On Saturday, after the straw poll showed Trump with 62% of the vote against Meatball Ron’s 20% and Nikki Haley’s 3%, Trump gave the big CPAC finale… to an enthusiastic but half empty room. As we’ve come to expect, the endless, boring speech was just a series of grievances, cobbled together lies and distortions, some entertaining, some too bizarre even for Trump. As John Hendrickson put it, it was his latest sales pitch and it included gems like “I stand here today, and I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent— and very easily— World War III. And you’re gonna have World War III, by the way.”
Trump warned that the United States was becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden filthy communist nightmare.” He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left. He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.” He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said.
…Rather than lay out his vision for America, he found a mess of topics about which to complain. The White House, Trump said, “wasn’t the easiest building to live in.” He opined that “illegal immigrants come in, and we house them in the Waldorf-Astoria.” He characterized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “China-loving politician” and sounded legitimately disappointed when saying, “My wonderful travel ban is gone.” He lamented the halcyon days before he knew the terms “subpoena” and “grand jury.” He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “racist” and griped about the “Department of Injustice.” Shortly before his speech, Trump told James Rosen of Newsmax that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race even if he is indicted in one (or more) criminal investigations. Relatedly, he promised to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”
The whole thing was kind of low-key apocalyptic, with the crackpot old man styling himself as “your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Sounds deranged? It got worse. “We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. People are tired of RINOs and globalists. They want to see America First. This is the final battle. They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win and if they win, we no longer have a country.”
As Daniel Dale wrote for CNN, the bellicose but low energy speech was “filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.” He listed 23 false claims and noted that “that’s far from the total.” Among Trump’s biggest whoppers:
While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.” Flat-out lie; NYC had 49 murders run 2022.
Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.” Flat-out lie; Gov. Tim Walz (D) called out the National Guard, not Trump.
Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.” False.
Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.” False.
Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations— they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills– that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.” Another oft-repeated lie.
Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.” Nonsense.
Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent— an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have— instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t— wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’” The cost was $1.3 billion.
Trump made his usual argument that the Washington Post and the New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.” Neither paper “admitted” their reporting was false, nor was it false.
Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here… But they supplied the bedsheets.” Other crazy lie. Obama provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine.
Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Baseless lie he ,axe up out of thin air.
Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.” The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president.
Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents— not one president got anything from them.” Another lie; the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries.
Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president– that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.” Made up figures within relation to reality— The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018.
Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].” The standard Tump lie; Biden had over 7 million more votes than he did and won the Electoral College 306-232
Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” Another lie; it was declared liberated 22 years into Trump’s term… and Trump’s role was minimal, not pivotal.
Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought— $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.” More bullshit; it was $7.1 billion worth of equipment, much of it inoperable.
Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.” Another made up lie.
Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.” He completed nothing.
Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.” Not true.