Trump's plan to execute drug dealers based on faux 'facts' As former president Donald Trump held rallies across the country in advance of the midterm elections, a central part of his speech was a dramatic proposal to begin executing drug dealers quickly, with little recourse for defendants to due process rules that might prevent swift prosecution and sentencing. Trump presents his idea with a blizzard of statistics and figures — and a gruesome anecdote — to justify what would be an extraordinary and legally shaky change in criminal justice policy. As is often the case with Trump, the claims he makes as part of this riff (such as drug dealers kill "an average of 500 Americans") are easily debunked or cannot be verified. And, as he often does, Trump speaks in admiring terms about an authoritarian regime as he offers China as a role model — although with an inaccurate depiction of its practices and history. Yet Trump's plan to execute drug dealers is one of the few substantive policy proposals he makes in speeches that delve deeply into grievances about his defeat in the 2020 election. As president, Trump sometimes complained that sentences were not tough enough for drug dealers. Now he appears to have developed a solution. So it should be taken seriously, given that he announced a third run for the presidency. We wrote a line-by-line dissection of specific claims Trump made at an Ohio rally Nov. 7 for Senate candidate J.D. Vance as he detailed his proposal to the cheers of the audience. Please read our full report via the link. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Trump's 'Golden Oldie' announcement speech Donald Trump is running for president again — and he's singing from the same hymn book of falsehoods. With few exceptions, many of the factual claims made in his announcement speech on Tuesday could have been plucked from a campaign-rally speech in the waning days of the 2020 election — or even from his 2015 announcement speech. We fact-checked 19 claims. Here's a sampling. "I made big promises to the American people. And unlike other presidents, I kept my promises." Despite his bravado, Trump broke many of his campaign promises. According to The Washington Post Trump Promise Tracker, Trump kept less than one-third of 60 key promises he announced during the 2016 campaign — and he broke half of them. "Businesses were pouring back because of our historic tax and regulation cuts, the biggest in both categories in history, bigger even than what Ronald Reagan was able to produce." Neither of these claims are correct. Reagan's tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product. Trump's tax cut was the equivalent of 0.9 percent of GDP, making it the eighth largest tax cut in 100 years. As for regulations, there is no reliable metric on which to judge this claim — or to compare Trump to previous presidents. Many experts say the most significant regulatory changes in U.S. history were the deregulation of airline, rail and trucking industries during the Carter administration, which are estimated to provide consumers with $70 billion in annual benefits. A detailed report in 2020 said the Trump administration had far more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones. Some readers have reported no cat videos in the last two newsletters! We've fixed this technical issue when readers complain and usually the videos reappear later in the day if you look back at the newsletter. Programming note: We're taking a couple of weeks off so the newsletter will return Dec. 9. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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