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Video: Fact-Checking Trump’s Louisiana Rally


In this week’s fact-checking video, CNN’s Jake Tapper examines six claims President Donald Trump made during a campaign rally in Monroe, Louisiana, on Nov. 6.

We’ve written about all of these topics before:

  • Trump wrongly claimed that when he released the White House memo on his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Democrats and the whistleblower were caught in a “giant lie.” The memo corroborates the main points the whistleblower made in his Aug. 12 complaint, as we’ve explained before. In fact, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire said that the whistleblower complaint “is in alignment” with the White House memo.
  • Trump claimed Joe Biden, as vice president, wanted “to get rid of the prosecutor in the Ukraine who was looking at his son.” But there’s no evidence that the prosecutor was looking into Hunter Biden.
  • The president falsely said that “we’re taking in billions and billions of dollars from a country that never gave us 10 cents,” thanks to his tariffs on Chinese goods. U.S. importers pay the tariffs, as customs duties, and the United States has been collecting billions on Chinese goods for years, an average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.
  • Trump misleadingly said, as he has before, “We will always protect patients with preexisting conditions.” His own Justice Department is siding with plaintiffs in a lawsuit that it said, if successful, would end Affordable Care Act protections for those with preexisting conditions.
  • He claimed that “Democrats want open borders.” Democrats are not advocating open borders, not even the small minority who are calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and move many of ICE’s functions to other agencies.
  • And Trump repeated his bogus claim that Sempra Energy’s Cameron LNG project in Louisiana “couldn’t get their permits for years” but “I got ’em real fast.” That natural gas project was approved under the Obama administration. The company’s website states: “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the project in June 2014,” a fact confirmed to us by a company spokesperson.

For more on these claims, follow the links to our various stories in the bullet points above. Our other fact-checking collaboration videos with CNN’s “State of the Union” are available on our website.