Thread by @NikitaKitty

AP FACT CHECK: Trump's Davos remarks rife with distortion apnews.com/66e93c782beccc…

His preening performance at the Davos economic conference was rife with distortion.

A sampling of his remarks:

TRUMP, on historically black colleges and universities: “I saved HBCUs. We saved them. They were going out and we saved them.”

THE FACTS: That’s a big stretch.

Trump signed a law in December restoring money that lapsed for several months when Congress failed to reauthorize some $255 million in financing on time.

The money came back because Senate education leaders reached a compromise on a broader dispute that had entangled financing for black schools. Neither the lapse nor the restoration was directly tied in any way to the Trump administration.

This segment of university education was not vanishing and Trump is not its savior.

BLUE-COLLAR ‘BOOM’
TRUMP: “This is a blue-collar boom. Since my election, net worth of t/bottom half of wage earners has increased by plus-47% - three times faster than t/increase for t/top 1%.”

THE FACTS: It isn’t a boom for blue-collar workers.

They haven’t done much better than everyone else, and some of their gains under Trump have faded in the past year as his trade war hurt manufacturing.

The mining and logging industry, for example, which includes oil and gas workers, lost 21,000 jobs last year. Manufacturers have added just 9,000 jobs in the past six months, while the economy as a whole gained more than 1.1 million jobs during that period.

The U.S. economy is still heavily oriented toward services. While factory jobs have grown, other jobs have grown faster, so manufacturing has slightly shrunk as a proportion of the work force since Trump took office.

He’s right that net worth among the bottom half has risen, but from such a low base that no boom can be claimed. The Federal Reserve says the bottom half has just 1.6% of the nation’s wealth, up from 1.1% when Trump took office. That’s down from 2.1% in 2006.

TRUMP: “For the first time in decades we are no longer simply concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. We are concentrating and creating the most inclusive economy to ever exist.”

THE FACTS: That’s not true. Wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few: The richest 1% of Americans own 32% of the nation’s wealth, about the same as in early 2017 when the president was inaugurated.

The middle-class share — defined by the Fed as those from the exact middle of the wealth distribution up to the top 10% — remains at about 29%. This, despite the slight gains of the bottom half.

The percentage of Americans who own their own homes, a key source of wealth-building, has improved modestly under Trump but remains below the level seen as recently as 2013.

ECONOMY

TRUMP: “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country. And I’m in Europe today because we’re bringing a lot of other companies into our country with thousands of jobs -- millions of jobs, in many cases. ”

THE FACTS: His persistent depiction of the U.S. economy as the greatest ever is false. As for jobs pouring into the country, investment by foreign companies has slumped under Trump,

according to a report by the Organization for International Investment, a Washington-based association that represents foreign businesses.

Foreign companies directly invested $268 billion into the U.S. economy in 2018, a decrease of nearly $220 billion from its record-breaking level in 2016 when Barack Obama was still president.

On the broader picture, economic growth under Trump is not nearly the greatest ever.

In the late 1990s, growth topped 4% for four straight years, a level it has not reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth reached 7.2% in 1984.

The economy grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 under Obama — and hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.

The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low of 3.5%, but the proportion of Americans with a job was higher in the late 1990s. Wages were rising at a faster pace back then, too.

This much is true: The Obama-Trump years have yielded the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. But not the greatest.

TRUMP: “The average unemployment rate for my administration is the lowest for any U.S. president in recorded history. We started off with a reasonably high rate.”

THE FACTS: That’s true, but that’s partly because Trump started with a rate that, if anything, was reasonably low,

not “reasonably high.” The unemployment rate was 4.7% when Trump entered the White House. That is below the long-term U.S. average unemployment of 5.7% since the Labor Department began compiling the data in 1948. Trump’s predecessor,

Barack Obama, inherited a rate of 7.8%. It remained high for years -- topping 8% for a record length of time -- but gradually fell to the below-average level Trump inherited.

AIR & WATER

TRUMP: “I’m proud to report the United States has among the cleanest air and drinking water on Earth -- and we’re going to keep it that way. And we just came out with a report that, at this moment, it’s the cleanest it’s been in the last 40 years.”

THE FACTS: No, air quality has worsened under the Trump administration. And it’s a stretch to say the U.S. is among the countries with the cleanest air. Dozens of nations have less smoggy air.

In the U.S. & other countries, air is better than it was during the days of full-on coal power, leaded gasoline and belching smokestacks, before the advent of modern pollution regulation decades ago. But by multiple measures, air quality has deteriorated in the last few years.

The Environmental Protection Agency declined to identify what new report Trump might be talking about, referring the question to the White House, which did not answer.

Trump made the claim after he proposed this month the latest enforcement rollbacks for the bedrock environmental acts credited with beginning that clean-up of U.S. air and water a half-century ago.

As to water quality, one measure, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index, finds the U.S. tied with nine other countries as having the cleanest drinking water.

But after decades of improvement, progress in air quality has stalled.

There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America in 2017 and 2018 than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when the U.S had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980, according to an AP analysis of EPA data.

A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that deadly air particle pollution increased 5.5% in the United States between 2016 and 2018 after declining by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016.

The Obama administration set records for the fewest air-polluted days.

Trump’s most recent proposals for rolling back environmental regulations include greatly cutting back on a decades-old requirement that federal agencies consider whether a big construction project would hurt the environment before they approve it.

He’s also proposing to pull back restrictions on major sources of air and water pollution, like coal-fired power