(By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 25 September 2024)
We’ve documented many times the false claims that former president Donald Trump has made about his achievements during his presidency. But there are also instances when Trump claims credit for something that either former president Barack Obama or President Joe Biden did. Here’s a recent sampling.
Capped
insulin at $35 a month
“Low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans
by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden. He had NOTHING
to do with it. It was all done long before he so sadly entered office. All he
does is try to take credit for things done by others, in this case, ME!”
— Trump, in a social media post, June 8
“And Kamala and Crooked Joe, they try and take credit for
$35 insulin. But I was the one that did the $35 insulin, not them.”
— Trump, in a rally speech in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Aug. 17
“I got insulin down, and they took credit for it, but I
got it down to $35. And I said, ‘I hope I win because somebody’s going to take
credit.’ It takes a period of time before it kicks in statutorily. And I got it
down to $35, which was a very low price, and they took credit for it, which is,
you know, now, I’m taking credit because I’m talking to you.”
— Trump, in an interview with comedian Theo Von, Aug. 20
In a constant refrain, Trump accuses Biden and Vice
President Kamala Harris of claiming credit for imposing a
$35-per-month cap on insulin; in one speech, he denounced it as “a lie.” But this is highly
misleading, especially when he says Biden and Harris had nothing to do with a
$35 cap.
Trump did establish a voluntary, time-limited model for a
$35 monthly cap on insulin that was available only to some seniors enrolled in
certain insurance plans. Fewer than half of Medicare Part D prescription drug
plans chose to participate, and they were able to select which insulin products
would be available at $35. Medicare estimated that the two-year model was made available
to about 800,000 Medicare enrollees who used insulin.
Naturally, when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, he falsely claimed that
the $35 cap was available to every senior. When he announced the temporary program in 2020, he jabbed,
“Sleepy Joe can’t do this.”
Even today, notice how Trump, in one interview, said the
program took a “period of time before it kicks in statutorily.” That
misleadingly suggests he passed a law, not just authorized a temporary pilot
program.
A law is what Biden achieved. Over the opposition of the
pharmaceutical industry, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (passed with a
tiebreaking vote in the Senate by Harris) permanently required all Part D plans
to charge no more than $35 per month for all insulin products; it also limited
cost sharing for insulin covered under Part B (Medicare medical insurance) to
$35 per month. KFF, a nonprofit health-policy organization, estimated that nearly 3.3 million Americans would
benefit from this provision of the law. That’s four times more than people who
were covered under Trump’s temporary measure.
Trump announced a small pilot program for a group of seniors
with an expiration date; Biden passed a law that benefited every senior.
There’s no comparison.
Lowest
Black unemployment rate
“Achieved the lowest African American unemployment rate,
the lowest ever.”
— Trump, in remarks to Black American business leaders,
June 26
The current Black unemployment statistic has been in
existence for about 50 years. It fell to 5.3 percent for two months in 2019
during Trump’s presidency before rising to 6.1 percent in February 2020 — and
then of course soared above 15 percent during the pandemic.
Trump keeps talking about this “lowest ever” achievement but
the Biden-Harris administration topped his brief record. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics shows the Black unemployment rate reached a new low of
4.8 percent in April 2023. The unemployment rate was lower or matched Trump’s
5.3 percent for a total of five months under Biden. As of August, the rate is
6.1 percent.
Passed
VA Choice
“In my first term, I gave the VA Choice and made it
permanent. You know, VA Choice, when you don’t have a doctor, you go, and you
go outside. I mean, people were waiting for four months, for five months. You
people probably know it. You have friends that know it very well. They go in
for something that was not a big deal, and they’d end up being terminally ill
because they couldn’t get to see a doctor. So, I created and have VA Choice.
They’d been wanting to do it for 57 years. I got it done, passed in Congress.”
— Trump, remarks to National Guard Association Conference in Detroit,
Aug. 26
This was a favorite claim during Trump’s presidency — he
said it more than 200 times, according to our database of Trump’s false and misleading
claims — but he actually signed the MISSION Act, which was a modest
update of the VA Choice law passed by Obama in 2014. The Obama legislation
expanded veterans’ ability to go to private doctors.
In 2020, our colleague Ashley Parker documented how this falsehood took root, using it as
an example of Trump’s method. “The president’s handling of the VA Choice
legislation offers a crystalline window into the anatomy of a Trump lie: the
initial false claim, the subsequent embellishment and gilding, the incessant
repetition and the clear evidence that he knows the truth but chooses to keep
telling the falsehood — all enabled by aides either unwilling or unable to rein
him in,” she wrote.
It’s four years later, and Trump is still trying to claim
credit for Obama’s achievement.
When I came into office, the auto industry was on its knees, gasping its last breaths after eight long years of Obama and Biden … It is no exaggeration to state the Trump presidency and the deftly used and applied Trump tariffs and taxes saved the American auto industry from extinction time and time again.”
— Trump, remarks at a campaign rally in Clinton Township, Mich.,
Sept. 27, 2023
Yet another false claim. During the 2008-2009 Great
Recession, Obama (and George W. Bush before him) saved the auto
industry with significant interventions. Obama’s Treasury Department, for
instance, organized taxpayer-financed reorganizations of General Motors and
Chrysler. The auto industry was in good shape when Trump took office in 2017.
Auto retail jobs under Trump declined 77,000 from February
2017 to February 2021, according to the BLS. Auto and
auto parts manufacturing jobs saw a slight increase — 2,500 jobs — in
the same period. If one looks at job creation before the pandemic tanked the
economy, there were 61,000 new auto manufacturing jobs and 38,000 auto retail
jobs under Trump though February 2020.
But compare that to Obama’s record: a gain of 238,000 auto
manufacturing jobs and 332,000 auto retail jobs. That’s a total of 570,000 jobs
— more than five times more than Trump’s pre-pandemic number. Under Biden, auto
manufacturing jobs have risen 125,000 and auto retail jobs 146,000 — almost
three times more than Trump’s pre-pandemic number. (In a speech on Tuesday in
Savannah, Ga., Trump falsely said “our auto industry has been decimated.”)
As for Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum helping the
auto industry, that’s wrong too. Automakers reported that Trump’s tariffs cost hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and
led to job losses and plant closings.