Accessibility statementSkip to main content Democracy Dies in Darkness Sign in Advertisement Democracy Dies in Darkness fact checkerAboutArchive fact checkerAboutArchive # Trump on Hannity’s show: 24 false or misleading claims in 5 minutes 17 min (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) ![\\"\\"](\\" apps/imrs.php?src= authors/washpost/44f31222-8f22-4a07-b0eb-c77cbf11540a.png&h=196&w=196\\"/) Analysis by Glenn Kessler December 12, 2023 at 10:44 a.m. EST A bogus claim every 12 seconds, on average. That’s what a single five-minute clip of former president Donald Trump speaking in Iowa on Dec. 5 yielded. In the clip, from a Fox News “town hall” hosted by Sean Hannity and brought to our attention by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), Trump ludicrously asserts that American oil and natural gas resources — “liquid gold” in the ground — could solve Social Security’s looming fiscal imbalance. That claim comes toward the end of the clip; to get there, a listener must first hear falsehood after falsehood in rapid succession. Hannity tees up Trump by noting that he had mentioned energy. Hannity says that with $34 trillion of debt, the United States is paying $1 trillion in annual interest costs — a correct statement — and says “that is unsustainable.” We went through a transcript of Trump’s response, noting each false or misleading statement in boldface and providing a time stamp. The first falsehood comes in the 43rd second. ### 0:43 “So before covid hit us, a gift from China. That was our gift. What happened to us with covid, **commonly known as the China virus**. They don’t like that. But it was a China virus.” Advertisement Story continues below advertisement The coronavirus that sparked the 2020 pandemic is not commonly known as the China virus. The origin has not been pinpointed, although the first known cases appeared in China in late 2019. But viruses are not country-specific and do not honor borders; the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, for example, appears to have started in Kansas. ### 0:53 “We were doing energy, **taking our liquid gold out of the ground at a rate that’s never been seen before**. And it was going up.” ✅ Follow Fact-checking politicians Follow This is misleading. Trump often takes credit for trends that were apparent before he became president. 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). ### 1:00 “We were going to be using that liquid gold to sell to Europe instead of the pipeline from Russia, **which I exposed**.” Advertisement Story continues below advertisement Nord Stream 2 is a Russian pipeline that would have doubled the export of Russian natural gas to Germany. Trump did not expose it; U.S. policymakers, including the Biden administration, have long objected to it. “Successive U.S. Administrations and Congresses have opposed Nord Stream 2, reflecting concerns about European dependence on Russian energy and the threat Russia poses to Ukraine,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2021 report. ### 1:02 “And I stopped, you know, **I stopped that line.”** False. During the Trump administration, Congress imposed sanctions that temporarily halted construction for only one year. Germany was progressing with certification of the pipeline but warned that a Russian attack on Ukraine could halt the deal. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the project was killed. ### 1:08 “Then they say I was nice to Russia. There was nobody that was nice. **I was not nice to Russia**.” Advertisement Story continues below advertisement False. Trump sided with Russian president Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community in a news conference in Helsinki in 2018, saying he did not believe Russia tried to intervene in the 2016 election. Trump often resisted congressional efforts to sanction Russia and led a charge to weaken NATO and the European Union — two important goals of Putin’s. He has suggested that he might pull the United States out of NATO if he’s elected to a second term. ### 1:15 “I stopped that pipeline. We would have been selling oil and gas to Europe, to Asia, all over the world. **We would have been paying off debt**.” False. Trump often has magical thinking about the national debt. When he first ran for president, Trump confidently claimed that he could eliminate the national debt — then $19 trillion — in just eight years through better trade deals. We gave him Four Pinocchios. He walked back the pledge, saying he would reduce a percentage of the debt. That didn’t happen. Instead, under Trump, the debt climbed to $27.8 trillion from not quite $20 trillion, a gain of $7.9 trillion. (More than half of the debt under Trump came in the last 10 months of his term because of the pandemic.) Advertisement Story continues below advertisement 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. 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 CRFB. 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. ### 1:19 “That debt would be way down right now because we have more than — What people don’t know, **we have more liquid gold than any other country in the world by far**.” Advertisement Story continues below advertisement False. According to the EIA, the United States has proven crude oil reserves of 44 billion barrels, which would put the country in 10th place. Venezuela, with 304 billion of oil reserves, is in first place, followed by Saudi Arabia (259 billion), Iran (209 billion), Canada (170 billion) and Iraq (145 billion). ### 1:24 “And **we started off in fourth place**. We were No. 4 with Saudi Arabia. It was Russia. It was two countries fighting for No. 3. And it was us at No. 4 or 5.” False. Trump here appears to switch from talking about reserves to crude oil production. In 2016, Barack Obama’s last year as president, the United States ranked third, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. In 2017, the United States produced 13.1 million barrels a day, compared to 12 million for Saudi Arabia and 11.3 million for Russia. ### 1:37 “**By the time I left, we were No. 1 by 25 percent**.” Advertisement Story continues below advertisement This is exaggerated. According to EIA, the United States produced 11.3 million barrels a day in 2020, compared to 9.9 for Russia, or 14 percent more. Saudia Arabia was in third place with 9.4 million barrels. Oil production actually went down — 8 percent from 2019 in the United States — because the pandemic sharply cut oil consumption. ### 1:41 “We **would have been No. 1 by 100** and we would have done twice what they were going to do combined. We would have been paying off debt. That we would have been.” This is an absurd assertion. Trump repeats his falsehood about paying off the debt. ### 1:47 “We gave you the **biggest tax cut in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan tax cut.** ” Story continues below advertisement The audience burst into applause with this line, but it’s false. Trump’s tax cut amounted to nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning it was far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century — and even smaller than two tax cuts passed under Obama. Trump’s tax cut was heavily tilted toward the wealthy and corporations. ### 1:58 “We would have been reducing taxes still further. And that’s why, Sean, that’s why we **had the most jobs of any president ever**.” Advertisement False. Trump says “jobs,” but as he did during his presidency, he’s referring to the number of Americans employed. That’s mostly a function of population growth. The number of Americans in non-farm jobs peaked at 152 million in February 2020 but then plunged because of the pandemic. It was about 143 million by the time Trump left office. Biden can claim to have beaten Trump on this (mostly meaningless) statistic. As of last month, 157 million Americans had non-farm jobs. ### 2:04 “We got rid of regulations. Tremendous. **No president got rid of more regulations or close**.” Story continues below advertisement Trump’s claim of the most or biggest regulation cuts cannot be easily verified and appears to be false. There is no reliable metric on which to judge this claim — or to compare him to previous presidents. Many experts say the most significant regulatory changes in U.S. history were the deregulation of the airline, rail and trucking industries during the Carter administration, which are estimated to provide consumers with $70 billion in annual benefits. A detailed November 2020 report by the Penn Program on Regulation concluded that “without exception, each major claim we have uncovered by the President or other White House official about regulation turns out to be exaggerated, misleading, or downright untrue.” The report said that the Trump administration had not reduced the overall number of pages from the regulatory code book and that it completed far more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones once the full data was examined. ### 2:28 “And we gave you the big tax cuts. So everybody had incentive and everybody was happy and everybody was working. I remember groups came to see me that wouldn’t normally like me, and they said, ‘We’ve never seen anything like it.’ We were actually starting to get along, but we got hit with the China virus. There were some people think purposely. I don’t. I think it was incompetence, but some people think purposely **because we were doing so much better than any other country ever** and we got hit.” Advertisement This is mostly Trump patting himself on the back, although he slips in a reference to the conspiracy theory that “some people” think China purposely attacked the United States with the coronavirus. The falsehood here is that the United States was doing better than any country ever. Before the pandemic struck, many other countries had faster growth rates, including China, India, Latvia, Poland and Greece. In the United States, by just about any key measure in the modern era, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton presided over stronger economic growth than Trump. ### 2:33 “But I will tell you, **we would be paying that debt off right now** at levels like never seen before. We would create a beautiful thing.” Trump once again falsely says he would have been paying off the debt. If he had beaten Biden, he, and not Biden, would have faced the challenge of large budget deficits created by the pandemic. At this point, Hannity interrupted Trump to repeat one of Trump’s favorite false claims: “You brought us to energy independence for the first time in 75 years.” While the United States exported more crude and refined products than it imported, it still relied on other countries for its energy needs. Hannity then emphasized the false message Trump has been making: “You’re saying that in a second term, you will push America to be the most energy-dominant country on earth and that you could pay down that $34 trillion in debt and we won’t have $1 trillion interest payment every year?” ### 3:13 “So it’s **Biden inflation**. That’s what it is.” Biden is the president, and so he’s going to be blamed for inflation. But if Trump had been reelected, he would have faced the same post-pandemic inflationary pressures caused by supply chain issues and a surge in energy consumption. Inflation struck every major industrialized country in the world, not just the United States. ### 3:20 “What he did with energy is unbelievable because energy went up so much. **Gasoline, $5, $6 a gallon** , that that’s what caused inflation.” This is slightly exaggerated. The average retail price of gasoline spiked at $5.032 a gallon in June 2022, according to EIA, not $6 — although of course it was higher in individual markets such as California. Fuel prices shot up in 2022 largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, adding to inflationary pressures caused by the pandemic. ### 3:27 “Now it’s all over the place. But **you have 29 percent total inflation**.” Another exaggerated figure. The consumer price index calculator on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website shows that $100 in January 2021, when Biden took office, would have the same buying power at $117.62 in October. That’s an increase of 18 percent. ### 3:32 “Now, when it holds up, because **the economy is starting to slow down very substantially**. So when it holds up, he’s saying, well, we don’t have too much inflation. But he doesn’t talk about all of the inflation that you’ve had to suffer over the last three years.” The Federal Reserve has boosted interest rates to the highest level in 22 years to bring down inflation. But the economy, contrary to many expectations, has not slowed substantially, as Trump claims. The U.S. economy created 199,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent, the BLS said last week. ### 3:57 “Now, we will have numbers like you’ve never seen. We have a thing in Alaska called ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge]. Ronald Reagan tried to get it approved. Everybody, Bush, maybe a little bit. You know, he didn’t work as hard. But we have we have ANWR in Alaska, the **biggest anywhere in the world** , including probably Saudi Arabia.” This is false. On the basis of geology, the U.S. Geological Survey in 2016 projected that there could be anywhere from 11.6 billion to 31.5 billion barrels of oil in the ANWR field. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, which has been producing oil since the 1950s, had 58 billion barrels left in reserves as of the end of 2018. At least 10 oil fields now in operation are estimated to have more than 20 billion barrels of oil, the midpoint of the USGS survey. (George W. Bush sought drilling in the Arctic refuge, but Democrats repeatedly blocked congressional approval.) ### 4:04 “I got it approved. I was so proud of it. **They ended it in the first week.** They ended it. We will get it back.” This is exaggerated. The Biden administration suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic refuge four months after Biden took office, citing problems with the environmental review process. Trump had offered the leases in his remaining weeks in office, but few companies were interested. “The Jan. 6 sale of 11 tracts in the refuge on just over 550,000 acres netted roughly $14.4 million, a tiny fraction of what Republicans initially predicted it would yield,” The Washington Post reported. “Only two of the bids were competitive, so nearly all of the drilling rights on the land sold for the minimum price of $25 an acre.” ### 4:27 “But we have more than anybody. We have more wealth than anybody, but we don’t use it. And then guys like [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis and guys like many of the Democrats, but guys like DeSantis and to a lesser extent, Nikki Haley, they want to play around with your Social Security. You don’t have to touch Social Security. **We have money laying in the ground,** **far greater than anything we can do by hurting senior citizens with their Social Security**.” We’ve demonstrated that this is false. Oil revenue would not make up the difference in Social Security. CRFB estimates that revenue from oil and gas leases would need to be about 27 times larger to cover Social Security’s actuarial deficit. If benefits are not changed, the fiscal imbalance in Social Security can be solved only by raising payroll taxes or boosting the income level subject to tax — nonstarters for Republicans — or financing it out of other government revenue, which would further increase the national debt. ### 4:55 “Ron DeSantis wanted to bring up — on Social Security. Now, of course, he says, well, I wouldn’t. But, you know, one thing I learned about politicians, I’ve known them. I’ve dealt with them on the other side for a long time. Their first thought is always the thought that they go to. He wanted to raise the minimum age to the age on Social Security to 70. That’s a big increase. **But he also wanted to raise it to 75**. If that happened, people would be devastated.” This is false. DeSantis, a rival for the GOP presidential nomination, never supported raising the retirement age to 75. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, DeSantis, as a member of Congress, supported budget plans drawn up by a conservative group of House members that called for raising the retirement age for younger workers to 70. Running for president, however, DeSantis has rejected that idea. Asked by Fox News in March about the possibility of raising the retirement age to 70, DeSantis replied: “We are not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.” Trump attacks DeSantis for the shift, saying he should be judged on his original proposal. But Trump also once called for raising the retirement age to 70 — just like DeSantis. In a 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” published when Trump sought the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, Trump made an emphatic case for a higher retirement age. “A firm limit at age seventy makes sense for people now under forty,” Trump wrote. “We’re living longer. We’re working longer. New medicines are extending healthy human life. Besides, how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon? The way the workweek is going, it will probably be down to about twenty-five hours by then anyway. This is a sacrifice I think we all can make.” ### 5:00 “**We have such incredible wealth under our feet.** ” The clip ends with Trump yet again reiterating this false talking point. 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We have money laying in the ground far greater than anything we can do by hurting senior citizens with their Social Security