Trump issues many falsehoods at Black journalists’ convention 31JUL24

EXPOSING THE MANY LIES, DECEPTIONS AND FALSEHOODS that make up most of drumpf's / trump's public statements, comments and social media post. From the Washington Post.....

Trump issues many falsehoods at Black journalists’ convention

The former president falsely claims nobody was charged for deaths in Black Lives Matter protests.

Updated July 31, 2024 at 8:09 p.m. EDT|Published July 31, 2024 at 7:42 p.m. EDT

By Glenn Kessler

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him or sending a DM on Twitter  Twitter

“You know, nobody died that day, you do know that? But people died in Seattle. Nobody died, but people died in Minneapolis. You know, people died in Minneapolis, and nothing happens. And nobody ever talks and nothing happens to those people. But you went after the J6 people with a vengeance.”

— Donald Trump, in a conversation at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, July 31

In his half-hour sit-down with three journalists at NABJ, the former president and Republican presidential nominee unleashed his usual litany of falsehoods, ranging from a phony story about the ex-governor of Virginia executing a baby after birth to an absurd claim that he “saved” historically Black colleges and universities. To a Black audience, he yet again bragged he did more for Black people than any president since Abraham Lincoln — earning the instant rejoinder (which he ignored) from ABC News’s Rachel Scott: “Better than President Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act?”

When asked about pardoning people convicted of violence during the Jan. 6 attacks — he said he would — he resorted to whataboutism. He asserted that people died in Seattle and Minneapolis during the social justice protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020 — and nothing happened to those people.

As part of his argument, Trump falsely claimed that “nobody died.” A Senate report said that “seven individuals, including three law enforcement officers, ultimately lost their lives” in connection with the attack, four of them “that day.” Four were Trump supporters — one shot by a U.S. Capitol police officer as she tried to climb through a broken window that led to the Speaker’s Lobby, two of heart attacks and one from amphetamine intoxication. Brian D. Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, collapsed at his desk after the attack and died a day later. The District’s chief medical examiner concluded that Sicknick had suffered two strokes nearly eight hours after being sprayed with a chemical irritant. Two other officers died by suicide within days of the attack.

Trump also claimed that just a few days ago there was a “horrible attack on the Capitol” by pro-Palestinian protesters — and “they fought with them much more openly than I saw on January 6th.” That’s not true. “Though most demonstrators walked and chanted peacefully, there were some clashes with law enforcement, and D.C. police and Capitol Police said they arrested 15 people in total. The U.S. Park Police arrested eight people,” The Washington Post reported. Trump spoke at length about the tragedy of “incredible monuments, bells, lions, all these magnificent limestone and granite with red paint.” The vandalism took place not at the Capitol but near Union Station — appearing on the Christopher Columbus memorial fountain and Freedom Bell, a reproduction of the Liberty Bell — and National Park Service officials said they would be cleaned within three days, despite Trump’s saying of the defacement: “You’ll see it in a hundred years from now.”

An American flag was also burned, earning condemnation from Trump’s rival for the presidency, Vice President Harris.

Here’s what happened in Seattle and Minneapolis. The information on deaths during the protests came from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a nonprofit. The organization found that the overwhelming majority of the 9,000 Black Lives Matter demonstrations were peaceful, but that 11 people were killed while participating in the protests and an additional 14 died in incidents linked to them.

Seattle

Two people were killed, according to ACLED. Summer Taylor, a Black Lives Matter activist, died when a car rammed into the protests. Another person, 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., was shot in an incident that ACLED said was tied to the broader unrest. (Another fatal shooting of a teen was not connected, ACLED concluded.)

Dawit Kelete, 30, who drove into the protest on July 4, 2020, killing Taylor and seriously injuring another person, was sentenced to 78 months in jail. The judge said that while there was no evidence he hit the protesters intentionally, his conduct was “extremely reckless.”

Mays died in the early morning hours of June 29, 2020, while driving a stolen Jeep in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, which protesters occupied for three weeks after police abandoned the area. Mays lived in San Diego, but traveled to Seattle to be part of history, his family said. The incident led the city to shut down the protest zone.

No one has been charged in Mays’s death. Mays’s father has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city for allowing “lawlessness to reign.”

Minneapolis

One person was killed, according to ACLED. The Max It Pawn Shop was set on fire during protests on May 28, 2020, and then two months later, police discovered a charred body in the wreckage. Surveillance video footage showed Montez Terriel Lee, 26, pouring an accelerant around the pawnshop and lighting it on fire. Lee was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, the Justice Department said.

Trump reissues his greatest hits of previously debunked claims

These are among the false claims Trump made at the Chicago event, in the order in which he made them, with links to earlier fact checks of them.

• He “saved” historically Black colleges and universities
• Best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln
• An invasion of “15, 16, 17 million” people
• Harris was the “border czar”
• Many migrants are from mental institutions
• The crime rate of other countries is going down
• The worst inflation in 100 years
• Trump was protected by the Presidential Records Act
• Biden was ruled “incompetent” in his presidential records case
• Democrats allow the killing of babies after being born
• “Everyone” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned
• Drilling will reduce inflation
• Grocery bills are up 60 percent
• U.S. has more oil than any other country.

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BOHICA!!! Who Screwed the Middle Class? 25MAR11

BOHICA working and middle class America! This from Mother Jones explaining why unemployment and economic inequality are government policy....

I've written several times before about Winner-Take-All Politics, in which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that middle-class wage stagnation and growing income inequality are due as much to political decisions over the past 30 years as they are to broad economic trends. I find their arguments persuasive, but there's no question that it's a tough case to make. After all, exactly which political decisions are we talking about? Can we point to specific pieces of legislation or specific agency decisions that have retarded wage growth? In fact, we can—things like tax policy, financial deregulation, the decline of antitrust enforcement, and anti-union rulings by the NLRB all played a role. By themselves, though, these just aren't enough to account for what's happened. So what's the smoking gun when it comes to the impact of politics on wage stagnation and growing income inequality?
I think Lane Kenworthy fingered the right culprit a few weeks ago: the abandonment in recent decades of full employment as even a rhetorical goal of American economic policy:

The post–World War II experiences of the rich democracies suggest three routes to rising working- and middle-class wages. One is an environment in which firms face only moderate competition in product markets and limited pressure from shareholders, allowing them to pass on a significant share of growth to their employees. This characterized the period from the late 1940s through the mid 1970s, but it’s now long gone. The second is strong unions. I see little hope of that in America’s future. The third is full employment.

But full employment is only possible if the Federal Reserve is committed to it, and this is decidedly no longer the case: "Since the late 1970s, independent central banks such as the Fed almost always have prioritized low inflation, rendering low unemployment difficult to achieve. If the Fed isn’t on board, even a workable plan for full employment supported by the American public and our elected officials probably won’t be enough."
Following the stagflation of the 70s, conservatives decisively took over Fed policy and put it in the service of the wealthy, prioritizing low inflation over low unemployment and tacitly promising bailouts whenever Wall Street found itself in danger (a practice charmingly known as the "Greenspan put"). Matt Yglesias has a useful piece in Democracy this month arguing that progressives need to take the Fed far more seriously if we ever want to have any chance of reversing this:

Central banks and monetary policy are the primary determinant of short-term economic conditions—of the unemployment rate, and thus of workers’ ability to bargain for wages. This is, clearly, a hugely important subject in its own right. But it’s also a critical determinant of overall political conditions.
....But when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he rather hastily chose to reappoint [Ben] Bernanke, creating a situation in which no Democrat has held the most important domestic policy job in the land since 1987. He inherited two vacancies on the Board of Governors that he left open for over a year, only putting names forward after a third vacancy emerged in 2010....Of course, no one can know for sure what the Fed would have done had Obama picked someone other than Bernanke to chair it or filled the vacancies more rapidly. But it’s certainly plausible that different personnel would have led to swifter and more forceful moves toward monetary stimulus, a more rapid end to the recession, and a lower unemployment rate.

A lot has happened over the past 30 years, but if you're looking for a single political sea change that's had the biggest impact on middle class wages—more important than union decline, more important than NAFTA, more important than the end of Glass-Steagall—it's the political consensus that underlies the Fed's reluctance to allow labor markets to stay tight enough to generate wage increases in the real economy. And it's something we're seeing all over again right now, as the DC chattering classes have almost unanimously decided that inflation is our real enemy right now, even though core inflation is running around 1% and unemployment is still near 9%.
This is a policy beloved of the business community, which prefers loose labor markets that keep wages low and executive compensation high, but it hasn't always been the Fed's policy and it's not written in stone that it has to be now. Tight labor markets and rising middle-class wages are, to a large extent, a choice we make. Politics took them away 30 years ago, and politics can return them to us if we want.

Front page image: Celine Nadeau

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Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Get Kevin Drum's RSS feed.