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Donald Trump made 12 false claims in his State of the Union address
The U.S. president was inaccurate about the economy and immigration Tuesday night. He has now said more than 1,100 false things since his inauguration.
Daniel Dale
By Washington Bureau Chief
Wed., Jan. 31, 2018
WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump made 12 false claims in his first official State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
In total, Trump has said more than 1,100 false things since his inauguration last Jan. 20, an average of 2.9 per day. You can read the Star’s full, interactive database at this link.
Here are the false claims Trump made in his State of the Union:
1) “After years and years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.”
Wages have been rising since 2014. As PolitiFact reported: “For much of the time between 2012 and 2014, median weekly earnings were lower than they were in 1979 — a frustrating disappearance of any wage growth for 35 years. But that began changing in 2014. After hitting a low of $330 a week in early 2014, wages have risen to $354 a week by early 2017. That’s an increase of 7.3 per cent over a roughly three-year period.” FactCheck.org reported: “For all private workers, average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose 4% during Obama’s last four years in office.” The Washington Post noted that wages “actually declined in the fourth quarter of 2017, from $353 a week to $345 in inflation-adjusted dollars.”
2) “And I have to tell you, what the Border Patrol and ICE have done — we have sent thousands and thousands and thousands of MS-13 horrible people out of this country or into our prisons.”
U.S. President Donald Trump claps during his State of the Union address in the House of Representatives in Washington on Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump claps during his State of the Union address in the House of Representatives in Washington on Tuesday. (WIN MCNAMEE / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
This is an exaggeration. The deputy director of ICE, Thomas Homan, said in December that “a renewed focus on ID’ing & dismantling the ultra-violent MS-13 gang led to nearly 800 arrests in (fiscal year) 2017, for an 83 per cent increase over last year.” That figure is disputed, as some of the people arrested may not be actual members of the gang. Even if they are, though, that is far from “thousands and thousands and thousands.” In November, Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed the U.S. had “worked with our partners in Central America to arrest and charge some 4,000 MS-13 members.” But those additional arrests were made abroad; the people arrested were not deported from the U.S. or put in U.S. prisons.
3) “Last year, Congress also passed, and I signed, the landmark VA Accountability Act. Since its passage, my administration has already removed more than 1,500 VA employees who failed to give our veterans the care they deserve.”
Trump is over-counting the number of removals that can be attributed to the new law, which passed in June. The Associated Press reports: “… More than 500 of those firings occurred from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, to late June, when the new accountability law began to take effect. That means roughly one-third of the 1,500 firings cannot be attributed to the new law.”
4) “We have ended the war on American energy — and we have ended the war on beautiful clean coal.”
We’ll leave aside the debate about the existence of a “war on American energy,” and Trump has indeed taken steps to encourage the coal industry — but the phrase “clean coal” is dishonest in itself, a creation of industry spin. As the Washington Post reports: “There’s no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ Power plants can mitigate some of the effects of burning coal by capturing and burying carbon-dioxide emissions, but that doesn’t cleanse the coal itself.” The phrase “clean coal,” the New York Times reported last year, “is often understood to mean coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks and bury it underground as a way of limiting global warming.” This technology, though, is not widely — — and Trump appears to extra-misleadingly use the phrase “clean coal” to describe coal extraction and use of any kind.
5) “We are now very proudly an exporter of energy to the world.”
The U.S. has exported energy for years, so, taking Trump’s claim in the most literal way possible, it is false that the U.S. has just “now” become an exporter. What he was clearly suggesting, though, is that the U.S. has become a net exporter of energy — exporting more than it imports. But that is also untrue; the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration estimated in 2017 that it could happen around 2026.
Trump's audience Tuesday night.
Trump's audience Tuesday night. (GABRIELLA DEMCZUK/NYT)
6) “Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we haven’t seen for decades.”
Car companies also announced during the Obama era that they would build and expand plants in the United States. In 2015, for example, Volvo announced that it would open its first U.S. car plant, in South Carolina. “Construction has now begun on the factory site, which will be capable of producing up to 100,000 cars per year,” the company announced in Sept. 2015. GM announced in 2013 that it would invest $1.2 billion to upgrade an Indiana truck plant, while Ford announced in 2015 that it would invest $1.3 billion to upgrade a Kentucky truck plant.
7) “Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan.”
Trump could have accurately said that Chrysler is “shifting some production from Mexico to Michigan,” or something of the sort. It is not accurate, though, to say that Chrysler is “moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan.” The company announced that it is moving the production of its Ram truck from a plant in Mexico to a plant in Michigan — but it said there would be no layoffs at the Mexican plant, let alone a closure, and that the plant would be “repurposed” to production of other vehicles.
U.S. President Donald Trump addresses trade deals in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Canada is currently re-negotiating NAFTA with the U.S. and Mexico.
8 ) “Very soon, auto plants and other plants will be opening up all over our country. This is all news Americans are totally unaccustomed to hearing. For many years, companies and jobs were only leaving us. But now they are roaring back.”
It is not true that “companies and jobs were only leaving us” prior to the Trump era. “Expenditures by foreign direct investors to acquire, establish, or expand U.S. businesses totaled $373.4 billion in 2016,” the last year of Obama’s tenure, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported. Nor is there evidence that companies and jobs are “roaring back.” Job growth in 2017, two million, was worse than in every year since 2010, and outsourcing continues. In November, a labour group called Good Jobs Nation released a study that found “93,449 jobs have been certified by the Department of Labor as lost to trade competition or corporate outsourcing since Trump’s election,” a total “higher than the average job loss rate of 87,576 for the preceding five years.” The study also found: “Since Trump was elected, major federal contractors have been certified as shipping 10,269 American jobs abroad.”
9) “Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers.”
Apple did announce a “$350 billion” figure — but the company, unlike Trump, made a point of separating its actual investment from its pre-existing spending. Its press release made clear that the new investment is only a fraction of the total. It said: “Combining new investments and Apple’s current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers — an estimated $55 billion for 2018 — Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years.” In other words, Apple’s pre-existing 2018 spending would have put it on track for $275 billion in spending over five years if maintained.
10) “The third pillar (of my immigration plan) ends the visa lottery, a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit, or the safety of American people.”
The lottery is indeed random, but Trump goes too far when he says green cards are handed out without any regard for safety. Each person who wins the lottery has to go through an application process that includes an interview and a background check. Also, there is at least a basic skill-related criteria: anyone accepted for a green card must be either a high school graduate or have two years of work experience, in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience and is on a list of occupations created by the U.S. government.
11) “The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration.”
This is simple nonsense. There is no reasonable argument that the “nuclear family” would be protected if Trump no longer allowed people to sponsor family members, such as children and parents, to immigrate to the U.S.
12) “Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”
Distant relatives like cousins cannot be sponsored by citizens and permanent residents (“green card holders”) for family-reunification immigration, what Trump means when he refers to “chain migration.” In fact, not even grandparents or uncles can be sponsored. Opponents of the family reunification system note that individuals brought in through sponsorships can eventually sponsor their own parents, siblings and children. But this is not the same thing as a single immigrant bringing in distant relatives. Further, the total number of people is effectively limited by extremely long wait times. As the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that seeks to reduce immigration, noted in 2015: “More than half of the waiting list (in family-based immigration categories) is comprised of about 2.5 million people who have been sponsored by a sibling who is a U.S. citizen. These applicants must wait at least 13 years for their application to be adjudicated. The largest number (30 per cent) are citizens of Mexico, and the wait for them is just over 18 years.”
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? The answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/anal ... dress.html
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