You think your job is tough?  Put yourself in Daniel Dale’s shoes.  He’s a Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star who has the unenviable task of following Donald Trump across the country to witness first hand the campaign rallies or, as we like to call them fabrication-fests and boast-a-thons leading up to the midterm elections.  It’s almost as if Trump doesn’t know cameras or reporters are in the hall because the level of lying is off the charts. 

Or maybe he just doesn’t care.  Nonetheless, Mr. Dale keeps a Twitter thread going during the rally that is much more entertaining, and accurate, than Trump’s speeches. Below are selected tweets from one of those twitter threads. This one from a rally in Elko, Nevada on Saturday. 

 

  • Trump: “Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs. Hashtag. Right? That’s called hashtag. That’s a new hashtag. That’s a hot one.”
  • Trump claims the Democrats’ platform involves “open borders, and crime. Because basically it’s crime.” (Democrats are obviously not calling for literally open borders, which is what Trump suggests the phrase means.)
  • Trump tells his usual lie about how presidents couldn’t get the Veterans Choice health program passed for “44 years” until he came along. (He says “44 years” three times.) Obama signed Choice into law in 2014. The law Trump signed modifies the Choice program.
  • Trump calls Rep. Maxine Waters, a black woman, “a low-IQ individual.” She’s the only Democratic House non-leader he regularly disparages at his red-state rallies.
  • Trump lies that California residents are “rioting” in protest of sanctuary city immigration laws: “They’re rioting now. They want to get out of their sanctuary cities.”
  • Trump lies that Kavanaugh was “top in his class” at Yale and Yale Law. He was not close to the top as an undergrad. Yale Law’s system doesn’t allow for rankings.
  • Trump repeats his usual nonsense about how Republicans will always protect people with pre-existing conditions and how Democrats are proposing “open borders.”
  • Trump with some vague conspiratorial thoughts on immigration: “Democrats want caravans. They like the caravans. A lot of people say, I wonder who started that caravan.”
  • “We started the wall,” Trump lies. He then claims he secured a nonexistent third $1.6 billion in border security funding to go along with the $1.6 billion this year and the $1.6 billion in the bill for next year.
  • Trump: If the media was “on my side, I think I’d be at 100% right now. You know? 100%. I really believe it. They’d have breaking news: President Trump, his approval rating, has just hit one hundred per cent.”
  • Trump lies that there were 45,000 people stuck outside of his rally in Springfield, Missouri. Springfield’s public information director, Cora Scott, told me there were “1,000 or so that were unable to get in, due to capacity issues.”
  • Trump says he is creating the Space Force “’cause this is where it’s at” (space).
  • “America is respected again. I was at the United Nations, and the leaders of the countries were coming up to me, countries that couldn’t have cared less, and they’re saying, ‘I must tell you Mr. President, America is respected again.'” People literally laughed at him at the UN.
  • Trump has concluded. That was immensely dishonest, basically devoid of news.