Tag: Trump lies

Trump’s G-7 achievements: No trade deal, no military deal, no climate deal — and ‘yes’ on helping himself

AlterNet logoAlmost from the moment he stepped into the White House, Donald Trump has been conducting trade negotiations with China. Unsuccessful trade negotiations with China. Trade negotiations with China that have gone so badly that they’ve disintegrated into a trade war in which Trump has slapped on an increasing series of tariffs in order to prove his personal theory—a theory held by no one else anywhere—that tariffs are a good thing and trade wars are beneficial. However, the Trump-shy stock market and recession-worried nation can just relax, because none of that was serious. Now, says Trump, now “serious negotiations can begin.” Well, not actually now. But “soon.”

As the AP reports, Trump claimed during a Monday interview at the G-7 that his team of trade negotiators had received a pair of “very good calls” from their Chinese counterparts over the weekend. Those calls, said Trump, indicated that the two sides finally understood each other and are “dealing on proper terms.” All this means that “we’re finally going to have a deal.”

Which is nice. Except … China says it’s BS. Minutes after Trump spoke, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman joined other officials in saying that there were no calls, that they didn’t know what Trump was talking about, and that China was ready to “protect itself” and continue this trade war to it’s bitter, recessionary end.

View the complete August 26 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

As Trump Touts Steel Industry, Earnings Fall

The steel industry is experiencing slowed growth and layoffs at the same time Trump has been touting the purported revitalization of the sector.

“The steel companies are thriving again,” Trump said in a speech in Pennsylvania last week.

But they aren’t.

“U.S. Steel cut its earnings outlook earlier this year and has plans to reduce production at another plant in Indiana. Its shares are down 60 percent over the past year,” CNN reported on Friday. “Other big steel companies like Nucor and Steel Dynamics are forecasting lower profits, too.”

View the complete August 26 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

New data challenges Trump’s economic narrative

The Hill logoPresident Trump has repeatedly said the U.S. economy under his watch has been extraordinary.

His tweeted descriptors have included “BOOMING,” “GREAT,” “stronger than ever” and “perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history.”

But a slew of recent data suggests the Trump economy has fared no differently than other expansions at this stage. And those same numbers indicate the president’s economy may be headed toward a downturn.

View the complete August 25 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

Trump said doctors left operating rooms to greet him after mass shootings. Hospitals in Dayton and El Paso say that’s not true.

Washington Post logoSpeaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn on Wednesday, President Trump claimed he was warmly welcomed at hospitals in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and intimated that surgeons had even deserted their patients to meet him.

“The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms,” Trump said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it.”

But the hospitals he visited say that isn’t what happened — and that doctors would never pause surgery to greet the president.

View the complete August 23 article by Antonia Noori Farzan on The Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s remarks on the economy

Washington Post logoIt’s been a while since we’ve done a roundup of President Trump’s claims. We usually handle the president’s various gaggle and media availabilities in our database of false and misleading claims. (12,019 and counting!) But, given the attention to the worsening economic news, we thought a roundup of claims made during his press availability with the Romanian president on Aug. 20 would be appropriate. Some of these statements are already in the database; some of them are new. We will keep it focused on the economy except for the last item.

The Federal Reserve “also did quantitative tightening, which was ridiculous. And so — and despite that — you know, if you look — I guess you could call it normalized, but if you look, our economy is doing fantastically, and if you take a look at the previous administration, they weren’t paying interest. They had no interest rates, they had loosening, not tightening, and frankly it’s a big difference.” Continue reading “Fact-checking President Trump’s remarks on the economy”

Trump team braces GOP donors for a potential ‘moderate and short’ recession

The White House is weighing cuts to corporate and payroll taxes, among other measures, to cushion the U.S. economy if an election-year recession hits.

In public, President Donald Trump and top White House officials keep extolling the strength of the U.S. economy. In private, they’re increasingly worrying about a global economic slowdown triggering a U.S. recession — and weighing options to shore up the economy ahead of an election year.

At a fundraising luncheon this week in Jackson, Wyo., headlined by both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged the risks to the GOP elite behind closed doors. If the U.S. were to face a recession, it would be “moderate and short,” Mulvaney told roughly 50 donors, according to an attendee. Continue reading “Trump team braces GOP donors for a potential ‘moderate and short’ recession”

US Steel lays off Michigan workers a week after Trump bragged ‘business is thriving’

AlterNet logoJust last week, Donald Trump was bragging about the success of his steel tariffs. This week, U.S. Steel is laying off workers in Michigan—temporarily, but for as long as six months.

“Steel was dead. Your business was dead. Okay? I don’t want to be overly crude. Your business was dead. And I put a little thing called ‘a 25 percent tariff’ on all of the dumped steel all over the country. And now your business is thriving” Trump said, in the same Monaca, Pennsylvania, speech at which he had a coerced audience of workers told they’d lose pay if they didn’t attend. “And I’ll tell you what,” he added later, “Those steel mills—U.S. Steel and all of them, all of them—they’re expanding all over the place. New mills. New expansions. We hadn’t have—we didn’t have a new mill built in 30 years, and now we have many of them going up.”

This is, of course, false. There are not “many” new steel mills going up (and on top of it, there had been at least one built within the last 30 years). U.S. Steel is investing $1 billion in its Mon Valley Works facilities, but there’s no guarantee of new jobs there.

View the complete August 20 article by Laura Clawson from the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s Baseless Election Fraud Claim Zooms From 3 Million To 16 Million Votes

This time he says it’s Google’s fault. “My victory was even bigger than thought!” he gushed on Twitter after watching a report on Fox Business.

President Donald Trump has more than quintupled down on his baseless claims of shady voting to explain why he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and this time he blamed Google.

Trump has repeatedly insisted — with no evidence — that 3 million (maybe as many as 5 million) votes were illegally cast by noncitizens. Three million happens to be close to Clinton’s popular vote margin over Trump. But now Trump is insisting that up to 16 million votes were manipulated by Google to Clinton’s benefit.

“My victory was even bigger than thought!” he gushed on Twitter.

View the complete August 19 article by Mary Papenfuss on the Huffington Post website here.

Trump adopts familiar mantra on possible recession: fake news

The Hill logoPresident Trump and his advisers are adopting a familiar mantra when it comes to mounting concerns about the economy: It’s all fake news.

Trump has dismissed concerns over a possible recession and accused the press of manufacturing a crisis and “doing everything they can to crash the economy” so he doesn’t win in 2020.

“I don’t think we’re having a recession. We’re doing tremendously well. Our consumers are rich. I gave a tremendous tax cut, and they’re loaded up with money,” Trump told reporters Sunday evening before returning to the White House from a 10-day stay at his New Jersey golf club.

View the complete article by Morgan Chalfant and Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Trump stumbles onto a new justification for losing the popular vote: It’s Google’s fault

Washington Post logoPresident Trump is back at the White House on Monday, after a week spent mostly at his private golf club in New Jersey. In short order, he was back to his typical routine at the executive mansion. Meaning, of course, that he spent some part of the morning watching cable news.

Shortly before noon, Fox Business aired a segment discussing testimony offered to the Senate last month. Robert Epstein, a psychologist who at one point was editor in chief of Psychology Today, told senators on July 17 that his research suggested Google had given millions of votes to Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. A guest on Fox Business named Oz Sultan, who worked with Trump’s 2016 campaign, looped that claim back into the broader, ongoing criticism of social-media companies that’s currently in vogue among conservatives.

Trump, though, quickly picked out — and exaggerated — the claim about Clinton votes.

View the complete August 19 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.