President Donald Trump spoke for more than an hour at the Republican National Convention on Thursday – giving him plenty of time to try to turn the presidency record positively and, it turns out, get a lot of things wrong.
CNN reporter Daniel Dale, who has made a name for himself for Trump fact-checking, went on the network with a preliminary fact-checking of the president – counting more than 20 false or misleading claims in Trump’s RNC speech, which one would be false or misleading claim about every three minutes. Dale went on to list those mistakes in the air, which lasted three minutes:
“This president is a serial liar, and he lied seriously last night,” Dale said.
Here is the full list of errors, as recited by Dale:
- “Trump said Joe Biden ‘was talking about removing the boundary wall.’ Biden specifically, explicitly rejected that idea. He just said he would stop with further additional construction.”
- “Trump claimed, as always, that he was the one who passed the veterans’ election law. Barack Obama signed that into law in 2014. Trump signed a 2018 law to change it. ”
- “Trump has done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” “I’m angry. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act for one.”
- “Trump is again talking about a ‘record gain of 9 million over the past three months.’ He did not mention, as usual, that this profit follows a record loss of 22 million jobs over the past two months. “
- “He said he would ‘continue with lower drug prices.’ They have grown during his presidency. “
- “He said they opened an embassy in Jerusalem for less than $ 500,000. Early documents show it was at least $ 21 million.”
- “He claimed that the expenses of NATO members had increased for the first time in about 20 years. Expenditures increased in 2015 and in 2016, before he took office.”
- “He said he will always and Republicans will always protect people strongly with all existing circumstances. That property has already been broken. He and she have repeatedly tried to weaken that protection in Obamacare.”
- “He repeatedly claimed that he banned travel from China and Europe. No, he imposed partial restrictions with many exemptions. Tens of thousands of people remained over traveling.”
- “He complained about the Covid test system and his general response. See, experts almost generally say that the US was deadly slow in its response, especially slow in setting up adequate tests. ”
- “He said he ended what he called a ‘NAFTA nightmare’ and he signed a brand new US-Mexico-Canada agreement – the USMCA. That agreement preserves, maintains most of NAFTA.”
- “He boasted about building about 300 miles of boundary wall. What he did not say is that most of it is a replacement barrier. As of August 7, according to official data, just 5 miles had been built where none existed before.”
- ‘He suggested that Joe Biden seize guns. That’s baseless. Biden runs on a non-compulsory repurchase of so-called assault weapons. ”
- “He said Democrats want to remove the police. Biden has not done that again, has denied that.”
- “He says he has ‘very good information’ that China wants Biden to win because Biden is soft on China or cheerleaders for China. The U.S. intelligence community says China wants Biden to win because it sees Trump as unpredictable. . ”
- “He said Biden promised to close charter schools. Biden’s plan is skeptical about charters, but would not completely lift them.”
- “He declared Biden to vote for the Iraq war. Biden did vote for the Iraq war. But what Trump does not mention is that he also supports that invasion.”
- “He said Democrats twice removed the word ‘God’ from the promise of fidelity at their convention. Two individual caucus meetings outside of major primetime programming left it out, but it was pronounced in every primetime event.”
- “Trump announced the so-called cancellation culture as a cunning, left-wing affair. He, Donald J. Trump, has tried to get dozens of people and entities annulled, fired, boycotted, including literally Goodyear last week. ”
- “He said he had issued an order to give rebels 10 years in prison. That is a maximum discretionary sentence to judges in existing laws. His order simply asked the government to fully enforce.”
- ‘He said Biden’s plan would eliminate America’s borders. No. Just no. It is wrong. “
It’s quite the list, but this level of lies and deception is not new to Trump. According to the Washington Post, Trump has now made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims since taking office.
As my colleague Matt Yglesias has pointed out, there’s something more to it than just lying – it’s bullshitting. Here is a passage from Princeton University’s professor of philosophy Harry Frankfurt, who explains the concept:
For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are out: he is not on the side of the true, nor on the side of the false. His eye is not at all on the facts, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except in so far as they may be relevant to his interest in getting away with what he is saying. He does not care if the things he says describe reality correctly. He simply picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
It’s not just that Trump is lying. It’s that Trump does not like the truth at all. What he says is only meant to make him feel good. That is the context in which Trump repeatedly claims that he passed laws he never passed and built border walls that he never built.
And so when the president speaks, it’s eternally difficult to say when he’s telling the truth or just presenting self-serving bullshit.
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