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FactChecking Trump's Weekend Claims - FactCheck.org

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On Sept. 26 and 27, President Donald Trump spoke for about two hours and 15 minutes in five appearances — including one campaign rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania. We’ve compiled many of the president’s false and misleading claims from those remarks.By contrast, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden spoke for less than 45 minutes in a few appearances. We wrote about Biden’s claims in “.”We examined the two candidates’ weekend remarks in the run-up to the .On Saturday, Sept. 26, Trump made remarks in Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court, the White House on Marine One and at in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Sept. 27, the president did and held .We’ve written about most of these claims before.Distorting the Facts on Biden’s PositionsBiden’s health plan.Trump inaccurately suggested Biden supported a Medicare for All health plan. Biden has been clear in his opposition to the idea, pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, as theshowed.Biden’s health plankeeping and building on the Affordable Care Act, creating “a public health insurance option like Medicare” that people could choose to buy, expanding the tax credits under the ACA and offering a premium-free plan for those in non-Medicaid-expansion states who otherwise would have qualified for the program under the ACA.Killing Osama bin Laden.&nbsp;Trump misleadinglyBiden “opposed the mission to take out Osama bin Laden.”, Biden said only that he wanted further confirmation that bin Laden was actually present at the compound in Pakistan.School choice/charter schools. Trump wronglythat Biden “As, Biden opposes federal funding going to “for-profit charter schools,” but schools managed by for-profit companies make up only a fraction of charter schools — about 10%, according to a researcher for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. And while Biden opposes vouchers for private school tuition — the ultimate in school choice for some — he does not oppose students choosing between public schools, magnet schools and high-performing charter schools.Biden and guns.Trump said, “Biden wants to confiscate your guns and indoctrinate your children with poisonous anti-American lies in schools, right?” As we have, it is not true that Biden favors confiscating weapons, and there is no evidence Biden wants to indoctrinate children with “poisonous anti-American lies.”After Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke — a proponent of mandatory buybacks of assault weapons — endorsed Biden in March, misinformation about Biden’s position on guns began to circulate. Videos and articles suggested Biden would be confiscating weapons should he make it to the White House. But that was unfounded, as we have.&nbsp;While Biden did say O’Rourke would help him with gun policy, he never adopted the mandatory buyback approach.Fracking.Health care access.Refugees.Trump his criticism of Biden for proposing to “increase refugee admission 700%.” That is close to correct — largely becauseElection Ballots, Polls and InterferenceBallots found in “river.”As part of his campaign against mail-in ballots, Trump misleadingly“many ballots” were found “in a riverbed.”According to the Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin,were found Sept. 21 along the side of a road and innext to a highway in Greenville. Officials there said the batch of mail included “several” absentee ballots, though a Postal Service spokesmanwhether those were completed ballots, or blank ones being sent to voters, according to thePost Crescent. The paper quoted the county clerking saying election officials started to mail out ballots to voters on Sept. 17.Double ballots.Trump also wrongly before departing the White House on Sept. 26 that there was “another case where a thousand ballots were sent, but not single — they were sent double, so you get to vote twice.” He said that “thousands of ballots sent to people and they’re double ballots, where you get two votes.”Asreported, election officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, believe up to 1,000 people who requested mail-in ballots may have gotten two by mistake. But those people won’t be able to vote twice. Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott said that when every ballot is returned, “we make an entry into their voter record that they have returned a ballot. So if something else shows up, the ballot has already been returned. We can’t count that ballot.”General election polls.Prior to leaving for a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the president said, “We’re leading in Pennsylvania. We’re leading in Florida. I think we’re leading everywhere.” He is trailing by nearly five points in Pennsylvania, according to polling averages byand. It is a virtual tie in Florida, with Biden holding ain the averages computed by both websites. It’s safe to say both states are very much in play for either candidate.On soliciting Russian interference.&nbsp;Trumpthat he was only joking when he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, find her [Hillary Clinton’s] emails.” According to Trump, when he delivered the line, “we all laughed together” and “the whole place cracks up along with me.” He blamed the media for creating the controversy, saying they “cut off my last word.”We’ll let readers decide for themselves Trump’s intent, but Trump did not laugh when he delivered the line at a press conference at his resort in Doral, Florida, in July 2016, nor did the assembled media..On or about that same day, Russian military intelligence officers attempted “to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office,” according to the&nbsp;filed against 12 Russian military intelligence officers for waging cyberattacks on&nbsp;Fatality rate decline.Excess mortality.Strategic National Stockpile “cupboards” weren’t “bare.”Saving lives.e don’t know for sure whether Trump is on target when he says that the lockdowns — which were imposed by many states, not by Trump — may have saved “millions” of lives. Also, Trump at times pressured states to open up before their governors wanted to.An early model from Imperial College London&nbsp;&nbsp;in March that the U.S. could lose 2.2 million people to the pandemic, but only if no mitigation measures whatsoever were taken to combat the virus.An unpublishedreleased in June by a group of economists estimated “mitigating public health measures” would save between 913,762 and 2,046,322 lives in the U.S. At the same time, they estimated that “the economic downturn from shelter-in-place measures and other restrictions on economic activity could create an indirect collateral loss of 84,000 to 514,800 lives over the following years.”A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeleyon June 8 in the journalNaturefound that lockdowns had prevented 60 million infections in the United States.&nbsp;The study didn’t say how many lives were saved, but the lead researcher, Solomon Hsiang, didthe benefits of the lockdown are in a sense invisible because they reflect “infections that never occurred and deaths that did not happen.”A study by researchers at the Imperial College London estimated lockdowns saved aboutlives in 11 European countries. Columbia University researchers&nbsp;&nbsp;thatfrom the coronavirus would have occurred if the U.S. had imposed social distancing one week earlier in March.Popular Talking PointsNot the “greatest economy.”As he frequently does, Trump falsely said at the rally that the United States had had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” before the novel coronavirus hit. As we have,that was not the case. The real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product grew 2.2% in 2019&nbsp; — down from 3% in 2018. Over the last 39 years — dating to Ronald Reagan’s presidency — the nation’s real economic growth has reached or exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% a total of 17 times.Trump also said, “We’ve added a historic 10.6 million jobs in the last four months.” He failed to mention that is fewer than half of the 22.2 million jobs the country hadearlier this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.Auto plants.Trumpabout auto plants in Michigan, telling the rally crowd in Pennsylvania: “What I’ve done for Michigan, in particular, also Pennsylvania, but what I’ve done for them with autos, forget it. They’re building 17, or expanding 17, different plants. They hadn’t built one in 42 years and we’re building a lot of them.”The last vehicle assembly plant built in Michigan before Trump took office was a General Motors plant in Lansing Delta Township,. As for the country at large,andboth announced new plants in 2015 in South Carolina.Despite Trump’s boasts, the number ofandin Michigan has gone down under Trump, even before the coronavirus pandemic caused economic shutdowns. Fiat Chrysler Automobilesin February 2019 it would convert two plants into a new assembly site in Michigan, andOil and natural gas.Trump took credit for milestones reached long before his presidency when he claimed: “We are now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.” The U.S.the leader in production of petroleum in 2013 and natural gas in 2009,.Nobel Peace Prize.At the rally, Trump complained that the media had ignored his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump: “I got nominated for two Nobel Peace Prizes. … And I said, ‘They didn’t cover two Nobel prizes.’ I got two in one week. … But the fake news never even put it on. And somebody had a show where they said the amount of time devoted to Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize, two of them, zero on the network, zero.”As we have, Trump makes a number of false statements when he discusses his nomination. Trump conflates being nominated, as he was, with actually winning, as his predecessor, Barack Obama, did. Trump hasn’t won one. Simply being nominated is not a huge deal: This yearBorder wall and open borders.&nbsp;As he often does, Trump talked about the progress his administration has made on building his long-promised wall on the border between the United States and Mexico, a major Trump campaign promise during 2016. “And we are just finishing a beautiful wall,” he said. “That wall 340 miles, 340.&nbsp; … Now we’re up to 330 miles.”U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 341 miles of wall and fencing have been erected. But as we have, most of that is replacement of existing fencing or wall; there has been little new construction. TheSan Antonio Express-Newsreported on Aug. 7 that only five miles of new wall have been built.Trump also said, “By contrast, Joe Biden supports open borders.” As we have, that is not the case. There’s no doubt Biden supports a more open and welcoming immigration policy than the one championed by Trump.&nbsp;But that’s not the same as advocating open borders.&nbsp;“I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry — that’s where all the bad stuff is happening,”in an interview on Aug. 5.Quelling urban unrest.Trump falsely took credit for sending the National Guard into Minneapolis to put down violent protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. “You saw what we did in Minneapolis,” he said. “She called us like a week and a half too late. We went in. How long did that take? About a half hour. It was over. We brought in the National Guard. We told Seattle we’re coming in and they left that night.”Trump is wrong about the National Guard&nbsp;in both cases. In Minneapolis, , after agot out of hand, Mayor Jacob Freya local emergency and called for the state’s National Guard to be deployed. Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz signed anLow–income housing in the suburbs. Trump said that he had “knocked out” an Obama-era regulation regarding low-income housing in the suburbs. “I knocked out the regulation that allows low-income housing in the suburbs,” he said. “They’re changing the zoning so they can build. That’s what it is. They’re changing the zoning. It was a rule, a regulation that was a disaster.” As we have, on other occasions Trump has said the regulation “required” building low-income housing in suburbia.As we said in our story, it’s unclear whether the rule had any impact at all, as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson suspended its requirements in 2018. Experts on regulatory processes and community development told us HUD’s 2015 final rule on “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” did not mandate either low-income housing or rezoning. In its published rule, HUD said of the regulation: “This rule does not impose any land use decisions or zoning laws on any local government.”Islamic State.Trumpfor recapturing Islamic State-held land. “In just three and a half years, we’ve … obliterated 100% of the ISIS caliphate,” he said. Before Trump took office, about half of the territory held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, had been regained under his predecessor, Barack Obama. That’s according to figures provided by Trump’s own administration.The rest of the land was retaken under Trump. In March 2019, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that the final stronghold in eastern Syria had been retaken.Obama’s unfilled judicial vacancies.Trump again wronglythat President Barack Obama left the Trump administration “over 100″ federal judicial court vacancies — it was precisely— “because he probably thought that Crooked Hillary was going to win. And, you know, in which case it wouldn’t have mattered too much. I guess that’s what he assumed.”As, the number of judicial vacancies left by Obama was historically high, but that wasn’t because Obama didn’t try to fill most of them. Rather, it was resistance to Obama’s judicial nominations from Senate Republicans whoduring the last two years of Obama’s presidency. In early January 2017, just before Trump took office, there werepending.UkraineUkraine prosecutor. At hisand in a, Trump repeated the false narrative about “Joe’s involvement” in the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2015. Trump falsely accused the former vice president of withholding $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine “until such time as they let go of a prosecutor that was investigating the company that his son was involved with,” referring to Hunter Biden’s work as a board member for the Ukraine gas company Burisma., the Obama administration joined the international community and anti-corruption advocates in Ukraine in calling for the prosecutor to be removed from office for his failure to aggressively prosecute corruption. A Republican-led Senate committee investigationof wrongdoing by the former vice president.Schiff and Trump’s Ukraine phone call.Trump criticizedA day after the White House released a memo of the July phone call, in whichSchiffhis own rendition at the start of a congressional hearing, saying this was “the essence of what the president communicates” in his call “in not so many words.” Later in the hearing, Schiff said the summary “was meant to be at least part in parody.”So, it’s true Schiff admittedly gave an account that was different than the memo — and in some respects inaccurate,. But it wasn’t “totally different”: Other parts of Schiff’s comments were siThis fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Clickfor more.Ask FactCheckDoes a video shared on social media show Joe Biden sleeping during a live television interview?No. The video was manipulated to make it appear that he had fallen asleep.Have a question?

On Sept. 26 and 27, President Donald Trump spoke for about two hours and 15 minutes in five appearances — including one campaign rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania. We’ve compiled many of the president’s false and misleading claims from those remarks.By contrast, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden spoke for less than 45 minutes in a few appearances. We wrote about Biden’s claims in “.”We examined the two candidates’ weekend remarks in the run-up to the .On Saturday, Sept. 26, Trump made remarks in Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court, the White House on Marine...

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Lori Robertson

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