Trump’s bombardment of dishonesty: Fact-checking 32 of his false claims to Time

[planosteve]

Former President Donald Trump delivered a bombardment of dishonesty in his interviews with Time magazine.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made at least 32 false claims in the two April interviews that Time released this week. His serial inaccuracy spanned a wide range of subjects, including the economy, abortion, the NATO military alliance, the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, his legal cases, his record as president and the 2020 election he has relentlessly lied about for more than three years.

Time published its own fact check of some of the 32 claims on Tuesday, when it released its cover story on Trump. Here is an in-depth CNN debunking.

Trump’s record as president
Terrorism during Trump’s presidency

Trump claimed that, during his presidency, “there was very little terrorism. We had none. I had four years of — we had no terrorism. We didn’t have a World Trade Center knocked down.”

Facts First: While it’s true, of course, that Trump’s presidency didn’t feature anything comparable to the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, his claim that “we had no terrorism” isn’t true. There were a variety of terrorist attacks on the US during his term.

Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

There were various additional terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018.

In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.

Border wall construction

Talking about his wall on the border with Mexico, Trump said, “I completed what I said I was going to do, much more than I said I was going to do.”

Facts Fist: This is false; Trump didn’t achieve nearly as much wall construction as he had pledged on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016.

Trump repeatedly said in 2015 and 2016 that “we need” 1,000 miles of wall to protect the southern border, with another 1,000 miles already protected by natural barriers. But not even close to 1,000 miles were built during his presidency; official federal statistics put the total construction at 458 miles, and only 52 miles of that total was new “primary” wall built where no barriers had previously existed. When Trump left office, there were about 280 miles of the border where wall construction had been planned but not executed.

The departure of Attorney General William Barr

Asked why voters should trust him with a second term when many of the people who worked closely with him during his first term now say he doesn’t deserve another term, Trump said, “Well, they don’t because I didn’t like them.
Some of those people I fired. Bill Barr, I fired Bill Barr. I didn’t want him.”

Facts First: This is false. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020; he was not fired, as a White House official confirmed to CNN at the time. Trump had been frustrated with Barr over Barr’s public rejection of his lies about mass election fraud and had been seriously considering firing Barr the same month, but Trump did not do so — and he made a positive public statement about Barr upon the resignation, writing on social media: “Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.”

The US military presence in South Korea

Trump claimed that, before he negotiated a better deal, South Korea was paying far too little “for 40,000 troops that we had there.”

Facts First: Trump’s “40,000” number is inaccurate. As of December 31, 2016, less than a month before Trump took office, the US had 26,878

Too much to post it all here. read://https_www.cnn.com/?url=https%3A% ... index.html

[jellowrestling]

I wonder if that 40,000 figure includes civilian support personnel.