10/19/2024
IF YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE YOU MUST READ THIS BEFORE VOTING
When former President Donald Trump was challenged at a Tuesday event about the potential economic harms of his proposal for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods, Trump told what sounded like a tariff success story.
He said that in response to his threat to impose hefty tariffs on John Deere if the storied American farm equipment maker went ahead with a plan to move some production from the US to Mexico, the company had just announced it was likely abandoning that outsourcing plan.
Trump said: “Are you ready? John Deere, great company. They announced about a year ago they’re gonna build big plants outside of the United States. Right? They’re going to build them in Mexico … I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants, OK? I kept the jobs here.”
But a search of news articles and corporate press releases showed nothing about any such John Deere announcement the day prior. And in response to Trump’s story, a John Deere spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News that it had not changed its plans or announced any such changes.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a CNN request for any evidence for the former president’s story.
Trump has told numerous fictional tales in recent weeks. Aside from the John Deere story, the Republican presidential nominee made at least 19 false claims at the Tuesday event, which was a public interview at the Economic Club of Chicago that was conducted by John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.
Harris, migrants and criminals: Trump, criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, again falsely described a recently released set of statistics about immigrants in the US with homicide convictions, claiming again that the figures are specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration: “It came out that 13,099 were let in, during their administration – they tried to say longer, wrong: over the last three-and-a-half years – 13,000-plus people came in: murderers.”
In reality, these figures are about people who entered the country over decades, including during Trump’s own administration, not just under Biden and Harris. And, critically, the figures include people who are currently incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails. You can read more here.
Guns and the Capitol riot: Trump, speaking of rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, repeated his false claim that “not one of those people had a gun.” It has been proven in court that multiple rioters had guns – in addition to stun guns, knives, chemical sprays and numerous other weapons.
The size of the Capitol riot: Trump correctly noted that the Washington, DC, rally he addressed prior to the Capitol riot was peaceful, but then wrongly described the size of the riot, saying, “I don’t know what you had – five, six, seven hundred people – go down to the Capitol.”
Trump’s figures are way off. The Justice Department said in an official update earlier this month that about 1,532 defendants had, so far, been federally charged with crimes associated with the attack on the Capitol. The FBI said in 2021 that “approximately 2,000 individuals are believed to have been involved with the siege” and the actual number might well be hundreds higher.
Inflation under Trump: Trump repeated his false claim that there was “no inflation” over his four years as president. Cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was about 8%.
Inflation under Biden: Trump also falsely claimed, “Biden went two years with no inflation, because he inherited from me. And then they started spending money like drunken sailors.” Cumulative inflation during Biden’s first two years as president was about 14%, and inflation increased sharply in Biden’s first months as president in 2021. In fact, the Biden-era peak for year-over-year inflation, about 9.1% in June 2022, happened within Biden’s first two years as president.
