Barack Obama and Kim Jong Un
"But in the meantime, North Korea, I like Kim, he likes me. We get along. I respect him, he respects me. 'You could end up in a war.' President Obama told me that. He said, 'The biggest problem, I don't know how to solve it.' He told me he doesn't know how to solve it. I said, 'Did you ever call him?' 'No.' Actually, he tried 11 times. But the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his call. OK? Lack of respect. But he takes my call,'" Trump said.
Facts First: There is no apparent basis for the claim that Obama tried to call Kim Jong Un 11 times.
"This is a total fabrication. Trump is completely delusional, and it's scary," Susan Rice, who served as Obama's national security adviser, said on Twitter in response to our tweet of Trump's quote.
"We never called Kim," Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama's deputy national security adviser, told CNN.
Trump has previously claimed that Obama begged Kim for a meeting, another assertion for which there is no evidence.
The Emoluments Clause
Trump attacked critics who said that holding a G7 summit at one of his resorts would violate the Constitution. He said:
"You people with this
phony Emoluments Clause."
Facts First: There's nothing phony about the Constitution's prohibitions against the President receiving payments from foreign and domestic governments.
The clause on foreign emoluments, found in Article I, Section 9, says that "no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."
The clause on domestic emoluments, found in Article II, Section 1, says: "The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them."
Trump might have been attempting to argue that it is phony to apply the clause to his own activities, but, at very least, his wording left an inaccurate impression.
Who is paying the tariffs on China
Trump said the US is "taking in billions and billions of dollars in tariffs from China, and they're eating the tariffs."
Facts First: Americans make the actual tariff payments, and a bevy of economic studies has found that Americans are bearing the overwhelming majority of the tariff costs.
Rally crowds
"I haven't had an empty seat at a rally," Trump said.
Facts First: There have been empty seats at various Trump rallies, including a rally earlier this month in Minneapolis, a July rally in Greenville, North Carolina, an October 2018 rally in Houston and an April 2017 rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, according to journalists on the scene.
The whistleblower and Adam Schiff
Schiff's comments
Trump said of the comments Schiff made about the Zelensky call at a committee hearing: "So he made up a lie, and I released -- they never thought that I'd do this -- I released a transcription done by stenographers of the exact conversation I had. And now the game was up."
Facts First: Schiff made his comments about Trump's call after the President released the rough transcript, not before. The White House issued the document on September 25. Schiff spoke at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on September 26.
The Ukraine scandal
The call document
Trump said, "... I released a transcription then by stenographers of the exact conversation I had."
Facts First: The document released by the White House explicitly says, on the first page, that it is not an exact transcript of the call.
source and much more
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