Fact-Checkers Kept Busy Around the Clock

Alleged Voting Fraud

TRUMP: "Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!" — tweet Saturday

TRUMP: "Mail ballots — they cheat. OK? People cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they're cheaters. They go and collect them. They're fraudulent in many cases." — briefing Tuesday

TRUMP: "You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody's living room, signing ballots all over the place. ... I think if you vote, you should go." — briefing Tuesday

THE FACTS: Voting fraud is rare. Trump's push for in-person voting in a pandemic, such as in Wisconsin last week, also contradicts the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his task force's social distancing guidelines, which urge Americans to maintain 6 feet of separation and avoid crowds of more than 10 people.

CDC specifically recommends states to "encourage mail-in methods of voting if allowed in the jurisdiction" given the coronavirus threat. Late last week, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services said it was monitoring the spread of the virus during Tuesday's voting.

It's true that some election studies have shown a slightly higher incidence of mail-in voting fraud compared with in-person voting, but the overall risk is extremely low. The Brennan Center for Justice said in 2017 the risk of voting fraud is 0.00004% to 0.0009%.

"Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a 'tremendous' potential for fraud," Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, wrote in an op-ed this week. "While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah."

Trump cast an absentee ballot by mail in the Florida Republican primary in March.

When asked about that contradiction Tuesday, he told reporters that it was fine "because I'm allowed to" vote by mail and that he didn't expect to get to Florida.

A commission Trump convened after the 2016 election to investigate potential voting fraud disbanded without producing any findings.

Virus Testing

TRUMP: "Initially speaking, the tests were old, obsolete, and not really prepared. We have a brand-new testing system that we developed very quickly, and that's your result." — news briefing on April 6

TRUMP: "This administration inherited a broken system, a system that was obsolete, a system that didn't work." — news briefing on March 30

THE FACTS: His assertion that he inherited a "broken" and "obsolete" Covid-19 test from the Obama administration is false. The novel coronavirus did not exist until late last year, so there was no test to inherit.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention struggled to develop its own test for the coronavirus in January, then discovered problems in its kits sent to state and county public health labs in early February.

It took the CDC more than two weeks to come up with a fix to the test kits, leading to delays in diagnoses through February, a critical month when the virus took root in the United States. Not until Feb. 29 did the Food and Drug Administration decide to allow labs to develop and use their own coronavirus diagnostic tests before the agency reviews them, speeding up the supply. Previously, the FDA had authorized only use of a government test developed by the CDC.

And the United States bypassed a test that the World Health Organization quickly made available internationally. Trump has said that test was flawed; it wasn't.

TRUMP: ""We are leading the world now in testing by far." — news briefing Friday

TRUMP: "America continues to perform more tests than any other nation in the world. ... Now we're performing them at a level that nobody has ever seen before." — news briefing Tuesday

TRUMP: "Nobody has done more testing. ... If (other countries) did the kind of testing proportionally that we are doing, they'd have many more cases than us." — briefing on April 6

THE FACTS: He's wrong to say the U.S. has done more tests "proportionally" than other countries. More broadly, his frequent boasts about testing mask what his own officials have called a failure of the system. The United States has notably lagged on this vital front.

As for proportional testing, South Korea is just one of the countries with better testing rates. It also has fewer known cases of Covid-19, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of its population.

One test has been done for every 100 South Koreans, compared with one for every 150 Americans, according to figures in recent days.

Altogether, South Korea has conducted nearly 500,000 tests; the United States has conducted more than 2.2 million. But South Korea's population is six times smaller.

The United States only recently surpassed South Korea in the total number of tests, though both countries reported their first confirmed cases on the same day in January.

U.S. testing continues to be constrained by shortages of key supplies, including sampling swabs, and backlogs of unprocessed tests.

Economic Relief

TRUMP, with his daughter Ivanka in the Roosevelt Room of the White House: "She created over 15 million jobs." — speaking Tuesday with bankers via video conference about virus aid for small businesses

THE FACTS: That's a baseless illusion. Before the coronavirus became widespread, less than half that many jobs were added to the entire U.S. workforce during Trump's presidency, and his daughter was not responsible for them.

He was referring to a White House initiative led by Ivanka Trump that garnered nonbinding commitments from companies to provide 14 million or so training opportunities in the years ahead. Training for a job is not working at a job for money.

There's no telling how many workers were already going to be trained without the initiative. In many cases, the pledge simply confers a presidential seal of approval on what some companies were doing anyway. By having companies sign the pledge, the administration is relying on the private sector to take on more of the financial burden of training workers.

And job gains under Trump have been more than wiped out by the pandemic.

TRUMP, on a federal emergency lending program for small businesses: "I'm hearing it's a very, very successful rollout." — news briefing Thursday

TRUMP: "As of today, Small Business (Administration) has processed more than $70 billion in guaranteed loans and will provide much-needed relief for nearly a quarter of a million businesses already ... we're way ahead of schedule." — news briefing Tuesday

THE FACTS: That’s not true. There have been substantial delays, with few loans issued.

The $349 billion emergency lending program began operating April 3, but the rollout has been plagued by a host of problems. Small-business owners have complained that they are unable to get through to the SBA or the banks to apply for loans, or that they are being rejected by banks that say they are accepting applications only from businesses that are already customers of the bank.

Two of the nation’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, were not initially set up to take applications.

The SBA's loan processing system stopped working early in the week, making it impossible for loans to be approved and money distributed, while confusion spread about the documents that lenders need from customers to complete loan transactions. That's according to a trade group for community bankers and the CEO of an online lending marketplace.

Trump was actually citing the value of applications received at the time but yet to be administered.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had predicted before the program started that loans could be turned around and money transferred to businesses’ bank accounts the same day as applications were received. That didn’t happen either.

Viruses in History

TRUMP, referring to his past comparisons of the coronavirus to the flu: "You said I said it was just like a flu. So the worst pandemic we ever had in this world was a flu. ... It was in 1917, 1918. And anywhere from 50 to 100 million people died. That was a flu, OK? So, you could say that I said it was a flu, or you could say, 'The flu is nothing to sneeze at.'" — briefing Tuesday

THE FACTS: He's revising history — both his own and that of the century-old pandemic.

Trump never suggested the coronavirus was akin to the pandemic Spanish flu, which spread from early 1918 to late 1920 and killed more than 50 million worldwide. On the contrary, he repeatedly dismissed Covid-19 from January until mid-March as being less of a danger than the common flu and something that would “miraculously disappear’ come spring.

In February, he asserted that coronavirus cases were going "very substantially down, not up," and told Fox Business it will be fine because "in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather."

"It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for," he told reporters on Feb. 26. "And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."

Two days before the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Trump still presented a sunny outlook on Coviud-19.

"So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu," he tweeted March 9. "It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!"

And in a Fox News virtual town hall March 24, Trump rejected likening the coronavirus to the 1918 pandemic. "You can't compare this to 1918 where close to 100 million people died. That was a flu, which — a little different," he said, overstating the death toll of that pandemic.

TRUMP, asked about the wisdom of freezing funding to the WHO during a pandemic: "I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but we're going to look at it." Told he had said minutes before that he would freeze funding, he said, "No, I didn't. I said we're going to look at it." — briefing Tuesday

THE FACTS: Actually, he said that he was going to freeze U.S funding to the organization.

"We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO," he said. "We're going to put a very powerful hold on it."

He's unhappy with the organization's coronavirus recommendations. The United States contributed nearly $900 million to its budget for 2018-19, according to information on the agency's website, one-fifth of the WHO's total budget for those years.

On Friday, Trump said he'll make an announcement about WHO soon. "We're going to be talking about that subject next week," he told reporters. "We'll have a lot to say about it. We'll hold it."

A Malaria Drug

TRUMP, on the government's decision to stockpile millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine to make it available for patients with Covid-19: "You're not going to die from this pill. ... I really think it's a great thing to try, just based on what I know. Again, I'm not a doctor." — news briefing Tuesday

TRUMP: "What do you have to lose? I'll say it again: What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it. But it's their choice and it's their doctor's choice, or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine — try it, if you'd like." — news briefing on April 4

TRUMP: "They say taking it before the fact is good. ... It can help them, but it's not going to hurt them." — news briefing on April 5

THE FACTS: He's making unverified claims about a drug that can have serious side effects and may not work on Covid-19. The drug has not been approved as a treatment for Covid-19, and Trump's own health experts say more studies are needed to know whether it's safe and effective to use.

Trump has been talking up hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, after very small preliminary studies suggested it might help prevent coronavirus from entering cells and possibly help patients clear the virus sooner.

Doctors can prescribe the malaria drug to patients with Covid-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing. Research studies are beginning to test if the drugs truly help Covid-19 patients, and the FDA has allowed the drugs into the national stockpile as an option for doctors to consider for patients who cannot get into one of the studies.

But the drug can have major side effects, especially for the heart, and large studies are under way. The FDA says people should not take it without a prescription and emphasizes that the malaria drugs being explored "are not FDA-approved for treatment of Covid-19."

The American Medical Association, the American Pharmacists Association and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists in a joint statement warned against "prophylactically prescribing medications currently identified as potential treatments for Covid-19." That means prescribing a medicine for the purpose of warding off a disease or preventing its spread.

Travel Restrictions

TRUMP, explaining his hesitancy to suspend U.S. domestic flights to stem spread of the virus: "They're generally very, very empty planes. ... There's also testing done when people get onto those planes and also when people get off the planes." — news briefing on April 6

THE FACTS: That’s false. There's no evidence to support his suggestion that travelers at U.S. airports are being regularly tested, let alone when they get on and off the planes.

There are coronavirus screenings of some passengers arriving at 13 major U.S. airports on international flights, which involve temperature checks and questioning by U.S. agents about possible symptoms. Some states are screening passengers who are arriving from hard-hit coronavirus areas in the United States and asking them to self-isolate. None of that is the same as getting a Covid-19 test, and there are plenty of gaps in containment.

The screenings, for instance, can miss people who don't yet show symptoms of Covid-19; and while symptoms often appear within five or six days of exposure, the incubation period is 14 days.

The checks on international travelers are primarily conducted for U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, and their immediate families who recently visited certain countries — many parts of Europe, as well as China and Iran.

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