S*** the President Says – 8/31/2020

Ladies and gentlemen, our president spoke for over an hour at the Republican National Convention last week, after which CNN’s Daniel Dale laid out over 3.5 straight minutes of Trump lies from that speech without taking a breath. It was an incredible thing to behold, so instead of our normal format, here is a simple transcription of Daniel Dale reporting on the avalanche of lies:

“Anderson, this President is a serial liar, and he serially lied tonight. I counted, preliminarily, more than 20 false or misleading claims. I want to go through a whole bunch of them quickly because I think it’s all important.

Trump said Joe Biden is, quite, ‘talking about taking down the border wall.’ Biden has explicitly, specifically, rejected that idea. He just said he’ll stop further, additional construction.

Trump claimed, as always, that he is the one who passed the veteran’s choice law. Barack Obama signed that into law in 2014. Trump signed a 2018 law to modify it.

Trump said, ‘I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln. That is ludicrous! Lyndon Johnson, for one, signed the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

Trump again touted a quote, ‘record nine million job gain over the past three months.’ He didn’t mention that that gain follows a record 22 million job loss over the previous two months.

He said he’ll, quote, ‘continue to lower drug prices.’ They’ve increased during his presidency.

He said they’ve opened the Jerusalem embassy for under $500,000. Early documents show it was at least $21 million.

He claimed NATO member spending has increased for the first time in about 20 years. Spending in fact rose in 2015 and 2016 – before he took office.

He said he will always, and Republicans will always, strongly protect people with preexisting conditions. That pledge has already been broken. He and they have repeatedly tried to weaken those protections in Obamacare.

He claimed again that he banned travel from China and Europe. No, he imposed partial restrictions with many exemptions. Tens of thousands of people continued traveling over.

He boasted about the COVID testing system, and about his general response. Look, experts near universally say the U.S. was fatally slow in its response. We were especially slow in setting up testing.

He said he ended what he called the ‘NAFTA Nightmare’ and he signed what he called a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement – the USMCA. That agreement preserves, maintains most of NAFTA.

He boasted about building about 300 miles of border wall. What he didn’t say is that most of that is replacement barrier. As of August 7, according to official data, just five miles have been built where none existed before.

He suggested that Joe Biden would confiscate guns. That’s just baseless. Biden is running on a non-mandatory buyback of so-called assault weapons.

He said Democrats want to defund the police. Biden, again, doesn’t. He’s rejected that.

He said he has, quite, ‘very good information’ that China wants Biden to win because Biden is soft on China or cheerleads for China. The U.S. intelligence community says China wants Biden to win because it sees Trump as unpredictable.

He said Biden vowed to close down charter schools. Biden’s plan is skeptical on charters, but would not abolish them entirely.

He denounced Biden for voting for the Iraq War. Biden did indeed vote for the Iraq War, but what Trump doesn’t mention is that he also supported that invasion.

He said Democrats twice removed the word ‘God’ from the pledge of allegiance at their convention. Two individual caucus meetings outside the main prime time programming did leave it out, but it was uttered in every prime time event.

Trump denounces so-called ‘cancel culture’ as like an insidious left-wing thing. He – Donald J. Trump – has tried to get dozens of entities canceled, fired, boycotted – including literally, last week, Goodyear.

He said he imposed an order to give ten years in prison to rioters. That’s a maximum, discretionary sentence, up to judges, in existing law, his order just asked the government to fully enforce.

And he said that Biden’s plan would eliminate America’s borders. No. Just no. It’s wrong.”

8/27/2020 – CNN’s Daniel Dale, fact-checking our president.

Even after years of this stuff, I’m still amazed that a president would have nothing true to say in his most important pitch for re-election. To hear this speech, though, was to hear 70 minutes of alternate reality. To acknowledge reality on reality’s terms, register and vote on November 3rd.