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Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Over 2/3 of Trump statements at Montana rallies were false, misleading or lacked evidence, The Fact Checker says

More than two-thirds of the claims President Trump made at his two rallies in Montana, one in July of 2018 and the other last week, were false, misleading, or unsupported by evidence, according to The Washington Post's fact-checkers. "We didn’t double-count statements when the president repeated himself, or else the number of false claims would be higher," Glenn Kessler writes for the Post in his column, The Fact Checker. "We avoided trivialities or opinions. (Two comments he made on Sept. 6 about Democratic candidates in other states might be fairly viewed as opinions, so they were not included.)"

Kessler assess all 88 claims the president made at the rallies. Here's a sample:

"In the election, we won this state by a lot. That was not close."
Accurate, Kessler says. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Montana by 20 percentage points.

"We have the best economy in history."
False, Kessler concludes: The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton — and Ulysses S. Grant.

"More Americans are working today than ever, ever, ever before."
Misleading, Kessler finds: Of course there are more Americans working. That’s because there are more Americans today than ever before. More meaningful measures of the overall health of the job market take population into consideration. The unemployment rate, or the share of people who don't have jobs, was at 3.9 percent in August and that wasn't a record low.

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