President Donald Trump is officially the most “fact-challenged” politician that the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker has ever encountered, columnists Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee reported Monday, just hours before the president claimed in a radio interview that “people don’t ask” why the Civil War happened.
In his first 100 days in office, they report, Trump has made 488 false or misleading claims—an average of 4.9 a day; gone no more than 10 days, counting six on a golfing vacation, without a single false claim; and made 20 or more false claims on four separate days.
His falsehoods ranged from taking credit for the January jobs report that showed the U.S. had created 216,000 new jobs, even though the data came from before he took office, to claiming the “failing” New York Times “had to” apologize to its readers for the coverage they gave him. It isn’t, and it didn’t.
Even the statement “We are keeping one promise after another,” which Trump said during a Pennsylvania rally to mark his 100 days, was a lie, the Post noted, in that he has broken five of his campaign pledges and taken no action on more than half of the others—perhaps most notably his vow to “drain the swamp” of corporate interests, which he has followed up on by appointing CEOs, bankers, and lobbyists to crucial White House positions.
The Post‘s tally came just before the Washington Examiner published an excerpt of an upcoming interview between Trump and Examiner journalist Salena Zito for Sirius XM’s “POTUS” station in which the president called seventh U.S. President Andrew Jackson a “swashbuckler” and asked why there was a Civil War.
Trump said of the slave-owning president who signed the Indian Removal Act and died 16 years before the war began in 1861, “He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. And he was really angry that—he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War—if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
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Nadia Prupis is a Common Dreams staff writer.
May 01, 2017 How long before Nancy Pelosi is officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia?
Some of the Democratic Party’s Marxist stalwarts are getting up there in age and it’s finally beginning to show: In public appearances they are having an increasingly difficult time enunciating their words, remembering key facts and clearly conveying their hatred for President Donald J. Trump.
http://newstarget.com/2017-05-01-how-long-before-nanci-pelosi-is-officially-diagnosed-with-alzheimers-or-dementia.html
I disagree with the idea that the principal reason for the US Civil War (War Between The States, also known as) was slavery. It’s akin to reducing World War 2 to a philanthropic war to save the Jews, which it wasn’t. It may have been the pretext but it was, at best, a peripheral reason. Among the various (real) reasons for the civil war was at least the one that is most plausible: the central government led by Abraham Lincoln (representing the industrial moneyed elite of the North) wanted to maintain their power over the other, less industrialised states of the South and utilise their resources to further their industrialisation, expansion and capitalist accumulation, as well as to keep the Union together as a federation (where secession is not allowed) instead of a motley collection or confederation of independent states.
I agree with John Roberts. But I don’t think even Trump could have made a deal with Jefferson Davis; maybe if Newton Knight had been head of the Confederacy things would have been different.