FACT CHECK: Exposing CNN’s lies about Trump’s NM rally speech

Shortly after President Trump’s landmark Rio Rancho, New Mexico rally, CNN published a “Fact Check” of his speech, citing “least 27 false claims.” Although CNN claims they found at least 27 false claims, we only found 26 supposed false claims. Here, we will break these claims down and fact check the fact-checkers.

• Trump repeated his claim that a “Google executive,” someone who “worked at Google,” reported that Google bias may have cost Trump up to 10 million votes in the 2016 election. That flawed study (which we fact-checked last month) was conducted by a psychologist, not a Google employee or executive.

However, this “fact check” by CNN is patently false. Here is what Trump actually said:

“And you must never forget. Get out there and vote and get ready and get everybody. We need it because we’re fighting a lot of forces, including Facebook, I saw, and Google, I saw. Did you see Google? He said I may have lost two-million to 10-million votes, according to this character that worked at Google, right? And we still won. How the hell did we win? Everybody was against us. How did we win? How did we win? This is a Google executive. From two-million to 10.5-million votes, and we won.” 

Trump never stated as a fact that Dr. Robert Epstein worked at Google. He was asking the audience if he did, in fact, work there. And Epstein has a long career of debunking Google’s censorship, spanning all the way back to 2012, despite critics’ attempts at discrediting the Harvard-educated psychologists’ work. 

Also, there was massive bias in the 2016 election, proven time and time again by current and former Google employees, as well as high-level executives who look to further manipulate the 2020 election. 

According to former Google employee Kevin Cernekee, “Google has a huge amount of information on every voter in the U.S.,” and the company will use it to “build psychological profiles” in an attempt to change the minds of voters across the country.

A leaked video shows a Google Executive crying while reflecting on the 2016 election results, despite Google’s best censorship efforts.

Also, CNN uses themself as a source, which is not exactly a nod to objectivity.

• Trump said Venezuela was “one of the wealthiest countries in the world” 15 years ago, when it wasn’t. Venezuela was 67th in the world in GDP per capita in 2004.

CNN’s second claim is also false, as President Trump’s characterization of Venezuela being “one of the wealthiest countries in the world” 15 years ago is accurate. In 2004, Venezuela’s economy experienced record growth of 17%, and since 2004, Venezuela’s GDP growth has dropped from rank 68 (not 67) to a staggering rank of 122. For a country like Venezuela, with its natural resources and potential, it’s clear that socialism has driven to immense poverty. Once-thriving businesses are closed, and the poverty has left citizens to resort to eating dogs and rats for nourishment. 

CNN’s claim is both inaccurate (68, not 67), and ignoring the facts showing Venezuela’s vast decline, from a once-fruitful nation, just 15 years ago.

• He boasted that he was the one who got the Veterans Choice health care program passed, saying, “They’ve tried to get that for 45 years. They haven’t been able to get it. But I’m good at getting things.” The program was created in 2014 in a bill signed by President Barack Obama.

CNN’s claim that President Trump didn’t spearhead the Veterans Choice program (as we know it) is false. In 2014, Obama did sign a bill called the Veterans Choice Program, which was a catastrophic mess. Senator Mark Kirk called the program a “failed joke” in a letter to Secretary Bob McDonald despite attempts to fix it.

In June 2018, President Trump signed a complete overhaul of the failed Veterans Choice Program, which would fix the broken system and allow veterans to visit the care provider of their choice.

• He said of his USMCA trade agreement, “Unions love it.” The agreement is generally opposed in its current form by major US unions, who have demanded changes to the text; the president of the AFL-CIO federation says it will be a “disaster for workers” if it is not amended.

Although the AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is skeptical of USMCA, the ALF-CIO is still willing to work to improve the text for passage of the agreement. Regardless, the USMCA will create many new freedoms to workers, and improve trade, with vast support on both the right and the left. In July, 14 House Democrats urged Nancy Pelosi to bring a vote on USMCA.

• He said, “They wanted a wall in San Diego — good mayor in San Diego, by the way. They wanted a wall.” There is no apparent basis for this repeated claim; even that mayor, Republican Kevin Faulconer, opposes the wall.

According to a poll of San Diegans, “of the 500 San Diegans who were polled, 48 percent oppose a border wall while 43 percent support it.” The poll also found huge support (62%) for cities working with immigration authorities, and 50% agreed that cities who do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities should be punished. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4.5 +/- 4.3, so the support vs. non-support of the border wall in San Diego is well in the margin of error. 

Although President Trump didn’t have a rally in San Diego, his trip this week had sold out events and fundraisers, and he was greeted by hundreds of supporters, an omen to just how popular the President is in the city. 

I would also note that President Trump never said the San Diego Mayor supported the Wall; Trump merely said he is a “good mayor,” and that San Diegans like the Wall.

• He said the Democrats have an agenda of “open borders.” Even Democratic presidential candidates who advocate the decriminalization of the act of illegally entering the country, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, do not support completely unrestricted migration, as Trump suggests.

Although 2020 Democrats deny being for open borders, their policy positions starkly contradict their denials. 

According to the Washington Post, 17 of the 24+ Democrat candidates running for President support abolishing or restructuring ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), 14 support giving government-run health care to illegal aliens, 16 reject or partially reject using E-Verify to check legal status, and all of them support a pathway to citizenship for the approximately 11 million criminal aliens currently living in America.

These statistics show just how radical the Democrats are on immigration, and it definitely is a sign that a vast majority of them support “open borders,” especially regarding the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

• Trump said, “We will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. The Republicans will always do that.” This promise has already proven false. Trump and Republicans, who have tried to pass bills that would have weakened protections for people with pre-existing conditions, are now trying to get the courts to declare Obamacare void, without a plan to replace those pre-existing protections if their lawsuit succeeds.

CNN cites (yet again), a CNN opinion piece to try and prove their argument (which doesn’t actually debunk anything), while happily ignoring a recent bill, introduced by Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and endorsed by 22 other Republican senators that  “would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of a person’s pre-existing conditions.” 

This is proof that Republicans support protections of individuals with pre-existing conditions, and CNN’s “fact check” claim is false to say the least.

• He said, “We eliminated the unfair estate tax or death tax.” His tax law raised the threshold for the tax, so that fewer people now have to pay it, but did not eliminate it entirely.

CNN’s claim that the death tax was not eliminated entirely is accurate, however, it massively raised the cap for tax to $11.2 million, which does virtually eliminate the tax, and Republican leadership in the Senate are working to repeal it altogether. 

• He said North Carolina congressional candidate Dan Bishop, who won a special election last week, was down “17 points” before Trump got involved. There is no apparent basis for this number; some polls did have Bishop down, but in the single digits.

It is unclear what poll President Trump was referring to by referencing Congressman Dan Bishop being down by 17 points, however, the few polls that were released showed Bishop trailing opponent Dan McCreedy. Bishop may have had an internal poll that was closer to that 17-point figure. However, according to the Washington Post, “Bishop campaign consultant Jim Blaine said at one point the Republican trailed by about 14 percentage points,” which is very close to the President’s figure. The jury is still out on this claim.

• He said another successful North Carolina Republican candidate, Greg Murphy, had been up only a “couple points” before his special election. Murphy was running in a district Trump won by 24 in 2016; polls had put him up by double-digits.

According to a right-leaning poll, it had Greg Murphy up by double digits, however, it is unclear what internal polling said about the race. 

• He said the Mueller investigation cost “$40 million.” The final total was $32 million, and the government is expected to recoup about $17 million from former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a result of Mueller’s convictions.

The Mueller probe reportedly cost Federal agencies $34 million, and it is not clear how much the fishing expedition cost the Executive Office of the President, which may, indeed, add up to well over $40 million. Also, equating assets seized from Paul Manafort on his technicality sentencing does not go back into the Special Counsel’s office, so it is dishonest to make it sound like the costs of the investigation were recouped. 

• He said China is “eating the tariffs” he has imposed on imports of Chinese products. A bevy of economic studies has found that Americans are bearing the overwhelming majority of the tariff costs, and Americans make the actual tariff payments.

The supposed “bevy” of left-wing economic studies (as sourced above from Princeton University and NBER – which are both critical papers) pale in comparison to the consensus of multiple market researchers and economists that Trump’s tariffs are indeed working, and China is “eating the tariffs.” 

• He said China is having its worst economic year in “57 years.” China’s second-quarter growth rate was the worst in 27 years. Trump has repeatedly made clear that he knows that this is the reported figure, but he has added additional years for no apparent reason.

CNN is correct in their assessment that China’s economy is the worst in 27 years, and although the President’s figure does not match that, he has previously acknowledged that it is the worst in 27 years. 

• He said the US has never previously received “10 cents” from China, only unemployment, job losses and “pencils.” The US generated billions per year in revenue from tariffs on China — again, paid by Americans — before Trump took office. The US imported $540 billion from China in 2018; the top categories were electrical machinery ($152 billion), machinery ($117 billion), furniture and bedding ($35 billion), toys and sports equipment ($27 billion), and plastics ($19 billion), according to the US government’s trade website.

The CNN fact-checkers don’t seem to realize by their “fact check” that they just proved Trump’s point. The massive influx of machinery, furniture and bedding, toys and sports equipment, and plastics (along with pencils), are all examples of the economic losses America has had, especially regarding unemployment. So, Trump’s assessment that China is benefitting from America’s loss of jobs is accurate. 

• He said his border wall is being built “fast.” As of the end of August, zero additional miles had been built during Trump’s presidency; 60 miles of replacement barriers had been built. (Trump has argued that these replacement projects should count as his wall.)

66 miles of wall have already been built, with funding secured for another 509 miles, according to Customs and Border Patrol. CNN’s fact check is false, and it also doesn’t take into account the miles of wall being independently built through non-profit “We Build the Wall,” including a wall project recently completed in Sunland Park, NM. 

• He said human trafficking victims do not come through legal ports of entry, only through “the desert areas” and “open” parts of the border. Experts on US trafficking say a large percentage of victims come through legal ports; according to the International Organization for Migration, in “the last ten years, almost 80% of journeys undertaken by victims trafficked internationally cross through official border points, such as airports and land border control points.”

First of all, CNN is making his comments sound like he is saying human traffickers ONLY come through the desert areas, but this is what President Trump actually said:

“They capture women, and they bring them across the open borders, and they don’t go through ports of entry, where you have guards standing there with guns and rifles and everything else. They go out into the desert areas, and they hang a left, or they hang a right and they come in, but now when you have a wall, they can’t do that. Right?” 

This contradicts other studies, showing that “women who fall into sex trafficking networks and prostitution are mostly from rural areas, and have suffered from extreme poverty and family violence.”

Also, it seems CNN doesn’t care that trafficking is, in fact, happening, just that they can fact check Trump about it. Even if their 80% statistic is true, 20% of people entering illegally is extremely high.

• He said he had ended the Obama administration’s “war on American energy” and that “the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.” The US became the number one producer of oil and gas under Obama in 2012. It is crude oil in particular in which it became number one under Trump.

It is unclear what CNN is looking to gain from this statistic, especially since crude oil is a massive feat, and CNN covered this development extensively, without citing America’s energy dominance regarding out #1 spot in 2012. 

I would note that Obama proposed extreme oil & gas killing regulations, and gave $500 million to the failed company Solyndra, which was seen dumping millions of dollars’ worth of solar panels in dumpsters (not exactly a green thing to do for American taxpayers or the environment). 

Also, Obama put America into the “Paris Climate Accord” to “combat global climate change,” which was later found out to be a hoax, as admitted by United Nations officials. 

• He said Asian American unemployment numbers are the best in history. The unemployment rate for Asian Americans did briefly fall to a record low under Trump, but it is now slightly higher than it was in Obama’s last month in office.

Again, it is unclear the point CNN was trying to make by somehow fact checking the true claim bt Trump that Asian American unemployment did, indeed hit record lows.

• He said the unemployment numbers for women are the best in “71 years.” This was his usual slight exaggeration. The rate this summer has been the lowest since 1953, 66 years ago.

CNN is correct that the figure is at a 66-year low, however, his number is close.

• He called unfavorable polls “suppression polls” designed to deflate his supporters. There is simply no basis for this claim.

I mean, do I really have to explain this one? Fake news CNN and the liberal media all predicted Trump would lose handily, yet their polls were wrong. So,it’s in CNN’s best interest to try and discredit the President’s claims that CNN is discrediting Trump supporters (pretty dishonest fact check). 21)

• He said the US has the “cleanest air that we’ve ever had in this country.” By several measures, US air was cleaner under Obama than it’s been under Trump. Three of the six types of pollutants identified by the Clean Air Act as toxic to human health were more prevalent in the air as of 2018 than they were before Trump took office, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. Additionally, there were more “unhealthy air days” for sensitive groups in 2018 than in 2016.

According to a 2018 World Health Organization air survey, the USA has some of the cleanest air in the world. 

• Trump said Obama left him “138” judicial vacancies to fill. According to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who tracks judicial appointments, there were 103 vacancies on district and appeals courts on January 1, 2017, just before Trump took office, plus one vacancy on the Supreme Court. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the confirmation of many of Obama’s judicial nominees late in his term.

On January 1, 2017, there were 103 vacancies on our federal courts, however by August 2017, the vacancy count did climb to 138. 

• He said that, before the 2016 election, Cubans in Miami “gave me the Bay of Pigs award. Can you imagine, right? The Bay of Pigs award.” Trump got an endorsement from the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, not an award. The endorsement was unprecedented from the association, so Trump could fairly boast about it. But still, an award and an endorsement are different things. (Trump claimed in August to have received an award from the Log Cabin Republicans, which told CNN it gave him an endorsement but not an award.)

One could make the argument that an endorsement is an award of support, so Trump is right on this one, and sadly, bitter ol’ CNN is wrong, yet again, like clockwork. 

• He suggested, appearing to be joking at least in part, that the Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal would require people to have no more than “a single car,” and would prohibit people from driving “more than 162 miles.” The Green New Deal resolution does not include any restrictions on the number of cars people can own or how far they can drive.

So… if it was obvious that Trump was joking, how is what he said “fact checkable”? 

• He said he calls the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party” not only because “Democrat” sounds worse than “Democratic” but because “that’s their name, the Democrat Party”; he advised the party to change its name to the Democratic Party, since he would then call them that. The party is already named the Democratic Party. We realize this is a strange-sounding fact check, but Trump has repeatedly insisted that the actual name is the Democrat Party.

“Democrat Party” is the grammatically correct term for the “Democratic Party.” proper nouns like “Democrat” are not converted into adjectives by adding “ic” as a suffix, so President Trump is actually correct to call the Democrat Party the Democrat Party.

• He said he “saw the other day” that the Democrats “just gave out a tremendous contract” for their 2020 convention site in Milwaukee. “You know what it’s for? They’re building a big wall around the building — they’re building a big wall, a massive wall.” No such contract has been awarded. “It’s not true,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Brandon Gassaway. While there will likely be some sort of security fencing around the convention, there are no known plans for a giant wall.

Define “wall…” According to the DNC plans, the “city will build fences and set up barricades under the auspice of the overall DNC security plan.” That sounds like a barrier or WALL to me. 

Conclusion 

Obviously CNN still has outrageous amounts of money to hire fact checkers to sift through President Trump’s speeches to try and find inaccuracies. As you have seen above, the vast majority of CNN’s supposed “fact checks” are incorrect, just more proof that CNN is fake news.