Donald Trump was subjected to a brutal fact check Tuesday morning by a Washington Post analyst who admitted it made his "brain hurt" to hear the former president's "fusillade of falsehoods" on Fox.
Glenn Kessler awarded Trump four Pinocchios, one for each inaccurate comment the former president made in just under two minutes during a recent Fox Business Network interview with pundit Maria Bartiromo.
"Trump ran through a list of his incoherent claims," Kessler wrote. "Anyone with a passing familiarity with the federal budget might find their brain hurts after reading them."
Kessler outlines in detail what he says Trump got wrong about the national debt, the ability of tax cuts to decrease it, his administration's economic record, and a plan to eliminate Social Security taxes which the analyst argues would "bust a hole in the program’s finances."
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Trump, faced with a nonpartisan estimate that his proposal policy would cause the Social Security Trust Fund to become insolvent a year earlier than currently projected and Medicare six years earlier, said he could cut "other costs."
Kessler called, er, nonsense, explaining that federal law prevents the president from touching much of the budget.
"Much of the federal government spending is on autopilot — mandated by federal law," he wrote. "The numbers do not add up."
Trump then echoed his claim that the economy was booming before the 2020 global COVID pandemic and that he had been just about to reduce the national debt, which Kessler called a "totally false claim."
"Until the federal government is running a budget surplus, the debt cannot be paid down," Kessler explained. "Even before covid, the deficit had worsened under Trump. But such rhetoric is in keeping with his effort to suggest the economy was booming before the pandemic — when in fact it was beginning to stumble."
Trump earned his third Pinocchio by asserting his tax cuts rivaled those of former President Ronald Reagan, which Kessler dubbed "one of his favorite falsehoods."
"Trump’s tax cut amounted to nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product," a weary Kessler explains, "meaning it was far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP."
Finally, Trump claimed that he brought in more tax revenue with the cuts, which Kessler noted primarily benefitted wealthy Americans and corporations.
"Trump doesn’t understand it," Kessler writes. "The tax cut merely slowed the growth of revenue; it did not reduce it."
Trump's tax cuts had another impact the former president did not mention on Fox, according to Kessler.
"Since Trump signed bills that cut taxes and dramatically increased spending, before the pandemic, the deficit under Trump soared — from $665 billion in fiscal 2017 to more than $1 trillion in 2020," he wrote.
"With Trump, it’s never clear whether he is truly ignorant about these issues or if he assuming he can skate by because he thinks his audience is ignorant," Kessler concluded. "But it’s clear he earned Four Pinocchios."
