Biden, the Storyteller in Chief, often leaves yarn that isn’traveling

When Donald J. Biden & Alvin Bragg Met: New York Times Investigations of a Top-Quasi-Standard White House

Mr. Biden has alwaysEmphasized the truth of his account by adding, “Not a joke!” in the middle of a story. But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.

Former President Donald J. Trump lied constantly, not only about trivial details (like insisting it hadn’t rained during his inauguration when it clearly had) but also about consequential moments — misleading about the pandemic, perpetrating the “big lie” that Mr. Biden stole the 2020 election, and claiming falsely that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

As far back as his 1987 presidential campaign, when he tried to apply someone else’s story to his own, his stories were challenged and he was forced to withdraw.

While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

Manhattan South had only one murder reported through February 19; Manhattan North had eight. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

Why do racial justice protests in Portland have so many crimes against humanity? A counterexample against the Mayor of Portland and the police murder of George Floyd

Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. We are not supposed to do that. It is up to the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind having their cities and states destroyed. There is something wrong with these people.

Trump claimed that he had taken effective action in order to stop the destruction of statues. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. It turns into 3 months, if you do that, and you get 10 years in jail. He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said something. It is possible to say that I do.

This is a big overestimation. Portland has hundreds of active storefronts and has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons. Some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/fact-check-trump-cpac/index.html

What did Trump say about NATO in 2020? An expert on Russian imperialism says that Trump didn’t “have anything to do with NATO”

Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an email that it was clear that Donald Trump did not have anything to do with NATO. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

We do not often fact-check claims about what could have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/fact-check-trump-cpac/index.html

Pulitzer Prize Reporting Defends Hunter Biden: A Case Study with the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline and the U.S. Department of State

Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that there were no facts that were not true regarding any of the winning submissions. The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

First, The Times and Post have not admitted anything. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

The US president said that nobody even heard of theNord Stream 2 gas pipe to Germany. It wasn’t until I came along that the people heard of Nord Stream 2. I started talking about the second part of the game. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

The German government halted the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

This is incorrect. The Obama administration provided $600 million of security assistance to Ukraine, which was much more than bedsheets. The aid included medical supplies and tactical drones.

Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/fact-check-trump-cpac/index.html

Facts First: The US lost 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency and the US had a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion

Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

Even if you only count goods and services, then the US has never had a trade deficit of $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. When they say that Biden won, the smart people know it didn’t happen.

This is nonsense and the facts are first. There is no evidence to support a broad claim of election fraud by the Democrats. In the US, election fraud and voter fraud are rare but occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. Trump claimed that he had “disinformation.” We will ignore his claim.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/fact-check-trump-cpac/index.html

Is the Islamic State Eliminated in Three Weeks? The Decline and Decline of the Border Wall During Donald Trump’s 2018 Visit to Iraq

The claim of elimination of the Islamic State in three weeks is a lie, as the caliphate was formally liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Trump claimed that the Taliban had acquired F-16 fighter planes, because of the US withdrawal. They now own them. Think of it.

It is not true that Trump has finished the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

Prior to Trump, neither of the countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had considered “recalcitrant” in accepting the return of their nationals was on the list.