The Republican National Convention concludes with more lies by Donald Trump and the administration, plus the largest violation of the Hatch Act yet.
The Hatch Act of 1939 bans federal employees from using their position or authority to promote a partisan political group or political campaign. The ethics law also bans use of government property for these purposes.
Trump already used the White House as a venue for RNC speeches and promotional videos in earlier nights, but on this final night, he turns the most sacred government property into a backdrop for a makeshift campaign event.
Nothing will be done about this; he’s broken the Hatch Act too many times to count in the past four years. Let’s skip to the lies.
Example 1: Trump tells the audience that the United States has the lowest coronavirus fatality rate of any modern country in the world. The most recent date shows our fatality rate is “just above 3 percent in the United States, putting it in roughly the top third of countries afflicted by the coronavirus”
Example 2: Trump says that his administration has brought U.S. business operations in China back home. In reality, while his tariffs have forced some businesses to find new suppliers, most of those businesses have switched to working with Mexico or Vietnam rather than expensive U.S. producers.
Example 3: Trump claims that he has made the United States energy independent. This is false. About half of the oil used in the U.S. is imported from other countries. We are the largest producer of oil and natural gas, but that happened under Barack Obama.
Example 4: Trump warns that Joe Biden will defund the police. Joe Biden has advocated for increasing police funding.
Example 5: Trump repeats his Obamagate conspiracy, that Obama and Biden spied on his 2016 campaign. The F.B.I. did wiretap someone, Carter Page, in its investigation of Russian interference. However, Page was no longer working with the campaign.
Example 6: Trump promises that his administration will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. In reality, he has spent the past four years making numerous attempts to overturn the only legislation that protects patients with pre-existing conditions.
Example 7: Trump claims to have built 300 miles of his border wall and says he will finish it if he’s reelected. But the 300 miles he has built have mostly been repairs where a wall already existed, and his “impenetrable” wall has been cut through with power tools and climbed with ladders on multiple occasions.
Example 8: Trump repeats the lie that his administration is responsible for the Veterans Choice healthcare program. That is actually an Obama administration law from 2014.
Example 9: Trump says he has kept our military out of wars and brought our troops home from the Middle East. On multiple occasions, Trump has nearly started a war, and the number of troops in the Middle East are about the same as when Trump became president.
There are more lies from Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Ivanka Trump, and others that you can find in the sources linked below, but let’s wrap this up with the biggest lie of them all:
Example 10: Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, tells Americans that Donald Trump is the only president in modern history to follow through on every campaign promise he made.
President Trump has failed to live up to a number of key campaign pledges. There has been no large-scale rebuilding of America’s infrastructure, no manufacturing renaissance, no elimination of the federal debt, no deportation of all 11 million undocumented immigrants and no prosecution of Hillary Clinton. On other promises, Mr. Trump can at best claim partial success. Though the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate has been repealed, he has not repealed and replaced the health care law. Though additional border barriers have been built, there is no 2,000 mile long wall nor is Mexico footing the bill.
PolitiFact, which has tracked 100 of his campaign promises, found that he has broken about half of them while keeping a quarter and compromising on another quarter.
Linda Qui, The New York Times
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/08/27/us/rnc-fact-check
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/2020-08-27-rnc-updates-n1238267/ncrd1238648#blogHeader
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/rnc-day-4-fact-check-trumps-claims-about-covid-19-drug-prices-preexisting-conditions
Photo: Public Domain