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Monthly Archives: February 2018

Why Trump’s parade will lead Republicans over a cliff


Matt Bai

3 hours ago
Markets are careening all over the place. Congress is struggling, again, to keep the Capitol open. The White House is at war with the FBI, and the special counsel’s investigation into Russian influence is about to touch off a constitutional crisis. If you’re the president, what’s your next bold move? A parade, obviously.
Not just any parade. What President Trump has in mind — what he has, in fact, ordered the Pentagon to spend weeks of time and millions of dollars planning, if the fake Washington Post can be trusted — is a garish show of military power, with tanks and missiles followed by warriors in full regalia marching up Pennsylvania Avenue for no apparent reason, except I guess that parades are super-fun and often involve things like cotton candy and sparklers, and that’s a hard thing for a grown man to resist.
Actually, Trump got this particular idea in Paris back in July, when he visited Emmanuel Macron and witnessed a similar display. Because you know, when you think about military might, your mind immediately goes to France.
Critics of the president see in this the aspirations of a strongman. They point out that the whole thing has a certain Kim Jong Un feel to it, with Trump and his ruling generals solemnly reviewing the troops as they high-kick it past the White House. It’s a show of force that could only be interpreted as threatening toward adversaries abroad, if not to the investigators working a few miles away.
But I give Trump more credit than that. I don’t actually think he’s motivated by some secret agenda to install himself as a small-handed dictator. I doubt he’s read enough history to understand why a parade like this might make a lot of thinking people nauseous.
No, I think Trump’s real agenda is getting clearer every day, and his silly parade fits in perfectly. His goal is to govern at the dawn of the Cold War, in the 1950s America he knew as a boy, when it wasn’t so uncommon for presidents to march alongside tanks and batteries.
He’s stuck in a moment most Americans can’t remember, and he wants the rest of us stuck there with him.
You can see it in Trump’s approach to foreign policy generally. A year into office, he’s moving to restart the nuclear arms race that darkened the second half of the 20th century, and he’s seeking billions more to ramp up conventional forces, rather than modernize them, in case we have to fight another land war on the Korean Peninsula.
Trump’s personal taunting of the North Korean leader, his boast about the superior size of his “nuclear button,” brings to mind America’s bygone fixation with Khrushchev or Castro. All that’s missing is the black-and-white TV.
About the only way Trump’s foreign policy isn’t lifted directly from the Cold War is that he just can’t summon any real antipathy for the Russians, no matter how menacing they become. Go figure.
You can see it in the way Trump fetishizes the stock market as the only indicator of economic progress, as if we still lived in the moment when the state of General Motors and IBM told you everything you needed to know about the state of the American worker. You can see it in the way he champions protectionism, as if American manufacturers could still subsist without foreign markets.
You can see it in the way he throws around explosive charges of treason and disloyalty, in the mold of Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon (not to mention Trump’s idol, Roy Cohn). You can see it, not least of all, in the way he baldly mythologizes pre-civil-rights America for the thousands of resentful white men who still wear the red hats at his rallies.
(And just by the way, you can hear it in the way he called Stormy Daniels, his alleged onetime paramour, “honeybunch.” Seriously. The last time someone used that term to refer to something other than breakfast cereal, man hadn’t yet walked on the moon.)
This is, after all, what making America great again was really all about. A more precise slogan would have been “Make America Eisenhower’s Again.” Minus the dignity and statesmanship.
It amazes me, still, that even now Republicans in Washington can’t seem to grasp the existential peril in all of this time traveling. Make no mistake: They don’t love Trump, and they wouldn’t prefer him as president. They’ve just decided, by and large, that protecting Trump from judgment is the likeliest route to protecting their majorities.
But I wonder if the Devin Nuneses and Paul Ryans of the world managed to put down their beers and weenies long enough to watch the Super Bowl last Sunday. If they did, they might have noticed that the companies who advertised to the largest single audience of the year wanted nothing to do with this Trumpian vision of lost greatness.
If Republican leaders sat through the commercials, they would have seen an almost endless array of multiracial faces, untraditional families and not-so-subtle messages about social progress and leaving the past behind.
For all the controversy stirred up by that boneheaded ad that had Martin Luther King hawking Dodge trucks, what was lost is that the company was clearly trying to repossess this limited concept of American greatness. However much that spot may have offended King’s admirers, its intended message was a rebuke of Trump’s core appeal.
So, I ask you, Washington Republicans: Who do you figure knows more about where American society is headed? Would that be the most sophisticated corporations in America, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars on consumer research, or the president of the United States, whose approval after the customary State of the Union bump barely broke 40 percent?
Why don’t you call all those companies that market-tested the Shih Tzu puppy out of those Super Bowl ads and ask them whether Cold War nostalgia will be an especially sellable commodity over the next decade of American life?
This is a crisis for modern Republicans. The larger point, though, is that however much Trump’s 1950s fantasy may endanger his party, I fear it endangers his country more. Every day spent thinking about more tanks and nukes we don’t need is a day closer to the moment when European powers and China are seen as the indispensable peacemakers on the world stage.
Every day spent obsessing over stock prices and tariffs (something plenty of retro Democrats do, too) is another day spent not thinking about how to maintain our influence in global markets or how to retool the social contract so we can compete in this century, rather than the last one.
Everybody loves a parade, right up until the moment it passes you by.

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Trump slams Democrats’ reaction to his State of the Union address


Sen. Tammy Duckworth: ‘Cadet Bone Spurs’ Won’t Tell Me When to Clap

HuffPost
Rebecca Shapiro
3 hrs ago
Iraq War veteran and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) criticized President Donald Trump for calling Democrats who did not clap during his State of the Union address “treasonous” on Monday.
“We don’t live in a dictatorship or a monarchy,” Duckworth tweeted soon after he made the comment. “I swore an oath ― in the military and in the Senate ― to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap.”

This is not the first time Duckworth, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot who received the Purple Heart after she lost both her legs in Iraq when her helicopter was stuck by a grenade, has referred to Trump as “Cadet Bone Spurs,” a reference to Trump’s stated reason for not being drafted during the Vietnam War.
During a floor speech last month, she also called Trump a “five-deferment draft dodger” as she slammed the president for criticizing Democrats’ support for the military.
“I spent my entire adult life looking out for the well-being, the training, the equipping of the troops for whom I was responsible,” she said. “I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger.”

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Our Loss


 

JANUARY 18, 2018
Meyerson on TAP
Six days ago, I was having an email exchange with the author of a piece I was editing on how Democrats can both turn out their base and reach out to voters outside their base in the 2018 midterms. We were going back and forth on three points in the piece—chiefly, on whether Latinos could be said to have realigned themselves more toward the Democrats during the 1990s (the author’s position) or whether so many new Latino voters came forth during that decade that their Democratic shift was more a surge than a realignment (my position).
After dredging up the exit poll percentages from the California gubernatorial elections of 1990, 1994, and 1998, and doing the numerical calculations (candidate preference percentage times Latino share of the electorate times raw number of votes cast) to come up with the steadily declining number of Latino votes for the Republican gubernatorial candidates in those three elections, the author quietly and indisputably won his point.
He then added: “I’m a trifle indisposed though I will try to do some revisions on points 2+3 later this morning. (Actually I’m at Sibley [a Washington, D.C., hospital] dealing with a flare-up of leukemia!). Can you point me to more data sources on the CA question?”
The indisposed author—Paul Booth—suddenly and shockingly died yesterday, succumbing to his flare-up of leukemia. So suddenly and unexpectedly that his wife, the legendary organizer Heather Booth, was on Capitol Hill getting herself arrested for demanding justice—and legal standing, and a path to citizenship—for DACA recipients and the other undocumenteds.
For decades, Paul had been one of the labor movement’s key strategists. As AFSCME’s organizing director, and then consigliore to the union’s presidents, Paul devised the nation’s very first living-wage campaign, helped mastermind the 1995 insurgency that ousted the old-line cold warriors from the leadership of the AFL-CIO, and mentored scores—perhaps hundreds—of union leaders and organizers, movement activists and elected officials. His organizing pedigree was as long and distinguished as any figure’s in American politics: As national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1965, he organized the first anti-Vietnam War demonstration in the nation’s capital. The following year, he became one of the first of numerous New Left veterans who entered, renewed, and, with varying degrees of success, transformed the main institution of the Old Left: the labor movement. The union presidents who hired Paul—first, Ralph Helstein at the Packinghouse Workers, then Jerry Wurf at AFSCME—were democratic socialists who found in Paul a comrade, a kindred spirit, and a brilliant analyst and tactician.
Some labor leaders are bombastic. Paul was quiet, ironic, self-effacing, witty, warm, scholarly, and diligent—just the kind of guy who’d crunch the numbers to make a point about Latino realignment, whose commitment to a decent future for his nation was such that he’d research and rewrite from his hospital bed on what the Democrats needed to do to win in 2018 (we’ll post that article tomorrow), who could dismiss his own illness as a trifle indisposition.
There was nothing trifling about Paul’s life or work. Damn your indisposition, Paul. We’ll miss you. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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The Nunes-Ryan Civil Liberties Sham


Marcy Wheeler, HuffPost Fri, Feb 2 5:40 PM CST

For the last three weeks, privacy advocates have been buffeted by two political whirlwinds. First, the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act two weeks ago, authored by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. And then today, the release of a partisan memo, authored by Nunes’ staffers, purporting to show FBI and Department of Justice abuses of the individual Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application process.
Because Nunes and others ― up to and including House Speaker Paul Ryan ― claimed to be motivated by a concern about civil liberties, it was generally assumed the privacy community would join the clamor. But those of us who’ve been through several surveillance fights with these posers know the reality is far more complex. Ultimately, two principles are at issue: the rule of law and privacy. In both instances, Nunes and Ryan are on the wrong side of the issue.
The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act extended a key part of FISA, called Section 702, that lets the government ask domestic telecommunications and tech providers for help spying on foreigners overseas. But that word “target” is misleading, because under the program, the government obtains the American side of any conversation with a targeted individual. The FBI can obtain that information in raw form and routinely queries the data when it gets leads to find out if Americans have been speaking to suspicious foreigners. That amounts to warrantless access of Americans’ communications, and exposes certain groups, like Chinese-Americans and Muslims, to far more scrutiny than others.
Also under Section 702, the government obtains certain entirely domestic communications that have obscured their location. While it has to purge most of those communications, the NSA can keep any that it shows are evidence of eight enumerated crimes. Again, this is warrantless surveillance of Americans, done in the guise of foreign intelligence collection.
A mere three weeks ago, Nunes and Ryan were happy to have Americans surveilled with no evidence whatsoever of wrong-doing.
During the 702 reauthorization debate, reformers like Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), tried to add protections in these instances, most notably by requiring a warrant before the FBI searches for communications involving Americans. The law authored by Nunes, however, only provides such protection to people for whom the FBI already has probable cause that they are committing a crime. Nunes’ law flips the Fourth Amendment on its head, providing protection only to criminal suspects and not for those against whom the FBI has no evidence of wrongdoing.
A mere three weeks ago, Nunes and Ryan were happy to have Americans surveilled with no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. Back then, Ryan backed suspicionless, warrantless searches of Americans as a necessary trade off. “This [bill] strikes the balance that we must have between honoring and protecting privacy rights of U.S. citizens, honoring civil liberties, and making sure that we have the tools we need in this day and age of 21st century terrorism to keep our people safe.”
Today, however, when a former Trump campaign adviser is at issue, Nunes and Ryan have discovered the due process they personally refused for so many Americans. The Nunes memo purports to show that an individualized FISA application against Carter Page did not adequately inform the FISA court about the political source of one piece of evidence among others. The memo argues the FBI did not adequately reveal “the political origins of the Steele dossier,” intelligence reporting paid for by the Democratic Party.
The application instead presented Steele as someone (the memo admits) who was a “longtime FBI source” with a “past record of credible reporting.” But even on that key issue, the memo is unclear whether DOJ knew precisely who was paying for Steele’s work. Indeed, it makes no mention that Republican billionaire Paul Singer was the first political actor to pay Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, for dirt on Trump, though Singer himself did not fund any of Steele’s work. In other words, on the central question of whether the FBI could have attributed Fusion’s intelligence to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats or to someone else, the memo doesn’t make its case.
Now, the role of consultants like Steele in judicial proceedings is a matter of grave concern. Consultants with an inadequate grasp of the Arabic language or Islamic faith have long been used by DOJ as witnesses against terrorism defendants, and defense attorneys have suspected consultants ― perhaps the very same ones ― provided intelligence used in FISA applications, just as Steele provided intelligence for the Page application. More recently, consultants assessing crime patterns and recidivism rates have been shown to rely on biased algorithms.
Yet none of the people pushing this Nunes memo have ever uttered a peep about due process concerns posed by outright incompetent consultants in the past. Here, however, they’re wailing that a consultant they admit has been reliable in the past got paid differently than in the past and that wasn’t fully briefed to the court.
The way to deal with both of these issues is to conduct actual oversight of the general problem, not extend protections just to one man like Page.
The sudden interest in problems Nunes and Ryan showed no interest in just weeks ago is all the more telling, given several details about this memo.

First, as the memo lays out, starting in October 2016 the FBI obtained and then renewed a FISA warrant against Page four times. That means over the span of at least nine months, the FBI demonstrated that a wiretap of Page demonstrated useful foreign intelligence, and FISA judges agreed with that assessment over and over. The memo either doesn’t mention or obscures an earlier FISA warrant, obtained in 2014 during a period when Page was being actively recruited by Russian spies who were either expelled or imprisoned. Effectively, then, the GOP memo admits that something about Page, something well beyond the Steele dossier, raised real concerns about whether he was spying for Russia. And the FISA court agreed that it was a real concern.
The memo also complains that the Page application mentions George Papadopoulos, another former Trump foreign policy aide who in October pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with people working on behalf of Russia. It reads: “The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos.” That’s not entirely true. As the committee itself learned in testimony, Page was copied on at least one of the emails Papadopoulos sent to the campaign detailing his own activities.
Moreover, the memo is silent about whether the Papadopoulos reference in the application served to do anything more than inform the court that, in response to a tip about Papadopoulos’ actions, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Russians were attempting to compromise Trump via his foreign policy advisers. Effectively, this amounts to saying that because the FBI was investigating Page in the context of other concerns that Russians were trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign (concerns Papadopoulos’ guilty plea validate), it should be deemed an abuse. As with 702 reauthorization, they’re trying to extend protections just to those against whom there is credible evidence of wrong-doing.
Finally, there’s the larger conduct. This memo was written for a guy, Devin Nunes, who was a Trump transition official. That transition period has already netted one guilty plea ― that of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI. Multiple reports make clear that Trump permitted the release of this memo explicitly as a way to delegitimize a legally constituted investigation into him, his family, and associates like Nunes. In the same way that Nunes and Ryan are pushing for further review only for a man who, abundant other evidence suggests, fostered legitimate suspicion, they’re also saying that they only care to scrutinize FBI and DOJ actions if they themselves might be subject to them.
Every single privacy activist I know cares about privacy in significant part to ensure the rule of law and to prevent the arbitrary exercise of justice to focus just on select groups like Muslims or Chinese-Americans, rather than those who pose the greatest risk to society, like people allegedly doing Russia’s secret bidding. Yet the actions of Ryan and Nunes reverse that, using a sham concern for civil liberties as a way to prevent themselves, their associates, and the president from being subject to the rule of law like the rest of us would be.
If we’re going to have this secret surveillance ― and Nunes and Ryan insist we need it ― the key to protecting Americans is drafting the law to provide protections and ensuring those standards are met. Section 702, as Nunes and Ryan reauthorized it, fails that test, because it permits the warrantless access of completely innocent Americans’ communications. And for all its bluster, the Nunes memo doesn’t tell us critical details we need to assess whether what happened to Page was improper specifically, or simply indicative of known concerns about outside consultants that Nunes and Ryan have long ignored (and continue to ignore with all other Americans). By all means let’s examine the role of consultants in FBI investigations. By all means let’s scrutinize whether the FISA process works as well as the DOJ claims.
But let’s do that for all Americans, and not just those about whom the FBI has real reason to worry.
Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog and is the author of “Anatomy of Deceit.” Follow her on Twitter at @emptywheel.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

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When is a commitment of $1.3 trillion worth precisely zero?


FEBRUARY 1, 2018
Meyerson on TAP
When is a commitment of $1.3 trillion worth precisely zero? When Donald Trump makes it in his State of the Union address.
On Tuesday night, Trump promised that he’d put before Congress a massive investment in infrastructure, to the tune of $1.5 trillion. What he neglected to say was that just $200 billion of that would actually be federal dollars. The balance would be funds that he hoped—if conditions were right, if the wind was from the east, if the weather was sunny and the creek didn’t rise—would come from state and local governments and private investors. That is, from sources the federal government does not control.
Traditionally, the federal government has picked up the lion’s share of infrastructure spending—and since that hasn’t amounted to all that much in recent decades, we have some of the industrialized world’s worst roads, rails, and airports to show for it. State and local governments, which often have limited bonding capacity and which can’t run deficits (unlike the feds), have seldom been able to pick up as much as half the cost of such projects, even during these decades when those projects have been too few and far between.
For a number of months, however, the word in Washington was that Trump’s administration would pony up no more than 20 percent of the trillion dollars it was touting. In the SOTU, however, that trillion magically grew to a trillion and a half, while the federal commitment remained anchored at $200 million, which would come to 13-and-a-third percent of the newly enlarged commitment.
So why stop there? Since the federal share won’t go any higher than that $200 mill, why not pledge a $5 trillion infrastructure project? A $10 trillion project? Once you begin taking credit for projects to be funded (or not) by other people’s money, resulting from other people’s autonomous decisions, there’s a whole lot you can take credit for. Why not take credit not just for the federal tax cut but for state and local tax cuts, too? Trump has gone beyond the doctrine of l’état c’est moi. L’état plus the 50 little états and Lord knows how many cities, counties and private investors—they’re all, as Trump sees them, moi, aussi. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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Fiscal Illinois


Listening to the Governor of Illinois in a newscast today, It appears that many members of the GOP nationwide use the same message of fiscal, national and security  responsibility. It seems to me that these folks are in the wrong decade, we have had too many distractive issues that take focus from the real problems. Our Governor has railed against Mike Madigan for four years and got nothing else done, he has provided no guidance and attempted to veto the only budget passed in four years. It is widely known that the State is in a budget crisis due to earlier fiscal mistakes however it would seem to me that a reasonable effort to bring both sides and the major unions to the table and work out what needs to be done to make the State fiscally stable. Part of the fiscal issue is the failure of the legislature to correct pension problems from prior administrations. Correcting this will not make the State fiscally stable but it will be a solid first step. If there are no rational conversations then there can be no fix. It is unfortunate that not enough voters realize the fiscal problem stems from “kicking the can” down the road thereby making it a political “football”. In a practical sense, our Legislators need to meet and resolve it without political rhetoric. Leave your party lines at the door!

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Tax Cuts


Bess Levin

Vanity Fair

February 1, 2018 11:00 AM

Tax Cuts
The G.O.P. Tax Cut Is Draining the Treasury Even Faster Than Expected
America’s burn rate is speeding up—leaving Congress just a few weeks to raise the debt ceiling again.
One of the many things confirmed by the great tax-bill melodrama of 2017 is that Republicans only pretend to care about “fiscal responsibility” when Democrats are in power and tax cuts aren’t on the line. With the opportunity to slash the corporate rate nearly in half, cries of “I won’t endorse a bill that adds one penny to the deficit!” evaporated, and tacking on $1.5 trillion became no big deal. Tax cuts, we will soon be reminded, don’t grow on trees, and the social safety net must be pared back in exchange. For now, though, Republicans are still in the trickle-down honeymoon phase, seeing in every corporate press release more confirmation that America has been made great again. Which makes it somewhat ironic that the Treasury is now burning through its cash reserves at an even more spectacular rate.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the federal government will run out of money even sooner than expected, thanks to the new tax legislation, which is estimated to lead to a fall in revenue of $136 billion in 2018. A default on debts had originally been forecasted for late March or early April. But now, because of the new withholding tables, “withheld receipts are expected to be less than the amounts paid in the comparable period last year.” That, combined with the fact that the Treasury generally issues a high number of tax refunds in February and March, means that the $272 billion in cash the Department had on hand as of Tuesday will quickly dwindle. If the debt ceiling isn’t increased by the first half of March, the C.B.O. cautioned on Wednesday, “the government would be unable to pay its obligations fully,” and would be forced to delay payments, default on its debts, or both.

Treasury markets are already skittish at the prospect, according to Bloomberg, and the matter may prove contentious in Congress, which is already grappling with an immigration stalemate and another government shutdown vote on February 8. A proposal to raise the debt ceiling may repel G.O.P. deficit hawks, who in the past have pushed for spending cuts before allowing a vote. And Democrats may be equally hesitant to support the measure, particularly if there’s been zero progress on the immigration front. (Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, in which he claimed that the visa lottery and family sponsorships are “deadly loopholes” that allow “criminals and terrorists to enter our country” did not help matters—“He is just setting another bad standard which we have to reject,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters Wednesday.)

To be fair, the C.B.O. report doesn’t factor in the stratospheric growth Team Trump promised would be spurred by the tax plan, allowing it—per Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin—to not only “pay for itself, but . . . pay down debt.” But experts have cast some doubt on that outcome. “That’s wishful thinking,” wrote Bruce Bartlett a former domestic-policy adviser to Ronald Reagan. “So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting.”

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AP Fact Check- State Of The Union


 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The AP is fact-checking remarks from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Here’s a look at some of the claims we’ve examined (quotations from the speech as delivered or as released by the White House before delivery):
Wage Gains:

WAGE GAINS
President Donald Trump on rising wages
TRUMP: “After years and years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.”
THE FACTS: Actually, they are not rising any faster than they have before. Average hourly pay rose 2.5 percent in 2017, slightly slower than the 2.9 percent increase recorded in 2016.
Most economists say wages should increase at a faster rate as the unemployment rate drops. The unemployment rate stands at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, but that has done little so far to spark rising wages.
The last time unemployment was this low, in the late 1990s, average hourly pay was rising at a 4 percent pace.
DIVERSITY VISAS
TRUMP: “The third pillar (of my immigration plan) ends the visa lottery — a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard to skill, merit or the safety of our people.”
THE FACTS: That’s a highly misleading characterization. The program is not nearly that random and it does address skills, merit and safety.
President Donald Trump talked about business moving to the U.S., chain migration, energy exports and the Islamic State group. We break down the facts. (Jan. 30)
The diversity visa program awards up to 50,000 green cards a year to people from underrepresented countries, largely in Africa. It requires applicants to have completed a high school education or have at least two years of experience in the last five years in a selection of fields identified by the Labor Department.
Winners are then randomly selected by computer, from that pool of applicants who met the pre-conditions. Winners must submit to extensive background checks, just like any other immigrant.
COAL
President Donald Trump on energy
TRUMP: “We have ended the war on beautiful clean coal.”
THE FACTS: Coal is not clean. According to the Energy Department, more than 83 percent of all major air pollutants — sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, toxic mercury and dangerous soot particles — from power plants are from coal, even though coal makes up only 43 percent of the power generation. Power plants are the No. 1 source of those pollutants.
Coal produces nearly twice as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide per energy created as natural gas, the department says.
In 2011, coal burning emitted more than 6 million tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides versus 430,000 tons from other energy sources combined.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

In this Dec. 6, 2017, file photo, demonstrators hold up balloons during an immigration rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), programs, near the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
TRUMP: “The first pillar of our framework generously offers a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents at a young age — that covers almost three times more people than the previous administration.”
THE FACTS: Not so. The Obama administration pushed legal status for many more immigrants and was prevented by Congress and the courts from offering it. A 2013 bill that passed the Senate but died in the House would have bestowed legal status on about 8 million people, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.
In 2014, the Obama administration announced an expanded program that included parents of young immigrants who were shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, the measure would have given legal status to up to 4 million people. The Supreme Court deadlocked on the plan, letting a lower court ruling stand that blocked it.
Read a previous AP Fact Check on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement .
TERRORISTS
TRUMP: “In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists only to meet them again on the battlefield, including the ISIS leader, (Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi, who we captured, who we had, who we released.”
THE FACTS: Trump is correct that al-Baghdadi had been released after being detained at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, U.S. detention facilities in Iraq. But Trump made his comment while announcing that he had signed an executive order to keep open the controversial U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If he meant that “hundreds and hundreds” of Guantanamo detainees had been released only to return to the battlefield, his math is off.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence said this summer in its most recent report on the subject that of the 728 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo, 122 are “confirmed” and 90 are “suspected” of re-engaging in hostile activities.
MS-13
TRUMP: “We have sent thousands and thousands and thousands of MS-13 horrible people out of this country or into our prisons.”
THE FACTS: That’s an exaggeration and goes beyond how even how Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s most aggressive anti-gang enforcer, characterizes the scope of the effort.
Sessions said in a speech this week that federal authorities had secured the convictions of nearly 500 human traffickers and 1,200 gang members, “and worked with our international allies to arrest or charge more than 4,000 MS-13 members.” On other occasions, the attorney general has specifically said the 4,000 number reflects work done with “our partners in Central America.”
That suggests that at least some of the MS-13 members Trump is referring to weren’t actually in the U.S when they were arrested, and aren’t now in U.S. prisons.
OPIOIDS
TRUMP: Changes in immigration policies, including more border security, “will also support our response to the terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction.”
THE FACTS: Drugs being brought across borders are only part of the problem contributing to the nation’s opioid crisis.
According to the U.S. Centers on Disease Control and Prevention, about 40 percent of the opioid deaths in 2016 involved prescription painkillers. Those drugs are made by pharmaceutical companies. Some are abused by the people who have prescriptions; others are stolen and sold on the black market.
The flow of heroin into the U.S. from Mexico is a major problem, but drugs that are brought from other countries don’t all come over land borders. Illicit versions of powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which are a major factor in rising overdose numbers, are being shipped directly to the U.S. from China.
TRUMP: “My administration is committed to fighting the drug epidemic and helping get treatment for those in need.”
THE FACTS: The bipartisan National Governors Association doesn’t think he’s lived up to that commitment. Earlier this month, the governors called on Trump and Congress to do more to pay for and coordinate a response to the opioid epidemic.
The Trump administration has allowed states to begin allowing states to seek permission to use Medicaid to cover addiction treatment in larger facilities — a measure advocates say is needed.
Read a previous AP Fact Check on past anti-drug campaigns ,
VETERANS
TRUMP: “Last year, the Congress passed, and I signed, the landmark VA Accountability Act. Since its passage, my administration has already removed more than 1,500 VA employees who failed to give our veterans the care they deserve.”

THE FACTS: This statement is inaccurate. It’s true that more than 1,500 firings at the VA have occurred so far during the Trump administration. But more than 500 of those firings occurred from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, to late June, when the new accountability law began to take effect. That means roughly one-third of the 1,500 firings cannot be attributed to the new law.
Congress passed the legislation last June making it easier to fire VA employees and shortening the time employees have to challenge disciplinary actions. But the law’s impact on improving accountability at the department remains unclear: More VA employees were fired in former President Barack Obama’s last budget year, for instance, than in Trump’s first.
Read a previous AP Fact Check on Trump’s claims of success improving care for veterans .
BORDER SECURITY
TRUMP: “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities.”
THE FACTS: “Open borders” is an exaggeration. Border arrests, a useful if imperfect gauge of illegal crossings, have dropped sharply over the last decade.

The government under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama roughly doubled the ranks of the Border Patrol, and Bush extended fencing to cover nearly one-third of the border during his final years in office. The Obama administration deported more than 2 million immigrants during the eight years he was in office, more than in previous administrations.
Studies over several years have found immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.
FAMILY IMMIGRATION
TRUMP: “Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”
THE FACTS: It’s not happening because the waiting list is so long.
There is currently no wait for U.S. citizens to bring spouses, children under 21 and parents. But citizens must petition for siblings and adult children, and green-card card holders must do the same for spouses and children.
On Nov. 1, there were 4 million people in line for family-based visas, according to the State Department. The waits are longest for China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. In January, Mexican siblings of U.S. children who applied in November 1997 were getting called, a wait of more than 20 years.
An immigrant could theoretically bring an uncle by bringing a parent who then brings his sibling, but the wait would be interminable for most.
OBAMA’S HEALTH LAW
TRUMP: “We repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare — the individual mandate is now gone.”
THE FACTS: No, it’s not gone. It’s going, in 2019. People who go without insurance this year are still subject to fines.
Congress did repeal the unpopular requirement that most Americans carry insurance or risk a tax penalty but that takes effect next year.
It’s a far cry from what Trump and the GOP-led Congress set out to do last year, which was to scrap most of the sweeping Obama-era health law and replace it with a Republican alternative. The GOP blueprint would have left millions more Americans uninsured, making it even more unpopular than “Obamacare.”
Other major parts of the overhaul remain in place, including its Medicaid expansion, protections for people with pre-existing conditions, guaranteed “essential” health benefits, and subsidized private health insurance for people with modest incomes.
Read a previous AP Fact Check on Trump’s claims of dismantling “Obamacare.”
AUTOS
TRUMP: “Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we have not seen for decades.”
THE FACTS: He’s wrong about recent decades. The auto industry has regularly been opening and expanding factories since before became president. Toyota opened its Mississippi factory in 2011. Hyundai’s plant in Alabama dates to 2005. In 2010, Tesla fully acquired and updated an old factory to produce its electric vehicles.
Trump also declared that “Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan.” That’s not exactly the case, either. Chrysler announced it will move production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan, but the plant is not closing in Mexico. It will start producing other vehicles for global sales and no change in its workforce is anticipated.
ISLAMIC STATE

Airstrikes target Islamic State positions in Mosul, Iraq, in July. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
TRUMP: “Last year I pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later, I’m proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria. But there is much more work to be done. We will continue our fight until ISIS is defeated.”
THE FACTS: Although it’s true that the Islamic State has lost nearly 100 percent of the territory it held in Syria and Iraq when the U.S. began airstrikes in both countries in 2014, Syria remains wracked by civil war, with much of that country controlled by the government of Russian ally Syrian President Bashar Assad and not by U.S.-allied groups. The Iraqi government has declared itself fully liberated from IS.
The progress cited by Trump did not start with his presidency. The U.S.-led coalition recaptured much land, including several key cities in Iraq, before he took office. And the assault on Mosul, which was the extremists’ main stronghold in northern Iraq, was begun during the Obama administration. But in the past year the counter-ISIS campaign has accelerated, based largely on the approach Trump inherited.
He’s right that more remains to be done to eliminate IS as an extremist threat, even after it has been defeated militarily. The group is still able to inspire attacks in the West based on its ideology, and it is trying to make inroads in places like Afghanistan and Libya.
MIDDLE-CLASS TAXES

TRUMP: “Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses.”
THE FACTS: That depends on how you define “tremendous.” The biggest beneficiaries from the tax law are wealthy Americans and corporations.
Most Americans will pay less in taxes this year. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that about 80 percent of U.S. households will get a tax cut, with about 15 percent seeing little change and 5 percent paying more.
Middle-class households — defined as those making between roughly $49,000 and $86,000 a year — will see their tax bills drop by about $930, the Tax Policy Center calculates. That will lift their after-tax incomes by 1.6 percent.
The richest 1 percent, meanwhile, will save $51,140, lifting their after-tax incomes by 3.4 percent, or more than twice as much as the middle class.
ENERGY EXPORTS

In this July 12, 2017, file photo the Valero Benicia Refinery in Benicia, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
TRUMP: “We are now an exporter of energy to the world.”
THE FACTS: There’s nothing new in that: The U.S. has long exported all sorts of energy, while importing even more. If Trump meant that the U.S. has become a net exporter of energy, he’s rushing things along. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the U.S. will become a net energy exporter in the next decade, primarily because of a boom in oil and gas production that began before Trump’s presidency. The Trump White House has predicted that could happen sooner, by 2020. But that’s not “now.”
TAX CUTS

In this photo March 22, 2013, file photo, the exterior of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
TRUMP: “We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history.”
THE FACTS: No truer now than in the countless other times he has said the same. The December tax overhaul ranks behind Ronald Reagan’s in the early 1980s, post-World War II tax cuts and at least several more.
An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in the fall put Trump’s package as the eighth biggest since 1918. As a percentage of the total economy, Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.
Valued at $1.5 trillion over 10 years, the plan is indeed large and expensive. But it’s much smaller than originally intended. Back in the spring, it was shaping up as a $5.5 trillion package. Even then it would have only been the third largest since 1940 as a share of gross domestic product.
Read a previous AP Fact Check on Trump’s claim that his tax cuts are the biggest ever.
WORKER BONUSES

This July 27, 2017, file photo shows an AT&T logo at a store in Hialeah, Fla. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz, File)
TRUMP: “Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.”
THE FACTS: This appears to be true, but may not be as impressive as it sounds. According to a tally of public announcements by Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that supported the tax law, about 3 million workers have gotten bonuses, raises or larger payments to their retirement accounts since the tax law was signed.
That’s about 2 percent of the more than 154 million Americans with jobs. The Labor Department said before the tax package was signed into law that 38 percent of workers would likely get some form of bonus in 2017.
Few companies have granted across-the-board pay raises, which Trump and GOP leaders promised would result from the cut in corporate tax rates included in the overhaul. Many, such as Walmart and BB&T Bank, said they will raise their minimum wages. Walmart made similar announcements in 2015 and 2016

ENERGY PRODUCTION

TRUMP: “We have ended the war on American energy – and we have ended the war on clean coal.”
THE FACTS: Energy production was unleashed in past administrations, particularly Barack Obama’s, making accusations of a “war on energy” hard to sustain. Advances in hydraulic fracturing before Trump became president made it economical to tap vast reserves of natural gas. Oil production also greatly increased, reducing imports.
Before the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. for the first time in decades was getting more energy domestically than it imports. Before Obama, George W. Bush was no adversary of the energy industry.
One of Trump’s consequential actions as president on this front was to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — a source of foreign oil, from Canada.
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Contributed by Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann, Seth Borenstein, Eric Tucker, Geoff Mulvihill, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Elliott Spagat, Robert Burns, Josh Lederman, Calvin Woodward, Christopher Rugaber and Hope Yen.

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