The disagreement between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Trump deploying state National Guard troops to Los Angeles is now being debated in court. We’ll explain how the situation developed and answer some common questions.
Q: Is there an ad in Craigslist to hire people to riot in L.A.?
A: No, there has been no such ad on Craigslist. Some social media posts cited a Craigslist ad to falsely claim it showed that people protesting the immigration raids in Los Angeles were being paid for their actions. But a pair of podcasters told the Associated Press they placed the ad as a prank for their show, and it had nothing to do with the protests.
President Donald Trump recently boasted that the nation’s murder rate has “plummeted by 28%” since he took office. Data supplied by local police departments do show the nation’s murder rate is dropping, as it has been for several years. Notably, Trump now seems comfortable with crime data that he criticized repeatedly during the campaign as “fake news.”
A viral graphic warns that if the House-passed reconciliation bill becomes law, “we won’t have another election.” But there is no evidence to support that or some of the graphic’s underlying claims about “what’s coming” if the Senate also approves the legislation without any changes. For other claims, it’s unclear what they are based on.
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that, on average, Americans’ taxes would rise about 7.5% if the 2017 tax cuts are allowed to fully expire at the end of the year. But President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that if the Republican budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, doesn’t pass, Americans “will get a 68% tax increase.”
A TV ad from a group supportive of President Donald Trump makes misleading claims, and uses outdated data, to argue that he is “fixing” an economy “ruined” by Democrats.
Since regaining power in January, the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed with false certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab. But there isn’t clear evidence that the virus came from a lab. A new government website promoting the claim also gets some basic facts wrong.
A House-passed reconciliation bill would reduce federal funding to states that provide state-funded health insurance to people in the U.S. illegally, resulting in 1.4 million people losing coverage, according to a preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis. But President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have wrongly cast the bill as removing these immigrants from Medicaid.
Former President Joe Biden’s office announced on May 18 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer two days earlier, following the discovery of a prostate nodule. President Donald Trump and others have suggested, without evidence, that Biden’s diagnosis had been known much earlier and hidden from the public.
In a salient moment with the leader of South Africa, President Donald Trump played a video that he said showed “burial sites” for a thousand white farmers — the victims of what he has called a genocide — along a roadside in South Africa. It actually showed a 2020 demonstration bringing attention to the issue of violence against farmers of all races in South Africa.