Are Things As Great As Trump Says They Are?

I covered this in a couple of paragraphs in my post "Why Trump Must Go", but I wanted to revisit the topic.

Why is the fact that Trump lies important? One of the critical reasons for understanding his lying nature is that many of the reasons that people have for supporting him is his "many accomplishments". In many, if not most, cases, his supposed victories are exaggerations, extensions of previous tends, or just plains lies.

Unemployment

This is one of those things that, while technically true, is misleading. Trump frequently touts historically low unemployment numbers to make the case that his presidency has created a booming economy. The lowest unemployment was more than 50 years ago at 3.0%. Under Trump we have gotten down to about 3.2% and have averaged under 4.0% for his whole tenure to date. However, if you look at the unemployment chart, you can see that this is just a continuation of a trend. After rising from 8% to 10% in Obama's first year, it went down steadily until it got down to around 4.7% at the end of his term. So, if you subscribe to the theory that presidential policies influence unemployment rates, Obama lowered the rate from 10% down to 4.7$; Trump has only lowered it from 4.7% to an average of 3.5%. It's also quite hypocritical that Trump, before he was president, attacked the accuracy of unemployment figures, suggesting that the "real" percentage was as high as 40%. It's crazy how the figures are no longer "fake" when they make him look good.

Unemployment is the only category that I'm going to put up a chart for, however, facts and figures backed up by government data are available for everything else that he says.

• He claims that he has "brought manufacturing back", "saved steel" and "ended the war on coal". Occasionally we hear about a company making a decision to stay in the U.S. rather than moving production abroad, but we hear just as often of companies closing or moving out of the country. 
• He claimed that he would build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and that Mexico would pay for it. Of course Mexico wasn't ever going to pay for it. As of December 2019 the Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection stated that 93 miles of new barriers have been built, 90 miles of which replaced existing barriers. The border is almost 2000 miles long and was already covered by 650 miles of barriers of various kinds.  I do not know if the new wall that blew over was deducted from the total. 
• He claimed that he would tear up NAFTA, which he said was a "disaster" and replace it with something better. What he did was negotiate some minor changes and updates, then renamed it USMCA and announced that it was a brand new agreement. 
• He claimed that our military was "decimated" and even went so far as to say that the Army had no ammunition. Military spending has gone up slightly under Trump, but nothing major has changed. 
• He claims to "love our vets" and says that he "got Choice passed" when it had been passed in 2014, having been sponsored in the Senate by Senators Sanders and McCain and signed into law by President Obama. 

I could go on and on, but you're grownups and can research this yourself. And by "research" I don't mean finding a New York Times article or Fox News story that supports your view. Just about every claim that every politician makes can be checked using available data sources.

Do that.