Category: Not Factual

Trump Claims His SOTU Had The Highest Ratings In History. It Didn’t.

In a tweet, President Trump claimed the largest audience ever tuned in for his State of the Union address. That’s not true.

“Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech,” Trump tweeted just after 7 a.m. ET Thursday. “45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!”

Though the specific numbers he cites in his tweet are correct, Trump’s audience on Tuesday night wasn’t close to being the highest in history for a State of the Union.

Quick note: The speech a president gives just after taking office looks like a State of the Union but is actually a joint address to Congress. But just for the purposes of this article, we will call those big speeches early in the first year of a presidency SOTUs, too, as a shorthand.

Let’s look at the numbers. Nielson counts the number of people who watch the speeches on broadcast networks, cable and PBS, either live or on the same day.

Nielson reported yesterday that an estimated 45.6 million people tuned in to Trump’s address on Tuesday night. Compared with other SOTUs since 1993, that total puts Trump’s speech in ninth place.

The SOTU with the largest audience was Bill Clinton’s 1993 speech, which drew a whopping 66.9 million viewers.

And if you look at the combined household rating, rather than combined number of viewers, Trump’s 26.9 rating nets him 16th place, tied with G.W. Bush’s 2006 address. (Clinton’s 1993 speech also wins on the rating front, with a 44.3.)

But despite the president’s obsession with ratings, it’s worth remembering that methods for counting television viewers are imperfect. The New York Times notes that the figures don’t include streaming.

Obama’s first official State of the Union, a year into his presidency, drew 48 million viewers and a 29.8 rating — higher on both metrics than Trump’s speech on Tuesday.

It’s not clear where Trump got the notion that his SOTU numbers were the highest. But CNN’s Brian Stelter notes that a segment on “Fox and Friends,” which Trump reportedly watches, Thursday morning mentioned the 45.6 million total, and that Fox had a record number of viewers.

Following the president’s morning tweet, Fox News Research tweeted Nielson’s viewership numbers for SOTUs back to 1993, along with a photo of Trump.

[NPR]

Trump taunts Jay-Z about black unemployment

President Donald Trump mused about hip-hop icon Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter on Sunday morning, asking whether someone would inform him about the black unemployment rate.

“Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!” the president wrote on Twitter.

Jay-Z was interviewed on the debut episode of “The Van Jones Show” on CNN on Saturday night. Jones asked the rapper and business mogul whether Trump’s demeanor and actions, including Trump’s reported use of the word “shithole” in reference to African and other countries, were important given the state of the economy.

It’s “not about money at the end of the day,” Jay-Z told Jones. “Money is not — money doesn’t equate to happiness. It doesn’t. That’s missing the whole point. You treat people like human beings, then — that’s the main point.”

The president is correct in saying that black unemployment is at a record low. However, the decline began under former President Barack Obama, and the rate continues to be higher than overall employment, a disparity that has endured for decades.

When asked about the reported “shithole” comment, which came in the context of a discussion of U.S immigration policy, Jay-Z said it was “really hurtful.”

“Everyone feels anger. After the anger, it’s really hurtful because he’s like looking down on a whole population of people,” Jay-Z said. “You are so misinformed because these places have beautiful people and beautiful everything.”

Comparing Trump’s reported remarks to former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s private, racist comments in 2013, Jay-Z said, “That’s just how people talk behind close doors.” In a leaked tape published by TMZ.com, Sterling criticized his mistress for being out in public with black people, telling her “not to bring them to my games.”

The NBA stripped Sterling of his ownership and banned him from the league. Despite the harsh penalties, Jay-Z said Sterling’s punishment avoided tough conversations, which in his eyes, can lead to someone like Trump.

“You have sprayed perfume on the trash can. What you do, when you do that is the bugs come and you spray something, and you create a superbug because you don’t take care of the problem,” he said. “You don’t take the trash out, you keep spraying whatever over it to make it acceptable. As those things grow, you create a superbug.”

That superbug, Jay-Z said, now resides in the Oval Office.

“And then now we have Donald Trump, the superbug.”

[Politico]

Reality

Donald Trump and his allies keep bringing up the low black unemployment rate, as a sign that he isn’t racist.

The black unemployment rate has been steadily falling since 2010 when Barack Obama turned the economy around from one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen, caused by Republican policies of tax cuts and deregulation.

Trump ‘asked acting FBI chief Andrew McCabe how he voted’

After firing James Comey as director of the FBI, US President Donald Trump asked the agency’s deputy director whom he had voted for, US media report.

Andrew McCabe, who had just become the agency’s acting chief after the surprise dismissal last year, said that he did not vote in the 2016 election.

FBI special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether Mr Comey’s firing was an attempt to obstruct justice.

Mr Mueller leads the probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

During Mr McCabe’s introductory meeting with the president after he took over the federal law enforcement agency, Mr Trump also allegedly expressed anger with Mr McCabe over his wife’s ties to the Clinton family.

Mr McCabe reportedly found the conversation “disturbing”, according to the Washington Post.

Jill McCabe, a failed Democratic candidate for the Virginia state senate, had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from a political action committee controlled by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Last July, Mr Trump told the New York Times: “We have a director of the FBI, acting, who received $700,000, whose wife received $700,000 from, essentially, Hillary Clinton.”

He also erroneously claimed in a subsequent tweet that Mr McCabe had led the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email during her time as US secretary of state.

Mr McCabe had recused himself from any investigations involving Virginia political figures, but Republicans have questioned why he was allowed to be involved in the investigations into Mrs Clinton’s emails, claiming he has a conflict of interest.

The FBI has said that Mrs McCabe’s campaign had ended months before Mr McCabe became involved in that investigation, which he later recused himself from as the date of the presidential election neared.

[BBC News]

Trump Mocks ‘Crazy Jim Acosta’ By Misquoting Him: ‘Thank You For Your Honesty Jim!’

President Donald Trump took a victory lap over the end of the government shutdown early Tuesday morning, making sure to include a bizarre jab at CNN’s Chief White House correspondent “Crazy” Jim Acosta in a tweet.

It’s not his best nickname, but then again the president has been slacking on those as of late, so that’s to be expected.

“Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees,” Trump wrote, quoting the reporter:

“Thank you for your honesty Jim!” the president added, perhaps signaling a turning point in the pair’s frosty relationship?

Trump seems to be misquoting this Monday tweet from Acosta, in which he reported that his White House sources were “dancing in end zone,” before quoting sources as claiming that Democrats “caved…gambled and lost” in their negotiations:

It’s not clear (it never is) whether Trump understands that Acosta’s tweet is composed of quotes, or if he’s deliberately trolling the White House reporter.

The government shutdown came to a close after a solid 69 hours on Monday, after Trump signed a bill to fund the government through February 8.

[Mediaite]

The Trump administration used bad math in its “foreign terrorists” report

Donald Trump has turned to data to argue for stricter immigration policies. According to a report his administration released yesterday, more than 70% of people convicted of “terrorism-related charges” from 2001 to 2016 were born outside the US.

“This report is a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists,” said Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in a statement.

But Trump’s statistics are misleading. That percentage is based on a list of 549 people, which experts say is flawed. First, the list excludes homegrown extremists, who have become the US’s biggest terror threat. Second, the vague term “terrorism-related charges” inflates numbers by including not just people who broke laws “directly related to international terrorism,” but others who were convicted of totally unrelated offenses, such as fraud or illegal immigration in the course of a terrorism-related investigation.

“’Terrorism-related’ is not a term that appears in the US criminal code,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “It’s pretty meaningless.”

His own analysis, which counts foreign-born terrorists convicted of planning or committing a terrorist attack in the US, found 154 cases from 1975 to 2015. That’s almost 250 fewer than the Trump administration’s count over a longer period of time. The White House and the Homeland Security department did not respond to requests for comment.

Bundling terrorism convictions with those that are merely “terrorism-related” is not new. Attorney general Jeff Sessions, who’s honed in on the issue since he was a senator, had produced a similar report in 2016, and the Department of Justice had relied on a similar method long before that. It’s an approach that has been questioned for years, including in a 2003 report by the Government Accountability Office that found the Justice Department had misclassified dozens of cases the previous year.

One example of how this can happen is the case of three Middle-Eastern grocers who were convicted for stealing boxes of Kellogg’s cereal in 2000—but remained on the list of terrorism-related cases because the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned them after a source inaccurately tipped agents that the three men had tried to buy a rocket-propelled grenade.

The new report didn’t look at any of the violent homegrown extremists because “domestic terrorism was not what was required by the president’s order,” a senior official told reporters. It doesn’t provide any statistic directly linking the numbers in the report to chain migration, or particular visas, either. “It takes some time and research,” he said.

The new report was a follow-up to president Trump’s March 6 executive order on “protecting America from foreign-born terrorism,” better known as the Muslim ban. In it, he asked the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to gather data on “foreign nationals” who have supported and engaged terrorism.

It’s part of a series of information requests about immigrants Trump has made–including regular reports on immigrants’ crimes–which some critics see as part of public relations campaign to promote the president’s anti-immigration campaign. (Trump has also asked for statistics on “honor killings” and other violence against women by foreigners, and on “sanctuary” jurisdictions that don’t honor DHS requests to hold immigrants until immigration authorities can collect them.)

But Nowrasteh, from the Cato Institute, found the report surprisingly thin given the time and resources the government had since Trump commissioned it last March. His study, published in 2016, includes the type of visa the convicted terrorists used to enter the country. “There’s very little new information in this report,” he said. “They have no excuse.”

[Quartz]

Trump attacks Wall Street Journal for quoting him accurately on North Korea, as audio confirms

This weekend, the White House has been lashing out at the Wall Street Journal, quibbling over a quote President Donald Trump made about his relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The Journal reported that Trump said, “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea,” while the White House contends that Trump said “I’d probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted out Saturday evening that the Journal’s reporting was “fake news.”

Though the Journal had released its audio the day before, Sanders then released the “official” White House audio at midnight Sunday morning.

On Sunday morning, Trump tweeted his own attacks about the interview, claiming the Journal “stated falsely” that he has a good relationship with Kim Jong Un.

But the Journal stands by its reporting, as well as the transcription provided by an independent transcription service. Neither version of the audio provides any audible or contextual indication that Trump said “I’d” in a line of comments about foreign relationships that were otherwise not conditional. Moreover, the transcript of the interview shows that the Journal’s own reporters clearly heard “I” — not “I’d” — and asked a follow-up question, which the President refused to answer:

TRUMP: …I have a great relationship with him, as you know I have a great relationship with Prime Minister Abe of Japan and I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I have relationships with people, I think you people are surprised.

WSJ: Just to be clear, you haven’t spoken to the North Korean leader, I mean when you say a relationship with Korea—

TRUMP: I don’t want to comment on it—I don’t want to comment, I’m not saying I have or I haven’t. But I just don’t—

WSJ: Some people would see your tweets, which are sometimes combative towards Kim Jong Un…

TRUMP: Sure, you see that a lot with me and then all of a sudden somebody’s my best friend. I could give you 20 examples. You give me 30. I’m a very flexible person.

It’s unclear exactly what this quibbling is designed to accomplish, though it certainly draws more attention — not less — to the possibility that the White House has a relationship with North Korea of a different nature than it has previously indicated.

It may, however, also be a form of retaliation against the Journal for something totally unrelated. The Journal published its story about Trump’s Kim Jong Un comments on Thursday, then on Friday published a report that shortly before the 2016 election, the Trump Organization paid an adult film star, Stephanie Clifford (stage name Stormy Daniels), $130,000 to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. It was only after this report that the White House began criticizing the Journal’s reporting on the relationship with North Korea.

[ThinkProgress]

Media

Trump Benefited From ‘Extraordinary’ Influx Of ‘Dark Money’ In Final Days Of 2016 Campaign

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the First Niagara Center, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Hillary Clinton’s electoral collapse in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign has often been attributed to former FBI Director James Comey’s 11th-hour decision to reopen an investigation into the Democratic nominee, or anti-Clinton ads on social media originating from Russian sources. But a new paper argues that a crucial and overlooked factor in Clinton’s lackluster finish was a huge influx of so-called dark money in support of President Donald Trump in the campaign’s final days.

“Dark money” is a term used to describe political spending by anonymous donors through nonprofits, which don’t have to disclose the names of the people giving them contributions. Thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions around the end of the last decade, these organizations are now often used to fund political ads at key moments of campaigns. According to a working paper by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking this week, dark money was mobilized on behalf of Trump in the final weeks of the campaign at an unprecedented scale.

“What happened in the final weeks of the campaign was extraordinary,” the authors wrote.

“Firstly, a giant wave of dark money poured into Trump’s own campaign — one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney’s munificently financed 2012 effort … The gushing torrent, along with all the other funds from identifiable donors that flowed in in the campaign’s final stages should refocus debates about that period.”

At the beginning of November, nearly $13 million worth of dark money was spent supporting Trump, compared to roughly $6 million worth of such funding for Romney at the same time in 2012, according to the authors’ review of FEC and IRS data. That increase does not correspond with a rising amount of dark money between the two election cycles: total dark money spending actually fell to $181 million in 2016 from a high of $308 million in 2012.

The paper doesn’t identify how much dark money benefited Clinton during the course of the 2016 election, but her total fundraising nearly doubled Trump’s, $1.2 billion to $647 million. Trump also generated a record amount of small dollar donations for a Republican candidate.

[International Business Times]

Trump questions whether Clinton coordinated with Russians

President Donald Trump, keeping up his attacks on Hillary Clinton, suggested Thursday that his 2016 election opponent and her fellow Democrats could have paid Russians for dirt on him during the campaign.

“Disproven and paid for by Democrats ‘Dossier used to spy on Trump Campaign. Did FBI use Intel tool to influence the Election?’ @foxandfriends,” Trump tweeted before dawn, adding, “Did Dems or Clinton also pay Russians? Where are hidden and smashed DNC servers? Where are Crooked Hillary Emails? What a mess!”

Trump is referring to an opposition research document that was compiled on him during the election, and it includes unverified allegations that the Russian government has compromising personal and financial information about the President.

The dossier — because of its allegations and questions surrounding its origin — has become an explosive political issue. Fusion GPS’ efforts researching Trump were first funded by his Republican foes during the primary campaign. The law firm for Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee picked up the tab once Trump became the clear favorite to win the nomination. After that switch, Fusion GPS hired a former British spy to put together the dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia.
Trump has frequently criticized his own Justice Department over its handling of the investigation into Clinton’s email use as secretary of state.

The tweet also continues Trump’s public criticism of Clinton.

On Wednesday, the President referred to his former rival several times while taking questions with Norwegian Prime Minister Edna Stolberg.
Asked about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into meddling in the 2016 election, Trump insisted there was “no collusion,” invoking Clinton’s July 2016 interview with the FBI, calling it “a very serious breach.”

“Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn’t sworn in, she wasn’t given the oath, they didn’t take notes, they didn’t record, and it was done on the 4th of July weekend. That’s perhaps ridiculous, and a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach and it really was,” he said.

At one point, Trump said any collusion was “really with the Democrats and the Russians, far more than it is with the Republicans and the Russians,” though he did not elaborate.

Later Wednesday, top White House adviser Kellyanne Conway insisted that while many cannot get over the election, the White House does not talk about Clinton.

“We don’t care about her. Nobody here talks about her,” the White House counselor told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “Cuomo Prime Time.” “Nobody here talks about Hillary Clinton, I promise you.”

[CNN]

Trump Hails Poll That Credits Obama for Booming Economy

Donald Trump hailed a new poll on the economy Thursday, despite the full results being a less than resounding endorsement of his presidency.

“In new Quinnipiac Poll, 66% of people feel the economy is “Excellent or Good.” That is the highest number ever recorded by this poll, Trump tweeted.

While Trump is right that these numbers are the highest positive rating in Quinnipiac poll on the economy since 2001, the survey also found that 49 percent of American voters believe former President Barack Obama is responsible for the economy’s current state. Only 40 percent of voters said Trump was responsible.

The Quinnipiac poll, which was published Wednesday, also asked about Trump’s intelligence, his level-headedness and his fitness to serve as president.

Asked to grade President Trump’s first year in office, 56 percent of those polled gave him a failing grade of F or D. Just 16 percent of respondents gave him an A.

As for Trump’s performance so far in office, only 36 percent said they approved, while 59 percent voiced disapproval.

“No one’s been this low at this point,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, told Newsweek, speaking of Trump’s 36 percent approval rating.

Meanwhile, the number of American voters giving former President Barack Obama credit for the state of the economy has increased since November.

Forty-three percent of respondents credited Obama in Quinnipiac’s November 22 poll. That percentage rose to 45 in December and 49 in January.

Trump’s numbers have been more stagnant. Forty-one percent gave him credit for the economy’s state in November. That percentage rose to 43 in December and fell to 40 in January.

“It’s been a very tough freshman year for President Donald Trump, by any measure,” Malloy said in a statement.

The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from January 5 to 9 via cellphones and landlines. The poll surveyed 1,106 voters nationwide and has a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

[Newsweek]

Reality

Also in the same poll:

  • 49 percent of voters say former President Barack Obama is more responsible for the state of the economy
  • 36% job approval rating, a historic low for any president at this point.
  • 69% say Trump is not level-headed
  • 57% say he is not fit to serve as president
  • 63% say he is not honest
  • 59% say Trump does not have good leadership skills
  • 59%say he does not care about average Americans
  • 65% say he does not share their values
  • 39% gave Trump an ‘F’ grade,  and 17% gave him a ‘D’ grade.

Trump just said the US sold Norway F-52s — but no such aircraft exists

President Donald Trump said the US had sold Norway F-52 fighter jets during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Wednesday.

But no such aircraft exists. The president may have misspoke because the US has sold Norway 52 F-35s.

Oslo received the first three last November.

Trump is getting roasted on Twitter for his gaffe

[Business Insider]

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