WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump misrepresented the testimony of his Supreme Court nominee’s chief accuser in a mocking turn on a rally stage over…
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump misrepresented the testimony of his Supreme Court nominee’s chief accuser in a mocking turn on a rally stage over the past week as campaign politics and the pitched struggle over Brett Kavanaugh’s fate provided fertile ground for distortion.
A look at some of his rhetoric and how it compares with the facts:
KAVANAUGH
TRUMP, as if recounting the questioning of Christine Blasey Ford at her Senate hearing: ‘How did you get there?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Where is the place?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How many years ago was it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ‘What neighborhood was it in?’ “I don’t know.’ ‘Where’s the house’ ‘I don’t know.’ Upstairs, downstairs, where was it?’ ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer, that’s the only thing I remember.’ And a man’s life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered.… They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.”
THE FACTS: He’s wrong to say Kavanaugh’s accuser could not recall whether the alleged sexual assault happened upstairs or downstairs or any level of detail regarding the likely location. She described in vivid detail being in a locked upstairs bedroom with Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge while others were downstairs at a small house party. Trump also falsely stated that she did not remember how many years ago this happened. She identified the summer of 1982, when she was 15.
It’s true she could not identify the house, or remember how she got there or home, but said it was within a “20 minute drive” between her house and a country club in the Bethesda, Maryland, area.
Researchers say it is common for people who have experienced a trauma to retain a searing memory of the event but not circumstances surrounding it.
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DRUG PRICES
TRUMP: “You might have seen last month where I called up some of the drug companies. I said, ‘Folks, you just raised up the drug prices. You can’t do that.’ And they all reduced them. Do you believe it? That’s when I said, ‘I’ve a lot of power.’ Pfizer, right? You saw that. Pfizer, Novartis, they raised their drug prices and I’m bringing them down. I said, ‘What are you doing with raising them?’ ‘I’m sorry, Mr. President, we’ll reduce them immediately.’ I said, ‘Man, this is a powerful position.’” — Minnesota rally Thursday.
THE FACTS: His account is overstated.
His call with Pfizer was at the beginning of July, not last month. It came right after he criticized Pfizer on Twitter for raising prices of about 40 drugs on July 1. Pfizer reversed those increases, meaning prices returned to their June 30 levels, though only until Jan. 1,2019, at the latest. Novartis was one of several drugmakers that said they wouldn’t raise any prices for the rest of 2018, but they’d already done so on nearly all of their drugs earlier in the year.
Few, if any, drugmakers actually lowered prices as a result of Trump’s pressure. A few drugs had price cuts for business reasons.
More broadly, an Associated Press investigation of brand-name prescription drugs found 96 price increases for every price reduction in the first seven months of this year. There were fewer price increases this year from January through July than in comparable prior year periods, but companies still raised prices far more often than they cut them.
AP analyzed 26,176 U. S. list price changes for brand-name prescription drugs from Jan. 1 through July 31 in the years 2015 through 2018, using data supplied by health information analytics firm Elsevier.
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VETERANS
TRUMP: “We just passed Choice. That was 44 years they’ve been trying to pass Choice, so that if you have to wait in line for 9 days, 30 days, 21 days, months, you don’t do that anymore. If the line’s big, and if you’re unhappy with it, you go to a private doctor, they take care of you, and we paid the bill. It’s better. They’ve been trying to pass that one for many, many decades. They couldn’t do it. We got it passed.” — Tennessee rally Monday.
TRUMP: “We also passed Veterans’ Choice. Forty-four years they tried to do it.”— Mississippi rally Tuesday.
THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating improvements to the Department of Veterans Affairs by incorrectly stating a private-sector health care program was never passed by Congress before him. He also falsely suggests the newly expanded program will have immediate effect.
Congress first approved the Veterans Choice program in 2014 in the wake of a scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center in which some veterans died while waiting months for appointments. The program allows veterans to see doctors outside the VA system if they must wait more than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles to a VA facility.
Trump signed legislation in June to expand the Choice program by giving veterans even wider access to private-sector doctors at government expense, subject to yet-to-be-finalized rules that will determine eligibility as well as available funding.
Contrary to what Trump suggests, the effects of the newly expanded program are not immediate. Key to its success is an overhaul of the VA’s electronic medical records to allow seamless sharing of medical records not only with the Pentagon but also private physicians, a process expected to take up to 10 years. The VA also has yet to resolve long-term financing for the program due to congressional budget caps that could put funding for VA or other domestic programs at risk of shortfalls next year.
At a Senate hearing last month, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie made clear that full implementation of the expanded Choice program was “years” away.
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IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT
TRUMP: “The new platform of the Democrat Party is to abolish ICE — the brave, brave people of ICE. In other words, they want to abolish immigration enforcement entirely.” — Mississippi rally Tuesday.
THE FACTS: While some Democrats in the House and Senate have raised the prospect of eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no top Democrats in the House or Senate have called for such a move. Those Democrats who have expressed openness to eliminating ICE have said they would not abandon border enforcement, which is largely carried out by U. S. Customs and Border Protection.
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U. S.-MEXICO-CANADA TRADE
TRUMP: “The agreement will govern nearly $1.2 trillion in trade, which makes it the biggest trade deal in the United States’ history.” — remarks Monday.
THE FACTS: That’s wrong, simply by virtue of the number of trade partners involved.
The proposed new agreement, replacing the North American Free Trade agreement, covers the same three countries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated by the Obama administration, included the three NAFTA partners — United States, Canada and Mexico — plus Japan and eight other Pacific Rim countries. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact on his third day in office.
Even the Pacific deal pales in comparison with one that did go into effect with the U. S. on board, the Uruguay Round. Concluded in 1994, the round of negotiations created the World Trade Organization and was signed by 123 countries. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found the following year that the WTO’s initial membership accounted for more than 90 percent of global economic output.
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TRUMP: “This deal will also impose new standards requiring at least 75 percent of every automobile to be made in North America in order to qualify for the privilege of free access to our markets.” — remarks Monday.
THE FACTS: That’s true. But as with any such requirement, it could make autos more expensive by discouraging the use of cheaper components from overseas.
