Donald Trump, already notorious for his mind-blowing dishonesty, repeated many of his usual lies during last night’s presidential debate—and added some new ones.
Some of Trump’s whoppers were obviously false, while others required a bit more digging to disprove.
Here are just 20 lies that Trump told during his first debate against Hillary Clinton:
- Trump’s Lies About His Own History
- Trump’s Lies About the Economy and Finance
- Trump’s Lies About National Security
- Trump’s Lies About Crime
Trump’s lies about his own history
Lie #1: Denies making remarks about climate change.
Clinton: “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.”
Trump: “I did not—I do not say that.”
Trump has in fact said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese:
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013
NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2014
Lie #2: Denies his own proposal to negotiate down the debt.
Clinton: “You even went and suggested that you would try to negotiate down the national debt of the United States.”
Trump: “Wrong.”
Trump has said that as president, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal” on the debt. Economists have widely panned this idea aseconomically catastrophic.
Lie #3: Denies supporting the Iraq War.
“I did not support the war in Iraq.”
Trump expressed support for the invasion of Iraq before it took place and only said that he opposed the war after the conflict had started.
Lie #4: Denies calling pregnancy a business inconvenience.
Clinton: “This is a man who is called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers.”
Trump: “I never said that.”
In 2004, Trump said that pregnancy is “certainly an inconvenience for a business.”
Lie #5: Contradicts himself about his tax audit.
Trump: “I’m under a routine audit.”
[moments later]
Trump: “Look, I have been under audit almost for 15 years. I know a lot of wealthy people that have never been audited. I said, ‘Do you get audited ?’ I get audited almost every year. And in a way I should be complaining. I’m not even complaining. I don’t mind them. It’s almost become a way of life. I get audited by the IRS. But other people don’t.”
Trump has previously claimed that he is facing an audit, which he has used to justify his refusal to release his tax returns, because he’s “a strong Christian,” but his own lawyers say that the “continuous examination” of his returns is “consistent with the IRS’ practice for large and complex businesses.” Experts also point out that there is nothing preventing Trump from releasing his returns.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said that his father was refusing to release his return because it would be a distraction from his campaign.
Lie #6: Falsely claims he already released key financial information.
“You will learn more about Donald Trump by going down to the federal elections where I filed a one hundred and four page, essentially financial statement of sorts, the forms that they have.”
As PolitiFact notes, this information leaves out essential information, including “details on his effective tax rate, the types of taxes he paid, and how much he gave to charity, as well as a more detailed picture of his income-producing assets.”
Lie #7: Falsely claims he only received a small loan from his father.
“My father gave me a very small loan in 1975.”
Trump has been regaling audiences with the tale that he received a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father, real estate mogul Fred Trump, when he first went into business. Far from an up-from-the-bootstraps success story, Trump regularly relied “on his father’s connections and wealth” in the form of “lucrative trusts” and “numerous loans and loan guarantees, as well as his father’s connections,” The Washington Post reports.
“As Trump’s casinos ran into trouble,” the Post reports, “Trump’s father also purchased $3.5 million gaming chips, but did not use them, so the casino would have enough cash to make payments on its mortgage—a transaction which casino authorities later said was an illegal loan.”
Indeed, loans Trump received from his father amounted to $14 million, “a value of $31 million in today’s dollars.”
Lie #8: Claims Clinton’s campaign, not Trump, started the birther movement.
“They were pressing it very hard, she failed to get the birth certificate. When I got involved, I didn’t fail. I got him to give the birth certificate. So I’m satisfied with it, and I’ll tell you why I’m satisfied with it.”
There is no proof that anyone in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign pushed the birther conspiracy theory. Instead, Trump cited an interview with Clinton’s former campaign manager in which she said that the campaign fired a volunteer who forwarded a birther email. He also cited a conversation that Sidney Blumenthal, who had no formal role in Clinton’s campaign, had with a McClatchy reporter, but McClatchy “found no proof that Blumenthal questioned Obama’s birthplace.”
Trump’s lies about the economy and finance
Lie #9: Misleadingly claims jobs are “fleeing” abroad.
“Our jobs are fleeing the country.”
Employment has been rising since the end of the Great Recession, but Trump has been using bogus statistics to claim that unemployment is actually as high as 42 percent.
Lie #10: Falsely claims China is devaluing their currency.
“You look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our product, they’re devaluing their currency and there’s nobody in our government to fight them.”
In fact, China has of late been doing the opposite of devaluing its currency.
Ian Talley of The Wall Street Journal notes that while “few U.S. economists would disagree China kept the yuan undervalued over the last two decades,” now, “many economists—including some of the strongest advocates for action against Beijing s—say the yuan is now close to fair value. Beijing appreciated the yuan from 2005 to 2014…. In fact, over the last two years, Beijing burned through nearly a quarter of what was once a $4 trillion currency stockpile to prevent the yuan from falling against the dollar.”
Lie #11 : Baselessly claims the Federal Reserve is “doing political” by not increasing interest rates.
“This Janet Yellen of the Fed, the Fed is doing political by keeping interest rates at this level. And believe me the day Obama goes off and he leaves and he goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf, when they raise interest rates, you are going to see some very bad things happen because the Fed is not doing their job. The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton.”
The Federal Reserve is an independent institution and Trump has yet to offer any evidence that Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen is taking her cues from President Obama, a claim that he has been making for weeks.
Trump’s lies about national security
Lie #12 : Absurdly claims Clinton has fought ISIS for decades.
“No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.”
ISIS was created out of the Islamic State of Iraq, which was founded in 2006, and was in turn the descendent of Al Qaeda in Iraq, established in 2004. Hillary Clinton is 68 years old and graduated from college in 1969.
Lie #13 : Claims other countries don’t pay us for military defense.
“We defend Germany. We defend South Korea. We defend Saudi Arabia. We defend countries. They do not pay us what they should be paying us because we are providing tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune.”
The U.S. is hardly “losing a fortune” in military aid.
Lie #14 : Falsely claims NATO allies aren’t paying the U.S.
Trump: “We pay approximately 73 percent of the cost of NATO.”
Lie #15: Falsely claims the U.S. paid Iran $400 million.
“One of the great giveaways of all time, of all time, including four hundred million dollars in cash nobody’s ever seen that before that turned out to be wrong.”
As the New York Times notes, the money Trump referenced “was Iran’s money, for military goods never delivered to Iran after the Iranian Revolution.”
Trump’s lies about crime
Lie #16: Absurdly suggests America is experiencing a crime wave.
“We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-American, Hispanics, are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot. In Chicago, they’ve had thousands of shootings, thousands, since January first. Thousands of shootings. And I’m saying where is this? Is this a war-torn countr y?”
Far from a crime wave, FactCheck.org points out that the violent crime rate “is lower than it has been since 1970” and “the murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate nationwide, at 4.5 in 2014, was at its lowest point since at least the early 1960s.”
Lie #17: Baselessly says stop and frisk “worked very well” in New York.
“You do stop and frisk, which worked very well—Mayor Giuliani is here — worked very well in New York.”
Katherine Krueger of TPM writes that a “2013 report from the New York attorney general found that out of 2.4 million stops by police between 2009 and 2012, the stops resulted in a 3 percent conviction rate, and just 0.1 percent of the total stops went on to a violent crime conviction.” Other cities that did not use stop and frisk experienced similar dips in crime, and one study, according to the Washington Post , “found that a high rate of stop-and-frisks was not associated with reduced crime when the practice was indiscriminate.” New York City’s crime rate continued to fall after stop-and-frisk was ended.
Lie #18: Falsely claims the murder rate in New York went up after the end of stop and frisk.
Clinton: “Well, it’s also fair to say, if we’re going to talk about mayors, that under the current mayor crime has continued to drop, including murders. So there is—“
Trump: “You’re wrong.”
Clinton: “No, I’m not.”
Trump: “Murders are up.”
Trump is wrong: Homicides in New York have been on the decline.
Lie #19: Falsely claims stop and frisk wasn’t ruled unconstitutional.
Lester Holt: “Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.”
Trump: “No, you’re wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her and our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case. They would have won an appeal.”
Trump is wrong: Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 .
Lie #20: Falsely claims ICE endorsed him.
“I was is endorsed by ICE. They’ve never endorsed anybody before — on immigration. I was just endorsed by ICE.”
ICE is a federal agency and has not endorsed Trump, or any other candidate for that matter.
