Politifact’s Truth-O-Meter
Politifact live fact-checked the newly minted 47th president’s inaugural address. Trump started lying as soon as he was sworn in (without placing his hand on the Bible) about everything from the number of Americans who died building the Panama Canal to the price of apples. Read the facts here.
Donald Trump made at least 19 false claims in a one-hour Fox News town hall event that aired Wednesday morning – most of them debunked earlier in the campaign but some of them new, notably including an absurd claim that he is “the father of IVF,” CNN reports.
The Hill: In his rambling May 31 monologue following his felony convictions, Donald Trump somehow found time to reference the ill-fated Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Trump declared: “I ended the Russian pipeline. It was dead. He [Biden] comes in and approves it.” Trump went on to allege that Biden did so because money from the former mayor of Moscow’s wife was paid to the Biden family.
Similarly, in a speech at CPAC last year, Trump noted that he “got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. … I ended it. It was dead.” Trump added that “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along.”
In fact, Trump did not stop Nord Stream 2 — he enabled it. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline went from zero to 90 percent completed during Trump’s presidency. Rather than stop it “dead,” the Trump administration rejected years of bipartisan congressional calls for imposition of sanctions to stop the project. Only when Congress, in frustration, passed mandatory sanctions did the administration finally take concrete action. But by then it was too late.
Predominantly white MAGA audience at a June 16, 2024, Trump event billed as a “Black roundtable,” via Raw Story
On Fox News, MAGA propagandist Kellyanne Conway told Trump-aligned presenter Maria Baritoromo, “You got Donald Trump in Detroit talking to 8,000 people at a Black church.” Politico.com headlined its story about this event in Detroit on June 16: “Trump Courts Black Voters in Detroit.”
In fact, there were fewer than 300 people in the pews and an estimated 90 percent of them were white. According to Raw Story:
The evangelical church is in the heart of Detroit’s west side and has a mainly Black congregation.
But photos caught by the media, and shared widely online, showed a lot of white people in the audience.
“It’s all lies, smoke, and mirrors,” wrote Jeff Timmer a Republican and senior adviser at the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, on X.
Jeffrey Evan Gold, a frequent legal analyst on networks including CNN and ABC, wrote, “MAGA whites in the hood for Trump.”
And Ben Meiselas, the co-founder of the progressive Meidas Touch, wrote, “Everything is a scam!!!!”
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: “A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.”
Art by imgflip
Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.
It’s a compelling argument:
In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.
The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.
It’s the Pope’s funeral, so Trump’s gotta go.
It wouldn’t be like him to miss such a show.
But when he arrives he might squall,
Because of arcane Vatican protocol
Trump might find himself seated in the back row.
“Let’s be honest. This uncertainty, this chaos, is no accident. The president of the United States has chosen. Chosen to destroy the federal government’s ability to help people.”
— Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), quoted by The Hill.
“Yes, Trump and his accomplices are malicious. Yes, they’re corrupt. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also profoundly stupid, and their stupidity is hurting or worrying a lot of people who voted for Trump. … So here’s my pitch: To break Trump’s coalition and reclaim our government, we need to talk not just about the administration’s corruption and its abuse of power, but about its pervasive incompetence.”
“We live in a moment when our freedoms are once again under attack from the highest office in the land. We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty.”
— Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D), quoted by the Boston Globe.
“Trump intends to send those he hates to foreign prisons beyond the reach of U.S. law. He does not care — he will not even seek to discover — if those he sends into these foreign hells are guilty of what he claims. Because this is not about their guilt — it is about his power. … And if he is capable of that, if he wants that, then what else is he capable of? What else does he want? And if the people who serve him are willing to give him that, to defend his right to do that, what else will they give him? What else will they defend?”
“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the assemblage of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody, there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from the courthouse still hold dear.”
— Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee and conservative icon, in an opinion about the Maryland man wrongly-deported to El Salvador.
“Buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s meme coin since his team advertised Wednesday that top purchasers could join Trump for an ‘intimate private dinner’ next month,” the Washington Post reports. “Nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP meme coins, worth roughly $100 million.”
A new Fox News poll finds President Trump’s overall approval at 44%, down 5 points from 49% approval in March. That’s lower than the approval of Joe Biden (54%), Barack Obama (62%), and George W. Bush (63%) at the 100-day mark in their presidencies. It’s also lower by 1 point compared to Trump’s 45% approval at this point eight years ago.
Wall Street Journal: “The wealthiest have gotten richer, and control a record share of America’s wealth. New data suggest $1 trillion of wealth was created for the 19 richest American households alone in 2024. … That is more than the value of Switzerland’s entire economy.”
The International Monetary Fund yesterday lowered its 2025 growth outlook for the US and the global economy, citing heightened uncertainty and economic disruption caused by President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs. The IMF trimmed the 2025 US growth estimate to 1.8% from 2.7%, the largest reduction among the world’s advanced economies, and cut the global growth forecast to 2.8% from 3.3%. The fund cautioned the trade policy climate and ongoing conflicts between the US and other tariff-hit countries are discouraging investment and spending. US inflation is now predicted to reach 3% this year, one percentage point higher than the IMF’s January projection, while the risk of a US recession has increased to 40%, up from 25% in October.