June 14, 2021 - 1:49pm
Former President Trump was no stranger to bending the truth, but this also meant that the press had a tendency to dismiss claims that might have otherwise been accurate. Never one to ignore or overlook a slight, the former president recently compiled and published a list of claims in which “they are now admitting [he] was right about everything they lied about before the election”. Below we have taken a look at these claims and given a traffic light rating as to how accurate they are:
RedHydroxychloroquine works
The president touted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure back in May 2020, tweeting that it was a “game-changer” and that he had been taking the anti-malaria drug himself. Unfortunately, the drug did not stop the President from catching Covid later that year, but was his claim valid? According to the Cochrane Institute, hydroxychloroquine does not reduce deaths from Covid-19, nor does it reduce the number of people needing mechanical ventilation.
AmberThe Virus came from a Chinese lab
Though the origin of the virus is yet to be confirmed, it is certainly true that the lab-leak theory has gradually been accepted by the scientific establishment as a plausible theory, with Dr Fauci even admitting that we “need to keep an open mind” about it. President Biden has since ordered an intelligence community investigation into the virus’ origin, but credit should be given to Donald Trump, who floated the theory back in May 2020 when he claimed to have seen evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
GreenHunter Biden’s laptop was real
This statement is likely in reference to the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story in the run-up to the presidential election. The story claimed that Hunter Biden traded off his father’s name for personal gain after correspondence between Hunter and a Ukrainian energy firm executive was found on his laptop in which the latter thanked Biden for introducing him to his then-vice president father. Left-wing media sites claimed that the emails found on Hunter’s laptop might not have been real and that there was no way to authenticate them, even though that wasn’t true.
GreenLafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op
It was one of the most notorious images of Trump’s entire presidency. At the height of the BLM protests last summer, it was claimed that the president used the national police to clear the street with teargas so that he could take a photo of him holding a bible outside of St John’s Church in Lafayette Park. Now a new inspector general report about what led to the protesters being teargassed has been released, stating that the park police did not clear the square for Trump’s photo op. According to the report, the President was surveying the site ‘hours after’ they already had begun planning to clear the area to put up new fencing, which should temper some of last year’s histrionic headlines about Trump’s actions.
GreenThe “Russian Bounties” story was fake
In June 2020, the White House was ‘under pressure’ to explain how much the Trump administration knew about the allegations that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan. Reports claimed that Trump received a written briefing about it earlier that year, which was then relayed by all the broadsheet newspapers. But last month, the White House intel community said that it did not have conclusive evidence that Russian operatives encouraged members of the Taliban to kill US troops, which flies in the face of earlier attacks by the likes of Joe Biden, who repeatedly went after Trump for failing to stand up to Putin over the purported bounty deals.
GreenWe did produce vaccines before the end of 2020, in record time
Operation Warp Speed, a $10bn investment programme with a remit to fund vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, was an unmitigated success. Commissioned by Donald Trump, the project accelerated investment in vaccine manufacturing and resulted in Americans getting vaccinated at record speeds. By the time Joe Biden took office, in January, over one million jabs were being administered per day.
AmberBlue state lockdowns didn’t work
As the coronavirus spread in spring 2020, blue states began locking down their populations. But did they work? Well it depends what you mean by “work”. Despite its stringent lockdown, California came close to being overwhelmed by Covid in December. What about deaths and cases? According to Avinash Dixit of Princeton University: “Red states have significantly far more cases in relation to population than the blue states. However, for deaths the effect is if anything in the opposite direction…” It does look like longer lockdowns damaged blue states’ economies. Take employment: there are 20 states with unemployment levels above the national average, only four are red states. There are six states with unemployment at 8% or higher, and all of them are blue. Still, given the complexity of this question, and the fact that the pandemic is not yet over in the United States, it is probably too early to make a definitive statement on the efficacy of lockdowns, as Trump has done here.
GreenSchools should be opened
According to the CDC: “in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission.” Elsewhere one study comparing county-level Covid-19 hospitalisations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on Covid-19 hospitalisation rates when baseline hospitalisation rates were low or moderate. With effective prevention strategies in place students, teachers and other staff can be protected in the school setting. Trump is probably right to say they should be opened up.
AmberCritical Race Theory is a disaster for our schools and our country
Critical race theory often ends up sounding quite… racist. The history of teaching millions of children to think of themselves as victimised members of a racial group is not particularly promising either. Arguments about the impact of CRT in schools are ongoing, and increasingly bitter. It is too early to say whether they are a “disaster” though. It is difficult to measure what the long-term consequences of say, the San Diego Unified School District telling white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children will be. Currently, there a dozen states with proposed legislation banning or restricting the teaching of CRT. Does banning ideas seem particularly American? Maybe the disaster of CRT won’t merely be that some children are indoctrinated into racial essentialism, but that America’s commitment to free speech will be maimed in the process of trying to stop that indoctrination.
AmberOur Southern border security program was unprecedentedly successful
Since Donald Trump’s departure from office, illegal border crossings under President Biden have been hitting record levels. In May 2021 alone, over 180,000 people attempted to cross the southwest border and so far this fiscal year, the number of border crossings have hit a 10-year high. Thanks to pent-up pressure from the pandemic and a relaxation of Trump-era immigration policies such as ‘Remain in Mexico’, under Biden, a crisis has erupted on the border. Whether Trump’s policy was ‘unprecedentedly successful’ is debatable, but there is no question that the situation on the border has worsened significantly since he left.
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SubscribeVery subjective scoring for sure. Easily could be 9.5/10.
– HCQ does work in some protocols but was oversold 0.5
-Preponderance of evidence supports lab leak 1.0
-The blue state lock downs clearly didn’t work. Some southern redstates have recently worked their way into the Top Ten Deadliest CV19 States, but this is primarily due to vaccine hesitancy there. Prior to widespread vaccine use, the list was almost all deep blue lock down states and NJ and NY still top the list. 1.0
-CRT is an unmitigated disaster and cancer 1.0
-Southern border policy was successful relative to 8 years prior and 5 months following 1.0
I can understand and agree with lab leak being amber, because although it seems very likely, it is not proven (and probably can’t be thanks to China’s coverup). It is a technically correct rating.
Lockdowns don’t work should be a green. They were sold on one basis only: that they would drastically affect the number of cases and deaths. The fact that areas with very different levels of lockdown saw no difference in outcomes is conclusive proof that Trump is correct (I wasn’t aware he’d actually claimed that though – when did he argue this?). Saying “we need more time” in order to justify an amber is just logically wrong. More time won’t make any difference because the policy was justified on impact within days/weeks, not ambiguous “maybe” differences several years from the start. Lockdowns have failed on their own terms, therefore, they have failed.
CRT. You are correct. Unherd explains that CRT is in fact extremely racist, but just like with lockdowns, apparently there’s a small chance that teaching children they’re “spirit murdering” people is actually beneficial and perhaps given enough years we’ll discover it wasn’t a “disaster” but merely “incredibly bad”.
I can’t comment on the others.
On one hand, I think it’s commendable that Unherd are willing to stick their neck out and defend Trump, because, that’s basically what checking this list is doing and other outlets wouldn’t touch this kind of story with a barge pole. On the other hand, at least two of these “amber” ratings are justified with reasoning of the form, well, it sure looks like he’s absolutely correct but maybe if give it even more years this obviously terrible thing will turn out to be not quite so terrible, somehow, via some unexplained possibility that nobody is brave enough to actually to articulate. Come on Unherd, be courageous. The moment you decided to write this story you already alienated all the never-Trumpists, so might as well just go all-in and be brutally honest about it: the ex-POTUS that supposedly lies all the time doesn’t seem to be lying about these things.
I don’t know if Trump was taking HQL prophylactically, but certainly HQL has efficacy at the right dose early on. I did read that Trump took Ivermectin when he got Covid, which would be the reason an old, obese man recovered so quickly,
Another point could be allocated for evidence that corporate media is (largely) fake news. I was sceptical when I heard this, but during the pandemic the scales dropped from my eyes. The slam dunk came when the CNN Technical Director was caught admitting on camera that they were biased and had an agenda.
Therefore Trump could score 10.5 out of 10!
That’s no surprise really. My wife just asked, “What is Biden doing?” Answer: much the same as Trump except that he gets a free pass from the MSM whereas Trump would have been attacked for the same policy decisions. I suppose Trump never needed to learn the importance of compromise to make gains or diplomacy to win people round. If he had maybe he would have got a second term.
The ‘Stay in Mexico’ advice/warning has now been replaced by President Kamala Harris with ‘Don’t come stay in Guatamala We don’t want you’ but that apparently is ‘progressive’ and nothing similar to DT, Trumps predictions that petrol/gas prices would soar has been born out even prior to the Capitol pipeline outage the price of petrol had more than doubled! (the outage caused a price increase of six cents) The free pass ‘Creepy Joe’ gets is sickening
Really odd article. The author had chosen 10 random issues and created a score based on them.
As a president, he had more successes than many would admit. But he divided rather than unified the country and his inability to win rejection is in large parts a result of that.
It doesn’t help that he’s also a lying narcissist and unfit for office to begin with.
Hi Simon, thanks for your comment. These issues were not chosen at random — a list was published by the former president himself, which we link to in the first paragraph.
See Victor Davis Hanson on Trump on current New Culture Forum (and elsewhere). He likens him to the sort of western hero who is called in to do other people’s dirty work, then rejected when he clears things up for them – because they didn’t really like his style..
Whether you like him personally or not – as you say yourself, Trump delivered in many ways. He could never have united the country with the current incarnation of the Democrats and their media lackeys in opposition. This has been analysed to death in the US and elsewhere.
“media lackeys” – The press turned out to be much more influential in destroying Trump than anybody believed possible. The constant barrage of criticism beat back the huge economic success once the pandemic hit. Had there not been a pandemic the press would likely been ineffective because people would have reflected on their experience.
He didn’t divide the country, the Left did. Multiculturalism and diversity are inherently divisive. But the media, universities, and Democrats got away with tarring Trump with the brush that more properly should have been applied to them.