Washington
CNN
—
Former President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign just as he ended his presidency in 2021: with a complete lot of inaccuracy.
Like lots of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday was full of false claims about quite a lot of topics – from his record in office to his Democratic opponents to the economy, the environment and foreign policy.
Here’s a fact check of 20 false or misleading things he said. This will not be a comprehensive list.
Trump claimed Tuesday evening that the US left $85 billion value of military equipment in Afghanistan upon its military withdrawal in 2021.
“Perhaps probably the most embarrassing moment within the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion value of the best military equipment anywhere on the planet,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump’s figure is fake. While a big quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been value about $7.1 billion — a piece of about $18.6 billion value of kit provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And a few of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.
There will not be any basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion value of kit was left behind. As other fact-checkers have previously explained, that was a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the full amount of cash Congress has appropriated throughout the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. Only a part of this funding was for equipment.
Trump claimed his administration “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve nevertheless it has now been “virtually drained” by the Biden administration.
Facts First: Each parts of Trump’s claim are false. He didn’t refill the reserve, and the reserve will not be “virtually drained.”
Though Trump has repeatedly boasted of supposedly having filled up the reserve, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not all due to him – the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress blocked the funding needed to execute Trump’s 2020 directive to purchase tens of tens of millions more barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capability – but nonetheless, it didn’t get filled.
As CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the US reserve stays the most important on the planet though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a significant chunk of it to assist keep oil prices down within the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, prior to the midterm elections). The reserve had greater than 396 million barrels of crude oil as of the week ending November 4.
Trump also boasted about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I got here along.”
Facts First: As we have now written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In point of fact, the US has had tariffs on China for greater than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a yr from 2007 to 2016, in keeping with the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”
Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing the price of the tariffs.
Trump claimed that unnamed people aren’t talking concerning the threat of nuclear weapons because they’re obsessive about environmental issues, which he said, “they are saying may affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They are saying the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the following 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that may take out entire countries with one shot.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false – even in case you ignore the absurd contention that folks aren’t being attentive to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Ocean Service said on its website that “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 – 12 inches (0.25 – 0.30 meters) in the following 30 years (2020 – 2050), which might be as much because the rise measured over the past 100 years (1920 – 2020).”
And though Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” on this claim, he strongly suggested that folks say climate change may only affect us in 300 years. That’s grossly inaccurate; it’s affecting the US today. The Department of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions brought on by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating recent security challenges for U.S. interests.”
Trump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” in any respect due to its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying, “in case you get caught dealing drugs in China you’ve gotten a right away and quick trial, and by the tip of the day, you’re executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they haven’t any drug problem.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim will not be true, just because it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of world health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, just like the US, has numerous individuals who use (a big selection of) drugs.” The Chinese government has itself reported that “there have been 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” as of the tip of 2021; up to now, officials in China have acknowledged that the variety of registered drug users are a big undercount of actual drug use there.
And while Trump solely credits harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its rehabilitation, education and anti-poverty efforts.
Complaining about how he’s under criminal investigation for taking presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a debunked claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.
“Obama took quite a lot of things with him,” Trump said.
Facts First: This is fake – because the National Archives and Records Administration identified in August when Trump previously made this claim. Though Trump claimed that Obama had taken tens of millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had itself taken these records to a NARA-managed facility within the Chicago area – which is near where Obama’s presidential library might be situated. It said that, as per federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and the way NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”
NARA has also debunked Trump’s recent claims about various other presidents having supposedly taken documents to their very own home states; in those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the previous presidents. It’s standard for NARA to establish temporary facilities near where former presidents’ everlasting libraries will eventually be situated.
As he has on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading figures when discussing the worth of gas. He said: “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars, and it’s gonna go really bad.”
Facts First: That is so misleading that we’re classifying it as inaccurate. While the worth of a gallon of standard gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) throughout the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for normal gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that – $2.393 per gallon, in keeping with data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some distant gas stations where prices are all the time much higher than the national average, the national average Tuesday is $3.759, per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the best prices as usual, has an average of $5.423.
Trump claimed Tuesday evening that his administration, unlike Obama’s administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members that had come to America.
“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out. Because their countries where they got here from wouldn’t take them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.
Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back their residents during Obama’s administration, though there have been some individual exceptions.
In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of nations that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.
For the 2016 fiscal yr, Obama’s last full fiscal yr in office, ICE reported Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, when it comes to the country of citizenship of individuals being faraway from the US. You’ll be able to read an extended fact check, from 2019, here.
Trump claimed Tuesday that a missile that was “sent in probably by Russia” landed 50 miles into Poland. “Persons are going absolutely wild and crazy and so they’re not pleased,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.
Facts First: This claim is fake. While Poland said a Russian-made missile did land of their territory Tuesday, killing two Polish residents, the explosion happened about 4 miles west from the Ukrainian border.
Moreover, it stays unclear where the missile was fired from, and why it fell in Poland.
Trump made a false claim about certainly one of his signature policies, a wall on the border with Mexico.
“We built the wall, and now we’ll add to it. Now, we built the wall – we accomplished the wall – after which we said let’s do more, and we did quite a bit more. And we did quite a bit more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that got here up. And once they got here in, that they had three more weeks to finish the additions to the wall, which might’ve been great, and so they said no, no, we’re not going to do this,” he said.
Facts First: It’s not even near true that Trump “accomplished” the border wall.
In keeping with an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been accomplished under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not accomplished. The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280, about 74 miles of barriers were “within the pre-construction phase and haven’t yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, instead of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”
Trump claimed that Democratic governors and mayors refused to ask for “help” even during “a complete breakdown of law and order,” and “don’t wish to ever ask to do anything,” so “we sent within the National Guard in Minneapolis and elsewhere.”
Facts First: This can be a false claim Trump liked to make during his presidency. It’s not true that Trump sent within the National Guard to Minneapolis and that Democratic leaders there refused to ask; it was actually Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard amid unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Walz, who served within the Army National Guard for greater than 20 years, first activated the Guard greater than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.
When Trump made this false claim in 2020, Walz’s office told CNN that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.
Mocking Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said, “There are quite a lot of bad things, like going to Idaho and saying ‘Welcome to the state of Florida, I actually adore it.’”
Facts First: This never happened. Biden, like Trump, has made occasional gaffes in referring to places, but this one is fiction. At a rally earlier this month, Trump claimed that Biden had gone to Iowa and wrongly claimed to be in Idaho; that false claim was published by a satirical website in 2020.
Lamenting illegal immigration, Trump said, “I feel it’s 10 million people coming in, not three or 4 million people. They’re pouring into our country.”
Facts First: False. “There isn’t any empirical basis in any respect for the concept 10 million undocumented people have entered under President Biden,” Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology on the University of Southern California’s law school, who studies immigration, said in a Monday email when CNN asked her about Trump making this claim earlier in November. Julia Gelatt, an authority on the Migration Policy Institute think tank, concurred: “Based on the information available, it will not be possible that 10 million unauthorized immigrants have come across the border to the U.S. under President Biden. In truth, the truth is a fraction of that.”
Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump (and head of the Border Patrol under Obama), told The Arizona Republic in an early-November article that the “worst case scenario” for the variety of illegal border crossings under Biden through October “could possibly be 6.2 million.” Trump’s estimate was not close even to that estimate.
And there are a bunch of necessary nuances here. Customs and Border Protection has recorded greater than 4.3 million total nationwide border “encounters” under Biden, but that number includes individuals who presented themselves to the authorities to start the strategy of in search of humanitarian protection. And while Trump used the word “people,” Ryo emphasized that the variety of “encounters” will not be similar to the variety of separate individuals who’ve crossed the border. Because many individuals encountered on the border are rapidly expelled under the Title 42 policy – including greater than half of those encountered within the 2021 fiscal yr – plenty of the identical people quickly come back to the border and take a look at again. Within the 2021 fiscal yr, the recidivism rate was 27%, in keeping with official data.
Trump claimed, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Primary, you won’t get it and in case you do, you’re gonna pay three to 4 times greater than you paid last yr.”
Facts First: This isn’t even near true. Turkey prices have increased since last Thanksgiving season, but they haven’t come near tripling or quadrupling. The weighted average advertised supermarket price of an entire frozen hen is 97 cents per pound as of probably the most recent US Department of Agriculture report – up about 10% from the identical time last yr. The worth of an entire frozen tom was up by about 7%.
And though Trump made these comments while criticizing the Biden administration over inflation, it’s value noting that the turkey market specifically has been significantly impacted by avian flu.
Trump said that his critics claimed throughout the 2016 presidential campaign that there can be a war inside weeks if Trump was elected – “and yet I’ve gone many years, many years and not using a war. The primary president to do it for that long a period.”
Facts First: That is nonsense. Trump was president for 4 years, so he couldn’t possibly have gone “many years, many years” and not using a war. Also, Trump presided over the US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he obviously didn’t start any of those wars and withdrew some troops from all three countries. And he was commander-in-chief for dozens of US airstrikes, including drone strikes, in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.
Trump gave himself credit for the liberation of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria, saying “the vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was in a position to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors in lower than three weeks.”
Facts First: That is a significant exaggeration. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated greater than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019, not “lower than three weeks” into his presidency in 2017; it’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by “decimated,” however the fight continued long after Trump’s first weeks in office. And Trump gave himself far an excessive amount of credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has up to now. There was major progress against the caliphate under Obama in 2015 and 2016 – and Kurdish forces did much of the bottom fighting.
IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing the scale of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in an announcement on the time.
Trump claimed: “We had practically, nearly, not that I can consider, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks, throughout the Trump administration.”
Facts First: Trump did qualify the claim by saying “practically, nearly, not that I can consider,” nevertheless it’s not true that there have been no terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists during his presidency. Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a terror attack in Latest York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was an act of Islamic extremism carried out in support of ISIS. In truth, Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. And Trump’s Justice Department alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.
Boasting of how he supposedly rebuilt the military, Trump said, “Once I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old, we had bombers where their grandfathers flew them once they were recent. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber – but not anymore.”
Facts First: It’s not true that Trump ended using 60-year-old bombers. The military continues to make use of B-52 bombers that old; they at the moment are being outfitted with recent Rolls-Royce engines to delay their life even further. (And the B-52 isn’t the one decades-old plane still in use.)
After boasting of how he’s viewed by Latinos, Trump claimed that “along the border in Texas, won each community – I won – each community.” He said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told him that he had “won each area along the border, the longest since Reconstruction.”
Facts First: We don’t know what Abbott told Trump, nevertheless it’s not true that Trump won each area along the border with Mexico. Trump lost border states in each of his previous races – California and Latest Mexico in each 2016 and 2020, Arizona in 2020 – and likewise lost quite a few border communities in Texas and elsewhere each times, as you’ll be able to see in these Latest York Times maps here and here.
Trump did make major gains with some Texas border counties between 2016 and 2020, becoming the primary Republican in many years to win a few of them, but his claim was about how he supposedly won all of them. That’s inaccurate.
Trump claimed about inflation: “As we speak, inflation is the best in over 50 years.”
Facts First: This will not be true; Trump exaggerated a statistic that will have worked in his favor even when he had recited it accurately. October’s year-over-year inflation rate of seven.7% is the best since 1982, in case you don’t count previous months this yr when it was higher. So, ignoring those other Biden-era months, it’s the best in 40 years, not the best in “over 50 years.”
We’d let this go if Trump didn’t have a years-long pattern of exaggerating numbers to suit his purposes.