Former president Donald Trump announced his third run for the White House in as many election cycles on Tuesday evening at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida.
The former president has told extensive and numerous lies throughout both his existence as a fixture in the New York City tabloids, a presidential contender and then as an occupier of the White House. He continued that tradition on Tuesday evening even as he had a more pallid and restrained delivery than his usual mode of communications at raucuous rallies.
Here are five major lies that he peddled during his presidential announcement.
Saying that he completed the wall
Throughout his 2016 campaign, Mr Trump said that he would erect a wall on the US-Mexico border and force Mexico to pay for it. At multiple rallies during the 2022 midterm elections, he said that his administration completed the wall.
“We completed the wall and then we said let's do more,” he said. “And we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall which would have been great and they said no, no, we're not going to do that.”
But Mr Trump’s administration only completed about 458 miles of the wall on the US-Mexico Border, according to US News and World Report. By comparison, the US-Mexico border is more than 1,900 miles.
Blaming the Green New Deal that has not passed
Few policies enrage conservatives as much as the Green New Deal, the proposed climate legislation that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey co-authored last Congress.
“The Socialist disaster known as the Green New Deal, which is destroying our country and the many crippling regulations that it has spawned, will be immediately terminated so that our country can again breathe and grow and thrive like it should,” he said.
But President Joe Biden did not support the Green New Deal during the 2020 campaign, although his running mate Kamala Harris did. In addition, Congress did not pass the Green New Deal, but rather the much-pared down Inflation Reduction Act, which includes lease sales for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
The ‘biggest tax cuts in history’
The former president failed to pass much major legislation throughout his time in the White House and never built a relationship with Congress. But one of his few signature accomplishments was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Despite his populist rhetoric, much of the tax cuts benefited the wealthiest Americans.
“Businesses were pouring back because of our historic tax and regulation cuts the biggest in both categories in history, bigger even than what Ronald Reagan was able to produce and he produced a lot,” he said.
But The New York Times debunked the claim. Former president Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981 remains the largest tax cut in history as a percentage of the US economy and reduction by federal revenue.
The lies about the election
It wouldn’t be a Trump event without the former president nursing his grudges about the 2020 presidential election. Specifically, he repeated his lies about how the election was “stolen” from him.
“They spent all of the money from machines and all of this stuff and they ended up two weeks later, three weeks later, by that time everyone forgot there was even an election,” he said. “It doesn't happen in third world countries. They do better than we do. It's horrible what's happening with our election election process. And I'll get that job done.”
Except, there is absolutely no evidence that the election was stolen from the former president. In addition, he mentioned how France’s election system was far more efficient during its presidential election. Though, as PolitiFact flagged earlier this year, a big reason for this is France’s national government runs presidential elections while in the United States, individual states do. Incidentally, Republicans decry Democratic efforts to pass voting rights as a federal takeover of voting.
