Fact-checking Donald Trump’s speech to the Detroit Economic Club - The Washington Post

Fact-checking Donald Trump’s speech to the Detroit Economic Club - The Washington Post

In an effort to reset his troubled presidential campaign, Donald Trump gave a prepared speech to the Detroit Economic Club, an important venue for major economic addresses. Here’s a guide to 16 of the more fact-challenged assertions made by the GOP nominee. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios in speech round-ups.

“Hillary Clinton short circuited again, to use a — now famous term — when she accidentally told the truth and said she wanted to raise taxes on the middle class.”

This is ridiculously false — something that earned Trump a “Pants on Fire” from our friends at PolitiFact three days ago. It is appalling that it still turns up in a prepared speech.

On Aug. 4, Clinton gave a speech in which the prepared text had this line: “We aren’t going to raise taxes on the middle class.” When Clinton delivered the speech, she dropped the “t” and so to some ears it might have sounded like an “are,” especially on a videotape. (Reporters at the event heard “aren’t.”)

PolitiFact asked a linguistic professor to run Clinton’s remarks through a phonetics computer program. That effort confirmed that when she said “aren’t,” she hit the “n” but somehow missed the “t.” So it’s rather strange Trump is still making this claim.