Donald Trump made a false statement every 12 seconds during a five-minute video clip from his town hall appearance hosted by Fox News broadcaster Sean Hannity, according to a new analysis.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CFRB) brought one of those claims — Trump's assertion that U.S. oil and natural gas resources could solve Social Security's coming fiscal imbalance — to the attention of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who analyzed the entire video and found the former president dispensed "falsehood after falsehood in rapid succession."
"Trump often takes credit for trends that were apparent before he became president," Kessler wrote about his claims regarding energy reserves. "The U.S. energy boom began during the Obama administration, largely because of the expansion of fracking and new drilling technologies. U.S. production of crude oil began increasing rapidly after 2010, and in 2013, the International Energy Agency predicted that the United States in 2016 would leap ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top oil producer.
"That happened in 2017, early in Trump’s presidency. As you will see below, Trump falsely takes credit for that. In fact, when both petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons are counted, the United States became the largest producer in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA)."
Trump's first falsehood came at the 43-second mark, when he claimed that COVID-19 was commonly known as the China virus, a term which he frequently uses but not everyone else, and he blew through multiple false claims about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and U.S. reserves of "liquid gold."
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"Running again for president, Trump now claims the debt would be reduced by money generated by oil and natural gas reserves in the ground. But most of the money is earned by oil producers, not the federal government," Kessler wrote.
"The federal government might own some of the land and earn leasing fees. Such fees on U.S. federal lands, federal waters and Native American lands amounted to about $20 billion in fiscal 2022, according to CFRB. The government also earns fees from taxes on sales, with a substantial portion already dedicated to transportation projects. All told, the federal government earns about $100 billion a year from fees and taxes on fossil fuel, according to a 2022 report from Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research group."
"The United States had a budget deficit almost four times as high — $383 billion — just in the first two months of fiscal 2024 (which began Oct. 1), showing the folly of Trump’s logic," he added.
