The president, Donald Trump, exposed the public in 2019 to a dizzying amount of misstatements, misleading statements and, in several cases, lies (15,413 false or misleading statements in 1,055 days, according to The Washington Post account ). The most important of these for his legacy was the torrent of falsehoods about his relations with Ukraine, which led to a process of impeachment or political trial being initiated against him.
Since Trump broke out on the national political scene more than four years ago with the false claim that Mexico was sending criminals to the United States, the president has often used falsehoods to attack his rivals and exaggerate his popularity and successes.
We verify what he says, repeatedly, because this guides US policy. in everything from commerce to immigration.
This year, the president promoted conspiracy theories about Ukraine and other inaccurate and misleading claims about how tariffs work in an attempt to turn his trade war with China as if it were a victory, even when data shows that Americans, including farmers, they are paying the price for it.
Other less serious falsehoods, but no less false, also appeared in the headlines.
Here we tell you about the 10 worst deceptive, false or unsubstantiated statements Trump made this year, and what the facts are about it. In addition, we include a repeated statement that finally, in October, came true.
Falsehood 1: Ukraine interfered in the 2016 elections
Video: Those accused of Russian interference increase in 2016 elections
This statement is false, according to the unanimous evaluation of the US intelligence community. and according to former special prosecutor Robert Mueller , who spent two years investigating Russia's efforts to interfere in the US elections.
The Russian government, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 elections "in a radical and systematic way," Mueller's report concluded, and Russia worked to boost Trump's campaign and harm his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton .
Even so, both in private and public comments, as well as in the crucial call of July 25 with the new president of Ukraine, Trump repeatedly pressed or made reference to a conspiracy theory that Ukraine and the Democrats unfairly accused Russia for the electoral interference, to discredit his presidency.
In the already famous July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy , the same call in which Trump asked him to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump turned that conspiracy theory around.
He talked about "this whole situation with Ukraine," "Democratic computer servers and CrowdStrike" (the private cybersecurity firm hired by the National Democratic Committee to investigate a hacking that the FBI concluded was a plan to hack and download information designed by Moscow, part of a major pro-Trump influence and propaganda campaign.
"The server, they say that Ukraine has it," Trump said, according to a record of the White House call. "I would like you to get to the bottom of it," he continued. "They say a lot started with Ukraine."
Later, Trump suggested to reporters that Clinton's emails could be in Ukraine.
In fact, there is no evidence that Ukraine has made any kind of electoral interference effort. Ukraine does not host a Democratic server, and Clinton's emails don't hide there either. Members of Trump's own administration, such as former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Bossert, said they tried to tell Trump that this was not true.
The conspiracy, which was first published in a far-right chat, 4chan, in March 2017, appears to be part of Trump's broader effort to discredit Mueller's investigation and undermine the idea that a foreign government helped him be elected.
Trump's unfounded fascination with Ukraine is an integral part of the false claims he has made about Biden, who is running to challenge him in the 2020 elections.
The president's obsession with Ukraine therefore played a leading role in the investigation of the political trial launched by the House of Representatives on whether Trump abused the power of his office while trying to pressure a vulnerable ally to announce investigations on the Biden and on Democrats, which could boost their efforts to be re-elected.
During the weeks of hearings and testimony in the course of the impeachment investigation, members of the State Department, the Department of Defense and Trump's own administration declared under oath again and again that it was Russia, and not Ukraine or the former vice president, who committed illegalities.
Trump's former Russian government expert, Fiona Hill , said the idea that Ukraine influenced the 2016 elections was a "fictional narrative" promoted by Russian intelligence services, and rebuked Republicans in the House of Representatives for using it to defend the president against impeachment .
Trump and members of the Republican Party say that the actions his government took towards Ukraine were not motivated by political or personal interests, but by a legitimate concern about corruption in the country, including the alleged Ukrainian electoral interference.
"In the course of this investigation, I would ask you to please not promote falsehoods with political motivations that clearly promote Russian interests," Hill said in his statement to Congress. "I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is an American adversary and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016."
False 2: Biden acted corruptly as vice president to benefit his son
Video: Trump admits that he talked about Biden with the president of Ukraine
Trump says he spoke with the president of Ukraine about his political rival Biden, in the call to the center of the secret complaint that unleashed the political trial, for one reason: his desire to eradicate corruption.
The former vice president, according to Trump, exerted his influence to benefit the work in the private sector of his son Hunter in Ukraine.
In May, Trump said Biden unduly dismissed a Ukrainian prosecutor, a claim he repeated in July's call with Zelenskiy. Trump later said that the dismissal was to protect Hunter Biden, who served on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy company at the time.
But despite Trump's continued claims, there is no evidence that Biden has committed irregularities. The removal of that Ukrainian prosecutor was a US policy. under the administration of former president Barack Obama .
Although Obama's government officials expressed concern at the time about the appearance of a conflict of interest that Hunter Biden's work posed for the vice president, these officials declared under oath, as part of the Trump political investigation, that there was no evidence that Biden himself had worked for anything other than to promulgate US policies.
False 3: The secret informant made "false statements" in his complaint
Video: Series of emails confirm that the order to withhold aid to Ukraine left the White House
In September, it was learned that an anonymous person from the US intelligence services community had filed a formal complaint ( whistleblower complaint , in English) about the president's relations with Ukraine, including July's call with Zelenskiy, and that the Trump administration I was preventing that complaint from reaching Congress.
At the end of the month, Congress obtained the nine-page complaint from the anonymous or anonymous whistleblower . The author wrote that he filed this complaint because he believed Trump was "using the power of his office to request interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 elections, and detailed alleged actions by the president and other government officials to pressure Ukraine to open investigations that were politically advantageous for them.
The Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives, on September 26, published a declassified version of this complaint, part of the preliminary investigation of the political trial.
Trump later made several misleading statements about that complaint, accusing the informant of making false allegations.
“He got his information, I guess, second or third hand. He wrote something that was a total fiction, "Trump said in October.
"The complainant made false statements," Trump said on another occasion days later. "Too bad," he later wrote in a tweet in November.
There is no evidence to support this; rather, the available evidence supports what the complainant said. The actions and conversations described in the complaint have been largely corroborated , both by the record of Zelenskiy's call published by the White House, and by the sworn testimony of Trump's advisers, according to an exhaustive NPR report , the National Public Radio
In fact, the informant used first and second hand information in the complaint, according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, noted that this is an acceptable practice in this type of complaint ( whistleblower complaint ).
Falsehood 4: Article II of the Constitution allows me to “do what I want”
"Article II lets me do what I want," Trump told ABC News in June.
"I have Article II, where I have the right to do what I want as president," he said in Washington in July.
What does Article II of the Constitution really say? It establishes the executive power and describes the power of the presidency. It gives the president a lot of power, but he doesn't say he can do what he wants, without restrictions.
In addition, Article II also describes the political trial as a remedy for a troubled president: "The President, the Vice President and all United States Civil Officers will be removed from their Office through a political trial and a conviction for Treason, Bribery, or other serious and minor crimes. "
Falsehood 5: We are "nailing China with taxes" with tariffs
Video: The US-China trade war will weigh on everyone's bag
"You are not paying for those tariffs. China is paying those tariffs," the president told a crowd in Ohio in August. "Until there is an agreement, we will be putting tariffs on China."
Trump repeatedly used a fundamental misunderstanding about how tariffs work to defend US trade policy, and repeatedly told voters that the country was using those tariffs to take advantage of the wealth of other countries.
Economists and experts told NBC News that this is false. Consumers who buy foreign products are those who pay extra for these tariffs. In August, JP Morgan estimated that the cost of these liens on average for US families was more than $ 1,000.
False 6: Mueller's report "totally exonerated" Trump
Video: Robert Mueller reveals why he decided not to blame or exonerate Trump
"Complete and total exoneration," Trump wrote in a tweet in March after Mueller's report was published. It is an inaccurate and misleading statement that often repeats.
The chairman of the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives, Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, asked former special prosecutor Mueller about this claim during his hearing before Congress:
"Did you totally exonerate the president?"
"No," said Mueller.
Mueller's report was also clear in this regard: "If we were confident after an exhaustive investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction to justice, we would declare it," says the report. "While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, he does not exonerate it either."
False 7: Where Hurricane Dorian was expected to hit
In September, the president was criticized for tweeting that Hurricane Dorian was expected to hit the state of Alabama, although the vast majority of forecasts said it would not be so, according to a review by The Associated Press .
The National Meteorological Service in Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted that Dorian would not affect the state. The president continued to insist that he was right, even apparently altering a map with a black marker, thus misrepresenting official scientific information of the State to reflect his own opinion.
Although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would later offer a statement from an unidentified spokesperson saying that the president was right at that specific time, the public and experts continue to doubt.
Falsehood 8: Windmills cause cancer
The president has repeatedly advocated against wind (wind) energy in a way that has perplexed scientists and journalists. In April, he said that the noise of windmills causes cancer and is a "graveyard" for birds. "They kill all the birds," he said in August. In December he said it again.
The American Cancer Society has categorically rejected that claim that windmills or their sound cause cancer. Wind turbines kill birds, but common cats and communications towers kill significantly more birds than mills.
Falseness 9: Now you have to release the water from the toilet 10 to 15 times
"People are releasing toilet water 10 times, 15 times, instead of just once. They end up using more water. Therefore, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is analyzing that very strongly, thanks to my suggestion "Trump said in December.
Water conservation restrictions have been a law since the 1990s and dictate the amount of water used by toilets, but there is no evidence that low flow toilets are causing anyone to have to discharge water more than 10 times .
Trump says he ordered a review of this protocol, but that's not true: the review was ordered by a 2018 law, the Vox publication reported.
Falsehood 10: Mars and the Moon
"We will go to Mars very soon," Trump said in May during a press conference with the president of Japan.
That estimate of time is quite imprecise. There will be neither Americans nor anyone else on Mars for at least another decade, The Associated Press reported, adding that international space agencies aspire to reach Mars, early, in the 2030s.
The following month, Trump continued to boast and criticize US ambitions in space in a tweet.
NASA "should focus on the much bigger things we are doing, such as Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science," Trump tweeted in June.
This tweet, written in a confusing way and that was subject to teasing in networks, suggests that the Moon is part of Mars, and definitely is not. Trump could have been referring to NASA's "From the Moon to Mars" program that seeks to establish a human presence on the Moon as part of its major effort to reach Mars and beyond, but it is worth noting that the Moon is the natural satellite of the Earth.
Extra: The wall is being built
Video: The construction of the water wall for Donald Trump is difficult
"The wall still obviously has a long way to go, but we are building it at breakneck speed," Trump said in September.
Trump has been crediting the construction of a new border wall for years. This was the biggest falsehood of 2018, and the assertion continued to be false when he said it several times this year.
But at the end of October, according to The New York Times , the Trump administration finally began a new stretch of wall in Texas. Before, the construction that Trump boasted about was actually the replacement of old sections, not new border barrier sections.
It is not the concrete wall Trump used to campaign, Mexico is not paying for it, nor is it being built in Colorado, as Trump said in October, as this state does not even limit Mexico. But it is, finally, a new stretch of border barrier by which the president can take the credit.
Read also:
The Mueller report against Trump: what the Russian plot investigation really says
Trump's political trial was approved. Now what's next?
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