Thursday 6th of March 2025
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not as many fibs as biden though......

Trump’s speech was full of wild claims. Here are seven that weren’t true

President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress highlighted several of the initiatives he has started in his first six weeks in office, but many of his comments included false and misleading information.

Here’s a look at the facts.

 

1. Trump overstated the numbers on his immigration crackdown

‘Illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded. Ever.’

Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday that Border Patrol apprehended 8326 people on the US-Mexico border last month. But US government data shows that Border Patrol routinely averaged below that number in the 1960s.

While February marked the lowest arrest total in decades, Border Patrol averaged fewer monthly arrests than the February number during the first seven years of the 1960s. The government website does not track US-Mexico border arrests before 1960. Border Patrol’s monthly average was 1752 arrests in 1961.

 

2. Trump inflated the number of people who entered the US illegally under president Joe Biden

‘Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States. Many of them were murderers, human traffickers, gang members.’

That figure, which Trump cites regularly, is highly inflated. US Customs and Border Protection reported more than 10.8 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico between January 2021 and December 2024.

But that is arrests, not people. Under asylum restrictions during the pandemic, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.

There is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or people with mental illnesses across the border into the US, despite this frequent line from Trump.

 

3. Economists differ with Trump on tariffs

‘Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again. And it’s happening. And it will happen rather quickly. There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that. It won’t be much.’

Trump is banking on the idea that taxing imports is the road to riches for the United States. Most economists say Trump’s tariffs would hurt the country as they are tax increases that could raise the costs of goods in ways that could also harm economic growth. Trump suggests that the impact on inflation would be minimal.

When the Yale University Budget Lab looked at the tariffs that Trump imposed on Tuesday on Canada, Mexico and China, it found that inflation would increase a full percentage point, growth would fall by half a percentage point and the average household would lose about $US1600 ($2550) a year in disposable income.

 

4. There’s no evidence Social Security money is being paid to many people aged over 100 

‘Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119 ... 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139, 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.’

The databases may list those people, but that does not mean they are getting paid benefits.

Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which doesn’t use a specific format for dates. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago. The news organisation Wired first reported on the use of COBOL programming language at the Social Security Administration.

Additionally, a series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector-general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier who were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these people were receiving benefits.

The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upwards of $9 million. As of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.

 

5. Trump did not inherit an ‘economic catastrophe’

‘Among my very highest priorities is to rescue our economy and get dramatic and immediate relief to working families. As you know, we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.’

Inflation in the US peaked at 9.1 per cent in 2022 under president Joe Biden, but Trump did not inherit a disastrous economy by any measure. The unemployment rate ticked down to a low 4 per cent in January, the month he took office, while the economy expanded a healthy 2.8 per cent in 2024. Inflation-adjusted incomes have grown steadily since mid-2023. And inflation, while showing signs of stickiness recently and still elevated at 3 per cent in January, is down from its 2022 peak.

6. Trump’s reference to an ‘EV mandate’ is inaccurate

‘We ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.’

There was no federal mandate to force the purchase of electric vehicles, as Trump has falsely claimed many times before.

Biden had set up a non-binding goal that EVs make up half of new cars sold by 2030. Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office revoking that goal.

Biden’s policies tightened restrictions on pollution from petrol-powered cars and trucks in an effort to encourage Americans to buy EVs and to get car companies to shift from petrol-powered vehicles to electric cars.

 

7. A closer look at army recruitment numbers

‘I am pleased to report that in January, the US Army had its single best recruiting month in 15 years.’

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US Army’s recruiting turnaround is tied to his time in office.

In fact, according to army data, recruiting numbers have been increasing steadily over the past year, with the highest total coming in August 2024, before the November election. Army officials closely track recruiting numbers.

A significant driver of the recruiting success was the army’s decision to launch the Future Soldier Prep Course at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in August 2022. That program gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards and move on to basic training.

AP

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trump-s-speech-was-full-of-wild-claims-here-are-seven-that-aren-t-true-20250305-p5lh8h.html

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

dealing with TDS....

 

What is an American with TDS to do?     By Michael Edesess

 

Donald Trump is an awful person and a terrible president. But he may provide an enduring breath of fresh air when it comes to the black/white posturing about freedom versus authoritarianism.

Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States of America, is a miserable excuse for a person. Even many of his supporters, people who voted for him, agree with that. One of them characterised him — approvingly — as a “junkyard dog”, conjuring up an image of a supremely mean, dirty-fighting canine ruler of a junkyard hell full of viciously brutal dogs. The dog that dominates all of them with his ugly display of fangs.

Nearly every other word Trump utters is a lie. He sponsors scams like Trump University and TrumpCoin. He lies without shame and never takes back his lies. While Barack Obama was president, he repeatedly accused Obama of not having been born in the United States, and therefore not legitimately its president, even though he must have known — any number of people would have told him — that this was patently false. After the US presidential election in November, 2020, in which Trump was running to be re-elected but which Joe Biden won, he repeatedly lied that Biden had in fact lost, even though everybody who knew anything said — and many of them told him directly — that this was false.

So many people in his party, the Republican Party, believed his repeated lies that now a solid majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen by Biden, even though more than 50 lawsuits attempting to overturn this result were rejected in court for lack of evidence. In his pursuit of overturning the election, Trump held the most incredible one-hour phone call, which was recorded, that I have ever heard, with the US State of Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger trying to force Raffensberger in the most extreme bullying terms into “finding” an additional 12,000 votes for Trump so that he would not lose the state. And of course, on 6 January 2021 and before that too, Trump did everything he could to try to steal the election, including inciting a violent mob to attack the US Capitol and doing almost nothing to stop them.

Only a few of these transgressions were known before he was elected in 2016 in a surprise victory for his first term as president – the Obama “birther” scam, and other incidents in his past that clearly identified him as an out-and-out racist and liar. And yet, when he shocked everybody, including many of my friends and compatriots, by winning that election, I too was appalled; yet unlike many of them, I viewed it with some equanimity. I thought he was a disrupter and a bull in a China shop, but that might not turn out to be a bad thing. Many things had been normalised in the United States — such as the extraordinarily corrupt financial industry — that could do with disruption.

Nevertheless, after his constant lying about the 2020 election and incitement of an armed mob, I could never forgive his lies and vicious bullying. He even bullied Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a phone call in 2019 to try to get him to manufacture dirt on Trump’s likely opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden – an act for which Trump, rightly, was first impeached by the US House of Representatives.

Trump is also a firm backer of Netanyahu and his destruction of Gaza, which has been labelled a genocide by the United Nations. This tends to square with Trump’s history of racism.

In short, though I am not much of a hater, I have always hated liars and bullies, and Trump is about as bad as they come. I hate everything about him. I want to see him fail in everything he does.

Many of those who support Trump, either strongly or reluctantly, would call this “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS. Then what am I to do when I agree with him on an issue, or at least, more than I agree with his opponents?

On the war in Ukraine, I am afraid I am inclined to agree with him. His opposition consists of a huge constituency in the US who see international relations in black and white; free world versus authoritarian world; good guys versus bad guys. This position requires constant posturing about how we, the United States, have to be strong and firmly oppose authoritarians. It requires assuming everything they do has evil, manipulative designs behind it.

Trump, much as I hate him, offers a breath of fresh air on this subject. He appears not to buy into the black/white syndrome. Is it because he simply loves authoritarian leaders like Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán, because he wants to be like them and to be one of them? One of the gods on Mt Olympus? That is what his opponents say. But perhaps it’s barely possible that he actually does have the “common sense” to see through the posturing about democracy versus authoritarianism.

I once commented that “left” and “right” often confront each other as if they were opposing teams in a tug-of-war. In a tug-of-war, in order to win you must never let down your resolve to make the other team lose; one slight relaxation of force can cause your team to fall like a line of dominoes. Even if one is only a spectator to a tug-of-war or a football game, one’s internal muscles are engaged in a phantom effort to cause the team you disfavour to lose. Like many people in the United States, my internal muscles are engaged to see Trump lose in spectacular fashion in everything he does.

But I’ll have to admit that in this case, I think he may be onto something. Perhaps, as with Nixon, we can congratulate him on one splendid call, then impeach him for something else later, and make it stick this time.

https://johnmenadue.com/what-is-an-american-with-tds-to-do/

 

TDS IS AN AWFUL CONDITION THAT PREVENTS ONE TO SEE RELATIVE REALITY... 

— IN 2016 TRUMP WON AGAINST HILLARY CLINTON — A VERY CORRUPT WOMAN ACCORDING TO MANY...

— IN 2020 TRUMP LOST TO JOE BIDEN — A MORE DEVIOUS SICK MAN THAN TRUMP...

— IN 2024 TRUMP WON AGAINST AN AVERAGE DUMB "WOKISH" CANDIDATE...

ACCORDING TO THE UNHAPPENED HISTORY, HILLARY CLINTON WOULD HAVE PUSHED THE WORLD TO THE BRINK OF WORLD WAR 3, WHILE BEING MORE DEVIOUS THAN HER HUSBAND BILL WHO PUSHED THE EXPANSION OF NATO TO ANNOY THE RUSSIANS... AND LET BANKS INDULGE IN DERIVATIVES... AND GOT HIS PENIS SUCKED...

ACCORDING TO RECORDED HISTORY, JOE BIDEN HAD SEALED THE FATE OF UKRAINE FOR OBAMA, WITH HIS OWN CORRUPTION AND THOUGH TRUMP SHOULD NOT HAVE ASKED ZELENSKY ABOUT JOE'S CROOKERY IN UKRAINE, THERE IS MUCH CONCRETE EVIDENCE OF SUCH. JOE BIDEN WAS A BETTER DEVIOUS LIAR THAN TRUMP CAN EVER BE. THE MEDIA COVERED UP HIS MENTAL DECLINE WHEN IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO HIDE IT ANYMORE. EVEN MENTALLY DEFICIENT JOE CARRIED ON LYING WITH THE BIGGEST INVERTED PORKIES...

ACCORDING TO THE UNWRITTEN BOOK OF THE PAST, HAD KAMALA WON THE PRESIDENCY, AMERICA AND THE WORLD WOULD HAVE TURNED TO BECOME A PITIFUL LAUGHING STOCK TO MY FRIENDS, THE VISITING ALIENS FROM PLANET ZORG... THE AMERICAN EMPIRE WOULD HAVE TURNED TO A SHITHOUSE, INSTEAD OF A JUNKYARD...

THIS IS THE SORRY STATE OF AMERICAN POLITICS, IN WHICH THE AMERICAN OLIGARCHS CAN MAKE A FEW MORE BUCKS WHILE YOU WILL COLLECT THE CRUMBS — AS USUAL. MEANWHILE, KICKING AND SCREAMING, THE MMMM (MEDIOCRE MASS MEDIA DE MIERDA) IS SWITCHING GEARS FROM THE YOKE OF WOKE TO THE TINCAN OF CONSERVATIVE...

THE DEEP STATE PSYCHOLOGIST MAY FIND THAT TRUMP IS MORE MORE PROFITABLE TO ITS COFFERS...WHICH WERE BLEEDING BY $3 TRILLION A YEAR...

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.