Donald Trump has definitely had some strange ideas about foreign policy, but perhaps the weirdest and most shocking suggested by the candidate at the debate was that China invade North Korea, to “solve that problem for us.” This is a candidate that has been railing against China and calling them every name in the book since he started his campaign.

Also suggested was involving Iran to keep North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons.

At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can’t take anything off the table. Because you look at some of these countries, you look at North Korea, we’re doing nothing there. China should solve that problem for us. China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea.

And by the way, another one powerful is the worst deal I think I’ve ever seen negotiated that you started is the Iran deal. Iran is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran has power over North Korea.

And when they made that horrible deal with Iran, they should have included the fact that they do something with respect to North Korea. And they should have done something with respect to Yemen and all these other places.

While there was a lot of hand wringing by the media concerning Donald Trump’s admittedly repugnant fat shaming of a woman during the (Bill) Clinton Administration, little has been made of his suggestion that China invade a sovereign nation, no matter how rambunctious that sovereign nation may be.

Donald Trump may also be forgetting that if China invaded North Korea that would bring them right to the DMZ at the border between the Koreas, where 28,000 American troops have remained since 1953 when the armistice was signed. No peace treaty has been signed, and technically the US is still at war with North Korea.

China responded to Trump’s remarks. “China has been making unremitting efforts with all sides concerned to achieve a proper resolution over the peninsular nuclear issue, for the purpose of maintaining the peninsular peace and stability and the system of international nonproliferation,” said spokesman for the Foreign Ministry Geng Shuang.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/27/did-trump-really-just-suggest-that-china-should-invade-north-korea/
http://www.businessinsider.com/after-the-debate-china-told-trump-were-doing-our-best-to-stabilize-north-korea-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

As Donald Trump has stated before, he really blames Hillary Clinton for ISIS. He continued this tack in the debate, making several false claims concerning Clinton and ISIS.

Early on in the debate, at the 22:45 mark of the above video, Donald Trump says “see, you’re telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you’ve been fighting — no wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.”

Firstly, Hillary Clinton is 69 years old. She became an adult in 1965. ISIS was formed in the mid-2000s from an Al-Qaeda splinter group, so clearly it is impossible that she has be fighting the terrorist group for her “entire adult life.”

Secondly, Hillary Clinton was only Secretary of State for four years, from 2009-2013. She was only tasked with contributing to the fight against ISIS for those years, a fraction of the time that the group has existed, much less the 51 years that Hillary Clinton has been an adult.

Later in the debate Trump continued this line of thinking.

Well, President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because they got out — what, they shouldn’t have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed.

So she talks about taking them out. She’s been doing it a long time. She’s been trying to take them out for a long time. But they wouldn’t have even been formed if they left some troops behind, like 10,000 or maybe something more than that. And then you wouldn’t have had them.

While it is impossible to tell what would have happened if the exit from Iraq was handled in a different way, but it seems unlikely that a small force of 10,000 troops would have made a difference. Furthermore, there has never been a US troop presence in the ISIS strongholds of Syria and Libya, so a presence in Iraq would be irrelevant to those areas.

According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, as Secretary of State, Clinton lobbied strongly to keep a larger force of troops in Iraq, but was overruled by President Obama. Clinton was also a strong proponent of arming the moderate rebels fighting against ISIS.

The hands of the Obama administration were largely tied, as they were legally bound to remove the troops from Iraq due to an agreement signed by the Bush Administration to remove all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Trump was certainly in favor of completely removing our troops in Iraq as early as 2006, when he made this statement to CNBC:

I would announce that we have been victorious in Iraq and all the troops are coming home and let those people have their civil war. I just said, announce victory, get them home…. Let’s say, ‘Victory, Tremendous.’ Have a big thing in the streets. Then get out real fast before you get shot. Let’s get home.

Sources:
View at Medium.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/us/politics/fact-check-debate.html?_r=0
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/27/fact-checking-the-first-clinton-trump-presidential-debate/

Welcome back to WDTLAY’s ongoing debate fact checking. Donald Trump has often raged against the amount of money that the US spends abroad defending our allies, calling NATO “obsolete” for example. At the 1:23:00 mark of the above video, Trump makes the following statement.

Just to go down the list, we defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia, we defend countries. They do not pay us. But they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune. That’s why we’re losing — we’re losing — we lose on everything. I say, who makes these — we lose on everything. All I said, that it’s very possible that if they don’t pay a fair share, because this isn’t 40 years ago where we could do what we’re doing. We can’t defend Japan, a behemoth, selling us cars by the million…

As Donald said, just to go down the list…

Japan paid the US $2 billion dollars in 2012 for defense, according to the Department of Defense, which translates to almost 4% of the total budget for that agency. That is hardly nothing. Japan also purchased $526 million worth of military equipment from the US. Additionally, Trump said Japan is “selling us cars by the million,” but it turns out that there was a net surplus of Japanese owned cars built in the US, so many built in the US were actually exported.

Germany did not make cash payments for the 38,000 troops stationed, there, but the Department of Defense says that Germany makes “in kind payments.” Presumably this would be waiving leasing fees and taxes, though the report did not elaborate. So Trump is not entirely wrong that Germany is not paying us. Germany purchased $164 million worth of military equipment from the US.

South Korea paid the US $866.6 million in 2014 for defense against North Korea. We’re still technically at war with North Korea, if you’ll remember. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is about 40% of the total US expenditure in the country. There are about 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea. South Korea purchased $641 million worth of military equipment from the US.

Saudi Arabia has not had US combat troops stationed there since 2003. While there are some military bases in Saudi Arabia, many of those are concerned with intelligence and drone strikes in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has a powerful army of its own, spending more than 13% of GDP on their military. They do not make cash payments to the US, but it is not accurate for Donald Trump to say that the US defends them, as they have their own substantial army. Saudi Arabia is a huge buyer of US military hardware, purchasing $1.15 billion in tanks last month alone.

Donald Trump is definitely wrong about those four countries not paying anything for the defense that the US provides. The payments made do not cover all of the costs of our military personnel in those countries, but to say that nearly $3 billion dollars a year is “not paying us” is not accurate. Trump also neglects to mention the intangible benefits of the alliance of these countries, and the influence around the world that this show of power can buy.

Sources:
View at Medium.com
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/presidential-debate-2016-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-fact-check-hofstra/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/27/trump-clinton-first-debate-fact-checks/
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/04/u-s-foreign-military-support/
http://us-foreign-aid.insidegov.com/q/150/1590/How-much-money-does-the-U-S-give-to-Saudi-Arabia
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-defense-idUSKCN10K1JR

Well that was fun. There are plenty of Trump lies to talk about from the debate last night, so WDTLAY will be doing several volumes looking at some of the newer falsehoods . It was a little surprising how many lies that have been covered on this blog previously were trotted out yesterday by Mr. Trump.

One of Trump’s numerous interruptions came when Clinton said “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I don’t, I think it’s real.” Trump interrupted to say “I did not, I do not say that, I do not say that.”

Actually, he did say that on Twitter in 2012 and didn’t bother to delete it.

While Trump has described this as some sort of joke, as recently as January 2016 on Fox and Friends he again made the connection between a global warming hoax and China.

Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know much about climate change. I’d be — received environmental awards. And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less. They have very — you know, their standards are nothing. But they — in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.

In case you were wondering whether or not Donald Trump understands how science works, here are a few bonus tweets from Trump alleging that “this climate change (global warming) bullshit” is a hoax. Enjoy, and we’ll see you tomorrow for Volume Two of or Debate fact check.

Sources:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/24/bernie-s/yes-donald-trump-really-did-tweet-climate-change-h/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/09/27/trump-didnt-delete-his-tweet-calling-global-warming-a-chinese-hoax/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/

The Debate looms close, and the mood around the WDTLAY offices is like a bunch of kids on Christmas eve. Even though Trump has been reading off of teleprompters and at least making an attempt at seeming Presidential recently, he has still been filling the ears of his supporters with lies.

Politico fact checked all of Trump’s statements this week, and found 87 lies. That comes out to one lie every 3 minutes and 15 seconds out of 5 hours of transcript. While WDTLAY has already covered many of these lies, we found a new one on the list.

“Michigan is getting killed. Ohio is getting killed. A lot of states are getting killed, including by the way, North Carolina,” Trump said at a rally in Kenansville, NC on September 20th when speaking about jobs.

As Politico pointed out, the unemployment rate for all three of those states is vastly better than they were in January 2009, when Obama took office.

Michigan unemployment in 2009: 11.6%

Michigan unemployment in 2016: 4.5%

Ohio unemployment in 2009: 8.8%

Ohio unemployment in 2016: 4.7%

North Carolina unemployment in 2009: 9.7%

North Carolina unemployment in 2016: 4.7%

If that’s getting killed, I sure hope we get eight more years of murder.

Sources:

Trump tried a new attack on Hillary Clinton on Friday, one that I don’t think I’ve seen before. He attacked her stance on estate taxes saying on Twitter that “Hillary Clinton just lost every Republican she ever had, including Never Trump, all farmers and & sm. biz, by saying she’ll tax estates at 65%.”

It is true that Hillary Clinton has proposed a 65% estate tax rate. What Donald Trump didn’t tell you is that it will only affect billionaires like him, as the top 65% rate only applies to married couples worth more than $1 billion. That’s correct, Donald Trump just said that Clinton lost “farmers and sm. biz” by wanting to tax billionaires more.

According to the Wall Street Journal, only 223 estates worth more than $50 million filed estate taxes is 2014. It really is mostly a moot point as families that wealthy will generally create trusts and foundations to avoid the worst of the estate taxes.

That being said, Clinton’s full estate tax proposal, if passed, is estimated to generate $1.5 trillion in taxes over 10 years. Trump’s tax plan, including repeal of the estate tax, leaves a $4.5 trillion shortfall of revenue over the same period.

Sources:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-proposes-65-tax-on-largest-estates-1474559914
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2016/09/23/hillary-clintons-65-estate-tax-or-donald-trumps-repeal/#270de7975bf7

In the last few months Donald Trump has been trying to appeal to the African American community mostly by telling them how terrible their lives are. Earlier this summer he said that “our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever.” Perhaps someone should remind Mr. Trump about slavery, Jim Crow and separate but equal, I’m sure our African American citizens do not need to be reminded.

It seems unlikely that African American voters will respond to his assertion that their lives are so terrible that they might as well vote for an openly racist candidate that tried to win them over with pandering condescension.

One of the “facts” that Trump has pointed to over and over in his attempt to attract black voters is the unemployment rate of African American youth.

“If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent,” Trump said in June, and has repeated several times in the past week. “If you look at what’s going on with Latinos, Hispanics – tremendous unemployment rates. You look at what’s going on with so many groups. We’re going to make it great for everyone. We’re going to bring jobs back to our country.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the unemployment rate for African Americans aged 16 to 24 is 18.7%. That is less than one third of the number of 59% that Trump has quoted repeatedly.

It is unclear where Trump is getting this 59% number. Politifact tried to juggle some numbers that included black youth that are disabled, attending high school or college or otherwise not looking for work and got pretty close to the number, but Trump said “unemployment rate.” That phrase has a specific definition, it means people without a job actively looking for work.

Sources:
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/09/23/donald-trump-said-six-false-things-on-thursday.html
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-obama-scolds-trump-20160923-story.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/22/donald-trump/trumps-pants-fire-claim-blacks-are-absolutely-wors/

Donald Trump has now come out in favor of the police tactic of “stop and frisk,” advocating for a national commitment to stop crime. “Stop and frisk” gives law enforcement wide leeway to stop and search nearly anyone in public, on suspicion of having contraband. The practice has been criticized as being inherently discriminatory, and a violation of the Fourth Amendment against illegal search and seizure.

Yesterday Donald Trump seemed to imply that he was in favor of the tactic nationally saying “I see what’s going on here (in Toledo), I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk, in New York City, it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor. But New York City was incredible the way that worked. So I think that would be one step you could do.”

This morning on Fox And Friends he backed off the national initiative, saying he just meant Chicago. “I think Chicago needs stop and frisk. Now people can criticize me for that or people can say whatever they want, but they asked me about Chicago and I think stop and frisk with good strong, you know, good, strong law and order. But you have to do something. It can’t continue the way it’s going.”

Immediately after this statement, at the 5:40 mark in the above video, Donald Trump makes a truly shocking statement. “Basically [the police] will, if they see possibly, you know, they’re proactive. If they see a person, possibly with a gun, or they think may have a gun, they will see the person, they’ll look, and they’ll take the gun away.”

Donald Trump is advocating that the police be able to stop and frisk anyone on the street with the barest “specific and articulable” suspicion and then confiscate any found weapons.

While the jury is literally still out on whether stop and frisk is a violate of the Fourth Amendment, stopping anyone with little or no probable cause and confiscating a gun is clearly in violation of the Second Amendment. Donald Trump has loudly denounced Hillary Clinton, but only one candidate in this race has promoted the idea of law enforcement taking guns away from private citizens with little to no probable cause.

Sources:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/09/22/trump-narrows-call-stop-and-frisk-policy-chicago/90826694/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/09/21/trump-calls-stop-and-frisk-policing-fight-crime/90801616/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-idUSKCN11R2NZ

At a rally on Monday Donald Trump weighed on the bombing in New York City and New Jersey that injured 31 people. The bombing appears to have been carried out by New Jersey resident Ahmad Khan Rahami, now in custody after being shot in a police shoot out.

“These attacks and many others were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system, which fails to properly vet and screen the individuals or families coming into our country,” Trump said, hammering the oft hit subject on the campaign trail. Trump blames the immigration system for allowing people that “have such hatred and sickness in their hearts” to enter the country.

Rahami was 7 years old when he immigrated to this country.

Ahmad Khan Rahami entered the US legally with his family in 1995.  becoming a naturalized citizen in 2011. He is a US citizen.

Donald Trump doesn’t elaborate on how a tighter immigration system or “extreme vetting” would have helped in this instance. As usual, he doesn’t provide any solutions on how an immigration officer can predict if a 7 year old boy from Afghanistan will commit a terrorist act 21 years in the future, or give any promises of how a President Trump would have prevented this terror attack.

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/19/us/ahmad-khan-rahami/index.html
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/09/19/terror-bombings-raise-immigrant-security-screening-concerns/90708704/

If you squint just right at about the 4:00 mark of the above video you can almost physically see Chris Christie’s last shred of dignity drift away. As he may come under indictment for his involvement of “Bridegate,” he came on to CNN with Jake Tapper to discuss Donald Trump’s birtherism, among other things. There was this exchange:

CHRISTIE: Oh, listen, I made my position on it really clear a long time ago. And Donald has now made his position on it clear, which is that, after the president presented his birth certificate, Donald has said he was born in the United States, and that’s the end of the issue…And so, you know, the birther issue is a done issue. I have said it’s a done issue for a long time. And Donald Trump has said it’s a done issue now…
TAPPER: Well, just as a point of fact, again, Donald Trump did not accept when Barack Obama released his birth certificate in 2011. He kept up this whole birther thing until Friday. That’s five years. But we only have a little time left. So, I want to ask you…
CHRISTIE: No, but, Jake, that’s just not true. It’s not true that he kept it up for five years.
TAPPER: Sure he did.
CHRISTIE: It’s simply not true.
TAPPER: It is true.
CHRISTIE: No, Jake. It wasn’t like he was talking about it on a regular basis … And when the issue was raised, he made very clear the other day what his position is.

In fact, Donald Trump has continually questioned President Obama’s citizenship since he released his long form birth certificate. NBC News found 67 times Donald Trump tweeted about the issue since 2011, when Obama released his birth certificate. That qualifies as a regular basis be any stretch.

It is true that Trump has backed off of his pet conspiracy theory in the last year or so, but for Christie to say that Trump accepted the long form birth certificate is absurd. 67 tweets. While Trump has talked about the conspiracy less and less in the last year, he has essentially refused to answer yes or no to direct questions on the issue, keeping it alive until Friday.

Trump even went so far as to imply that the Hawaii State Health Director, who died in a plane crash, was murdered as part of the conspiracy. Notice the use of quotes around “birth certificate.”

Trump even refused to answer the question of Obama’s birth status as recently as September 15th, when interviewed by the Washington Post. That was last week, Mr. Christie.

Christie is just lying to Jake Tapper and the American people, even as Tapper calls him out on it multiple times. It is almost sad to see Christie debasing his trustworthiness like this for Trump, who called him a “weak little man” less than a year ago.

Sources:
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-surrogates-spin-birther-narrative/
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/18/politics/donald-trump-birtherism-chris-christie-mike-pence/
https://boingboing.net/2016/09/19/even-by-chris-christie-standar.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/67-times-donald-trump-tweeted-birther-movement/story?id=42145590
https://www.buzzfeed.com/christophermassie/here-are-some-of-the-meanest-things-trump-and-christie-have?utm_term=.dkQwBd34a#.hj9MYEW5o