Washington
CNN
—
Former President Donald Trump made more than two dozen false claims at his Tuesday marketing campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin, together with two important makes an attempt to rewrite Wisconsin historical past.
The first was a barely vaguer than traditional model of his familiar lie that he received Wisconsin within the 2020 presidential election. He misplaced the state by 20,682 votes.
The second was a model of a false declare Trump delivered in 2020 and again in 2022: his assertion that he had saved the Wisconsin metropolis of Kenosha from destruction in 2020 when Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, refused to take motion to take care of the civil unrest that adopted the police taking pictures of a Black man.
“By the way in which, , Kenosha: I saved Kenosha, have you learnt that? Once I was president. Proper? Proper? I saved it,” Trump said Tuesday. “Kenosha was — Kenosha was about able to go down the tubes and the governor wouldn’t transfer, he simply wouldn’t transfer, and I moved. You recognize, I’m not presupposed to; it’s presupposed to be the governor, is meant to do it, the mayor and the governor.”
Information First: Trump’s claims that Evers “wouldn’t transfer” and that Trump was the one who “saved Kenosha” are false, as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when he made comparable claims in 2020. Evers, not Trump, deployed the Wisconsin Nationwide Guard in the course of the rioting in Kenosha — and Evers first deployed the Guard the day earlier than Trump publicly demanded that Evers accomplish that. In different phrases, Trump insisted that Evers do one thing that he was already doing.
Trump has repeatedly made a near-identical false declare about one other state, Minnesota, that had a Democratic governor and civil unrest in 2020. Although Trump has asserted that he deployed the Nationwide Guard to Minneapolis over the objection of Gov. Tim Walz, it was Walz who deployed the Guard to Minneapolis hours before Trump demanded that he do so.
The 2020 unrest in Kenosha, which concerned each peaceable protests and acts of violence and vandalism, adopted the police taking pictures of Jacob Blake by a White police officer who was responding to a domestic disturbance call on August 23, 2020. (State and federal regulation enforcement later decided to not file prices towards the officer.)
On Tuesday, after Trump repeated his false declare, the governor’s workplace supplied CNN with the identical timeline it had despatched to reporters when Trump had made the declare in 2020. The timeline, which is corroborated by public proof, conclusively debunks Trump’s narrative.
Trump tweeted on the evening of August 25, 2020, that the “governor ought to name within the Nationwide Guard in Wisconsin.” However the governor had already achieved so by then. Evers approved the deployment of 125 Wisconsin Nationwide Guard troops just after 3 a.m. the day previous to the tweet, then doubled the deployment to 250 troops on the afternoon of the tweet – greater than 4 hours earlier than Trump weighed in.
Evers continued to deploy extra Wisconsin Nationwide Guard troops within the coming days, and he additionally accepted Nationwide Guard troops from three different states; they have been by no means federalized. Evers did settle for restricted federal help from the US Marshals Service and the FBI, his workplace stated, however that’s no foundation for Trump’s claims that he saved the town when Evers wouldn’t.
The concept that the town’s very existence was ever threatened can be questionable, however we’ll depart that apart right here.
Different Trump false claims
Trump made numerous different false claims in the course of the Racine rally. Right here’s a fast truth test on 12 of them:
· He said “the world was at peace” when he was president in 2020, although there have been quite a few ongoing armed conflicts.
· He said Democrats rigged the 2020 election, which didn’t occur.
· He said folks’s votes “are likely to disappear” after they’re solid, which is simply not true.
· He said the nation is “in the course of the worst crime wave in fashionable historical past,” although preliminary statistics present crime declined sharply in 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.
· He said he has been indicted extra instances than infamous gangster Al Capone, who was indicted at least six times to Trump’s four.
· He said anyone left cocaine on the White Home “a couple of month in the past,” although that happened about 11 months ago, and said it was “a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} value of cocaine,” although images present the cocaine was in a small bag value nothing even remotely near that quantity.
· He said he went to Washington, DC, the opposite day for one in every of his trials, although the journey was actually for meetings with congressional Republicans.
· He said then-Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down his provide of 10,000 troopers on the Capitol January 6, 2021; there’s no evidence she ever received such an offer, and she or he wouldn’t have had the ability to reject it if she did.
· He said no earlier president had taken even 10 cents “out of China” from tariffs; the US has had tariffs on China since the 1700s and generated billions per yr from them underneath predecessor President Barack Obama — and examine after examine has proven that Individuals pay the tariffs, not China.
· He said Syria and Turkey have been combating over their border “for two,000 years,” although historians have said this is nonsense: Turkey and Syria have been each a part of the Ottoman Empire, and the trendy border between them is lower than 100 years previous.
· He said he thinks cumulative inflation underneath Biden is “40 or 50 p.c”; it’s actually about 19%.