President Donald Trump was immediately on the defensive in his primetime address Wednesday, insisting he’s “fixing” his predecessor’s “mess”—but his arguments were filled with holes.
The 79-year-old president, known for making tens of thousands of false claims, was at it again during his rushed speech from the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room.
For one, Trump claimed that gasoline was under $2.50 in much of the country, but the national average last week was $2.90, according to the Energy Information Administration. He also asserted that prices reached $1.99 in many states, but AAA says no state averaged that amount or lower.
The president then repeated his assertion that he lowered drug prices by as much as 600 percent—a mathematical impossibility, even though administration officials like Dr. Mehmet Oz tried to spin it otherwise.
In his address, Trump tried to credit his tariffs for how companies in the U.S. are “building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen.” However, factory construction spending fell this year after peaking during the last year of his predecessor’s term.
Trump’s claim that he has brought in $18 trillion in investments also doesn’t square with the White House’s figure of $9.6 trillion.
Another problematic claim by the president: that more Americans are working than ever before. The nation’s unemployment rate reached a four-year high last month, and about 700,000 more Americans were unemployed in November than before Trump took office.
In an effort to confront the issue of “affordability,” which he has been claiming is “hoax” created by Democrats, Trump argued that the price of a Thanksgiving turkey fell by one-third in the last year. He may have been exaggerating by more than double, as the American Farm Bureau estimated turkey prices dropped about 16 percent. When it comes to wholesale, however, prices rose this year due to avian flu outbreaks, according to Purdue University.
The White House last month was called out for promoting how Walmart’s Thanksgiving food package was less than it was last year—without mentioning that it had fewer items.
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