The following article by S. V. Date was posted on the Huffington Post website December 24, 2017:
The president’s near daily falsehoods appear to be tripping up Republicans on their victory lap.
Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s falsehood-rich style appears to have come back to bite him as he brags about his only major legislative accomplishment.
Having passed tax cuts that provide modest help to most Americans, Trump and GOP leaders are finding that most Americans just don’t believe it.
A CNN poll earlier this month found that only 21 percent of respondents believed they would be better off under the tax plan, while 37 percent believed they would be worse off. Another 36 percent thought they would not be affected much either way.
The following article by Linda Qiu was posted on the New York Times website December 20, 2017:
WASHINGTON — President Trump celebrated the tax bill that Congress approved on Wednesday by characterizing it as a two-for-one victory, falsely claiming that it also made good on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed,” Mr. Trump said in a cabinet meeting. “We have essentially repealed Obamacare, and we will come up with something that will be much better.” Continue reading “Trump Falsely Claims to Have ‘Repealed Obamacare’”
The following article by Linda Qiu was posted on the New York Times website December 18, 2017:
President Trump made erroneous claims during his speech on national security on Monday.CreditEvan Vucci/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In a speech outlining his first national security strategy, President Trump sought to distinguish himself as a commander in chief who is breaking records and setting precedents.
Mr. Trump spoke of historic military spending, a never-before-seen emphasis on border security at home and allies finally sharing the United States’ defense burdens abroad — all claims that require some explanation. Here’s an assessment. Continue reading “Trump Inaccurately Claims ‘Firsts’ in Defense Speech”
The following article by David Lewis was posted ont he Washington Post website December 16, 2017:
President Trump said on Dec. 14 that the FBI is “a very sad thing to watch,” but pledged to rebuild the agency to make it “bigger and better than ever.” (The Washington Post)
“It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI,” President Trump told reporters yesterday, calling the bureau’s conduct “really, really disgraceful.” He was building on criticisms he’d levied earlier this month, when he labeled the Federal Bureau of Investigation “tainted” and said its reputation was “in tatters.” The president claimed that ideological bias was behind the FBI’s decisions about criminal investigations involving Hillary Clinton and Robert S. Mueller III’s ongoing special counsel investigation. Continue reading “President Trump claims the FBI is tainted and its reputation in tatters. This graph shows he’s wrong.”
The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website December 14, 2017:
President Trump cut a red ribbon between stacks of paper on Dec. 14 to symbolize his administration’s work cutting regulations. (The Washington Post)
Regulations are boring. They are sometimes boring by design and almost always boring when examined. There are some regulations that are not boring, but those are a small minority of the lot. Overall, regulations are a dull part of a dull system — a system that one might view as analogous either to scaffolding or to binding.
The following article by Eric Boehlert was posted on the Share Blue website December 11, 2017:
With a non-existent list of legislative accomplishments, the Trump team claims nearly 1,000 regulations have been wiped off the books. They’re lying.
Under pressure to name any of Donald Trump’s accomplishments as the calendar winds down on his first year in office, and unable to point to any bills passed or agenda items completed, the White House has of late begun to point to rolling back regulations.
The following article by Angie Drobnic Holan was posted on the Politifact website December 12, 2017:
Tampa Bay Times illustration by Ron Borresen
A mountain of evidence points to a single fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016.
In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election. Those actions included the cyber-theft of private data, the placement of propaganda against particular candidates, and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.
The following article by Nicole Lewis was posted on the Washington Post website December 11, 2017:
Trump says the U.S. is exporting “clean coal” but there is virtually no “clean coal.” And in 2015 and 2016, West Virginia exported virtually no coal to China. (The White House)
“If you look at what’s happened in West Virginia and so many different places, we’re sending clean coal. We’re sending it out to different places — China. A lot of coal ordered in China right now. So a lot of things are changing, and they’re changing very rapidly.” — President Trump, remarks during Taxpayer Family Event, Dec. 5, 2017
On Dec. 5, several families gathered at the White House to discuss how the GOP tax plan would benefit the middle class. One of the speakers, North Dakota state Sen. Jessica Unruh, discussed how the corporate-tax reduction would benefit her coal mining company. Unruh praised the tax plan, including a provision that reduces the tax credit for renewable wind energy, saying it would allow her to invest more money in domestic energy production. Continue reading “Trump’s claim that West Virginia is ‘sending clean coal’ to ‘China’”
The following article by Bella DePaulo was posted on the Washington Post website December 8, 2017:
According to The Fact Checker’s calculation, the president now averages 5 false or misleading claims per day. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
Inresearch beginning in the mid-1990s,when I was a professorat the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants’ rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else). Continue reading “I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.”
The following article by Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey was posted on the Washington Post website December 8, 2017:
In 2012, Donald Trump greets Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney after endorsing his candidacy for president at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. As president, Trump’s relationship with Romney is complicated. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)
Before Ronna Romney McDaniel took over as Republican National Committee chairwoman earlier this year, President Trump had a request: Would she be willing to stop using her middle name publicly?
Trump followed up by saying in a lighthearted way that McDaniel, the niece of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, could do what she wanted, according to two people familiar with the comments. But the change was soon plain for all to see. Though she had used her maiden name for years in Michigan, where her grandfather George W. Romney had been governor, McDaniel dropped “Romney” from most official party communications and has rarely used it since.
The moment offers a window on Trump’s complicated and often tense relationship with the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, who has remained a frequent critic of the president and is considering a Senate campaign next year in Utah. The pair’s history stretches from Romney’s pained courtship of Trump’s endorsement in 2012 to Trump’s searing criticism of Romney in 2016, when he called his predecessor a “stone cold loser” who blew an easy chance to beat then-President Barack Obama. Continue reading “Trump calls Romney ‘a great man,’ but works to undermine him and block Senate run”
