‘Deep green word salad’: In incoherent Rose Garden rant, Trump lies about AIDS vaccine

A photograph of a parade figure of Donald Trump wearing a "liar" sign.

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At a Rose Garden event to mark an executive order on policing, President Trump was at times lethargic and incoherent, lying repeatedly about everything from the existence of an AIDS vaccine to the substance of the executive order.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce described Trump’s energy level as “sub-Jeb,” writing:

“He burbled and babbled and, very often, just sort of drifted off into a deep green word salad.”

In criticizing the previous administration, touting his own response to the pandemic, and predicting the economy would recover soon, Trump used the event for a campaign-style stump speech. But, the pretext for the event was an executive order in response to African Americans being killed by the police. Yet Trump mentioned “race” just once, failed to even mention racism, and spoke of African Americans only in terms of education and the economy.

Even for a president who has kept fact-checkers working overtime,  the 27-minute event was remarkable for the frequency and audacity of Trump’s lies.

No, there is no AIDS vaccine

Baby getting a shot

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Despite Trump’s statement that scientists have “come up with the AIDS vaccine,” that is categorically untrue.

In fact, more than 700,000 people died in 2018 from AIDS. With this falsehood about a cure for AIDS now online in the official White House transcript, Trump once again reveals he can’t be trusted to tell Americans the truth about the coronavirus.

“And they’ve come up with the AIDS vaccine. They’ve come up with — or the AIDS. And they — as you know, there’s various things, and now various companies are involved. But the therapeutic for AIDS — AIDS was a death sentence, and now people live a life with a pill. It’s an incredible thing.”

Erasing history, lying about the Obama-Biden record

Obama sitting at his desk

Barack Obama Presidential Library

Trump falsely claimed that President Obama and Vice President Biden did nothing to address the use of excessive force by police and related issues. But that’s another lie.

As The Guardian reported in June,  Trump overturned the Obama administration’s consent decrees, which increased federal oversight of police departments with a record of using excessive force.

The biggest civil rights issue of our time?

A photograph of George Floyd

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Trump’s comments about school choice were also telling, as he changed the subject while signing an executive order that supposedly would prevent police killings like that of George Floyd.

White cops killing Black people isn’t the most significant civil rights issue of our time, according to Trump. He claims that it’s school choice. Esquire’s, Charles P. Pierce, mocks Trump both for getting it wrong and for not being able to communicate clearly:

Every Republican candidate for 30 years has said, mendaciously, ‘School choice is the civil rights issue of our time.’ He couldn’t get through it, Quayle-ing the cliche into shredded Mozzarella.

Trump finally tells the truth — about how weak his executive order is

A photograph of a Black Lives Matter sign

Flickr / Tony Webster

Trump stated, “Chokeholds will be banned, except if an officer’s life is at risk.” And that is true.

However, as Emma Vigeland of The Young Turks reports, New York City banned chokeholds in 1993, also with an exception for when the officer’s life was in danger. However, a decade after the ban, an NYC police officer killed Eric Garner by putting him in a chokehold.

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