Zelensky was ‘totally innocent’

Pelosi and other House Democrats have been stressing that Trump crossed the line when he tried to bully Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. But Trump, in his letter, told Pelosi, “I had a totally innocent conversation with the president of Ukraine…. I said to President Zelensky, ‘I would like you to do us a favor, though’…. I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign.”

Boasting ‘No Photo Ops,’ Trump Booster Posts Afghan Trip Video — With Photo Ops

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a far right wing BFF to Donald Trump, Jr. and vehement supporter of President Donald Trump is getting roundly mocked after posting a tweet insisting the Commander-in-Chief’s trip to Afghanistan had “No press” and “No photo ops” – despite including a video that literally showed photo ops.

“Incredible,” Kirk tweeted. “President Trump made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan to visit our troops No press No photo ops Just there to support our brave men and women in uniform I’m thankful for our troops today and I’m thankful for a president who is too.”

Like many of Kirk’s tweets supporting Trump, it was untrue. And as for “unannounced,” all high-level trips to combat zones or other theaters of war are always unannounced for security reasons.

Not enough Pinocchios for Trump’s CrowdStrike obsession Add to list

Washington Post logoThe president persists in pursuing a debunked conspiracy theory. Somehow, we’ve never gotten around to assigning a Pinocchio rating for this claim. Maybe that’s because there aren’t enough Pinocchios available in our system to truly do this justice.

Note to the president: When even one of your strongest TV allies expresses skepticism about a claim, it’s probably time to drop it.

The Facts

Trump made these comments the day after Fiona Hill, his former top Russia adviser, told Congress that any notion that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election was a hoax hatched by Russia to deflect from its well-documented efforts to interfere in the vote.

Continue reading here.

In Afghanistan, Trump Creates Confusion Over U.S. Policy on Taliban

New York Times logoThe president said stalled talks with the militant group were back on and called for a cease-fire — something his negotiators had deemed unrealistic.

KABUL, Afghanistan — After abruptly axing nearly a year of delicate peace talks with the Taliban in September, President Trump put the negotiations back on the front-burner this week in a similarly jolting fashion by seeming to demand a cease-fire that his negotiators had long concluded was overly ambitious.

Despite a sense of relief at the prospect of resuming talks to end the 18-year conflict, Western diplomats and Taliban leaders were scrambling to figure out whether Mr. Trump had suddenly moved the goal posts for negotiations.

They were particularly confused by his remarks, made during an unannounced Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, that the United States was once again meeting with the Taliban to discuss a deal, but that “we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire.”

View the complete November 29 article by Mujib Mashal on The New York Times website here.

Trump Tower Tax Reporting Shows ‘Inconsistencies’

Donald Trump’s business reported conflicting information about a key metric to New York City property tax officials and a lender who arranged financing for his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to tax and loan documents obtained by ProPublica. The findings add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month.

In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show.

For example, as of December 2011 and June 2012, respectively, Trump’s business told the lender that 99 percent and 98.7 percent of the tower’s commercial space was occupied, according to a prospectus for the loan. The figures were taken from “borrower financials,” the prospectus stated.

View the complete November 28 article by Heather Vogell from ProPublica on the National Memo website here.