AP fact check: Donald Trump on North Korea, wages, climate; dem misfires
Straining for deals on trade and nukes in Asia, President Donald Trump hailed a meeting with North Korea’s leader that he falsely claimed President Barack Obama coveted, asserted a U.S. auto renaissance that isn’t and wrongly stated air in the U.S. is the cleanest ever as he dismissed climate change. He also ignored the reality in suggesting that nobody had implicated Saudi’s crown prince in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s own intelligence agencies and a United Nations investigator, in fact, have pointed a finger at the prince. The president’s misstatements over the weekend capped several days of extraordinary claims, including a false one accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of a crime and misrepresenting trade in multiple dimensions. Democratic presidential candidates, meantime, stepped forward for their first debates and tripped at times on issues dear to them: climate change, health care and immigration among them. A look at the misstatements: AUTOMAKERS TRUMP: “Many, many companies — including South Korea — but many companies are coming into the United States. … Car companies, in particular. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio and North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Florida. … We hadn’t had a plant built in years — in decades, actually. And now we have many plants being built all throughout the United States — cars.” — remarks Sunday to Korean business leaders in Seoul. THE FACTS: Car companies are not pouring into the U.S. as Trump suggests, nor does he deserve all the credit for those that have moved here. He’s also wrong in saying that auto plants haven’t been built in decades. A number of automakers — Toyota, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen among them — opened plants in recent decades, mostly in the South. Government statistics show that jobs in auto and parts manufacturing grew at a slower rate in the two-plus years since Trump took office than in the two prior years. Between January of 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, and May of this year, the latest figures available, U.S. auto and parts makers added 44,000 jobs, or a 4.6 percent increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.But in the two years before Trump took office, the industry added 63,600 manufacturing jobs, a 7.1 percent increase. The only automaker announcing plans to reopen a plant in Michigan is Fiat Chrysler, which is restarting an old engine plant to build three-row SUVs. It’s been planning to do so since before Trump was elected. GM is even closing two Detroit-area factories: one that builds cars and another that builds transmissions. Toyota is building a new factory in Alabama with Mazda, and Volvo opened a plant in South Carolina last year, but in each case, that was in the works before Trump took office. Automakers have made announcements about new models being built in Michigan, but no other factories have been reopened. Ford stopped building the Focus compact car in the Detroit suburb of Wayne last year, but it’s being replaced by the manufacture of a small pickup and a new SUV. That announcement was made in December 2016, before Trump took office.GM, meantime, is closing factories in Ohio and Maryland. Trump can plausibly claim that his policies have encouraged some activity in the domestic auto industry. Corporate tax cuts freed more money for investment, and potential tariff increases on imported vehicles are an incentive to build in the U.S. But when expansion does happen, it’s not all because of him. Fiat Chrysler has been planning the SUVs for several years and has been looking at expansion in the Detroit area, where it has unused building space and an abundant, trainable automotive labor force. Normally it takes at least three years for an automaker to plan a new vehicle. NORTH KOREA TRUMP: “President Obama wanted to meet, and Chairman Kim would not meet him. The Obama administration was begging for a meeting. They were begging for meetings constantly. And Chairman Kim would not meet with him.” — joint news conference Sunday with South Korea’s president in Seoul. THE FACTS: That’s not the case. While Obama came into his presidency saying he’d be willing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and other U.S. adversaries “without preconditions,” he never publicly sought a meeting with Kim. Obama eventually met Cuba’s President Raul Castro and spoke to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone but took a different stance with Kim in 2009 as North Korea was escalating missile and nuclear tests. “This is the same kind of pattern that we saw his father engage in, and his grandfather before that,” Obama said in 2013. “Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior. You don’t get to bang your — your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.” Ben Rhodes, who was on Obama’s national security team for both terms, tweeted: ?”Obama never sought a meeting with Kim Jong Un.” Trump has portrayed his diplomacy with Kim as happening due to a special personal chemistry and friendship, saying he’s in “no rush” to get Kim to commit fully to denuclearization. INCOME INEQUALITY TRUMP: “Blue-collar workers are doing fantastic. They’re the biggest beneficiary of the tax cuts, the blue collar.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan. THE FACTS: Wrong. While most middle-income taxpayers did see a tax cut this year, Trump’s tax cut clearly skewed to the wealthy rather than lower-income groups such as manufacturing workers, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. It found that taxpayers making $308,000 to $733,000 stood to benefit the most. The Joint Committee on Taxation separately found the tax cuts were particularly helpful to businesses and people making more than $100,000 annually. LARRY KUDLOW, White House economic adviser: “The United States economy is booming. It’s running at roughly 3 percent average since President Trump took office two and a half years ago. On this business about bad distribution, the blue-collar
Chuck Yeager “endorsement” of Donald Trump? False, Snopes says
Snopes.com has debunked the recent “endorsement” of presidential candidate Donald Trump by aviation hero and retired Air Force Gen. Chuck Yeager. The latest online legend began as a Nov. 5 post on “conservative strategist” Gary Forbes‘ blog. An about 1,900-word article purportedly written by the 92-year-old former test pilot — famous for the being first person to break the sound barrier — reads as a defense of Trump. For example, “while it may surprise many, he’s actually humble when it comes to his generosity and kindness,” it says. The post also sticks up for Trump as a friend of the military and believer in a strong national security plan, among other things. One problem: Yeager didn’t write it, according to Snopes, a fact-checking website for claims in email chains and on the Internet. This article, titled “Donald Trump — Who He REALLY Is by Chuck Yeager,” was not written by the retired USAF General, nor was it first published on the Gary Forbes website. The article has been posted on a variety of blogs and websites … Chuck Yeager’s name was eventually tacked on to the essay, first by Catholic.org in August, and later by Gary Forbes, but this form of credit was undertaken without the General’s knowledge or approval. As people started to tweet links to the post, Yeager’s personal Twitter account (@GenChuckYeager) tweeted back not to. “Please delete this,” read one tweet. “As a military person, I do not publicly endorse candidates.” Screenshots of the tweets were included in the Snopes post, but it appears they’ve since been hidden from Yeager’s public Twitter account. (Here’s a direct link to one of them.)
