Trump lies

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The Trump administration is considering a rule change that would make it easier for American companies to stash money offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, despite the president’s repeated campaign promises to bring offshore cash back home. The Treasury Department is looking to weaken or eliminate Obama-era regulations aimed at preventing companies from moving their income to their overseas branches to lower their U.S. tax bill, Bloomberg reports. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, instead wants to replace the existing rules with “something more business friendly.” The move would be a boon to large corporations, who already saw their taxes permanently slashed by the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited companies at the expense of individual taxpayers.

‘Another betrayal’: Trump promised to bring offshore profits home — but he’s doing the opposite – Alternet.org

• Are you even surprised anymore?
  

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A leading Fox News host has issued a bizarre defence of Donald Trump, in which he described the president as a "liar" and a “full-blown BS artist”. Tucker Carlson said the president makes misleading statements because “that’s who he is” and compared Mr Trump to a “salesman”. “He's a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he's a full-blown BS artist,” Mr Carlson said. The Fox News presenter also rejected the White House’s claim that Mr Trump’s 2017 inauguration was “the largest ever measured on the national mall”. “We're not going to lie to you: that was untrue,” he added. A Washington Post report published in October found Mr Trump had made more than 13,000 false or misleading claims since taking office in January 2017..

Fox News host Tucker Carlson admits media is right about Trump’s lying: ‘He’s a full-blown BS artist’ | The Independent

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Today Trump is claiming that he is responsible for Veteran’s Choice, a piece of legislation that provides care to injured veterans.   But, as ever, there’s one big problem: this isn’t true.  As Vox’s Aaron Rupar reports, this bill was actually signed by president Obama. Not only that, but the legislation was actually written by Trump’s nemesis, the late John McCain, and socialist Bernie Sanders. This isn’t the first time that Trump has made this claim. In March 2019, Rupar wrote: “Trump’s untruths about Veterans Choice illustrate the sheer audaciousness of his lies”. Rupar said that Trump take s credit for the program “in order to demean the late war hero who in fact created it”.

Trump news: President tries to take credit for Obama-era legislation | indy100

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In two new interviews this week, President Donald Trump made brazen attempts to rewrite history about his administration’s ill-fated child separation policy, trying to shunt the blame to his predecessor Barack Obama. In both instances, Trump dodged dogged questions about the family separation policy his administration implemented last year by asserting, falsely, that he inherited it from Obama.

Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his family separation policy - Vox

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Instead, the president once again falsely blamed his predecessor for routinely separating families at the border, saying that “under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it.” Mr. Trump has repeatedly made that assertion, which is not true. Mr. Obama’s administration — like others before it — only separated children from their parents at the border on a case-by-case basis when they feared abuse by the parent or there was a question of parentage.

Trump Shrugs Off Khashoggi Killing by Ally Saudi Arabia - The New York Times

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Donald Trump has clashed with a Fox News interviewer after the president was challenged about a false claim that Joe Biden wants to defund police. 'The guy stinks and he’s a racist': Anthony Scaramucci on Donald Trump Read more In a clip of Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday interview with Trump released on Friday, the president said his likely opponent in November’s presidential election supported the movement to defund police forces. But in the interview, held on the Oval Office patio, Wallace intervened to say Biden did not support defunding. Trump, hoping to prove his allegation, was then seen calling for a copy of a policy charter Biden agreed with Bernie Sanders and which was released this week. The document did not prove his claim. The interview, the first Sunday interview with Trump for more than a year, will be aired in full this weekend. Wallace later told Fox News: “If it looked like it was hot on that patio right outside the Oval Office there – it was about 100F.” Trump, he said, “kept saying, ‘Whose idea was this?’ Well, of course, it was the president’s idea but, as he said, he wanted to make me sweat.

Trump clashes with Fox News interviewer over false claim about Biden | Donald Trump | The Guardian

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President Trump on Friday teased an executive order to require health insurers to cover all preexisting conditions, something already established under the Affordable Care Act, which his administration is suing to dismantle.

Trump teases order requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions | TheHill

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The most consistent theme of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention wasn’t that Joe Biden was a puppet for radicals. It wasn’t even that rioters and looters are coming to your home and only Trump can protect you from the radical left. The clear theme of the RNC was a flagrant and brutal disregard for the truth.

The first night of the RNC featured more false and misleading claims than all four nights of the DNC put together, according to a CNN fact-check. The second night starred an anti-abortion activist whose tale about the horrors of Planned Parenthood had been exposed as a fraud more than 10 years ago. On the third night, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that the murder of a police officer by a far-right extremist was a crime committed by left-wing rioters. It was all capped off by President Trump’s Thursday night speech, a farrago of falsehoods that even veteran Trump fact-checkers found stunning. “Basically everything Trump says about Biden’s proposals is false,” the Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes. In a tour-de-force segment, CNN’s Daniel Dale spent three minutes debunking the speech at a rapid clip — and still didn’t cover all the lies. 

Writing honestly about the RNC requires centering the dishonesty. But adequately describing the sheer breadth and brazenness of the lying that was on display these past four days would take volumes. And after a certain point, the whole thing reaches diminishing returns: Some depressing political science research suggests that pointing out when Trump is lying doesn’t actually change the way voters feel about him. And that’s the dark brilliance of the RNC, and maybe the entire Trump presidency. If you just lie and break legal rules frequently enough and brazenly enough, the sheer volume of misconduct will overwhelm the systems that are designed to check them.

Donald Trump’s RNC weaponized exhaustion - Vox

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When moderator Chris Wallace pointed out that Trump has been promising a plan for four years — and still hasn’t yet delivered — Trump just filibustered, and the discussion turned to another topic.

It appears a lot of people who plan to vote for Trump find this sufficient. Two reporters for the Upshot talked to numerous Trump voters and found that their faith in his intention to protect preexisting conditions was rock-solid.

Some of them have even struggled with this problem in the past.

“I’ve heard from him that he would continue with preexisting conditions so that people would not lose their health insurance,” one Florida woman told the Upshot of Trump. Her husband has a heart condition.

“I still think he has everybody’s best interest at heart,” a Georgia woman added. “I just cannot see him allowing for preexisting conditions to come back.” She has a son with schizophrenia.

Others interviewed by the Upshot said much the same thing. But this one is the most revealing:

“There is not a single guy or woman who would run for president that would make it so that preexisting conditions wouldn’t be covered,” said Phil Bowman, a 59-year-old retiree in Linville, N.C. “Nobody would vote for him.”

This is really the crux of the issue: None of them can begin to imagine someone would face the voters and ask for another term as president while standing for such an indefensible position.

Trump is benefiting from a perverse dynamic: He isn’t being held accountable — at least by many of his voters — for not offering an actual plan to replace the ACA precisely because wiping out the ACA’s protections, and not having any plan to replace them, seems politically unthinkable to them. And that enables him to politically get away with it — among those voters, anyway.

Opinion | Trump’s health-care stance is so bad that his voters can’t believe he holds it - The Washington Post

• Taking away protections for pre-existing conditions in order to fund tax cuts for the rich is such an immoral policy that supporters don't believe it's true
  

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HOPES WERE HIGH among the employees who joined Foxconn’s Wisconsin project in the summer of 2018. In June, President Donald Trump had broken ground on an LCD factory he called “the eighth wonder of the world.” The scale of the promise was indeed enormous: a $10 billion investment from the Taiwanese electronics giant, a 20 million-square-foot manufacturing complex, and, most importantly, 13,000 jobs. Which is why new recruits arriving at the 1960s office building Foxconn had purchased in downtown Milwaukee were surprised to discover they had to provide their own office supplies. “One of the largest companies in the world, and you have to bring your own pencil,” an employee recalls wondering. Maybe Foxconn was just moving too fast to be bothered with such details, they thought, as they brought their laptops from home and scavenged pencils left behind by the building’s previous tenants. They listened to the cries of co-workers trapped in the elevators that often broke, noted the water that occasionally leaked from the ceiling, and wondered when the building would be transformed into the gleaming North American headquarters an executive had promised. The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs.

Inside Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin