Let's Do A Fact Check On That Debate. Sure Dont Mind If I Do.

CLAIM CNN

claimed that President Donald Trump refused to call out white supremacists in the first presidential debate.

VERDICT: FALSE.

He did so explicitly and has done so before.

CNN ran a headline Tuesday evening specifically claiming: “Trump refuses to call out white supremacists.”

That is simply untrue.
When moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacists — falsely implying he had not done so in the past — Trump said, “Sure.” When Wallace asked him if he would ask “white supremacists and militia groups” to “stand down,” Trump said: “Sure. I’m willing to do that.”

He then did so, specifically mentioning the Proud Boys, a right-wing group.

CNN later changed its headline — but not before spreading the fake news about what Trump had said.

As noted before Trump has repeatedly condemned white supremacists — despite what Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail, and what Wallace implied in his inflammatory question to Trump. https://medium.com/@graham100200/fact-check-12-70b3a06a7f0

Wallace seemed poorly informed on the subject, as he was on every question he asked Trump on Tuesday involving race.
He repeated the Charlottesville “very fine people hoax,” and falsely claimed that President Trump had cancelled racial sensitivity training (he only barred the use of Critical Race Theory and racial and gender discrimination within such training.)

Oh I do love this fact-checking lark

Let's all look at another.

Fact Check:

Joe Biden Referred to China Travel Ban as ‘Hysterical Xenophobia’

CLAIM:

During the first presidential debate, President Trump accused Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden of calling his travel bans on China “xenophobic.”

VERDICT:

True. In January, Biden called Trump’s travel ban on China to slow the spread of the Chinese coronavirus “hysterical xenophobia.”

“I closed [the country], and you said, ‘He’s xenophobic. He’s a racist, and he’s xenophobic’ because you don’t think I should have closed our country,” Trump said. “You didn’t think we should have closed our country because … you thought it was terrible. You wouldn’t have closed it for another two months. By my doing it for another two months, Dr Fauci said, ‘President Trump saved thousands of lives.’”

During a campaign event on January 31, the day Trump banned travel from China, Biden referred to Trump’s plan as “hysterical xenophobia.”

Fact Check: Joe Biden Says Obama-Biden Left Trump a Booming Economy and Trump Caused a Recession

CLAIM:

“We left him a booming economy and he caused a recession,” Joe Biden said Tuesday.

VERDICT:

FALSE. Twice.

Economic growth had nearly come to a standstill by the end of the Obama administration, verging on recession. The economy grew at a perilous 1.6 per cent in 2016 and growth was declining. In the first quarter of 2017, the last in which Barack Obama was president, the rate of GDP growth fell to 1.4 per cent.

There’s no reasonable interpretation of recent history in which Donald Trump can be accused of causing the recession. The truth is that the recession was inevitable once the global pandemic hit. That’s proven by the fact that the economies of every major industrialized nation contracted due to either the pandemic itself or measures taken to combat it.

Oh I do love this Fact-checking which the Democrats started 😂😂

Fact Check: Biden Claims ‘No One Has Established’ There Is ‘Fraud Related to Mail-in Ballots’

CLAIM:

Joe Biden (D) claimed that “no one has established” that there is fraud related to mail-in voting.

VERDICT:

FALSE. There have been several well-documented examples of fraud and error in relation to vote-by-mail.

During a discussion on accepting the results of the election and the increase in mass vote-by-mail, Biden proclaimed that “no one has established, at all, that there is fraud related to mail-in ballots — that somehow it’s a fraudulent process.”

“It’s already been established,” Trump quipped, prompting Biden to say that Trump had “no idea what he’s talking about.”

Despite the former vice president’s claim, there are numerous instances of fraud and error related to vote-by-mail, as Breitbart News has extensively detailed over the months.

This month, for example, several mailed-in ballots in Wisconsin were discovered in a ditch alongside other mail. Recently in Virginia, 1,000 people who requested absentee ballots received two in the mail; and over the summer, a dead cat in Atlanta received a voter registration form by mail.

Also over the summer, two Paterson, New Jersey, councilmen and two men linked to a councilman’s campaign were charged with
“election fraud, mail-in voting fraud, and illegal possession of mail-in ballots,” as Breitbart News extensively detailed.

Additionally, a local TV station conducted an experiment over the summer, which further exposed the flaws in the vote-by-mail system. They sent 100 “‘mock ballots’ from across the city to a P.O. box set up specifically for the test.” The experiment found that just 97 per cent of the ballots arrived, leaving three per cent of voters effectively “disenfranchised by mail.”

Last month, a Democrat operative stated that anti-Trump United States Postal Service (USPS) workers will “sometimes help election fraudsters by throwing in the garbage mail-in ballots from Republican-heavy neighbourhoods.”

Additionally:

• New York City officials mailed absentee ballots with the incorrect names and addresses on the return envelopes.
• Michigan clerks had to reject 10,694 primary ballots because the voters were deceased.
• Hundreds of New Jersey Republicans received mail-in primary ballots featuring Democrat candidates.
• A mail carrier in Virginia’s Pendleton County pleaded guilty to election fraud for “altering the party affiliation on absentee ballot request.”
• Over 1,600 New Jersey primary ballots were discovered in a “mislabeled” bin after the election.

Over the weekend, Trump provided further evidence of vote-by-mail fraud to reporters, as Breitbart News reported:

• In Brooklyn, 25 per cent of mail-in ballots were ruled invalid during the June Democrat primary.
• In a New Jersey special election, nearly 20 per cent of the ballots were thrown out, and four people are being prosecuted for fraud.
• In a Florida primary, more than 35,000 mail-in ballots were rejected, and over 100,000 ballots were rejected in California.
• In Pennsylvania’s primary, half of the counties were still counting ballots a week after the election.
• The story of discarded military ballots discovered in Pennsylvania, many of them were cast for Trump.
• Reports in Wisconsin of three trays of mail containing absentee ballots were found in a ditch.
• In North Carolina, voters reported receiving two ballots in the mail

Fact Check: Biden Falsely Claims the Trade Deficit with China is Higher Now

CLAIM:

“We have a higher deficit with China now than we did before,” Joe Biden said at the debate Tuesday night.

VERDICT: FALSE.

The U.S. trade deficit in goods is on pace to be at its lowest since 2009.

Unfortunately, much of the decline in the trade deficit is not a result of trade policy. It’s been caused, in large part, by the pandemic and the economic disruptions that have lowered U.S. demand for Chinese goods and China’s ability to supply them.

Census Bureau data shows that in the first six months of the year, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with China of around $132 billion. If that keeps up, and it appears that it may, that would put the deficit at $264 billion, the lowest since the year Barack Obama took office during the Great Recession.

But Biden’s comment would likely have been wrong even without the pandemic reducing trade flows. Last year, as the Trump administration raised tariffs on Chinese goods, the trade deficit fell to $345.2 billion from $418 billion the prior year. That is slightly lower than it was in the last year of the Obama-Biden administration and lower than in the first year of the Trump administration when trade was still being conducted under the terms set by Obama-Biden.

CLAIM:

Democrat governors praised the Trump administration’s response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, President Trump said Tuesday during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio.

VERDICT: True.

In March, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) expressed his gratitude to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for supporting the state’s efforts to build up drive-through testing centres, according to Breitbart News.

“I want to thank the vice president, and especially the president, who facilitated this and moved quickly,” he said.

In April, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) echoed Cuomo’s comments during Pence’s visit to the Mayo Clinic.

“I can tell you that the vice president spends countless hours on the phone with governors every week; he’s there to pick up the phone when we call. I want to thank you and the president,” Walz said.

At the White House in April, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) also praised the administration’s response.

“We are grateful to both President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence for keeping Louisiana at the forefront of this fight against COVID-19 and appreciate them understanding the necessity of these ventilators for the survival of our people,” Bel Edwards said, “especially in light of today’s sobering numbers.”

During the debate Tuesday, Trump said Biden did not think the country should have been closed to protect citizens as much as possible.

“You wouldn’t have closed it for another two months. By doing it early, in fact, Dr Fauci said, ‘President Trump saved thousands of lives.’ Many of your Democrat governors said, ‘President Trump did a phenomenal job,’” he told the former vice president.

The president continued:

We worked with the governors. Oh really? Go take a look. The governors said I did a phenomenal job. Most of them said that. In fact, people that would not be necessarily on my side said that, “President Trump did a phenomenal job.” We did. We got the gowns, we got the masks, we made the ventilators. You wouldn’t have made ventilators, and now we’re weeks away from a vaccine. We’re doing therapeutics already. Fewer people are dying when they get sick. Far fewer people are dying. We’ve done a great job.

However, Trump said the media kept giving him bad press regarding his response to the pandemic, calling it “fake news.”

“They give you good press, they give me bad press because that’s the way it is, unfortunately,” he said, adding that he did not care and that he had become “used to it.”

“But I’ll tell you, Joe, you could never have done the job that we did. You don’t have it in your blood You could have. never done that job,”

the president concluded.

Fact Check: Biden Falsely Claims the Pandemic Recovery Helps Only the Wealthy

Claim:

Joe Biden said on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s efforts to soften the blow of the coronavirus pandemic and revive the economy had only benefited the wealthy and inflated the stock market.

Verdict: FALSE.

The stock market has recovered much faster than many expected after crashing in the early weeks of the pandemic — but so has the broader recovery. The unemployment rate has dropped much lower than many thought it would, from 14.4 per cent to 8.4 per cent. The economy has added tens of millions of jobs as states lifted lockdown orders.

Several of the administration’s programs bolstered Americans with low and middle incomes rather than the wealthy:

• the economic impact payments handed out $1,200 to most Americans, with more going to bigger families, but was capped at around $100,000 of income;
• federal government enhancements to unemployment benefits increased jobless payments by $600 per week, which allowed a huge share of Americans who had lost their jobs to receive more income than they had while working.
• the Paycheck Protection Program lent hundreds of millions to small businesses, keeping millions of Americans employed even when the economy was largely shuttered; and
• federal programs to pause student loan payments and stop foreclosures have helped millions avoid debt trouble during the crisis.

Because of the Trump administration’s relief programs, poverty declined even as the economy was ravaged by the pandemic

Fact Check: Chris Wallace and Joe Biden Repeat Charlottesville ‘Very Fine People Hoax’ at Presidential Debate

CLAIM:

Both moderator Chris Wallace and Democrat nominee Joe Biden claimed that President Trump said in response to riots in Charlottesville in 2017 that neo-Nazis were “very fine people.”

VERDICT: FALSE.

Biden has repeated this hoax since the beginning of his campaign. Wallace knows better.

As Breitbart News has noted in fact check after fact check:

President Trump repeatedly condemned the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in August 2017 — “totally.”

Moreover, the neo-Nazis were not the only violent group in Charlottesville. The “clash” was not with those “standing against” hate peacefully, but with violent, black-clad Antifa extremists.

As to “very fine people,” Trump had been referring to peaceful protests both for and against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

He completely condemned the extremists — as the timeline and transcript confirm:

• Aug. 12, 2017: Trump condemned “violence “on many sides” in Charlottesville, after neo-Nazi and Antifa clashes
• Aug. 14, 2017: Trump condemned “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups” in White House statement
• Aug. 15, 2017: Trump condemned neo-Nazis “totally,” praised non-violent protesters “on both sides” of statue debate

Biden launched his campaign with the Charlottesville hoax, and persisted in doing so, even after Breitbart News confronted him last August with the fact that he was misquoting the president. His words on that occasion, like his words on Wednesday, repeated his campaign launch speech almost verbatim — a script from which he refuses to depart.

Wallace should never have introduced this canard into a presidential debate. Trump tried to correct him — and Biden — by interjecting, challenging Biden to include the rest of his statement, but Wallace cut him off.

FACT CHECK: Joe Biden Claims Donald Trump Told People to Inject Bleach into Their Arms

CLAIM:

Vice President Joe Biden claimed during the first presidential debate that President Donald Trump told people to inject bleach into their arms.

VERDICT:

MOSTLY FALSE.

President Donald Trump questioned an expert during a press conference about the value of injecting disinfectant or Ultraviolet rays into the body to kill the coronavirus. He did not tell Americans to inject bleach into their arms.

From the White House transcript:

THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with… But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

During the same press conference, Trump was asked a follow-up question from a reporter about whether he thought disinfectant should be “injected into a person.”

Trump said no: “It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area.”

Later the president said he was being “sarcastic.”

“I was asking a sarcastic and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump said. “That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.”

Fact Check: Trump Paid Tens of Millions of Dollars in Taxes

Claim: President Trump said he pays millions of dollars in federal income taxes.

Verdict: TRUE.

The New York Times this week reported that Trump paid tens of millions of dollars, amounting to at least $66 milllion, in taxes since 2000.
In taxes in seven of the years of tax returns the paper looked at Trump had tax billions in the millions thanks to the alternative minimum tax.

“Mr Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017 — a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing. For 2015, he paid $641,931, his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010,” the New York Times reported.

In Trump’s first two years in office, he filed for extensions for taxes on the prior years tax filing and paid estimated taxes on those. For 2016, he paid $1 million, according to the New York Times. The following year, Trump paid $4.2 million when he filed for an extension.

When Trump eventually filed his tax returns for those years, he said his tax liability should have been $750. In other words, Trump was saying he overpaid his taxes. The Times said that Trump was able to reduce his liability by using up tax credits he had earned in connection with the renovation of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C.

The Times story also says that Trump did not get a refund for the overpayment. He just asked for credits that could be used to reduce future tax bills.

In some earlier years, Trump paid even more in taxes. According to the New York Times, Trump paid $13.3 million in 2008. In 2005 and 2006, he paid a total of $56.9 million.

His tax bill fell to zero in 2008, likely because of massive losses in the real estate sector. After the financial collapse of his Atlantic City casino operations, Trump sought and received a $70 million refund to recoup the losses. That refund, according to the Times, is what he has been fighting with the I.R.S. over for nearly a decade.

Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims Trump Did Not Ask China to Allow U.S. to Investigate Coronavirus

CLAIM: Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that President Donald Trump did not ask China’s Premier, Xi Jinping, to let the U.S. into the country to investigate coronavirus.

VERDICT: FALSE.

This is a false claim that Biden has used before, notably in a campaign ad that claimed — somewhat laughably — that Trump has rolled over for China.

Breitbart News — among others — fact-checked this claim:

Biden claims, for example, that he urged the president to send the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into China — but that the president did not, and praised China instead. The ad cites Biden’s comments from the Democrat debate on Feb. 25 in South Carolina — the first time any Democrat debate discussed the coronavirus issue: “I would be on the phone with China and making it clear, we are going to need to be in your country; you have to be open; you have to be clear; we have to know what’s going on; we have to be there with you, and insist on it and insist, insist, insist,” Biden said.

But as the Washington Post noted, U.S. officials had already visited China three days before, on Feb. 22. And they had been trying to do so since early January, according to the New York Times in early February: “For more than a month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been offering to send a team of experts to China to observe its coronavirus outbreak and help if it can. But no invitation has come — and no one can publicly explain why.”

The central claim of the ad is false.

Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims Trump Has Not Lowered Drug Prices

CLAIM: President Donald Trump has not lowered drug prices for anyone, according to former Vice President Joe Biden.

VERDICT: FALSE.

The fact is that drug prices have fallen under President Trump for the first time in nearly half a century.

As Breitbart News noted in a fact check earlier this year, Trump’s regulatory changes have removed some of the barriers to, and costs of, drug production.

As MarketWatch explained last year:

Here’s a shocker: The cost of prescription drugs are falling for the first time in 47 years.

The government on Tuesday said prescription prices sank 1% in February, marking the biggest one-month decline ever.

What’s more, the cost of prescription drugs over the past year have dropped by 1.2%. That’s the biggest 12-month decline since 1972.

What’s going on?

Drugmakers are feeling the heat, for one thing. Amid a public outcry, lawmakers in both parties from President Trump on down have been pushing drugmakers to rein in prices or face potentially stiffer rules.

Congress has already held a half-dozen hearings this year and grilled drug industry executives in public.

Episodes of pubic browbeating can only go so far, though. Government regulators are seeking to do their part by speeding up the approval of generic drugs to increase competition. A slew of new one ones are hitting the market in 2019.

Read the full MarketWatch article here.

Trump has also made experimental medicines and therapies more easily available through new laws championed by his administration, such as Right to Try. And his effort to cut red tape at the Food and Drug Administration during the coronavirus pandemic could have long-term effects in lowering drug prices.