Trump is back and his campaign exaggerations are even worse than his tan

Donald Trump is back for a third round and he's already running on some highly exaggerated claims about his former success in the oval office.

At a private event at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Donald Trump announced his much-anticipated return to politics in a rambling speech filled with inaccuracies, exaggerations, and sometimes outright lies. Here are just a few of Trump's most egregious moments from his November 16th speech by him.

One of the first lies of the night came when Trump said he was the one to fill America's strategic national oil reserves and President Joe Biden drained them to keep gas prices low before the midterm election.

“Gas prices have reached the highest levels in history. And expect them to go much higher now that the strategic national reserves, which I filled up, have been virtually drained in order to keep gasoline prices lower just prior to the election. Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence,” Mr. Trump said.

There's just one problem with this claim, it's completely untrue. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), when Trump entered the office the strategic oil reserves were 95% full with 695.1 million barrels stored out of the 727 million spots available.

Robert Rapier, a senior correspondent with Forbes dug into Trump's claims and found that information from the EIA showed that when Trump left office, American oil reserves were sitting at about 638.1 million barrels, much less than the 695.1 billion Trump had when taking office. 

Also, the idea that the United States had gained energy independence under Trump is also more than a little cheeky.

It was during the Biden presidency that the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum in 2020, something that hadn't happened since 1949 according to the EIA. But it should be noted that the United States has never been truly energy independent, nor has the country ever stopped importing oil, something tracked by the EIA which has provided data projections on daily U.S. oil imports since the early 1950s.

Apparently, China was footing the bill for billions in tariff-related fees under the Trump administration. “China was paying billions and billions of dollars in taxes, the former president said, “No president had ever saw or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along.”

There's just one problem with Trump's statement on China paying the tariff bill: the Chinese aren't the ones paying, you are. Tariffs are generally paid by the importer in the destination country, which in this case is most likely a US corporation that is passing that bill onto you, the end consumer. According to a report from the Consumer Technology Association, U.S. importers paid over $32 billion worth of extra tariffs to China between mid-2018 and the end of 2021. 

“When the wall was finished, that's how we set all these records… Because the border was so tight, drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years.”

The flow of migrants into the United States was not at its lowest point during the Trump administration since migrant arrivals at the border peaked in 2019 under Trump according to US Customs and Border Protection.

In fact, Trump never even finished his much-beloved wall to block migrants and drugs from entering the United States.

During this administration, Trump only completed 453 miles of border wall according to the US Customs and Border Protection, of which only 47 miles were new constructions. The US-Mexican border is over 1,900 miles long… so the math just doesn't square.

Trump also falsely claimed that the United States hadn't suffered a single terrorist attack under his stewardship. “We had practically, just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks during the Trump administration.” 

On December 6th, 2019, however, Saudi Arabian military student Ahmed al-Shamrani attacked a naval flight school in Pensacola, Florida, killing three people and wounding thirteen in what Attorney General Willam Barr called a terrorist attack motivated by “jihadist ideology.”

In his speech, Trump stated that he has killed inflation. “We actually got [inflation] to exactly one percent. The perfect number one thing every economist agrees don't have it. You have it like at one percent. They would say one to two. But I said, let's do one. And we had it at one percent and we had it there for a long period of time…. Inflation was nonexistent.”

Trump's rambling mess of words on his inflation numbers was completely exaggerated. According to Macrotrends.net, annual US inflation under Trump was just above or just below two percent a year. Inflation never reached the one percent level in any of the four years Trump served as president.

But the best exaggeration of the night came when Trump claimed he was a man who kept his promises.

“I made big promises to the American people,” Trump stated, “And unlike other presidents, I kept my promises.”

Despite his confidence, both stamens were very, very exaggerated and completely untrue. According to the Washington Post's Trump Promise Tracker, President Donald J. Trump kept less than one-third of the over 60 key promises he made during the 2016 election. So should we really believe anything he has to say this time around?