Fact Check: 19 False Claims in Barack Obama’s Speech for Joe Biden in Florida

Article author: 
Joel B. Pollak
Article publisher: 
Breitbart
Article date: 
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Medium
Article Body: 

President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Florida on behalf of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on Saturday, in the course of which he stated at least nineteen false claims about President Donald Trump and his record.

From the transcript:

1. “He doesn’t have a plan” for coronavirus. ...the president did, in fact, specifically mention Operation Warp Speed, his plan to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine quickly.

2. Trump couldn’t answer Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes when she asked, “What’s your priority in your second term?” In fact, Trump answered her: “The priority now is to get back to normal, get back to where we were, to have the economy rage and be great with jobs and everybody be happy. And that’s where we’re going and that’s where we’re heading.”

3. “He doesn’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem” (i.e. coronavirus).  This is obviously not true, and provably so. Trump even talked about coronavirus in his State of the Union address, which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped in two.

4. Trump said “if you put some bleach in you, that might clean things up.” Trump never said that....

5. “America created 1.5 million more jobs in the last year of the Obama-Biden administration than in the first three years of the Trump-Pence administration.” Obama seems to be saying that more jobs were created in 2016 than in 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined, which is demonstrably untrue...

6. Black unemployment went down, but “not because Donald Trump did anything.” It is possible to credit several Trump policies with lowering black unemployment, especially immigration enforcement...

7. “The only people truly better off than they were four years ago are the billionaires who got Trump tax cuts.” A Gallup poll recently found that 56% of registered voters said they were better off than they were four years ago, which is a record high....

8. “He barely pays income taxes.” In fact, Trump pays tens of millions of dollars in taxes, despite losses in some years.

9. Trump has “secret Chinese bank accounts.” The Trump hotel chain used a legal bank account to pay taxes in China when it made licensing deals....

10. “His first year in the White House he only paid $750 in federal income tax.” Trump paid over seven million dollars in taxes in 2017...

11. Trump has no plan “when it comes to preexisting conditions.” The president... issued an executive order laying out his plan in September.

12. Trump “drove up costs” under Obamacare. Actually, Obamacare premiums have been falling under Trump.

13. Trump said: “We hope the Supreme Court takes your health insurance away.” Trump never said that...

14. Trump is “MIA” when “Russia puts bounties on the heads of our brave soldiers in Afghanistan.” The Pentagon said that there was never “corroborating evidence” of a supposed Russian program to pay bounties for killing U.S. soldiers.

15. “Joe Biden would never call the men and women of our military suckers and losers.” Neither would Trump, because it never happened. Biden did call U.S. troops “stupid bastards,” however....

16. Trump asked if we could “nuke hurricanes.” Even Snopes.com regards this claim as “unproven.”...

17. Trump “cannot call out or even criticize white supremacists.” This divisive, false claim is also easily disproven.

18. Trump “threatens people with jail for just criticizing him.” This does not appear to have ever happened. Trump did threaten a reporter with prison time — after he defied instructions not to photograph a classified letter from Jim Kong-un. It was the Obama administration, that tried to prosecute journalist James Risen of the New York Times, and which jailed an obscure filmmaker after it blamed an obscure anti-Islamic YouTube video for the Benghazi terror attack in September 2012.

19. The EPA is “giving polluters free reign to dump unlimited poison into our air and water.” Demonstrably untrue....

Related

Fact Check: Kamala Harris Repeats Lies About Trump and Racism in Nevada, Breitbart, October 28, 2020.

Fact Check: Kamala Harris Lies 4 Times About Trump and Racism on ’60 Minutes’, Breitbart, October 25, 2020.

Fact Check: 19 Lies in Barack Obama's Speech for Joe Biden in Florida, Breitbart, October 24, 2020.