Tag: Trump lies

FACT CHECK: Trump Continues To Lie About Lowering Prescription Drug Prices

At his rally last night, Trump continued to lie about lowering prescription drug prices. The reality is that Trump has failed to deliver on his promises, and costs continue to skyrocket. It’s clear why a majority of Americans trust Democrats over Trump and Republicans to lower prescription drug costs.

LIE: Trump said his administration has taken bold action to reduce drug costs, and took credit for Pfizer cancelling price hikes.

Trump: “We have taken bold action to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Drug prices are starting to come down. Drug companies, a number of months ago, were going to raise their prices. I actually called up the heads of Pfizer and Novartis and others. I said you can’t do that. You can’t raise your prices. And you know what they did? They brought them down, they didn’t raise them.”

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Trump suggests Californians can rake their forests to prevent wildfires. (He is wrong.)

Reversing course on his threat to cut the state’s federal funding if Californians don’t solve their forest fire problem, President Trump now says he’ll solve it with them.

“We go through this every year; we can’t go through this,” Trump said Saturday as he toured the state’s massive wildfire zones. “We’re going to have safe forests.”

How to make California’s vast drought-stricken forests “safe” after the Camp Fire grew to the size of Chicago this month, killing dozens if not hundreds of people and burning an entire town to the ground? Trump promised federal funds and says he has some ideas.

View the complete November 19 article by Avi Selk on The Washington Post website here.

President Trump’s crowd-size estimates: Increasingly unbelievable

“We went to Mississippi, we went to Missouri, we went to Nevada, we went to — every place, and we have crowds, we have tens of thousands of people outside of every arena. They have to start building larger arenas in this country, right? Something is happening.”

— President Trump, at a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio, Oct. 12, 2018

“The crowds at my Rallies are far bigger than they have ever been before, including the 2016 election. Never an empty seat in these large venues, many thousands of people watching screens outside. Enthusiasm & Spirit is through the roof. SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING – WATCH!”

— Trump, in a tweet, Oct. 15, 2018

“There have never been crowds like this, just so you understand, in the history of politics. You’ve never had crowds like this for midterm elections. There’s never been crowds like this.”

— Trump, at a campaign rally in Macon, Ga., Nov. 4, 2018

View the complete November 19 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

It’s easy to fact check Trump’s lies. He tells the same ones all the time.

Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

I’ve made it my mission to fact-check every word Donald Trump utters as president. That means trying to watch every speech, read every transcript, decipher every tweet. I’ve accidentally established a reputation for using Twitter to point out that he’s lying within seconds of him telling a lie.

People sometimes ask in response how I can blast out these corrections so quickly. But I have no special talent. My secret is that Trump tells the same lies over and over.

On his fifth day in office, Trump baselessly alleged widespread voter fraud. He did the same thing this past week. In his third month in office, Trump falsely claimed that the United States has a $500 billion trade deficit with China. He has said the same thing more than 80 times since.

View the November 16 article by Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star on The Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s wild Daily Caller interview

President Trump’s Nov. 14 interview with the Daily Caller had prompted much head-scratching with his comment that an ID — he said “voter ID” — is needed to buy cereal. But there were many other dubious statements in his lengthy interview, some of which we have fact-checked as part of our database on Trump’s false and misleading claims. Here’s a quick roundup of the president’s most notable errors of fact, in the order in which he made them.

“You know, it’s very interesting, because when you talk about not Senate confirmed, well, [special counsel Robert] Mueller’s not Senate confirmed. He’s heading this whole big thing; he’s not Senate confirmed.”

Trump is responding to assertions that he violated the Constitution by appointing the Justice Department’s chief of staff, Matthew G. Whitaker, as acting attorney general. The chief of staff post is not subject to Senate confirmation, unlike the deputy attorney general, who ordinarily would fill the vacancy.

View the complete November 16 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan Brilliantly Grills Trump Official On President’s Lies

Al Jazeera host wrote on Twitter, “Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump’s lies.”

A journalist for Al Jazeera media network might have found the secret to interviewing spokespeople for Donald Trump: Asking them to provide the facts that back up their claims.

Mehdi Hasan, who hosts the show “UpFront” on Al Jazeera English, did just that during a Nov. 9 interview with Steven Rogers, an adviser for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Hasan thought it was pretty good, as he pointed out in a tweet of a clip from the segment.

Right-wing media and Trump Jr. peddle debunked, years-old story about illegal voters in Florida

Credit: Melissa Joskow, Media Matters

And one fact-checker explains what she did to fight back.

Is it true that “nearly 200,000 Florida voters may not be citizens?” No, but that didn’t stop some prominent conservative social media accounts — including that of the president’s son — from spreading a since-debunked 2012 story making that claim.

To understand how this happened, it’s good to know a little background about Florida’s brush with “anti-fraud” initiatives in recent years.

In May 2012, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner announced a partnership between the Florida Department of State and Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to remove possible noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls ahead of that year’s election. The departments would cross-check data with each other for voter inconsistencies, flag them, and send them to the state’s Supervisors of Elections for review and, if needed, removal of registrations.

View the complete November 13 article by Parker Molloy on the MediaMatters.org website here.

Trump’s itchy Twitter finger: His latest false claims

As wildfires grow in frequency and intensity in California, President Trump is launching false attacks and threats at the state. (Jenny Starrs , Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)

Forest fires in California. An automatic recount in tight Florida races for senator and governor. A stock market plunge.

President Trump’s Twitter finger has been itchy the past few days, fanning the flames of conspiracy theories and offering speculation without evidence. We asked the White House for evidence for his statements but heard nothing back. Here’s a guide to the Four-Pinocchio fury.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

— Tweet, Nov. 10

View the complete November 13 article by Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

The Trump administration’s fuzzy math on ‘criminals’ in the caravan

The Department of Homeland Security is stretching for data to back up the president’s assertions. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“Think of it, 300 people. You know, we’re getting a lot of heat because, I was saying, there were some bad people in that caravan. Right? So we checked, 300 people.”

— President Trump, remarks during a campaign rally in Huntington, W.Va., Nov. 2, 2018

“You know, every time I say, ‘You have some rough people in there,’ the media says, ‘How dare you. We want to see proof.’ Well, they gave you 300 names yesterday. These are rough, rough people in many cases and if they’re allowed to break through our borders, only larger and bigger, we have emboldened these people.”

— Trump, remarks at a rally in Macon, Ga., Nov. 4

President Trump often makes pronouncements and assertions, and then his aides scramble to try to fill in the blanks. During his rallies before the midterm elections, the president all but acknowledged that he had been claiming the “caravan” of migrants traveling from Honduras contained criminal elements without evidence. But then the Department of Homeland Security came to the rescue.

View the complete November 9 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Twitter Chokes As President ‘Grabby Hands’ Vows To Protect Women From Migrant Caravan

What do women want? President Donald Trump thinks he knows.

“Women want security,” Trump said about the caravan of migrants heading to the U.S. border with Mexico during a rambling press conference on Thursday. “Women don’t want them in our country. You look at what the women are looking for: They want to have security.”

He again proclaimed, without evidence, that the migrants were “tough people,” and warned that if they throw rocks at troops he’s sending to the border, “I say, consider it a rifle.”

View the complete November 2 article by Mary Papenfuss of the Huffington Post on the Yahoo News website here.