WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump and his GOP allies are playing loose with the facts when it comes to a successor for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Seeking to justify a possible confirmation vote before the Nov. 3 election, Trump asserted over the weekend that many high court nominations were made in an election year and in all cases, they went forward. That’s clearly not true.
In fact, just one hour after Justice Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death in February 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly made clear the Senate should not confirm a successor chosen by President Barack Obama because of the coming election. That slot ultimately went unfilled until after President Donald Trump announced a nominee 11 months later.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on Sunday also claimed a constitutional crisis if a replacement isn’t confirmed right away, insisting Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden has stated he won’t accept the election results if he loses. Biden has said he will.
The revisionist GOP history comes following a week of outright falsehoods, on subjects like auto manufacturing, voting fraud and more. Trump told a North Carolina rally that a conversation with the Japanese prime minister led to five new car companies opening in Michigan the next day. That didn’t happen.
Biden laid out a broad and largely supported case that Trump has underplayed the severity of the pandemic. But the devil was in the details: No, Trump did not call the coronavirus a hoax.
A look:
GINSBURG
TRUMP, on advancing a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year: This has happened numerous times. And every time, there was a nominee, as you know. Theres been many occasions where, frankly, it turned out to be during a presidential year. … But in all cases, they went forward. remarks Saturday to reporters.
THE FACTS: A Supreme Court nomination put forth in a presidential election year in fact wasn’t advanced in all cases.
After Scalia’s death, Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland in March 2016 to fill his seat. But McConnell, R-Ky., declined to act on the nomination, declaring that the next elected president should fill the vacancy.
Garland’s nomination lasted 293 days, extending past the November 2016 election that Trump won and expiring in January 2017. As president, Trump subsequently nominated Neil Gorsuch, who won confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate.
Democrats typically point to Garland’s example as a case of Republican hypocrisy in seeking an immediate replacement now for Ginsburg. McConnell has said Trump’s pick expected to be announced this week will get a Senate vote but hasn’t indicated when.
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TED CRUZ: I think it is particularly important that the Senate take it up and confirm this nomination before the election. Because Joe Biden has been explicit. He has said, if he doesnt win, hes going to challenge this election. Hes going to go to court. … Given that, there is a serious risk of a constitutional crisis. interview Sunday on ABC’s This Week.
THE FACTS: The Texas senator is incorrect.
Unlike Trump, Biden says he will accept the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.
Sure, the full results. Count every vote, Biden said Thursday at a CNN town hall.
Biden has been assembling a team of lawyers in anticipation of court challenges to the election process and says his legal war room will work to ensure that elections are properly administered and votes correctly counted.
Trump, who frequently asserts rigged elections and voting fraud despite the lack of evidence, has suggested he may not accept the election outcome.
The president told Fox News Sunday in July when asked whether he would accept the results: I have to see. No, Im not going to just say yes. Im not going to say no, and I didnt last time, either.
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AUTOS
TRUMP, about former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: We won Michigan first time in decades. And you know what we’ve done? Many, many car plants are now opening up … I said, ‘Shinzo, please do me a favor, we need more car companies. … We want them built here, not in Japan, please.’ He said, But we cannot do that, this is a free enterprise system. I said, … Please, I need some car companies. … I said, Shinzo, you have to do it. Next day, it was the story: ‘Five car companies opened up in Michigan.’ North Carolina rally Saturday.
THE FACTS: Trump is making up the story.
No Japanese automaker assembly plants have been announced or built in Michigan, let alone in one day, and there are no plans to add any.
There is one manufacturing facility, a joint venture between General Motors and Honda, south of Detroit. Its the $85 million expansion of an existing facility to make hydrogen fuel cells with about 100 new jobs, according to the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Subaru has a new research center with about 100 new jobs, and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi and Toyota have announced expansions of research facilities. These are not new car plants run by Japanese automakers.
In fact, the number of auto and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan fell between Trump’s inauguration and February of this year, before the coronavirus took hold. When Trump took office there were 174,200 jobs, and that dropped to 171,800 in February, according to Labor Department statistics. In July, the most recent figures available, there were 154,400 auto and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan.
That’s far from a car company renaissance in the state courtesy of Japan, as Trump asserts.
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PANDEMIC
TRUMP: If you look at what weve done and all of the lives that weve saved … this was our prediction, that if we do a really good job, well be at about a hundred and 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. And were below that substantially, and well see what comes out. But that would be if we did the good job. If the not-so-good job was done, youd be between 1.5 million I remember these numbers so well and 2.2 million. news conference Wednesday.
THE FACTS: He’s glossing over grim numbers and wrongly describing the scientific projections.
First and most notably, the U.S. is not running substantially below projections that 100,000 to 240,000 would die from COVID-19. The death toll is about 200,000 and the pandemic is far from over. Tens of thousands of new infections are being reported each day.
The White House and federal public health authorities have often pointed to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington as a source for their pandemic projections. The institute now forecasts more than 378,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19 by Jan. 1.
In early April, U.S. officials estimated at least 100,000 would die from the pandemic even if all conceivable steps were taken against it a thorough and enduring lockdown, full use of masks and more. A death toll up to 240,000 assumed aggressive mitigation.
Trump has often cited a potential death toll of 2.2 million or so a number that puts the reality of several hundred thousand deaths in a better light. He uses it to claim to have saved many lives. But such an extreme projection was merely a baseline if nothing at all were done to fight the pandemic. It was never, as he claimed, an expected death toll if the not-so-good job was done.
At an April 1 briefing, when Trump and his officials discussed the projection of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, the president held out hope of keeping deaths under 100,000. I think were doing better than that.
Now he’s trying to move the goal posts and have the public consider anything under 240,000 deaths a success.
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TRUMP: Well have manufactured at least 100 million vaccine doses before the end of the year. news conference Friday.
TRUMP: We expect to have enough vaccine for every American by April. news conference Friday.
THE FACTS: Dont count on this.
Even if one or more vaccines is authorized for emergency use by the end of this year, those numbers stretch credulity.
Public authorities are so certain there will be only limited doses at first that theyre developing plans to triage them for people who need it the most, such as health workers. In a distribution plan released this past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions best-case option was that 35 million to 45 million doses would be available by the end of December if two of the leading candidates both proved safe and effective. And those candidates require two doses, three weeks to four weeks apart.
Having enough vaccine for everyone – whenever that may be is different from getting it into peoples arms. Plans for how to accomplish that are still being worked out.
Trump is pushing hard to have a vaccine announced before the election or at least to convince people that such an outcome is possible. But federal health officials and scientists have signaled or outright stated that that is unlikely.
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BIDEN VIDEO: Trump in public: Hoax. Trump in private: Killer. video tweeted by Biden on Tuesday.
BIDEN VIDEO, showing Trump saying at a Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina: The coronavirus and this is their new hoax.
THE FACTS: The accusation is misleading. So is the selective video editing that made it appear Trump was calling the coronavirus a new hoax.
At the rally featured in the video, Trump actually said the phrases the coronavirus and this is their new hoax at separate points. Although his meaning is difficult to discern, the broader context of his words shows he was railing against Democrats for their denunciations of his administrations coronavirus response.
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, he said. You know that, right? Coronavirus. Theyre politicizing it. He meandered briefly to the subject of the messy Democratic primary in Iowa, then the Russia investigation before returning to the pandemic. They tried the impeachment hoax. … And this is their new hoax.
Asked at a news conference the next day to clarify his remarks, Trump made clear he was not referring to the coronavirus itself as a hoax.
No, no, no. he said. Hoax referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody, because weve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — Im not talking about whats happening here. Im talking what theyre doing. Thats the hoax.
He continued: Certainly not referring to this. How could anybody refer to this? This is very serious stuff.
The videos reference to Trump in private calling the virus a killer comes from the presidents interview in April with author and journalist Bob Woodward, whose new book Rage contains Trumps acknowledgment that he was playing down the virus threat in public, so as to avoid panic.
But it is incorrect for Biden to suggest, as the video does, that Trump insisted the virus was a hoax before ultimately acknowledging to the author in April that it was deadly and serious.
Trump on several occasions before that did refer publicly to the virus as a plague and a killer, while also falsely dismissing it as something that would go away on its own, in hot weather or otherwise.
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VOTING
TRUMP: A giant SCAM, and the Dems know it! tweet Sunday.
TRUMP: The big Unsolicited Ballot States should give it up NOW, before it is too late, and ask people to go to the Polling Booths and, like always before, VOTE. Otherwise, MAYHEM!!! Solicited Ballots (absentee) are OK. tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Trump is overstating the potential for mayhem and fraud in big unsolicited ballot states.
There is no such thing as an unsolicited ballot. Five states routinely send ballots to all registered voters so they can choose to vote through the mail or in person. Four other states and the District of Columbia will be adopting that system in November, as will almost every county in Montana. Election officials note that, by registering to vote, people are effectively requesting a ballot, so it makes no sense to call the materials sent to them unsolicited.
More broadly speaking, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.
In the five states that regularly send ballots to all voters who have registered, there have been no major cases of fraud or difficulty counting the votes.
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TRUMP: Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to voters, or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want. tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Its highly unlikely that any chaos in states with universal mail-in voting will cause the election result to never be accurately determined.
The five states that already have such balloting have had time to strengthen their systems, while four new states adopting it California, New Jersey, Nevada and Vermont have not. Of those nine states, only Nevada is a battleground, worth six electoral votes and only likely to be pivotal in a national presidential deadlock. The others, including the District of Columbia, are overwhelmingly Democratic.
The main states that are being contested Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin only send mail ballots to voters who request them. Trump said Thursday that such solicited ballots are absolutely OK.
Trump frequently blasts mail-in voting as flawed and fraudulent while insisting that mail ballots in certain states such as Florida, a must-win state for him, are fine. But mail-in ballots are cast in the same way as what Trump refers to as absentee mail ballots, with the same level of scrutiny such as signature verification in many states. In court filings, the Trump campaign has acknowledged that mail-in and absentee ballots are legally interchangeable terms.
States nationwide expect a surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus threat.
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TRUMP: Unsolicited Ballots are uncontrollable, totally open to ELECTION INTERFERENCE by foreign countries, and will lead to massive chaos and confusion! tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Mail-in ballots arent the biggest risk for foreign interference.
Trying to influence a federal election through mail-in ballots would probably mean paying thousands of U.S. citizens, carefully selected in pivotal states, who are willing to conspire with a foreign government and risk detection and prosecution.
Far easier and cheaper would be a social media campaign seeking to discourage certain groups of people from voting, which is something the FBI has warned about. Or a cyberattack on voter registration data that would eliminate certain voters from the rolls. That could cause havoc at polling places or election offices as officials attempt to count ballots from people who are missing from their voter databases.
Attorney General Bill Barr has raised the possibility that a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots. He argued they would be hard to detect, but thats been disputed by election experts.
Mail-in ballots are printed on special paper and must be formatted correctly in order to be processed and counted. Ballots are specific to each precinct, often with a long list of local races, and would be identified as fraudulent if everything didnt match precisely.
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TRUMP: The Governor of Nevada worked very hard to cancel all of our venues. Despite the fact that he controls the state, he failed, but would have rather done rally outside. Can you imagine this man is in charge … of the Ballots in Nevada!? Not fair, Rigged Election! tweets on Sept 14.
THE FACTS: You don’t have to imagine that man being in charge of the election because he isn’t.
Whatever his beef with Nevadas Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, the governor isn’t running the state’s new all-mail election in November. That responsibility falls to Nevada’s secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske. She is a Republican.
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OBAMAS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
TRUMP: You know, Obama came into office, they gave him the Nobel Prize, like almost immediately, right? In fact, he didnt even know why he got it. He didnt even know. He had no idea why he got it and he was right about that because nobody else does either. They still dont know. — rally in Minden, Nevada, Sept. 12.
TRUMP: But its true, Obama got it for no reason whatsoever. — rally in Henderson, Nevada, Sept. 13.
Neither of Trumps oft-stated assertions about Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize is true. The Nobel committee announced Obama as recipient of the prize on Oct. 9, 2009, nearly nine months after his inauguration — that’s not almost immediately.
As far as the reason for awarding the prize to Obama, the committee was quite clear in its 258-word statement issued 11 years ago, which focused on his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples and noted in particular Obamas vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the worlds attention and given its people hope for a better future, the committee said in its statement.
To be sure, the prize reflected aspirations more than accomplishments. When Obama was asked later why he got the prize, he did say: To be honest, I dont know. He said they give those prizes to just about anybody these days. He was making self-deprecating jokes, which Trump turned against him at his rally.
But agree or disagree with the committees decision, it gave its reasons for honoring Obama.
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Krisher reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi in Denver, and Kevin Freking, Lauran Neergaard, Eric Tucker and Douglass K. Daniel in Washington contributed to this report.
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EDITORS NOTE A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.
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