The president and his familiar falsehoods

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump says Mexico is paying for the wall (it isn’t), health care choice for veterans came from him (it didn’t) and his tax cut stands as the biggest in American history (nowhere close).

These are among his touchstones — the falsehoods that span his presidency — and he’s giving them another go in the final days of his relentless campaigning.

He’s got fresher false material, too, claiming “incredible” numbers in the pandemic response despite record infections, rising deaths and a statement from his chief of staff Sunday that the government cannot bring the coronavirus under control. He warned darkly of voting fraud in the Nov. 3 election without offering evidence that malfeasance is in play.

In weekend rallies, Trump also portrayed Democratic rival Joe Biden as the helmsman of a Marxist party who lined his own pockets with $3.5 million via Moscow. This didn’t happen.

A look at rhetoric from the weekend:

The virus

TRUMP >> “Even without vaccines, we’re rounding the turn. It’s going to be over.” — on C-SPAN, Sunday

THE FACTS >> The numbers have turned harrowing, not “incredible.”

The U.S. set a daily record Friday for new confirmed coronavirus infections and nearly matched it Saturday with 83,178, data published by Johns Hopkins University show. Close to 8.6 million Americans have contracted the coronavirus since the pandemic began, and about 225,000 have died; both totals are the world’s highest. About half the states have seen their highest daily infection numbers so far at some point in October.

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, said on CNN. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.” He did not share his boss’s view that the pandemic is turning a corner or that it will, absent a vaccine.

Veterans

TRUMP >> “We passed VA Choice.” — New Hampshire rally

THE FACTS >> He did not get the Choice program passed. President Barack Obama did. Trump expanded it. The program allows veterans to get medical care outside the Veterans Affairs system under certain conditions.

The border wall

TRUMP >> “And by the way, Mexico is paying for the wall.” — New Hampshire rally

THE FACTS >> The U.S. is paying for it. Mexico isn’t. The Mexican government flatly refused to contribute to extending or reinforcing barriers on U.S. soil — “Not now, not ever,” Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president, tweeted in May 2018.

Since the start, Trump has been fishing for ways to make it appear that he was keeping his promise to make Mexico pay for the project at the core of his 2016 campaign. But the money is coming from today’s U.S. taxpayers and the future ones who will inherit the federal debt.

Voting fraud

TRUMP >> “In Nevada, they want to have a thing where you don’t have to have any verification of the signature.” — New Hampshire rally THE FACTS >> Not true, despite his frequent assertions to the contrary. The state’s existing law requires signature checks on mail ballots. A new law also spells out a process by which election officials are to check a signature against the one in government records.

In Nevada’s June primary, nearly 7,000 ballots were thrown out due to mismatched or missing signatures.