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Former President Donald Trump announced his third run for the White House in even numbers Tuesday afternoon at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida. The former president has lied extensively and numerously throughout his existence as a New York City tabloid, a presidential candidate, and then a White House occupier. He continued that tradition on Tuesday night, although he had a softer and more subdued delivery than his usual way of communicating in noisy gatherings. Here are five big lies he told during his presidential announcement. Saying he completed the wall During his 2016 campaign, Trump said he would build a wall on the US-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. At multiple rallies during the 2022 midterm elections, he said his administration had completed the wall. “We finished the wall and then we said let’s do more,” he said. “And we did a lot more. And as we did, we had elections that came up. And when they came in, they had another three weeks to complete the additions to the wall that would have been great, and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that.” However, the Trump administration has only completed about 458 miles of the wall on the US-Mexico border, according to US News and World Report. By comparison, the US-Mexico border is more than 1,900 miles. Blaming the Green New Deal for not passing Few policies enrage conservatives as much as the Green New Deal, the proposed climate legislation that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey authored last Congress. “The socialist disaster known as the Green New Deal, which is destroying our country and the many exterminating regulations it has spawned, must be ended immediately so that our country can once again breathe, grow and thrive as it should,” he said. However, President Joe Biden did not endorse the Green New Deal during the 2020 campaign, although his running mate Kamala Harris did. Furthermore, Congress did not pass the Green New Deal, but rather the much-debated Deflation Act, which includes sales of drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The ‘biggest tax cuts in history’ The former president failed to pass much major legislation throughout his time in the White House and never built a rapport with Congress. But one of his few accomplishments was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Despite his populist rhetoric, much of the tax cuts benefited the wealthiest Americans. “Businesses were coming back because of our historic tax and regulatory cuts, the largest in both categories in history, larger even than Ronald Reagan was able to produce and he produced a lot,” he said. But the New York Times dismissed the claim. Former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut remains the largest tax cut in history as a percentage of the U.S. economy and a cut from federal revenue. The lies about the elections It wouldn’t be a Trump event without the former president nursing his grudge against the 2020 presidential election. Specifically, he repeated his lies about how the election was “stolen” from him. “They spent all the money on machines and all that stuff and it ended up two weeks later, three weeks later, then everybody forgot there was even an election,” he said. “It doesn’t happen in third world countries. They do better than us. It is appalling what is happening to our electoral process. And I will do this work.” Except there is absolutely no evidence that the election was stolen by the former president. In addition, he mentioned how France’s electoral system was much more efficient during its presidential elections. Although, as PolitiFact pointed out earlier this year, a big reason for this is that France’s national government conducts presidential elections while in the United States, individual states do. Incidentally, Republicans decry Democratic efforts to pass voting rights as a federal takeover of the vote.
