WAPO - 26 hours, 29 Trumpian false or misleading claims

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In a period of less than 26 hours — from 6:31 p.m. on July 24 to 8:09 p.m. on July 25 — President Trump made two fired-up speeches, held a news conference and tweeted with abandon, leaving a trail of misinformation in his wake. Here’s a roundup of his suspect claims.

National Scout Jamboree at Glen Jean, W.Va., 6:31 p.m. EST, July 24, 2017

“19th Boy Scout Jamboree, wow, and to address such a tremendous group. Boy, you have a lot of people here. The press will say it’s about 200 people. It looks like about 45,000 people. You set a record today. You set a record. That’s a great honor, believe me.”

The figure of 45,000 is not official but if so, that would not be a record. The most-attended single-site jamboree was held in 1964, in Valley Forge, Pa., with 50,960 attendees. In 1973, the jamboree was held in two sites, in Idaho and Pennsylvania, for a total of 73,610 attendees. (Those are raw numbers. In terms of percentage of Boy Scouts attending, 2010 holds the record.) At last count, 26,000 Scouts were expected at the 2017 event, suggesting it would fall well short of the record.

“Our stock market has picked up — since the election November 8th. Do we remember that date? Was that a beautiful date? What a date.”

Trump equates the rise of the stock market since the election as a demonstration of a good economy. But the stock market had already been rising for years before he was elected — and he called it “a big, fat, ugly bubble.”

“And you know we have a tremendous disadvantage in the electoral college — popular vote is much easier.”

According to a tally by John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, every Republican president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 won a larger share of the electoral college votes than Trump, with the exception of George W. Bush (twice) and Nixon in 1968.

“We had the best jobs report in 16 years. The stock market on a daily basis is hitting an all-time high.”

Trump appears to referring to the fact that the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent in June, which is a 16-year low. (This was a slight increase from 4.3 percent in May.) The unemployment rate was 4.8 percent in January, when Trump took office — and when he campaigned for president he routinely said the unemployment numbers were phony and were actually as high as 42 percent. (The actual jobs report was nothing special, with fewer jobs created than in June 2016.) As we noted, during the campaign Trump often said the stock market was in “a big, fat, ugly bubble.” Now he celebrates its continued rise.

“And very soon, Rick, we will be an energy exporter. Isn’t that nice — an energy exporter? In other words, we’ll be selling our energy instead of buying it from everybody all over the globe.”

The United States is already exporting energy, and has exported more than it has imported since 2015. Led by the hydraulic fracturing techniques, the United States and the rest of the world have been in the midst of an energy revolution that began nearly 15 years ago. Saudi Arabia leads the world with one-fifth of the world’s oil reserves.

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