Trump Montana Rally: 76 Percent of Trump's Claims are False or Misleading

As a former Republican, I like to believe that there was once a time when the Republican Party mostly took truthful positions.  True, there could be honest debate on issues, but the vast majority of the Party platform or statements wasn't deliberately false.  As I have noted before, the GOP began turning its back on truthfulness and honesty concurrent with the rise of "Christian conservatives" - I call them Christofascists - within the GOP base.  Having followed self-labeled "Christian" family values groups for two decades, there are few groups/people in America who lie as consistently and/or viciously than these self-congratulatory "godly folk."   With the rise of Donald Trump, this type of lying and the dissemination of falsehoods has hit record highs.  With large majorities of Republicans supporting Trump, the endorsement of deliberate lying has gone party wide.  An article in the Washington Post looks at the level of lying that Trump engaged in during his recent "rally" in Montana.  What is frightening is that the Trump/GOP base eats it up and never question the truthfulness of their führer's statements and claims.  Here are article highlights:

We’re doing something new: analyzing every factual claim from President Trump’s campaign rally in Montana on Thursday.

According to The Fact Checker’s database, [Trump] the president had made 3,251 false or misleading claims at the end of May, and his average daily rate was climbing. This side of Trump really comes alive during campaign rallies, so we wanted to do the math and find out whether the president speaks more fictions or facts in front of his crowds. We focused only on Trump’s statements of material fact at the Montana rally, avoiding trivialities and opinions. . . . According to our analysis, the truth took a beating in Montana. From a grand total of 98 factual statements we identified, 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.

Here’s a [partial] breakdown: [of the ] 45 false or mostly false statements, 25 misleading statements and four unsupported claims.

Trump’s rallies draw huge crowds — an estimated 6,500 people attended the Thursday rally — and they usually provide days of fodder for TV networks. Because three-quarters of the president’s claims in Montana were false, misleading or unsupported, there is a need to fact-check these events.

Here’s our [partial] analysis of all 98 claims:

False. The federal estate tax rarely falls on farms or small businesses, since only those leaving behind more than $5 million pay it. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million — were subject to the tax. Of those, only 80 taxable estates would be farms and small businesses.

False. Democrats support measures to tighten border security, but they don’t support Trump’s plans for a border wall or other parts of his aggressive immigration agenda. There’s no evidence to show that immigration leads to higher crime. In fact, most studies have found that legal and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born.

False. Trump suggests the Justice Department went easy on Clinton while investigating her use of a private email server as secretary of state, but then-FBI Director James B. Comey gave detailed reasons for declining to bring charges and took the extraordinary step of rebuking Clinton in public shortly before the 2016 election. The Justice Department inspector general found “no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations” and said Comey acted inappropriately in calling her out before the election.

False. Germany in March approved an $11 billion pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to be built by Russian energy giant Gazprom. But the United States is not “paying for the whole thing,” not even by some logic that factors in U.S. spending on NATO. Germany is the second-highest contributor to NATO’s common programs. The United States pays 22 percent of these costs; Germany pays 15 percent.

False. Republicans often win the presidency. Trump’s suggestion that he lost the popular vote to Clinton because of voter fraud is not supported by any evidence.

False. MS-13 has a large presence in Long Island and other places, but it’s a serious exaggeration to say ICE has “liberated” towns from MS-13.

False. There’s no evidence that “thousands” of MS-13 members have been deported. Hundreds, yes. Thousands, no.

False. Trump has not secured funding for his promised border wall. The $1.6 billion he’s referring to comes with strings attached and cannot be used for the wall. It’s designated for a stretch of bollard-style fencing near San Diego.

False. Trump’s tax cut is nearly 0.9 percent of GDP, much smaller than Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth largest since 1918 — smaller than two tax cuts passed under Obama.

False. It’s not hard to find countries that the United States has a trade surplus with, including close allies such as Canada.

False. U.S. GDP growth is not the fastest among large nations, according to the World Bank.

False. Trump started commenting on NFL players kneeling in the fall of 2017. Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who first knelt during the anthem, began protesting in 2016. Ratings fell 9 percent in 2017 and 17 percent since 2016, according to Nielsen. But that roughly tracks with an overall decline in TV viewership and experts say that the protests were not the primary reason the ratings declined.

The lies go on and on and Trump's audience would rather embrace lies than face objective reality and the fact that their racism and bigotry are the real motivating factors for the support of Trump and the cesspool that is today's GOP.