WASHINGTON (AP) – In his first post-presidential speech, Donald Trump falsely held his nuclear election, wrongly blamed wind power for the catastrophic power outages in Texas, and revived a variety of unfounded claims that saturated his time in office with immigration. the economy and more.
A look at Trump’s remarks Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference:
WIND POWER
TRUMP, leading the Democrats on energy policy: “The windmill disaster we see in Texas … it’s so sad when you look at it. This will only be the beginning. ”
TRUMP, on President Joe Biden: “He wants windmills. … The windmills that do not work when you need them. ‘
THE FACTS: ‘Windmill calamity’ is a false characterization. The power outages during the severe February storm in Texas were mainly due to failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems, not to wind and solar power.
According to the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, these traditional sources were responsible for nearly twice as many interruptions as frozen wind turbines and solar panels.
ERCOT reported that of the 45,000 total megawatts of power that was offline across the country during the winter storm, about 30,000 came from thermal sources – gas, coal and nuclear power plants – and 16,000 came from renewable sources. Wind supplies only about a quarter of the electricity in Texas.
“It’s not like we rely on driving us through this opportunity,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, about wind power. “It could not save us either, even if it were now working at 100% capacity. We just do not have enough of it. ”
Wind power comes from turbines, not from wind pumps. Windmills grind grain. Trump always gets it wrong.
___
ELECTION
TRUMP: “If we had a fair election, the results would have been very different.”
TRUMP: “You can not have a situation where voices flow indiscriminately from all over the country … where illegal aliens and dead people vote.”
TRUMP: “This election was hampered and the Supreme Court and other courts did not want to do anything about it.”
TRUMP on Democrats: “They have just lost the White House. … I might even decide to beat them a third time. ‘
THE FACTS: This is completely wrong, except that the Supreme Court did not intervene because the judges – among them Trump nominees – saw no reason.
Biden won the election. It is managed and counted fairly. His victory was confirmed in Congress, with Trump’s vice president presiding over the process in the Senate, in the hours following the January 6 uprising of the American Capitol by a mob incited by Trump.
Trump’s allegations of massive vote fraud were either refuted or dismissed as baseless by a variety of judges, state election officials, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security from his own administration and his own attorney general. His campaign’s lawsuits across the country were thrown out of court or otherwise ended in nothing.
No case determined irregularities on the scale that would change the outcome – no flood of dead people who voted or ballot papers “flowed in indiscriminately from all over the country.”
Biden earned 306 voting votes on Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump had when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, which he repeatedly described as a ‘landslide’. (Trump eventually got 304 votes because two voters ran over.)
___
IMMIGRATION
TRUMP on foreign countries that are the source of migrants to the US: ‘They do not give us their best and their best.’
THE FACTS: This falsehood goes back a lot in the Trump administration. Foreign countries do not choose people to send to the US This is not at all how immigration works.
He refers to the lottery program for diversity visas, although he did not identify it as such in these comments. As president, Trump has frequently assaulted and mistakenly characterized the program as one in which other countries choose unwanted citizens to send to the United States.
The US government manages the visa program and foreigners who want to come to the US apply for it. The program requires that applicants have completed a high school education or have at least two years of experience in a selection of fields identified by the Department of Labor over the past five years.
From that pool of people from certain countries who meet the conditions, the State Department randomly selects a much smaller group of winners. Not all winners will eventually approve visas. This is not a pipeline for countries to send their troublemakers to the US
___
CHINA
TRUMP: “We took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China during my administration. They never gave us ten cents. ”
THE FACTS: False and untrue, and very well known.
It is false to say that the US never collected a penny in tariffs on Chinese goods before taking action. In some cases, they are simply higher than before.
It is also wrong to say that the tariffs are paid by China. Tariff money coming into the treasury comes primarily from U.S. businesses and consumers, not from China. Rates are mainly if not entirely a tax paid domestically.
___
ECONOMY
TRUMP: “We have built the strongest economy in world history.”
THE FACTS: No, the numbers show that it was not the greatest in American history, and even less so in the history of the world. He was actually the first president since Herbert Hoover in the Depression to leave office with less work than when he started.
The US does have the most jobs before the pandemic, but population growth explains part of it. The unemployment rate of 3.5% before the pandemic-induced recession was at a low century, but the percentage of people looking for work or work was still below a peak in 2000.
Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer looked at Trump’s record for economic growth. The growth under Trump averaged 2.48% per year before the pandemic, only slightly better than the 2.41% increase achieved during Barack Obama’s second term. In contrast, the economic expansion that began in 1982 during Ronald Reagan’s presidency averaged 4.2% per year.
___
Yen reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press author Josh Boak contributed to this report.
___
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR – A Look At The Truth Of Claims By Political Figures.
___
Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck