Fact-checking Donald Trump's CPAC claims about elections, immigration, economy
PolitiFact fact-checked several statements former President Donald Trump made during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4.
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Former President Donald Trump vowed to a Republican audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference to "finish what we started."
"I am your warrior, I am your justice — and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution," Trump said March 4 at the conference in National Harbor, Maryland. "I will totally obliterate the deep state."
We fact-checked several false or misleading statements he made about the 2020 election, the border, the economy and war during his more-than-90 minute speech.
Elections
This is misleading and ignores the role of the Electoral College. Trump received more popular votes in 2020 (about 74 million) than 2016 (about 63 million). But the popular vote doesn’t determine the presidential victor. Trump lost the Electoral College vote in 2020, so he lost that race for president.
But people were not denied the right to vote. Voters who encountered a faulty tabulator were given other options, including staying and waiting for a working tabulator, voting at another voting location or putting their completed ballots in a secure slot so that officials could tabulate them later.
A court rejected a request by the Republican National Committee to extend the county’s voting hours. The court concluded there was no evidence that voters were precluded from voting. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit.
When candidates run for president in the U.S., there are multiple local, state and federal races on the same ballot. The presidential contest in France in April 2022 had only one contest on the ballot.
There are other key differences in how elections operate in the two countries, including that in France nearly all voters cast their ballot on one day, in person. In the U.S., state laws generally give voters more options on how to vote, including by mail.
Border security
Trump mainly replaced barriers installed by previous administrations. When he entered office in 2017, the U.S. had 654 miles of primary border barriers (some sections of the border have up to three layers of barriers that run parallel to the border; the first impediment a migrant may face is the primary barrier). By January 2021, that number increased to 706 miles, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Trump replaced about 184 miles of dilapidated primary barriers with updated fences. When Trump says his administration "build hundreds of miles," what he's referring to is the replacement of older barriers with new fences, not hundreds of miles of barriers protecting the border for the first time.
In fiscal year 2017, Border Patrol agents recorded 310,531 apprehensions nationwide, the lowest since 1971. (This included about four months of Obama’s presidency.) But apprehensions increased after that, reaching 859,501 in fiscal year 2019.
When the coronavirus began in early 2020, migration dropped, but then steadily rose after April 2020. And the way officials tracked migration data changed as the government implemented Title 42, a public health policy intended to limit the number of people coming into the U.S. This makes it hard to compare pre-pandemic immigration data to data after March 2020.
Economy
Before COVID-19, the unemployment rate under Trump hit historic lows. Experts said Trump could take some credit for this, but he also benefited from the continuation of trends that had been in place under former President Barack Obama.
Under Trump, growth in the nation’s gross domestic product — probably the single most important statistic used to gauge the overall strength of the economy — was similar to the rate under Obama and well below that of prior presidents.
National security
Formal declarations of war by Congress are rare, and have happened in just five conflicts: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. Joseph DeThomas, a professor at Penn State University’s School of International Affairs, told PolitiFact that defining war solely based on formal declarations by Congress would exclude conflicts such as the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Iraq War.
Trump in October 2019 said that his administration was responsible for defeating "100%" of the ISIS caliphate. But weeks later, when he announced Islamic State leader Abu al-Baghdadi’s death, he walked that back, saying the figure was closer to 70%.
"(ISIS) no longer has significant territorial holdings, and its top leader has been killed. It is weaker than when Trump came to office, organizationally and ideologically and territorially," Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy specialist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, previously told PolitiFact. Trump deserves some credit for that, O’Hanlon said, but "that was mostly due to the implementation of a strategy that he inherited."
Citing a journal published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that ISIS’ African affiliates had gained significant territory, recruits and firepower.
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