Category: Not Factual

Trump says ‘polls are fake’ before bragging about poll showing his popularity

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President Trump declared during a rally in Florida on Tuesday night that “polls are fake” before bragging about a poll that he claims found he is the most popular Republican president since Abraham Lincoln.

Trump at the campaign-style rally first accused the news media of suppressing polls that indicate positive numbers about his presidency.

“Polls are fake, just like everything else,” Trump declared during the rally in Tampa, echoing his attacks on “fake news.”

He said if the “fake news” did a poll, they would report only 25 percent of Americans have 401(k) accounts, though the correct number is around 44 percent.

He paused, then launched into a tirade about the poll that he says indicates his popularity as a Republican president.

“They just came out with a poll – the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party is Trump! Can you believe that?” he said.

“So I said, does that include Honest Abe Lincoln? He was pretty good, huh?” he continued.

It is unclear which poll Trump is referring to for his claim, which he has repeated several times in recent weeks.

While Trump’s overall approval has remained well below his predecessors, a Gallup poll released in July found that 90 percent of Republicans approved of Trump, which would make him one of the most popular modern presidents with his own party during his first term.

Still, former President George W. Bush had a higher approval rating among Republicans after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to the poll, which stretches back to the Eisenhower administration.

[The Hill]

Media

Trump claims picture ID is required to buy groceries

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President Trump on Tuesday made the claim that a photo ID is required to buy groceries as part of his argument for introducing stricter voter ID laws.

“You know if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card,” he said. “You need ID.”

The president made the comment while speaking at a campaign rally in Florida in support of GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial bid. It came as he was pushing for stronger voter ID laws, pointing to other instances where an American would need to show identification.

[The Hill]

Media

Trump says his poll numbers are higher than Lincoln’s – but polling didn’t exist then

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President Trump on Sunday claimed his poll numbers are higher than “Honest Abe Lincoln” despite the fact that presidential polling didn’t begin until 1936.

“Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan,” Trump posted on his Twitter account. “There must be something wrong, please recheck that poll!”

It’s unclear which survey he was referring to, but Gallup became the first company to poll a presidential election in 1936.

In a survey released last month, it found Trump’s approval rate was at 42 percent and his disapproval rate at 54 percent.

Comparing Ronald Reagan’s numbers at the same point in his presidency, Gallup found Reagan’s approval rating also at 42 percent.

Among other Republican presidents in July of their second year, George W. Bush had a 72 percent approval rating and George H.W. Bush had a 62 percent approval mark.

But Republicans gave Trump an 88 percent approval rating, compared to 9 percent among Democrats.

[New York Post]

Mike Pence Defends White House Banning CNN Reporter From Press Event

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Vice President Mike Pence stood by the White House’s decision to ban a CNN reporter from a press event last week, citing the need to maintain “decorum.”

“This administration believes in the freedom of the press,” Pence told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview airing Sunday. “But maintaining the decorum that is due at the White House… is an issue that we’ll continue to work forward.”

The White House was hit with intense backlash from dozens of journalists and media outlets on Wednesday after it disinvited CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, representing five television networks as the day’s chosen pool reporter, from a press event.

Collins was told by the White House that at a brief gathering earlier in the day, she had asked President Donald Trump “inappropriate” questions and had refused to leave the Oval Office, according to CNN. Collins and other reporters present at the time disputed the White House’s claim.

Several cable news networks, including Fox News, issued statements expressing solidarity with CNN and calling for reporters’ full access to press events.

Despite Trump’s repeated attacks on the press, including falsely accusing outlets of publishing “fake news” and calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” Pence told Bartiromo that the administration has provided “extraordinary access to the media.”

“The president answers so many questions in so many different settings, and I can assure that we’ll continue to do that,” Pence said.

While Trump occasionally takes impromptu questions from reporters at various gatherings, he hasn’t held a solo press conference since February 2017.

Pence deflected when asked by Bartiromo whether shutting out Collins was like shutting out “everybody” from the press event.

“I would leave that decision to the White House staff,” he said. “We’ll make sure that every network, every major news organization, continues to have access because we stand for the freedom of the press in this White House.”

Trump and New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, meanwhile, found themselves offering vastly different takes on a meeting they had earlier this month at the White House that focused on journalistic matters.

The president tweeted on Sunday that they spent “much time” discussing “the vast amount of Fake News being put out,” his erroneous phrase for stories that displease him.

But Sulzberger, in a statement to HuffPost, said his “main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.” He said he told Trump “directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”

[Huffington Post]

Reality

Here is a list of over 300 times Trump has not held the same decorum he wants the press to be held to:

http://www.stopthedonaldtrump.com/category/unpresidential/attack-the-press/

Trump Goes On Anti-Media Tweetstorm, Attacks Reporting He Says Puts Lives ‘At Risk’: ‘Very Unpatriotic!’

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President Donald Trump is going on yet another Twitter tirade about the media, this time attacking certain reporting as “very unpatriotic!”

To recap: Trump tweeted this morning that he recently met with New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and talked about the “fake news.” Sulzberger shot back by saying he specifically told the President he’s concerned about his “dangerous” attacks on the media.

Well, um, he’s still doing it (not that he ever stopped).

And not only that, but Trump is now accusing reporters of putting lives at risk by reporting on “internal deliberations of our government”:

You will also notice that Trump, hours after revealing his meeting with Sulzberger, is back to attacking the Times again.

The Times report on this meeting features Sulzberger making one very serious point to the President:

Mr. Sulzberger recalled telling Mr. Trump at one point that newspapers had begun posting armed guards outside their offices because of a rise in threats against journalists. The president, he said, expressed surprise that they did not already have armed guards.

[Mediaite]

Trump calls press the ‘Enemy of the People’ after claiming he confronted publisher of New York Times over ‘fake news’

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On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted that he met with the publisher of the New York Times and confronted him over what the president calls “fake news,” adding that the free press is becoming the “Enemy of the People.”

According to Trump, “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”

Earlier in the morning Trump bizarrely boasted that he had higher polls number than even President Abraham Lincoln — who served when there was no polling

You can see the tweets below:

[Raw Story]

Trump Celebrates ‘Record’ Sales of Nonexistent Health Insurance Policies

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As usual, President Donald Trump is either ignorant or lying about his own policies. This time, it’s so ridiculously obvious that correcting the record might sound fake.

During an event Thursday at Northeast Iowa Community College in Peosta, Trump was very excited to report that “incredible” numbers of people were signing up for association health plans, a form of coverage his administration is making easier to buy. He’s right about one thing: That truly is incredible, in that it’s the opposite of credible.

Trump didn’t use the term ”association health plans” in his remarks, but he did repeatedly praise Alexander Acosta, the secretary of labor, whose department published the regulations governing these policies last month, so it’s clear what Trump is referring to.

“I hear it’s like record business that they’re doing,” Trump said. “We just opened about two months ago, and I’m hearing that the numbers are incredible. Numbers of people that are getting really, really good health care instead of Obamacare, which is a disaster.”

To recap: zero people have actually enrolled in this insurance because it is literally impossible to do so until Sept. 1 at the earliest. And as for Obamacare being a “disaster,” its current problems have a lot to do with Trump himself.

Association health plans are policies that allow small companies in the same industry to band together to buy health benefits for their employees. These already existed before Trump, and before the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010.

President Barack Obama’s administration made them comply with the Affordable Care Act’s rules requiring health plans to provide a minimum, basic set of benefits (things like prescription drugs and maternity care) and limited how insurers could set prices based on the health status of the workers.

The Trump administration is changing that. These association health plans could evade the benefit rules and also charge premiums based on workers ages, occupations and places of business.

Association health plans may save some employees and employers money because they offer skimpier benefits, although those savings could be negated if an employee needs care not covered by her plan and has to pay out of pocket.

And these plans are designed to attract healthy consumers, so the more of them that leave the Affordable Care Act exchanges to join association health plans, the more costly the exchange customer base becomes and the higher premiums for those customers will be.

[Huffington Post]

Trump policy shop filters facts to fit his message

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President Donald Trump’s appointees in the health department have deleted positive references to Obamacare, altered a report that undermined the administration’s positions on refugees and added anti-abortion language to the strategic plan — part of an ideological overhaul of the agency’s research office.

While every administration puts its imprint on the executive branch and promotes ideas that advance its own agenda, this one has ventured several steps further — from scrubbing links to climate change studies from an Environmental Protection Agency website to canceling an Interior Department study on coal mining risks and suppressing reports on water contaminationand the dangers of formaldehyde.

Inside the Health and Human Services policy research shop, staffers say the political pressures to tailor facts to fit Trump’s message have been unprecedented.

Several pointed to embarrassments such as PolitiFact grading a lawmaker’s statement, based on the agency’s May 2017 report on Obamacare premium hikes, as “false,” and concluding the study had serious methodological problems.

Another report suggesting that millions more people would get health coverage if Obamacare were rolled back — a finding at odds with nearly every independent analysis — was widely mocked and produced over the objections of career staff at the office of the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation, known as ASPE, say several sources.

“The heartbreaking part is that ASPE is the source of the evidence and the science for how decisions are made,” said a former senior official, who worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “It’s just another example of how we’re moving to a post-fact era.”

The office has been especially vulnerable to political pressure because its leadership remains in flux. The University of Minnesota health economist tapped to lead the office by Trump has been dogged by questions about his financial entanglements, leaving his nomination in limbo for more than a year. The acting head of ASPE was recently reassigned to a regional office, and the top deputy altered McKinsey-produced data to make it more favorable to the Trump administration, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the changes.

“I find the attack on the integrity and the culture of the office to be disturbing,” said Richard Frank, a Harvard health economist who ran ASPE as an Obama administration political appointee. “This is really a departure to an office that has a 50-year history to it.”

HHS officials vigorously disputed portrayals of the office as ideologically driven.

“I reject the premise of your question and allegation,” said spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley. “Secretary [Alex] Azar has made very clear that HHS is a science- and evidence-based organization and it will operate accordingly.”

Oakley said the 120-person office has been refocused to work on Trump administration priorities like drug pricing and the opioid epidemic. Two staffers say those topics are regarded as safer ground because they are not part of the health care culture wars. Under Azar, who assumed leadership of the agency about six months ago — after most of these incidents occurred — the office has produced a six-page research brief on drug pricing, which published this week, and two studies on the opioid epidemic. Oakley said more reports are coming.

But the group’s morale and role remain diminished, as key staff and teams have dwindled; there are just three staffers working on analyzing health coverage, down from about a dozen at the end of the Obama administration, said a staffer.

Republican health policy analyst Lanhee Chen, who served as an HHS senior counselor in the George W. Bush administration, scoffed at the notion that this policy shop is more partisan than the one that preceded it.

“I don’t believe the Trump administration ASPE has put out reports that are any less analytically or methodologically rigorous than those of the Obama administration ASPE,” Chen said. “Those who express concerns regarding the quality of reports ‘falling off’ are probably using that argument as a cover for the fact that they disagree with the findings of the reports.”

Chen said he regards the policy shop as a vehicle to advance administration policy, “so in that sense, methodological rigor has not necessarily been a metric I have used to evaluate their reports. That’s why we have studies from academics and analysts outside of government.”

This story is drawn from interviews with nine individuals with knowledge of ASPE operations, most of whom asked for confidentiality to speak freely, as well as with outside observers.

Shift in office’s focus

ASPE historically has been used to investigate the impact of HHS policies and help shape future strategy, and under the Obama administration, it focused closely on the expansion of health insurance coverage and the Affordable Care Act — issues on which Barack Obama had campaigned heavily and made central to his presidency. The office published 43 reports on the ACA’s effects on rural hospitals, women’s health and other discrete corners of health care between January 2015 and January 2017 alone, generally extolling the effects and sometimes overlooking the drawbacks.

For instance, one 2016 study on choosing health plans in the ACA market was criticized for slanting its findings.

[Politico]

White House faces claims of fake weather news

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A small change in President Trump’s travel plans on Thursday morning left some members of the press corps suggesting the White House literally lied about whether the sky was blue to avoid facing questions. The debate over the day’s weather was a dramatic illustration of the mounting tensions between the Trump administration and the reporters who cover it.

The latest controversy centers around whether canceling Trump’s helicopter ride to Andrews Force Base was a ruse to keep reporters away from the president. Trump’s walks to the presidential helicopter are one of the increasingly few venues where he takes questions from reporters.

Trump spent Thursday in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, where he toured local businesses, participated in a roundtable discussion on workforce development and delivered a speech on trade. His departure from Washington came after 9 a.m. on a gorgeous morning with blue skies, but the White House said bad weather forced Trump to skip the planned helicopter ride and instead travel by motorcade to Joint Base Andrews for his flight.

The White House’s claim that Trump was grounded by bad weather on what appeared to be a beautiful day prompted consternation from the press corps. Several reporters strongly hinted the travel arrangements were an effort to limit press access as the president faces a slew of issues, including the emergence of a taped conversation between Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen where they discussed a payment to a former Playboy Playmate who has alleged she had an affair with Trump.

McClatchy Newspapers White House correspondent Anita Kumar expressed skepticism in her press pool report announcing the president’s change of plans.

“On what appears to be the nicest day Washington has had all week, the White House has informed the pool that POTUS will motorcade to JBA because of bad weather,” Kumar wrote.

On Twitter, several other reporters speculated that the change was part of an effort to shield Trump from the shouted questions he would have faced if he had taken the presidential copter.

“The official reason, per the TV pool, is fog. But not having a Marine One departure to Andrews also means there won’t be an open press opportunity to try to ask the president questions on his way out,” wrote CBS News’ Steve Portnoy.

ABC White House reporter John Parkinson posted a photo of the clear blue skies outside the White House along with a pair of hashtags, “#noquestions #badweathercall.”

While the skies were clear when Trump left after 9 a.m., White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters told Yahoo News the decision to nix his helicopter flight was made earlier.

“Weather calls are made over an hour in advance of the planned departure time. Following a routine test flight this morning, a bad weather call was made at 7:39 a.m. due to ground fog at JBA,” Walters said.

Though the skies did appear clear, satellite maps showed there was low cloud cover — which can be dangerous for helicopters — in the area during the 7 a.m. hour. Thursday’s weather forecast for the D.C. area from the Washington Post also noted there would be “morning clouds.” CNN senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny, who initially accused Trump of dodging questions in a tweet, later posted a follow-up saying “our meteorologists note low cloud cover as well.”

In the end, Trump didn’t entirely dodge questions from the press corps. Before he boarded Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews. Members of the traveling press pool were allowed to wait by the plane’s wing and lobbed questions at the president as he boarded the aircraft. According to a pool report from HuffPost senior White House correspondent S.V. Date, Trump “ignored shouted questions about Michael Cohen, etc.” as he got on the plane.

The forecast fracas highlighted just how toxic the relationship has become between the White House and a press corps that Trump routinely derides as “fake news.”

Thursday morning’s cloud controversy came on the heels of an incident where a CNN reporter was banned from covering one of Trump’s appearances because the White House objected to questions she asked in the Oval Office. On Wednesday, CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins was brought into the Oval Office to witness a meeting between Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as a pool reporter for the television networks. While there, Collins questioned Trump about Cohen and his invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to Washington for a summit. Trump did not answer the questions, and afterward Collins said she was informed by White House communications director Bill Shine that she was “dis-invited” from a subsequent appearance with Juncker that Trump made in the Rose Garden.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement about the incident saying the administration took issue with Collins’s conduct, claiming she “shouted questions.” Sanders insisted, “We support a free press and ask that everyone be respectful of the presidency and guests at the White House.”

Reporters typically ask questions of Trump when they are allowed in the Oval Office.

The issues involving Trump’s Thursday White House departure and his meeting the day before in the Oval Office come as the White House has curtailed press access in other venues. Sanders has been holding few press briefings in recent weeks, and the ones that have taken place have been shorter than in prior administrations. Trump also has not held a solo press conference on U.S. soil since February 2017.

While the Trump administration has cut down engagement with the media in presidential press conferences and briefings, the president has regularly taken questions from reporters when he walks to helicopter flights and during pool visits to the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. The White House crackdown on Collins and the canceled flight raised the specter that the administration might be cutting down on these venues.

Yahoo News reached out to Sanders to ask if Trump will continue to take questions in the Oval Office and as he walks to Marine One.

“President Trump is the most accessible president in modern history,” Sanders said in response. “It’s absurd to suggest anything otherwise.”

[Yahoo News]

Reality

Weather.com put the day in DC as partly cloudy and sunny with a high of 89 degrees/

White House disputes that CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was ‘banned’

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The White House took issue with the characterization that they banned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from covering a White House event Wednesday after the White House informed her that she was not welcome to attend.

White House deputy chief of staff for communications Bill Shine challenged reporters on Thursday about whether the administration had ever used the word “ban.”

On Wednesday, Collins was representing the television networks in an Oval Office event where she shouted several questions to the president related to his former lawyer Michael Cohen and about a White House invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Could you ask her if we ever used the word ban?” Shine said to reporters on Thursday, referring to Collins, standing outside the West Wing and addressing reporters standing several feet away.

Even as he refuted that Collins’ denied access amounted to a ban, Shine repeatedly declined to tell reporters what word he would use to characterize the White House’s decision to block her from attending the event.

“When you ask her if we ever used the word ban, then I will answer that question,” Shine said in reply to reporters inquiring about what word he would use. “You ask her, focus now, you ask her if we ever used the word ban.”

The White House statement issued yesterday said Collins was “informed…she was not welcome to participate in the next event.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association issued a statement condemning the White House’s decision.

“This type of retaliation is wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak. It cannot stand,” WHCA President Olivier Knox said.

While Shine did not engage in a full conversation with reporters on Wednesday’s incident, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the White House doesn’t object to reporters asking questions of the president but that she felt Collins’ exchange didn’t demonstrate a necessary level of civility and politeness.

“The question isn’t are the press allowed to ask questions, this president obviously isn’t afraid of taking questions,” said Conway, who said it’s about “being polite and not shouting questions long after the press has politely been asked to leave.”

Collins’ behavior was not out of order from the standard procedure of White House reporters who regularly pose questions to the president at the conclusion of press events. The president has, on numerous occasions, responded to these shouted inquiries.

[ABC News]

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