Trump Wants Americans To Judge Him On His Failed Record
July 22, 2020
In his briefing yesterday, Trump was asked if he wants the American people to judge him on his failed coronavirus response that has led to more than 140,ooo deaths and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Instead, Trump pointed to parts of his record he wants the American people to judge him on, but they don’t look good either.
TRUMP: “They’ll judge us on the economy that I created and that already we’re creating. We’re setting record job numbers, as you know.”
REALITY: Millions of jobs were lost under Trump’s watch and job growth actually slowed even before the pandemic hit.
FactCheck.org: “Since he took office: 7.8 million jobs have been lost — including 7,100 coal mining jobs and 274,000 manufacturing jobs.”
FactCheck.org: “Even in February, when employment was at its highest, Trump was far behind the pace needed to fulfill his campaign boast that he would be ‘the greatest jobs president that God ever created.’ Up until then, the average monthly gain under Trump had been 185,000, while the average monthly gain during the four years before he took office was 216,000.”
AP Fact Check: “Trump never managed to achieve the rates of economic growth he promised in the 2016 campaign. The U.S. economy was not the world’s best in history when this started.”
TRUMP: “I think they’re going to judge me on the tax cutting and the regulation cutting, which nobody has ever done to the extent that we’ve been able to do it.”
REALITY: Trump’s tax law failed to boost investments or increase economic growth as Trump and Republicans promised.
NPR: “After 2 Years, Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed To Deliver On GOP’s Promises”
NPR: “The federal deficit this year was $984 billion — an extraordinary figure at a time when the country is not mired in recession or widespread war. The tax cut also failed to produce a permanent boost in economic growth, despite promises from Republican supporters.”
Industry Week: “Besides stock buybacks, American corporations continue to sell, hire, and invest more in their overseas operations than they do in the U.S. facilities.”
REALITY: More than half of Americans would pay more in taxes while the top 1% got more than 80% of the benefits over the next decade.
Vox: “By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes under the tax bill agreed to by House and Senate Republicans, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds. That year, 82.8 percent of the bill’s benefit would go to the top 1 percent, up from 62.1 under the Senate bill.’ And even in the first years of the bill’s implementation, when it’s an across-the-board tax cut, the benefits of the law would be heavily concentrated among the upper-middle and upper-class Americans, with nearly two-thirds of the benefit going to the richest fifth of Americans in 2018.”
REALITY: While corporations got massive tax cuts and some paid no federal taxes, the benefits did not trickle down to workers as promised.
CNBC: “These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018”
Wall Street Journal: “Still, one widely publicized feature of the 2017 tax law hasn’t held up: The bonuses many companies announced for employees—often described as sharing the benefits of the corporate tax cut with workers —haven’t been repeated, even as company tax savings persist.”
TRUMP: “On rebuilding the military, on how we’ve handled the VA: On the VA, we got Veterans Choice. Nobody thought that would be possible.”
REALITY: Trump is trying to take credit for the Veterans Choice program that was first passed under President Obama.
Associated Press: “Trump said he passed a private-sector health care program, Veterans Choice, after failed attempts by past presidents for the last ‘45 years.’ That’s not true. The Choice program, which allows veterans to see doctors outside the government-run VA system at taxpayer expense, was first passed in 2014 under President Barack Obama.”
REALITY: Trump threatened to block crucial military funding and pay raises for service members so he can protect the legacy of Confederate generals.
Reuters: “Earlier Tuesday, the White House issued an official announcement that Trump would veto the bill if it required the Defense Department to strip the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military bases.”
TRUMP: “I don’t think any administration, any President has accomplished so much as we’ve accomplished, from energy to health to so many other things.”
REALITY: Trump’s health care policies and failed coronavirus response have led to millions more uninsured Americans—and he’s trying to strip coverage from tens of millions more by eliminating the ACA.
Vox: “The number of Americans without health insurance has increased by 7 million since President Donald Trump took office, new Gallup data released Wednesday shows. The country’s uninsured rate has steadily ticked upward since 2016, rising from a low of 10.9 percent in late 2016 to 13.7 percent — a four-year high.”
New York Times: “The coronavirus pandemic stripped an estimated 5.4 million American workers of their health insurance between February and May, a stretch in which more adults became uninsured because of job losses than have ever lost coverage in a single year, according to a new analysis.”