New York Times: Don’t Take Trump’s Word for It. Check the Data.

July 24, 2024

For more than 90 minutes last week, Donald Trump gave a rambling speech accepting the Republican nomination for president for a third time. He used the opportunity, as well as his June debate with President Biden, to repeat favorite false claims and exaggerations. That Mr. Trump has a proclivity for saying untrue things is well known. But in his latest campaign for the White House, I’ve been struck by what appears to be an escalation in both the frequency of Mr. Trump’s lies and the outrageousness of his distortions.

Now that the uncertainty around Mr. Biden’s candidacy has been resolved, the campaign will begin anew. With Mr. Trump sure to ratchet up his falsehood-laden rhetoric, it’s a good time to review his recent record of dishonesty.

Jobs

Lie: “The only jobs [President Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs — they’re bounced back from the Covid.”

Truth: Under Mr. Trump — even excluding the impact of the Covid pandemic — the economy generated an average of 182,000 jobs a month, well below Mr. Biden’s 277,000 a month (excluding his post-pandemic bounce) and Bill Clinton’s 242,000.

Lie: “It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t — you look at the cost of food where it’s doubled, and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore.”

Truth: Rising food prices are understandably on the minds of many Americans. But not a single item tracked by the government is more than 56 percent more expensive than it was when Mr. Biden took office, while grocery prices overall have gone up 21 percent.

Lie: “What we did was incredible …. We got the largest tax cut in history.”

Truth: The most analytically valid method for measuring the size of a tax cut is to compare it with the size of the economy at the time. By this standard, the Trump tax package was the eighth largest tax cut in the past century, well behind the cuts that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama signed into law. (And, of course, Mr. Trump’s tax cuts mostly benefited corporations and the wealthy.)

Lie: “The tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to Covid …. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt.”

Truth: The national debt grew considerably and at a faster rate each year under Mr. Trump. His tax cut helped drive the annual budget deficit to $1 trillion in 2019 from $680 billion in 2017. Including the impact of the pandemic, the national debt increased to $27.7 trillion from $19.8 trillion during Mr. Trump’s tenure.

Lie: “[Tariffs are] not going to drive [prices] higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China — and many others, in all fairness to China — it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money.”

Truth: Studies have found that the costs of goods subjected to tariffs increased by roughly the full amount of those tariffs, meaning the costs were passed on to consumers.

Lie: “The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us.”

Truth: Mr. Trump has this reversed. While the United States and Europe spent roughly similar amounts the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, their aid continued to grow; ours flatlined as Mr. Biden battled with isolationist Republicans before finally securing a new aid package in April.

Lie: “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

Truth: With unemployment having been at or below 4.1 percent for 30 months, we have a shortage of workers, not an excess. The number of employed native-born Americans has not grown meaningfully since 2019, but that’s largely because of retirements, not competition from immigrants.

Lie: “Our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country.”

Truth: Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

Lie: “[President Biden is] without question the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country.”

Truth: Presidential greatness may be in the eye of the beholder, but this assertion is laughable. A recent survey of more than 150 current and former members of the presidents and executive politics section of the American Political Science Association put Mr. Trump dead last, behind James Buchanan (tarred with allowing the Civil War to begin) and Andrew Johnson (impeached, like Mr. Trump, and nearly convicted). Mr. Biden was ranked 14th greatest, just above Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan.