#TRUMPS FIRST ONE HUNDRED DAYS FULL#

While the US was indeed expelling the majority of all migrants encountered at the border, it was sending back less than half of the families in particular. And he has often been ad-libbing about some sort of statistic.Īt a CNN town hall in February, for example, Biden claimed that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic (experts put the actual figure at two-thirds or more Hispanic), that China has more retired people than working people (it has hundreds of millions more working people than retired people), that community health centers would be sent one million Covid-19 vaccine doses a week (the plan was to send one million in the “initial phase” of the program, not every week), and that the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage would be $20 per hour today if it had been linked to inflation upon its creation (Biden was not even close – the White House said Biden got mixed up with another statistic).Īt a press conference in March, Biden claimed the US was sending back “the vast majority of families” who arrived at the southern border. When Biden has made false claims, he has tended to be ad-libbing rather than reading a text.

Biden prefers to post conventionally presidential messages, a large number of which do not contain checkable claims of any kind. Trump used the social media service to deliver off-the-cuff and oft-inaccurate boasts and attacks. Then, of course, there is the Twitter gap. Biden’s prepared texts have been quite factual. When Biden does make public remarks, he is much more likely to be reading from a prepared text than the famously freewheeling Trump was. According to data provided to CNN by, a website that tracks presidential utterances, Biden said about 28% fewer public words than Trump through April 29 of their respective terms. And Biden also just talks much less in public than Trump did. Trump was a distinctively prolific liar, so it’s neither a surprise nor a compliment to note that his successor has been far more accurate than he was.

#TRUMPS FIRST ONE HUNDRED DAYS FULL#

Trump averaged about eight false claims per day in the full year I tracked as a CNN reporter, from August 2019 through July 2020. But I counted 214 false claims from Trump over his own first 100 days in office, more than two per day on average – and that was a very slow Trump period compared to what came later. He certainly isn’t.īut through his first 100 days in the Oval Office, Biden has given us intermittent false claims rather than the staggering avalanche of daily wrongness we faced from his predecessor.īy CNN’s rough count, Biden has made 29 total false claims in his first 100 days, about one every three-and-a-half days on average. Not because President Joe Biden is accurate all the time. To hear the full conversation, click the audio player above.Things have been quieter around here in presidential-fact-check land. “This book… contains a lot of what I have come to conclude through more than 50 years of writing history and of trying to understand as best as possible who it has been that has really made our progress as a nation possible,” says McCullough, “and what they - and consequently, let us hope, we - stand for.” To a large degree, history is a lesson in proportions… History teaches that character counts. “A sense of history is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance, of which there is much too much in our time. McCullough’s book offers a number of reflections on the politics of the time in which they were written, many of which reverberate today.ĭuring a speech at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in 1998, he says: “I think it’s been appalling and I think it’s easily the most inept and undisciplined raucous start off of any president ever… And there’s no eloquence. But he says Trump has not delivered anything of substance. Change is part of our ritual,” says McCullough. “I can understand why some people, many people felt that we needed a change. Still, he does have an opinion on the president’s behavior over the last three months or so, bringing it into the context of American voting habits. “It’s one of those unrealistic score-keeping systems that catch on.” “I think the hundred days is arbitrary and really a senseless issue to make,” says McCullough. He recently released a collection of his speeches, given between 19, called “ The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For.”ĭetroit Today host Stephen Henderson speaks with McCullough about his new book and what he thinks of what he’s seeing in President Trump’s first 100 days. He’s a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner who has documented the lives and careers of a number of presidents, including John Adams and Harry Truman. David McCullough is one of America’s most acclaimed and well-known historians and authors.

Trumps first one hundred days