In a contentious interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made several false, misleading and baseless claims about the origins of Lyme disease and the respiratory syncytial virus, the COVID-19 pandemic, and what the science shows about autism, vaccination and acetaminophen use during pregnancy.
President Donald Trump continues to insist damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of vandalism, despite a Department of Justice motion filed on July 31 that placed the blame squarely on a contractor’s “botched” installation of the pool coating “and not vandalism as initially represented” by the Department of Interior.
Sen. Rand Paul has pointed to a line in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary to claim that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases privately “knew” in January 2020 that the coronavirus did not come from a wet market, saying this contradicted Fauci’s public statements regarding a natural origin of the virus. That misconstrues Fauci’s original statement.
President Donald Trump has blamed improper forest management for Canadian wildfires whose smoke drifted into the Midwestern and Northeastern U.S. earlier this month. But climate change — and not a lack of “Debris Removal,” as Trump suggested — is the main factor leading to worsening Canadian wildfires and smoke pollution, experts from both sides of the border told us.
Multiple Democratic lawmakers have claimed that 8 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage as a result of the Trump-backed budget reconciliation bill that passed a year ago, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But experts told us the enrollment declines seen to date are largely due to other factors — including other Trump administration policies.
Our quarterly series presents just the statistics on various measures since Trump reentered the White House.
As a large outbreak of cyclospora has ravaged the Midwest, Democrats have frequently pinned blame on the Trump administration for terminating a monitoring program for the parasite. But the change to the program, called FoodNet, is unlikely to have played much of a direct role in the current outbreak, several food safety experts told us.
In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children, “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18. That’s only true if parents or other donors contribute thousands of dollars per year, per child, assuming that future returns are close to the historic stock market averages.
In a July 16 prime-time speech that warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” President Donald Trump cast doubt on the country’s ability to hold “free and fair elections” but offered no evidence that widespread fraud had occurred.
