Trump's 'escalation' of lies torn down by brutal fact-check from ex-Treasury official

Former President Donald Trump gave one of the largest presidential nomination acceptance speeches in history at the Republican National Convention last week. It was also loaded with lies, wrote Steven Rattner, a former adviser to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, for The New York Times.

This comes after The Times analyzed the reaction of undecided voters to the speech, many of whom found it bizarre and unsettling.

Trump, wrote Rattner, "used the opportunity, as well as his June debate with President Biden, to repeat favorite false claims and exaggerations. That Mr. Trump has a proclivity for saying untrue things is well known. But in his latest campaign for the White House, I’ve been struck by what appears to be an escalation in both the frequency of Mr. Trump’s lies and the outrageousness of his distortions."

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Among the most egregious lies that Rattner highlighted are: Biden only created "bounce-back" jobs from the COVID-19 pandemic (his job creation has consistently exceeded Trump's even excluding COVID-19 recovery); that the cost of food has "doubled or tripled" (it's up 21 percent); that Trump passed the "largest tax cut in history" (Presidents Reagan, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Obama, and Harding all passed larger ones); that Trump had America on track to be "paying down debt" (he increased the federal deficit); that his tariff plan will not raise prices (it will); that the U.S. has spent $100 million more on Ukraine defense than all of Europe combined (it's the opposite); that Americans are being "squeezed out of the labor force" by immigrants (there's a shortage of American workers); and that crime is going up (it's gone down every year Biden's been in office).

Perhaps one of the silliest claims, Rattner said, is Trump's insistence Biden is "the worst president ... in the history of our country." While this is to some extent a matter of opinion, he noted, "A recent survey of more than 150 current and former members of the presidents and executive politics section of the American Political Science Association put Mr. Trump dead last, behind James Buchanan (tarred with allowing the Civil War to begin) and Andrew Johnson (impeached, like Mr. Trump, and nearly convicted). Mr. Biden was ranked 14th greatest, just above Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan."

All of these falsehoods just scratch the surface. Other fact-checkers have also torn Trump's speech to shreds, among other things for claiming with no evidence that Central American countries are sending insane asylum patients to the U.S., that Biden plans to quadruple the tax rate, and that the 2020 election was rigged.