In an effort to clean up the mess of Bob Woodward’s release of information from his upcoming book, Rage, and the continued fallout from his alleged insults to active duty military, MIAs, WIAs and KIAs, President Trump found a safe space on Sean Hannity’s Fox “News” broadcast and did a call-in segment.
Trump said of Woodward’s book, “I almost definitely won’t read it because I don’t have time to read it.”
Trump claimed he is “a cheerleader for this country, and I don’t want to see panic.” While Trump admitted specifically to lying to the American people by downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, the talking point the Trump Administration has settled on seems to be, the American people can’t handle the truth, so we must lie to them.
Trump touted that he “banned China, banned the people from China.” However, in the press briefing this afternoon, Trump praised China, saying they did a great job containing the virus. [Fact Check: 40,000 people entered the US from China after Trump’s January 31st travel ban, and the more virulent strain of the virus came into the United States from Europe, not China.]
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Trump: “They were all goin’ around, ‘No problem. No problem.” Everybody. Practically everybody. Nobody had any idea it would be as [sniff] violent as it turned out to be and we studied it, we understand it, now we’re opening up. [Fact Check: a number of places that opened up are once again closing down because of new outbreaks of the virus.] We coulda lost two million, two and a half million, maybe even more than that if we did it a different way and we’ve done a really good job, but if you look at our numbers, our fatality numbers compared to other countries, we’re in, we’re in really, I mean, it’s amazing what we’ve done. We’ve been able to do something that a country with the kind of size we’re dealing with, we’ve done an incredible job. [Fact Check: The US leads the world in the number of coronavirus cases and fatalities. The US is in the top ten of nations over 100,000 population for fatalities per capita and the nation is in the bottom half worldwide for case fatality rate. I’m not sure if Trump means “incredible job” in a good or bad way.]
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Hannity threw Trump a softball laying out the false premise that people don’t know tens of thousands of people die of influenza every year, but Trump put a travel ban in place a week before making that comment to Woodward. “Action mean something,” Hannity said. “And you taking it seriously was very clear then. [Fact checking the question: No, it wasn’t. Trump said in a January 22nd interview from Davos, Switzerland, “It’s going to be just fine. We have it totally under control.”] And then when you said, ‘I don’t want people to panic, they say, well, you must’ve been downplaying it. Wouldn’t your actions contradict that narrative?”
Trump: “Yeah, absolutely. If you look at flu years, we’ve lost 70-, 80-, 90,000 people. People don’t realize that. [Fact Check: Yes, people do.] If you look that and multiply that times five, it’s actually more than we lost. [Editor’s Note: I have no damn clue what he’s talking about here. I listened to it three times to make sure I didn’t miss something.]
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Trump rambled on about how nobody saw the coronavirus as a problem, specifically pointing to Biden and Pelosi, and continued his claim that nobody wanted him to do the China ban.
“Shortly thereafter I did a ban on Europe. [Fact Check: the China travel ban was signed January 31st; the European travel ban was March 10th. By March 10th, we had 1,300 known cases and 37 fatalities in the US; the virus was firmly established in the nation.] … I saw what was going on in Italy and in Spain and in France and we did a ban there and if we didn’t do those bans, we would’ve had numbers that were much, much more, and if we didn’t the shutdown and now the reopening–and they should do the opening faster if you look at some of the states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, you look at what they’re doing, they’re taking so, they’re shut down. They’re still shut down. Michigan is terrible. It’s still shut down. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame. They don’t know what they’re doing frankly.”
[Fact Check: A lot to unpack. First, Trump didn’t implement a shut down. That was done by individual state governors. The reason the US is still a facing problems is that there was no, and is still no, federal domestic response to contain the virus. Second, states that have re-opened have had to shut down again. Third, North Carolina and Michigan are still seeing spikes in cases, while Pennsylvania has leveled off at a high level: about 1,000 new cases per day.]
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Trump: “Our country’s doing very well. We have record numbers of jobs. You saw the numbers just came out. For the four months, it’s the largest number ever, by far, not even close.
[Fact Check: Trump fails to mention the April jobs numbers, which was also “the largest number ever, by far, not even close,” for job losses in a month at 20 million. Over the course of Trump’s term, the US has lost a net 5.1 million jobs, according to BLS.]
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Trump: “And retail sales, the same thing. It’s record numbers.”
[Fact Check: Retail sales in May set a record at 17.7% increase; however, sales in July were modest with just a 1.2% gain from the previous month, with early tracking for August showing a potential drop.]
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Hannity then continued with his BS talking point that Joe Biden is”frail.” “Everyone that I meet, that I run into everywhere, and even people in the media,” Hannity lied, “interestingly, quietly, and Democrats I know, quietly, are saying Joe looks like he is weak and he is frail. How do you interpret Joe Biden, the basement bunker strategy, his unwillingness to take questions?”
[Fact checking the question: Biden has taken questions or done interviews every day but Sunday this week.]
Without evidence, Trump created out of whole cloth a claim that Biden is reading answers off teleprompters, meaning that the media is colluding with Biden to give him the questions beforehand.
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Hannity asked about the list of potential Supreme Court justices Trump announced Wednesday afternoon in a hastily called press event designed to take headlines away from his recorded lies about coronavirus. Hannity asked why Trump released them and why he called on Biden to release a list as well.
Trump: “Because outside of war and peace [Editor’s Note: WTF?], the most important thing a president does is select Supreme Court justices, and judges. … The whole country, it depends on these decisions: which way you go, whether you have a Second Amendment or not. I mean, the Second Amendment, it would be under siege. If I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t have a Second Amendment right now. You wouldn’t have a right to guns. [Fact Check: That’s an obvious lie.] You would, I, erm… Whether you had it or it was just almost totally obliterated, but it would be in a very different form than you have it now. I’ve kept it totally as it was, and it’s, ahhhhh, something I’ve very proud of and people, I think it’s, it’s a real voting issue, Second Amendment, ah, life, you look at that.”
[Fact Check: Donald Trump is the only president in memory to propose “taking the guns first” before people go through due process. That is an anti-Second Amendment position.]
Trump: “So these judges are going to be making massive decisions, and the next president is going to get one, two, three or four justices of the Supreme Court. [Editor’s Note: By saying “the next president,” Trump seems to be conceding that he’s not going to win. He also seems to be very proud of being able to count to four.]
Trump: “Joe has to now come up with a list. He should come up with a list, otherwise people can’t vote for him, but the reason he possibly won’t is because he’s going to come up with far radical left judges. I mean, these will be people who are very, very far to the left that are, y’know, revolutionary in a sense, I think. Aaaand, he’s going to come up with them. I don’t know if they will allow, because they control him totally. They control Joe Biden. He’s not controlled, he’s not in control of himself. He’s controlled by the radical left. It’s a very dangerous part of our society, and he is totally controlled, and he is not going to be able to name Democrat judges that are in the middle someplace or normalized [odd noise], y’know people that are, like, normal people. He will be forced to pick extremely radical left judges, and I don’t think you can get elected if you do that.”
[Fact check: “[O]therwise people can’t vote for him” is completely a lie. There is no rule that a list of judicial candidates must be released by a candidate. And Trump seems to be projecting here, with his “they control him” rantings. Who is “they”?]
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Hannity finally asks about The Atlantic story about Trump disparaging soldiers.
Trump: “It’s a total lie. It’s total disinformation. … To think that… nobody that I know could have said such a thing. Look down at soldiers that have been dead for decades and decades and decades, real heroes, and they made it up. They made up the story. We have 21 people, I think you probably saw, much more than that if we wanted to, ’cause there were many people there, and the Secret Service wouldn’t let me take the trip ’cause the dangers of going through very crowded parts of, certain parts of Europe, as you know, er, in Paris, and they wouldn’t let, they said we can’t do it because the helicopter couldn’t fly. It was raining as hard as I’ve ever seen it rain. It was foggy, so foggy you couldn’t see anything.”
[Fact check: Various other world leaders made it to the ceremonies.]
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Trump: “I’ve worked too hard on the military and making it really great again. That’s what we’ve done: we’ve rebuilt it. It was totally depleted when I took over. It was depleted. It was tired. It was exhausted from all these endless wars where our soldiers are being brought back because I can’t stand to see them coming back in shape, when they’re not really fighting, they’re really serving as police forces over there. We’re not fighting to win and they haven’t fought to win.”
[Fact Check: Trump hasn’t “brought back” soldiers to the US. They’re being redeployed to other stations overseas, including Saudi Arabia and Germany. And again, Trump demeans troops by saying they “haven’t fought to win.”]
Trump: But I knocked out ISIS, killed Solemani, killed al-Baghdadi, did things that Obama can’t even think about doing.
[Fact Check: The soldiers Trump just said “haven’t fought to win” were the ones who took out Solemani and al-Baghdadi. And Obama? He just ordered the mission that eliminated the top terrorist in the world for the last century, Osama bin Laden.”
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After rattling off names of various cities that saw protests, sometimes violent, in the wake of police killing unarmed Black people, Hannity: “Why do you think these mayors and governors steadfastly refuse your assistance to help them restore order?”
[Fact checking the question: More than 93% of protests relating to Black Lives Matter have been peaceful, as we’ve written about here. Very few cities are experiencing ongoing violence.]
Trump: “Well, Kenosha is a great example. That was ready to burn down after three nights, and we went in with the National Guard and just closed it out. It took, like, so quick.”
{Fact check: The Governor of Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers, ordered the National Guard into Kenosha, not Trump.]
Trump: “And I’ve never seen someone who could change like Biden. Now, I don’t think he’s even aware of what he’s even saying, to be honest with you, but I’ve never seen anything like it where he talks about defunding the police or not doing much for the police and then all of a sudden, he sees what’s happening with his poll numbers, ’cause as you see, we’re going way up. I think we’re leading in Florida. We’re leading in Wisconsin. We’re leading in Pennsylvania. We’re leading in North Carolina. I think we’re leading in New Hampshire. We’re leading by a lot, we’re really leading by a lot in Ohio, I just saw a poll a little while ago. I think we’re leading all over the place, frankly. … I must tell you, that Fox has among the worst pollsters of all. I think they’re terrible. I don’t know who at Fox is doing it but they’re terrible pollsters, and they have been, frankly, even for years ago. That’s probably the same group. But they don’t have a clue, your pollsters.”
[Fact Check: Biden hasn’t called for “defunding the police.” And according to RealClearPolitics, Trump is trailing in the polls in every state he mentioned.]
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Hannity asked another false-premised question about Biden “flip flopping” on issues like manufacturing jobs and fracking.
Trump: “But how about fracking, and you need that. It’s basically your fossil fuels, your energies. We would have to close many of the plants, a big percentage of the plants in our country if we didn’t do this. We have these massive plants, and they’re not going to run by wind and they’re not going to run by solar at this point and maybe at no point, but we have, ah, natural gas which is really very environmentally friendly. We have all sorts of things. We’re the number one in the world now in energy. We’ve done a great job with energy and you look at what you’re paying a price a gallon in your car, people are saying it’s unbelievable. They’re paying less than two dollars in many cases and going down even, and they can’t believe how well we’ve done.”
[Fact Check: “Massive plants” around the world are running on alternative energy sources. Natural gas is not “environmentally friendly”; while it’s less toxic than gasoline or oil, it still harms the environment, from production through use. And finally, the reason gas at the pump is so cheap is simple: there’s no demand for it because we’re in a freakin’ recession during a freakin’ pandemic. No one is driving.]
Trump: “We don’t need [the Middle East] for energy anymore. We’re energy independent. It’s the first time we’ve ever been, or at least for many, many decades, energy independent.”
[Fact Check: The United States is NOT “energy independent.” Trump demonstrates that he doesn’t know what the term means. The US is a net exporter of energy, but it relies on fossil fuels from overseas to power vehicles and manufacturing at this point. And the US became a net exporter of energy for the first time in 2014, and started sustaining that title in 2016, not “many, many decades” ago.]
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Trump: “If Biden got in, he was talking about no fracking, very strongly. And his super-liberal running mate, who’s the most liberal person, moreso than Bernie, rated the most liberal in all of the Senate, Kah-ma-la, if you look at what she said about fracking, there won’t be any fossil fuels, there won’t be any fracking, and they’re all disciples of AOC and AOC plus three, and, ah, it’s ridiculous, but they constantly talk about no fracking, then all of a sudden, he sees his poll numbers going down and he sees, y’know, Texas wants oil. I say they’re against guns, they’re against oil and they’re against religion. That doesn’t do well in Texas or Pennsylvania or North Carolina or just about any other place I can think of, and, y’know, and it’s incredible, but they’ll change in an instant and pretend that nothing ever happened.”
[Fact Check: Well, Trump is right about something: this is ridiculous. Biden never called for a ban on fracking. The Biden-Harris policy platform calls for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050; that does not ban carbon-based fuels put implements off-sets to take carbon out of the air. And Joe Biden is a devout Catholic; Harris is a non-denominational Christian who attended Black churches growing up, and she’s married to a Jewish man. They are NOT against a person’s right to worship.]
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