General Discussion

riversedge

(70,084 posts) Fri May 22, 2020, 06:37 AM May 2020

"I was honored by the man of the year in Michigan," Trump says, but this never happened. He made it

No one challenges him. Trump sits in his Task Force meeting. (I see dr. Brix was there) and he lies about his imaginary man of the year award. No one challenges him publicly. damn

Trump begins his speech at a Ford plant by boasting about winning the "man of the year" award in Michigan. There's just one problem -- he totally made it up. There is no such award. https://factcheck.org/2019/08/trumps

Link to tweet

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"I was honored by the man of the year in Michigan," Trump says, but this never happened. He made it up:
https://factcheck.org/2019/08/trumps

Link to tweet

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Link to tweet

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FactCheck Posts
Trump’s Dubious Michigan ‘Man of the Year’ Boast

By Robert Farley Posted on August 22, 2019

11.8K

President Donald Trump has claimed no fewer than seven times over the past three years — including at a recent rally in New Hampshire — that he won Michigan’s “man of the year” award. But there’s no evidence that he did.

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This is what we did find: It appears that Trump is referring to a 2013 dinner hosted by a county Republican Party organization, which presented him with token gifts – including a statuette of Abraham Lincoln. But a former Republican congressman who organized the dinner said Trump did not receive an award, and the group has never given out “man of the year” awards.

The boast is politically expedient; Michigan is a key swing state in presidential elections. When referencing the award, Trump often notes he was the first Republican presidential candidate to win Michigan since 1988. Trump also often mentions his narrow win in Michigan as critical to his upset victory.

“For many many years nobody won Michigan as a Republican,” Trump said at the rally in New Hampshire on Aug. 15. “But I used to complain and you know I just — I’d go there and I’d say, they’re stealing your car business. I go, for years. In fact, five or six years before I even thought about running, for whatever reason they named me ‘man of the year’ in Michigan. I said, ‘How come?’ I didn’t even understand it myself. But I was named ‘man of the year.’ I wasn’t even political. That was years before I did this. But I was always complaining that our car business is being stolen.”

As we said, it’s a claim Trump has made repeatedly for years, according to searchable records of Trump’s public comments archived by Factba.se.

The earliest mention we could find was during a campaign speech Trump made two days before the election, on Nov. 6, 2016, in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

“I’ve been fighting for the car industry for years,” Trump said. “I was honored five years ago, ‘man of the year’ in Michigan. That was a great honor for me. And during my speech, all I talked about is what Mexico and these other countries are doing to us, and especially what they’re doing to Michigan. That’s all I talked about. And I was criticized. They said, ‘Donald, speak about something else.’ I said, ‘No, what’s happening is horrible. What’s happening is terrible.’ One of the main reasons I ran for president is to stop it.”.....................

...........The context of Trump’s comments at the roundtable in Ypsilanti lends credence to the idea that Trump believes he received an award at the Lincoln Day Dinner in Michigan in 2013 — an event at which Trott says Trump was not awarded Michigan’s “man of the year.”

Trump’s claim is vague enough — he hasn’t provided an exact year or the name of the organization that supposedly honored him — that it makes it nearly impossible to entirely disprove. But the responsibility to back-up political claims rests with the politicians who made them, and in this case, neither the White House nor Trump’s presidential campaign has provided any information on the president’s boast. If any such proof ever emerges, we’ll update our story.