Trump's Rose Garden presser turns into campaign speech with more lies and few questions

Trump announces he has signed the bill to sanction China over its treatment of Hong Kong. “We've all watched what happened. Not a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away, their rights have been taken away,” Trump says.

Trump says he's signed an executive order to end special economic treatment for Hong Kong, that it will now be treated the same as China. “No special privileges, no special economic treatment,” he says.

This was kinda wild — Trump pivoted from his prepared text about standing up to China's oppression of Hong Kong and went into an ad-lib monologue about how all this is good for US business. https://t.co/vPy11pFTE3

Trump is listing the ways he has, he says, stood up to China. One of the things he lists is how he decided to withdraw from the WHO. (Many experts have noted that the withdrawal allows for more Chinese influence over the WHO.)

I know it's Trump, but this is extraordinary stuff. From the White House, the president is doing a prepared campaign speech attacking his opponent at great length.

Good call https://t.co/XwC7pfOHJc— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 14, 2020

Trump often deviates from the prepared texts of his official speeches to ad-lib attacks on his opponent. This is a prepared anti-Biden text.

Again, Pelosi was not “dancing in the streets” of San Francisco's Chinatown in February. She walked around, encouraging people not to discriminate against Asian-American businesses.

Trump repeats his usual stuff about how 135,000 deaths is bad but it would've been millions if he didn't do anything.

Trump exaggerates when he says he put a “ban” on people coming from Europe. His restrictions contained multiple exemptions…including multiple entire European countries.

Trump claims Obama-Biden got very bad poll results on their handling of H1N1. The polls didn't ask about Biden; Obama's poll results on H1N1 were much higher than Trump's poll results for his handling of the coronavirus.

There's no evidence the US has “just about the lowest mortality rate” on the coronavirus. I'm cautious on this subject, because we don't currently have good denominator numbers, but the numbers we do have don't have the US as the world leader.

“We had very few ventilators” at first, Trump claims, though he inherited 19,000 from the Obama administration, about 16,600 in condition to be deployed, and though the Trump administration had deployed fewer than 11,000 as of June 23.

Trump says testing is good but it also gives “fodder for the fake news to report cases.”

The president is saying it is bad if the media can accurately tell the public how many people are infected.

When Trump says he asked “one of the biggest people on Wall Street” about Hunter Biden's dealings with China and that man says no, he means Stephen Schwarzman…whose spokesperson keeps telling reporters, including me, that he's never spoken to Trump about either Biden.

Contrary to Trump's regular claim, Hunter Biden was not jobless before he got appointed to the Burisma board in 2014. He was a lawyer at the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, an adjunct prof at Georgetown, chairman of World Food Program USA, and CEO of his investment advisory firm.

I'm no longer “live”-tweeting, rather five-minutes-behind tweeting, because Trump is lying so much I keep having to stop

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 14, 2020

Trump says we're in competition with many places, including “Europe, which has never treated us well.” He repeats his false claim that the EU was formed “to take advantage of the United States.”

Trump says Biden's agenda, influenced by Bernie Sanders, is the most extreme ever for a major presidential candidate, “it's gone so far right.” (sic)

Trump touts his travel ban focused on Muslim-majority countries, which he says is a ban on “jihadist regions.”

Trump claimed earlier that Biden wants to defund the military. Just no basis for that. (There are always some arguments about incremental funding levels, but that's not the insinuation.)

Trump, who has repeatedly tried to terminate the DACA program a Democratic president created and who has rejected multiple Democratic offers to safeguard DACA without reductions to legal immigration, says he'll take care of DACA much better than Democrats.

Trump says Biden will “abolish law enforcement as we know it.” No idea what he means. Biden supports nothing remotely resembling abolishing police.

The Trump campaign is running ads aimed at Black voters about Biden's tough-on-crime Senate record. But Trump himself is railing against Biden for now opposing the death penalty and mandatory minimums.

Trump says that net-zero carbon emissions for buildings “basically means no windows.” That is extremely not what it means. Trump took a confusing Bill de Blasio comment from a while ago and twisted it into…this.

Trump: “There is nothing that the African American community wants more than school choice.”

Trump: “I've been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood. Well, I'm ending that rule. I'm taking it out. So.”

Trump says “25,000 people” were going to show up to tear down a statue but then he deterred them

Trump boasts about how many people greeted him when he went to a swab factory in Maine. Then suggests there are Trump supporters who don't want to admit this publicly.

Trump says Obama took away lobster fishing from Maine over 5,000 square miles, but he opened it back up. (Lobsters were still allowed to be caught in that monument zone until September 2023, so it hadn't affected the industry yet.)

Trump again baselessly says there'll be “tremendous fraud” with mail-in voting, then says “absentee ballots are okay,” though there's no significant distinction in security levels.

Trump exits after his anti-Biden monologue and a few questions.

Aside from the appropriateness of doing a rally speech against his opponent from the White House grounds, that was a wildly dishonest performance.

President Trump just now at the WH said: “Think of this: If we didn't do testing — instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we'd have half the cases. If we did another — you cut that in half, you'd have yet again half of that.”— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) July 14, 2020

Trump is at 39% approval on the coronavirus, per the latest FiveThirtyEight average. Obama was at 57% approval on H1N1 in a CNN poll in October-November 2009. https://t.co/DZ5JnGuoBW

“Had we done it right the first time, we’d be operating at near 100 percent now, schools would be preparing for a nearly normal school year, football teams would be preparing to practice — and tens of thousands of Americans would not have died.”https://t.co/XYVgJ0gUB8 pic.twitter.com/dS0A3cZOEP

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