Tag: Trump lies

Trump used his latest coronavirus briefing to make a bizarre claim about the deficit

“Prior to this virus, the deficit was coming down under my administration.”

Though the proceedings were ostensibly about the coronavirus, President Donald Trump used Monday’s press briefing to push an odd claim about his stewardship of the budget.

As part of his argument that he oversaw the development of the greatest economy in world history prior to the coronavirus reaching US shores and wrecking things, Trump claimed that “if you look, prior to this virus, the deficit was coming down under my administration.” He said this was due to him putting “massive tariffs on China” — tariffs that resulted in America “taking in tens of billions of dollars” from the country he’s now trying to blame for the pandemic.

(Update: A reader pointed out that when Trump’s reference to “the deficit” is read in context of the question he was responding to about China, he may have been referring to the trade deficit specifically with China and not the national deficit. While the trade deficit with China did shrink last year to $345.6 billion from a record of $419.5 billion it hit under Trump’s leadership in 2018, data shows that instead of buying things domestically, Americans just turned to other foreign countries to buy things.)  Continue reading.

Trump vs. Pelosi: What happened in Chinatown

Washington Post logoUnder fire for reacting too slowly to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump is trying to turn the tables and argue Pelosi was actually slower than he was. He points to his Jan. 31 decision (effective on Feb. 2) to impose some travel restrictions on non-U.S. citizens coming from China — and contrasts that with a visit Pelosi made to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Of course, Chinatown is not China. And there are many things Trump keeps getting wrong about her visit. It was pretty uneventful, but he tries to spice it up with claims that she called for a “big parade,” a “street party,” a “street fair” and so forth. Then he tosses in some ridiculously false claims.

The Facts

Trump’s repeated remarks dismissing the threat of the coronavirus to the United States have proved to be a problem for his reelection campaign. A president sets the national tone. But, to be fair, other high-profile politicians also did not express early alarm or advocate the extreme social distancing tactics now set in most of the country. Continue reading.

It sure looks like Bill Barr gave Trump the absurd idea he has ‘total authority’ to force states to reopen

AlterNet logoBack on April 13, President Trump made an astonishing declaration, even for him, and he’s made some doozies. You may recall that this was the briefing at which he showed a strange campaign-style video featuring compliments from Democratic officials, which had clearly been inspired by a very similar compilation shown the night before on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, already a de facto Trump celebration hour.

It was also the appearance in which he repeatedly made the claim that he had “total authority” to reopen the government and blathered on about how he’d saved hundreds of thousands of lives when he supposedly “closed” the country in the first place.

Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked him a question I think we all were wondering at that point: Continue reading.

The Memo: Low trust in Trump mars crisis response

The Hill logoTrust in President Trump’s ability to deal with the coronavirus crisis — and even to impart reliable information about it — is eroding, posing a significant danger to his reelection hopes.

In several polls, the share of the population that finds Trump trustworthy on the crisis is lower than his overall job approval number — an indication that the lack of public trust cannot be attributed only to the nation’s partisan divide.

The fact that concerns about Trump’s accuracy are felt beyond the ranks of his ideological foes could be a political time bomb as the nation begins to grapple with the tough question of when to begin reopening. Continue reading.

Trump Lies About March Rallies — And PBS Reporter Nails Him

PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor called out President Donald Trump for falsely claiming he hasn’t left the White House “in months” at a press briefing on Monday evening.

Trump was attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has criticized the administration’s slow and negligent response to the coronavirus crisis. In response, critics have pointed out that, as late as Feb. 24, Pelosi told people to go to Chinatown in an effort to mollify the growing fears of the coronavirus. While in retrospect, any advice to go out at this time was likely a mistake, the Trump administration itself was weeks away from issuing any guidance discouraging public gatherings. And, as Alcindor pointed out, Trump was holding campaign rallies throughout February and into March, which potentially could have served to spread the virus.

“You held rallies in February and March,” Alcindor said. Continue reading.

Trump’s bizarre effort to tag Obama’s swine flu response as ‘a disaster’

Washington Post logo“Biden/Obama were a disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu. Polling at the time showed disastrous approval numbers. 17,000 people died unnecessarily and through incompetence! Also, don’t forget their 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare website that should have cost close to nothing!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, April 17

As the coronavirus pandemic emerged, President Trump quickly sought to compare his performance to the pandemic that appeared in 2009 under the watch of his predecessor, Barack Obama. He called it a “big failure” and a “debacle,” compounded by “horrific mistakes.” He railed about the death toll, often inflating the figures to 17,000, as he did in this recent tweet.

These criticism might have had some resonance back when there appeared to be relatively few cases in the United States. On March 4, when Trump first attacked Obama’s handling of the swine flu, there were only about 100 reported cases of covid-19 in the United States.

But as of April 17, there were more than 700,000 cases reported in the United States and nearly 40,000 deaths, more than double than what supposedly took place under Obama. One would think Trump would drop this talking point, but apparently he thinks it still works for him. Continue reading.

Trump Uttered 59 Lies About The Pandemic In One Month

Since March 14, Donald Trump has been holding daily press briefings, ostensibly about the COVID-19 pandemic and what his administration is doing to combat it.

In the process, he’s told numerous lies on everything from the severity of the virus to his administration’s response.

Over the past month, the American Independent has been tracking Trump’s lies and distortions.

The list is by no means exhaustive. He has also repeated many of these lies on multiple occasions. However, here are 59 of the worst lies he told in the course of a month, in chronological order:  Continue reading.

‘Pure baloney’: Zoologist debunks Trump’s COVID-19 origin theory — explains how animal-human transmission works

AlterNet logoWith the largest one-day death toll in the U.S. yet — 2,400 in just 24 hours — President Trump is trying to deflect attention from his handling of the pandemic by waging a war on public health experts and science, threatening to cut World Health Organization funding and fueling a theory that the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. We speak to a zoologist who has been sounding the alarm about a coming pandemic for years. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney,” says Peter Daszak, disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that works globally to identify and study our vulnerabilities to emerging infectious disease. “These pandemic viruses that emerge originate in wildlife.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, here in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, with my co-host Nermeen Shaikh, usually sitting right here at my side but joining us from her home to keep us all safe and stop community spread. Hi, Nermeen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hi, Amy. And welcome to our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. Continue reading.

Chris Cuomo Slams Ingraham, Fox News Over Coronavirus Coverage: ‘Never Ends For State TV’

Chris Cuomo Slams Ingraham, Fox News Over Coronavirus Coverage: ‘Never Ends For State TV’

CNN’s Chris Cuomo joined the backlash against Fox News’ coverage of the coronavirus pandemic on Friday as he fired back at a tweet from the rival network’s prime-time personality Laura Ingraham.

“It never ends for state tv,” Cuomo responded to a post from Ingraham that attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Cuomo slammed the conservative network over its “constant division” and for weeks downplaying the threat posed by the coronavirus, which has now killed more than 37,000 people nationwide. Continue reading.

Trump claims U.S. coronavirus cases have peaked. Not so fast, doctors say.

Trump, eager to restart the economy, has suggested that the worst has passed. But there’s no way to know without mass testing, one expert said.

President Donald Trump, seizing on recent signs of progress in hard-hit areas like Seattle and New York City, has said coronavirus cases in the U.S. have peaked, suggesting that the worst of the pandemic is over as he encourages states to ease up on restrictions and revive an economy in tailspin.

“The battle continues, but the data suggests that nationwide we have passed the peak on new cases. Hopefully that will continue and we will continue to make great progress,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House.

In the same news conference, he added, “It looks like we’re plateauing and maybe even, in many cases, coming down.” Continue reading.