Watch live, with ongoing reporting/commentary. President Trump is reportedly going to address his economic and jobs record.
Overall note: in his Labor Day press conference, Trump didn’t reflect once on the contributions of the Labor movement and unions to the prosperity of the United States.
Preemptive fact checks:
- Since Trump took office, the US has lost more than 5 million jobs, including 5,400 coal jobs.
- During the pandemic, the US has had 22 weeks of one million or more first time unemployment claims.
- Nearly 30 million Americans on receiving some type of unemployment assistance.
- The US ranks in the bottom half of all nations in coronavirus case fatality rate.
- The Trump Administration has yet to put any federal domestic policy in place to stop the spread of coronavirus in the US.
- The US does not have the best economic recovery of any western nation.
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A listless President Trump took to the podium in a press conference that devolved into a rant of his grievances and whines, including his false claims that the Obama-Biden Administration spied on his 2016 campaign.
Touting that “the United States has experienced the lowest case fatality rate in the world,” President Trump said, “we are an absolute leader in every way. Under my leadership, we will produce a vaccine in record time.”
[Fact Check: There is no evidence that a vaccine will be available by January 2021.]
“Biden and his very liberal running mate–the most liberal person in Congress, by the way–not a confident person, in my opinion, will destroy this country and will destroy this economy, should immediately apologize for the anti-vaccine rhetoric that they are talking right now, talking about endangering lives, it undermines science and what’s happening is, uh, all of a sudden you’ll have this incredible vaccine and because of that fake rhetoric, it’s political rhetoric, that’s all it is.”
[Fact Check: Democratic VP nominee Kamala Harris has said she would not “take [Trump’s] word alone” on the effectiveness of a vaccine he would roll out in office because he has politicized his statements and response to the coronavirus. This is a clear case of Trump projecting his irrational statements onto his opponents.]
“We’ll continue to unleash American energy. We’re number one in the world and we’re totally energy independent right now,” Trump claimed. “In 2021, we’ll create ten million jobs, at least, in the first ten months.”
[Fact Check: Numerous sources have debunked Trump’s claim that the US is “energy independent.” And ten million jobs in ten months is virtually unattainable given the economic conditions of the US because of poor handling of the economy and the pandemic. That would require an average of one million new jobs a month, more than was created under the Trump economy.]
Trump’s press appearance devolved into a campaign speech with few facts and many self-congratulatory lies as he deviated from prepared remarks with lots of “nobody’s ever done this” and “did you know that”?
“I’ve taken in billions and billions of dollars from China. No other president has done what I’ve done. I’ve given much of it to farmers. I’ve given it to farmers, manufacturers, but I’ve given most of it to the US Treasury. Nobody’s done that,” Trump claimed. “We haven’t taken ten cents from China ever. They targeted our farmers and I targeted them. And I gave $28 billion to our farmers. Our farmers wouldn’t be existent right now.”
[Fact Check: Trump has a fundamental misunderstanding of how tariffs work. US consumers ultimately pay increased costs of tariffs, and US importers pay the direct costs. The money doesn’t go to the US Treasury; China hasn’t written a check to the Treasury. But Trump did give tens of billions of dollars to farmers as a bailout for the fiscal impact of his disastrous trade war.]
As soon as Trump finished his prepared statement, Trump’s whining increased with claims about Democrats getting away with spying on his campaign, his claimed grievance against the story in The Atlantic about his degradation of US war dead, and mail-in voting.
Trump claimed that the Obama/Biden Administration would have been in jail “it would have started two years ago and it would have been 50 years for treason.”
“They spied on my campaign. And that includes Biden and Obama. They spied on my campaign trying to defeat me,” Trump claimed. “They wrote up a fake dossier, that has proven to be totally fake, written by Christopher Steele, paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and they used that illegally in the FISA Courts.”
[Fact Check: The Steele Dossier hasn’t been “proven to be completely fake.” Much of it is verified, including by the Senate Intelligence Committee report. And the dossier was referred to in a FISA application on Carter Page, who was not with the campaign when the application was approved by FISA judges. Trump also claimed the Clinton campaign paid “millions of dollars” for the dossier; FEC filings show the campaign paid $1.02 million.]
Speaking of mail-in ballots, Trump went on a rant about how much cheating goes on with “unsolicited ballots, as [Trump calls] them. Trump claimed that the election of New York Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney should be redone because of voter fraud, an unproven and completely unsubstantiated claim.
Calling Democrats “dirty fighters,” Trump ranted “The dirtiest fight of all is the issuance of (sniff) 80 million ballots. Unrequested. They’re not requested. They’re just sending 80 million ballots all over the country. Eighty million ballots, non-requested. I call them ‘unsolicited ballots.’ That’s going to be the dirtiest fight of all. People are going to get ballots and they’re going to say, ‘What am I doing’ and then they’re gonna harvest and they’re going to do all the things.”
[Fact Check: The only criminal conviction relating to “ballot harvesting” that happened in the 2018 mid-term election involved republican operatives in North Carolina.]
Trump said that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is “a very honorable man,” but if evidence of wrongdoing is found, he should be prosecuted.
“They’ve been looking at me for four years. Four years,” Trump whined. “Think of it. For four years. From the day I came down the escalator, I’ve been under investigation by sleaze, and they found nothing. They found nothing. Friend of mine said you have to be the most innocent, honorable man ever to hold the office of president. Think of it, they spent just Mueller alone, he spent, I guess the real number turned out to be $48 million but whatever it was, many, many millions of dollars. They had 18 angry Democrats lookin’. They had FBI agents lookin’ all over the place and they found no collusion. Friends of mine have said–sophisticated friends–you’ve got to be the most innocent guy ever to hold this office, and there’s a lot of truth to that.”
[Fact check: Not only did the Mueller report find ten potential cases of obstruction of justice, the Senate Intelligence Committee found the Trump campaign worked with Russian government representatives, and Trump himself has been named as Individual-1 in the Michael Cohen federal fraud case. Trump also again relied on an anonymous “friend of mine” for a personal endorsement. Also note that the endorsement went from one friend to many “sophisticated friends” making that statement in just one minute. There is no truth to that.]
Asked about what was “un-American” about critical race theory training in the federal government, Trump bragged, “We’re gonna do a report. I fired all those people. It was a disgrace, frankly.”
Trump also said that Biden-Harris were “negative” about Trump’s claim of having a vaccine by October, a promise virtually all virologists think is idiotic.
“Wait a minute,” Trump rambled. “So now what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, wow, this is bad news. President Trump is getting this vaccine in record time.’ By the way, if this were the Obama Administration, you wouldn’t have that vaccine for three years. You probably wouldn’t have it at all. So we’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date. You know what date I’m talking about.”
[Fact Check: WT actual F? First off, we *don’t have a vaccine* so any Trump claims about a vaccine are, as yet, unfulfilled. And his obsession with Obama continues with a series of lies. Trump’s insistence that a vaccine will be available by Election Date is not only reckless, but it puts a political deadline on a public health issue.]
Trump also disparaged mask-wearing, telling a journalist who removed his mask to ask a question, “You sound so clear, as opposed to everybody else when they refuse….” Trump said, tailing off, but making an obviously insult to people wearing masks in close quarters to one another.
The reporter asked why Trump has disparaged the 1619 project being taught in schools. Trump replied, “I want everybody to know everything they can about our history. I’m not a believer in ‘cancel culture,’ the good and the bad. If you don’t study the bad, it can happen again. … But we grew up with a certain history and now they’re trying to change our history. Revisionist history. That’s why they want to take down our monuments. That’s why they want to take down our statues.”
“I saw something the other day that–The Washington Monument. They want to rename it. The DC Committee. The DC Committee, but they’re all Democrats. Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson. We’re talking the big stuff. This is the big stuff. And they want to rename it. They want to redesignate it. They want to take some down. No, we don’t do that. Never gonna happen with me, I guarantee ya that.”
[Fact Check: while Trump claims he wants people to study “the good and the bad,” he apparently does not want slavery labeled as part of “the bad,” nor does he believe that people who fought to preserve slavery were “bad.” And the “DC commission” does not want to take any structural monument down. First off, those structures sit on federal land, outside the purview of any DC authority. Second, the report Trump cites was by a task force that looked at all possible options without making any recommendation. And finally, the report itself asked the Mayor of DC, Muriel Bowzer, to request the federal government “remove, relocate, or contextualize”–that is, provide educational background–on the history of the people honored in federal structures. As the Associated Press reports:
The report doesn’t go into detail about how “re-contextualizing” would work, but there have been recent recommendations that plaques be added to the monuments to Jefferson and Washington, explaining that their namesakes were longtime slave-owners.
The report itself didn’t even list the Lincoln Memorial, and dealt mostly with smaller statues on federal land as well as naming nomenclature for future schools, buildings and parks.