Jobs
Lie: “The only jobs [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs – they’ve bounced back from COVID.”
Truth: Under Trump – even excluding the impact of the COVID pandemic – the economy generated an average of 182,000 jobs a month, well below Biden’s 277,000 a month (excluding his post-pandemic bounce).
Inflation
Lie: “It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t – you look at the cost of food where it doubled, and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore.”
Truth: Trump’s lie doesn’t diminish the significance of higher food prices for many Americans. But the truth is not a single item tracked by the government is more than 56 percent more expensive than it was when Biden took office, while grocery prices have gone up 21 percent overall.
Tax cuts
Lie: “What we did was incredible … We got the largest tax cut in history.”
Truth: Trump’s tax package was the eighth largest in the past 100 years if you compare it to the size of the economy at the time. This is well behind the tax cuts of Ronald Regan (which was more than four times the size of Trump’s) and Barack Obama. Notably, Trump’s tax cuts mostly benefited corporations and the wealthy.
Debt
Lie: “The tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to Covid. … the country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt.”
Truth: The national debt increased by about $8 trillion – to $27.7 trillion – during Trump’s four years in office. This includes the impact of the pandemic. The debt grew at a faster rate each year under Trump. His tax cut helped drive the annual deficit to $1 trillion in 2019, up from $680 billion in 2017.
Tariffs
Lie: “[Tariffs are] not going to drive [prices] higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China – and many others, in all fairness to China – it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money.”
Truth: Studies have found that the costs of goods subjected to tariffs increased by roughly the full amount of those tariffs, meaning the costs were passed on to consumers.”
Ukraine
Lie: “The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us.”
Truth: European nations have outspent the United States in Ukrainian aide $188 billion to $107 billion. The United States and Europe spent roughly similar amounts the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After that their aide continued to grow while ours flatlined as Biden battled isolationist Republicans before finally securing a new aid package in April.
Immigration
Lie: “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”
Truth: We have a shortage of workers, not an excess. Since 2021, the United States has had millions of more jobs than workers to fill them. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.1 percent for 30 months. The number of employed native-born Americans hasn’t meaningfully grown since 2019, largely because of retirements, not competition from immigrants.
Crime
Lie: “Our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country.”
Truth: Crime has declined since Biden took office. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.
Presidential rankings
Lie: “[President Biden is] without question the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country.”
Truth: Rattner calls this claim “laughable.” Trump is dead last in a recent survey of more than 150 current and former members of the presidents and executive policies section of the American Political Science Association. Biden ranks 14th.
You can read these facts – loaded with charts – here.
***
The lies of Trump, other Republicans, and the Right-wing news silo come so fast and at such volume that it’s hard to bat them all down.
That’s what they’re hoping for. That we get overwhelmed, or discouraged, or lazy. We can’t let that happen. We can’t let lies win over the truth. We can’t let their gaslighting and “alternate facts” become our reality.
Birds fly, fish swim, and liars lie. When they throw their bullshit at us there’s only one thing to do: pick it up and shove it down their throats.