Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

So America's very own Boris Johnson - Donald Trump - gave a speech to the far-right wingnuts & authoritarians at #CPAC filled with lies & wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections & other subjects.

Trump claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

Manhattan North: 43 reported murders in 2022 & 379 in 1990.

Manhattan South: 35 in 2022 & 124 in 1990.

NYC: 438 in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle. It's bullshit of course.

“We saved Minneapolis. We’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities & states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.” - Trump.

Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.

Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.”

Trump added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

Trump’s claim on this is absolute bullshit. Trump did NOT create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

The executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations & prosecutions of monument-destruction cases & suggested prosecuting such cases to the fullest extent under existing law.

The order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

Trump said “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.” Portland has hundreds of active storefronts, & while some businesses have been vandalized by protesters, Trump wildly exaggerates this.

Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

This is totally false: Trump was NOT the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country.

If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.

If by Russia he means the USSR, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, & Czechoslovakia 1968).

Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

It’s a lie that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency.

NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s budget to run NATO. While it’s true that most NATO countries don't meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of GDP on defense, the 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”.

It is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

This is unhinged delusional total nonsense.

NATO was created in 1949, would not have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

Trump's claim about what might have happened in an alternative scenario has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

The only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance was the US, under Trump. While the US leaving the alliance could feasibly end it, that wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side.”

The NATO HQ headquarters was actually constructed for a sum UNDER the approved budget of about $1.3 billion.

Trump argued The Washington Post & NYT should not have won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election: “They were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, & they got the prize.”

Bullshit.

The NYT & Washington Post have certainly not made any sort of “hoax” admission. When the Pulitzer Prize was challenged by Trump, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review.

No passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequently’. The NYT reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation & Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into it.

Trump falsely claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along... I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

It’s an absurd lie that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before Trump began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016.

Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’

Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies, that was three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete. The state-owned Russian company behind the project said it would complete the pipeline itself.

The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved”.

The Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, but it provided more than $600M in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 & 2016.

While aid under the Obama administration didn't provide 'lethal weapons', the aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

Trump claimed that as VP, Biden held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” & a company that was paying him. This is baseless. There has never been ANY evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor.

Prosecutor Viktor Shokin had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists & European countries for failing to investigate corruption.

A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor said the investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

Daria Kaleniuk told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws, at least as of now.”

Biden was carrying out US & allies' policy in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian Govt didn't sack Shokin.

Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

This is more utter bullshit. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the WORST overall jobs record for any president.

While the net loss was largely because of the pandemic, even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7M jobs added – was far from the 'greatest of any president ever'. The economy added more than 11.5M jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

On China, Trump said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China... no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

It’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. The US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, &in 2019 the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016.”

Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods & ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China.

The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit did hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018, before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

Onto the Big Lie. Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

This is Trump’s regular lie. All but the pathologically tribal and/or delusional believe Trump won. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

Master of disinformation Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” & “cheating on elections.”

Total bullshit. Election fraud & voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials & supporters of both parties.

Trump claimed he had liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks.”

“I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks. How are you going to do that?’... I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” is more total bullshit; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019.

Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate.

He's previously made this absurd & infantile claim: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

Two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration it was reported that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project.”

Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.”

Trump added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

Trump’s $85 billion figure is of course more bullshit & completely false.

While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Dept has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion - not "$85 billion".

Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s, & now they own them. Think of it.”

Bullshit. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal. The Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

Trump claimed he'd kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall & completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

It's bollocks.

Trump did NOT complete the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written two days after Trump left office, 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for construction had NOT been completed.

Trump claimed that until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador & Honduras.

It’s not true, Guatemala & Honduras DID take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration.

In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US.

Full fact-check here:

edition.cnn.com/2023/03/05/pol…

Like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump is a con artist, a charlatan, a mythomaniac, a phony, a fake, a falsifier, a calumniator, a deceiver, a dissimulator, an equivocator, a fabricator, a fabulist, a falsifier, a fibber, maligner, misleader, prevaricator, trickster, deluder & LIAR. 🤥