Trump is known for straying from the script, and he has not stopped delivering ads as Tuesday approaches. But as he breaks down from state to state – so did the president 14 events scheduled from Saturday to Monday – his dishonesty tends to follow a rough pattern.
We can divide his rally false claims into seven broad categories.
Trump is using his speeches to try to convince voters that the worse coronavirus crisis is actually improving.
Even if confirms new cases, hospitalizations and the test positivity rate everyone increases, Trump falsely claims that “we turn the corner.” And he falsely maintains that the increase in cases is merely the result of the US conducting more tests, although this allegation has been publicly rejected by top federal officials.
According to Johns Hopkins University data, Trump said dealing with a pandemic that killed at least 229,000 Americans continues to declare the death toll to be 2.2 million. The amount of 2.2 million was probably an extreme worst estimate of what would have happened if US authorities had not acted at all to fight the pandemic.
Trump has erroneously claimed that anyone who gets the virus will just ‘get better’ – citing the unrepresentative example of his own case, for which he received exceptional medical care. And he promoted a fictitious conspiracy theory, which you can read here, about media coverage on the demand for Covid-19 immunity for people who get and survive the virus.
2) Describe Biden’s positions
The Joe Biden or Trump speeches are very different from the actual Joe Biden.
The speech of the Biden of Trump plans to eradicate everyone’s private health insurance plan; the real Biden wants to preserve private plans and only allow people to opt into a public insurance program if they prefer. The speech of the Biden of Trump wants to “completely dismantle law enforcement” and “eliminate American borders completely”; the real Biden wants to increase federal funding for community policing and liberalize immigration policies with borders that still exist. The speech of the Biden of Trump refuses to condemn the violence in Philadelphia; the actual Biden condemned the violence both harshly and in writing.
3) The proposal of election fraud
Trump often spends part of his speeches on his massively dishonest attempt to undermine confidence in the election in general and assent in particular.
Trump unjustifiably maintains that the entry of votes is fraught with ‘fraud’. Although he has consistently followed national public polls, he unjustifiably claims that the only way he can lose is if his opponents commit ‘massive fraud’. And he went on to cite either bloated or imaginary, alleged examples of bad election behavior. He claimed, for example, that 50,000 ballots had been found in a river; it did not take place.
4) Written of rewriting
Trump’s reports on what has happened in the past are reliably incorrect.
Trump likes to tell a story about how Biden during their first debate refused to say the words ‘law and order’. In fact, Biden did say these words.
Trump liked to say he was being accused of calling the president of Ukraine to say congratulations. In fact, Trump got into trouble because he said much more than congratulations on the call – such as asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden.
5) To make false or misleading economic pride
Trump has consistently chosen economic numbers to make the national situation sound better than it is.
As of September, the country still had more than ten million jobs before the pandemic. But Trump continues to tell his crowd that he is setting records for job creation, with 11.4 million jobs in the past five months. That’s a real figure, but he does not mention that it preceded a larger record loss of 22.2 million jobs over the past two months.
Trump also began to record record growth in the third quarter, an annual and seasonally adjusted rate of 33.1%. He does not mention that the economy is still smaller than before the pandemic due to the record decline that preceded this profit.
Sometimes Trump ignores the pandemic era completely. He said at rallies that he had created 700,000 manufacturing jobs, although until September it was actually a net loss of 164,000 manufacturing jobs since he entered employment. How does he get to plus-700,000? By stopping the clock in February – when it was a net profit of 483,000 during his presidency – and then doing his usual exaggeration.
6) The transfer of his achievements
Trump practically recounts the things he did in his office: create a space force, move the US embassy to Jerusalem, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But he also generates applause by mentioning non-existent achievements.
He says Mexico pays for its border wall, even though the wall is only funded by US public money. He says he passed the Veterans Choice program even though President Barack Obama signed the Choice Bill in 2014. (Trump has signed a 2018 law to amend and expand the program.) And he says he is the first president ever to make China pay ’10 cents’ in tariffs even though it is Americans who pay for his tariffs. paid, and although the Obama-era government took in billions in revenue from tariffs on China.
7) To say false things on trivial topics
We have shown you that Trump’s speeches are filled with lies on important topics. But it is also littered with trivial lies.
After insulting CNN, he regularly claims that he just saw CNN turn off the red light on his camera. CNN photojournalists do not turn off their cameras when he attacks the network – and they do not even use red light visible to Trump. In other words, Trump is just making it up.
Perhaps Trump’s strangest rally lie is something he almost always said when he spoke in Michigan, where he intends to final Monday rally. He explains that he was once named ‘man of the year’ in the state.
Trump has never lived in Michigan, and it has not happened.