Former President Donald Trump vowed to “finish what we started” before a Republican audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“I am your warrior, I am your justice — and for those wronged and deceived, I am your vengeance,” Trump said at the March 4 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “I will completely wipe out the deep state.”
We reviewed several false or misleading statements he made during his 90+ minute speech about the 2020 election, the border, the economy and the war.
“I won the second election. I won it by a wide margin.”
We rated these Pants on Fire! Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Biden won by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million.
Officials in Trump’s own administration were among the experts who concluded the election was safe.
“We did much better in 2020 than in 2016.”
This is misleading and ignores the role of the Electoral College. Trump received more popular votes in 2020 (about 74 million) than in 2016 (about 63 million). But the popular vote does not determine the president’s winner. Trump lost the electoral college election in 2020, so he lost that presidential race.
In Arizona, during the 2022 midterm elections, “a tremendous percentage of the machines were broken and you couldn’t vote. … They said come back in seven hours.”
Trump is wrong about Republicans not being able to vote in November. On election day in Maricopa County, some ballot machines failed to read some ballots due to a printing error. The equipment problems occurred in about 70 of the county’s 223 voting centers. This was a significant inconvenience and caused some voters to wait in long lines.
But the people were not denied the right to vote. Voters who encountered a faulty tab were given other options of staying underneath and waiting for a working tab, voting at a different polling location, or placing their completed ballots in a secure slot for officials to tab them later.
Technical problems at Maricopa County’s voting centers haven’t disproportionately hit Republican voters, according to a Washington Post analysis.
A court denied a request by the Republican National Committee to extend the district’s voting times. The court concluded that there was no evidence that voters were barred from voting. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit.
In 2022, “in France, 37 million people had voted, they voted in one day and announced the winner at 10:30 p.m. in the evening.”
This leaves out the context of why tabulating votes is so much faster in France than in the US
When candidates run for president in the United States, there are multiple local, state, and federal races on the same ballot. In the presidential election in France in April 2022, only one choice was on the ballot.
There are other important differences in the way elections are conducted in the two countries, including the fact that in France almost all voters cast their ballots in person in one day. In the US, state laws generally give voters more ways to vote, including by mail.
border security
“I built hundreds of kilometers of wall and completed this task as promised.”
PolitiFact tracked Trump’s promise to “build a great wall” and make Mexico pay for it, and ruled it a broken promise.
Trump mainly replaced barriers put up by previous administrations. When he took office in 2017, the US had 654 miles of primary border barriers (some sections of the border have up to three tiers of barriers that run parallel to the border; the first barrier a migrant may encounter is the primary barrier) . As of January 2021, that number increased to 706 miles, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
Trump replaced about 184 miles of derelict primary barriers with updated fences. When Trump says his administration has “built hundreds of miles,” he means replacing older barriers with new fences, not hundreds of miles of barriers protecting the border for the first time.
“Before Biden came into office, we had illegal immigration at an all-time low.”
This is misleading and fails to take into account that the coronavirus pandemic has slowed migration.
In fiscal 2017, border patrol agents nationwide recorded 310,531 arrests, the lowest level since 1971. (This spanned about four months of the Obama presidency.) However, arrests increased thereafter, reaching 859,501 in fiscal 2019.
Migration decreased when the coronavirus began in early 2020, but then increased steadily after April 2020. And the way officials tracked migration data changed when the government implemented Title 42, a public health policy designed to limit the number of people coming to the U.S. making it difficult to compare pre-pandemic immigration data with post-March data 2020 to compare.
Business
“We had the best jobs in history, we had the best economy in history.”
We have ruled a similar claim false. The US economy was strong before the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020. But it wasn’t the best in the nation’s history, economists told PolitiFact.
Before COVID-19, the unemployment rate hit historic lows under Trump. Experts said Trump could take credit for this, but he also benefited from the continuation of trends underway under former President Barack Obama.
Under Trump, the nation’s gross domestic product growth — probably the single most important statistic measuring the overall strength of the economy — was similar to that under Obama and well below the rate of previous presidents.
National security
“I was the only president in decades” who “didn’t have a war”.
As we previously reported, during his four-year tenure, Trump has not sought congressional authorization to use military force or officially declare war on any other country. Nor did he embroil the US in new protracted conflicts. However, Trump ordered and supervised new military operations under existing authorizations, including counter-terrorism raids, which spread to several countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Formal declarations of war by Congress are rare and have occurred in only five conflicts: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Joseph DeThomas, a professor in Penn State University’s School of International Affairs, told PolitiFact that defining war solely on the basis of formal declarations by Congress would exclude conflicts such as the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Iraq War.
The Correlates of War Project, an academic project that collects war data, defines war as a conflict between two organized armed forces that results in at least 1,000 combat-related casualties. Under that definition, Trump didn’t start wars, but neither did Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, said Robert Gulotty, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Says he defeated “100% of the ISIS Caliphate”.
The key context is missing here.
Trump said in October 2019 that his administration was responsible for defeating “100%” of the ISIS Caliphate. But weeks later, when he announced the death of Islamic State leader Abu al-Baghdadi, he backtracked and said the number was closer to 70 percent.
Experts told PolitiFact that ISIS has been significantly weakened but has not disappeared. They added that Trump was largely building on President Barack Obama’s long-established strategy to combat the group.
“(ISIS) no longer has any significant territorial holdings and its supreme leader has been killed. He is organizationally, ideologically and territorially weaker than when Trump came into office,” Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC-based think tank, told PolitiFact. Trump deserves some credit for that, O’Hanlon said, but “that was mostly due to executing a strategy he inherited.”
Citing a magazine published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that ISIS’s African branches had gained considerable territory, recruits and firepower.
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