Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made at least 32 false claims in the two April interviews that Time
released this week. His serial inaccuracy spanned a wide range of subjects, including the economy, abortion, the NATO military alliance, the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, his legal cases, his record as president and the 2020 election he has relentlessly lied about for more than three years.
Trump claimed that, during his presidency, “there was very little terrorism. We had none. I had four years of — we had no terrorism.
Facts First: Trump’s own Justice Department
alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out
in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also
alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was
carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.
There were various additional terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department
said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when
one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018. In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York,
including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department
described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.
Talking about his wall on the border with Mexico, Trump said, “I completed what I said I was going to do, much more than I said I was going to do.”
Facts First: Trump
repeatedly said in 2015 and 2016 that “we need” 1,000 miles of wall to protect the southern border, with another 1,000 miles already protected by
natural barriers. But not even close to 1,000 miles were built during his presidency;
official federal statistics put the total construction at 458 miles, and only 52 miles of that total was new “primary” wall built where no barriers had previously existed.
Asked why voters should trust him with a second term when many of the people who worked closely with him during his first term now say he doesn’t deserve another term, Trump said, “Well, they don’t because I didn’t like them.
Some of those people I fired. Bill Barr, I fired Bill Barr. I didn’t want him.”
Facts First:
This is false. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020; he was not fired, as a White House official confirmed to CNN at the time. Trump had been frustrated with Barr over Barr’s public rejection of his lies about mass election fraud and had been seriously considering firing Barr the same month, but Trump did not do so — and he made a positive public statement about Barr upon the resignation, writing on social media: “Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.”
Trump claimed that, before he negotiated a better deal, South Korea was paying far too little “for 40,000 troops that we had there.”
Facts First: Trump’s “40,000” number is inaccurate. As of December 31, 2016, less than a month before Trump took office, the US had 26,878 military personnel in South Korea, including 23,468 on active duty, according to official statistics from the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center. As of December 31, 2018, less than two months before the Trump administration signed a new deal with South Korea, the total was 29,389 US military personnel in South Korea, including 26,311 on active duty.
Trump claimed that he got South Korea to agree to pay the US “billions of dollars” for its military presence there, but “now probably now that I’m gone, they’re paying very little.” He continued, “I don’t know if you know that they renegotiated the deal I made. And they’re paying very little. But they paid us billions, many billions of dollars, for us having troops there. From what I’m hearing, they were able to renegotiate with the Biden Administration and bring that number way, way down to what it was before, which was almost nothing.”
Facts First:
Trump made two false claims here. First, it’s not even close to true that the Biden administration permitted South Korea to pay “almost nothing” for the US military presence there. In fact, as Time noted in its own fact check, South Korea agreed under President Joe Biden to pay more than it had been paying during the Trump era. Completing negotiations that began under Trump, South Korea agreed in March 2021 to a 2021 payment increase of 13.9% — meaning its payment that year would be about $1 billion — and then additional increases in 2022 through 2025 tied to increases in South Korea’s defense budget.
Second, it’s also not true that South Korea paid “almost nothing” for the US troop presence before Trump came along. South Korea
agreed to pay the US about $867 million in 2014 and,
through 2018, to increase the payments annually based on the rate of inflation. The Congressional Research Service
wrote in a 2023 report: “In the past, South Korea generally paid for 40%-50% (over $800 million annually) of the total non-personnel costs of maintaining the U.S. troop presence in South Korea.”
After boasting about what he did for Israel during his presidency, Trump said, “The people of Israel appreciate it. I have like a 98% — I have the highest approval numbers.”
Facts First:
A 2018 poll
found that 59% of Jewish Israelis had a favorable view of Trump. A poll late in the 2020 presidential election
found that 70% of Jewish Israelis thought a Trump victory would be best for Israel’s interests (versus 13% who chose Biden). A
poll released this March found that 44% of Israeli adults wanted Trump elected in 2024, 30% wanted Biden and 26% were unsure.
Hermann said
President Bill Clinton was more popular in Israel during his presidency than Trump was during his, and that “Trump has lost much of his popularity here after leaving the White House because of his hectic/sometimes antagonistic
statements.”
Ok this goes on for quite a while so im going to stop there cause it would take forever to put everything here. He lips were moving during these interviews so he was lying about everything of course.
www.newsweek.com
thehill.com
www.mediaite.com
www.rawstory.com
www.nbcnews.com
www.yahoo.com
www.dailymail.co.uk
