In his 64 minutes on stage, Trump also lied about having stopped eight wars, went on a familiar tangent about transgender athletes, personally insulted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, used a racist smear against Minnesota’s Somali community generally and congresswoman Ilhan Omar in particular, bragged about his extrajudicial killing of more than 100 suspected drug smugglers on the high seas and attacked the late President Jimmy Carter for turning over the Panama Canal to Panama, as a treaty required him to do. Trump did occasionally lie about the economy, as well, claiming falsely that grocery prices were coming down, that predecessor Joe Biden had overseen “stagflation” on his watch, that tariffs were not borne by American consumers, that he had given the largest tax cuts in history, and that the crude oil he coerced from Venezuela after attacking its capital to capture its dictator was worth $5 billion. Trump’s tax cuts were smaller as a share of gross domestic product than either the ones passed under Ronald Reagan in 1981 or George W. Bush in 2001, and the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Venezuela has offered to the United States is likely worth about half of the $5 billion Trump claimed, given the extra cost to process it and the current market price.
Author: S.V. Date
Published at: 2026-01-13 22:09:04
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