Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Excellent. "AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP distort on health care, vote fraud" A shorter version:

That first day is a stark example of Trump's truth-free America.

HEALTH CARE

TRUMP: “We protected your preexisting conditions. Very strongly protected preexisting ... and you don’t hear that.”

THE FACTS: You don’t hear it because it’s not true.

[...]

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is pressing the Supreme Court for full repeal of the Obama-era law, including provisions that protect people with preexisting conditions from health insurance discrimination.

With “Obamacare” still in place, preexisting conditions continue to be covered by regular individual health insurance plans.

VOTING FRAUD

[...]

TRUMP, on mail-in voting: “Absentee — like in Florida — absentee is good. But other than that, they’re very, very bad.”

THE FACTS: He’s making a false distinction. Mail-in ballots are cast in the same way as absentee mail ballots, with the same level of scrutiny such as signature verification in many states.

___

TRUMP, on the November vote count and Democrats: “We have to be very, very careful and this time they are trying to do it with the whole post office scam. They will blame it on the post office. You can see them setting it up.”

THE FACTS: No postal scam has emerged from the Democrats. Instead Trump has given credence to suspicions that he wants to suppress mail-in voting to help his chances in the election.

[...]

Over the weekend, the House approved legislation that would reverse recent changes in postal operations and send $25 billion to shore up the agency before the November election, but the White House has said Trump would veto it.

During a House hearing, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy acknowledged that Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in ballots are “not helpful,” but he denied that recent cuts were linked to the election.
___

TRUMP, on defective ballots in an election: “What does defective mean? It means fraud.”

THE FACTS: No, defective ballots do not equate to fraud. The overwhelming majority aren’t.
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POLICE

REP. STEVE SCALISE of Louisiana on the police: “Joe Biden has embraced the left’s insane mission to defund them.”

THE FACTS: No, Biden has explicitly rejected the call by some on the left to defund the police. He has proposed more money for police, conditioned on improvements in their practices.

[...]

Specifically, he calls for a $300 million infusion into federal community policing grant programs. That’s more money, not less.
___

BIDEN AGENDA

NIKKI HALEY, former ambassador to the United Nations, on the Democrats: “They want a government takeover of health care. They want to ban fracking and kill millions of jobs.”

REP. JIM JORDAN of Ohio on the Democratic agenda: “Defund the police, defund border patrol and defund our military.”

RONNA McDANIEL, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee: “You deserve to know that they would ban fracking and eliminate fossil fuels, which would kill millions of good-paying jobs and raise the cost of driving our cars and heating our homes. You deserve to know that they want a complete government takeover of our health care system, so moms like me won’t be able to take our kids to the same pediatrician they’ve been seeing for years.”

THE FACTS: Those aren’t Biden’s positions. A number of Republican speakers seized on proposals of the Democratic left, in some cases distorting those positions, and assigned them to Biden, who doesn’t share those views.

He does not favor a government takeover of health care; instead he proposes building on “Obamacare,” which preserves the private insurance market while expanding Medicaid.

He also did not endorse proposals to cease border enforcement or even to decriminalize illegal crossings.

Biden supports banning only new oil and gas permits, fracking included, on federal land. But most U.S. production is on private land — the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says production on federal land accounted for less than 10% of oil and gas in 2018.

In a March 15 primary debate, Biden misstated his energy policy, suggesting he would allow no new fracking. His campaign quickly corrected the record. Biden has otherwise been consistent on his middle-of-the-road position, going so far as to tell an anti-fracking activist that he “ought to vote for somebody else” if he wanted an immediate fracking ban.
___

PANDEMIC

DONALD TRUMP JR. on the coronavirus response: “The president quickly took action and shut down travel from China.”

THE FACTS: He didn’t shut down travel from China. He restricted it. Dozens of countries took similar steps to control travel from hot spots before or around the same time the U.S. did.

[...]

Additionally, more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also told The Associated Press that the federal government was slow to understand how much coronavirus was spreading from Europe, which helped drive the acceleration of outbreaks across the U.S. in late February. Trump didn’t announce travel restrictions for many European countries until mid-March.
___

DONALD TRUMP JR.: “The president acted quickly and ensured ventilators got to hospitals that needed them most. He delivered PP&E to our brave front-line workers.”

THE FACTS: No, not all hospitals and front-line workers got the ventilators and personal protective equipment they needed. States were left scrambling in the early weeks of the pandemic, while Trump scoffed at some of their requests, calling them inflated.
___

ECONOMY

DONALD TRUMP JR, on his father: “So if you’re looking for hope, look to the man who did what the failed Obama-Biden administration never could do and built the greatest economy our country has ever seen.”

THE FACTS: That’s false. The economy was healthy before the coronavirus pandemic hit but not the best in U.S. history.
___

McDANIEL: “You deserve to know about their plans to raise taxes on 82% of Americans.”

THE FACTS: That’s not the plan. Biden says he won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000.

An analysis of Biden’s tax plan .. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/3/10/the-biden-tax-plan-updated .. by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model in March found that the bottom 90 percent of income earners would not pay more in federal income taxes under Biden’s proposal.
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TRUMP JR. on his father: “He’s pledged to repeal the Trump tax cuts, which were the biggest in our country.”

THE FACTS: Trump’s tax cuts are nowhere close to the biggest in U.S. history.

It’s a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years. As a share of the total economy, a tax cut of that size ranks 12th, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest, followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.

Post-Reagan tax cuts also stand among the historically significant: President George W. Bush’s cuts in the early 2000s and Obama’s renewal of them a decade later.

Biden has pledged to raise taxes on wealthy people and not the middle class and working class.
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Seitz reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.
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Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

https://apnews.com/7c6c47ba0bef4fb26ca667e4ea15e131

Bullshit and deceit reign in Trump's incorrigibly dishonest fiefdom.