Fact-checking Trump’s visit to Wisconsin

Resuming campaigning after an extended hiatus for the pandemic, President Donald Trump made Wisconsin one of his first stops.

Trump won battleground Wisconsin by less than 20,000 votes in 2016, but Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump 49% to 41% in the latest Marquette University Law School Poll.

On June 25, 2020, Trump made stops in Marinette and Green Bay. He conducted a town hall aired on Fox News and toured Fincantieri Marinette Marine, which recently received a defense contract worth up to $5.5 billion.

In comments at both locations, Trump tackled an array of topics — the wave of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the coronavirus response, the economy and mail-in voting. But his descriptions often strayed from reality. Here’s what we found fact-checking the president.

One can debate the effectiveness of various measures, but President Barack Obama and Biden, his vice president, did take steps in this area. 

Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, reducing the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine (long criticized as discriminating against Black offenders). His Department of Justice launched the Smart on Crime initiative, which directed prosecutors nationwide to stop bringing charges that carry harsh minimum sentences except in the most extreme cases.

Obama also convened the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which produced a lengthy report on improving policing. And in a key step Obama could take on justice directly, he granted clemency to 248 federal inmates, more than the past five presidents combined, according to the Washington Post.

There’s a lot of truth to this claim. The stock market, based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was at historic highs in late 2019, even when adjusted for inflation.

The employment element is more nuanced. PolitiFact Wisconsin rated Mostly True a Trump claim from a January 2020 visit to Milwaukee that the 160 million people working at the time were the most in history. But examining employment as a rate instead — that is, as a percentage of the population — shows the U.S. was actually at its peak around 2000.

This statement, from the Marinette remarks, is nonsense. Conducting fewer tests doesn’t reduce the number of cases, it just reduces the number we know about. This is nevertheless a claim Trump has recycled frequently, including May 14 and 15.

PolitiFact National has rated variations of the claim False and Pants on Fire.

Trump walked back this line of reasoning in the Green Bay town hall, saying: "Sometimes I jokingly say or sarcastically say, if we didn’t do tests we’d look great. You know what? It’s not the right thing to do."

Though, as we wrote in rating True an attack ad zeroing in on such statements by Trump, the president has also said he wasn’t joking when he made them.

The opposite is actually true. Among the 20 nations most affected by COVID-19 worldwide, the U.S. has among the highest death rates — whether calculated as a percentage of known cases or as a percentage of the population as a whole, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Mortality Analyses.

Across all 161 countries tracked by the site, the U.S. is ninth-highest for deaths by population (38 per 100,000) and 33rd-highest for death frequency by case (5.1%).

The U.S. also has the highest raw number of coronavirus deaths in the world at 124,000, more than double any other country.

State Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, was assaulted in Madison two days before Trump’s visit after taking a picture of a group of protesters who were vandalizing buildings and destroying statues.

Trump described it this way: "The person they beat up was a Democrat who happened to be gay, and he was probably out there rooting them on or something, because Democrats think it’s wonderful that they’re destroying our country."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted this unsupported claim flies in the face of multiple eye-witness, video and audio accounts of the events in Madison. Carpenter was not part of the protest. Rather he said he was headed to the Capitol to do some work.

The massive deal announced in April awarded Fincantieri Marinette Marine a contract to build the service's first new frigate, with options for up to 10 total ships, according to the Green Bay Press Gazette. The deal that will keep the company's shipbuilders working for the next two decades and lead to the hiring of about 1,000 new workers in Marinette.

A review of past news reports showed Oshkosh Corp. received a $6.75 billion contract in 2015 to build 17,000 light trucks. And they were awarded a $3 billion contact in 2010 to build medium tactical vehicles. But the new Marinette deal certainly appears among the largest the state has seen.

This claim is in line with an array of past statements from Trump, who has alleged mail-in voting leads to widespread fraud.

PolitiFact California rated Pants on Fire a claim Trump made in May that California is sending ballots "to anyone in the state." Mail-in ballots in California, like other states, are only sent to active registered voters.

(In Wisconsin, election officials decided this month to send absentee ballot request forms — not actual ballots — to the 2.7 million voters who are registered)

Trump also raised the spectre of people taking the ballots from mailboxes or foreign nations printing millions of ballots and sending them in. Experts consulted by FactCheck.org said mail-in voter fraud is rare, though it is more common than fraud in person.