Fact checking the president on fires, climate and trade

The Washington Post got an interview with President Trump, and he "made a number of false or misleading claims," says the paper's Fact Checker column, written by Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo. Some of the off-base assertions dealt with rural concerns such as wildfire and climate change.

Trump blamed the California fires on "forest management," but "Experts say the most recent wildfires besetting California were not sparked by forest management problems," the Post reports. It quotes LeRoy Westerling, a climate and fire researcher at the University of California at Merced, from a previous fact-check: “The ones in Southern California are burning in chaparral, so it’s not a forest management issue at all.” The Post notes, "Some California forests appear to have many more trees per acre than what is considered healthy, according to an expert cited by the San Francisco Chronicle. But more than half of the state’s forested land is managed by the federal government," which has decreased the budget of the Forest Service.

On climate, Trump said, “If you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death; then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion.” The Post says he "appears to be referring to some speculative journalism a half-century ago. There had been a period of cold winters in the early 1970s, and so some reporters put two and two together — and came up with five. . . . In 2006, Newsweek admitted it had been 'spectacularly wrong' in publishing its article. Yet the bad journalism of the 1970s is still cited today by climate skeptics such as Trump, even though the science affirming the impact of human activity on climate change now is widely accepted."

Trump also said, "We lose $800 billion a year with trade." He was talking about trade deficits, which might be better described as trade disparities because they don't involve a loss of money. The Post explains: "The trade deficit just means Americans are buying more products from other countries than foreigners are buying from the United States, not that they are somehow stealing U.S. money. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as the relative strength of currencies, economic growth rates, and savings and investment rates. By passing a large deficit-financed tax cut, Trump has made it harder to reduce trade deficits, if that were even important. Trump’s figure is also inflated. The U.S. had a $552 billion trade deficit in 2017, when goods and services are counted. But Trump only counts trade in goods, thus inflating the total. The trade deficit has widened in 2018, according to the Commerce Department."