In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, President Trump made a number of misleading and false claims, including statements on health insurance, the biography of his deputy attorney general and French history.
He misrepresented how health insurance works.
“You’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan,” Mr. Trump said. “Here’s something where you walk up and say, ‘I want my insurance.’”
Mr. Trump’s description aligns with life insurance or Social Security more accurately than health insurance. A 21-year-old who took out a whole life insurance policy, for example, would pay premiums until death, and the amount accumulated over the decades would be paid out to beneficiaries.
A 21-year-old who purchases a health insurance policy is not paying premiums to save up for care 50 years down the line. Rather, the 21-year-old’s premiums help cover the costs of an older person or someone with more expensive medical needs.
Mr. Trump is right that in most situations, a 21-year-old is healthier than a 70-year-old and needs less medical care. But a 21-year-old with a pre-existing condition could have been denied coverage or charged much more before the Affordable Care Act’s passage.
He falsely said the wife of the Japanese prime minister ‘doesn’t speak English,’ not even ‘hello.’
Motoko Rich, The Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, refuted Mr. Trump’s claim. Though Akie Abe, the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, speaks Japanese in many public international appearances, she delivered a 15-minute speech in English in New York three years ago and made a public service announcement on H.I.V./AIDS for MTV in English.
He said news about Russia ‘wasn’t hot’ when his son met with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.
Mr. Trump has a point that the conversation around Russia did not center on potential connections between his campaign and the Kremlin, but discussion of Mr. Trump’s ties to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and Moscow preceded Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting.
Mr. Trump routinely suggested improving relations with Russia during the Republican primary and earned praise from Mr. Putin in December 2015, prompting stories from many news outlets and criticism from political opponents and foreign policy experts.
He said he discussed adoptions with Mr. Putin. That’s a proxy for sanctions.
As The Interpreter column explained in The Times, Russia’s ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans is “practically synonymous” with sanctions on Russian officials. The Magnitsky Act of 2012, named for a young Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow prison after exposing corruption, prohibits Russian officials responsible for human rights abuses from entering the United States and freezes their American assets. The law infuriated Mr. Putin, who retaliated by halting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.
He incorrectly recounted the history of the F.B.I. and falsely said its director ‘really reports directly to the president of the United States.’
Mr. Trump said that the F.B.I. started reporting to the Justice Department “out of courtesy” after President Richard M. Nixon, but that “there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress” to cement that relationship.
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