Donald Trump nailed for lies and misstatements at his Louisiana rally. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Donald Trump long ago lost touch with reality. Nowhere was that more evident than his Louisiana rally last night. Trump lies and misstatements flew so fast, fact checkers could barely keep up, according to Daniel Dale, who live-tweeted the president’s speech for CNN.
“He is saying false/misleading/bizarre things in rapid succession, faster than I can type,” Dale wrote at one point.
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Trump’s lies and misstatements included a number of old chestnuts and some new ones, mostly focused on the impeachment inquiry and the Ukraine scandal.
One fact is indisputable. The president has spouted oceans of lies since taking office. The president’s penchant for making up facts to fit his narrative was evident during the 2016 campaign and has continued for his first 1,000 days in office.
In fact, he has significantly stepped up his pace of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasts and outright falsehoods, according to fact checkers at The Washington Post.
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He’s currently averaging almost 22 claims a day for a total of 13,435 false or misleading statements during his administration.
The pace of lies and misstatements has accelerated since the release of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry.
In just a few weeks he’s uttered more than 250 lies or misstatements related to the subject, according to The Post.
Even after Trump’s claims have been widely debunked, the president continues to repeat them.
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The president, for example, has claimed on 29 separate occasions that the whistleblower complaint about his phone call is inaccurate. Yet, subsequent evidence has shown that the complaint accurately captures the content of the call.
Trump has also falsely claimed 18 times that Democratic political rival Joe Biden forced the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor to shield his son Hunter Biden from scrutiny.
Trump senior diplomat Kurt Volker testified before a congressional committee that the president’s allegations against the Bidens were “self-serving and not credible.”
Some of Trump’s most frequent whoppers involve building the wall (218 times), the U.S. economy being the best in history (204 times), the U.S. has “lost” money on trade deficits (171 times), his tax cut being the biggest in history ( 171 times) and 350 other instances where he’s uttered a false claim at least three times.
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Trump’s rallies have been a major source of his lies and misstatements. He’s speeches are often rambling and disjointed, almost to the point of stream of consciousness.
Dale ran herd on Trump’s incorrect statements at the rally which touched on the Ukraine scandal, the impeachment inquiry and this old chestnut, chain migration.
Check his Twitter steam on Trump’s rally below. All tweets are repeated verbatim.
Trump is holding a rally in Louisiana. Quotes and fact checks in this thread.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 7, 2019
Daniel Dale
@ddale8
Trump is holding a rally in Louisiana. Quotes and fact checks in this thread.
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Trump begins his speech by saying there are thousands of people outside. Someone feel free to let me know if this is true!
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Trump says “the fake news” treats him badly but “the locals,” local media, treat him better. He encourages people to vote for Eddie Rispone in early voting. He notes that he’s going to the LSU-Alabama game. “Two great teams. Two great teams.”
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Trump boasts of the US being the world’s #1 producer of oil and natural gas, a title it took in 2012 and has kept every year since.
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Trump boasts that the “monstrous animal known as al-Baghdadi is dead.” He says that coverage of this has been minimal because he is the president. “Me, I got about a day out of it…but that’s OK. That’s OK. That’s OK.”
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Trump: “Democrats are becomingly (sic) increasingly totalitarian. Suppressing dissent, defaming the innocent, eliminating due process, staging show trials, and trying to overthrow American democracy to impose their socialist agenda.”
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Trump pivots from Democrats’ alleged totalitarianism to asking people how their 401(k)s are doing. He says there’d be a depression if Democrats got elected. He calls the Mueller investigation “the biggest lie ever foistered (sic) upon the American people.”
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“Crooked Hillary.” A Lock Her Up chant. Trump: “So is there any place that you would rather be than at a Trump rally on a beautiful, wonderful evening in Louisiana?”
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Trump bashes the media. “The CNN light is gonna go off,” he says. CNN’s cameras at these rallies do not have any visible lights turned on, I am told, and we don’t turn off any streams when he bashes us.
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Trump is railing against the whistleblower, baselessly claiming the whistleblower “disappeared” as soon as he released the rough transcript. “A perfect phone call. A totally perfect phone call.” He says “anybody that can read…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
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Trump says the whistleblower’s source probably does not exist, which makes no sense. He is saying false/misleading/bizarre things in rapid succession, faster than I can type.
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Trump is criticizing chain migration, hyperbolically/wrongly saying that it allows you to bring in “everybody you ever met in the history of the world” and “any person that ever met you.” He invokes the “maniac” who perpetrated the West Side Highway attack.
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Trump seemed to forget the point of this story — he usually falsely claims that the perpetrator of this attack brought in like 20 people through chain migration. This time he just omitted that part and ranted about the man.
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File away for election night: Trump says “we’re so far up” in Louisiana, though the state isn’t that Republican.
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Trump criticizes the Washington Post, then points to the back of the room and asks people if they see the Post reporter over there. There are some quick boos.
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Hunter Biden. China. “Pocahontas.” “Indian blood. I have more than she does.”
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Trump on Elizabeth Warren: “Not a nice person.”
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Trump: “I didn’t run in 2018, you know, they keep forgetting. I didn’t run.” He says a lot of people said they weren’t going to vote until he was running again. (He has previously described 2018 as a great victory for him and the party.)
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Trump repeats his usual complaint about “the elite”: “I went to better schools than they did, I have nicer houses than they do, I have nicer apartments, I have nicer everything. And they’re ‘elite,’ but we’re not elite.”
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Trump is doing his usual fiction about how Adam Schiff only made his comments at committee because “he never thought that I was going to release the conversation,” but then Trump surprised him. Schiff spoke the day after Trump released the rough transcript.
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Trump says Louisiana, under a Democratic governor, has the highest auto insurance rates “in the entire nation, by far.” It is second to reliable winner Michigan, according to http://Insure.com figures regularly cited in Louisiana media.
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Trump after talking about “car insurance”: “Some people call it ‘auto insurance.’ Call it whatever the heck you want.”
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Trump: “And they arrested Jane Fonda! Nothing changes! I remember 30, 40 years ago. She always has the handcuffs on. Oh man. She’s waving to everybody with the handcuffs…She went to Vietnam to find out how nice they were…no they arrested her…Jane Fonda…every 25 years…”
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Trump is criticizing Democratic Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards at length. I don’t know enough to fact check these attacks, so I’ll leave them out for now.
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Republican Sen. John Kennedy on Pelosi and impeachment: “I don’t mean any disrespect, but it must suck to be that dumb.” (This is a line he has used before.)
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Trump after talking about “car insurance”: “Some people call it ‘auto insurance.’ Call it whatever the heck you want.”
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Trump just told a brief Sir story about Rep. Ralph Abraham. It is very rare for the Sir-er to be named.
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Trump is giving more time than usual to other people. He’s now brought up the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame.
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Trump takes credit for the big Cameron LNG facility approved during the Obama administration: “They couldn’t get their permits for years, I got ’em real fast…I said ‘let’s go get them that permit’…for years and years they tried to get those permits, they couldn’t get ’em…”
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Trump says tariffs are producing “billions and billions of dollars from a country that never gave us 10 cents, China.”
This is false in two ways. 1) Americans are paying the tariffs. 2) Even if China were paying, the US has long taken in billions per year from tariffs on China.
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Trump is decrying the economic and foreign policies of previous administrations, saying they were overly focused on other countries at the expense of this one.
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Trump boasts of implementing the travel ban on some “dangerous and deadly places.” He didn’t talk about this much for a long while, but it’s now becoming a regular part of his stump speech.
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Trump repeats his usual line, which has already been proven false, about how he’ll always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. This time, there is an addendum: “And we will also protect patients with pre-existing PHYSICIANS.”
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Trump says the Republican Party is not only the party of the American worker and American family: “It’s also the party of the late, great Abraham Lincoln. People forget.”
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Trump describes his opponents, whom he doesn’t name, as “these somewhat evil and in some cases very evil people.”
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Trump has concluded.