Trump's ABC News town hall: Four Pinocchios, over and over again
At the ABC News town hall Tuesday night, President Trump was challenged by ordinary voters in ways that he rarely experiences in the safe spaces of Fox News, where he regularly answers questions. But he still retreated to false or misleading talking points that he offers in his usual venues. Heres a quick tour through 24 claims made at the Philadelphia town hall, in the order in which he answered questions.
Were very close to having the vaccine. If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals, and were within weeks of getting it. You know, could be three weeks, four weeks, but we think we have it.
Most experts believe a scientifically credible vaccine for the novel coronavirus will not be available until at least early 2021, and vaccine manufacturers insist they will not be rushed for political considerations. In any case, it will take months to make a safe vaccine available to most Americans. Trump has no basis to claim the Obama administration would have been slower, given how poorly the Trump administration ramped up coronavirus testing.
If you look at what weve done compared to other countries, with the excess mortality, the excess mortality rate, weve done very, very well.
Trump can cherry-pick whatever numbers he wants, but as moderator George Stephanopoulos pointed out, the United States ranks poorly compared to its peers on most measures of the coronavirus.
We were short on ventilators because the cupboards were bare when we took it over.
This is a Four-Pinocchio claim. When the new coronavirus emerged, the Strategic National Stockpile held 16,660 working ventilators, which turned out to be enough to deal with the initial surge of the pandemic, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. (Almost 11,000 were distributed to states.) HHS said that the number available in March 2020 was essentially the same number as of January 2017, when President Barack Obama left office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/15/trumps-abc-news-town-hall-four-pinocchios-over-over-again/
cp
(6,543 posts)maxsolomon
(32,992 posts)Did you read something different?
ramapo
(4,585 posts)That was an artifact of the past. I believe it went away during the Reagan years. There was also a limit on how many Media outlets a single company could own... also long gone.
SergeStorms
(18,903 posts)and yes, it was established in 1949 and shit-canned in 1987 by Ronnie Rayguns. After that conservative hate radio took over the air waves and the rest, as they say, is history.
maxsolomon
(32,992 posts)I thought that had still been retained.
Biden has a CNN event tonight. I suppose that's "balance"...
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)Stuart G
(38,365 posts)DENVERPOPS
(8,679 posts)of incomplete articles that refer us to a different website with a pay wall.
I would guess a lot of them are under RepubliCON ownership, but to ALL of them, how greedy can you get, given what is going on in the news and world............................
PJMcK
(21,921 posts)In order to prevent violations of copyright laws, DU limits posts to about 4 paragraphs of quoted material.
The Washington Post is a respectable news outlet and if you don't want to pay them, sorry but it's their content.
Incidentally, there are several ways to get around paywalls that are not illegal. Do a little research to find them.
Many news sites have paywalls: The NY Times, The Daily Beast, Talking Points Memo and Mother Jones are but a few and none of those are "RepubliCON" owned.
Basically, these sites are in business and need to charge for their content. The costs are quite modest if you consider the time one spends reading the news. Did you ever buy a newspaper or a magazine? You had to pay for it, right?
Although DU is a free site, if you throw them a few bucks, you'll enjoy the experience a bit more without the ads and such.
DENVERPOPS
(8,679 posts)I will look into what you suggested.