Interpretations of the phrase vary, depending on personal
perspectives, political ideologies and the selective use of statistics. It is frequently used in politics, to refer to perceived redistribution from those who have more to those who have less.
Occasionally, albeit rarely, the term is used to describe laws or
policies that cause redistribution in the opposite direction, from the
poor to the rich.
The phrase is often coupled with the term class warfare, with high-income earners and the wealthy portrayed as perpetrators of unfairness and discrimination.
Redistribution tax policy should not be confused with predistribution
policies. "Predistribution" is the idea that the state should try to
prevent inequalities from occurring in the first place rather than
through the tax and benefits system once they have occurred. For
example, a government predistribution policy might require employers to
pay all employees a living wage and not just a minimum wage, as a "bottom-up" response to widespread income inequalities or high poverty rates.
Many alternate taxation proposals have been floated without the
political will to alter the status quo. One example is the proposed "Buffett Rule",
which is a hybrid taxation model composed of opposing systems intended
to minimize the favoritism of special interests in tax design.
The effects of a redistributive system are actively debated on
ethical and economic grounds. The subject includes an analysis of its
rationales, objectives, means, and policy effectiveness.
History
In ancient times, redistribution operated as a palace economy.
These economies were centrally based around the administration, meaning
the dictator or pharaoh had both the ability and the right to say who
was taxed and who received special treatment.
Another early form of wealth redistribution occurred in Plymouth Colony under the leadership of William Bradford. Bradford recorded in his diary that this "common course" bred confusion, discontent, distrust, and the colonists looked upon it as a form of slavery.
A closely related term, distributism
(also known as distributionism or distributivism), refers to an
economic ideology that developed in Europe in the late 19th and early
20th century. It was based on the principles of Catholic social teaching, particularly the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno. More recently, Pope Francis echoed the earlier Papal statements in his Evangelii Gaudium.
Role in economic systems
Different types of economic systems
feature varying degrees of interventionism aimed at redistributing
income, depending on how unequal their initial distributions are.
Free-market capitalist
economies tend to feature high degrees of income redistribution.
However, Japan's government engages in much less redistribution because
its initial wage distribution is much more equal than Western economies.
Likewise, the socialist planned economies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc featured very little income redistribution because private capital and land income
were restricted. To attain an efficient allocation of resources with
the desired distribution of income, if the assumptions of the
competitive model are satisfied by the economy, the sole role of the
government is to alter the initial distribution of wealth
– the major drivers of income inequality in capitalist systems – was
virtually nonexistent; and because the wage rates were set by the
government in these economies.
A comparison between Socialist and Capitalist
Systems in terms of distribution of income is much easier as both these
systems stand practically implemented in a number of countries under
compatible political systems. Inequality in almost all the Eastern
European economies has increased after moving from socialist controlled
systems to market-based economies.
For the Islamic distribution, the following are the three key
elements of the Islamic Economic System, which have significant
implications for the distribution of income and wealth (if fully
implemented) and are markedly different from Capitalism. The Islamic
system is defined by the following three key elements: Ushr and Zakat,
the prohibition of usury, and the Inheritance Law. Ushr is an obligatory
payment from agriculture output at the time of harvesting. If
agricultural land is irrigated by rain or some other natural freely
available water the producer is obliged to pay ten percent of the output
as Ushr.
In case irrigation water is not free of cost then the deduction
would be five percent, while Zakat is a major instrument of restricting
the excessive accumulation of wealth and helping the poor and most
vulnerable members of the society, Secondly, usury, or charging interest,
is prohibited. Elimination of interest from the economic system is a
revolutionary step with profound effects on all spheres of economic
activities. Finally, the Inheritance Law Of Islam is the distribution of
the property of a deceased person from closest family members and
moving towards a more distant family. Son(s), daughter(s), wife, husband
and parents are the prime recipients. This distribution is explicitly
illustrated in Qur’an and cannot be changed or modified. Under varying
conditions, the share received by different relatives accordingly
changes. The important principle is that the owner at the time of
his/her death cannot change these shares.
How views on redistribution are formed
The context that a person is in can influence their views on redistributive policies. For example, despite both being Western civilizations, typical
Americans and Europeans do not have the same views on redistribution
policies.
This phenomenon persists even among people who would benefit most from
redistributive policies, as poor Americans tend to favor redistributive
policy less than equally poor Europeans.
Research shows this is because when a society has a fundamental belief
that those who work hard will earn rewards from their work, the society
will favor lower redistributive policies.
However, when a society as a whole believes that some combination of
outside factors, such as luck or corruption, can contribute to
determining one's wealth, those in the society will tend to favor higher
redistributive policies.
This leads to fundamentally different ideas of what is ‘just’ or fair
in these countries and influences their overall views on redistribution.
Another context that can influence one's ideas of redistributive policies is the social class that one is born into. People tend to favor redistributive policy that will help the groups that they are a member of.
This is displayed in a study of Latin American lawmakers, where it is
shown that lawmakers born into a lower social class tend to favor more
redistributive policies than their counterparts born into a higher
social class.
Research has also found that women generally support redistribution
more than men do, though the strength of this preference varies across
countries.
While literature remains mixed on if monetary gain is the true
motivation behind favoring redistributive policies, most researchers
accept that social class plays some role in determining someone's views
towards redistributive policies.
Nonetheless, the classic theory that individual preferences for
redistribution decrease with their income, leading to societal
preferences for redistribution that increase with income inequality has been disputed.
Perhaps the most important impact of government on the distribution of
“wealth” is in the sphere of education—in ensuring that everyone has a
certain amount of human capital.
By providing all individuals, regardless of the wealth of their
parents, with a free basic education, government reduces the degree of
inequality that otherwise would exist.
Income inequality has many different connotations, three of which are of particular importance:
The moral dimension, which leads into the discussion of human
rights. What kinds of reasons should a society accept for the emergence
or existence of inequality and how much inequality between its members
is reconcilable with the right of each individual to human dignity?
The second dimension links inequality to political stability.
How much inequality can a society endure before a significant number of
its members begin to reject the existing pattern of distribution and
demand fundamental changes? In societies with very rigid forms of the
income distribution, this may easily lead to public protest, if not
violence. Authorities are then faced with the option of reacting to
protests with repression or reform. In societies with flexible tools of
negotiation and bargaining on income, smoother mechanisms of adaptation
may be available.
The third dimension – in many cases the dominant pattern in the social debate – links inequality to economic performance.
Individuals who achieve more and perform better deserve a higher
income. If everybody is treated the same, the overall willingness to
work may decline. The argument includes the scarcity of skills.
Societies have to provide incentives to ensure that talents and
education are allocated to jobs where they are needed most. Not many
people doubt the general accuracy of these arguments – but nobody has
ever shown how to correctly measure performance and how to find an
objective way of linking it to the prevailing level of the income
distribution. Inequality is needed – to some extent – but nobody knows
how much of it is good.
Inequality in developing countries
The existence of high inequality within many developing countries, alongside persistent poverty,
began to draw attention in the early 1970s. However, throughout the
1980s and into the 1990s, the dominant view among development economists
was that inequality in poor countries was a less pressing issue
compared to ensuring sufficient growth, which was believed to be the
primary means of reducing poverty. The policy recommendation for
developing countries was clear: it was not possible to simultaneously
decrease poverty and inequality. This perspective was based on the
belief that economic growth would eventually lead to a trickle-down
effect, where the benefits of growth would eventually reach the poorest
members of society. However, evidence began to emerge in the 1990s that
challenged this notion and suggested that the link between economic
growth and poverty reduction was not as strong as previously thought.
This shift in thinking led to a reconsideration of the importance of
addressing inequality in the pursuit of development.
Modern forms of redistribution
The
redistribution of wealth and its practical application are bound to
change with the continuous evolution of social norms, politics, and
culture. Within developed countries income inequality has become a
widely popular issue that has dominated the debate stage for the past
few years. The importance of a nation's ability to redistribute wealth
in order to implement social welfare programs, maintain public goods,
and drive economic development has brought various conversations to the
political arena. A country's means of redistributing wealth comes from
the implementation of a carefully thought out well described system of
taxation. The implementation of such a system would aid in achieving the
desired social and economic objective of diminishing social inequality
and maximizing social welfare. There are various ways to impose a tax
system that will help create a more efficient allocation of resources,
in particular, many democratic, even socialist governments utilize a
progressive system of taxation to achieve a certain level of income
redistribution. In addition to the creation and implementation of these
tax systems, "globalization of the world economy [has] provided
incentives for reforming the tax systems" across the globe.
Along with utilizing a system of taxation to achieve the redistribution
of wealth, the same socio-economic benefit can be achieved if there are
appropriate policies enacted within a current political infrastructure
that addresses these issues. Modern thinking towards the topic of the
redistribution of wealth, focuses on the concept that economic
development increases the standard of living across an entire society.
Today, income redistribution occurs in some form in most democratic
countries, through economic policies. Some redistributive policies
attempt to take wealth, income, and other resources from the "haves" and
give them to the "have-nots", but many redistributions go elsewhere.
In a progressive income tax
system, a high income earner will pay a higher tax rate (a larger
percentage of their income) than a low income earner; and therefore,
will pay more total dollars per person.
Other taxation-based methods of redistributing income are the negative income tax for very low income earners and tax loopholes (tax avoidance) for the better-off.
Government Redistribution
Two other common types of governmental redistribution of income are subsidies and vouchers (such as food stamps or Section-8 housing vouchers). These transfer payment programs are funded through general taxation, but benefit the poor or influential special interest groups and corporations.
While the persons receiving transfers from such programs may prefer to
be directly given cash, these programs may be more palatable to society
than cash assistance, as they give society some measure of control over
how the funds are spent.
Benefit redistribution
In addition to having a progressive tax rate, the U.S. Social Security system also redistributes wealth to the poor via its highly progressive benefit formula.
Governmental redistribution of income may include a direct
benefit program involving either cash transfers or the purchase of
specific services for an individual. Medicare is one example.
Medicare is a government-run health insurance program that covers
people age 65 or older, certain younger people with disabilities, and
people with end-stage renal disease
(permanent kidney failure requiring dialysis or a transplant, sometimes
called ESRD). This is a direct benefit program because the government
is directly providing health insurance for those who qualify.
Gini Index
The difference between the Gini index for the income distribution before taxation and the Gini index after taxation is an indicator for the effects of such taxation.
Property redistribution
Wealth redistribution can be implemented through land reform that transfers ownership of land from one category of people to another, or through inheritance taxes, land value taxes or a broader wealth tax on assets in general. Before-and-after Gini coefficients for the distribution of wealth can be compared.
Interventions like rent control can impose large costs. Some
alternative forms of interventions, such as housing subsidies, may
achieve comparable distributional objectives at less cost. If the
government cannot costlessly
redistribute, it should look for efficient ways of redistributing—that
is, ways that reduce the costs as much as possible. This is one of the
main concerns of the branch of economics called the economics of the
public sector.
Class analysis
One
study suggests that "the middle class faces a paradoxical status" in
that they tend to vote against income redistribution, even though they
would benefit economically from it.
Objectives
The
objectives of income redistribution are to increase economic stability
and opportunity for the less wealthy members of society and thus usually
include the funding of public services.
One basis for redistribution is the concept of distributive justice, whose premise is that money and resources ought to be distributed in such a way as to lead to a socially just, and possibly more financially egalitarian, society. Another argument is that a larger middle class benefits an economy by enabling more people to be consumers, while providing equal opportunities for individuals to reach a better standard of living. Seen for example in the work of John Rawls,
another argument is that a truly fair society would be organized in a
manner benefiting the least advantaged, and any inequality would be
permissible only to the extent that it benefits the least advantaged.
Some proponents of redistribution argue that capitalism results in an externality that creates unequal wealth distribution.
Many economists have argued that wealth and income inequality are a cause of economic crises,
and that reducing these inequalities is one way to prevent or
ameliorate economic crises, with redistribution thus benefiting the
economy overall. This view was associated with the underconsumptionism school in the 19th century, now considered an aspect of some schools of Keynesian economics; it has also been advanced, for different reasons, by Marxian economics. It was particularly advanced in the US in the 1920s by Waddill Catchings and William Trufant Foster. More recently, the so-called "Rajan hypothesis" posited that income inequality was at the basis of the explosion of the 2008 financial crisis.
The reason is that rising inequality caused people on low and middle
incomes, particularly in the US, to increase their debt to keep up their
consumption levels with that of richer people. Borrowing was
particularly high in the housing market and deregulation in the financial sector made it possible to extend lending in sub-prime mortgages. The downturn in the housing market in 2007 halted this process and triggered the financial crisis. Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, along with many others, supports this view.
There is currently a debate concerning the extent to which the world's extremely rich have become richer over recent decades. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is at the forefront of the debate, mainly focusing on within-country concentration of income and wealth. Branko Milanovic provided evidence of increasing inequality at the global level, showing how the group of so-called "global plutocrats", i.e. the richest 1% in the world income distribution, were the main beneficiaries of economic growth in the period 1988–2008.
More recent analysis supports this claim, as 27% of total economic
growth worldwide accrued to the top 1% of the world income distribution
in the period 1980–2016. The approach underpinning these analyses has been critiqued in certain publications such as The Economist.
Moral obligation
Peter Singer's argument contrasts to Thomas Pogge's in that he states we have an individual moral obligation to help the poor.
The rich people who are living in the states with more redistribution,
are more in favor of immigrants than poorer people, because this can
make them pay less wages.
A 2011 report by the International Monetary Fund
by Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry found a strong association
between lower levels of inequality and sustained periods of economic
growth. Developing countries (such as Brazil, Cameroon, Jordan) with
high inequality have "succeeded in initiating growth at high rates for a
few years" but "longer growth spells are robustly associated with more
equality in the income distribution."
The Industrial Revolution led to increasing inequality among nations. Some economies took off, whereas others, like
many of those in Africa or Asia, remained close to a subsistence standard of living. General calculations show that
the 17 countries of the world with the most-developed economies had, on average, 2.4 times the GDP per capita of
the world's poorest economies in 1870. By 1960, the most developed economies had 4.2 times the GDP per capita of
the poorest economies.
Regarding to GDP indicator, GDP has nothing to say about the level of
inequality in society. GDP per capita is only an average. When GDP per
capita rises by 5%, it could mean that GDP for everyone in the society
has risen by 5%, or that GDP of some groups has risen by more while that
of others has risen by less—or even declined.
Criticism
Public choice
theory states that redistribution tends to benefit those with political
clout to set spending priorities more than those in need, who lack real
influence on government.
The socialist economists John Roemer and Pranab Bardhan criticize redistribution via taxation in the context of Nordic-stylesocial democracy, reportedly highlighting its limited success at promoting relative egalitarianism
and its lack of sustainability. They point out that social democracy
requires a strong labor movement to sustain its heavy redistribution,
and that it is unrealistic to expect such redistribution to be feasible
in countries with weaker labor movements. They point out that, even in
the Scandinavian countries, social democracy has been in decline since
the labor movement weakened. Instead, Roemer and Bardhan argue that changing the patterns of enterprise ownership and market socialism, obviating the need for redistribution, would be more sustainable and effective at promoting egalitarianism.
Marxian economists
argue that social democratic reforms – including policies to
redistribute income – such as unemployment benefits and high taxes on
profits and the wealthy create more contradictions in capitalism by
further limiting the efficiency of the capitalist system via reducing
incentives for capitalists to invest in further production. In the Marxist view, redistribution cannot resolve the fundamental issues of capitalism – only a transition to a socialist economy can.
Income redistribution will lower poverty
by reducing inequality, if done properly. But it may not accelerate
growth in any major way, except perhaps by reducing social tensions
arising from inequality and allowing poor people to devote more
resources to human and physical asset accumulation. Directly investing
in opportunities for poor people is essential.
The distribution of income that emerges from competitive markets
may be very unequal. However, under the
conditions of the basic competitive model, a redistribution of wealth
can move the economy to a more equal allocation that is also Pareto
efficient.
Described by Piketty as "in large part a sequel" to its predecessor, Capital and Ideology has a wider scope, and Piketty has expressed his preference for the 2019 book.
In the book, Piketty outlines potential means of redistributing wealth,
and explores historical and contemporary justifications for inequality. Paul Krugman
wrote of the book, "In Marxian dogma, a society's class structure is
determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of
production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality
as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional
change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society:
'Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and
political.'"
Methods for redistributing wealth proposed in the book include the
"inheritance for all", a payment distributed to citizens by their
country at the age of 25.
Reviews
Book Marks reports an overall reception of "Positive" based on two rave reviews, six positive reviews, and six lukewarm reviews. The book has received mixed reviews from economists, scholars and pundits.
The book also generated attention because Piketty refused to censor
parts of it, which led to it not being published in mainland China.
Robert Shortt of RTÉ.ie
rated the book four stars out of five. He wrote, “Some of his
conclusions [...] can at times sound simplistic, even glib", referring
to Piketty's proposal that pooling sovereign debt in the Eurozone would
reduce member states' debt interest payments and his criticism of the
much greater spending on interest payments than on a program like Erasmus+.
Shortt also said that the history "sometimes takes away from the very
real and pertinent questions Piketty raises” about modern politics.
However, Shortt said that Capital and Ideology still “goes a long way towards framing what is happening both here and abroad in a broad historical and political context.”
In Kirkus Reviews,
the book was billed as a "deftly argued case for a new kind of
socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread
discussion." William Davies of The Guardian
wrote that the book "is occasionally naive (it will bug the hell out of
historians and anthropologists) but in a provocative fashion, as if to
say: if inequality isn't justified, why not change it?" and that
Piketty's policy recommendations "are not the most arresting features of
the book." However, Davies also wrote, "Amid the distraction and
perpetual outrage of our dysfunctional public sphere, this enlightenment
confidence in empirics feels beamed in from another age. It also makes
for a unique scholarly edifice, which will be impossible to ignore."
Marshall Steinbaum of Boston Review stated that in comparison to Capital in the Twenty-First Century
the work "loses much of the economic theory, but it gains a vast wealth
of historical, sociological, and political detail". He wrote that the
book "systematically demolishes [the] self-serving conceit" of the
economy as a natural force uninfluenced by ideas on how it should work.
While Steinbaum said that Piketty's narrative that left-wing parties
became parties of the educated rather than the working class is flawed
"because the working class is getting more educated", Steinbaum lauded
Piketty's engagement with political science, writing, "Few economists
are as methodologically curious and versatile, much less as adept."
Geoff Mann praised Capital and Ideology in London Review of Books.
He disputed Piketty's claim that social democracy in the 20th century
was intended to transcend private property and capitalism. However, Mann
said that the book "proves conclusively that [the idea that economic growth will fix the inequality problem]
was an illusion", and concluded, "Whether or not his revolution without
revolutionaries can get us where we need to go, his analysis of how we
got here demands our attention." The Hindu's
G. Sampath wrote, "Contradicting the claims of Hayekian market
fundamentalists, Piketty shows, through page after page of charts,
graphs and histograms, how unfettered capitalism in 19th century Europe
led to levels of inequality not seen anywhere except in quasi-slave
societies. [...] The singular value of this book may well be its power
to revive research and activism that re-embed economic problems in a
social and civic substrate."
The New Republic's
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein argued, "Piketty's own imagination of new
worlds is grounded in a rigorous and detailed analysis of the
institutions that have existed in the real world. [...] He is uncovering
ideas that have worked before. They could work again." In The Washington Post, James Kwak
approved of Piketty's explanation for the rise of far-right politics
and wrote that "as long as the Democratic Party muddles along with the
same old ideology of market-driven growth and supposed equality of
opportunity, our political system will remain defined by two parties
dominated by competing segments of the economic elite."
Ryan Cooper of The Week
praised the book. Cooper said that Piketty sometimes "struggles with
organizing his titanic collection of arguments and evidence", but found
convincing Piketty's discussion of the rightward shift in 21st century
politics and dubbed Capital and Ideology "a fascinating,
essential study both of where we came from and of two possible paths
forward: how we might create a better future for all human society, and
the dark possibilities should we fail. [...] on his key point of the
brute necessity of a reborn international left, Piketty is inarguably
correct.” Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy
wrote, "The reams of economic data he unearths are eye-opening; many of
his proposed solutions seem eye-rolling in the current climate. [...]
Piketty's latest effort is a very welcome, very controversial, and, in
another time and place, possibly even constructive contribution."
Conversely, a reviewer in The Economist said that Piketty "draws on an impressive range of historical statistics" and that, compared to most post-Marxist critiques, Capital and Ideology
is "readable. The prose is pithy and light on theory." But the reviewer
described the economist's account of ideology by elites throughout
history as lesser than accounts by thinkers like Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault
because Piketty "flits between case studies" and suggests that "elites
are only ever self-serving"; the reviewer also said that he
insufficiently deals with concerns that "sky-high wealth taxes would
play havoc with incentives, reducing investment and entrepreneurship
[...] it is hard not to conclude that, deep down, Mr Piketty believes
the worth of a society is measured by its Gini coefficient alone."
The Guardian's Paul Mason said that Piketty's discussions
of history and ideologies show ignorance of the "methodological debates
that rage" in the field of history. The journalist also argued that
"Piketty's solutions [for the rise of nativism and xenophobia] are
perfunctory [...] a survey of 'red wall'
seats found they [...] reject attempts to take money from the modestly
well-off and even from billionaires“. Summing up Piketty's central idea
as taxing capitalism out of existence, Mason concluded, "My objection is
not that it is too radical but, lacking any explanation of which social
forces might enact it, not radical enough."
Paul Collier of New Statesman
wrote, "There is much of value here and many of its ideas are
insightful. But in the end, if this becomes the agenda of the left, it
will exchange one cul-de-sac for another." Collier claims that Piketty
"conflates opposition to open borders with hatred of immigrants".
Collier also said the northern working class in the U.K. would likely
prefer a tax on the capital appreciation of the ABs who own London
property to Piketty's recommendations, and that "it is ethically better
that you should save to help your children rather than lavish
consumption on yourself now".
Cole Stangler of The Nation
discussed how Piketty differs from Marx and Engels, in that Piketty
views major transformations in economics as shaped by various factors
(like religious beliefs, sense of national belonging, and crises)
whereas Marx and Engels famously described the history of all society as
a history mainly of class struggle. Stangler wrote that while some
might find nuanced Piketty's lack of identification of a central force
and his unpacking of each major transformation "on its own terms,
insisting on a multitude of alternative paths that might have been
followed at any given moment [...] others may be put off by its
unwillingness to dig in and take sides." Stangler also argued against
the privileging of ideological struggle over class struggle by arguing
that some groups are selfish and "simply aren't interested in a
good-faith debate [...] one can't help but wonder if [Piketty]
underplays the extent to which individuals' access to and relationship
with wealth [...] influences how they look at the world and engage in
politics."
Tyler Cowen's
words were mostly unfavorable. While he argued that there is a
"considerable sum of useful and valuable material" and praised as
"carefully done" Piketty's history of wealth and property accumulation,
Cowen dismissed his commentary on recent events as "distorted and
unreliable. There is massive distrust of the wealthy in this book, and
virtually no distrust of concentrated state power." Cowen suggested that
the high innovation of the United States and that, according to him,
real wages are higher in the United States than in Western Europe stand
as evidence against Piketty's worldview. Till Breyer and Felix Kersting reported in Critical Inquiry
that his "concrete historical analysis seems to run somewhat counter
to” his view of ideas as autonomous, and actually supports the view that
crises and struggles are needed for changes in ideological structures.
In Financial Times, Raghuram Rajan wrote that Capital and Ideology
"reflects a prodigious amount of scholarship" but would not persuade
those who disagreed. Rajan said that studies had debunked Piketty's
implicit assumption that today's rich are largely the "idle rich"; that
the high growth from 1950 to 1980 was dependent on a number of factors
that are unlikely to be repeated; that "we never actually ran the
high-tax experiment" because tax loopholes were abundant in that period;
and that other factors besides tax policy determine inequality. Rajan
also argued, of the author's vision of participatory socialism, that "it
is unclear what would offer a countervailing balance to an overpowerful
state [...] Most people will have little sense of control over their
futures." Rajan said, "Inequality is a real problem today, but it is the
inequality of opportunity, of access to capabilities, of place, not
just of incomes and wealth."
Economic historian Harold James
wrote that "Piketty largely leaves war and war finance out of his
account, and his extensive discussion of property and the French
Revolution amazingly omits the assignat inflation. Piketty begins with
an appeal to social scientists that they learn more history, but
choosing which bits of history to include and which to exclude is always
likely to be a matter for contestation."
Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg
said, in response to the high proposed taxes, that "Piketty's book
doesn't do a good job of explaining how an inevitable collapse in
property prices will affect the tax base and investment — or, indeed, in
what form assets will be parceled out if the rich can't sell 90% of
their assets immediately." Bershidsky also wrote, "I'm pretty sure
Piketty overestimates the role inequality has played in the recent rise
of [political forces that want to focus on identity and tradition rather
than any economic vision]."
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, however, wrote that the book is too tepid,
stating that Piketty ignores "key Marxist insights about dynamics such
as the profit motive, unequal access to and ability to develop technology, and labour-squeezing cost-cutting."
In Paul Krugman's
unfavorable review, he praised the Pikettian method of using "a
combination of extrapolation and guesswork to produce quantitative
estimates for eras that predate modern data collection" as applied "to
very good effect" in Capital and Ideology. But he also questions
whether Piketty knows enough to have constructed valid claims about the
dozens of societies he discusses, as well as whether all of the case
studies strengthen Piketty's core argument that rising inequality
throughout history is fundamentally due to ideology and politics rather
than economics and technology (with Krugman noting Evsey Domar's
claims on the reasons for serfdom in Russia). Krugman also argued that
the white working class in the U.S. would probably not support Piketty's
policies. Despite saying that "the book does advance at least the
outline of a grand theory of inequality, which might be described as
Marx on his head", Krugman concluded by asserting that he was unsure
what the book's central message was.
Ewan McGaughey in Oeconomia described Capital and Ideology
as "an encyclopaedic, data driven, and intensely rewarding work,
spanning the world's modern history and contemporary politics", but
sought to emphasise that "inequality of economic power is even more
extreme than inequality of wealth and income". On top of the lack of workplace democracy
on which Piketty focuses, there is also a need to democratise capital,
by ensuring the true investors in pensions or mutual funds can control
votes taken by asset managers or banks. Largely agreeing with Piketty,
he argued that "the legal construction of markets can go very far to
pre-empt unjustified inequality, before redistributive taxation", but
stressed that the meaning of a just society goes further than a fair
distribution of wealth, and ensures everyone can develop their potential
to the fullest. "Perhaps the greatest achievement of Piketty's work",
he concludes "could be to bring economics firmly back to the values in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."
Fact-checkers from The Washington Post (top, monthly), the Toronto Star and CNN(bottom, weekly) compiled data on "false or misleading claims", and
"false claims", respectively. The peaks corresponded in late 2018 to the midterm elections, in late 2019 to his impeachment inquiry, and in late 2020 to the presidential election. The Post reported 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years,an average of more than 20.9 per day.
During and after his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. The Washington Post's fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day. The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of 6.1 per day. Commentators and fact-checkers have described the scale of Trump's mendacity as "unprecedented" in American politics, and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities. Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found "significant evidence" of an intent to deceive.
By June 2019, after initially resisting, many news organizations began to describe some of his falsehoods as "lies". The Washington Post said his frequent repetition of claims he knew to be false amounted to a campaign based on disinformation. Trump campaign CEO and presidency chief strategist Steve Bannon said that the press, rather than Democrats, was Trump's primary adversary and "the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
On June 8, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump
on one count of making "false statements and representations",
specifically by hiding subpoenaed classified documents from his own
attorney who was trying to find and return them to the government. In August 2023, 21 of Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election were listed in his Washington, D.C. indictment, while 27 were listed in his Georgia indictment.
Veracity and politics
"It has long been a truism that politicians lie," wrote Carole McGranahan for the American Ethnologist
journal in 2017. However, "Donald Trump is different" from other
politicians, stated McGranahan, citing that Trump is the most
"accomplished and effective liar" thus far to have ever participated in
American politics. McGranahan felt that "the frequency, degree, and
impact of lying in politics are now unprecedented" as a result of Trump.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University
stated that past U.S. presidents have occasionally "lied or misled the
country," but none of them were a "serial liar" like Trump. Donnel Stern, writing in the Psychoanalytic Dialogues
journal in 2019, declared: "We expect politicians to stretch the truth.
But Trump is a whole different animal," because Trump "lies as a
policy," and he "will say anything" to satisfy his supporters or
himself.
Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth, writing for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
in 2017, described how lies have "always been an integral part of
politics and political communication". However, Trump was "delivering
untruths on an unprecedented scale" in U.S. politics, both during his
presidential campaign and during his presidency. Skjeseth also commented
that no one in French politics was comparable to Trump in his provision
of falsehoods.
Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times
described in 2017 that U.S. presidents "of all stripes" have previously
misled the public, either accidentally or "very purposefully". Barabak
provided examples of Ronald Reagan, who falsely stated that he had filmed Nazi death camps, and Barack Obama, who falsely stated that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" under his Affordable Care Act.
However, Barabak goes on to state that "White House scholars and other
students of government agree there has never been a president like
Donald Trump, whose volume of falsehoods, misstatements and serial
exaggerations" is unparalleled.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote that "lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump's campaign and presidency".
Thomas B. Edsall wrote "Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency."
George C. Edwards III wrote: "Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president. There is no one that is a close second."
Use of repetition
Trump is conscious of the value of repetition to get his lies believed. He demonstrated this knowledge when he instructed Stephanie Grisham,
his White House press secretary, to use his method of lying: "As long
as you keep repeating something, it doesn't matter what you say."
Trump effectively uses the Big lie technique's method of repetition to exploit the illusory truth effect, also known as the 'illusion of truth effect', a tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure.
Research has studied Trump's use of the effect.
New research published in Public
Opinion Quarterly reveals a correlation between the number of times
President Donald Trump repeated falsehoods during his presidency and
misperceptions among Republicans, and that the repetition effect was
stronger on the beliefs of people who consume information primarily from
right-leaning news outlets.
The Washington Post fact-checker created a new category of
falsehoods in December 2018, the "Bottomless Pinocchio," for falsehoods
repeated at least twenty times (so often "that there can be no question
the politician is aware his or her facts are wrong"). Trump was the only
politician who met the standard of the category, with 14 statements
that immediately qualified. According to The Washington Post, Trump repeated some falsehoods so many times he had effectively engaged in disinformation.
Some examples of his use of repetition are: falsely claiming there had been massive election fraud and that he won the 2020 election; that The Apprentice was the top-rated television program in America; that he was of Swedish descent; claiming in 2015 that the actual unemployment rate of around 5% "isn't reflective [of reality]... I've seen numbers of 24%, I actually saw a number of 42% unemployment"; that the US would "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it"; that he, and not former President Barack Obama, had passed the Veterans Choice Act; that he and his campaign did not collude or cooperate with Russia, even though Mueller found cooperation and explained that he did not investigate "collusion", only "conspiracy" and "coordination"; and characterizing the economy during his presidency as the best in American history.
Within years of expanding his father's property development business into Manhattan in the early 1970s, Trump attracted the attention of The New York Times
for his brash and controversial style, with one real-estate financier
observing in 1976, "His deals are dramatic, but they haven't come into
being. So far, the chief beneficiary of his creativity has been his
public image." Der Scutt, the prominent architect who designed Trump Tower,
said of Trump in 1976, "He's extremely aggressive when he sells, maybe
to the point of overselling. Like, he'll say the convention center is
the biggest in the world, when it really isn't. He'll exaggerate for the
purpose of making a sale."
A 1984 GQ profile of Trump quoted him stating he owned the whole block on Central Park South and Avenue of the Americas. GQ noted that the two buildings Trump owned in that area were likely less than a sixth of the block.
In a 2005 interview with Golf Magazine, Trump said he was able to purchase Mar-a-Lago
in 1985 by first purchasing the beach in front of it, then announcing
false plans to build large houses between Mar-a-Lago and the ocean (to
lower the price of Mar-a-Lago by blocking its view).
The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, has opened a civil investigation into Trump's business practices, especially regarding inflated property values. Additionally, she joined the Manhattan district attorney's office in a criminal investigation into possible property tax fraud by the Trump Organization.
The company is suspected of significantly misrepresenting its property
values: inflating reports to apply for loans, deflating reports to lower
tax bills. In February 2022, amid the ongoing civil and criminal probe, Mazars
informed the Trump Organization that it would no longer support the
accuracy of the previous decade of financial statements it had prepared
for the organization, suggesting that the Trump Organization had
provided it with false information. Mazars said that, furthermore, it
would no longer serve as the accountant for the Trump Organization nor
would it file personal tax returns for Donald and Melania Trump.
Other investments and debt
In 1984, Trump posed as his own spokesman John Barron and made false assertions of his wealth to secure a higher ranking on the Forbes 400
list of wealthy Americans, including by claiming he owned over 90
percent of his family's business. Audio recordings of these claims were
released in 2018 by journalist Jonathan Greenberg.
Following the October 1987 stock market crash,
Trump claimed to press that he had taken no losses and had sold all his
stock a month before. Per SEC filings he owned large stakes in some
companies during the crash. Forbes calculated that Trump had lost at least $19 million related to Resorts International stock, while journalist Gwenda Blair noted $22 million from stock in the Alexander's department store chain.
Challenging estimates of his net worth he considered too low, in 1989 Trump said he had very little debt. Reuters reported Trump owed $4 billion (~$7.96 billion in 2022) to more than 70 banks at the beginning of 1990.
In 1997, Ben Berzin Jr., who had been tasked with recovering at
least some of the $100 million (~$170 million in 2022) his bank had lent
Trump, said "During the time that I dealt with Mr. Trump, I was
continually surprised by his mastery of situational ethics. He does not
seem to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction."
A 1998 New York Observer article entitled "Tricky Donald Trump Beats Jerry Nadler
in Game of Politics" reported that "Nadler flatly calls Mr. Trump a
'liar'," quoting Nadler stating, "Trump got $6 million [in federal
money] in the dead of night when no one knew anything about it" by
slipping a provision into a $200 billion federal transportation bill.
During a 2005 deposition in a defamation lawsuit he initiated
about his worth, Trump said: "My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up
and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own
feelings... and that can change rapidly from day to day".
Philanthropy
David Fahrenthold investigated the long history of Trump's claims about his charitable giving and found little evidence the claims are true. Following Fahrenthold's reporting, the Attorney General of New York opened an inquiry into the Donald J. Trump Foundation's
fundraising practices, and ultimately issued a "notice of violation"
ordering the Foundation to stop raising money in New York. The Foundation had to admit it engaged in self-dealing practices to benefit Trump, his family, and businesses. Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his coverage of Trump's claimed charitable giving and casting "doubt on Donald Trump's assertions of generosity toward charities".
In 1983, when Trump was forming a business relationship with the New Jersey Generals
football team, he spoke about the team at a public forum. "He promised
the signing of superstar players he would never sign. He announced the
hiring of immortal coaches he would never hire. He scheduled a news
conference the next day to confirm all of it, and the next day never
came," CNN reporter Keith Olbermann
recalled in 2021. Following the forum, Trump approached Olbermann and,
rather than waiting for interview questions, began speaking into
Olbermann's microphone about "an entirely different set of coaches and players than he had from the podium."
In 1987, during testimony regarding an antitrust case between the United States Football League (USFL, a spring-time league of which Trump's New Jersey Generals were a franchise team) and the National Football League (NFL), Trump stated that he had had a meeting with NFL commissionerPete Rozelle
several years earlier where Rozelle offered him an NFL franchise in
exchange for keeping the USFL a spring-time league and not initiating a
lawsuit with the NFL. Rozelle denied having made this offer and stated that he was opposed to
Trump becoming an NFL team owner, with a person who was present at the
meeting between the two later stating that Rozelle told Trump, "As long
as I or my heirs are involved in the NFL, you will never be a franchise
owner in the league".
In 1996, Trump claimed he wagered $1 million (~$1.73 million in
2022) on 20-to-1 odds in a Las Vegas heavyweight title boxing match
between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. The Las Vegas Sun
reported that "while everyone is careful not to call Trump a liar," no
one in a position to know about such a sizable wager was aware of it.
In a 2004 book, The Games Do Count: America's Best and Brightest on the Power of Sports,
Trump claimed to have hit "the winning home run" when his school played
Cornwall High School in 1964, garnering a headline "TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN
THE GAME" in a local newspaper. Years later, a journalist discovered
that Trump's high school did not play Cornwall that year, nor did any
such local headline surface. (Furthermore, a classmate recalled a
separate incident in high school in which Trump had hit "a blooper the
fielders misplayed," sending the ball "just over the third baseman's
head," yet Trump insisted to him later: "I want you to remember this: I
hit the ball out of the ballpark!" The event had happened at a practice
field, not a ballpark.)
After purchasing the Trump National Golf Club in 2009, Trump erected The River of Blood monument between the 14th hole and the 15th tee with a plaque describing the blood of Civil War casualties that turned the river red. No such event ever took place at this site.
Other
In 1973,
the New York Times ran its first profile of Trump, stating he had
"graduated first in his class from the Wharton School of Finance of the
University of Pennsylvania" five years earlier.
However, in 1984, the New York Times Magazine shed light by pointing
out that "the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as
graduating with honors of any kind."
After three Trump casino executives died in a 1989 helicopter
crash, Trump claimed that he, too, had nearly boarded the helicopter.
The claim was denied 30 years later by a former vice president of the
Trump Organization.
Promoting his Trump University
after its formation in 2004, Trump asserted he would handpick all its
instructors. Michael Sexton, former president of the venture, stated in a
2012 deposition that Trump selected none of the instructors.
During a 2018 interview, television personality Billy Bush recounted a conversation he'd had with Trump years earlier in which he refuted Trump's repeated false claims that The Apprentice
was the top-rated television program in America. Bush recalled Trump
responding, "Billy, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That's
it: you just tell them and they believe. They just do."
Perceptions
The architect Philip Johnson said in 1984 that Trump often lied, adding "But it's sheer exuberance, exaggeration. It's never about anything important."
Alair Townsend, a former budget director and deputy mayor of New York City during the 1980s, and a former publisher of Crain's New York Business, said "I wouldn't believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized." Leona Helmsley later used this line as her own when she spoke about Trump in her November 1990 interview in Playboy magazine.
Trump often appeared in New York tabloid newspapers. Recalling her career with New York Post's Page Six column, Susany Mulcahy told Vanity Fair
in 2004, "I wrote about him a certain amount, but I actually would sit
back and be amazed at how often people would write about him in a
completely gullible way. He was a great character, but he was full of
crap 90 percent of the time." (Trump told the magazine, "I agree with
her 100 percent.")
Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive vice president
who worked for Trump from 1978 until 1998, said "he would tell the
staff his ridiculous lies, and after a while, no one believed a single
word he would say".
Tony Schwartz is a journalist who ghostwroteTrump: The Art of the Deal. In July 2016, Schwartz was interviewed by Jane Mayer for two articles in The New Yorker.
In them, he described Trump, who was running for president at the time,
highly unfavorably, and described how he came to regret writing The Art of the Deal. When Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal, he created the phrase "truthful hyperbole" as an "artful euphemism" to describe Trump's "loose relationship with the truth". This passage from the book provides the context, written in Trump's voice: "I play to people's fantasies...
People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest
and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent
form of exaggeration—and it's a very effective form of promotion". He said Trump "loved the phrase".
Schwartz said "deceit" is never "innocent". He added, "'Truthful
hyperbole' is a contradiction in terms. It's a way of saying, 'It's a
lie, but who cares?'" Schwartz repeated his criticism on Good Morning America and Real Time with Bill Maher, saying he "put lipstick on a pig".
Fearing that anti-German sentiments during and after World War II would negatively affect his business, Trump's father, Fred Trump, began claiming Swedish descent. The falsehood was repeated by Donald to the press and in The Art of the Deal, where he claimed that his grandfather, Friedrich Trump, "came here from Sweden as a child". In the same book, Donald also said his father was born in New Jersey.
When asked during his U.S. presidency why he upheld the false narrative
about his father being Swedish, Trump said, "My father spent a lot of
time [in Sweden]. But it was never really something really discussed
very much." Additionally, as president, Trump on at least three occasions claimed his father was born in Germany. Trump's father is of German descent but was born in the Bronx, New York. In one case Trump said his father was "born in a very wonderful place in Germany," and another time stated, "I was raised by the biggest kraut of them all," invoking an ethnic slur for a German (particularly a soldier of either world war). The Guardian pointed out the irony of Trump previously supporting the "birtherism" conspiracy theory asserting Barack Obama was born in Africa.
On September 11, 2001, after at least one of the World Trade Center towers was destroyed, Trump gave a telephone interview with WWOR-TV in New York. He said: "40 Wall Street
actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it
was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then,
when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second
tallest, and now it's the tallest." Once the Twin Towers
had collapsed, the 71-story Trump Building at 40 Wall Street became the
second-tallest building in Lower Manhattan, 25 feet (7.6 m) shorter
than the building at 70 Pine Street.
Two days after the attack, Trump stood near Ground Zero in a suit
and tie and told a television station that he was paying over two
hundred of his employees to come "find and identify victims". No record
of such work has ever been found. Over two decades later, in 2023, he
reposted the claim on Truth Social.
At a rally in Columbus, Ohio,
in November 2015, Trump said "I have a view—a view in my apartment that
was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center." He added "and I
watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit ... I saw
the second plane hit the building and I said, 'Wow that's
unbelievable.'" At the time of the 2001 attack, Trump lived in Trump
Tower in midtown Manhattan, more than four miles (6 km) away from where
the World Trade Center towers once stood. His campaign did not respond
to inquiries about how it was possible for him to see people jumping
from that far away. He still lived in that building when he made his
comments at the 2015 rally.
In another rally in 2015 on November 21 in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump claimed seeing "thousands and thousands" of Arab Americans cheering during the collapse of the World Trade Center on the other side of the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey. Several news organizations like the Associated Press (AP), The Washington Post, and The Star-Ledger
reported rumors of 9/11 celebrations in New Jersey but they were each
found to be "unfounded", unsourced, or finding that people were
memorializing the event rather than celebrating it. Nobody else was
known to remember seeing masses of thousands of people celebrating after
9/11. Furthermore, Trump, living in Midtown Manhattan would not have
been able to hear or see people cheering in New Jersey with a clear
view.
Additionally, during his 2016 campaign, Trump falsely claimed to have predicted the attacks in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, as well as that Osama bin Laden was not well known at the time the book was published and that it called for the U.S. to "take him out".
Trump promoted a number of conspiracy theories that have lacked
empirical support. These have included those related to Barack Obama's
citizenship from 2011. Known as "birther" theories, these allege that
Obama was not born in the U.S. In 2011, Trump took credit for pushing the White House to release
Obama's "long-form" birth certificate, while raising doubt about its
legitimacy, and in 2016 admitted that Obama was a natural-born citizen from Hawaii. He later falsely stated that Hillary Clinton started the conspiracy theories.
In September 2015, Boing Boing reproduced newspaper articles from 1927, which reported that Trump's father had been arrested that year at a Ku Klux Klan march, though had been discharged. Multiple articles on the incident list Fred Trump's address (in Jamaica, Queens), which he is recorded as sharing with his mother in the 1930 census and a 1936 wedding announcement. Trump, then a candidate for U.S. president, admitted to The New York Times
that the address was "where my grandmother lived and my father, early
on." Then, when asked about the 1927 story, he denied that his father
had ever lived at that address, and said the arrest "never happened",
and, "There was nobody charged."
Within six months of Trump's announcement of his presidential campaign, FactCheck.org
declared Trump the "King of Whoppers", stating, "In the 12 years of
FactCheck.org's existence, we've never seen his match. He stands out not
only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for
his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong."
During his campaign, Trump claimed that his father, Fred Trump,
had given him "a small loan of a million dollars," which he used to
build "a company that's worth more than $10 billion," denying Marco Rubio's allegation that he had inherited $200 million from his father. An October 2018 New York Times
exposé on Fred and Donald Trump's finances concludes that Donald "was a
millionaire by age 8," and that he had received $413 million (adjusted
for inflation) from his father's business empire over his lifetime,
including over $60 million ($140 million in 2018 currency) in loans,
which were largely unreimbursed.
Trump claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail in 2015 that the
actual unemployment rate of around 5% "isn't reflective [of reality]... I've seen numbers of 24%, I actually saw a number of 42% unemployment". PolitiFact rated this claim "Pants on Fire," its rating for the most egregious falsehoods. Jeremy Adam Smith, writing for the Greater Good Magazine,
said Trump's falsehoods may be "blue lies," which are "told on behalf
of a group, that can actually strengthen the bonds among the members of
that group". As a result, he posited, Trump's dishonesty does not cause
him to lose the support of his political base, even while it "infuriates
and confuses almost everyone else".
In November 2015, Buzzfeed News'
Andrew Kaczynski reported that Trump, despite having claimed to have
the best memory in the world, actually had a history of "conveniently
forgetting" people or organizations in ways that benefit him. In July
2016, PolitiFact's Linda Qiu also pointed out that despite Trump's boast
for his memory, he "seems to suffer bouts of amnesia when it comes to
his own statements". Both Kaczynski and Qiu cited examples of Trump's
stating he did not know anything about former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, despite past statements showing he clearly knew who Duke was.
Over three months before the 2016 presidential election, Trump claimed the election was going to be "rigged".
Throughout his campaign and into his presidency, President Trump
repeatedly claimed that the US would "build the wall and make Mexico pay
for it". President of MexicoEnrique Peña Nieto said that his country would not pay for the wall, and ultimately never did. While not unusual for a campaign promise
to not pan out, Trump's insistence that Mexico would pay for it was a
central element of his campaign and continued for years afterward. At
the February 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference,
Trump again reiterated that Mexico would be paying for the wall,
saying, "Mexico is paying for it and it's every bit—it's better than the
wall that was projected."
Presidency
Fact-checking Trump
Trump's statements as president have engaged a host of fact-checkers. Tony Burman
wrote: "The falsehoods and distortions uttered by Trump and his senior
officials have particularly inflamed journalists and have been
challenged—resulting in a growing prominence of 'fact-checkers' and
investigative reporting." The situation got worse over time, as described by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ashley Parker: "President Trump seems to be saying more and more things that aren't true."
Glenn Kessler said in 2017 that in his job as a fact-checker for The Washington Post
there was no comparison between Trump and other politicians. Kessler
gave his worst rating to other politicians 15 percent to 20 percent of
the time, but gave it to Trump 63 percent to 65 percent of the time.
Kessler wrote that Trump was the most fact-challenged politician that
he had ever encountered and lamented that "the pace and volume of the
president's misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up". Kessler and others have described how Trump's lying has created an alternate/alternative reality. David Zurawik says we should "just assume Trump's always lying and fact check him backwards" because that's "how to cover a habitual liar".
The Washington Post fact-checker created a new category of
falsehoods in December 2018, the "Bottomless Pinocchio," for falsehoods
repeated at least twenty times (so often "that there can be no question
the politician is aware his or her facts are wrong"). Trump was the
only politician who met the standard of the category, with 14 statements
that immediately qualified. According to The Washington Post, Trump repeated some falsehoods so many times he had effectively engaged in disinformation.
Glenn Kessler wrote:
The president keeps going long
after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to
replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is
not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely
injecting false information into the national conversation.
Professor Robert Prentice summarized the views of many fact-checkers:
Here's the problem: As fact checker
Glenn Kessler noted in August, whereas Clinton lies as much as the
average politician, President Donald Trump's lying is "off the charts."
No prominent politician in memory bests Trump for spouting spectacular,
egregious, easily disproved lies. The birther claim. The vote fraud
claim. The attendance at the inauguration claim. And on and on and on.
Every fact checker – Kessler, Factcheck.org, Snopes.com, PolitiFact –
finds a level of mendacity unequaled by any politician ever scrutinized.
For instance, 70 percent of his campaign statements checked by
PolitiFact were mostly false, totally false, or "pants on fire" false.
At the end of 2018, Kessler provided a run-down summary of Trump's accelerating rate of false statements during the year:
Trump began 2018 on a similar pace
as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false
claims a month. But his rate suddenly exploded in June, when he topped
500 falsehoods, as he appeared to shift to campaign mode. He uttered
almost 500 more in both July and August, almost 600 in September, more
than 1,200 in October and almost 900 in November. In December, Trump
drifted back to the mid-200s.
Several major fact-checking sites regularly fact-checked Trump, including:
PolitiFact, which awarded Trump its "Lie of the Year" in 2015, 2017 and 2019.
FactCheck.org, which dubbed Trump the "King of Whoppers" in 2015.
The Washington Post said in January 2020 that Trump had made more than 16,241 false or misleading claims as president, an average of about 14.8 such statements per day.
The Toronto Star which said that, as of June 2019, Trump had made 5,276 false statements since his inauguration.
As late as June 2018, the news media were debating whether to use the
word "lie" to describe Trump's falsehoods. That month, however, many
news organizations, including CNN, Star Tribune,Financial Times,Los Angeles Times,Chicago Tribune,The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy began describing some of Trump's false statements as lies. The Toronto Star
was one of the first outlets to use the word "lie" to describe Trump's
statements, and continues to do so frequently. Still, some organizations
have continued to shy away from the term.
On June 5, 2019, Paul Farhi wrote that Glenn Kessler, author of The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column, had used the word lie only once to describe Trump's statements, although he has sometimes used other terminology that implies lying. Since then, The Washington Post's fact-checking team has written the 2020 book Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth. The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.
By October 9, 2019, The Washington Post's fact-checking team documented that Trump had "made 13,435 false or misleading claims over 993 days". On October 18, 2019, the Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter described the situation:
A thousand days of Trump. We
often hear from readers wondering how President Trump's penchant for
falsehoods stacks up in comparison to previous presidents. But there is
no comparison: Trump exists in a league of his own. Deception,
misdirection, gaslighting, revisionism, absurd boasts, and in some cases, provable lies, are core to his politics.
After departing the White House on the final day of his presidency, January 20, 2021, Trump gave a farewell address at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland prior to departing on Air Force One for his residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
The AP fact-checked his speech, and reported that it included a number
of false statements about his presidency and his administration's
accomplishments. These included the statements that he passed the
largest tax cuts in history; that the U.S. economy during his tenure was
the greatest in U.S. history; that he achieved record job creation;
that his administration rebuilt both the U.S. military and the American
manufacturing industry; that he destroyed the ISIS caliphate; and a reiteration of his previously repeated falsehood that he, and not former President Barack Obama, had passed the Veterans Choice Act. These falsehoods added to the 30,573 falsehoods that The Washington Post's fact-checker had tallied by the end of Trump's presidency, an average of 21 falsehoods a day.
Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found "significant evidence" of an intent to deceive:
Analyzing Trump's tweets with a regression function designed to predict
true and false claims based on their language and composition, it finds
significant evidence of intent underlying most of Trump's false claims,
and makes the case for calling them lies when that outcome agrees with
the results of traditional fact-checking procedures.... We argue, based
on our findings here, that intent to deceive is a reasonable inference
from most of Trump's false tweets, and that drawing that conclusion when
the evidence warrants could help scholars and journalists alike better
explain the strategic functions of political falsehoods.
Credibility polling
According
to a September 2018 CNN-SSRS poll of 1,003 respondents, only 32%
percent found Trump honest and trustworthy, the worst read in CNN
polling history. The number was 33% on election day, November 8, 2016. In June 2020, a Gallup
poll of 1,034 adults within the U.S. found that 36% found Trump honest
and trustworthy. By comparison, 60% of respondents found President Obama
honest and trustworthy in June 2012 during his re-election campaign.
Commentary and analysis
As president, Trump frequently made false statements in public speeches and remarks. Trump uttered "at least one false or misleading claim per day on 91 of his first 99 days" in office according to The New York Times, and 1,318 total in his first 263 days in office according to the "Fact Checker" political analysis column of The Washington Post. By the Post's tally, it took Trump 601 days to reach 5,000 false or misleading statements and another 226 days to reach the 10,000 mark. For the seven weeks leading up to the midterm elections, it rose to an average of 30 per day from 4.9 during his first 100 days in office. The Post found that Trump averaged 15 false statements per day during 2018.
The New York Timeseditorial board
frequently lambasted Trump's dishonesty. In September 2018, the board
called him "a president with no clear relation to the truth". The following month, the board published an opinion piece titled, "Donald Trump Is Lyin' Up a Storm".
James Comey
had frequent discussions with Trump, and in his first major interview
after his firing he described Trump as a serial liar who tells
"baffling, unnecessary" falsehoods:
Sometimes he's lying in ways that
are obvious, sometimes he's saying things that we may not know are true
or false and then there's a spectrum in between... he is someone who is—for whom the truth is not a high value.
The Washington Post commentator Greg Sargent pointed out eight
instances where government officials either repeated falsehoods or came
up with misleading information to support falsehoods asserted by Trump,
including various false claims about terrorists crossing or attempting
to cross the Mexican border, that a 10% middle class tax cut had been
passed, and a doctored video justifying Jim Acosta's removal from the White House press room.
James P. Pfiffner, writing for The Evolving American Presidency
book series, wrote that compared to previous presidents, Trump tells
"vastly" more "conventional lies" that politicians usually tell to avoid
criticism or improve their image. However, Pfiffner emphasized that
"the most significant" lies told by Trump are instead "egregious false
statements that are demonstrably contrary to well-known facts," because
by causing disagreements about what the facts are, then people cannot
properly evaluate their government: "Political power rather than
rational discourse then becomes the arbiter."
Selman Özdan, writing in the journal Postdigital Science and Education,
describes that "many" of Trump's statements in interviews or on Twitter
"may now be classed as bullshit," with their utter disregard for the
truth, and their focus on telling "a version of reality that suits
Trump's aims". She added that these statements are "often" written in a
way which criticizes or mocks others, while offering a misleading
version of Trump's accomplishments to improve his image.
Daniel Dale, writing for The Washington Post,
described fact-checking Trump as being "like fact-checking one of those
talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except
if none of those phrases were true", noting that Trump had repeatedly
and falsely claimed that he had passed the Veterans Choice Act and that U.S. Steel
was building six, seven, eight or nine plants (the company had invested
in two existing plants). Dale added: "Many of Trump's false claims are
so transparently wrong that I can fact-check them with a Google search."
Susan Glasser
wrote that falsehoods are "part of his political identity" and quoted
Glenn Kessler's description of them as "Trump's political 'secret
sauce'". She described how "The White House assault on the truth is not
an accident—it is intentional." When comparing Trump to Nixon, she
quoted Barry Goldwater, who described Nixon as "the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life", but she did not stop there. She spoke to Morton Halperin
"who oversaw the writing of the Pentagon Papers and then served on
Nixon's National Security Council staff... Halperin insisted, strongly,
that Nixon wasn't nearly as damaging to the institution of the
Presidency as Trump has been. 'He's far worse than Nixon,' Halperin told
me, 'certainly as a threat to the country'."
Purpose and effect
A
few days after Trump's January 20, 2017, inauguration, some experts
expressed serious concerns about how Trump and his staff showed
"arrogance" and "lack of respect...for the American people" by making
"easily contradicted" false statements that rose to a "new level" above
the "general stereotype that politicians lie". They considered the
"degree of fabrication" as "simply breathtaking", egregious, and
creating an "extraordinarily dangerous situation" for the country.
They elaborated on why they thought Trump and his team were so deceptive: he was using classic gaslighting in a "systematic, sophisticated attempt" as a "political weapon";
he was undermining trust and creating doubt and hatred of the media and
all it reports; owning his supporters and implanting "his own version
of reality" in their minds; creating confusion so people are vulnerable,
don't know what to do, and thus "gain more power over them"; inflating a
"sense of his own popularity"; and making people "give up trying to
discern the truth".
If Donald Trump can undercut
America's trust in all media, he then starts to own them and can start
to literally implant his own version of reality.
Specific topics
Inaugural crowd
Trump's presidency began with a series of falsehoods originating from Trump himself. On the day after his inauguration,
he falsely accused the media of lying about the size of the
inauguration crowd. He then exaggerated the size, and White House press
secretary Sean Spicer backed up his claims. When Spicer was accused of intentionally misstating the figures, Kellyanne Conway, in an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, defended Spicer by saying he merely presented alternative facts. Todd responded by saying, "Alternative facts are not facts; they're falsehoods."
In September 2018, a government photographer admitted that he, at Trump's request,
edited pictures of the inauguration to make the crowd appear larger:
"The photographer cropped out empty space 'where the crowd ended' for a
new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his
presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was
smaller than Barack Obama's in 2009."
Trump went on to claim that his electoral college victory in 2016 was a landslide; that three of the states he did not win in the 2016 election had "serious voter fraud"; and that he didn't win the popular vote because Clinton received 3 million to 5 million illegal votes. Trump made his Trump Tower wiretapping allegations in March 2017, which the Department of Justice twice refuted. In January 2018, Trump claimed that texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were tantamount to "treason," but The Wall Street Journal reviewed them and concluded that the texts "show no evidence of a conspiracy against" Trump.
Denial of Russian hacking and election interference
Trump has frequently denied and/or sowed doubt on the fact that
Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and interfered in the 2016 election.
He has made many different claims, such as that there was no hacking at
all, or that other countries than Russia did it, or that the DNC hacked
itself and that Seth Rich
was involved. He has said that Russia didn't try to get him elected and
often called allegations of Russian meddling "a hoax". "Trump is fond
of tossing out conspiracy theories, even if just to add a sliver of
doubt. His supporters have embraced his conspiracy theories, especially
when it comes to Mueller's investigation." The Russia investigation
conclusively proved that Russian intelligence was behind the hackings
and interference.
Robert Mueller, who led a Special Counsel investigation, concluded that Russian interference was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law", and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations.
The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump
campaign officials and associated Americans, on unrelated charges. The Special Counsel's report,
made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump
campaign and Russian officials but concluded that, though the Trump
campaign welcomed the Russian activities and expected to benefit from
them, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or
coordination charges against Trump or his associates. Russian government
interfered in the election in "sweeping and systematic fashion" and
violated U.S. criminal laws.
Trump has repeatedly claimed he and his campaign did not collude with
Russia, and Republicans and many otherwise reliable sources have
repeated that false claim even though Mueller explained that he did not investigate "collusion", only "conspiracy" and "coordination". The claim that there was no collusion has been described as a myth.
In a January 2019 interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani
undermined Trump's claim when he "claimed Wednesday night that he
'never said there was no collusion' between President Trump's campaign
and Russia leading up to the 2016 presidential election."
Giuliani: [complained about] "false reporting" on the Russia investigation. Cuomo:
"Mr. Mayor, false reporting is saying that nobody in the campaign had
any contacts with Russia. False reporting is saying that there has been
no suggestion of any kind of collusion between the campaign and any
Russians." Giuliani: "You just misstated my position. I never said
there was no collusion between the campaign, or between people in the
campaign." Cuomo: "Yes, you have."
After his comments on CNN, Giuliani made statements that NPR
described as an "apparent reversal" from his TV interview: He said
"'there was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form'
and that he had 'no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands
of people who worked on the campaign'."
The investigation found there were at least 140 contacts between
Trump or 18 of his associates with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks or
their intermediaries, though the contacts were insufficient to show an
illegal "conspiracy".
Dismissal of FBI director
On May 9, 2017, Trump dismissedJames Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying he had accepted the recommendations of U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein
to dismiss Comey. In their respective letters, neither Trump, Sessions
nor Rosenstein mentioned the issue of an FBI investigation into the many
suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies, with Rosenstein writing that Comey should be dismissed for his handling of the conclusion of the FBI investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy, a rationale seconded by Sessions. On May 11, Trump said in an NBC News interview: "Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey...
in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you
know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story". On May 31, Trump wrote on Twitter, "I never fired James Comey because of Russia!"
Personal lawyer
In 2017 and in the first half of 2018, Trump repeatedly praised his personal attorney Michael Cohen
as "a great lawyer," "a loyal, wonderful person," "a good man" and
someone Trump "always liked" and "respected". In the second half of
2018, with Cohen testifying to federal investigations, Trump attacked
Cohen as a "rat," "a weak person, and not a very smart person" and
described Cohen as "a PR person who did small legal work, very small legal work... He represented me very little".
In 2018, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he did not know about a payment of $130,000 that Cohen made to porn actressStormy Daniels or where Cohen had obtained the money from. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post described this statement as a lie, as Trump had personally reimbursed Cohen for the payment.
In 2021, several lawyers who had previously worked with Trump
reportedly declined to assist him in asserting executive privilege over
the subpoenas served by the House Select Committee on January 6. One of these lawyers was William Burck, who had once represented 11 Trump associates regarding the Mueller investigation.
When Trump was asked about the refusal of his former lawyers to involve
themselves in his current legal battle, he said: "I don't even know who
they are... I am using lawyers who have been with us from the
beginning."
Political commentators and high-ranking politicians from both
sides of the political spectrum have dismissed Trump's allegations as
lacking evidence and maintained that the FBI's use of Halper as a covert
informant was in no way improper. Trump's claims about when the
counterintelligence investigation was initiated have been shown to be
false.
A December 2019 Justice Department Inspector General report "found no
evidence that the FBI attempted to place any [Confidential Human
Sources] within the Trump campaign, recruit members of the Trump
campaign as CHSs, or task CHSs to report on the Trump campaign."
During the 2018 California wildfires which ultimately caused $3.5
billion (~$4.04 billion in 2022) in damages and killed 103 people, Trump
misrepresented a method that Finland uses to control wildfires. After
speaking with President of FinlandSauli Niinistö,
Trump reported on November 17, 2018, that Niinistö had called Finland a
"forest nation" and that "they spend a lot of time on raking and
cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problem." Trump's
comments sparked online memes
about raking leaves. President Niinistö later clarified that there is
"a good surveillance system and network" for forest management in
Finland and that he did not recall having mentioned raking.
Special counsel investigation
In March 2019, Trump asserted that the Mueller special counsel investigation
was "illegal". Previously in June 2018, Trump argued that "the
appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!"
However, in August 2018, Dabney Friedrich, a Trump-appointed judge on the DC District Court ruled the appointment was constitutional, as did a unanimous three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in February 2019.
The Mueller Report
asserted that Trump's family members, campaign staff, Republican
backers, administration officials, and his associates lied or made false
assertions, with the plurality of falsehoods from Trump himself (mostly
while he was president), whether unintentional or not, to the public,
Congress, or authorities, per a CNN analysis.
Also in March 2019, following the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of the findings of the completed special counsel investigation,
Trump tweeted: "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total
EXONERATION". However, Barr had quoted special counsel Mueller as
writing that "while this report does not conclude that the President
committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him" on whether he had
committed obstruction of justice. Barr declined to bring an
obstruction-of-justice charge against the President. In testimony to
Congress in May 2019, Barr said he "didn't exonerate" Trump on
obstruction as that was not the role of the Justice Department.
Trump, Republicans, and many otherwise reliable sources have repeatedly and falsely claimed that Mueller found "no collusion", even though Mueller explained that he did not investigate "collusion", only "conspiracy" and "coordination". The claim has been described as a myth.
Through his first 28 months in office, Trump repeatedly and falsely
characterized the economy during his presidency as the best in American
history.
As of March 2019, Trump's most repeated falsehoods, each repeated
during his presidency more than a hundred times, were that a U.S. trade deficit would be a "loss" for the country, that his tax cuts were the largest in American history, that the economy was the strongest ever during his administration, and that the wall
was already being built. By August, he had made this last claim at
least 190 times. He also made 100 false claims about NATO spending,
whether on the part of the U.S. or other NATO members.
Trump claimed during the campaign that the U.S. real GDP could
grow at rate of "5 or even 6" percent under his policies. During 2018,
the economy grew at 2.9%, the same rate as 2015 under President Obama.
Longer-term projections beyond 2019 by the CBO and Federal Reserve are
for growth below 2%. President Obama's advisers explained growth limits
as "sluggish worker productivity and shrinking labor supply as baby
boomers retire".
Trump claimed in October 2017 he would eliminate the federal debt
over eight years, even though it was $19 (~$22.00 in 2022) trillion at
the time. However, the annual deficit (debt addition) in 2018 was nearly $800 billion, about 60% higher than the CBO
forecast of $500 billion when Trump took office. The CBO January 2019
forecast for the 2018–2027 debt addition is now 40% higher, at $13.0
trillion rather than $9.4 trillion when Trump was inaugurated.
Other forecasts place the debt addition over a decade at $16 trillion,
bringing the total to around $35 trillion. Rather than a debt to GDP
ratio in 2028 of 89% had Obama's policies continued, CBO now estimates
this figure at 107%, assuming Trump's tax cuts for individuals are
extended past 2025.
Trump sought to present his economic policies as successful in
encouraging businesses to invest in new facilities and create jobs. In
this effort, he took credit on several occasions for business
investments that began before he became president.These exporters were bearing the burden of his tariffs, not Americans, a claim PolitiFact rated as "false". Studies indicate U.S. consumers and purchasers of imports are bearing the cost and that tariffs are essentially a regressive tax.
For example, CBO reported in January 2020 that: "Tariffs are expected
to reduce the level of [U.S.] real GDP by roughly 0.5 percent and raise
consumer prices by 0.5 percent in 2020. As a result, tariffs are also
projected to reduce average real household income by $1,277 (in 2019
dollars) in 2020." While Trump has argued that tariffs would reduce the trade deficit, it expanded to a record dollar level in 2018.
Trump repeatedly claimed that the U.S. had a $500 billion annual
trade deficit with China before his presidency; the actual deficit never
reached $400 billion prior to his presidency.
The following table illustrates some of the key economic
variables in the last three years of the Obama Administration
(2014–2016) and the first three years of the Trump Administration
(2017–2019). Trump often claimed the economy was doing better than it
was, after he was elected.
President Trump repeatedly and falsely said he inherited his administration's family separation policy
from Obama, his predecessor. In November 2018, Trump said, "President
Obama separated children from families, and all I did was take the same
law, and then I softened the law." In April 2019, Trump said, "President
Obama separated children. They had child separation; I was the one that
changed it." In June 2019, Trump said, "President Obama had a
separation policy. I didn't have it. He had it. I brought the families
together. I'm the one that put them together... I inherited separation,
and I changed the plan". Trump's assertion was false because the Obama
administration had no policy systematically separating migrant families,
while "zero tolerance" was not instituted until April 2018. PolitiFact
quoted immigration experts saying that under the Obama administration
families were detained and released together and separations rarely
happened.
In June 2019, writer E. Jean Carroll
accused Trump of raping her in a department store in the mid-1990s. In
an official statement, Trump said that (1) he had "never met [Carroll]
in my life" although she provided a photograph of them socializing in
1987, and (2) the store shared security footage debunking the claim
though in his 2022 deposition for the case, he denied having reached out
to the company.
Trump was also criticized for saying in 2019 that Carroll was "not
[his] type" but in his deposition confusing her in the aforementioned
photograph for his ex-wifeMarla Maples.
Article II and unlimited executive power
In July 2019, during a speech addressing youth at Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit in Washington, The Washington Post reported that, while criticizing the Mueller investigation, Trump falsely claimed Article Two of the U.S. Constitution ensures, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president." The Post clarified that "Article II grants the president 'executive power'. It does not indicate the president has total power".
President Trump receives an update on Hurricane Dorian on August 29, 2019. This map was later altered to show the hurricane impacting Alabama.
As Hurricane Dorian
approached the Atlantic coast in late August 2019, Trump presented
himself as closely monitoring the situation, tweeting extensively about
it as The New York Times reported he was "assuming the role of meteorologist in chief".
On September 1, Trump tweeted that Alabama, among other states, "will
most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated" by Dorian. By that time, no weather forecaster was predicting Dorian would impact Alabama and the eight National Hurricane Center forecast updates over the preceding 24 hours showed Dorian steering well away from Alabama and moving up the Atlantic coast. The Birmingham, Alabama office of the National Weather Service (NWS) contradicted Trump 20 minutes later, tweeting that Alabama "will NOT see any impacts from Dorian." After ABC News White House reporter Jonathan Karl reported the correction, Trump tweeted it was "Such a phony hurricane report by lightweight reporter
@jonkarl".
On September 4, in the Oval Office, Trump displayed a modified
version of an August 29 diagram by the National Hurricane Center of the
projected track of Dorian. The modification was done with a black marker
and extended the cone of uncertainty of the hurricane's possible path into southern Alabama. Modifying official government weather forecasts is illegal in the U.S.
Trump was known to use a Sharpie to write on official documents during
his presidency, as well as on speech notes and on the campaign trail. A White House official later told The Washington Post Trump had altered the diagram with a Sharpie marker.
Trump said he did not know how the map came to be modified and defended
his claims, saying he had "a better map" with models that "in all cases
[showed] Alabama was hit". Later on September 4, Trump tweeted a map by
the South Florida Water Management District
dated August 28 showing numerous projected paths of Dorian; Trump
falsely asserted "almost all models" showed Dorian approaching Alabama.
A note on the map stated it was "superseded" by National Hurricane
Center publications and that it was to be discarded if there were any
discrepancies.
On September 5, after Fox News correspondent John Roberts
reported about the story live from the White House, Trump summoned him
to the Oval Office. Roberts later characterized Trump as "just looking
for acknowledgment that he was not wrong for saying that at some point,
Alabama was at risk—even if the situation had changed by the time he
issued the tweet". Later that day, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor
Peter Brown issued a statement asserting Trump had been provided a
graphic on September 1 showing tropical storm force winds touching the
southeastern corner of Alabama; a White House source told CNN that Trump
had personally instructed Brown to issue the statement.
On September 6, at Trump's direction, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to order acting NOAA
administrator Neil Jacobs to fix the contradiction by Birmingham NWS,
and Ross threatened to fire top NOAA officials if he did not.
NOAA then tweeted a statement by an unnamed spokesman disavowing the
Birmingham NWS tweet, asserting "the information provided by NOAA and
the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public
demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could
impact Alabama," adding that the Birmingham tweet "spoke in absolute
terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast
products available at the time".
The president of the NWS Employees Organization responded, "the
hard-working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly
disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight". Former senior NOAA executives were also sharply critical.
That evening, Trump tweeted a video of a CNN hurricane forecast from
the Wednesday before his Sunday tweet in which the forecaster mentioned
Alabama could be affected by Dorian—with the video altered to show
"Alabama" being repeated several times; the video ended with a CNN logo
careening off a road and bursting into flames. Trump continued to insist he was correct through September 7, asserting "The Fake News
Media was fixated" on the matter and tweeting forecast maps from at
least two days before his original Sunday tweet, as the media dubbed the
episode "Sharpiegate".
Numerous commentators expressed bafflement that Trump chose to continue
insisting he was correct about what might otherwise have passed as a
relatively minor gaffe.
On September 9, NWS director Louis Uccellini said the Birmingham
NWS had not tweeted in response to Trump's tweet, but rather in response
to numerous phone calls and social media contacts their office had
received in response to Trump's tweet. "Only later, when the retweets
and politically based comments started coming to their office, did they
learn the sources of this information," he said.
Meeting with Iran
On
September 16, 2019, Trump tweeted that "the fake news" was incorrectly
reporting that he was willing to meet with Iran with no pre-conditions.
Trump had said in July 2018 and June 2019 that he was willing to meet
with Iran with no pre-conditions, and secretary of state Mike Pompeo and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed this to be Trump's position during a White House press briefing five days before Trump's tweet.
On May 10, 2020—one day after former president Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—Trump posted a one-word tweet: "OBAMAGATE!" On May 11, Philip Rucker of The Washington Post
asked Trump what crime former president Barack Obama committed. Trump's
reply was: "Obamagate. It's been going on for a long time ... from
before I even got elected and it's a disgrace that it happened.... Some
terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our
country again." When Rucker again asked what the crime was, Trump said:
"You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.
All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours."
On May 15, Trump tweeted that Obamagate was the "greatest political
scandal in the history of the United States". This was the third time
Trump claimed to be suffering from a scandal of such magnitude, after
previously giving Spygate and the Russia investigation similar labels. Also on May 15, Trump linked Obamagate to the "persecution" of Michael Flynn, and a missing 302 form.
Trump called for Congress to summon Obama to testify about "the biggest political crime". Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he did not expect to summon Obama, but would summon other Obama administration officials. Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr stated that he did not "expect" Obama to be investigated of a crime.
Some of Trump's allies have suggested that the "crime" involved the FBI
launching an investigation into incoming national security advisor
Michael Flynn,
or possibly the "unmasking" by outgoing Obama officials to find out the
name of a person who was reported in intelligence briefings to be
conversing with the Russian ambassador.
In a May 2020 op-ed at the news website RealClearPolitics, Charles Lipson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago
analyzed the content of "Obamagate". He claimed that the concept refers
to three intertwined scandals: (1) The Obama administration conducted mass surveillance
through the NSA; (2) the Obama administration used surveillance against
Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and (3) the Obama administration
did not transfer power seamlessly to the new Trump administration.
Lipson further claimed that "these abuses didn't simply follow each
other; their targets, goals, and principal players overlapped. Taken
together, they represent some of the gravest violations of
constitutional norms and legal protections in American history".
The AP in May 2020 addressed Obamagate in a fact check, stating
that there was "no evidence" of Trump's suggestion that "the disclosure
of Flynn's name as part of legal U.S. surveillance of foreign targets
was criminal and motivated by partisan politics." AP stated that there
is not only "nothing illegal about unmasking," but also that the
unmasking of Flynn was approved using the National Security Agency's
"standard process." Unmasking is allowed if officials feel that it is
needed to understand the collected intelligence. AP further pointed out
that the Trump administration was conducting even more unmasking than
the Obama administration in the final year of Obama's presidency. In May 2020, attorney general Bill Barr appointed federal prosecutor John Bash to examine unmasking conducted by the Obama administration. The inquiry concluded in October with no findings of substantive wrongdoing. By October 2020, the complex "Obamagate" narrative served as an evolution and rebranding of the "Spygate" conspiracy.
Joe Scarborough murder conspiracy theory
Trump repeatedly advocated a baseless conspiracy theory suggesting that television host Joe Scarborough was involved in the 2001 death of a staffer who worked for Scarborough while the latter was a member of Congress. Trump labeled the woman's death an unsolved "cold case"
in one of multiple tweets and called on his followers to continue to
"keep digging" and to "use forensic geniuses" to find out more about the
death. Scarborough's wife and Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski called the president a "cruel, sick, disgusting person" for his tweets and urged Twitter to remove Trump's tweets. Scarborough called Trump's tweet "unspeakably cruel".
Lori Klausutis was a constituent services coordinator in one of Scarborough's congressional offices in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Klausutis was found dead on the floor near her desk in that office on July 19, 2001. An autopsy by Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Berkland revealed a previously undiagnosed heart-valve irregularity, floppy mitral valve disease, that caused a cardiac arrhythmia
that in turn halted her heart, stopped her breathing, and caused the
28-year-old to lose consciousness, fall, and hit her head on the edge of
a desk. Klausutis' cause of death was determined at the time of death to be due to natural causes,
and local authorities have never attempted to re-investigate because
there was no evidence of an alternative explanation for her death. Scarborough was in Washington, D.C. at the time of her death in Florida.
In May 2020, Klausutis's widower, Timothy Klausutis, called for the removal of Trump's tweets. He wrote a letter to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter,
saying: "I'm asking you to intervene in this instance because the
President of the United States has taken something that does not belong
to him—the memory of my dead wife—and perverted it for perceived
political gain". Twitter refused to take down Trump's false tweets, and the White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany,
only stated that her heart was with the family. Twitter stated that
statements by the President, even false ones, are newsworthy.
Advances for black Americans
In
2020, Trump claimed multiple times that he or his administration had
"done more for the black community than any president," in some cases
compared to all presidents, and in other cases to all presidents "since Abraham Lincoln" (who abolished slavery in the U.S.). Prominent historians instead pointed to Lyndon B. Johnson as the president who did most for the black community since Lincoln, for his Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his Voting Rights Act of 1965. The historians also highlighted that the presidencies of Harry Truman, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy,
and Barack Obama had done much for the black community. Trump's own
achievements were dismissed as minor, while Trump was faulted for racially divisive rhetoric and attacks on voting rights.
Republican Party approval rating tweets
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
President Trump Approval Rating in the Republican Party at 96%. Thank You!
July 10, 2020
After Trump took office in 2017, he routinely tweeted an approval
rating between 94% and 98% in the Republican Party without citing a
source. Trump tweeted these approval ratings almost weekly, with a
percentage around 96%. For example, a tweet from June 16, 2020, by Trump
says "96% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. Thank you!" Another
tweet from August 23, 2019, says "94% Approval Rating within the
Republican Party. Thank you!" Trump's approval rating in the Republican
Party was found to be around 88% in a Fox News poll, 90% in a Gallup
poll and 79% in an AP-NORC poll, with no evidence to support his tweets
of approval ratings around 96%. The Pew Research Center has reported an average approval rating of 87% amongst Republicans.
Ilhan Omar
In 2019, Trump falsely accused Ilhan Omar of praising al-Qaeda, describing remarks Omar made in 2013 about how one of her college professors acted when he discussed al-Qaeda.
In 2021, Trump stated without evidence that Omar married her brother,
committed "large-scale immigration and election fraud", and wished
"death to Israel".
In
the early stages of the pandemic, Trump's pronouncements "evolved from
casual dismissal to reluctant acknowledgement to bellicose
mobilization".
Though Trump "occasionally adopted health officials' more cautious
tone", the optimism that dominated his early response "hadn't completely
disappeared", Trump having downplayed the threat of COVID-19 over 200 times by November 3, 2020.As
U.S. cases reached 4,800,000 and deaths reached 157,690 in the summer
of 2020, Trump repeated his assertion that he believes coronavirus will
"go away" despite his top public health expert warning that it could
take most of 2021 or longer to get the pandemic under control. Trump "made numerous versions of this assertion over...more than six months".
Trump denied responsibility for his administration's disbanding of the US Pandemic Response Team headed by Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer in 2018.
Trump made various false, misleading, or inaccurate statements related to the COVID-19 pandemic,
such as "We have it under control. It's going to be just fine" (January
22, 2020); "Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a
little warmer, it miraculously goes away" (February 10), and "Anybody
that wants a test can get a test" (March 6). Trump also repeatedly claimed that the pandemic would "go away", even as the number of daily new cases rose.
On February 24, Trump tweeted: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," and the next day Trump said, "I think that whole situation will start working out. We're very close to a vaccine," when none was known to be near production.
In late February, the Trump Administration stated that the
outbreak containment was "close to airtight" and that the virus is only
as deadly as the seasonalflu. Including that, the administration also stated that the outbreak was "contained" in early March even as the number of U.S. cases continued to increase, regardless of being publicly challenged.
While on Fox News, Trump contradicted the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that the global mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2
coronavirus is 3.4%, saying. "Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a
false number—and this is just my hunch—but based on a lot of
conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people
will have this and it's very mild, they'll get better very rapidly.
They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor. You never
hear about those people," and said his "hunch" is that the real figure
is "way under 1%". Trump also speculated that "thousands or hundreds of
thousands" of people might have recovered "by, you know, sitting around
and even going to work—some of them go to work but they get better,"
contradicting medical advice to slow disease transmission. On March 17, Trump stated, "I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."
Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained in a Science
interview that before COVID-19 press conferences, the task force
presents its consensus to Trump "and somebody writes a speech. Then
(Trump) gets up and ad libs on his speech".
Fauci explained that afterwards, the task force told him to "be careful
about this and don't say that," adding "I can't jump in front of the
microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let's try and get it
corrected for the next time."
Trump made 33 false claims about the coronavirus crisis in the first two weeks of March, per a CNN analysis. Trump made various other incorrect COVID-19 related statements. One false claim was that the U.S. had the highest rate per capita of COVID-19 testing, which it did not at the time, compared to South Korea, Italy, and Germany.
Trump's misrepresentations often attempt to paint the federal
coronavirus response in an excessively positive light, such as claiming
that hospitals "even in the really hot spots" were "really thrilled"
with the level of medical supplies, when in fact hospitals nationwide
were concerned about shortages of medications, personal protective
equipment, and ventilators.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted from April 13–15, 900 registered voters, found that 36% of Americans trusted Trump for information on COVID-19, and 52% distrusted him for that information.
On April 14, Trump said that he had "total" authority to reopen
states, then said the next day that state governors had to make their
own decision on when to reopen.
On April 16, Trump said "Our experts say the curve has flattened,
and the peak in new cases is behind us." Trump added that "Nationwide,
more than 850 counties, or nearly 30 percent of our country, have
reported no new cases in the last seven days." The 30 percent of the
counties in the country represented 6 percent of the population. Cases
were added in counties where 94 percent of the population lived.
On April 28, while discussing his own response to the pandemic,
Trump falsely suggested that in late February, Dr. Anthony Fauci had
said that the American COVID-19 outbreak was "no problem" and was "going
to blow over". Contrary to Trump's claims, Fauci had said in a February
29 interview that "now the risk is still low, but this could change ...
You've got to watch out because although the risk is low now ... when
you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to
become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from
spread ... this could be a major outbreak." Also on February 29, Fauci
had stressed during a press conference that "we want to underscore that
this is an evolving situation".
On "totally harmless" cases
Now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless.
South Lawn "Salute to America" speech July 4, 2020
On COVID-19 testing
Think of this: If we didn't do testing—instead of testing over 40
million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the
cases. If we did another—you cut that in half, we would have, yet
again, half of that.
Journalist: "I'm talking about death as a proportion of population. That's where the US is really bad. ..." Trump: "You can't do that! You have to go by—look, here's the United States—you have to go by (death as a proportion of) the cases."
On May 19, Trump tweeted a statement claiming that the WHO had
consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in
December 2019, including reports from The Lancet. The Lancet
rejected Trump's claims, saying "The Lancet published no report in
December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere
else in China. The first reports the journal published were on January
24, 2020". The Lancet
also wrote that the allegations that Trump made against the WHO were
"serious and damaging to efforts to strengthen international cooperation
to control this pandemic". The Lancet
also said that "It is essential that any review of the global response
is based on a factually accurate account of what took place in December
and January".
On June 20, at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
Trump suggested that America should slow down testing. In response to
the high number of tests, he said that "When you do testing to that
extent, you're going to find more people, you're going to find more
cases, so I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" White
House officials claimed that Trump was only joking. In an interview,
Trump said that while he never gave an order to slow down testing, he
claimed that if the U.S. slowed down the testing, they would look like
they're doing better. "I wouldn't do that," he said, "but I will say
this: We do so much more than other countries it makes us, in a way,
look bad but actually we're doing the right thing." At the time, the
percentage of positive cases in the U.S. was over two times higher than
recommended by the WHO.
On July 4, 2020, Trump falsely stated that "99 percent" of COVID-19 cases are "totally harmless".
In the same speech, Trump contradicted several public health experts by
saying that the U.S. will "likely have a therapeutic and/or vaccine
solution long before the end of the year". FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn declined to state whether Trump's "99 percent" statement was accurate or to say how many cases are harmless. In March, the WHO estimated 15% of COVID-19 cases become severe and 5% become critical.
As the U.S. COVID-19 daily new case count increased from about
20,000 on June 9 to over 50,000 by July 7, Trump repeatedly insisted
that the case increase was a function of increased COVID-19 testing.
Trump's claims were contradicted by the facts that states having
increased case counts as well as those having decreased case counts had
increased testing, that the positive test
rate increased in all ten states with the largest case increases, and
that case rate increases consistently exceeded testing rate increases in
states with the most new cases.
On August 5, 2020, Trump asserted that children should go back to
school and learn in an in-person setting. He said, "If you look at
children, children are almost, I would almost say definitely, but almost
immune from this disease. So few. Hard to believe. I don't know how you
feel about it but they have much stronger immune systems than we do
somehow for this. They don't have a problem." According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children account for about 7.3% of COVID-19 cases. A study reported in Science Magazine
showed that "children under age 14 are between one-third and one-half
as likely as adults to contract the virus." Facebook took action against
President Trump's claim that children are "almost immune," removing a
video of him making this claim that was posted on his official Facebook
account. Twitter took action against a similar tweet made by Trump's
campaign, stating that the account would be restricted from tweeting
until the tweet was removed. The Trump campaign account removed the
tweet later that day.
Trump noted New Zealand's success in dealing with COVID-19 while referring on August 18, 2020, to a "big surge in New Zealand"—on
a day when New Zealand had 13 new reported cases of infection, a
cumulative total of 1,643 COVID-19 cases and a cumulative total of 22
COVID-19-related deaths, with no new COVID-19-related deaths reported
since late May 2020. Local commentators in New Zealand called Trump's
terminology into question—Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters noted: "The American people can work out that what we have for a whole day, they have every 22 seconds of the day [...]."
(New Zealand has a total population about 1.5 percent of that of the U.S.)
In a series of eighteen interviews from December 5, 2019, to July 21, 2020, between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward,
Trump admitted that he deceived the public about the severity of the
COVID-19 pandemic. On February 7, he told Woodward, "This is deadly
stuff. You just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so
that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more
deadly than even your strenuous flu." On March 19, he said in another
interview, "I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it
down, because I don't want to create a panic." Many audio recordings of
these interviews were released on September 9, 2020.
The military and veterans
In 2014, a bipartisan initiative for veterans' healthcare, led by Senators Bernie Sanders and John McCain, was signed into law by President Barack Obama. The Veterans Choice program enables eligible veterans to receive government funding for healthcare provided outside the VA system.
In 2018, Trump signed the VA MISSION Act to expand the eligibility
criteria. Over the next two years, Trump falsely claimed over 150 times
that he had created the Veterans Choice program itself. When reporter Paula Reid
questioned him about this in August 2020, noting that he repeatedly
made a "false statement" in taking credit for the program, Trump
abruptly walked out of the news conference.
In a speech given at Al Asad Airbase to US military personnel on Christmas 2018,
Trump boasted that the military had not gotten a raise in ten years,
and that he would be giving them a raise of over 10 percent. In fact,
American military personnel received a pay hike of at least one percent
for the past 30 years, got a 2.4 percent pay increase in 2018, and would receive a 2.6 percent pay increase for 2019.
On January 3, 2020, Trump stated in a speech "Last night, at my
direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless
precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the
world, Qasem Soleimani." Trump's act of changing the reasons for killing Soleimani were questioned and analyzed by fact-checkers, and Secretary of DefenseMark Esper contradicted Trump's claim that the Iranians were planning to attack four embassies.
Voting by mail
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less
than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will
be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.
The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people,
anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got
there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling
all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting
before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No
way!
May 26, 2020
President Trump repeatedly made false, misleading or baseless claims in his criticism of voting by mail in the U.S.
This included claims that other countries would print "millions of
mail-in ballots", claims that "80 million unsolicited ballots" were
being sent to Americans, and claims that Nevada's presidential election
process was "100% rigged". Another claim was alleging massive voter fraud. In September 2020, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray,
who was appointed by Trump, testified under oath that the FBI had "not
seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort
in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise".
CNN fact checker Daniel Dale
reported that through June 9, 2021, Trump had issued 132 written
statements since leaving office, of which "a third have included lies
about the election"—more than any other subject.
Missing ballots
Did you see they found 50,000 ballots in, like, a river?
—Trump, in Michigan, October 2020
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Trump claimed his opponent Joe Biden would "destroy" Americans' "protections for pre-existing conditions", while Trump's administration has said the entire Affordable Care Act, which created such protections, should be struck down.
On November 4, Trump delivered a speech inside the White House falsely claiming he had already won the 2020 presidential election.
He made numerous false and misleading statements to support his belief
that vote counting should stop and that he should be confirmed as the
winner. After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed Biden had won through ballot fraud against him. He repeated and tweeted false and misleading claims about vote counting, Dominion Voting Systems, poll watchers, alleged voting irregularities, and more. During the two-month transition period to the Biden administration, according to a Huffington Post
count of his false claims, Trump said the election was rigged (he made
this claim 68 times), stolen (35 times), determined by fraudulent or
miscounted votes (250 times), and affected by malfunctioning voting
machines (45 times).
Following the election, Trump continued to claim he had won it and that it was a rigged election. Anthony Scaramucci,
a longtime Trump associate who was briefly White House communications
director before breaking with Trump, said in July 2022 that the former
president knew the election had not been stolen. Scaramucci said that
during the 2016 campaign Trump had asked him and others why people
didn't realize he was playacting and 'full of it' at least half the
time, "so he knows that this is all a lie." Years later, Trump persists in the false claim about the 2020 election. For example, on August 29, 2022, he demanded on Truth Social that the nation "declare the rightful winner or ... have a new Election, immediately!"
In October 2022, a U.S. District Court Judge ruled that Trump and allies participated in a "knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia
when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court".
Specifically, the judge wrote that "President Trump knew that the
specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those
numbers, both in court and to the public". The judge also found that
related emails "are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a
conspiracy to defraud the United States" that the crime-fraud exemption voids Trump's lawyer's claim of attorney–client privilege.
On April 25, 2023, CNN reported that Trump had told a new lie
about the 2020 election: "Trump pointedly noted that Biden got more
votes than Trump in fewer than a fifth of US counties in 2020. Trump
then said, 'Nothing like this has ever happened before. Usually, it's
very equal, or—but the winner always had the most counties.'" The
statement was described as "complete bunk". Both "Barack Obama in 2008
and 2012 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, carried a minority of
counties in each of their victories." William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained the facts:
There is nothing suspicious about
winning the presidency with a smaller number of counties. Counties vary
widely in size, with large urban and suburban counties—areas where Biden
did best—housing far larger populations than most of the outer suburb,
small town and rural counties that Trump won.
On July 18, 2023, when responding to Sean Hannity
at a town hall meeting in Iowa, Trump told a new lie: "I also have to
say something else, 'cause the one thing a lot of people, including you,
don't talk about: they also create phony ballots, and that's a real
problem. That's my opinion. They create a lot of phony ballots." The
claim was described as "pure fiction".
It
was zero threat. Right from the start, it was zero threat. ... Some of
them went in, and they're hugging and kissing the police and the guards,
you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved
in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.
Donald Trump on March 25, 2021 Phone interview with Fox News
During the January 6, 2021, attack, minutes after Mike Pence
had been rushed off the Senate floor, Trump tweeted that "Mike Pence
didn't have the courage" to refuse to certify the election results,
implying Pence had the Constitutional power to do so—a claim dismissed
by the federal judges in the final two of 62 election-related lawsuits.
In a January 7, 2021, White House video, Trump claimed, falsely,
that he had "immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law
enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders".
Among outtakes
for the January 7 video that were shown on July 21, 2022, by the House
Select Committee, Trump remarked, "I don't want to say the election's
over. I just want to say Congress has certified the results without
saying the election's over, OK?"
In late March 2021, Trump said the rioters "were ushered in by the police" and "They showed up just to show support",
which is false in view of the 140 assaults on police officers in
hours-long battles involving police engaging in hand-to-hand combat to
try to keep rioters out of the building.
At a July 7, 2021, news conference, Trump claimed "the person that shot Ashli Babbitt
right through the head, just boom. There was no reason for that"; in
fact, Babbitt was shot in the shoulder as she tried to enter an area of
the Capitol used to evacuate lawmakers and was within sight of lawmakers being evacuated.
In a July 11, 2021, interview on Fox News, Trump called the
events of January 6 a "lovefest" and said that it was "not right" that
the rioters were "currently incarcerated"—conflicting with his January 7
statement telling rioters, "You will pay."
In an interview that aired on December 1, 2021, Trump said
"hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people" had gathered to hear him
speak on the day of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, saying "I think it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before"; the Associated Press reported it as "several thousand." Investigators estimated that "more than 2,000 people" entered the Capitol.
On December 10, 2021, Trump told Fox News that the attack was "a
protest" and that "the insurrection took place on November 3" (election
day),
while in fact about 140 police officers were assaulted and the peaceful
transfer of power was violently interrupted in an attack that involved
thousands of alleged crimes, and the election wasn't rigged or
fraudulent.
Trump also said to Fox News of his January 6 speech that "if you look
at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming,
actually", while in fact his speech proclaimed that "we fight like hell.
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country
anymore."
On December 21, 2021, Trump made a statement calling the attack a "completely unarmed protest". Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson
subsequently testified before the House January 6 committee that the
Secret Service had warned Trump on January 6 that protestors were
carrying weapons, but that Trump demanded that the magnetometers—used to detect metallic weapons—be disabled, so that more supporters would fill the rally space. When warned, Trump is said to have angrily responded:
I don't fucking care that they have
weapons, they're not here to hurt me. They're not here to hurt me. Take
the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol
from here, let the people in and take the mags away.
Some protestors were armed with guns, stun guns, knives, batons,
baseball bats, axes, and chemical sprays. In January 2022, the Justice
Department made an official statement that over 75 people had been
charged with entering a restricted area with "a dangerous or deadly
weapon".
In a February 5, 2022, rally, Trump said that if he runs again in
2024, "we will treat those people from January 6 fairly... And if it
requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being
treated so unfairly"—the claim of unfairness being unsupported by evidence. Trump's claim echoed his September 16, 2021, written statement that "Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election".
Post-presidency
2021 California gubernatorial recall election
Before the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election
took place, Trump claimed without evidence that the election was
"probably rigged" and stated, "Does anybody really believe the
California recall election isn't rigged?" After polls closed, he stated there was "rigged voting".
COVID-19 healthcare discrimination against white people
In
reference to a New York policy that allows race to be a consideration
when dispensing oral antiviral treatments, Trump distorted this policy
during a rally by claiming white people don't get the vaccine and "have to go to the back of the line" for COVID-19 care.
There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it. You're the
president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's
declassified, even by thinking about it. ... In other words, when I left
the White House, they were declassified."
Donald Trump on September 21, 2022 Interview with Fox News
Following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump made false, misleading, unsubstantiated, and contradictory claims about the investigation into his handling of classified material.
Among these, he suggested, without evidence, that President Biden
played a role in the search, the FBI planted evidence, the search was
unnecessary, and the classified documents in his possession were already
declassified. He stated that as a US president, he was not required to
follow the prescribed legal process, but could simply declassify them
just "by thinking about it",
and "because you're sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you're sending
it. There doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but
there doesn't have to be."
On June 8, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump.
The 37th count was for "False statements and representations",
specifically alleging that Trump hid documents from his own attorney, Evan Corcoran.
The government had subpoenaed Trump for any classified documents he
might have, so Corcoran searched the boxes for documents with classified
markings. Because Trump deliberately misled him, Corcoran drafted a
"sworn certification" that all subpoenaed documents had been returned,
and another attorney, Christina Bobb, provided it to "the grand jury and the FBI".
On June 27, 2023, responding to the revelation that in 2021 he showed
off a classified document and told the writers in the room to "look" at
it, Trump described his own audiotaped words as "bravado, if you want to
know the truth... I was talking and just holding up papers... but I had
no documents."
The August 1, 2023 indictment listed 21 election-related lies Trump told.
Claim of intervening in 2018 Florida vote count
On
November 10, 2022, Trump alleged that Democrats had perpetrated "ballot
theft" four years earlier in the Florida gubernatorial election. He
claimed that, as president, he had intervened to support Republican
candidate Ron DeSantis over his Democratic rival Andrew Gillum.
"I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys," Trump claimed, when it
seemed that DeSantis had been "running out of the votes necessary to
win." Trump said he had thereby "fixed" the DeSantis campaign. Gillum
filed in court to demand further information from Trump, as it sounded
like an admission of wrongdoing; meanwhile, Florida's Broward County elections office denied that any such thing had happened during the 2018 election. The FBI said in March 2023 that it had no records to support Trump's claim.
2023 CNN town hall
During the May 10, 2023 CNN Republican Town Hall,
Trump repeated his false claims about the 2020 presidential election,
the January 6 Capitol attack and his handling of classified documents.
He also falsely claimed he had never met E. Jean Carroll and that the jury in her lawsuit against him
had ruled that "he didn't rape her". Trump also falsely claimed that
Brazil had seen a significant decline in gun-related violence after
loosening its gun laws; criminologists consulted by The Washington Post
cited an aging population, investment in policing and recessions in
drug cartel conflicts as more likely explanations for the decline. He also promoted false claims about aid given to Ukraine for Russia's invasion, abortion and the economy during his presidency.
On November 15, 2022, almost two years in advance of the 2024 election, Trump announced his candidacy for a second term as president. His announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago was "full of exaggerated and false talking points" and at least "20 false and misleading claims",
uttering the first inaccurate claim "about two minutes in and a few
minutes later, tick(ing) off at least four hyperbolic claims about his
own accomplishments". The New York Times
Fact Check stated that "Mr. Trump repeated many familiar exaggerations
about his own achievements, reiterated misleading attacks on political
opponents and made dire assessments that were at odds with reality."
Trump's first inaccurate claim, about two minutes in, was that
his administration "built the greatest economy in the history of the
world", a claim that was inaccurate even for recent American history.
Trump wrongly claimed Americans surrendered $85 billion worth of
military equipment to the Taliban in the Afghanistan withdrawal; the
Defense Department estimate was $7.1 billion, some which was rendered
inoperable before the withdrawal. Trump claimed that his administration "filled up" the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
but that under Biden it has been "virtually drained"; in fact, the
reserve was not "virtually drained" under Biden, and it actually
contained less when Trump left office than when he took office.
He falsely claimed that climate scientists "say the ocean will rise 1/8
of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years"; NOAA estimated average sea
level rise along the U.S. coastline will be 10-12 inches in the next 30
years.
Speaking of border crossings by undocumented aliens, he said "I
believe it's 10 million people coming in, not three or four million
people", a claim for which there is no empirical basis. Likewise, his claim that the U.S.-Mexico border had been "erased" since Biden was sworn in, was also baseless. Trump falsely heralded completion of his border wall;
in fact, the vast majority of the "new" barriers reinforced or replaced
existing structures, and only about 47 miles were new primary barriers
along the 1,900-mile border.
Trump said "I've gone decades, decades without a war, the first
president to do it for that long a period"; however, he presided over
U.S. involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and was commander-in-chief for dozens of U.S. airstrikes.
He claimed that when he began his term the U.S. had jet fighters that
were 48 years old (and) bombers that were 60 years old—but not anymore";
in fact, the military continues to use B-52 bombers that are being outfitted with new Rolls-Royce engines to prolong their life even further.
Trump was wrong in claiming that the U.S. takes longer than "any"
country to count votes, belied by longer times in Indonesia (more than a
month in 2019), Afghanistan (five months after a September 2019 vote),
and Bosnia (weeks in fall 2022).
Immigration claims
In
March and April 2023, on several occasions, Trump claimed that all the
psychiatric patients in an unnamed "South American country" had been
sent to the United States; he said he had "read a story" in which an
unnamed "psychologist or psychiatrist" in that country said all his
patients had disappeared. When CNN asked the Trump campaign to
substantiate this, a spokesperson responded by providing unrelated
information.
Indictments
On
July 18, 2023, Trump said in an Iowa speech that, before the
indictments he was currently facing, "I didn't know practically what a
subpoena was and grand juries and all of this—now I'm like becoming an
expert." (He and his businesses had been involved in over 4,000 legal cases even before he was elected president seven years earlier.) He also suggested he was facing jail time for having "sa[id] something about an election", whereas the likely charges had to do with attempts to overturn it.
In August 2023, 27 of Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election were listed in his Georgia indictment.
Public opinion
A June 2019 Gallup poll found that 34% of American adults think Trump "is honest and trustworthy".
A March 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation poll estimated that 19% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans trusted Trump to provide reliable information on COVID-19.
A May 2020 SRSS poll for CNN
concluded that 36% of people in the U.S. trusted Trump on information
about the COVID-19 outbreak. Only 4% of Democrats trusted that
information from Trump, compared to 84% of Republicans.
In April 2022, Trump stated at a rally in Selma, North Carolina: "I think I'm the most honest human being, perhaps, that God ever created," prompting laughter from the crowd.
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