Just when you decided politics hit the nadir of respect and decorum...
Fact check (http://www.factcheck.org/person/donald-trump/
Donald Trump gets an ‘F’ for a video he posted to YouTube purporting to tell the “truth” about Trump University, the real-estate program that has been the subject of three ongoing lawsuits alleging fraud.
In the video, Trump holds up a sheet of paper showing that the Better Business Bureau gave Trump University an “A” rating, claiming it proves that what he said during the March 3 debate was correct. That’s false. As we wrote in our debate story, the most recent BBB rating for Trump University that we could find for the program was a “D-” in 2010 — which is when the school stopped taking new students.
But Trump keeps insisting he is right, even when the evidence proves him wrong. He tweeted a screenshot of the “A” rating after the debate. He posted a video to YouTube on March 7, criticizing Fox News for refusing to correct the record during the debate. He tweeted about that, too.
Hillary Clinton went too far when she claimed that Donald Trump said “we should pull out of NATO.” Trump said that he would “certainly look at” pulling the U.S. out of NATO, because it is “obsolete” and “is costing us a fortune.” "Obsolete?" - How?
When asked why he doesn’t lead by example and have more of his products from the Donald J. Trump Collection made in the U.S., Trump wrongly responded, “They don’t even make this stuff here.” They do.
Donald Trump distorts the facts when he says “Hillary Clinton wants to take your guns away” and “abolish the Second Amendment.” Clinton’s gun violence prevention proposal would impose restrictions, but it does not call for banning all guns.
As CNN’s Jake Tapper explains in the following video, there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton or her campaign started rumors during the 2008 presidential race that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Donald Trump claimed in an Indiana speech that the U.S. ranks “last in education” and “first in terms of spending per pupil” among 30 countries. He’s wrong on both counts, as measured by federal and international organizations.
Donald Trump used a thinly sourced story from the tabloid National Enquirer to make the baseless claim that Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot.”
Donald Trump says that “instead of taking charge” during the Benghazi attacks, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “decided to go home and sleep.” Clinton says she was continuously engaged in responding to the attack and “did not sleep all night.”
In his foreign policy speech, Donald Trump claimed ISIS “is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil.” But an expert on Libya’s oil operations told us there’s no evidence that the Islamic State is producing or selling oil out of that country.
Donald Trump repeatedly has accused Club for Growth of airing attack ads against him because he refused to give the conservative group a $1 million donation – or what Trump calls “a form of extortion.” WRONG!
Republican front-runner Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed, for months, that premiums under the Affordable Care Act are “going up 35, 45, 55 percent.” Trump cherry-picks insurers’ rate increases on the ACA marketplaces.
Donald Trump falsely claims that while he has had “55,000 negative ads” run against him, John Kasich has “never had one negative ad against him.” While it’s true that Trump has had far more negative ads run against him in the presidential campaign, it’s simply not true that Ohio Gov. Kasich hasn’t had any. There have been 92 TV ads that ran about 57,000 times against Trump and 18 ads that ran about 9,400 times against Kasich, according to Kantar Media, which tracks political advertising.
In fact, Trump himself ran an ad in Ohio attacking Kasich. It ran 755 times.
Republican Donald Trump criticized U.S. military support for several countries — Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and South Korea — during a discussion on nuclear proliferation at a CNN town hall in late March, saying “we can’t afford it.” We’ll answer the question: What exactly does the U.S. provide in terms of military support to these countries?
The United States gives very little monetary military aid to those countries — about $10,000 to Saudi Arabia in fiscal year 2014. And Saudi Arabia purchased more than $2 billion of military equipment and construction services that year. The support the U.S. provides to the other countries — Japan, Germany and South Korea — comes from the cost of having U.S. military bases in those countries, and the added cost and benefit of that is difficult to quantify.
After a brief hiatus, CNN’s Jake Tapper returns with a fact-checking video on Donald Trump’s false claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign bought the rights to a racy photo of Trump’s wife, Melania, and gave it to a super PAC.
Donald Trump continues to say that Wisconsin has a budget deficit of $2.2 billion. It didn’t last year when he made the same claim, and it doesn’t this year, either.
Donald Trump has accused Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign of buying the rights to a racy photo of Trump’s wife, Melania, and giving the photo to a super PAC that used it in an ad. But the photographer who took the photo told us no one contacted him to buy the rights.
An ad from an anti-Donald Trump super PAC uses a partial quote from Trump to distort his position on gun control. What is the Republican front-runner’s position on guns, the ad asks, and then cuts to a video of Trump saying, “I hate the concept of guns. I’m not in favor of it.” The full quote from Trump in that same interview makes clear that Trump not only supports the right to own guns, but he also owns several himself.
In making the case for his electability in the general election, Donald Trump said that when it comes to primary voter turnout so far “the Democrats are down 35 percent, whereas the Republicans are up over 70 percent.” Actually, both Republicans and Democrats are seeing higher primary voter turnouts compared with 2012.
Donald Trump denied that he ever accused President George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “I didn’t say lie,” Trump said. That’s false. Trump at least twice — most recently in a debate last month — said Bush “lied.”
Trump wrongly claimed that a Pew Research Center survey found that among the world’s Muslims, “27 percent, could be 35 percent, would go to war” against the U.S.
Businessman Donald Trump wrongly claimed that the Obama administration isn’t “knocking out the oil” controlled by the Islamic State in Syria, because of climate change concerns. The administration, which stepped up attacks on oil facilities, hasn’t cited climate change. Instead, it has cited concern about long-term economic harm and local environmental damage.
- Trump incorrectly referred to Common Core as “education through Washington, D.C.” and claimed Common Core has been “taken over by the federal government.” The education standards were developed by the states, and the curriculum will continue to be managed at the state and local level.
- Trump wrongly said the U.S. gross domestic product was at “zero, essentially.” Real GDP grew at a rate of 2 percent in the third quarter of 2015 and 1 percent in the fourth quarter.
- Trump, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich repeated several claims we’ve checked before — including Trump’s claim to be self-funding his campaign (he’s taken $7.5 million in donations); Kasich’s boast on job creation (Ohio’s growth trails the national rate); Cruz’s claim about welfare benefits for immigrants in the country illegally (they’re already barred from most government benefits); and more.
- Trump also said that the 1,237 delegate count needed to secure the party’s nomination was “a very random number.” It’s actually a simple majority of the total available delegates, 2,472.
- Trump wrongly said the U.S. gross domestic product was at “zero, essentially.” Real GDP grew at a rate of 2 percent in the third quarter of 2015 and 1 percent in the fourth quarter.
- Trump, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich repeated several claims we’ve checked before — including Trump’s claim to be self-funding his campaign (he’s taken $7.5 million in donations); Kasich’s boast on job creation (Ohio’s growth trails the national rate); Cruz’s claim about welfare benefits for immigrants in the country illegally (they’re already barred from most government benefits); and more.
- Trump also said that the 1,237 delegate count needed to secure the party’s nomination was “a very random number.” It’s actually a simple majority of the total available delegates, 2,472.
Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz disagreed over whether Cruz had waffled on his opposition to ethanol mandates. Trump was wrong, and Cruz was right.
Donald Trump gets an ‘F’ for a video he posted to YouTube purporting to tell the “truth” about Trump University, the real-estate program that has been the subject of three ongoing lawsuits alleging fraud.
- Trump said that the so-called university “had an A rating from the Better Business Bureau.” Actually, it once had an “A+” rating, according to a Better Business Bureau spokeswoman. But its most recent rating was a “D-.”
- Trump claimed that “many of” the university’s instructors were “handpicked” by him. That’s not true. In a 2012 deposition, a top executive for Trump University said that “none of our instructors” was picked by Trump himself.
- Trump said that “98 percent of the people that took the courses … thought they were terrific.” That’s misleading. A class-action lawsuit against Trump alleges that the surveys were not anonymous and were filled out during or immediately after sessions when participants were still expecting to receive future benefits from the program.
Trump and his “university,” which was never officially licensed as such and eventually had to change its name to The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in May 2010, are the subjects of three ongoing lawsuits alleging fraud. One $40 million lawsuit was filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2013, and two other class-action lawsuits have been filed by former participants who paid thousands of dollars for the courses and are seeking reimbursement.
Trump told Wallace that his program “had an ‘A’ rating from the Better Business Bureau,” a nonprofit organization that reviews millions of businesses by request and rates them on a scale from “A+ to F.”
The BBB website does not currently list a rating for The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative. It says that is “because BBB has information indicating it is out of business.”
Donald Trump has repeated throughout his presidential campaign that he opposed the Iraq war before the March 19, 2003 invasion, often taking credit for his judgement and vision — claiming he knew it would destabilize the Middle East.
On Feb. 13, in the most recent debate, Trump said: “I said it loud and clear, ‘You’ll destabilize the Middle East.'” In the Sept. 16, 2015 debate, Trump claimed that he “fought very, very hard against us … going into Iraq,” saying he could provide “25 different stories” to prove his opposition.
Trump has even said that he was “visited by people from the White House” in attempt to silence him, because, he said, he was getting “a disproportionate amount of publicity” for his opposition to the war.
There is no evidence that we could find, however, that he spoke against the war before it started, although we did find he expressed early concerns about the cost and direction of the war a few months after it started.
Others have looked, but no one else — including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — has been able to find any evidence to support his claims, either. Now, BuzzFeed reports that Trump indicated his support for war in a radio interview with shock jock Howard Stern on Sept. 11, 2002 — a little more than six months before the war started.
Stern asked Trump directly if he supported going to war with Iraq, and Trump hesitantly responded, “Yeah, I guess so.”
This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper, in collaboration with FactCheck.org, examines Donald Trump’s claim that he “heard” that the unemployment rate is 42 percent.
The official unemployment rate was 4.9 percent in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s nowhere near what Trump said he heard.
Even including the underemployed (part-time workers wanting full-time work) and the “marginally attached” (those who have given up looking for a job but had looked for one in the past year), the rate would be 9.9 percent.
Donald Trump claimed that the loan rates Sen. Ted Cruz received during his 2012 Senate run were “lower than you could get, lower than anybody could get.” In fact, the evidence shows the interest rates Cruz reported were attainable at the time.
Donald Trump said he can beat Hillary Clinton in November, citing “so many” polls that show “we beat her and we beat her easily.” In fact, only four of 40 polls listed on Real Clear Politics show Trump beating Clinton — none easily.
Donald Trump claims Illinois is “very seriously” looking at Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility to run for president and “may not even let him run.” That’s misleading.
A Ted Cruz TV ad says Donald Trump “colluded with Atlantic City insiders to bulldoze the home of an elderly widow” for a casino parking lot. The ad leaves the false impression that the widow lost her home, and she didn’t.
Donald Trump made two false statements on ABC’s “This Week” while discussing foreign policy and the Republican presidential primary:
- He denied saying that Americans detained by Iran would “never” be released during the Obama administration. But that’s exactly what he said. In September, Trump said that “frankly they’re never going to come back with this group.”
- Trump also claimed “all of the latest polls have me No. 1 in Iowa.” In fact, a poll released Jan. 13 showed him trailing Sen. Ted Cruz by three points.
Trump: Absolutely not. And I never said it was never going to happen. I said that if I got in, it would happen immediately.
Anchor George Stephanopoulos, Jan. 16: So we have some news. We have four American hostages, including Jason Rezaian, and released by Iran. Now you said that was never going to happen. You blamed Obama. Are you ready to give him credit?Trump’s Falsehoods
Trump: Absolutely not. And I never said it was never going to happen. I said that if I got in, it would happen immediately.
We won’t get into Trump’s controversial policy positions; it’s not a fact-checker’s role to offer opinions on whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea for the federal government to bar Muslims from entering the United States or to kill the families of terrorists, for example. What we focus on here are some of the many cases where he’s just wrong on the facts.
We start with his Nov. 21 claim to have watched on television as “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Multiple news organizations and the New Jersey attorney general’s office searched for evidence of public celebrations at the time of 9/11 and found none.
- Trump boasted that he “predicted Osama bin Laden.” Nope. The book Trump published in 2000 mentioned bin Laden once, and predicted nothing about bin Laden’s future plans.
- Trump “heard” that Obama is “thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away.” If so, he misheard. What Obama reportedly considered was requiring large-volume private gun dealers to conduct background checks, not confiscating firearms from those who own them.
- Trump said he “heard” the Obama administration plans to accept 200,000 Syrian refugees — even upping that wildly inaccurate number to 250,000 in another speech. Nope and nope. The number is about 10,000.
- Trump said he got to know Putin “very well” while the two were on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Nope. The two men were interviewed separately, in different countries thousands of miles apart.
- Trump claimed his campaign is “100 percent” self-funded. Nope. At the time, more than 50 percent of his campaign’s funds had come from outside contributors.
- Trump said his tax plan is revenue neutral. Nope. The pro-business Tax Foundation estimated the Trump plan would reduce revenues to the Treasury by more than $10 trillion over 10 years, even assuming his plan would create economic growth.
- Trump told the story of a 2-year old who got autism a week after the child got a vaccine. But there’s no evidence of such a link. The study that claimed to have found a link between vaccines and autism has been exposed as an “elaborate fraud.” It was retracted five years ago by the journal that published it, and the author was stripped of his license to practice medicine in Britain.
- Trump said Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy. It does.
- Trump claimed credit for getting Ford Motor Co. to move a plant from Mexico to Ohio. Ford says that’s baloney; it made the decision years before Trump even announced his run for president.
- Trump denied that he ever called female adversaries some of these things: “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” He used all of those terms.
- Trump said in June “there are no jobs” to be had, when official statistics were showing 5.4 million job openings — the most in 15 years.
- Trump claimed economic growth in the U.S. has “never” been below zero — until the third quarter of 2015. “Who ever heard of this?” he asked. Except it’s not unheard of. Economic growth has been below zero 42 times since 1946.
- "Lying Ted Cruz"?
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