Thestar.com 2017/04/24
Trump’s Associated Press interview is replete with lies, exaggerations, rambles and strange non-sequiturs.
WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump did an Oval Office interview with Associated Press reporter Julie Pace to discuss his first 100 days in office.
He made some news, offering praise of far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and promising to act soon on tax reform. The interview is most notable, though, for its immense weirdness. The extended transcript, which was published on Sunday, is surreal — replete with lies, exaggerations, non-sequiturs and rambling asides.
The complete list of every false thing Donald Trump has said as president
For your reading pleasure, or perhaps reading alarm, we have compiled the 19 strangest parts. The full transcript follows.
1. Trump remembers and then immediately forgets how many missiles he fired at Syria:
“When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, this is more than just like, 79 missiles. This is death that’s involved,’” he said.
2. Trump talks about watching CNN, then boasts of not watching CNN: Trump, a renowned television addict, explained to Pace that he never thought he had “the ability” to do what he said he had done: stop watching CNN, a network he says is unfair to him. But Pace pointed out that he had just talked, in this same interview, about watching CNN. (Those remarks aren’t in the transcript; Pace says they came during an off-the-record portion.)
“Where? Where?” Trump asked.
“Two minutes ago,” Pace informed him.
Trump’s bewildering response: “No, they treat me so badly. No, I just said that. No, I, what’d I say, I stopped watching them. But I don’t watch CNN anymore.”
3. Trump says he doesn’t talk to European leaders about the Iran deal, then that he did:
Trump continued to gripe about the Iran nuclear deal the U.S. and other world powers struck with Iran during the tenure of Barack Obama. Asked what Germany’s Angela Merkel or the United Kingdom’s Theresa May say about the deal, Trump responded, “I don’t talk to them about it.” But when Pace followed up — “You don’t talk to them about the Iran deal?” — Trump quickly said he does talk to them about it.
“I mention it, but it’s very personal when I talk to them, you know, it’s confidential,” he said.
4. Trump disassociates himself from his own “Contract With The American Voter”:
Two weeks before voting day, Trump issued a “Contract With The American Voter” that listed all of the things he promised to accomplish in his first 100 days. The contract includes his very own signature. But when Pace asked whether he should be held accountable for the promises in the contract, Trump suggested he had nothing to do with it.
“Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a 100-day plan,” he said.
5. Trump explains he only called NATO obsolete because he didn’t know what he was talking about:
Trump rattled U.S. allies with his insistence as a candidate that the NATO military alliance was “obsolete.” He explained to Pace that he only did so because he was “not knowing much about NATO,” which he now knows much about. (“People don’t go around asking about NATO,” he said, “if I’m building a building in Manhattan, right?”)
The explanation is especially outlandish because of what Trump said at a CNN town hall at the time: “I understand this stuff. I mean, I really do understand this stuff. NATO is obsolete.”
6. Trump falsely claims terrorism didn’t exist before 1949:
Trump has long falsely claimed that NATO did not start dealing with terrorism until he complained as a 2016 candidate that it was not doing so. This time, he added a new whopper: “You know, back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism.”
7. Trump uses the phrase “a super-duper”:
The president insisted that his giant wall on the Mexican border would cost less than $10 billion — but more, perhaps, “if I do a super-duper, higher, better, better security, everything else.”
8. Trump suggests his first address to Congress was one of the best speeches in the history of the House of Representatives:
“A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he said.
9. Trump says “most people don’t even think of NAFTA in terms of Canada”:
There are a mere three countries in the North American Free Trade Agreement: the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But Trump, long obsessed with Mexico, only recently started talking about Canada and NAFTA, and he has a tendency to project his own thinking, or non-thinking, onto the broader population.
It wasn’t his only odd claim on the subject: He also said Wisconsin and New York dairy farmers are “getting killed by NAFTA,” though Canadian dairy isn’t part of the deal at all.
10. Trump repeats his lie about F-35 savings:
The U.S. government was on track to cut the price of the troubled F-35 fighter jet program regardless of who was elected president. Trump, though, has falsely claimedat least a dozen times that his superlative negotiating skills are single-handedly responsible for these savings.
“Because of me,” he told Pace. “I mean, because that’s what I do.”
11. Trump falsely claims he had never heard of WikiLeaks until last year:
WikiLeaks has been the subject of major controversy since it published secret U.S. military videos and documents in 2010. Trump, though, claimed he had “never heard of WikiLeaks”— “never heard of it,” he repeated — until the organization released emails hacked from Democratic officials during the 2016 campaign.
At best, this would be a confession of ignorance; in fact, it is untrue. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski uncovered a 2010 interview in which he called WikiLeaks “disgraceful.”
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