This may be a little late: I suspect most of us have been reveling in checked facts for more than 24 hours, and I haven’t paid enough attention to know all of those that might have been discussed in diaries. So, having just found this one, I decided to pass it along on the chance that it would interest at least a few, out there.
NPR has fact-checked the first debate, and it’s excellent. I have pulled a few examples, below, ones I cared most about for whatever reason. Scan it for what may interest you, but please visit the link and see the full scope of what NPR has done.
I rarely — never — just summarize some work or article, so this feels a little awkward and, therefore, may read that way as well. My apologies for that, but, again, check out the NPR page. Below the break, inset texts are quotes from Donald Trump’s debate performance (such as it was). Paragraphs that follow are the fact-checks, including the name of the checker.
You look at what China is doing for country in terms of making our product, they're devaluing their currency and there's nobody in our government to fight them.
In fact, over the past two years, Beijing has been selling off some of its roughly $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to prop up the value of its currency, the renminbi or yuan. This has contributed to a lower U.S. trade deficit with China. Beijing allowed the RMB to appreciate against the dollar for about a decade until 2014, leading the IMF to judge the RMB as fairly valued in May of last year. — Anthony Kuhn, International Correspondent
Obama has brokered an agreement with Chinese President Xi to reduce hacking, and IP theft — and cybersecurity experts who monitor intrusions from China say that attacks are in fact down. Aarti Shahani Tech Reporter
Thousands of jobs leaving Michigan, leaving Ohio, they’re all leaving.
Unemployment in Michigan is 4.5 percent; Ohio rate is 4.7 percent. Both are better than the national average of 4.9 percent. Marilyn Geewax Senior Business Editor
Ford CEO Mark Fields says zero jobs will be lost in Michigan because Ford will build two new vehicles at that plant. Aarti Shahani Tech Reporter
Well, for one thing and before we start on that my father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built into a company that's worth many many billions of dollars with some of the greatest ssets in the world and I say that only because that's the kind of thinking that our country needs.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's father came to his rescue repeatedly with multiple loans. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
I did not -- I do not say that.
Actually, Trump has called climate change a "hoax" on several occasions. He said on Meet the Press that he was joking about China's role. As PolitiFact noted: "On Dec. 30, 2015, Trump told the crowd at a rally in Hilton Head, S.C., 'Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a moneymaking industry, OK? It's a hoax, a lot of it.' " Domenico Montanaro Lead Editor, Politics & Digital Audience
The original source for the “hoax” quote was a tweet Trump sent in 2012. He said the concept of global warming was created by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive. Chris Joyce Science Desk Correspondent/Covers Energy & The Environment
Our energy policies are disaster. Our country is losing so much in terms of energy, in terms of paying off our debt.
Domestic oil and gas production have increased steadily during President Obama’s time in office. The U.S. has been the world’s leading producer of natural gas since 2011 and the top producer of oil since 2013.
The Energy Information Administration says gasoline prices averaged $2.17 a gallon last week — about a nickel cheaper than a year ago, and about 30 cents a gallon less than Obama’s first year in office, and about a buck and a half less than during George W. Bush’s last year in office. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere but certainly ever signed in this country.
Most studies show NAFTA had a relatively small impact on the economy. "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters. The net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest," according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Marilyn Geewax Senior Business Editor
Now look, we have the worst revival of an economy since the Great Depression.
Private sector employers have added 15.1 million jobs since the trough of the recession in 2010. Unemployment, which peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, has fallen to 4.9 percent. Unemployment among African-Americans, which peaked at 16.8 percent in March 2010, has fallen to 8.1 percent. And unemployment among African-American young people is not 58 percent as Trump claimed, but 26.1 percent.
For comparison: Jobs per year was strongest under Bill Clinton (2.8 million), followed by Carter (2.6 million), Reagan (2 million), Obama (1.3 million as of January), H.W. Bush (659,000), and W. Bush (160,000). Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
Lester, we have a trade deficit with all of the countries that we do business with of almost eight hundred billion dollars a year.
… The Trump campaign has argued that a more muscular trade policy would boost federal revenue …. Outside economists are not convinced. The pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics warns that Trump’s threat of steep tariffs on imports from China and Mexico could unleash a trade war, costing 4 million jobs and driving the economy into recession …. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
That makes me smart. (Responding to Hillary Clinton’s remark, “And they showed he did not pay any federal income tax. ”
… As Politico noted: “Trump’s losses were large enough to prevent him from owing taxes.” But it added for context, while it’s not “a huge surprise that Trump would not owe significant taxes during the economic slowdown of the early 1990s as his companies teetered near bankruptcy[, s]till, it is notable that a man living on $450,000 per month — Trump also had a massive yacht and aircraft at the time — could avoid paying income taxes.”
What’s more, Trump all but agreed that he didn’t pay taxes in some years, bragging about being “smart” for not paying them. That is almost certainly not smart — politically. Domenico Montanaro Lead Editor, Politics & Digital Audience
It’s because it is about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money.
… But investors in his first public company — Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts — lost a lot of money, even as Trump himself was handsomely rewarded. The public company lost money every year Trump ran it, loaded up his Atlantic City casinos with costly debt, and ultimately filed for bankruptcy.
Trump … drained cash out of the business to pay personal debts and support his lavish lifestyle. Contractors, including small businesses, lost money along with Trump’s investors. Trump also forced an investment firm to fire an analyst, Marvin Roffman, who had warned that the business was unsustainable. Trump has been sued by the New York attorney general for allegedly defrauding students at Trump University, by investors who bought into failed condominium projects bearing the Trump name, and by contractors who say he refused to pay them. Trump boasts that he never settles lawsuits, but in fact he has settled at least 100 lawsuits, as USA Today reports. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
Here’s USA Today on Trump’s unpaid bills. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
Wrong. [Responding to Hillary Clinton’s claim, “You even went and suggested that you would try to negotiate down the national debt of the United States. ”]
Clinton is correct; Trump did suggest this on CNBC in May. Sarah McCammon Politics Reporter/Covers Trump
No, you're wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against police judge. [Responding to Lester Holt’s comment, “Stop and Frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.”]
Lester Holt is correct. Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional by a federal district judge. The city appealed, and after a change of mayor the case was settled before the appeal. Scott Horsley White House Correspondent
But stop and frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City, tremendous beyond belief, so when you say it has no impact, it really did. It had a very big impact.
Studies by scholars at Columbia University and elsewhere say the widespread use of stop-and-frisk resulted in relatively few arrests or illegal gun recoveries. New York’s homicide numbers remain very low, at 352 in 2015 and a projected 359 this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. New York Police Department spokesman Peter Donald said stop-and-frisk has declined nearly 97 percent since 2011 and crime, murders and shootings have “decreased significantly during the same period.” Carrie Johnson Justice Correspondent
I’ll tell you- it’s very simple to say. Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and a very close friend of Secretary Clinton. And her campaign manager Patti Doyle went to, during her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard, and you can go look it up, and you can check it out, and if you look at CNN this past week Patti Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this happened. Blumenthal sent McClatchy, a highly-respected reporter at McClatchy to Kenya to find out about it.
There is no truth to the charge that the Clinton campaign or Hillary Clinton started the birther movement, as we’ve written. Donald Trump, however, for several years was the chief spokesman for it and the principal person pushing the falsehood. And Trump still has not apologized to the president of the United States for an effort that many African-Americans saw as an effort to delegitimize the first black president. Undoubtedly, Clinton and Obama fought a bitter 2008 primary campaign. Fringe supporters and advisers did go after Obama’s “otherness.” One of Clinton’s informal advisers, Sidney Blumenthal, told a McClatchy bureau chief based in Africa to look into Obama’s birthplace, according to that McClatchy bureau chief. But Clinton certainly did not take the show on the road. The false equivalence Trump is trying to draw isn’t even remotely close to the same thing as what Trump did. For the record, once again, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, something proved over and over again. Here’s his birth certificate, the legitimacy of which Trump called into question explicitly as late as 2014. Domenico Montanaro Lead Editor, Politics & Digital Audience
China should solve the problem for us. China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea.
China, while not pleased about the nuclear advancement of North Korea, also has a historical “lips and teeth” relationship with North Korea and is Pyongyang’s largest trading partner. An estimated 90 percent of North Korea’s trade goes to or through China. But China is not interested in “going into” North Korea, as a collapse of the Kim Jong Un regime could lead to a refugee crisis at the Chinese-North Korean border or worse, a chaotic situation in which remaining North Korean military take control of its nuclear weapons. Elise Hu International Correspondent