Fact Checker • Analysis

Fact-checking Trump’s freewheeling Cabinet session

By Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo January 4 at 3:00 AM

President Trump’s 90-minute Cabinet session was a fact-checking nightmare, with sentence after sentence uttered by the president false or misleading. We will eventually cover every line in our comprehensive database, which now has 7,645 claims, but many of his lines are simply golden oldies we have fact-checked before. So here we will focus mainly on the newly wrong things he said, in the order in which he said them.

“Every day, Border Patrol encounters roughly 2,000 illegal immigrants — we have to talk about this — trying to enter our country. Two thousand a day, and that’s a minimum.”

This is misleading. Trump is conflating two different numbers reported monthly by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

First, there’s the figure for Southwest border apprehensions. Anyone caught trying to cross the border illegally is tallied in this column. For fiscal 2018, CBP reported 396,579 apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. So far in fiscal 2019, the number is 102,857.

{snip. I don't have the time.}

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than three decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him, tweeting at him, or sending him a message on Facebook. Follow https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP

Salvador Rizzo is a reporter for The Fact Checker. He previously covered New Jersey politics, courts, state finances and Gov. Chris Christie, with stints at the Star-Ledger, the Bergen Record and the Observer. Follow https://twitter.com/rizzoTK