In his latest video collaboration with FactCheck.org, CNN’s Jake Tapper highlights claims regularly made by Donald Trump in his speeches on the campaign trail.
Tapper focused on these four claims from a speech in Fort Myers, Florida, on Sept. 19.
- In that speech, Trump falsely claimed Clinton plans to bring in “620,000 refugees in her first term.” Clinton has not said how many refugees she would accept in fiscal 2017 or beyond.
- Trump, as usual, claimed that “I was against going into the war in Iraq.” But there’s no evidence for that. Trump voiced an opinion only once on whether to invade Iraq before the war started, and he said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
- Trump also criticized the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, saying “we got out the wrong way.” But Trump had supported a troop withdrawal, telling CNN in a 2007 interview that the U.S. should “declare victory and leave … [T]his is a total catastrophe and you might as well get out now, because you just are wasting time.”
- Also in Fort Myers, Trump referenced his oft-stated belief that it was a mistake for the U.S. to get involved in Libya, and that we would be better off if Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was still in power. But he fails to mention that he called at the time for just such an intervention. In February 2011, Trump, referring to Gadhafi, said that the U.S. should go into Libya “on a humanitarian basis” and “knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively and save the lives.”
These and other claims were covered in our Sept. 28 article, “Trump on the Stump.”
Tapper’s video can found on CNN’s website. All of the videos as part of our fact-checking collaboration can be found on our website.