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FactChecking Trump's Town Hall - FactCheck.org

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In an Oct. 15 town hall on NBC News, President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims on the coronavirus, the economy and more:The was held in Miami and hosted by “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie. Over on ABC News, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was answering questions in another town hall at the same time. We .Wrong on MasksTrump the CDC “came out with a statement that 85% of the people who wear masks catch” the coronavirus. Rather, among the COVID-19 patients surveyed in the study, 85% reported they “always” or “often” wore a mask in the 14 days before illness onset.Trump: I’m OK with masks. I tell people, wear a mask. But just the other day they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.The day before the town hall, the CDC releaseddirectly contradicting the president’s claim, saying, “The major finding of the, released Sept. 11, was that people in the survey with COVID-19 were twice as likely to have eaten at a restaurant, and that eating in restaurants or drinking in bars might be a higher risk activity. The report also found that people in the study with and without COVID-19 reported high levels of mask wearing in public. Among the approximately 150 COVID-19 patients in the study, 85% reported they “always” or “often” wore a face mask in the 14 days before illness onset.Although Trump offered a tepid endorsement of mask-wearing — “I’m OK with masks. I tell people wear masks” — as we have written, Trumpon the subject, as he then did at the town hall, saying: “I’ve heard many different stories on masks,” and, “Hey, Dr. Fauci said don’t wear a mask.”In the early months of 2020,, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,anddidthe general public not to wear face masks. However, as health officials learned more about the virus, and how often it was being transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, the CDC reversed course on April 3 andthat people begin “wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”“Anybody who has been listening to me over the last several months know that a conversation does not go by where I do not strongly recommend that people wear masks,” Fauci said inon Sept. 30 on ABC News’ “Start Here” podcast.As the CDCon Oct. 14, “Inon Sept. 24 on the “Today” show, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the official messaging from the White House has been “clear and unambiguous” in support of public mask-wearing since early April. But the president has densely packed rallies where many supporters are not wearing masks. Trump has said little to discourage them.Misleading on Mail-In BallotsAs has been the casethe president warned of mail-in ballot fraud in the general election, citing— seven for him — that were found in a trash can in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. State elections officials have since said the ballots were discarded in error,theTimes Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.In a Sept. 30 story, the paper quoted Jonathan Marks, the state deputy secretary for elections, as saying military and overseas ballots sometimes are mailed in envelopes that are not clearly marked as ballots.WhenTrump responded: “Oh, really? Then he’s not doing a very good job. All you have to do is pick up the papers every day. 50,000 in Ohio, the great state of Ohio. 50,000 in another location, I think North Carolina. 500,000 applications in Virginia. No, no. There’s a tremendous problem.”Trump is wrong to cite Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina as examples of fraud. They were errors, and they have been or are being corrected.In Ohio, the Franklin County Board of Elections said in anthat “49,669 voters received an inaccurate ballot,” promising to have correct ballots mailed out in 72 hours. “We want to make it clear that every voter who received an inaccurate ballot will receive a corrected ballot,” the board said. “Stringent tracking measures are in place to guarantee that a voter can only cast one vote.”In Virginia, ABC7in August that 500,000 ballot applications were mailed to Fairfax County residents by the nonprofit Center For Voter Information with the wrong information. The center blamed a printing error. “We don’t believe this organization was acting maliciously, they just were not very diligent in their follow-through,” Gary Scott, the county general registrar and director of elections, told ABC7.Similarly, 11,000 North Carolinians received inaccurate pre-filled voter registration applications — not actual ballots — from Civitech, a technology vendor that works with companies and campaigns to increase voter registrations, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in an. Civitech Chief Operating Office Sarah Jackel apologized and promised to send out “corrected mailers with blank applications to all affected NC recipients.”Falsely Blaming COVID-19 for DACA ChangesAfter Trump told an audience member that “we are going to take care of DACA” if he is reelected, Guthrie offered some facts about the Trump administration’s current approach to the.“Mr. President, in point of fact, the DACA program, there are — under your administration — no new applicants are allowed and in fact the DACA recipients now have to renew every year as opposed to every two years. So in fact the DACA program has been curtailed by your administration,” Guthrie said.Trump then falsely suggested that those changes were due to the COVID-19 pandemic.“Well what happened is because of the pandemic, much changed on the immigration front,” he responded. “Mexico is heavily infected as you know and we’ve made it very, very difficult to come in because of the pandemic and other reasons, and crime.”First of all, the DACA program isn’t for new immigrants. As we’ve, the program was started in 2012, and itcontinuously since June 15, 2007.The Trump administration began in 2017 an effort to “” the program. But&nbsp;in June, the Supreme Courtthe administration’s termination of the program.Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, thenin July outlining “immediate changes to the DACA policy to facilitate my thorough consideration of how to address DACA in light of the Supreme Court’s decision.”Among them were the changes cited by Guthrie: “no new initial requests for DACA should be accepted” and “going forward, renewals of deferred action and the accompanying work authorization should be granted for one-year, rather than two-year, periods,” Wolf’s memo said.Trump’s Tax DistortionTrump once again claimed that Biden wants to raise taxes on “everybody” including “middle income” people, when in fact Biden has vowed he won’t raise federal income taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year.Trump:&nbsp;And if Biden comes in and raises&nbsp;taxes on everybody, including middle income taxes,&nbsp;which he wants to do.As, Biden’s tax plan would not directly increase federal income taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. But it would also raise corporate income taxes — which experts generally agree would have the indirect effect of holding down wages.However, Biden has also proposed a number of new tax credits for low- and middle-income earners. And those would offset even the indirect effect of increased corporate taxes. The(issued Oct. 15) by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for example, calculates that the net result of all Biden’s tax proposals would be, on average, an increase in after-tax income (in effect, a tax cut) for the bottom 80% of households, with the top one-tenth of 1% of earners bearing 70% of Biden’s proposed tax increases.The business-supportedcomes to a similar conclusion in its latest study, figuring that the middle 20% of earners would see a 1.4% increase in after-tax income in 2021. (However, the Tax Foundation also figures that the dynamic effects of Biden’s tax proposals would eventually — over the long run — hold down economic growth by 1.5% and result in a 1.2% reduction in after-tax income for that middle quintile.)Trump’s Hollow Economic BoastsTrump painted a too-rosy picture of the economy, past and present.He boasted that before the COVID-19 recession, “We were up to 160 million jobs.” Not true. At its peak in February,He spoke of gaining 11.4 million jobs. That’s the number of jobs that have been regained in the six months following the loss of 22 million jobs in March and April. Even after that rebound, the U.S. still had nearly 11 million fewer jobs last month than it did in February — and 3.9 million fewer than in the month Trump took office.He said that gross domestic productpredicted that “we’re going to have a phenomenal third quarter.” Maybe so, compared with the second quarter whenAnd he repeated his false claim that “wand 3.0% the year before, which was Trump’s best. It grew faster — 3.1% — in 2015, which was then-President Barack Obama’s best year.Trump’s Response on QAnonGuthrie asked Trump about QAnon and whether he would condemn the widespread conspiracy theory, whichGuthrie: “Let me ask you about QAnon — it is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now can you just once and for all state that that is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?”Trump responded: “I know nothing about QAnon. I know very little … I do know they are very much against pedophilia.”Later, when pressed again by Guthrie, Trump again said, “I just don’t know about QAnon.”We don’t know how much Trump knows or doesn’t know about QAnon, but it’s worth noting that the question was far from the president’s first encounter with the high-profile conspiracy theory. The FBI in 2019 described the theory as a domestic terror threat,to a memo obtained by Yahoo News.Trump hasposts on Twitter from accounts that espouse the theory, and QAnon signage andalsoat Trump rallies.During a press briefing in August, a reporterTrump about his thoughts about the theory’s growth, and he said he didn’t “know much about the movement” but had “heard these are people that love our country.”Trump, Aug. 19:Well, I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate, but I don’t know much about the movement. I have heard that it is gaining in popularity. And from what I hear, it’s — these are people that, when they watch the streets of Portland, when they watch what happened in New York City in just the last six or seven months — but this was starting even four years ago when I came here. Almost four years; can you believe it?These are people that don’t like seeing what’s going on in places like Portland and places like Chicago and New York and other cities and states. And I’ve heard these are people that love our country, and they just don’t like seeing it.In a follow-up question, the reporter explained to Trump the core gist of QAnon — as Guthrie did — telling him, “Trump replied: “Well, I haven’t — I haven’t heard that. But is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know, if I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it.”University of Oxford economists Janine Aron and John Muellbauer concluded in apublished last month that the U.S.’s excess mortality rate is “substantially worse” than Europe’s.to include dataAffordable Care ActTrump said: “We’ve also brought down the price of Obamacare.” Premiums for plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act exchanges have gone down in 2020 (by 3.5% for the lowest-cost “silver” level premium) and 2019 (by 0.4%), but that was after a double-digit increase for 2018 plans (up 29.7%).The large increase then was driven by the Trump administration’s elimination of cost-sharing subsidies on the marketplaces and insurer uncertainty over the ACA’s future. When insurers set marketplace premiums for 2019, the , “it became clear that many of them had overreacted to the tumult and uncertainty” in pricing 2018 plans. So, those premiums, which do “vary considerably across states,” the report noted, have now dropped.The 2 Million FigureTrump argued that the precautions his administration took to minimize COVID-19 spreading avoided an expected loss of “ people.”Trump has made this claimin the past.&nbsp;Aswebefore, the 2.2 million figure is based on a model in March that U.S. deaths if no mitigation measures were taken and no individual behavior changes occurred.The figure, therefore, was not intended to be a practical estimate of the true number of losses.As of Oct. 16, , there have been more than 217,000 deaths in the U.S.No ‘Lockdown’ in MichiganTrump repeated a false claim that the state of Michigan was in the midst of a lockdown.Trump:We won a big case in Michigan because that governor has a lockdown where nobody but her husband can do anything. He can go boating and do whatever he wants but nobody else can.In fact, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat and a frequent target of Trump, on June 1 lifted the state’s stay-at-home, which the governor issued in March to combat the spread of COVID-19. The vast majority of the state’s businesses are open with some restrictions, as are churches and schools, although some of the latter are teaching remotely.The reference to Whitmer’s husband and a boat goes back to an&nbsp;&nbsp;for the couple late in May. Just before Memorial Day, when the governor was urging Michiganders not to crowd waterfront areas due to concern about COVID-19,&nbsp;Whitmer’s husband, Marc Mallory, called a marina in Northern Michigan to see if it could get his boat in the water for the holiday. When told that it was impossible, Mallory asked if the fact that he was married to the governor would help.News about the request triggered criticism of the Whitmers, particularly from people upset about strict stay-at home policies Whitmer had imposed. The governor said it had simply been an unsuccessful stab at humor on her husband’s part.Trump’s Repeated Claims on the Travel ‘Ban,’ Biden“I put on a travel ban far earlier than Dr. [Anthony] Fauci thought it was necessary, who I like, far earlier than the scientists,” he said. “I was actually the only one that wanted to put it on, and I did it actually against the advice of a lot of people.”As we’ve, the travel restrictions were not a “ban”; tens of thousands of people continued to fly to the U.S. from China.And Trump wasn’t the “only one” who wanted the restrictions. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azaron Feb. 7 that the “Trump also again claimed that Biden called him “xenophobic and racist and everything else because I put [the travel policy] in.” Biden did call Trump “xenophobic” on the day the restrictions were announced, but it was unclear why he said that, as we’ve.Biden said during a campaign event that Americans “Biden took no public position on the travel restrictions at the time, but his deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, in ansaid that he supported the measures. She furtherthat the “reference to xenophobia was about Trump’s long record of scapegoating others at a time when the virus was emerging from China,” and that he was not talking about the travel rules.No ‘Spying’ on Trump CampaignTrump falsely claimed that the Obama administration “The Justice Department’s inspector general has investigated and found that there is no truth to that allegation. As we, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government based on information from a “Friendly Foreign Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General&nbsp;report&nbsp;on the origins of the investigation.The inspector general’sreleased in December 2019 found no evidence of illegal “spying” — either before or after the FBI opened the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. “We did not find any documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBl’s decision to conduct these operations,” the report said. “Additionally, we found no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any CHSs [confidential sources] within the Trump campaign, recruit members of the Trump campaign as CHSs, or task CHSs to report on the Trump campaign.”This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Clickfor more.Ask FactCheckHave a question?

In an Oct. 15 town hall on NBC News, President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims on the coronavirus, the economy and more:The was held in Miami and hosted by “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie. Over on ABC News, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was answering questions in another town hall at the same time. We .Wrong on MasksTrump the CDC “came out with a statement that 85% of the people who wear masks catch” the coronavirus. Rather, among the COVID-19 patients surveyed in the study, 85% reported they “always” or “often” wore a mask in the 14 days before illness...

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Brooks Jackson

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