WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump uttered a dizzying number of false statements in his epically long weekend speech, to an audience that didn’t seem to mind at all.
He got the unemployment rate wrong. He misstated his winning margin in the election. He reprised some of his most frequently told fictions and dusted off old ones, even going back to the size of his inauguration crowd.
A look at some of his words in his two-hour-plus speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday:
“We’re down to 3.7 percent unemployment, the lowest number in a long time.”
The unemployment rate is 4 percent. It was 3.7 percent in September.
On the diversity visa lottery program: “They send us the people they don’t want.”
A persistent falsehood. “They,” meaning other countries, do not select citizens for the U.S. program. Foreigners decid on their own to apply for it. They must meet education or skills benchmarks to apply and those who are tentatively selected through the lottery must pass background checks before being confirmed.
Trump attributed similar characteristics to migrant caravans from Central America, suggesting governments try to get rid of their bad people by putting them in caravans for the U.S. Again, migrants are self-selected, not told to march to the U.S.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team has “13 of the angriest Democrats in the history of our country.”
Mueller is a longtime Republican and party affiliation cuts both ways — or no way at all — in the varied background of the team. Some have donated campaign money to Democrats. The team is not known to be particularly or historically angry.
on what he considers false reporting about his crowd sizes: “They did the same thing at our big inauguration speech. You take a look at those crowds. ...We had a crowd, I’ve never seen anything like it. ... There were people (from) the Capitol down to the Washington Monument.”
The National Park Service released dozens of photos of the crowd gathered for his inauguration ceremony and it was clear from them that crowds did not extend to the Washington Monument from the Capitol. Large swaths of empty space were visible on the National Mall.
The park service also released photos from President Barack Obama’s two inaugurations, showing that his 2009 event far outstripped the number of people who attended Trump’s inauguration.
It released the photos in response to news media requests made through the Freedom of Information Act after Trump and his aides accused news organizations of framing or timing photos and video to make it look like not many people came.
“Every single Democrat said Comey should be fired” for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails late in the campaign. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer “called for his resignation many times.”
Not true. Democrats did not universally — or even broadly — call for Comey to be fired despite their anger over his decision to go public before Election Day with news that the FBI had renewed its investigation of Clinton’s handling of her emails. Several Democratic lawmakers did want him out, but they were a distinct minority.
Schumer said he had lost confidence in Comey but did not urge his removal, telling Bloomberg News he wanted to speak with the FBI chief “to restore my faith.” The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, also held off on asking for Comey to step down, while musing: “Maybe he’s not in the right job.” Trump fired him months later.
“No planes, no energy. ...Perhaps nothing is more extreme than the Democrats’ plan to completely take over American energy, and completely destroy America’s economy through their new $100 trillion dollar Green New Deal. ...It would end air travel.”
He’s ignoring the actual provisions of the plan, which would not ban air travel or end traditional sources of energy. The plan, backed by some liberal Democrats but greeted cautiously or opposed by others in the party, does call for a drastic drop in greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.
Trump is extrapolating from a fact sheet that initially accompanied the plan, then was disavowed and withdrawn by its sponsors. It proposed building high-speed rail at a scale “where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
, on his Electoral College win: “We didn’t get to 270. We got 306.”
Trump misstates the Electoral College vote in his 2016 presidential race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. The official count was 304 to 227, according to an Associated Press tally of the electoral votes in every state.