Donald Trump’s Fox News-Inspired Tweets Found To Contain Numerous Falsehoods

On July 3, President Donald Trump unloaded a series of tweets inspired by various Fox News stories which, upon closer inspection, contain a number of glaring falsehoods.

  1. Harley Davidson’s Customers Are Psychic

The president attributed the company’s poor worldwide performance last year to U.S. consumers’ anger over a decision it only made last month — to relocate outside of the country. In reality, the company has been experiencing a downward trend in domestic sales for years. And part of the reason the company chose to relocate is to protect itself from any retaliatory tariffs caused by Trump’s erratic trade policy.

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Also, despite the president’s claim to be “working with other motor cycle companies,” he never specified which in particular, and the White House could not name any to which he was referring. And contrary to Trump’s previous statements, all Harley-Davidson’s sold in the U.S will still be manufactured domestically.

  2. Obama Granted Citizenship to 2,500 Iranians

The statement was solely based on a Fox News article that cited an Iranian news agency that cited an Iranian newspaper that quoted a single Iranian cleric, who is also a member of parliament. The cleric reportedly said the Obama administration granted citizenship to 2,500 unidentified Iranians as a favor of President Hassan Rouhani of Iran.

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The claim comes with no other evidence to support it.

Jeff Prescott, the former senior director on Obama’s National Security Council, called the allegation “absurd and entirely false.” He also countered the claim with immigration data from the Department of Homeland Security, showing that the number of Iranians naturalized in the United States over the course of the Obama and Bush administrations was relatively consistent.

Jake Sullivan, a former Obama official who was involved at the start of the Iran nuclear negotiations also referred to the claim as “completely false.”

  3. The N.S.A is Working with the “Deep State” to Undermine Trump

The claim is in reference to the National Security Agency’s (N.S.A) recent public notice that it had began purging its database by deleting all call detail records acquired since 2015. The move was in response to a technical glitch which resulted in the agency receiving certain data that it was not authorized to have. 

Later that week, a guest host on the Fox Business show Lou Dobbs Tonight, speculated that the move was actually done on purpose by the N.S.A in order to undermine Trump and fuel “the investigations and the political biases that the deep state has, particularly, in this case, against Donald Trump becoming president.”

The “deep state” refers to a supposed underground body of insiders, secretly influencing the state without the consent of the people. Trump has previously used the term when referencing the U.S Justice Department, suggesting that federal law enforcement is secretly working to undermine his presidency.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has since, however, backed the intelligence community as of Tuesday. In their most recent examination, the senators found that the intelligence agencies’ findings on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election were well-supported and their tradecraft strong.

“As numerous intelligence and national security officials in the Trump administration have since unanimously re-affirmed, the (Intelligence Community Assessment’s) findings were accurate and on point,” said committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner.