Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Fact Check

Fact-Checking Trump’s New Hampshire Rally

President Trump on Thursday repeated inaccurate claims about energy, China and his predecessor.

President Trump, at a rally in Manchester, N.H., on Thursday, revisited the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton and denounced the news media, Democrats and America’s allies in Europe.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

What Trump Said

“We have incredible things going on in Pennsylvania, we just opened up a $10 billion plant. ... In Louisiana, an L.N.G. plant, $10 billion, could never have happened, could never have happened. Pennsylvania would’ve never happened. They wouldn’t have allowed them to frack.”

Both facilities predate Donald J. Trump’s presidency, as does the resurgence of oil and natural gas production in the United States known as the “shale revolution.”

In Monaca, Pa., Royal Dutch Shell is building a chemical plant that will convert natural gas to plastic products. Shell announced the plant in 2012 and completed the decision in June 2016; it has not yet opened. Sempra Energy received approval for its liquefied natural gas plant in Louisiana in 2014.

The boom in natural gas and crude oil production began in the 2000s, “driven mainly by production from tight rock formations using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing,” according to the Energy Information Administration.

What Trump Said

“Earlier this month, the U.S. government officially labeled China for the first time ever a currency manipulator — another promise kept.”

The Treasury Department did label China a currency manipulator in early August, but China also fell under the designation from 1992 to 1994.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump promised to affix the label to China on Day 1 of his administration, and the pledge was featured in his “100-day action plan.”

What Trump Said

“If he was a great president, how come he left me 138 judges to appoint when everybody said that’s the single most important thing a president of the United States has to do?”

Though Mr. Trump inherited over 100 judicial vacancies when he took office, his suggestion that President Barack Obama shirked his responsibilities omits crucial context. The Senate, under Republican control, did not confirm most of Mr. Obama’s nominees.

During the last two years of his presidency, Mr. Obama made 70 nominations for circuit and district courts but the Senate confirmed just 20 for a rate of 28.6 percent. For context, Mr. Trump had nearly double that rate confirmed in his first two years in office at 53.5 percent.

Other Claims

Mr. Trump also repeated a number of inaccurate claims that The New York Times has previously fact-checked:

Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com.

Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to The Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact. More about Linda Qiu

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT