Third Night of the Republican Convention Continues to Ignore the Challenges Facing America

RNC Day 2: Even More Malarkey

• Kaiser Health News x Politifact: “To hear chief White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow say it, the pandemic is in the rearview mirror. There are states, such as Texas and Florida, where a deadly surge has eased. Nationally, however, the death toll continues to climb.” 

• CNN: “This is false. The Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not actively investigating Burisma. In fact, Biden sought the prosecutor's removal because Shokin was widely seen as ineffective and corrupt. [...] But there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Biden, and no evidence Joe Biden has profited from his son's business dealings abroad. [...] Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded and false claims to allege that the former vice president and his son acted corruptly in Ukraine.”
   
• Washington Post: “But at its core, Trump’s tale, repeated at the convention by Bondi, was a fiction: There had been no prosecution or investigation of Biden’s son Hunter, and Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine were fully coordinated with the State Department and America’s European allies. [...] Trump had it completely backward. Biden was thwarting corruption, not abetting it.”
   
• NBC: “Bondi repeated Trump's debunked claim that Biden wielded his influence as vice president to benefit Hunter's bosses. She said Joe Biden used U.S. foreign aid to engineer the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who'd investigated the company...She neglected to mention that the probe into the company was dormant at the time, and that numerous Western countries had wanted the prosecutor gone because he was soft on corruption.”
   
• Politifact: “There is no evidence that Biden’s position on Shokin had anything to do with his son. [...] Overall, we found no indication that the younger Biden did anything illegal. [...] In 2019, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump for withholding aid to Ukraine while asking the government there to look into the Bidens’ activities.” 

• CNN: “While some members of the administration, including Pompeo, criticized China over the virus early on, Trump repeatedly praised China and its leader Xi Jinping at the outset for how it handled the outbreak, while also repeatedly downplaying the potential seriousness of the disease in the US. CNN identified 37 times between January and early April where Trump praised China on Twitter and in comments.” 

• Politifact: “No, the economy didn't suddenly get strong under Donald Trump [...] However, unlike Obama, who inherited the Great Recession, Trump inherited an economy that was already getting back on its feet. Overall, we found a continuation of the favorable trend lines Trump inherited from Obama.”
   
• Washington Post: “Kudlow is wrong to claim that Trump inherited a “stagnant economy” near a recession. In reality, Trump inherited a pretty good economy. [...] The United States added more than 250,000 jobs each month in 2014 and 227,000 a month in 2015. It added 193,000 a month in 2016, as Trump barnstormed the country saying the economy was in crisis. [...] In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, monthly job growth slowed to 179,000 per month. It jumped to 223,000 a month in 2018 — lower than under Obama in 2014 and 2015 — and fell back to 175,000 a month in 2019. [...] When in 2018, Trump proclaimed, twice in the same day, ‘an economic turnaround of historic proportions,’ the United States had been adding jobs for 94 straight months, of which 18 were under Trump’s leadership.”
   
• CNN: “This is misleading. The US economy was growing 1.7% in 2016 when Trump was elected. It continued to grow after he took office, especially after the 2017 tax cuts.”
   
• NBC: “Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, claimed that Trump, when elected, was ‘inheriting a stagnant economy on the front end of recession.’ That is false.

• Washington Post: “That’s simply false and, with its ‘Joe Biden’s America’ line, tips us to Four Pinocchios.
   
• Politifact: “No, Joe Biden isn’t 'on board with defunding police'”
   
• Politifact: “Biden said that Trump proposes cutting half a billion dollars from local police support. According to the Trump administration’s budget requests, Biden’s number is about right.”
   
• New York Times: “This is false. [...] Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has repeatedly said that he opposes defunding the police and instead has proposed ‘to get police more money.’ He has proposed that federal aid to police departments could be contingent on whether agencies meet certain standards.”
   
• CNN: “Biden has expressly not supported calls to ‘defund the police.’”
   
• NBC: “The assertion, made or insinuated in multiple speeches at the RNC, is inaccurate. Biden rejected those calls from the hard left in June, telling CBS News: ‘No, I don't support defunding the police.’”

• Washington Post: “President Barack Obama set up virtually all the structures that did the key fighting against the Islamic State under Trump, and more fighters were trained and munitions dropped under Obama than under Trump. 

• New York Times: “Mr. Biden has also said he supports the Second Amendment and is a gun owner himself. But Mr. Biden also argues for a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and he supports background checks and other regulations.”
   
• CNN: “Biden has not pledged to remove the Second Amendment. He does support certain gun control measures.”
   
• NBC: “Biden has pledged no such thing.”  

• Washington Post: “Since he started running for president, Trump has claimed he opposed the invasion, but this is one of his signature lies. We searched high and low — as did other reporters — and there is no evidence Trump was an opponent of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, let alone a vocal one. In fact, he offered lukewarm support.”
   
• Politifact: “In 2002, asked if America should go to war, he said, ‘I guess so.’ [...] Trump didn’t speak often about the Iraq War before it happened, but what he said did not add up to the sort of opposition he describes today. We rate this claim False.”
   
• CNN: “Though Trump himself has repeatedly claimed to have opposed the war before it began, he only became an explicit opponent of the war more than a year after it began.”
   
• Washington Post: “While there have been some relatively minor shifts in distribution — and since 2017, the Defense Department no longer includes troops in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq in its unclassified published tallies — the overall total of those serving abroad is believed to have slightly increased since Obama left office.”
   
• NBC: “Before the Iraq War began, Trump said he supported the invasion of the country in an interview.”

• Washington Post: “President Trump has barely shifted the trade landscape for American farmers, and some economists say his trade war with China has made matters worse. [...] But China is lagging far behind in its commitment to purchase $200 billion in agricultural, manufactured and energy products above 2017 levels.”
   
• NBC: “Trump and China signed phase one of a hard-fought trade deal only months ago in January, and questions have remained among U.S. officials and policy watchers ever since over whether China has held up its end of the deal.”

• Politifact: “However, those executive orders are far from being implemented, and multiple experts told us it’s unlikely the measures would pass along drug-pricing discounts to a majority of Americans. And the text of one, the favored nation executive order, has not yet been made public ― making it hard to know how exactly the initiative would work.
   
• CNN: “It's not true that Trump's measures on favored nations and rebates are bringing prices down now -- mainly because they haven't gone into effect yet. And whether drug prices will be cut by half or more in the future is hard to predict.”

Biden Campaign Criticizes Mike Pompeo’s Republican Convention Address as Politicization of Diplomacy 

RNC Day 1: Too Many Lies to Count

• PolitiFact: “Independent tax analysts agree that the Biden plan would not directly raise taxes on any household earning below $400,000 a year.”

• New York Times: “False. Mr. Biden’s climate change plan would end new leases for hydraulic fracturing or fracking, for oil and gas on federal lands, but does not ban existing fracking on public lands or new or existing fracking on private lands.”

• Associated Press: “AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP distort on health care, vote fraud”
  “TRUMP: “We protected your preexisting conditions. Very strongly protected preexisting ... and you don’t hear that.”
  
  THE FACTS: You don’t hear it because it’s not true.
  
  People with preexisting medical problems have health insurance protections because of Obama’s health care law, which Trump is trying to dismantle.”
   
• NBC: “Trump falsely claims he 'protected pre-existing conditions.' (He didn't.)”

• New York Times: “Mr. Biden has not embraced the “defund the police” movement. On the contrary, he has repeatedly said that he does not support defunding the police.
   
• NBC: “Republicans claim Democrats want to defund the police. Biden isn't in favor.”
   
• CNN: “Biden's published criminal justice plan called for a $300 million investment in community policing efforts -- including the hiring of more officers.
   
• Associated Press: “No, Biden has explicitly rejected the call by some on the left to defund the police. He has proposed more money for police, conditioned on improvements in their practices.
   
• PolitiFact: “This is False. Biden has explicitly said he does not support defunding the police.”

• NBC: “Political analysts, including NBC News' Jonathan Allen, have pointed out that Trump, in saying Biden wants to "abolish the suburbs," is actually saying Biden is just trying to enforce a federal rule to counter segregation in housing.”

• NBC: “That’s false [...] Democrats have spent months pushing for more funding for the U.S. Postal Service.”

• Washington Post: “President Trump’s son overstates the impact of Trump’s actions. On Jan. 31, the president announced that effective Feb. 2, non-U.S. citizens were barred from traveling from China, but there were 11 exceptions. Meanwhile, U.S. citizens and permanent residents could still travel from China but were subject to screening and a possible 14-day quarantine. Trump’s action did not take place in a vacuum. Many airlines were canceling flights, and by our count, at least 38 countries took similar action before or at the same time the U.S. restrictions were put in place. [...] The virus was already spreading through the United States, and there is little evidence the travel restrictions saved lives, especially because the Trump administration did not rapidly set up an effective testing regime like many other countries.”
   
• NBC: “Doctors, public health experts and a prominent Republican governor on the front lines of the pandemic have sharply criticized how the Trump White House lagged in responding to the coronavirus, including delays in the distribution of ventilators and personal protective equipment, and public opinion surveys don't support a rosy assessment of Trump's leadership during this period. [...] Trump Jr.'s remarks omit the president's stance from January to March, when the president publicly downplayed the threat and predicted that the virus would disappear — time that public health experts have contended cost the U.S. in terms of developing all-important tests.”

• CNN: There's "just no comparison between Trump and anyone in the Democratic field.”