[Comments and poll in response to H.R.6304, the "Stop Federal Vaccine Mandates for Employees Act," which says "No emergency standard may require any drug or vaccine or other biological product to be administered to any employee." See H.R. 6304 for Congressional response]
Speaking on the Sean Hannity radio show in January 2012, Trump predicted, "I say that [Obama] starts a war in Iran before the election. He'll start a war; lives will be wasted for no reason."
Speaking on the Laura Ingraham Show in April 2012 [and other times], Trump repeated his prediction: "I happen to think that the president is going to start a war with Iran. I think it'll be a short term popular thing to do. And I think he's going to do that for political reasons."
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow acknowledged that the Chinese do not directly pay tariffs on goods coming into the US, but instead American importers pay and oftentimes pass it on to US consumers, contradicting Pres. Trump's claims. Kudlow said that "both sides will suffer on this," but argued that China will suffer significant GDP losses as export markets are hit. The blow to US GDP won't be substantial since the economy is "in terrific shape," he said.
"The Republicans are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare," Trump continued. "In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans win back the House."
Trump wrote online that the Republican proposal "will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America," and that "Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions."
The president's comments come after his Justice Department endorsed a federal court ruling to eliminate ObamaCare in its entirety; Trump declared that the Republican Party "will soon be known as the party of health care."
"We've accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions," Trump said in a July 2018 Rose Garden press conference.
This is false. The economy wasn't hurting when Trump took office, and it hasn't turned around in just two short years. The economic turnaround Trump refers to is actually credited to his predecessor, President Barack Obama, who steered the country from a devastating recession into booming growth.
Economists told NBC News that Trump might have given the economy a boost with the tax cuts and dampened it with the trade war, but he didn't turn things around. Economies do not turn on a hair with a new presidency. While Obama can look back on his eight years and see his leadership play out, Trump's effect is still not yet known.
"Big steel is opening and renovating plants all over the country. Auto companies are pouring into the U.S., including BMW, which just announced a major new plant," Trump tweeted in November.
This is not true, according to industry experts. Auto investment is down; BMW had said they might open a new plant, but they didn't announce one. There are a handful of bright spots for steelmakers--production is up, for one--but there's no sign of a broad trend of investment and new plants.
The falsehood came days after news broke that General Motors would close American plants because the president's steel tariffs raised the cost of doing business, and Trump has repeatedly sought to portray his trade war as a boon to the country.
"When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so... We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN," Trump wrote in a December 2018 tweet.
Trump is misstating how tariffs work. Tariffs are a fee charged by the U.S. when a good is brought into the U.S. They're designed to make foreign made goods more expensive--thus boosting domestic producers--but that expense, charged to the importer, is typically passed down to American consumers.
"All Republicans support people with pre-existing conditions, and if they don't, they will after I speak to them," Trump tweeted in October. "I am in total support."
The Trump administration backed Republican-led states in a lawsuit that claims ObamaCare's protections for pre-existing conditions are illegal, and a federal court ruled the law unconstitutional in December. If the Supreme Court confirms the ruling, insurers would be able to start denying coverage to those people. The White House has not proposed alternative legislation that would offer those with pre-existing conditions the protections ObamaCare gives consumers. Supporting the concept of health care for people with pre-existing conditions, and supporting legislation that accomplishes it, are two different things.
"Remember this: President Obama separated children from families," Trump said in November 2018.
This is false. There was no widespread Obama-era policy of separating parents and children. The Obama administration instead opted to detain families together, earning outrage of their own. Advocates said there were a handful of scenarios under the Obama administration where children were separated from their parents because of fears of human trafficking, but reunification was speedy.
The president made this claim as a way to defend his own administration's policy that separated more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents earlier this year--a policy he was forced to end after widespread public outrage and condemnation from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
"People have no idea how badly our country has been treated by other countries," Trump said. "They've destroyed the steel industry, they've destroyed the aluminum industry, and other industries, frankly."
Trump railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement and the nation's trading partners throughout his campaign. Speaking at the shuttered Osram Sylvania factory in Manchester NH in June 2016, he said, "New Hampshire has lost 31 percent of their manufacturing jobs since NAFTA," which went into effect in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, Trump said. He called the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 "another Clinton disaster."
This has not happened. Trump issued an executive order on Oct. 12 to ask his Secretary of Labor to propose regulations to allow more employers to make use of "association health plans." But the actual change has not actually been made yet, noted Timothy Jost, an expert on health law as an emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University--so even if millions of people will eventually use these plans, they have, obviously, not been able to do so yet.
Trump added about people joining associations due to changes to ObamaCare, "That's gonna be a big bill, you watch."
The move toward association health plans is not going to be a bill at all, let alone a "big bill." This "would be a change in regulation or guidance," not legislation, Jost noted.
No funding has been appropriated by Congress to advance the project beyond the testing phase. "We're calling on Congress to fund the border wall, which we're getting very close to," Trump said Dec. 20 during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. "We have some wonderful prototypes that have been put up. And I may be going there, very shortly, to look at them in their final form."
The White House didn't respond to requests for comment. Trump has occasionally vented frustration with the pace of progress on the wall, but has nonetheless projected confidence that it will eventually be built. "We're going to get the wall," Trump said Dec. 8 at the White House. "If we don't get the wall, then I got a lot of very unhappy people, starting with me."
Trump has long attacked the 1986 Tax Reform Act as a disaster. The Act eliminated tax advantages for real estate, and Trump naturally equated the loss of special treatment for his own industry with harm for the economy as a whole. "This tax act was just an absolute catastrophe for the country," he told Congress in 1991. Eight years later, still fuming that Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ)--a co-sponsor of the law--was running for president, Trump called it "one of the worst ideas in recent history."
One might wonder why Trump reversed himself. The answer is, he really hasn't. Republicans have used the aura of the 1986 Tax Reform Act to promote their tax-cut plans. But what they have in mind now is quite different. The 1986 Tax Reform Act was a bipartisan law, which did not reduce revenue to the government, and actually increased the effective tax rate paid by the rich by eliminating special treatment for capital gains and other tax breaks for the rich. Some Democrats have offered to support legislation along those lines, but the Republican leadership has outright refused.
It's not clear whether Trump realizes the law he praised at length [this week] is the same one he previously accused of destroying the American economy.
Short Answer: Yes, mines are opening, including a new one in Pennsylvania.
Long answer: That doesn't reverse the overall decline of the coal mining industry from its glory days. The mines that are opening produce a special kind of coal used in steelmaking and are opening largely because of events unrelated to federal policy, experts say. The market for the kind of coal used in electricity--the biggest use for coal--remains down relative to where it was several years ago. In other words, the industry has rebounded slightly after years of layoffs and closures caused mainly by competition from cheap natural gas.
"This is the policy that ensures no one gets left behind in America anymore--that we protect our industry from unfair competition, favor the products produced by our fellow citizens and make certain that when jobs open those jobs are given to American workers first," the White House said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear how much the administration could accomplish without cooperation from Congress. However, industry experts said Trump's executive order was a good first step to protecting the U.S. defense industrial base, and U.S. firms that do business with the federal government.
The president will also order a review of existing federal procurement policies. These are statutes and rules instituted over the decades that may bar foreign contractors from bidding for jobs, exclude certain raw materials from abroad, or mandate that international firms deliver projects at reduced prices relative to American firms in order to win contracts.
The administration will also review exceptions to these policies granted under free-trade agreements and the World Trade Organization. While these agreements are designed to give U.S. firms access to foreign governments' contracts in exchange for allowing firms from abroad to bid on federal projects, a senior administration official argued that U.S. bids are treated unfairly overseas.
Trump, who campaigned on an "America First" ideology, had promised to "end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program." His executive order would require the agencies to perform administrative reviews immediately and propose reforms to ensure that the H-1B visas are awarded to the most skilled and highest paid workers, officials said.
Indian outsourcing firms currently receive the lion's share of the visas because they submit tens of thousands of applications to increase their chances.
White House officials singled out the H-1B visa for "high-skilled" foreigners in the science and engineering industries as the priority for reform, but said a comprehensive review could lead to changes in other guest worker programs, including visas Trump's own company uses for foreign workers at his hotels, golf courses and vineyard.
The officials said reform could first come through administrative changes, such as raising the visa application fees, adjusting the wage scale to more accurately reflect prevailing salaries in the tech industry, and more vigorously enforcing violations. It could also change the lottery system to give foreigners with U.S. master's degrees a leg up. The current worker visa program has been diluted as rules have gone unenforced, the officials said.
That was then. After 82 days in office, Trump officially pronounced NATO rehabilitated, taking credit for transforming it into a modern, cost-sharing, terrorism-fighting pillar of American and European security. "I said it was obsolete," the president noted as he hosted NATO's secretary general. "It's no longer obsolete."
Never mind that the alliance has changed very little if at all in the last three months, and that whatever modest changes have been made were in train long before Trump entered the White House. After weeks of being lobbied, cajoled and educated by the leaders of Britain and Germany, not to mention "my generals," as he likes to call his national security team, Trump has found fresh virtue in a venerable organization.
The Russia reversal and the NATO turnabout were inherently linked, of course. As Russia appears more ominous, NATO seems more necessary. But the shift in attitude also offered one of the starkest examples yet of Trump's evolving views: "We must not be trapped by the tired thinking that so many have, but apply new solutions to face new circumstances throughout the world," Trump said at his news conference with the NATO secretary general.
Trump's campaign criticism of NATO stunned many at home and abroad, especially when he suggested conditioning America's commitment to defend its treaty allies on whether they had met their financial obligations.
The missile strike, in response to a chemical weapons attack, was intended to be a limited, one-time operation, and the president seemed determined to quickly move on. Critics, including Senator Marco Rubio, argued that Syria's President Assad felt free to launch a chemical attack precisely because the Trump administration had given him a green light.
Trump's action in Syria was welcomed by many traditional American allies who had fretted over Obama's reluctance to take a greater leadership role in the Middle East. After the missile strike, Israeli news outlets were filled with headlines like "The Americans Are Back," and European leaders expressed relief both that he had taken action and that he had not gone too far.
Nearly four years later, now president himself and grappling with how to respond to another chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government, Trump ignored his own warnings and did what Obama threatened but never carried out: order a missile strike targeting assets of President Assad.
To understand the magnitude of Trump's reversal, look at his Twitter account. Trump posted dozens of tweets about the conflict in the years before he declared his candidacy for the White House, and frequently did so during the campaign as well. He carved out a staunchly noninterventionist stance on the conflict and criticised Obama's approach as plodding. But he also made one thing clear: If he was in charge, any action would be swift and secretive to catch Assad off guard.
"The Trump administration has conceded that its original Muslim ban was indefensible. Unfortunately, it has replaced it with a scaled-back version that shares the same fatal flaws. The only way to actually fix the Muslim ban is not to have a Muslim ban. Instead, Pres. Trump has recommitted himself to religious discrimination. The changes the Trump administration has made completely undermine the bogus national security justifications the president has tried to hide behind.
Trump said, "I am the first one that would like to see nobody have nukes, but we're never going to fall behind any country, even if it's a friendly country. It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we're going to be at the top of the pack."
Russia has 7,000 warheads and the United States, 6,800. The New START treaty between the US and Russia requires that by February 5, 2018, both countries limit their arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons to 800 ICBMs for 10 years. Trump called New START "a one-sided deal."
In addition, the secretary of homeland security is ordered to hire 10,000 more immigration officers, create a publicly available weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and review previous immigration policies.
The order also creates an office to assist the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and calls on local and state police to detain or apprehend people in the United States illegally.
Other parts of the order call for hiring 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, building facilities to hold undocumented immigrants near the Mexican border and ending "catch-and-release" protocols, in which immigrants in the United States without documentation are not detained while they await court hearings.
The order directs the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), within 30 days of a request, to determine a project's environmental impact and decide whether it is "high priority." Project review deadlines are to be put in place by the CEQ's chairman.
The order is widely believed to have been issued in response to the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, [an incomplete project for shale oil which many protest on environmental grounds].
Trump said that Britain's decision to leave the European Union would "end up being a great thing" and predicted that other countries would follow. "People, countries want their own identity, and the U.K. wanted its own identity," he said.
Diplomats said they had heard him sound off during the campaign. But with the inauguration less than a week away, there is a growing realization in European capitals that Trump's acerbic criticism of NATO and the European Union was not just an attempt to win votes.
"I took such heat when I said NATO was obsolete," Mr. Trump said. "It's obsolete because it wasn't taking care of terror. I took a lot of heat for two days. And then they started saying, 'Trump is right.'"
During his hourlong interview with the European publications at Trump Tower in Manhattan, Trump sought to temper some of his criticism of NATO by noting that the alliance "is very important to me." Still, his characterization of it as divorced from the fight against terrorism was challenged by NATO experts, who noted that the alliance had joined the US in Afghanistan.
Trump amplified his position by posting the statement on Facebook and Twitter as well: "The resolution being considered at the United Nations Security Council regarding Israel should be vetoed." His words closely echoed the positions expressed by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has treated the impending UN vote as a crisis, posting on his own Twitter account a message urging Obama to veto what he called the "anti-Israel" resolution. Egypt, who drafted the resolution, withdrew it afterwards.
In a tweet that offered no details, Trump said, "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes."
During the campaign, Trump talked in one debate about the need to modernize the country's infrastructure of nuclear weaponry, saying the US is falling behind.
Trump's tweet came shortly after Putin, during a defense ministry meeting, said, "We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems."
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