A whistle blew, an impeachment inquiry swung into motion and the president at the center of it all rose defiantly to his own defense, not always in command of the facts.
A CIA officer, in a complaint filed under federal whistleblower protections that preserve anonymity, alleged President Donald Trump abused his office in pressing for a Ukrainian investigation of a Democratic rival, Joe Biden. That revelation persuaded Democrats to move ahead with an inquiry that could produce articles of impeachment. Trump has reacted with anger.
A look at Trump’s words this past week on impeachment, Ukraine and other subjects:
UKRAINE
TRUMP, describing the July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart: “Another Fake News Story! See what was said on the very nice, no pressure, call.”— tweet Thursday.
TRUMP: “My call was perfect.” — remarks to reporters Thursday.
THE FACTS: It’s a big stretch for Trump to say he placed no pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in that phone call — a conversation marked by Trump’s blunt remark: “I would like for you to do us a favor,” according to a White House account of the call.
Trump repeatedly prodded Zelenskiy to help investigate Biden and son Hunter, as well as to look into a cybersecurity firm that investigated the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and concluded it was carried out by Russia.
The call followed a monthslong campaign by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, conducted on Trump’s behalf to get Ukrainians to scrutinize Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine when Joe Biden was vice president. It also followed Trump’s abrupt suspension of military aid for Ukraine that Congress had approved. The aid was recently released.
When Zelenskiy thanked Trump for past U.S. aid and suggested his country might need more, Trump switched the topic to the investigation he wanted Ukraine to do. He asked Zelenskiy to work with Attorney General William Barr and Giuliani on the matter.
As for the call being “perfect,” it was actually worrisome enough so that White House attorneys moved a rough transcript of it to a highly secure system where fewer officials would have access to it than is normally the case for conversations between Trump and world leaders.
The call and the broader effort to win a foreign government’s help on a matter that could benefit Trump’s reelection are what sparked the impeachment inquiry.
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TRUMP, denouncing information from the whistleblower: “All second hand information that proved to be so inaccurate.” — tweet Friday.
THE FACTS: The whistleblower’s accusations have not been shown to be incorrect. Several key details have actually been corroborated. For example, the White House account of the July 25 phone call showed that the whistleblower had accurately summarized the conversation, as relayed by unidentified U.S. officials, in the complaint sent to the acting director of national intelligence.
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TRUMP: “I want to see other countries helping Ukraine also, not just us. As usual the United States helps and nobody else is there.” — remarks to reporters Wednesday.
TRUMP: “I’d withhold again, and I’ll continue to withhold until such time as Europe and other nations contribute to Ukraine. Because they’re not doing it; it’s the United States. … Why is it only the United States putting up the money?” — remarks to reporters Tuesday.
THE FACTS: It isn’t only the U.S. putting up money. It’s false to say “nobody else is there.”
European Union institutions have provided far more development assistance than the U.S.— $425 million in 2016-2017 compared with $204 million from Washington. EU members, Japan and Canada also contribute significantly.
Since 2014, the EU and European financial institutions have mobilized more than $16 billion to help Ukraine’s economy, counter corruption, build institutions and strengthen its sovereignty against further incursions by Russia after its annexation of Crimea.
The U.S. is a heavy source of military assistance. The aid package held back by Trump, and recently released, amounted to nearly $400 million in such aid. But NATO also contributes a variety of military-assistance programs and trust funds for Ukraine. In most such cases, the programs are modest and NATO countries other than the U.S. take the lead.
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TRUMP, in the July 25 call with Ukraine’s leader: “Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk.” — according to White House account of the conversation, released Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Germany is the third largest bilateral donor to Ukraine, after the EU and the U.S.
“Anyone who views this soberly will conclude Germany is strongly involved,” said German foreign ministry spokesman Rainer Breul.
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GUN CONTROL
TRUMP, speaking of the Democratic senator from Connecticut: “Chris Murphy — who I’ve been dealing with on guns — you know, so nice. He’s always, ‘Oh, no, we want to work it out. We want to work it out.’ But they’re too busy wasting their time on the witch hunt.” — news conference Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump is the main holdup on gun control legislation as he mulls whether to endorse expanded background checks.
The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill in February that would require background checks on all gun sales, including those between strangers who meet online or at gun shows. But Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said it’s not clear the Senate would be able to pass the legislation or that Trump would sign it into law. Earlier this month, McConnell stressed that Congress would remain “in a holding pattern ” on gun control as lawmakers await proposals from the White House.
A proposal being floated by Barr on Capitol Hill would require background checks on all commercial gun sales, including at gun shows. But Trump told reporters this month the plan was one of many ideas under consideration and he would go “very slowly.”
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ECONOMY and TRADE
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: “We have before the Congress what will be the largest trade deal in American history. … It’s time for Congress to pass the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and pass it this year.” — remarks Thursday in Indianapolis.
THE FACTS: It’s not the largest trade deal ever made.
It covers the same three countries as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Trump administration is seeking to replace. In contrast, the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations concluded in 1994 created the World Trade Organization and was signed by 123 countries. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found the following year that the WTO’s initial membership accounted for more than 90 percent of global economic output.
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TRUMP on the effects of the impeachment inquiry: “The stock market went up when they saw the nonsense. All of a sudden the stock market went down very substantially when they saw a charge. After they read the charge, the stock market went up very substantially.” — remarks to reporters in New York on Wednesday.
THE FACTS: First, he’s not actually charged with anything. He’s saying the market went down Tuesday when the impeachment drive was announced and up after the White House memo on his phone call with Ukraine’s president came out. That’s roughly right, but it’s wrong to tie the market fluctuations solely — or even primarily — to the impeachment episode.
The market cares even more about the economy, and currently the biggest wild card for the U.S. economy is how much Trump’s trade war with China could curtail growth. Since it began last year, the stock market has fallen with each escalation of tensions and risen when the two sides appeared close to resolving the dispute.
The 142-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday was partly due to the impeachment developments but was also tied to Trump taking a hard line on China in a speech to the United Nations, which seemed to dim the prospects that coming talks would resolve the trade standoff. While the market did move higher Wednesday after the release of the memo, the Commerce Department released some solid numbers on the housing market around the same time.
Moreover, just after the comment on the stock exchange, Trump told reporters a deal with China “could happen sooner than you think,” and the Dow quickly doubled its gain.
The economic-political dynamic was evident in the impeachment inquiries of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. After the initial inquiry of Nixon in October 1973, the S&P 500 index fell 33% the next year. But the S&P 500 gained 39% after the Clinton impeachment inquiry started in October 1998. The difference: The economy was headed toward a recession in the mid-1970s, while the economy was growing strongly in the late 1990s. For Trump, the U.S. economy slowed to growth of about 2% in the second quarter from 3% in the first quarter and current estimates are for 2% growth in the third quarter.
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TRUMP: “Our country is the strongest it’s ever been economically.” — news conference Wednesday.
THE FACTS: It isn’t.
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 President Barack Obama — and hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.
The unemployment rate is near a 50-year low of 3.7%, but the proportion of Americans with a job was higher in the 1990s. Wages were rising at a faster pace back then, too. More Americans are now out of the workforce, taking care of children or relatives, or going to school, while others became discouraged about their job prospects and stopped looking. The government doesn’t count people as unemployed unless they are actively searching for jobs.
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TRUMP: “In America, the result was 4.2 million lost manufacturing jobs … the United States is now taking that decisive action to end this grave economic injustice.” — address Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly.
WHITE HOUSE: “The president is getting rid of the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement and replacing it with a better deal, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Our country has lost 4 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA went into effect.” — news release Tuesday.
THE FACTS: The loss of factory jobs is not all due to NAFTA.
Trump is correct that the United States has lost nearly 4 million factory jobs since that pact took effect in January 1994. But most economists attribute the losses to other factors — the recessions of 2001 and 2007-2009, automation that lets machines replace workers and low-cost competition from China.
Trump’s proposed NAFTA replacement is hardly expected to create a jobs boom. The independent International Trade Commission estimates that the new deal would create 176,000 jobs over six years, a rounding error in a country with 152 million nonfarm jobs.
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BEAUTY PAGEANT
TRUMP, recalling his days as the owner of the Miss Universe pageant: “It’s a great thing. And we had a winner from Ukraine.” — remarks Wednesday before a meeting with Zelenskiy.
THE FACTS: A Ukrainian woman has never won the Miss Universe title. Several made the top 10 during Trump’s tenure at the pageant, which he bought in 1996 and sold in 2015. But none took the prize in the pageant’s history, which dates to 1952. Ukrainian Olesia Stefanko was first runner-up in 2011.
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Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo, Zeke Miller, and Paul Wiseman in Washington and Paul Harloff in New York contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump arrives on stage at the Crown Expo for a campaign rally, Monday, Sept. 9, 2019, in Fayetteville, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump is sticking to his distorted picture of the consequences of his trade war with China, refusing to acknowledge the U.S. is feeling any pain.
His remarks at a rally in North Carolina on Monday night revisited many of his familiar fabrications and exaggerations. A sampling:
TRUMP on China’s economy: “They’ve had now the worst year in 57 years.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. China is far from the impoverished disaster of a half century ago, when it was reeling from the massive famine caused by Mao Zedong’s radical economic policies and heading into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
China’s economy is indeed slowing from Trump’s taxes on Chinese imports, as well as its own campaign to constrain runaway debt. The International Monetary Fund expects the Chinese economy to grow 6.2% this year. That’s the slowest growth for China in nearly 30 years. But it’s still markedly faster than U.S. growth.
And since overhauling its economy in the late 1970s, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, established a growing middle class and surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-biggest economy.
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TRUMP: “Hundreds of billions of dollars have been and are coming into our country in the form of tariffs, and China is eating the cost.”
THE FACTS: Americans are also eating the cost.
As he escalates a trade war with China, Trump refuses to recognize that tariffs are mainly, if not entirely, paid by companies and consumers in the country that imposes them.
In a study in May , the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with Princeton and Columbia universities, estimated that tariffs from Trump’s trade dispute with China were costing $831 per U.S. household on an annual basis, before tariffs were recently escalated. Analysts also found that the burden of Trump’s tariffs falls entirely on U.S. consumers and businesses that buy imported products.
A report last month by JPMorgan Chase estimated that tariffs would cost the average American household $1,000 per year if tariffs on an additional $300 billion of U.S. imports from China proceed in September and December. Trump has since bumped up the scheduled levies even higher, probably adding to the U.S. burden.
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TRUMP: “We passed the largest package of tax cuts and reforms in American history.”
THE FACTS: His tax cuts are nowhere close to the biggest in U.S. history.
It’s a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years. As a share of the total economy, a tax cut of that size ranks 12th, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest, followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.
Post-Reagan tax cuts also stand among the historically significant: President George W. Bush’s cuts in the early 2000s and President Barack Obama’s renewal of them a decade later.
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TRUMP: “More Americans are working today than ever before in the history of our country.”
THE FACTS: He’s correct, but that’s driven by population growth. A more relevant measure is the proportion of Americans with jobs, and that is still below record highs.
According to Labor Department data , 60.9% of people in the United States 16 years and older were working in August. That’s below the all-time high of 64.7% in April 2000.
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TRUMP: “We passed something they wanted to do for half a century: We passed VA Choice.”
THE FACTS: No, it was President Barack Obama who won passage of the Veterans Choice program, which gives veterans the option to see private doctors outside the VA medical system at government expense. Congress approved the program in 2014, and Obama signed it into law. Trump expanded it.
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President Donald Trump smiles during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, Sunday, Aug. 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
President Donald Trump is painting a false picture of a U.S. economy unaffected by his trade war with China and other countries.
He describes a blue-sky world in which rapidly escalating tariffs have no impact on American consumers even as a raft of businesses and economists say otherwise, chastising those who caution of potential weakness in the economy as partisans.
“Our Country, economically, is doing great – the talk of the world!” he tweeted Sunday.
He’s glossing over the facts.
Some economists have put the costs to an average U.S. household from Trump’s pending tariffs on imports from China at $1,000 per year or more, not taking into account the most recent tax hike the president announced Friday of up to 30% on goods. Trump also insisted that economists don’t believe his trade disputes with China could spur recession, but in fact most analysts believe a downturn could start in the next two years.
The claims capped a week in which Trump repeatedly misrepresented his administration’s record, also citing false progress on veterans’ health care, boasting misleadingly about his judicial nominations and blaming President Barack Obama for a policy of separating migrant families that he himself started.
A look at the claims:
ECONOMY
TRUMP: “I think our tariffs are very good for us. We’re taking in tens of billions of dollars. China is paying for it.” — remarks Friday night to reporters before leaving for the Group of Seven summit in France.
TRUMP: “It’s coming in by the billions. We never got 10 cents from China.” — remarks Sunday with the British prime minister at G-7 summit.
TRUMP: “The tariffs have cost nothing, in my opinion. …And we’re not paying for the tariffs; China is paying for the tariffs, for the one-hundredth time.” — remarks on Aug. 18 to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
THE FACTS: Americans, in fact, are paying for the tariffs. It’s also false to say the U.S. never collected a dime in tariffs on Chinese goods before Trump took action; they are simply higher in some cases than they were before.
As he escalates a trade war with China, Trump refuses to recognize a reality that his own chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has acknowledged. Tariffs are mainly, if not entirely, paid by companies and consumers in the country that imposes them. China is not sending billions of dollars to the U.S. treasury.
In a study in May, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with Princeton and Columbia universities, estimated that tariffs from Trump’s trade dispute with China were costing $831 per U.S. household on an annual basis, before tariffs were recently escalated. Analysts also found that the burden of Trump’s tariffs falls entirely on U.S. consumers and businesses that buy imported products.
A report this month by JPMorgan Chase estimated that tariffs would cost the average American household $1,000 per year if tariffs on another $300 billion of U.S. imports from China proceed in September and December. Trump has since bumped up the scheduled levies even higher, likely adding to the U.S. burden. He announced Friday that tariffs on the $300 billion in goods would increase from 10% to 15%; existing tariffs on another $250 billion in Chinese imports would go from 25% to 30% on Oct. 1 after public feedback.
Trump also has threatened anew to place tariffs on French wine imports to the U.S. in a spat over France’s digital services tax; the European Union promised to retaliate. On Sunday, after saying he had “second thoughts” about the trade war with China, the White House later made clear his only regret was that he didn’t raise tariffs higher.
The Congressional Budget Office said last week that “trade policies” were weighing on U.S. economic activity, particularly business investment.
“Businesses’ uncertainty about trade policies is expected to continue to weigh on private investment and, thus, output,” it said.
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TRUMP, asked if he should take responsibility for a 600-point drop Friday in the Dow Jones industrial average spurred by his escalating trade war: “Not at all. Because if you look at from November 9th — the day after the election — we’re up 50% or more. We’re up many, many points. We were at about sixteen or seventeen thousand. We’re at 25,000.” — remarks Friday night to reporters.
TRUMP, on the news media: “They are trying to force a Recession, they are trying to ‘will’ America into … bad Economic times.” — tweets Sunday.
THE FACTS: He’s inflating the stock market performance since he was elected.
The Dow closed at 18,590 on Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Trump’s election, and it closed at 25,627 last Friday — a 38% increase.
While Trump now regularly praises a rising stock market and blasts those who try to promote “bad economic times,” he wasn’t always such a big cheerleader.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump derided the economic recovery under Obama as a mirage, dismissing stock gains and warning of recession. “The only thing that looks good is the stock market, but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that’s going to come crashing down,” Trump said in Sept. 2016. “We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble.”
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TRUMP: “I don’t think we’re having a recession. We’re doing tremendously well … And most economists actually say that we’re not going to have a recession.” — remarks to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
THE FACTS: Actually, most economists — about 74% — do expect a recession in the U.S. by the end of 2021.
The economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics mostly didn’t share Trump’s optimistic outlook for the economy. Thirty-four percent of the economists said they believe a slowing economy will tip into recession in 2021. That’s compares with 25% in the February survey.
An additional 38% of those polled predicted that recession will occur next year, down slightly from 42% in February. An additional 2% of those polled expect a recession to begin this year.
The 226 economists responding work mainly for corporations and trade associations.
The economists have previously expressed concern that Trump’s tariffs and higher budget deficits could eventually slow the economy.
The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on goods from many key U.S. trading partners, from China and Europe to Mexico and Canada. On Friday, Trump escalated his trade fight with China by raising retaliatory tariffs and ordering American companies to consider alternatives to doing business there, maintaining that the tariffs will help the administration gain more favorable terms of trade. But U.S. trading partners have also retaliated with tariffs of their own.
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TRUMP: “The Economy is doing really well. The Federal Reserve can easily make it Record Setting! The question is being asked, why are we paying much more in interest than Germany and certain other countries?” — tweet Thursday.
TRUMP: “Germany sells 30 year bonds offering negative yields. Germany competes with the USA. Our Federal Reserve does not allow us to do what we must do. They put us at a disadvantage against our competition.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Trump misrepresents the impact of Federal Reserve policies and is mistaken about Germany’s economy, suggesting that it enjoys some kind of advantage. In fact, the negative yields are a sign of that economy’s weakness.
The German economy shrank in the previous quarter and there are expectations from investment banks that Germany soon could fall into a recession. Nor is the phenomenon isolated to Germany. Japan and much of Europe are also struggling with interest rates on government debt that are negative or close to negative.
Investors are betting that stimulus efforts by the European Central Bank will keep rates persistently low. But the negative interest rates on German bonds also reflect that government’s aversion to issuing debt, even though the borrowing would allow it to spend more on roads and bridges to spur stronger economic growth.
By having even slightly positive interest rates compared to the rest of the world, the United States is in a better position to attract global investment.
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MIGRANTS
TRUMP: “President Obama had separation. I’m the one that brought them together. This new rule will do even more to bring them together. But it was President Obama that had the separation.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.
THE FACTS: Trump is distorting the truth. The separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents resulted from his “zero tolerance” policy. Obama had no such policy. After a public outcry and a court order, Trump generally ceased the practice and largely reunited families his policy had driven apart.
Zero tolerance meant that U.S. authorities would criminally prosecute all adults caught crossing into the U.S. illegally. Doing so meant detention for adults and the removal of their children while their parents were in custody. During the Obama administration, such family separations were the exception. They became the practice under Trump’s policy, which he suspended a year ago.
His administration is now moving to end an agreement limiting how long migrant children can be kept in detention. The new rules being adopted by the Homeland Security Department seek to keep families together by holding children in detention longer than the generally held limit of 20 days set by a federal court settlement.
Before Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, migrant families caught illegally entering the U.S. were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation, unless they were known to have a criminal record. Then and now, immigration officials may take a child from a parent in certain cases, such as serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns.
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GUN VIOLENCE
TRUMP, on prospects for gun control after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio: “We have very, very strong background checks right now. … And we’re looking at different things. And I have to tell you that it is a mental problem. And I’ve said it a hundred times: It’s not the gun that pulls the trigger; it’s the person that pulls the trigger.” — remarks Tuesday with Romania’s president.
TRUMP: “I don’t want people to forget that this is a mental health problem. … Just remember this: Big mental problem, and we do have a lot of background checks right now.” — remarks Sunday to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
THE FACTS: He’s oversimplifying the role of mental illness in public mass shootings and playing down the ease with which Americans can get firearms.
Most people with mental illness are not violent and they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators, according to mental health experts. They say that access to firearms actually is a big part of the problem.
Arthur Evans, chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, said that red flag laws urged by Trump, which are also known as extreme risk protection orders, are a worthwhile step. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have such laws, according to the nonprofit Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence; some have used the laws to temporarily disarm people who have threatened violence.
But Evans and others said assigning too much blame to those with mental illness adds to stigma that keeps people from getting treatment.
A country’s rate of gun ownership is a far better predictor of public mass shootings than indicators of mental illness, said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist who published a 2016 analysis of data from 171 countries.
“The key of what’s going on here is access to guns for people who are dangerous or disturbed,” Lankford said. Red flag laws make it easier to disarm people believed to be a danger to themselves or others, “but sometimes there are not clear warning signs or those signs are not reported to the authorities until after an attack,” he said.
Last month, the U.S. Secret Service released a report on mass public attacks in 2018, finding that “no single profile” can be used “to predict who will engage in targeted violence” and “mental illness, alone, is not a risk factor.”
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AUTOS
TRUMP: “The Legendary Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, the Founders of Ford Motor Company and General Motors, are ‘rolling over’ at the weakness of current car company executives.” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: He’s incorrect that Sloan is the founder of General Motors.
William Durant started GM in 1908, combining several companies that produced Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and other vehicles. Sloan was a longtime president, CEO and chairman of GM, leading the company from the 1920s to the 1950s.
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TRUMP: “My proposal to the politically correct Automobile Companies would lower the average price of a car to consumers by more than $3000, while at the same time making the cars substantially safer. Engines would run smoother. Very little impact on the environment! Foolish executives!” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump is inflating the projected savings to consumers under his plan to freeze Obama-era fuel economy requirements at 2021 levels. He’s also minimizing the potential environmental harm.
His administration, in documents proposing to freeze the standards, puts the cost of meeting the Obama-era requirements at around $2,700 per vehicle. It claims buyers would save that much by 2025, over standards in place in 2016. But that number is disputed by environmental groups and is more than double the estimates from the Obama administration.
Trump’s tweet also is ignoring money that consumers would save at the gas pump if cars get better mileage. A study released Aug. 7 by Consumer Reports found that the owner of a 2026 vehicle will pay over $3,300 more for gasoline during the life of a vehicle if the standards are frozen at 2021 levels. The administration’s proposed freeze would hold the average fuel economy for the new-vehicle fleet at 29.1 mpg in real-world driving, while the Obama-era standards would raise it to 37.5 mpg by 2026, according to Consumer Reports.
Trump claims his proposal would cause little environmental harm, but documents from his administration say that U.S. fuel consumption would increase by about 500,000 barrels per day, a 2% to 3% increase. Environmental groups predict even more fuel consumed, resulting in higher pollution.
Trump’s statement that cars would be substantially safer also is in dispute. His administration argues that lower-cost vehicles would allow more people to buy new ones that are safer, cutting roadway deaths by 12,700 lives through the 2029 model year. But Consumer Reports says any safety impact from changes in gas mileage standards are small and won’t vary much from zero.
And there’s little basis for Trump’s claim that engines would run more smoothly. Early versions of cars with more fuel-efficient transmissions, turbochargers and technology that stops engines at red lights were rough, but those have been refined. “The automakers have figured out how to use this technology and make the cars smoother driving, too,” said Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports director of auto testing.
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VETERANS
TRUMP: “My administration has worked aggressively to boost veterans employment, and we’re setting records. … Veterans unemployment has reached the lowest level ever recorded.” — remarks Wednesday at AMVETS convention in Louisville, Kentucky.
THE FACTS: It’s true that the unemployment rate for veterans fell to 2.3% in April, matching the low set in May 2000 under President Bill Clinton. But this figure is volatile on a monthly basis, not adjusted for seasonal changes, and has since risen. The figure stood at 3.4% in July, according to the Labor Department.
Veterans’ unemployment has fallen mostly for the same reasons that joblessness has dropped generally: strong hiring and steady economic growth over the past decade dating to the Obama administration.
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TRUMP: “The VA is now providing same-day emergency mental health care and mental health screenings to every patient that walks through the door.” — AMVETS convention.
THE FACTS: Same-day mental health service started at VA before Trump took office in January 2017.
VA’s effort to provide same-day primary and mental-health care when medically necessary at every VA medical center was publicized in April 2016, during the Obama administration. By late 2016, the department’s blog announced that goal would be achieved by year’s end.
A Dec. 23, 2016, article in the Harvard Business Review cites new same-day services at all VA hospitals as evidence of notable progress at the department. Former VA Secretary David Shulkin told Congress in late January 2017 the services already were fully in place.
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TRUMP: “Veterans Choice, as you’ve been trying to get that for 44 years, they say — 44 years. I guess it’s longer than that; probably earlier than that. But for 44 years, at least, that we know of. And you got it.” — AMVETS convention.
THE FACTS: You wouldn’t know from Trump’s boasting that it was Obama who won passage of the Veterans Choice program, which gives veterans the option to see private doctors outside the VA medical system at government expense. Congress approved the program in 2014, and Obama signed it into law. Trump expanded it. Its ultimate scope remains uncertain, in part because of questions of money.
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JUDGES
TRUMP: “We will have, within another 90 days, 179 federal judges. And I say, ‘Thank you very much, President Obama.’ Because he was unable to get them filled. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was unable. So, President Obama did not do his job.” — remarks on Aug. 18 to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
TRUMP: “Within about two months, we’ll be at 179 federal judges and two Supreme Court judges.” — AMVETS convention on Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump does have a stronger record than Obama so far in picking federal judges, but it isn’t due to complacency from the Obama administration. Instead, unprecedented lack of action by the Republican-controlled Senate on Obama’s judicial nominees in his last two years in office left Trump more vacancies to fill.
Of the 71 people whom Obama nominated to the district courts and courts of appeals in 2015 and 2016, only 20 were voted on and confirmed, said Russell Wheeler, an expert on judicial nominees at the Brookings Institution. Trump entered office in January 2017 with more than 100 vacancies on the federal bench, about double the number Obama had in 2009. Trump has since been aided by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has pushed through Trump’s nominations of appeals court judges in particular.
Wheeler said Trump has had 146 judges confirmed and seated — a pace that is solid but not extraordinary . At least four other presidents — Clinton, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in modern times as well as George Washington — surpassed him at comparable points in their terms in the number of appointees as a percentage of “authorized judgeships,” or the total judicial seats created by Congress.
Wheeler doesn’t put much stock in Trump’s claim of reaching 179 federal judges within two months. Twenty-five nominees have had their Senate hearings and may be ready to be voted on soon, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. “It’s a moving target,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Tom Krisher in Detroit and Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump can’t seem to get his facts straight when it comes to Barack Obama.
From the economy to veterans and immigration, Trump routinely claims achievements of the former president as fully his own or distorts the truth to undermine the Democrat’s legacy. On problems uniquely his own, Trump deflects.
This past week was no different.
Fresh off vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey, and mindful of the 2020 campaign, Trump insisted that economists don’t believe his trade disputes with China could spur recession even though most analysts believe a downturn could start in the next two years. He also claimed progress on veterans’ health care under his watch that didn’t happen and blamed Obama for a policy of separating migrant children from their parents that he himself started.
Trump repeatedly pointed to mental illness, not access to guns, as a main culprit behind the recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. That’s oversimplifying the issue.
A recap, also covering fuel economy standards and judges:
ECONOMY
TRUMP: “I don’t think we’re having a recession. We’re doing tremendously well … And most economists actually say that we’re not going to have a recession.” — remarks Sunday to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
THE FACTS: Actually, most economists — about 74% — do expect a recession in the U.S. by the end of 2021.
The economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics mostly didn’t share Trump’s optimistic outlook for the economy. Thirty-four percent of the economists said they believe a slowing economy will tip into recession in 2021. That’s compares with 25% in the February survey.
An additional 38% of those polled predicted that recession will occur next year, down slightly from 42% in February. An additional 2% of those polled expect a recession to begin this year.
The 226 economists responding work mainly for corporations and trade associations.
The economists have previously expressed concern that Trump’s tariffs and higher budget deficits could eventually slow the economy.
The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on goods from many key U.S. trading partners, from China and Europe to Mexico and Canada. Officials maintain that the tariffs, which are taxes on imports, will help the administration gain more favorable terms of trade. But U.S. trading partners have also retaliated with tariffs of their own.
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TRUMP: “The Economy is doing really well. The Federal Reserve can easily make it Record Setting! The question is being asked, why are we paying much more in interest than Germany and certain other countries?” — tweet Thursday.
TRUMP: “Germany sells 30 year bonds offering negative yields. Germany competes with the USA. Our Federal Reserve does not allow us to do what we must do. They put us at a disadvantage against our competition.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Trump misrepresents the impact of Federal Reserve policies and is mistaken about Germany’s economy, suggesting that it enjoys some kind of advantage. In fact, the negative yields are a sign of that economy’s weakness.
The German economy shrank in the previous quarter and there are expectations from investment banks that Germany soon could fall into a recession. Nor is the phenomenon isolated to Germany. Japan and much of Europe are also struggling with interest rates on government debt that are negative or close to negative.
Investors are betting that stimulus efforts by the European Central Bank will keep rates persistently low. But the negative interest rates on German bonds also reflect that government’s aversion to issuing debt, even though the borrowing would allow it to spend more on roads and bridges to spur stronger economic growth.
By having even slightly positive interest rates compared to the rest of the world, the United States is in a better position to attract global investment.
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TRUMP: “My administration has worked aggressively to boost veterans employment, and we’re setting records. … Veterans unemployment has reached the lowest level ever recorded.” — remarks Wednesday at AMVETS convention in Louisville, Kentucky.
THE FACTS: It’s true that the unemployment rate for veterans fell to 2.3% in April, matching the low set in May 2000 under President Bill Clinton. But this figure is volatile on a monthly basis, not adjusted for seasonal changes, and has since risen. The figure stood at 3.4% in July, according to the Labor Department.
Veterans’ unemployment has fallen mostly for the same reasons that joblessness has dropped generally: strong hiring and steady economic growth over the past decade dating to the Obama administration.
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MIGRANTS
TRUMP: “President Obama had separation. I’m the one that brought them together. This new rule will do even more to bring them together. But it was President Obama that had the separation.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.
THE FACTS: Trump is distorting the truth. The separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents resulted from his “zero tolerance” policy. Obama had no such policy. After a public outcry and a court order, Trump generally ceased the practice and largely reunited families his policy had driven apart.
Zero tolerance meant that U.S. authorities would criminally prosecute all adults caught crossing into the U.S. illegally. Doing so meant detention for adults and the removal of their children while their parents were in custody. During the Obama administration, such family separations were the exception. They became the practice under Trump’s policy, which he suspended a year ago.
His administration is now moving to end an agreement limiting how long migrant children can be kept in detention. The new rules being adopted by the Homeland Security Department seek to keep families together by holding children in detention longer than the generally held limit of 20 days set by a federal court settlement.
Before Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, migrant families caught illegally entering the U.S. were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation, unless they were known to have a criminal record. Then and now, immigration officials may take a child from a parent in certain cases, such as serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns.
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GUN VIOLENCE
TRUMP, on prospects for gun control after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio: “We have very, very strong background checks right now. … And we’re looking at different things. And I have to tell you that it is a mental problem. And I’ve said it a hundred times: It’s not the gun that pulls the trigger; it’s the person that pulls the trigger.” — remarks Tuesday with Romania’s president.
TRUMP: “I don’t want people to forget that this is a mental health problem. … Just remember this: Big mental problem, and we do have a lot of background checks right now.” — remarks Sunday to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
THE FACTS: He’s oversimplifying the role of mental illness in public mass shootings and playing down the ease with which Americans can get firearms.
Most people with mental illness are not violent and they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators, according to mental health experts. They say that access to firearms actually is a big part of the problem.
Arthur Evans, chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, said that red flag laws urged by Trump, which are also known as extreme risk protection orders, are a worthwhile step. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have such laws, according to the nonprofit Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence; some have used the laws to temporarily disarm people who have threatened violence.
But Evans and others said assigning too much blame to those with mental illness adds to stigma that keeps people from getting treatment.
A country’s rate of gun ownership is a far better predictor of public mass shootings than indicators of mental illness, said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist who published a 2016 analysis of data from 171 countries.
“The key of what’s going on here is access to guns for people who are dangerous or disturbed,” Lankford said. Red flag laws make it easier to disarm people believed to be a danger to themselves or others, “but sometimes there are not clear warning signs or those signs are not reported to the authorities until after an attack,” he said.
Last month, the U.S. Secret Service released a report on mass public attacks in 2018, finding that “no single profile” can be used “to predict who will engage in targeted violence” and “mental illness, alone, is not a risk factor.”
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AUTOS
TRUMP: “The Legendary Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, the Founders of Ford Motor Company and General Motors, are ‘rolling over’ at the weakness of current car company executives.” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: He’s wrong that Sloan is the founder of General Motors.
William Durant started GM in 1908, combining several companies that produced Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and other vehicles. Sloan was a longtime president, CEO and chairman of GM, leading the company from the 1920s to the 1950s.
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TRUMP: “My proposal to the politically correct Automobile Companies would lower the average price of a car to consumers by more than $3000, while at the same time making the cars substantially safer. Engines would run smoother. Very little impact on the environment! Foolish executives!” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump is inflating the projected savings to consumers under his plan to freeze Obama-era fuel economy requirements at 2021 levels. He’s also minimizing the potential environmental harm and may be exaggerating the safety benefits.
His administration, in documents proposing to freeze the standards, puts the cost of meeting the Obama-era requirements at around $2,700 per vehicle. It claims buyers would save that much by 2025, over standards in place in 2016. But that number is disputed by environmental groups and is more than double the estimates from the Obama administration.
Trump’s tweet also is ignoring money that consumers would save at the gas pump if cars get better mileage. A study released Aug. 7 by Consumer Reports found that the owner of a 2026 vehicle will pay over $3,300 more for gasoline during the life of a vehicle if the standards are frozen at 2021 levels. The administration’s proposed freeze would hold the average fuel economy for the new-vehicle fleet at 29.1 mpg in real-world driving, while the Obama-era standards would raise it to 37.5 mpg by 2026, according to Consumer Reports.
Trump claims his proposal would cause little environmental harm, but documents from his administration say that U.S. fuel consumption would increase by about 500,000 barrels per day, a 2% to 3% increase. Environmental groups predict even more fuel consumed, resulting in higher pollution.
Trump’s statement that cars would be substantially safer also is in dispute. His administration argues that lower-cost vehicles would allow more people to buy new ones that are safer, cutting roadway deaths by 12,700 lives through the 2029 model year. But Consumer Reports says any safety impact from changes in gas mileage standards are small and won’t vary much from zero.
And there’s little basis for Trump’s claim that engines would run more smoothly. Early versions of cars with more fuel-efficient transmissions, turbochargers and technology that stops engines at red lights were rough, but those have been refined. “The automakers have figured out how to use this technology and make the cars smoother driving, too,” said Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports director of auto testing.
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VETERANS
TRUMP: “We are modernizing your medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense into the VA — something that they just said they couldn’t do. You know that, right? They said, ‘We can’t do it. It’s just too complicated.’ We did it.” — AMVETS convention.
THE FACTS: No, it’s not done. The Department of Veterans Affairs last year signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner Corp., the same company that is overhauling the Pentagon’s electronic health records; some $6 billion more will be needed for IT upgrades and program staff. But a full rollout of the new VA health records is expected to take 10 years.
The aim of the new system is to provide veterans easy access to their health records upon leaving active-duty service and when they receive medical treatment at a VA facility or a private doctor referred under the VA’s Choice private-sector program.
The contract, one of the largest in VA’s history, has drawn concern from lawmakers that it could be plagued with problems and ultimately prove ineffective.
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TRUMP: “The VA is now providing same-day emergency mental health care and mental health screenings to every patient that walks through the door.” — AMVETS convention.
THE FACTS: Same-day mental health service started at VA before Trump took office in January 2017.
VA’s effort to provide same-day primary and mental-health care when medically necessary at every VA medical center was publicized in April 2016, during the Obama administration. By late 2016, the department’s blog announced that goal would be achieved by year’s end.
A Dec. 23, 2016, article in the Harvard Business Review cites new same-day services at all VA hospitals as evidence of notable progress at the department. Former VA Secretary David Shulkin told Congress in late January 2017 the services already were fully in place.
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TRUMP: “Veterans Choice, as you’ve been trying to get that for 44 years, they say — 44 years. I guess it’s longer than that; probably earlier than that. But for 44 years, at least, that we know of. And you got it.” — AMVETS convention.
THE FACTS: You wouldn’t know from Trump’s boasting that it was Obama who won passage of the Veterans Choice program, which gives veterans the option to see private doctors outside the VA medical system at government expense. Congress approved the program in 2014, and Obama signed it into law. Trump expanded it. Its ultimate scope remains uncertain, in part because of questions of money.
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JUDGES
TRUMP: “We will have, within another 90 days, 179 federal judges. And I say, ‘Thank you very much, President Obama.’ Because he was unable to get them filled. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was unable. So, President Obama did not do his job.” — remarks Sunday to reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
TRUMP: “Within about two months, we’ll be at 179 federal judges and two Supreme Court judges.” — AMVETS convention on Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Trump does have a stronger record than Obama so far in picking federal judges, but it isn’t due to complacency from the Obama administration. Instead, unprecedented lack of action by the Republican-controlled Senate on Obama’s judicial nominees in his last two years in office left Trump more vacancies to fill.
Of the 71 people whom Obama nominated to the district courts and courts of appeals in 2015 and 2016, only 20 were voted on and confirmed, said Russell Wheeler, an expert on judicial nominees at the Brookings Institution. Trump entered office in January 2017 with more than 100 vacancies on the federal bench, about double the number Obama had in 2009. Trump has since been aided by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has pushed through Trump’s nominations of appeals court judges in particular.
Wheeler said Trump has had 146 judges confirmed and seated — a pace that is solid but not extraordinary . At least four other presidents — Clinton, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in modern times as well as George Washington — surpassed him at comparable points in their terms in the number of appointees as a percentage of “authorized judgeships,” or the total judicial seats created by Congress.
Wheeler doesn’t put much stock in Trump’s claim of reaching 179 federal judges within two months. Twenty-five nominees have had their Senate hearings and may be ready to be voted on soon, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. “It’s a moving target,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Tom Krisher in Detroit and Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump talks to reporters aboard Air Force One after visiting Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
It was a week of exaggeration and outright fiction for President Donald Trump as he confronted the aftermath of two mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.
Trump twisted science in seeking to assign blame on video games for the shootings, rather than on his own words that critics say contributed to a combustible racial climate spawning violence. He pointed to an imminent magic solution in the form of legislation on background checks that was far from certain and misrepresented his record on gun control.
Escalating a potentially devastating trade war with China, Trump exaggerated the benefits of tariffs and sought unfairly to fault the Federal Reserve for any weakness in the U.S. economy.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden claimed Trump did nothing on gun control, but in fact Trump banned bump stocks, a gun attachment deemed legal during the Obama-Biden administration.
A review:
GUN VIOLENCE
TRUMP: “We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.” — remarks Monday on the mass shootings.
THE FACTS: There is no scientific link between video games and mass violence.
Some studies show a short-term increase in aggressive thoughts and feelings after playing video games, but nothing that rises to the level of violence.
In 2006, a small study by Indiana University researchers found that teenagers who played violent video games showed higher levels of emotional arousal but less activity in the parts of the brain associated with the ability to plan, control and direct thoughts and behavior.
“Plenty of gamers and get upset when they lose or feel the game was ‘cheating,’ but it doesn’t lead to violent outputs,” said Benjamin Burroughs, a professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University who focuses on video games, found in his research that men who commit severe acts of violence actually play violent video games less than the average male. About 20% were interested in violent video games, compared with 70% of the general population, he said.
Another study by Markey and his colleagues showed that violence tends to dip when a new violent movie or video game comes out, possibly because people are at home playing the game or in theaters watching the movie.
Trump’s statements this past week assigning blame to the video game industry were more reserved compared with his last brush with the subject in 2018, when he called video games “vicious” and summoned game-industry executives to meet at the White House, to little lasting effect.
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TRUMP, on prospects for gun control legislation: “There’s a great appetite — and I mean a very strong appetite — for background checks. And I think we can bring up background checks like we’ve never had before. I think both Republican and Democrat are getting close to a bill on — they’re doing something on background checks.” — remarks to reporters Wednesday before departing for Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.
THE FACTS: He’s overstating the level of political will for gun control measures.
Passage of a background checks bill in the Senate remains far from certain. Support for a bipartisan background checks measure co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia reached a high point with a 2013 vote after the Sandy Hook shooting, but it fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance. Both senators spoke to Trump on Monday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, under pressure to call senators back to Washington from their summer recess to work on gun measures, said Thursday that he hopes to consider legislation to expand federal background checks when Congress returns in the fall. He said he wants to spend the August recess talking with senators to see what’s possible.
Two other gun bills have passed the House this year but languished in the Republican-controlled Senate. One of them would require federal background checks for all firearms sales and transfers, including those online or at gun shows. The second bill allows an expanded 10-day review for gun purchases.
With gun control legislation stalled, some senators have pushed for a bipartisan proposal to create a federal grant program to encourage states to adopt “red flag” laws to take guns away from people believed to be a danger to themselves or others. But it remains to be seen if such a law could pass Congress.
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BIDEN, Democratic presidential candidate: Trump is “doing nothing — nothing about the endemic and epidemic of guns that is fueling a literal carnage in America.” — remarks Wednesday in Burlington, Iowa.
THE FACTS: He’s wrong that Trump did absolutely nothing on gun control
A nationwide ban took effect in March on bump stocks, the attachment used by the gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre to make his weapons fire rapidly like machine guns.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives outlawed the attachments at Trump’s direction after the shootings killed more than 50 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. It is the only major gun restriction imposed by the federal government in the past few years.
The Trump administration’s move was an about-face for the bureau. In 2010, under the Obama-Biden administration, it found that the devices were legal. But under the Trump administration, officials revisited that determination and found it incorrect.
After the Las Vegas shootings, the National Rifle Association initially said “devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.” After the bureau’s ruling banning the devices, however, the gun lobby called it “disappointing” and said it should have provided amnesty for gun owners who already have bump stocks.
The government estimates that more than 500,000 bump stocks were sold after they were legalized in 2010.
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TRUMP, on gun restrictions: “We have done much more than most administrations. …We’ve done, actually, a lot.” — remarks on Aug. 4 to reporters.
THE FACTS: Trump’s record on gun control is not groundbreaking.
Congress has proved unable to pass substantial gun violence legislation, despite the frequency of mass shootings, in large part because of resistance from Republicans, particularly in the GOP-controlled Senate. That political dynamic seems difficult to change.
It’s true that after other mass shootings Trump called for strengthening the federal background check system, and in 2018, he signed legislation to increase federal agency data sharing. In December 2018, the Trump administration also banned bump stocks.
But he has rolled back restrictions, reneged on pledges and resisted Democratic calls to toughen other gun control laws.
Within weeks of taking office, Trump scrapped a federal rule imposed by Obama that could have made it harder for some mentally ill people to own guns. Under the rule, the Social Security Administration was supposed to provide information to the gun-buying background check system on recipients with a mental disorder so severe they cannot work or handle their own benefit checks. The rule didn’t make certain people ineligible to buy a firearm but was designed to ensure the background check system was comprehensive.
In February, the House approved bipartisan legislation to require federal background checks for all gun sales and transfers and approved legislation to allow a review period of up to 10 days for background checks on firearms purchases. The White House threatened a presidential veto if those measures passed Congress.
At a February meeting with survivors and family members of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting in which 17 people died, Trump promised to be “very strong on background checks.” Trump claimed he would stand up to the gun lobby and finally get results in quelling gun violence. But he later retreated, expressing support for modest changes to the federal background check system and for arming teachers.
Some Democrats have called for stronger measures such as renewing a federal ban on assault weapons, which was put in place during the Clinton administration before it expired under President George W. Bush. Trump has shown no interest in embracing that issue.
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TRUMP: “We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but, when necessary, involuntary confinement.” — remarks Monday on the mass shootings.
THE FACTS: His words don’t match his past actions.
Trump’s budgets would have slashed the federal-state Medicaid program, which provides health insurance for more than 70 million low-income and disabled people and is also the major source of public funds for mental health treatment.
Such proposals failed to advance in Congress, even when both chambers were under Republican control.
The president’s 2020 budget does call for some spending increases on smaller mental health programs, including an increase of $15 million, for a total of $107 million, to expand school-based programs. The Parkland shootings last year at a Florida high school heightened sensitivity to the mental health needs of students.
But such increases for specific programs pale in comparison with the impact of Medicaid cuts. This year Trump again proposed to turn the program over to the states, limiting future federal financing. That would have led to a cut of about $1.4 trillion over 10 years from currently projected levels of federal spending.
The administration says that’s not really a cut, since spending would have continued to grow, just more slowly. But limits on federal financing would have forced states to confront hard choices over competing priorities like mental health or addiction treatment, nursing home costs or prenatal care for low-income women.
As a candidate, Trump had originally promised that he would not cut Medicaid.
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FEDERAL RESERVE
TRUMP: “As your President, one would think that I would be thrilled with our very strong dollar. I am not!” — tweet Thursday.
TRUMP: “The Fed’s high interest rate level, in comparison to other countries, is keeping the dollar high, making it more difficult for our great manufacturers like Caterpillar, Boeing …. John Deere, our car companies, & others, to compete on a level playing field. With substantial Fed Cuts (there is no inflation) and no quantitative tightening, the dollar will make it possible for our companies to win against competition.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: The president is oversimplifying the Fed’s role in determining the dollar’s value and failing to take into account possible threats to the country from a weaker dollar.
Trump is correct that U.S. interest rates play a role in determining the value of the dollar against other currencies. Higher U.S. rates tend to attract foreign investors who want to earn higher rates of return on dollar-denominated investments and this does push the dollar’s value higher.
The Fed cut its key short-term rate by a quarter-point last week, its first reduction in more than a decade. But the Fed’s action in setting its short-term rate is only one factor influencing the dollar’s value.
U.S. economic growth also plays a major role. Investors have pushed up the value of the dollar because they are attracted to U.S. assets since America’s economy is growing faster than most other major economies.
And Trump’s drumbeat for a lower dollar ignores the threats that could be posed if the dollar were to weaken significantly. That could spark higher inflation in this country and push interest rates up as foreign buyers of Treasury bonds to fund the government’s $22 trillion debt demand a higher return to guard against the devaluation of the dollar.
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TRADE
TRUMP: “China is losing so many — they’re losing — thousands and thousands of companies are leaving China now because of the tariffs.” — remarks to reporters Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Not so fast. It’s true that many companies are rethinking their supply chains in an effort to dodge Trump’s tariffs on goods from China. Some are moving production to other countries such as Vietnam and Mexico. But there’s no evidence of a mass exodus. For one thing, relocating factories takes time — often 12 to 18 months. For another, it will be hard for multinationals to duplicate what they have in China — long-standing relationships with Chinese contractors and access to a vast array of specialized suppliers who can quickly deliver niche components.
Trump last week sought to intensify pressure on China to reach a trade deal by saying he will impose 10% tariffs Sept. 1 on the remaining $300 billion in Chinese imports he hasn’t already taxed. U.S. consumers will likely feel the pain if Trump proceeds with the new tariffs.
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TRUMP: “China dropped the price of their currency to an almost a historic low. It’s called ‘currency manipulation.’ Are you listening Federal Reserve? This is a major violation which will greatly weaken China over time!” — tweet Monday.
TRUMP: “China is intent on continuing to receive the hundreds of Billions of Dollars they have been taking from the U.S. with unfair trade practices and currency manipulation. So one-sided, it should have been stopped many years ago!” — tweet Monday.
THE FACTS: He’s misrepresenting the facts.
Trump is correct to be worried that China may decide to use its currency as a weapon in its ongoing trade war with the United States. But it is Trump’s own Treasury Department that had failed to cite China as a currency manipulator in five reports it had issued since Trump took office in January 2017, even though Trump promised in the 2016 campaign to do so right away. Treasury’s surprise move to formally label China a currency manipulator late Monday came after China allowed its currency, the yuan, to fall below the seven yuan-to-$1 level for the first time in 11 years. In the following days, China continued to lower the trading range for the yuan, showing the potential to use its currency as a weapon in the trade war with the United States.
A weaker yuan would make Chinese goods less expensive in the United States, potentially offsetting some of the impact of the tariffs Trump has already imposed on $250 billion in Chinese goods and is threatening to widen to an additional $300 billion in goods next month. Those U.S. tariffs drive up the cost of Chinese imports to American consumers.
Trump appeared to blame the Federal Reserve for not taking action against China in the currency area. In reality, the Treasury’s previous reports had repeatedly said that China did not meet the requirements established in U.S. law to be branded a currency manipulator. Under U.S. law, the Federal Reserve plays no role in deciding whether countries are unfairly manipulating their currencies.
In its announcement Monday, the Treasury Department contended that the real purpose of “China’s currency devaluation is to gain unfair competitive advantage in international trade.” It was the first time Treasury put China on the currency blacklist since 1994.
The administration’s surprise announcement raised questions about what exactly had changed from the Treasury’s last report issued in May that said China did not meet the criteria to be labeled a currency manipulator.
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TRUMP: “I am the least racist person. Black … Unemployment is the lowest (BEST) in the history of the United States!” — tweet Tuesday.
THE FACTS: Trump is seeking credit he doesn’t deserve for black job growth.
It’s true that black unemployment did reach a record low during the Trump administration: 5.9% in May 2018. It currently stands at 6%.
But many economists view the continued economic growth since the middle of 2009, when Obama was in office, as the primary explanation for hiring. More important, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening and the administration appears to have done little, if anything, to specifically address this challenge.
The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8% in March 2010 to 7.8% in January 2017.
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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Colleen Long, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Paul Wiseman in Washington, Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho, and Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this report.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md.(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Facing growing accusations of racism for his incendiary tweets, President Donald Trump is seeking to deflect the criticism by labeling a leading black congressman as himself racist.
In the latest rhetorical shot at non-white lawmakers, Trump said his weekend comments referring to Rep. Elijah Cummings’ majority-black Baltimore district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” were not racist. Instead, Trump argued, “if racist Elijah Cummings would focus more of his energy on helping the good people of his district, and Baltimore itself, perhaps progress could be made in fixing the mess.”
“His radical ‘oversight’ is a joke!” Trump tweeted Sunday.
His comments capped a weekend of attacks on Cummings, the son of former sharecroppers who rose to become the powerful chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, even as a top White House aide sought to dismiss the controversy by describing Trump’s comments as hyperbole. Two weeks ago, Trump caused a nationwide uproar with racist tweets directed at four Democratic congresswomen of color as he looked to stoke racial divisions for political gain heading into the 2020 election.
Speaking in television interviews, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Trump was reacting in frustration to the Democrats’ unrelenting investigations and talk of impeachment. He said Trump swung hard at Cummings and his Baltimore district because he believes such Capitol Hill critics are neglecting serious problems back home in their zeal to unfairly undermine his presidency.
“I understand that everything that Donald Trump says is offensive to some people,” Mulvaney said. But he added: “The president is pushing back against what he sees as wrong. It’s how he’s done it in the past, and he’ll continue to do it in the future.”
Mulvaney, a former congressman, said he understood why some people could perceive Trump’s words as racist.
Mulvaney said Trump’s words were exaggerated for effect — “Does the president speak hyperbolically? Absolutely” — and meant to draw attention to Democratic-backed investigations of the Republican president and his team in Washington.
“Instead of helping people back home, they’re focusing on scandal in Washington D.C., which is the exact opposite of what they said they would do when they ran for election in 2018,” Mulvaney said, pointing at Democrats who now control the House.
He asserted that Trump’s barbs were a reaction to what the president considered to be inaccurate statements by Cummings about conditions in which children are being held in detention at the U.S.-Mexico border.
At a hearing last week, Cummings accused a top administration official of wrongly calling reports of filthy, overcrowded border facilities “unsubstantiated.”
“When the president hears lies like that, he’s going to fight back,” Mulvaney said.
Trump’s tweets Saturday also charged that Cummings’ district, which includes Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Social Security Administration and the national headquarters of the NAACP, is “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.”
Condemnation followed from Democrats over the weekend, including some of the party’s presidential candidates. Statements from a spokesman for Maryland’s Republican governor and from the lieutenant governor defended Cummings’ district and its people.
The president has tried to put racial polarization at the center of his appeal to his base of voters, tapping into anxieties about demographic and cultural changes in the nation in the belief that the divided country he leads will simply choose sides over issues such as race.
Mulvaney argued that Trump would criticize any lawmaker, no matter the person’s race, in a similar way if Trump felt that individual spoke unfairly about the president’s policies. He volunteered that if Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, had made the same remarks as Cummings, Trump would have pushed back.
“It has zero to do with the fact that Adam is Jewish and everything to do with Adam would just be wrong if he were saying that,” Mulvaney said. “This is what the president does. He fights and he’s not wrong to do so.”
To Mulvaney, Trump was “right to raise” the challenges faced in Cummings’ district at the same time that Cummings and other Democrats are “chasing down” the Russia investigation undertaken by Robert Mueller and pursuing “this bizarre impeachment crusade.”
Cummings is leading multiple investigations of the president’s governmental dealings. In his direct response to Trump on Twitter, Cummings said: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Cummings has also drawn the president’s ire for investigations touching on his family members serving in the White House. His committee voted along party lines Thursday to authorize subpoenas for personal emails and texts used for official business by top White House aides, including Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro said Trump was engaging in “racial priming.”
“Using this language and taking actions to try and get people to move into their camps by racial and ethnic identity. That’s how he thinks he won in 2016 and that’s how he thinks he’s going to win in 2020,” Castro said.
Earlier this month, Trump drew bipartisan condemnation following his call for Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to get out of the U.S. “right now.” He said that if the lawmakers “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries.
All four lawmakers of color are American citizens and three of the four were born in the U.S. The House later voted largely along party lines to condemn his “racist comments.”
Mulvaney was interviewed on “Fox News Sunday” and CBS’ “Face the Nation,” where Castro also appeared.
President Donald Trump attributed statements to a Democratic congresswoman that she didn’t make as he set off an incendiary week of vilification with accusations that she and three other lawmakers of color hate America.
One of his top White House advisers, Stephen Miller, reinforced the charges Sunday, pointing to their remarks about terrorism and Trump’s handling of border policy and saying the lawmakers “detest America as it exists.”
The comments have roiled the capital and excited Trump’s North Carolina rally, overshadowing distortions in rhetoric that came from many quarters and from both parties on a variety of matters over the last week-plus — the Democratic presidential campaign among them.
A look at the claims and reality:
LOVING AMERICA
MILLER, on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.: “You saw the quotes from Representative Omar saying some people did something at 9/11. And yes, if you watch it in context, it’s worse.” — interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
TRUMP: “When she talked about the World Trade Center being knocked down, ‘some people.’ You remember the famous ‘some people.’ These are people that, in my opinion, hate our country.” — remarks on July 15 at a manufacturing event.
THE FACTS: It’s true that plenty of critics thought Omar sounded dismissive about the 2001 terrorist attacks in a comment in a speech in March. Those remarks, though, did not express love “for enemies like al-Qaida,” as Trump put it, or any proof of hatred or detesting America.
Speaking to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Omar said the group “was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” Her phrasing — “some people did something” — struck many people as a tone-deaf way to refer to the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The American-Islamic group actually was founded in 1994, according to its website. Its membership skyrocketed after the 2001 attacks.
In the speech, Omar said many Muslims saw their civil liberties eroded after the attacks, and she advocated for activism. “For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” she said.
But she also noted that “what we know, and what Islam teaches us, and what I always say, is that love trumps hate.”
After being criticized for her remarks, Omar noted that President George W. Bush had stood at Ground Zero days after the attacks and also referred somewhat generically to “the people who knocked these buildings down,” while vowing they “will hear all of us soon.”
Trump is continuing to assail Omar and three other liberal Democratic women of color, challenging their loyalty to the U.S. They are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The House rebuked him Tuesday for his “racist comments” after he said they should “go back” to their countries. All four are Americans; Omar was born in Somalia; the others in the U.S.
Omar said Trump is a “fascist” and she and the other women he’s going after will “continue to be a nightmare to this president because his policies are a nightmare to us.”
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TRUMP quotes Omar as saying: “You don’t say ‘America’ with this intensity. You say ‘al-Qaida,’ it makes you proud. Al-Qaida makes you proud. You don’t speak that way about America.” — North Carolina rally on Wednesday.
TRUMP: “I hear the way she talks about al-Qaida. Al-Qaida has killed many Americans. She said, ‘You can hold your chest out, you can — when I think of America — uhh — when I think of al-Qaida, I can hold my chest out.’” — remarks Monday at a manufacturing event at the White House.
THE FACTS: This is a wholly distorted account of what the Omar said. She did not voice pride in the terrorist group.
Trump is referring to an interview Omar gave in 2013. In it, she talked about studying terrorism history or theory under a professor who dramatically pronounced the names of terrorist groups, as if to emphasize their evil nature.
“The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘al-Qaida,’ he sort of like — his shoulders went up” and he used a menacing, intense tone, she said. Her point was that the professor was subtly rousing suspicions of Muslims with his theatrical presentation, while pronouncing “America” without the intensity he afforded the names of terrorist groups.
At no point did she say “al-Qaida” should be uttered with intensity or pride and that “America” shouldn’t.
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TRUMP, on Ocasio-Cortez: “Cortez said that illegal immigrants are more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be. Can you believe that? That’s what she is saying.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: True, except that people who come to the border and ask for refugee status can’t be described as “illegal immigrants.” They commit no crime by applying for that status. Ocasio-Cortez, speaking of women and children who show up seeking refuge or opportunity, said: “They’re acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be.” This was from an MSNBC interview in January.
At the rally, Trump refused to call the New York congresswoman by her full hyphenated surname.
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ECONOMY
TRUMP: “Economic numbers reach an all time high, the best in our Country’s history.” — tweet Saturday.
TRUMP: “We have the strongest economy in history.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: The economy is not the strongest in the country’s history. It expanded at an annual rate of 3.1% in the first quarter of this year. That growth was the highest in just four years for the first quarter.
In the late 1990s, growth topped 4% for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth even reached 7.2% in 1984.
The economy is now in its 121st month of growth, making it the longest expansion in history. Most of that took place under Obama.
The economy grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 under Obama — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.
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TRUMP: “I think a number that makes me the happiest is that, proportionately, the biggest gainer in this entire stock market — when you hear about how much has gone up — blue-collar workers, the biggest proportionate gainer.” — Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
THE FACTS: Wealthier Americans have largely benefited from the stock market gains, not blue-collar workers.
The problem with the president claiming the stock market has helped working-class Americans is that the richest 10% of the country controls 84% of stock market value, according to a Federal Reserve survey. Because they hold more stocks, wealthier Americans have inherently benefited more from the 19% gain in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks so far this year. Only about half of U.S. families hold stocks, so plenty of people are getting little to no benefit from the stock market gains.
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TRUMP: “The lowest unemployment numbers ever.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: Not so.
The 3.7% unemployment rate in the latest report is not the best in history. It’s near the lowest level in 50 years, when it was 3.5%. The U.S. also had lower rates than now in the early 1950s. And during three years of World War II, the annual rate was under 2%.
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TRUMP: “The best unemployment in our history. And likewise, women, 74 years. … I’m sorry, women, I let you down, it’s not in our history but we’re going to be there very soon.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: No, the jobless rate for women of 3.1% in April was the lowest in 66 years, not 74, and it has since increased to 3.3% in June. The data only go back 71 years, so 74 years isn’t a possibility.
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MIGRANTS
TRUMP: “The Obama Administration built the Cages, not the Trump Administration!” — tweet on July 15.
THE FACTS: He is right.
The same facilities that Democrats characterize as cages for migrant children were used by the Obama administration. They are sectioned-off, chain-link indoor pens where children who come to the border without adults or who are separated from adults in detention are temporarily housed. The children are divided by age and sex. When Vice President Mike Pence recently visited detention facilities at the border, journalists accompanying him witnessed migrant men crowded into fetid chain-link quarters.
A year ago, Associated Press photographs showing young people in such enclosures were misrepresented online as depicting child detentions by Trump and denounced by some Democrats and activists as illustrating Trump’s cruelty. In fact, the photos were taken in 2014 during the Obama administration.
Many Democrats in the presidential campaign and Congress continue to exploit the “kids in cages” imagery without acknowledging Obama used the facilities, too. His administration built the McAllen, Texas, facility with chain-link holding areas in 2014.
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HEALTH CARE
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS of Vermont, Democratic presidential candidate: ”‘Medicare for All’ would reduce overall health care spending in our country.” — speech Wednesday.
THE FACTS: That remains to be seen. Savings from Medicare for All are not a slam dunk.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report this year that total spending under a single-payer system, such as the one proposed by Sanders, “might be higher or lower than under the current system depending on the key features of the new system.”
Those features involve payment rates for hospitals and doctors, which are not fully spelled out by Sanders, as well as the estimated cost of generous benefits that include long-term care services and no copays and deductibles.
Sanders’ figure of $5 trillion over 10 years in health cost savings comes from a study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The lead author has been a political supporter of Sanders’.
Sanders also cites a savings estimate of $2 trillion over 10 years taken from a study from the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. But the author of that study says that Medicare for All advocates are mischaracterizing his conclusions.
A report this year by the nonprofit Rand think tank estimated that Medicare for All would do the opposite of what Sanders is promising, modestly raising national health spending.
Part of the reason is the generous benefits. Virtually free comprehensive medical care would lead to big increases in demand.
The Rand study modeled a hypothetical scenario in which a plan similar to Sanders’ legislation had taken effect this year.
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TRUMP: “We are offering plans up to 60 percent cheaper than Obamacare.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: The bargain health insurance plans Trump talks about are cheaper because they skimp on benefits such as maternity or prescription drug coverage and do not guarantee coverage of preexisting conditions.
The short-term plans that his administration began offering last year on the federal insurance marketplace provide up to 12 months of coverage and can be renewed for up to 36 months.
Premiums for the plans are about one-third the cost of fuller insurance coverage. The health plan offerings are intended for people who want an individual health insurance policy but make too much money to qualify for subsides under the Affordable Care Act.
The administration introduced the short-term plans, which undermine how the Obama health law is supposed to work, after failing to repeal much of that law.
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TRUMP: “Patients with preexisting conditions are protected by Republicans much more so than protected by Democrats, who will never be able to pull it off.” — North Carolina rally.
THE FACTS: But Democrats did pull it off. Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, requires insurers to take all applicants, regardless of medical history, and charge the same standard premiums to healthy people and those who had medical problems before or when they signed up.
The Trump administration is pressing in court for full repeal of that law.
Trump and other Republicans say they’ll have a plan to preserve protections for people with preexisting conditions. The White House has provided no details.
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AUTO INDUSTRY
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS of California, Democratic presidential candidate: “Some estimate that as many as 700,000 autoworkers are going to lose their job before the end of the year.” — remarks in July 12 radio interview.
THE FACTS: This isn’t happening. Harris mischaracterized the findings of a study that is also outdated.
In July 2018 the Center for Automotive Research laid out a variety of scenarios for potential job losses across all U.S. industries touched by the auto business — not just autoworkers — if a number of new tariffs and policies that Trump threatened were enacted. The worst case was 750,000. But those hypothetical losses went well beyond autoworkers, to include workers at restaurants, retail stores and any business that benefits from the auto industry.
In any event, the center revised its study in February 2019, with a worst-case scenario down to 367,000 job losses across all industries. And since then, the administration lifted tariffs on steel and aluminum products coming from Canada and Mexico, further minimizing the impact on the auto industry.
The auto industry has grown under Obama and Trump both. Although it’s facing a leveling off in demand, it still posts strong numbers. It is not at risk of the catastrophe Harris raises as a possibility — the loss of 3 in 4 autoworkers in the remainder of this year.
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TRUMP: “They’re coming in at a level that we haven’t seen for decades. Car companies are coming in — Japanese car companies, in particular. … Japan has 12 different companies building plants in Michigan, in Ohio, in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania. One is going to be announced in Florida. We are doing things that nobody thought were possible.” — Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
THE FACTS: There’s no evidence that car companies are coming to the U.S. at a rate faster than in previous decades. Industry observers know of only a few Japanese automotive companies building or expanding factories in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina or Pennsylvania — nowhere near a dozen.
Federal statistics show that jobs in auto and parts manufacturing grew at a slower rate in the two-plus years since Trump took office than in Obama’s last two years.
Between January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, and June of this year, the latest figures available, U.S. auto and parts makers added 41,900 jobs, or a 4.4% increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But in the two years before Trump took office, the industry added 63,600 manufacturing jobs, a 7.1% increase.
In Ohio, Honda has filed paperwork for a small expansion of its engine plant in Anna, Ohio, near Dayton, but also has announced production cuts without layoffs. A parts supplier announced plans last year to expand in Springfield, Ohio. In North Carolina, transmission maker Aisin in April announced plans to bolster manufacturing operations with 900 jobs by 2021, but gave few details.
The only Japanese automakers building a new U.S. assembly plant are Toyota and Mazda, which are jointly constructing a factory in Alabama that will build SUVs. At least three parts companies have announced plans to build factories in Alabama to serve that facility.
Also, spokesmen for German automakers Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG say they haven’t been told of any coming new factory announcements.
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Associated Press writers Tom Krisher in Detroit, Colleen Long, Josh Boak, Christopher Rugaber and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington, and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
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President Donald Trump talks to the media with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, and Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, rear left, at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea, Sunday, June 30, 2019 after he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Straining for deals on trade and nukes in Asia, President Donald Trump hailed a meeting with North Korea’s leader that he falsely claimed President Barack Obama coveted, asserted a U.S. auto renaissance that isn’t and wrongly stated air in the U.S. is the cleanest ever as he dismissed climate change.
He also ignored the reality in suggesting that nobody had implicated Saudi’s crown prince in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s own intelligence agencies and a U.N. investigator, in fact, have pointed a finger at the prince.
The president’s misstatements over the weekend capped several days of extraordinary claims, including a false one accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of a crime and misrepresenting trade in multiple dimensions.
Democratic presidential candidates, meantime, stepped forward for their first debates and tripped at times on issues dear to them: climate change, health care and immigration among them.
A look at the misstatements:
NORTH KOREA
TRUMP: “President Obama wanted to meet, and Chairman Kim would not meet him. The Obama administration was begging for a meeting. They were begging for meetings constantly. And Chairman Kim would not meet with him.” — joint news conference Sunday with South Korea’s president in Seoul.
THE FACTS: That’s not the case.
While Obama came into his presidency saying he’d be willing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and other U.S. adversaries “without preconditions,” he never publicly sought a meeting with Kim. Obama eventually met Cuba’s President Raul Castro and spoke to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone but took a different stance with Kim in 2009 as North Korea was escalating missile and nuclear tests.
“This is the same kind of pattern that we saw his father engage in, and his grandfather before that,” Obama said in 2013. “Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior. You don’t get to bang your — your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.”
Ben Rhodes, who was on Obama’s national security team for both terms, tweeted: ?“Obama never sought a meeting with Kim Jong Un.”
Trump has portrayed his diplomacy with Kim as happening due to a special personal chemistry and friendship, saying he’s in “no rush” to get Kim to commit fully to denuclearization.
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INCOME INEQUALITY
TRUMP: “Blue-collar workers are doing fantastic. They’re the biggest beneficiary of the tax cuts, the blue collar.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: Wrong.
While most middle-income taxpayers did see a tax cut this year, Trump’s tax cut clearly skewed to the wealthy rather than lower-income groups such as manufacturing workers, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center . It found that taxpayers making $308,000 to $733,000 stood to benefit the most.
The Joint Committee on Taxation separately found the tax cuts were particularly helpful to businesses and people making more than $100,000 annually.
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LARRY KUDLOW, White House economic adviser: “The United States economy is booming. It’s running at roughly 3 percent average since President Trump took office two and a half years ago. On this business about bad distribution, the blue-collar workers, the nonsupervisory workers have done the best. They’re the ones running wages at 3-1/2 percent. Their growth and incomes and wages is exceeding the growth of their supervisors.” — interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
THE FACTS: There’s some truth to the claim that low-income workers have seen better wage gains than others in the workforce. This trend predates Trump’s presidency and has continued. But the blue-collar workforce has lagged behind lower-wage workers in pay gains.
Some of the gains reflect higher minimum wages passed at the state and local level, not just the rate of economic growth. The Trump administration opposes an increase to the federal minimum wage.
With the unemployment rate at 3.6%, the lowest since December 1969, employers are struggling to fill jobs. They have pushed up pay for the lowest-paid one-quarter of workers more quickly than for everyone else since 2015. In April, the poorest 25% saw their paychecks increase 4.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3.1% for the richest one-quarter.
But when measured by industry, wages are rising more quickly for lower-paid service workers. Hourly pay for retail workers has risen 4.1% in the past year and 3.8% for hotel and restaurant employees. Manufacturing workers — the blue collars — have seen pay rise just 2.2% and construction workers, 3.2%.
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SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: “Eighty-three percent of your tax benefits go to the top 1%.”— Democratic presidential debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: That statistic is not close to true now. The Vermont senator is referring to 2027, not the present day. He didn’t include that critical context in his statement.
His figures come from an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. That analysis found that in 2027 the top 1% of earners would get 83% of the savings from the tax overhaul signed into law by Trump. Why is that? Most of the tax cuts for individuals are set to expire after 2025, so their benefits go away while cuts for corporations continue. The 2017 tax overhaul does disproportionately favor the wealthy and corporations, but just 20.5% of the benefits went to the top 1% last year.
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REP. TIM RYAN: “The bottom 60% haven’t seen a raise since 1980. The top 1% control 90% of the wealth.” — Democratic presidential debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Those figures exaggerate the state of income and wealth inequality. While few studies single out the bottom 60%, the Congressional Budget Office calculates that the bottom 80% of Americans have seen their incomes rise 32% since 1979. That is certainly lower than the doubling of income enjoyed by the top one-fifth of income earners. And the richest 1% possess 32% of the nation’s wealth, according to data from the Federal Reserve, not 90%.
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BETO O’ROURKE, former U.S. representative from Texas: “That’s how you explain an economy that is rigged to corporations and the very wealthiest. A $2 trillion tax cut that favored corporations while they were sitting on record piles of cash and the very wealthiest in this country at a time of historic wealth inequality.” — debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: The tax cut wasn’t quite that big: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that it will reduce tax revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. And individuals, not corporations, will actually receive the bulk of those cuts — they’re getting $1.1 trillion while businesses get $654 billion, offset by higher tax revenues from changes to international tax law.
The tax cuts did mostly favor richer Americans: The top one-fifth of income earners got 65% of the benefit from the tax cuts in 2018 with just 1% going to the poorest one-fifth, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
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AUTOMAKERS
TRUMP: “Many, many companies — including South Korea — but many companies are coming into the United States. … Car companies, in particular. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio and North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Florida. … We hadn’t had a plant built in years — in decades, actually. And now we have many plants being built all throughout the United States — cars.” — remarks Sunday to Korean business leaders in Seoul.
THE FACTS: Car companies are not pouring into the U.S. as Trump suggests, nor does he deserve all the credit for those that have moved here. He’s also wrong in saying that auto plants haven’t been built in decades. A number of automakers — Toyota, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen among them — opened plants in recent decades, mostly in the South.
The only automaker announcing plans to reopen a plant in Michigan is Fiat Chrysler, which is restarting an old engine plant to build three-row SUVs. It’s been planning to do so since before Trump was elected. GM is even closing two Detroit-area factories: one that builds cars and another that builds transmissions. Toyota is building a new factory in Alabama with Mazda, and Volvo opened a plant in South Carolina last year, but in each case, that was in the works before Trump took office.
Automakers have made announcements about new models being built in Michigan, but no other factories have been reopened. Ford stopped building the Focus compact car in the Detroit suburb of Wayne last year, but it’s being replaced by the manufacture of a small pickup and a new SUV. That announcement was made in December 2016, before Trump took office.
GM, meantime, is closing factories in Ohio and Maryland.
Trump can plausibly claim that his policies have encouraged some activity in the domestic auto industry. Corporate tax cuts freed more money for investment, and potential tariff increases on imported vehicles are an incentive to build in the U.S. But when expansion does happen, it’s not all because of him.
Fiat Chrysler has been planning the SUVs for several years and has been looking at expansion in the Detroit area, where it has unused building space and an abundant, trainable automotive labor force.
Normally it takes at least three years for an automaker to plan a new vehicle, which is the case with the three-row Jeep Grand Cherokee and the larger Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer SUVs that will fill the restarting Detroit-area plant and an existing one. Several years ago then-CEO Sergio Marchionne said the Wagoneer would be built in the Detroit area.
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KHASHOGGI
TRUMP, on the murder of Khashoggi: “Nobody, so far, has pointed directly a finger at the future King of Saudi Arabia.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies and a U.N. investigator have pointed a finger at him.
U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have at least been aware of a plot to kill Khashoggi when the journalist went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to pick up documents to marry his Turkish fiancee. Last month, an independent U.N. report into the killing of Khashoggi said there was “credible evidence” to warrant further investigation into the possible role of the crown prince, and suggested sanctions on his personal assets.
Khashoggi, who had been living in the U.S., criticized the Saudi royal family in his writings.
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CLIMATE CHANGE
TRUMP, playing down the need to address climate change: “We have the cleanest air we’ve ever had.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan.
THE FACTS: That’s false, and air quality hasn’t improved under the Trump administration. Dozens of nations having less smoggy air than the U.S.
After decades of improvement, progress in air quality has stalled. Over the last two years the U.S. had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data show.
There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before 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.
The Obama administration set records for the fewest air polluted days.
The non-profit Health Effects Institute’s “State of Global Air 2019” report ranked the United States 37th dirtiest out of 195 countries for ozone, also known as smog, worse than the global average for population-weighted pollution. Countries such as Britain, Japan, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Albania, Cuba, Russia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Canada have less smoggy air. The U.S. ranks 8th cleanest on the more deadly category of fine particles in the air. It’s still behind countries such as Canada and New Zealand but better than the global average.
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JOE BIDEN, on Obama’s record: “He is the first man to bring together the entire world — 196 nations — to commit to deal with climate change.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: Not really. The former vice president is minimizing a major climate deal from 22 years ago, a decade before Obama became president.
In 1997, nations across the world met in Japan and hammered out the Kyoto Protocol to limit climate change in a treaty that involved more than 190 countries at different points in time. That treaty itself stemmed from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Biden is referring to an agreement that came out of a 2015 meeting in Paris that was the 21st climate change convention meeting.
The Kyoto Protocol only required specific greenhouse gas emission cuts of developed nations, fewer than half the countries in the world. The Paris agreement, where several world leaders pushed hard, including France’s president, has every country agreeing to do something. But each country proposed its own goals.
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JAY INSLEE, Washington’s governor: “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change and we are the last that can do something about it. … It is our last chance in an administration, next one, to do something about it.” — debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Not quite. This answer implies that after 2025 or 2029, when whoever is elected in 2020 leaves office, it will be too late to fight or limit climate change.
That’s a common misconception that stemmed from a U.N. scientific report that came out last fall, which talked about 2030, mostly because that’s a key date in the Paris climate agreement. The report states that with every half a degree Celsius and with every year, global warming and its dangers get worse. However, it does not say at some point it is too late.
“The hotter it gets the worse it gets but there is no cliff edge,” James Skea, co-chairman of the report and professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, told The Associated Press.
The report co-author, Swiss climate scientist Sonia I. Seneviratne this month tweeted, “Many scientists point – rightfully – to the fact that we cannot state with certainty that climate would suddenly go berserk in 12 years if we weren’t doing any climate mitigation. But who can state with certainty that we would be safe beyond that stage or even before that?”
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O’ROURKE, referring to the international climate goal: “If all of us does all that we can, then we’re going to be able to keep this planet from warming another 2 degrees Celsius and ensure that we match what this country can do and live up to our promise and our potential.” — debate Wednesday.
THE FACTS: O’Rourke gets the climate goal wrong.
Since 2009, international summits and the Paris climate agreement list the overarching goal as limiting climate change to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times. That’s somewhere between 1850 and 1880, depending on who is calculating.
There’s a big difference because since pre-industrial times, Earth has already warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). So the world community is talking about 1 degree Celsius from now and O’Rourke is talking about twice that.
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MUELLER
TRUMP, on communications between two FBI employees: “Mueller terminated them illegally. He terminated the emails, he terminated all of the stuff between Strzok and Page, you know they sung like you’ve never seen. Robert Mueller terminated their text messages together. He would – he terminated them. They’re gone. And that’s illegal, he — that’s a crime.” — interview Wednesday on Fox Business Network.
THE FACTS: Not true. Mueller had no role in deleting anti-Trump text messages traded by former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and there’s no basis for saying he was involved in anything illegal. Also, the communications didn’t vanish.
Once Mueller learned of the existence of the texts, which were sent before his appointment as special counsel, he removed Strzok from his team investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The FBI, for technical reasons, was initially unable to retrieve months of text messages between the two officials. But the FBI was ultimately able to recover them and there’s never been any allegation that Mueller had anything to do with that process.
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RACE
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: “Vice President Biden, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America, then?”
BIDEN: “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: That’s hairsplitting.
Biden is claiming that he only opposed the U.S. Education Department’s push for busing to integrate schools because he didn’t want federal mandates forced on local school boards. But in the early and mid-1970s, those were the fault lines in almost every U.S. community, from New Orleans to Boston, where there was stiff opposition to busing. If you were a politician opposing federally enforced busing, you were enabling any local school board or city government that was fighting against it.
As a senator in the late 1970s, Biden supported several measures, including one signed by President Jimmy Carter, that restricted the federal government’s authority in forced busing.
Biden told NPR in 1975 that he would support a constitutional amendment to ban court-ordered busing “if it can’t be done through a piece of legislation.”
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MIGRANT CHILDREN
BIDEN, on Trump’s treatment of migrant children at the border: “The idea that he’s in court with his Justice Department saying, children in cages do not need a bed, do not need a blanket, do not need a toothbrush — that is outrageous.”
HARRIS: “I will release children from cages.”
JOHN HICKENLOOPER, former Colorado governor: “If you would have ever told me any time in my life that this country would sanction federal agents to take children from the arms of their parents, put them in cages, actually put them up for adoption — in Colorado we call that kidnapping — I would have told you it was unbelievable.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: They are tapping into a misleading and common insinuation by Democrats about Trump placing “children in cages.”
The cages are chain-link fences and the Obama-Biden administration used them, too.
Children and adults are held behind them, inside holding Border Patrol facilities, under the Trump administration as well.
President Barack Obama’s administration detained large numbers of unaccompanied children inside chain link fences in 2014. Images that circulated online of children in cages during the height of Trump’s family separations controversy were actually from 2014 when Obama was in office.
Children are placed in such areas by age and sex for safety reasons and are supposed to be held for no longer than 72 hours by the Border Patrol. But as the number of migrants continues to grow under the Trump administration, the system is clogged at every end, so Health and Human Services, which manages the care of children in custody, can’t come get the children in time. Officials say they are increasingly holding children for 5 days or longer.
HHS facilities are better equipped to manage the care of children. But, facing budget concerns, officials cut activities such as soccer, English classes and legal aid for children in their care.
As for Hickenlooper’s claim about the government forcing those children into unwanted adoption, that is not federal policy.
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HEALTH CARE
SANDERS: Under “Medicare for All,” ″the vast majority of the people in this country will be paying significantly less for health care than they are now.” — debate Thursday.
THE FACTS: Probably true, but that’s only part of the equation for a family. Sanders’ plan for a government-run health care system to replace private insurance calls for no premiums, and no copays and deductibles. But taxes would have to go up significantly as the government takes on trillions of dollars in health care costs now covered by employers and individuals. Independent studies estimate the government would be spending an additional $28 trillion to $36 trillion over 10 years, although Medicare for All supporters say that’s overstating it.
How those tax increases would be divvied up remains to be seen, as Sanders has not released a blueprint for how to finance his plan.
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TRUMP ON ECONOMY
TRUMP on his tariffs on Chinese goods: “Don’t let anyone tell you that we’re paying. We’re not paying, China’s paying for it.” — Fox Business Network interview.
THE FACTS: Americans are paying for it.
Trump refuses to recognize a reality that his own chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has acknowledged. Tariffs are mainly if not entirely paid by companies and consumers in the country that imposes them. China is not sending billions of dollars to the U.S. treasury.
In a study in May , the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with Princeton and Columbia universities, estimated that tariffs from Trump’s trade dispute with China were costing $831 per U.S. household on an annual basis. And that was based on the situation in 2018, before tariffs escalated. Analysts also found that the burden of Trump’s tariffs falls entirely on U.S. consumers and businesses that buy imported products.
Trump persistently mischaracterizes trade in all its dimensions, giving the wrong numbers for trade deficits, asserting that tariffs did not exist before him, and portraying them inaccurately as a windfall for the government and taxpayers. In that respect, he was correct when he said in the interview, “I view tariffs differently than a lot of other people.”
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TRUMP: “The poverty index is also best number EVER.” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: Not true. The current poverty rate of 12.3% is not the lowest ever; it’s fallen below that several times over the last half-century, according to the Census Bureau’s official count.
The poverty rate dropped only modestly under Trump’s watch, to 12.3 percent in 2017 — the latest figure available — from 12.7 percent in 2016. At the same time, nearly 40 million Americans remained poor by the Census Bureau’s count, statistically unchanged from 2016.
The poverty rate previously has stood at 12.3% as recently as 2006, and was 11.3% in 2000.
The U.S. poverty rate hit a record low of 11.1% in 1973.
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Christopher Rugaber, Colleen Long, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Stephen Braun, Eric Tucker, and Paul Wiseman in Washington, Tom Krisher in Detroit, Foster Klug in Tokyo, and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.
Former President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
President Donald Trump has a silent partner behind several of the accomplishments he likes to boast about: Barack Obama.
Despite assailing his Democratic predecessor for waging a “cruel and heartless war on American energy,” for example, Trump can brag about U.S. energy supremacy thanks to the sector’s growth in the Obama years.
And the Obama-Trump decade is soon to yield an economic record if things stay on track a little longer — the most sustained expansion in U.S. history. Though Trump claims all the credit, the expansion started in Obama’s first year, continued through his presidency and has been maintained under Trump.
There are no fist bumps in the offing, however.
The past week saw the kickoff of Trump’s 2020 campaign with a rally in Florida and interviews outside his usual comfort zone on Fox News. Such events provided Trump a platform that he used to exaggerate what he’s done, take some factually challenged swipes at Obama and Democrats at large, and make promises that will be hard to keep.
A sampling:
MIGRANTS
TRUMP, on separating children from adults at the Mexican border: “You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it.” — interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
TRUMP: “When I became president, President Obama had a separation policy. I didn’t have it. He had it. I brought the families together. I’m the one that brought ‘em together. Now, I said something when I did that. I’m the one that put people together. … They separated. I put ‘em together.’ — interview with Telemundo broadcast Thursday.
JOSE DIAZ-BALART, interviewer: “You did not.”
THE FACTS: Trump is not telling the truth. The separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents resulted from his “zero tolerance” policy. Obama had no such policy. After a public outcry and a court order, Trump generally ceased the practice and reunited families his policy had driven apart.
Zero tolerance meant that U.S. authorities would criminally prosecute all adults caught crossing into the U.S. illegally. Doing so meant detention for adults and the removal of their children while their parents were in custody. During the Obama administration, such family separations were the exception. They became the practice under Trump’s policy, which he suspended a year ago.
Before Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, migrant families caught illegally entering the U.S. were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation, unless they were known to have a criminal record. Then and now, immigration officials may take a child from a parent in certain cases, such as serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns.
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TRUMP on detention centers at the border: “President Obama is the one that built those prison cells.” — Telemundo interview.
TRUMP: “President Obama built the cages. Remember when they said that I built them?” — “Meet the Press” interview.
THE FACTS: He has a point. Whether they are called prison cells or something else, Obama held children in temporary, ill-equipped facilities and built a large center in McAllen, Texas, that is used now.
Democrats routinely and inaccurately blame Trump for creating “cages” for children. They are actually referring to chain-link fencing inside the McAllen center — Obama’s creation.
Conditions for detained migrants deteriorated sharply during a surge of Central American arrivals under Trump, particularly in El Paso, Texas.
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TRADE
TRUMP: “This will be the largest trade deal ever made, and it won’t even be close. If you take a look at the numbers, second is so far away, you don’t even call it second. So it’s very exciting. And very exciting for Mexico; very exciting for Canada.” — remarks Thursday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
THE FACTS: That’s wrong, simply by virtue of the number of trade partners involved.
The proposed new agreement, replacing the North American Free Trade agreement, covers the same three countries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated by the Obama administration, included the three NAFTA partners — United States, Canada and Mexico — plus Japan and eight other Pacific Rim countries. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact on his third day in office.
Even the Pacific deal pales in comparison with one that did go into effect with the U.S. on board, the Uruguay Round. Concluded in 1994, the round of negotiations created the World Trade Organization and was signed by 123 countries. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston said the WTO’s initial membership accounted for more than 90 percent of global economic output.
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TRUMP on his tariffs: “We are taking in billions and billions of dollars into our treasury. … We have never taken 10 cents from China.” — rally Tuesday in Orlando, Florida.
THE FACTS: It’s false to say the U.S. never collected a dime in tariffs on Chinese goods before he took action. They are simply higher in some cases than they were before. It’s also wrong to suggest that the tariffs are being paid by China. Tariff money coming into the treasury is mainly from U.S. businesses and consumers, not from China. Tariffs are primarily if not entirely a tax paid domestically.
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IRAN
TRUMP: “President Obama made a desperate and terrible deal with Iran – Gave them 150 Billion Dollars plus I.8 Billion Dollars in CASH! Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out. Gave them a free path to Nuclear Weapons, and SOON. Instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled … Death to America. I terminated deal.” — tweet Friday.
TRUMP, on his accomplishments: “And then terminating one of the worst deals ever made, the Iran deal that was made by President Obama — paid $150 billion. Paid $1.8 billion in cash. I terminated that and Iran is a much different country.” — Fox News interview Wednesday.
THE FACTS: There was no $150 billion payout from the U.S. treasury. The money he refers to represents Iranian assets held abroad that were frozen until the international deal was reached and Tehran was allowed to access its funds.
The payout of about $1.8 billion is a separate matter. That dates to the 1970s, when Iran paid the U.S. $400 million for military equipment that was never delivered because the government was overthrown and diplomatic relations ruptured.
That left people, businesses and governments in each country indebted to partners in the other, and these complex claims took decades to sort out in tribunals and arbitration. For its part, Iran paid settlements of more than $2.5 billion to U.S. citizens and businesses.
The day after the nuclear deal was implemented, the U.S. and Iran announced they had settled the claim over the 1970s military equipment order, with the U.S. agreeing to pay the $400 million principal along with about $1.3 billion in interest. The $400 million was paid in cash and flown to Tehran on a cargo plane, which gave rise to Trump’s dramatic accounts of money stuffed in barrels or boxes and delivered in the dead of night. The arrangement provided for the interest to be paid later, not crammed into containers.
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ENERGY
TRUMP: “Since I came in, we’re the number one energy producer in the world. OK?” — “Meet the Press” interview.
TRUMP: “We’ve ended the last administration’s cruel and heartless war on American energy. What they were doing to our energy should never be forgotten. The United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.” — Orlando rally.
TRUMP: “We’re now No. 1 in the world in energy.” — Fox News interview Wednesday.
THE FACTS: As he’s done many times before, Trump is crediting himself with things that happened under Obama.
Here’s what the government’s U.S. Energy Information Administration says: “The United States has been the world’s top producer of natural gas since 2009, when U.S. natural gas production surpassed that of Russia, and the world’s top producer of petroleum hydrocarbons since 2013, when U.S. production exceeded Saudi Arabia’s.”
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JOBS
TRUMP: “Almost 160 million people are working. That’s more than ever before.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: True but that’s a tribute to Americans making babies and immigrants coming to the country. Population growth, in other words.
Other than during recessions, employment growth has been trending upward since 1939, when the Labor Department started counting. The phenomenon is not a marker of leadership; it has spanned successful and failed presidents.
More on point, the annual rate of job growth has been within the same range since roughly 2011. It was 1.6% through May.
Another measure is the proportion of Americans with jobs, and that is still below record highs. The Labor Department says 60.6 percent of people in the U.S. 16 years and older were working in May. That’s below the all-time high of 64.7 percent in April 2000 during Bill Clinton’s administration, though higher than the 59.9 percent when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.
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TRUMP: “Women’s unemployment is now the lowest it’s been in 74 years.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: No, the jobless rate for women of 3.1% in April was the lowest in 66 years, not 74, and it ticked up in May to 3.2%.
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ECONOMY
TRUMP: “It’s soaring to incredible new heights. Perhaps the greatest economy we’ve had in the history of our country.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: The economy is not one of the best in the country’s history. It expanded at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. That growth was the highest in just four years for the first quarter.
In the late 1990s, growth topped 4 percent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth even reached 7.2 percent in 1984.
The economy grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 under Obama — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.
Trump has legitimate claim to a good economy but when it comes to records, there’s one he will have to share with Obama. The economy is on track to achieve its longest expansion ever, in July. Much of that decade-long growth came during Obama’s presidency, an achievement that Trump so far has largely sustained. Other than in its durability, the economy is far from the finest in history.
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THE WALL
TRUMP: “We’ll have over 400 miles built by the end of next year.” — Fox News interview Wednesday.
TRUMP: “We’re going to have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. It’s moving very rapidly.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: That’s highly unlikely, and even if so, the great majority of the wall he’s talking about would be replacement barrier, not new miles of construction. Trump has added strikingly little length to barriers along the Mexico border despite his pre-eminent 2016 campaign promise to get a wall done.
Even to reach 400 miles or 640 kilometers, he would have to prevail in legal challenges to his declaration of a national emergency or get Congress to find more money to get anywhere close.
So far, the administration has awarded contracts for 247 miles (395 km) of wall construction, but that initiative has been constrained by court cases that are still playing out.
In any event, all but 17 miles (27 km) of his awarded contracts so far would replace existing barriers.
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TAXES
TRUMP: “We’ve done so much … with the biggest tax cut in history.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: His tax cuts are nowhere close to the biggest in U.S. history.
It’s a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years. As a share of the total economy, a tax cut of that size ranks 12th, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest, followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.
Post-Reagan tax cuts also stand among the historically significant: President George W. Bush’s cuts in the early 2000s and Obama’s renewal of them a decade later.
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ENVIRONMENT
TRUMP: “Our water and our air today is cleaner than it ever was. … Our air — it’s the best it ever was.” — Fox News interview Wednesday.
TRUMP: “Our air and water are the cleanest they’ve ever been by far.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: Not true about air quality, which hasn’t gotten better under the Trump administration. U.S. drinking water is among the best by one leading measure.
After decades of improvement, progress in air quality has stalled. Over the last two years the U.S. had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data show.
There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.
The Obama administration, in fact, set records for the fewest air polluted days, in 2016.
On water, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index finds 10 countries tied for the cleanest drinking water, the U.S. among them. On environmental quality overall, the U.S. was 27th, behind a variety of European countries, Canada, Japan, Australia and more. Switzerland was No. 1.
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JUDGES
TRUMP on the confirmation of federal judges: “President Obama was very nice to us. He didn’t fill the positions.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: Trump’s sarcasm aside, he does have a better success rate than Obama in filling judicial vacancies. The Republican-controlled Senate in Obama’s last two years avoided taking action on many of his nominees. Republicans still control the Senate and have been able to confirm about 120 of Trump’s picks despite their slim majority. That’s about 35 more than Obama had confirmed at this point in his presidency.
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HEALTH CARE
TRUMP: “We will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Always.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: His administration’s actions say otherwise. It is pressing in court for full repeal of Obama’s health law, which requires insurers to take all applicants, regardless of medical history, and charge the same standard premiums to healthy people and those who had medical problems before or when they signed up.
Trump and other Republicans say they’ll have a plan to preserve protections for people with pre-existing conditions, but the White House has provided no details.
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ABORTION
TRUMP: “Leading Democrats have even opposed measures to prevent the execution of children after birth.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: Executing children is already a crime.
Trump is offering here a somewhat toned down version of a distorted story he’s been telling for months that falsely suggests Democrats are OK with murder.
His account arises from extremely rare instances when babies are born alive as a result of an attempted abortion. When these cases occur, “execution” is not an option.
When a baby is born with anomalies so severe that he or she would die soon after birth, a family may choose what’s known as palliative care or comfort care. This might involve allowing the baby to die naturally without medical intervention. Providing comfort without life-extending treatment is not specific to newborns. It may happen with fatally ill patients of any age.
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VETERANS
TRUMP: “We passed VA Choice. …They’ve been trying to get that passed also for about 44 years.” — Orlando rally.
THE FACTS: No, Congress approved the private-sector Veterans Choice health program in 2014 and Obama signed it into law. Trump signed an expansion of it.
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Christopher Rugaber, Matthew Daly, Seth Borenstein, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Colleen Long in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
An eye toward his 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump is turning to a familiar playbook of exaggerated boasts about economic performance and overdrawn complaints about a race tilted against him.
He insisted the Electoral College gives Democrats a “big advantage” in U.S. presidential elections, making it difficult for Republicans like himself to win. That’s wrong. Though in 2016 he often described the election as “rigged” against him, Trump, in fact, wouldn’t have won the presidency without the Electoral College system in which the votes of smaller rural states that tend to vote Republican are weighted more heavily than big, Democratic-leaning states like New York and California.
Trump also claimed over the weekend that he’s presided over one of the best U.S. economies ever. He’s wrong about that, too.
The misleading rhetoric over the past week came as the president prepared to kick off his re-election campaign Tuesday in Florida.
In Trump’s reckoning, an Iran tamed by him no longer cries “death to America,” the border wall with Mexico is proceeding apace, the estate tax has been lifted off the backs of farmers, the remains of U.S. soldiers from North Korea are coming home and China is opening its wallet to the U.S. Treasury for the first time in history. These claims range from flatly false to mostly so.
President Donald Trump’s assertion that he would be open to accepting a foreign power’s help in his 2020 campaign is ricocheting through Washington. AP Washington bureau chief Julie Pace talks about the implications and the reactions. (June 13)
Here’s a look:
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
TRUMP, in part addressing polls finding him lagging some of the 2020 Democratic candidates: “It’s always tougher for the Republican because, you know, I don’t know, people — people never cover this, but the Electoral College is very much steered to the Democrats. It’s a big advantage for the Democrats. It’s very much harder for the Republicans to win.” — Fox News interview Friday.
THE FACTS: Actually, the Electoral College’s unique system of electing presidents is a big reason why Trump won the presidency. Four candidates in history, including Al Gore in 2000, have won a majority of the popular vote only to be denied the presidency by the Electoral College. All were Democrats.
In the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton received nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump after racking up more lopsided victories in big states such as New York and California, according to election data compiled by The Associated Press. But she lost the presidency due to Trump’s winning margin in the Electoral College, which came after he narrowly won less populous Midwestern states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
Unlike the popular vote, Electoral College votes are set equal to the number of U.S. representatives in each state plus its two senators. That means more weight is given to a single vote in a small state than the vote of someone in a large state.
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ECONOMY and TAXES
TRUMP: “No President has done what I have in … the first 2 1/2 years of his Presidency, including the fact that we have one of the best Economies in the history of our Country.” — tweets Saturday.
THE FACTS: This is one of Trump’s most frequent falsehoods. The economy is solid but it’s not one of the best in the country’s history. Trump is also claiming full credit for an economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in mid-2009.
The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. That growth was the highest in just four years for the first quarter.
In the late 1990s, growth topped 4 percent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth even reached 7.2 percent in 1984.
While the economy has shown strength, it grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.
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TRUMP: “Wages are growing, and they are growing at the fastest rate for — this is something so wonderful — for blue-collar workers. The biggest percentage increase — blue-collar workers.” — remarks Tuesday in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
THE FACTS: He’s claiming credit for a trend of rising wages for lower-income blue-collar workers that predates his presidency.
Some of the gains also reflect higher minimum wages passed at the state and local level; the Trump administration opposes an increase to the federal minimum wage.
With the unemployment rate at 3.6%, the lowest since December 1969, employers are struggling to fill jobs. Despite all the talk of robots and automation, thousands of restaurants, warehouses, and retail stores still need workers.
They are offering higher wages and have pushed up pay for the lowest-paid one-quarter of workers more quickly than for everyone else since 2015. In April, the poorest 25% saw their paychecks increase 4.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3.1% for the richest one-quarter.
Those gains are not necessarily flowing to the “blue collar” workers Trump cited. Instead, when measured by industry, wages are rising more quickly for lower-paid service workers. Hourly pay for retail workers has risen 4.1% in the past year and 3.8% for hotel and restaurant employees. Manufacturing workers — the blue collars — have seen pay rise just 2.2% and construction workers, 3.2%.
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TRUMP: “And to keep your family farms and ranches in the family, we eliminated the estate tax, also known as the ‘death tax,’ on the small farms and ranches and other businesses. That was a big one. … People were having a farm, they loved their children, and they want to leave it to their children. … And the estate tax was so much, the children would have to go out and borrow a lot of money from unfriendly bankers, in many cases. And they’d end up losing the farm, and it was a horrible situation.” — remarks in Council Bluffs.
THE FACTS: There still is an estate tax. More small farms may be off the hook for it as a result of changes by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017 but very few farms or small businesses were subject to the tax even before that happened.
Congress increased the tax exemption — temporarily — so fewer people will be subject to those taxes.
Previously, any assets from estates valued at more than $5.49 million, or nearly $11 million for couples, were subject to the estate tax in 2017. The new law doubled that minimum for 2018 to $11.2 million, or $22.4 million for couples. For 2019, the minimums rose to $11.4 million, or $22.8 million for couples. Those increased minimums will expire at the end of 2025.
According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, only about 80 small farms and closely held businesses were subject to the estate tax in 2017. Those estates represent about 1 percent of all taxable estate tax returns.
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RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
TRUMP, on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report: “He said no collusion. … The report said no collusion.” — ABC News interview aired Sunday.
TRUMP: “The Mueller report spoke. … It said, ‘No collusion and no obstruction and no nothing.’ And, in fact, it said we actually rebuffed your friends from Russia; that we actually pushed them back — we rebuffed them.” — remarks Wednesday in Oval Office.
THE FACTS: He’s wrong to repeat the claim that the Mueller report found no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign; it’s also false that his campaign in 2016 denied all access to Russians. Nor did the special counsel’s report exonerate Trump on the question of whether he obstructed justice.
Mueller’s two-year investigation and other scrutiny revealed a multitude of meetings with Russians. Among them: Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who had promised dirt on Clinton.
On collusion, Mueller said he did not assess whether that occurred because it is not a legal term.
He looked into a potential criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign and said the investigation did not collect sufficient evidence to establish criminal charges on that front.
Mueller noted some Trump campaign officials had declined to testify under the Fifth Amendment or had provided false or incomplete testimony, making it difficult to get a complete picture of what happened during the 2016 campaign. The special counsel wrote that he “cannot rule out the possibility” that unavailable information could have cast a different light on the investigation’s findings.
In his interview with ABC News, Trump said if a foreign power offered dirt on his 2020 opponent, he’d be open to accepting it and that he’d have no obligation to call in the FBI. “I think I’d want to hear it,” Trump said. “There’s nothing wrong with listening.”
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REPUBLICAN SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, Judiciary Committee chairman, in response to Trump’s comments that he’d be open to accepting political dirt from foreign adversaries like Russia: “The outrage some of my Democratic colleagues are raising about President Trump’s comments will hopefully be met with equal outrage that their own party hired a foreign national to do opposition research on President Trump’s campaign.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Graham is making an unequal comparison.
He seeks to turn the tables on Democrats by pointing to their use of a dossier of anti-Trump research produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, that was financed by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Graham also insists on “equal outrage” over Democrats using that information from a former intelligence officer of Britain, an ally with a history of shared intelligence with the U.S. That’s a different story from a foreign adversary such as Russia, which the Mueller report concluded had engaged in “sweeping and systematic” interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Moreover, Steele was hired as a private citizen, though one with intelligence contacts.
The Mueller report found multiple contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, and the report said it established that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Trump and his GOP allies typically point to the Steele dossier as the basis for the Russia probe. But the FBI’s investigation began months before it received the dossier.
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TRUMP: “What kind of a rigged deal is this? And then on top of it, after two years and after being the most transparent in history…” — ABC News interview aired Sunday.
TRUMP: “The Democrats were very unhappy with the Mueller report. So now they’re trying to do a do-over or a redo. And we’re not doing that. We gave them everything. We were the most transparent presidency in history.” — Oval Office remarks Wednesday.
THE FACTS: It’s highly dubious to say Trump was fully cooperative in the Russia investigation.
Trump declined to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team, gave written answers that investigators described as “inadequate” and “incomplete,” said more than 30 times that he could not remember something he was asked about in writing, and — according to the report — tried to get aides to fire Mueller or otherwise shut or limit the inquiry.
In the end, the Mueller report found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but left open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice.
According to the report, Mueller’s team declined to make a prosecutorial judgment on whether to charge partly because of a Justice Department legal opinion that said sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted. The report instead factually laid out instances in which Trump might have obstructed justice, specifically leaving it open for Congress to take up the matter.
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IRAN:
TRUMP, speaking about Iranians “screaming ‘death to America’” when Barack Obama was in the White House: “They haven’t screamed ‘death to America’ lately.” — Fox News interview Friday.
THE FACTS: Yes they have. The death-to-America chant is heard routinely.
The chant, “marg bar Amreeka” in Farsi, dates back even before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Once used by communists, it was popularized by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s figurehead and Iran’s first supreme leader after the U.S. Embassy takeover by militants.
It remains a staple of hard-line demonstrations, meetings with current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, official ceremonies, parliamentary sessions and main Friday prayer services in Tehran and across the country. Some masters of ceremonies ask audiences to tone it down. But it was heard, for example, from the crowd this month when Khamenei exhorted thousands to stand up against U.S. “bullying.”
In one variation, a demonstrator at Tehran’s Quds rally last month held a sign with three versions of the slogan: “Death to America” in Farsi, “Death to America” in Arabic,” ″Down with U.S.A.” in English.
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NORTH KOREA
TRUMP: “I think we’re going to do very well with North Korea over a period of time. I’m in no rush. … Our remains are coming back; you saw the beautiful ceremony in Hawaii with Mike Pence. We’re getting the remains back.” — joint news conference Wednesday with Poland’s president.
THE FACTS: The U.S. is not currently getting additional remains of American service members killed during the Korean War.
With U.S.-North Korea relations souring, the Pentagon said last month it had suspended its efforts to arrange negotiations this year on recovering additional remains of American service members. The Pentagon said it hoped to reach agreement for recovery operations in 2020.
The Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency said it has had no communication with North Korean authorities since the Vietnam summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February. That meeting focused on the North’s nuclear weapons and followed a June 2018 summit where Kim committed to permitting a resumption of U.S. remains recovery; that effort had been suspended by the U.S. in 2005.
The agency said it had “reached the point where we can no longer effectively plan, coordinate, and conduct field operations” with the North during this budget year, which ends Sept. 30.
Last summer, in line with the first Trump-Kim summit in June, the North turned over 55 boxes of what it said were the remains of an undetermined number of U.S service members killed in the North during the 1950-53 war. So far, six Americans have been identified from the 55 boxes.
U.S. officials have said the North has suggested in recent years that it holds perhaps 200 sets of American war remains. Thousands more are unrecovered from battlefields and former POW camps.
The Pentagon estimates that about 5,300 Americans were lost in North Korea.
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BORDER WALL
TRUMP: “The wall is going up. It’s going up rapidly. We’re going to have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year … And we just won the lawsuit on the wall.” — Fox News interview Friday.
TRUMP: “By next year, at the end of the year, we’re going to have close to 500 miles of wall.” — remarks Tuesday at the Republican Party of Iowa annual dinner.
THE FACTS: He’s being overly optimistic. It’s unclear how Trump arrives at 400 to 500 miles (800 km), but he would have to prevail in legal challenges to his declaration of a national emergency or get Congress to cough up more money to get anywhere close. Those are big assumptions. And by far the majority of the wall he’s talking about is replacement barrier, not new miles of construction.
So far, the administration has awarded contracts for 247 miles (395 km) of wall construction, but more than half comes from Defense Department money available under Trump’s Feb. 15 emergency declaration. On May 24, a federal judge in California who was appointed by Obama blocked Trump from building key sections of the wall with that money. In a separate case, a federal judge in the nation’s capital who was appointed by Trump sided with the administration , but that ruling has no effect while the California injunction is in place.
Even if Trump prevails in court, all but 17 miles (27 km) of his awarded contracts replace existing barriers.
The White House says it has identified up to $8.1 billion in potential money under the national emergency, mostly from the Defense Department.
Customs and Border Protection officials say the administration wants Congress to finance 206 miles (330 km) next year. The chances of the Democratic-controlled House backing that are between slim and none.
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TRADE
TRUMP: “Right now, we’re getting 25% on $250 billion worth of goods. That’s a lot of money that’s pouring into our treasury. We’ve never gotten 10 cents from China. Now we’re getting a lot of money from China.” — remarks on June 10 with Indianapolis 500 champions.
TRUMP: “We’re taking in, right now, billions and billions of dollars in tariffs, and they’re subsidizing product.” — remarks Tuesday in Council Bluffs.
THE FACTS: He’s incorrect. The tariffs he’s raised on imports from China are primarily if not entirely a tax on U.S. consumers and businesses, not a source of significant revenue coming into the country.
A study in March by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Columbia University and Princeton University, before the latest escalation, found that the public and U.S. companies were paying $3 billion a month in higher taxes from the trade dispute with China, suffering $1.4 billion a month in lost efficiency and absorbing the entire impact.
It’s also false that the U.S. never collected a dime in tariffs before he took action. Tariffs on goods from China are not remotely new. They are simply higher in some cases than they were before. Tariffs go back to the beginning of the U.S. and were once a leading source of revenue for the government. Not in modern times. They equate to less than 1% of federal spending.
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TRUMP: “Look, without tariffs, we would be captive to every country, and we have been for many years. That’s why we have an $800 billion trading deficit for years. We lose a fortune with virtually every country. They take advantage of us in every way possible.” — CNBC interview on June 10.
THE FACTS: Trump isn’t telling the whole story about trade deficits.
When he refers to $800 billion trade gaps, he’s only talking about the deficit in goods such as cars and aircraft. He leaves out services — such as banking, tourism and education — in which the U.S. runs substantial trade surpluses that partially offset persistent deficits in goods. The goods and services deficit peaked at $762 billion in 2006. Last year, the United States ran a record $887 billion deficit in goods and a $260 billion surplus in services, which added up to an overall deficit of more than $627 billion.
The U.S. does tend to run trade deficits with most other major economies. But there are exceptions, such as Canada (a nearly $4 billion surplus last year), Singapore ($18 billion) and Britain ($19 billion).
Mainstream economists reject Trump’s argument that the deficits arise from other countries taking advantage of the United States. They see the trade gaps as the result of an economic reality that probably won’t bend to tariffs and other changes in trade policy: Americans buy more than they produce, and imports fill the gap.
U.S. exports are also hurt by the American dollar’s status as the world’s currency. The dollar is usually in high demand because it is used in so many global transactions. That means the dollar is persistently strong, raising prices of U.S. products and putting American companies at a disadvantage in foreign markets.
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FEDERAL RESERVE
TRUMP: “We have people on the Fed that really weren’t, you know, they’re not my people, but they certainly didn’t listen to me because they made a big mistake.” — CNBC interview on June 10.
THE FACTS: Actually, most of the members on the Fed’s Board of Governors owe their jobs to Trump.
In addition to choosing Jerome Powell, a Republican whom Obama had named to the Fed board, to be chairman, Trump has filled three other vacancies on the board in his first two years in office. Lael Brainard is the only Democrat on the board.
There are still two vacancies on the seven-member board. Trump had earlier intended to nominate two political allies — Herman Cain and Stephen Moore — but both later withdrew in the face of sharp opposition from critics.
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AUTOMAKERS
TRUMP: “All of the car companies — you know, long before I got here, we lost 32 percent of our car industry, our automobile manufacturing business, to Mexico.” — Fox News interview Friday.
TRUMP: “Tariffs are a great negotiating tool, a great revenue producer and, most importantly, a powerful way to get … companies to come to the U.S.A., and to get companies that have left us for other lands to come back home. We stupidly lost 30% of our auto business to Mexico.” — tweets Tuesday.
THE FACTS: He’s incorrect that Mexico took 30% of the U.S. automobile business in the years since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994.
In 2017, 14% of the vehicles sold in the U.S. were imported from Mexico, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a think tank in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Parts imported from Mexico exceed 30%.
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TRUMP: “If I put tariffs on, as an example, Mexico, you know what would happen? 25%. All the car companies would move back to the United States because they don’t want to pay the 25%.” — Fox News interview Friday.
TRUMP: “If the Tariffs went on at the higher level, they would all come back.” — tweet Tuesday.
THE FACTS: He’s wrong to assume that auto companies in Mexico would immediately move back to the U.S. if there were a 25% tariff on Mexican-made vehicles and parts.
It takes three years or four years minimum to plan, equip and build an auto assembly plant, so there would be little immediate impact on production or jobs. Auto and parts makers are global companies, and they would also look to countries without tariffs as a place to move their factories. The companies could also just wait until after the 2020 election, hoping that if Trump is defeated, the next president would get rid of the tariffs.
“They’re not going to invest in duplicative capacity in response to short-term policy incentives,” said Kristen Dziczek, a vice president at the Center for Automotive Research.
It is possible that some production could be shifted back to the United States. General Motors, for instance, makes about 39% of its full-size pickup trucks at a factory in Silao, Mexico, mainly light-duty versions, according to analysts at Morningstar. If the U.S. imposed a 25% tariff on assembled automobiles, GM could shift some production to a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that also makes light-duty pickups. But there are limits. That plant already is running on three shifts and is almost near its maximum capacity.
Tariffs on Mexico probably would cost auto jobs in the U.S., too, because Mexico would almost certainly retaliate with tariffs of its own. Tariffs on both sides would raise prices of vehicles, because automakers probably would pass the charges onto their customers.
Industry experts say higher prices would cause more buyers to shift into the used-vehicle market, cutting into new-vehicle sales. Tariffs could be higher than 25% because parts go back and forth across the border multiple times in a highly integrated supply chain.
Vehicles built in Mexico get 20% to 30% of their parts from the U.S., so the tariffs would drive up prices there. That would hit lower-income people hard because automakers produce many lower-priced new vehicles in Mexico to take advantage of cheaper labor. About 62% of U.S. vehicle and parts exports go to Canada and Mexico, according to the Center for Automotive Research.
Tariffs would add $1,300 to $4,500 to the price of vehicles based just on the cost of parts, the center estimated.
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Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Eric Tucker, Martin Crutsinger and Paul Wiseman in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Tom Krisher in Detroit and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
