Former President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign exactly as he ended his 2021 presidency: with a lot of inaccuracies.
Like many of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech in Florida on Tuesday was filled with false and misleading claims on a variety of topics — from his record in office to his Democratic rivals to the economy, the environment and foreign policy. .
Here’s a fact-check on some of the things he said at Mar-a-Lago. This article will be updated with additional claims.
Trump claimed on Tuesday night that the US has left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan after it withdraws in 2021.
“Perhaps the most shameful moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and turned over $85 billion worth of the best military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump said, speaking from his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Facts One: Trump’s number is bogus. While a significant amount of U.S.-supplied military equipment to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned by the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal, the Defense Department estimated that this equipment was worth about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion dollars worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inactive before US forces withdrew.
There is no basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind. As other auditors have previously explained, this was a rounded figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war into a fund that supports Afghan security forces. Only a portion of this funding was for equipment.
Trump claimed his administration had “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but it has now been “virtually depleted” by the Biden administration.
Facts One: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. The stock is not full and the stock is not “virtually out of stock”.
Although Trump has repeatedly boasted that he was supposed to have filled the stockpile, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not just because of him — the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress have blocked the funding needed to carry out Trump’s 2020 directive to buy tens of millions of extra barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capacity – but still, no got paid.
As CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the U.S. stockpile remains the largest in the world, even though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a significant portion of it to help prop up oil prices. at low levels. after Russia invaded Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, before the midterm elections). Inventories stood at more than 396 million barrels of crude oil in the week ended Nov. 4.
Trump also bragged about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever asked for or received $1 for our country from China until I came.”
Facts One: As we’ve written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump has raised revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In fact, the US has imposed tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an average of $12.3 billion in tariffs annually from 2007 to 2016, according to the International Trade Commission of the USA. DataWeb.”
Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during the Trump presidency has found that Americans have borne the cost of the tariffs.
Trump claimed that unnamed people are not talking about the threat of nuclear weapons because they are obsessed with environmental issues, which he said, “they say could affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They say the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch in the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can wipe out entire countries with one shot.”
Facts One: Trump’s claims are false – even if you ignore the absurd claim that people don’t pay attention to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Oceanic Administration stated on its website that “sea levels along the US coastline are projected to rise, on average, 10 – 12 inches (0.25 – 0.30 meters) over the next 30 years (2020 – 2050). as well as the rise measured in the last 100 years (1920 – 2020).
And although Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” in that claim, he strongly suggested that climate change could only affect us in 300 years. This is grossly inaccurate. affects the US today. The Ministry of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Temperatures are rising. changing precipitation patterns; And more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather events caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”
Trump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” because of its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying: “If you get caught dealing drugs in China, you get a straight and quick trial and at the end of the day they execute you. This is terrible, but they don’t have a drug problem.”
Facts One: Trump’s claim is not true, as it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, like the U.S., has a large number of people using (a wide range of) drugs .” The Chinese government itself reported that “there were 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” at the end of 2021. In the past, officials in China have acknowledged that the number of registered drug users is a significant understatement of actual drug use there .
And while Trump only delivers harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its efforts in rehabilitation, education and the fight against poverty.
Protesting how he is under criminal investigation for moving presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a dismissive claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.
“Obama took a lot of things with him,” Trump said.
Facts One: This is false – as the National Archives and Administration pointed out in August when Trump previously made this claim. Although Trump claimed Obama had moved millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had moved those records to a NARA-run facility in the Chicago area — which is close to where he will be the obama presidential library. He said that under federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores his administration’s presidential records.”
NARA has also shot down Trump’s recent claims that several other presidents allegedly moved documents to their home states. In those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the former presidents. It is standard for NARA to set up temporary facilities near where the permanent libraries of former presidents will eventually be located.
As he did on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading data when discussing the price of natural gas. He said, “We were at $1.87 a gallon for gas, and now it’s five, six, seven, even eight dollars, and it’s going to be really bad.”
Facts One: This is misleading. While the price of a gallon of regular gas briefly dipped to $1.87 (and lower) during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, Jan. 20 2021, it was much higher than that – $2,393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some outlying gas stations where prices are always much higher than the national average, the national average on Tuesday is $3.759 per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, has an average of $5,423.
Trump claimed Tuesday night that his administration, unlike the Obama administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members who had come to America.
“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they couldn’t get them out. Because their countries where they came from wouldn’t accept them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.
Facts One: It is not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras would not take back their citizens during the Obama administration, although there were some isolated exceptions.
In 2016, shortly before Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras were on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deemed “reluctant” or uncooperative in accepting the return of their nationals.
For fiscal year 2016, Obama…
