Trump’s liar-in-chief: Since joining his staff, Kellyanne Conway has been living in a world of make believe

CODY CAIN

SEP 3, 2016

When Kellyanne Conway became the new campaign manager two weeks ago for Donald Trump, she established her hallmark right out of the gate: lying.

It began with very circumstances of her hiring. Everyone knew that her appointment meant that Trump’s existing campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was out. This sort of reshuffling generates bad publicity for a campaign because such a major shake-up only two months before an election indicates turmoil within the organization.

Conway’s solution to the problem was simple: to just lie. This is really not a shake-up, she insisted. Instead, she characterized it as an “expansion.” She claimed that Manafort would remain in his job and she would merely join Manafort along with Stephen Bannon, the new campaign CEO who was also brought in at the same time as Conway. She painted a lovely picture that the three of them would work together in perfect harmony to run the campaign all the way through until the election. Two days later, Manafort was gone. Some might say that Conway deserves some leeway because such a major shake-up is a sensitive event and any new campaign manager would certainly finesse the issue to minimize the damage. Fair enough.But this was no mere finessing. This was a carefully planned lie. Presenting to the media the new false management structure of the three-person team created the impression that a disorderly shake-up was not underway. But, of course, this turned out to be a deception.Furthermore, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton suggested that it was a shake-up, Conway viciously attacked her for being a liar. “That was a complete lie,” Conway charged, insisting, “Nobody got fired at the Trump campaign today.” The audacity is stunning. Not only was Conway lying herself but when someone else spoke the truth, Conway attacked that person, calling her a liar.This is how Conway began her new job as Trump’s campaign manager. And it didn’t stop there. The bald-faced lies have only continued.

Some of them are so obviously false that they are laughable like Conway’s assertion that Trump does not insult people. “He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she claimed.

This, of course, is absurd. Trump is the king of hurling personal insults. Even Megyn Kelly on her Fox News program scolded Conway for this doozy. “Now, you know that’s not true,” Kelly said.

When pushed on this, Conway has shamelessly tried to seek a moral high ground. “I don’t like when people hurl personal insults,” she said. “I’m the mother of four small children. That would be a terrible example for me to feel otherwise.” But yet there she is, stumping as the campaign manager for someone who should never become a role model for children.

After Trump flip-flopped on his immigration position by saying he could “soften” by not immediately deporting all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already in America, Conway took to the airwaves to insist that Trump had not changed his position at all. This was stunning because, of course, shifting from a proposal to deport them to a plan to not deport them sure seems like a change. “I assure you,” Conway said. “Nothing has changed.” Once again, her statements simply bear no resemblance to reality.

Sometimes Conway’s statements are the exact opposite of reality. For example, Conway maintains that Trump desires to focus on substance and policy, whereas Clinton just wishes to pursue attacks and insults.

The world is upside down. Conway has it precisely backward. It is Trump who lacks substance and policies. He even said himself that voters don’t care about policies, and he mocked Clinton for producing policies. Trump’s campaign is hardly based upon substance and policies; rather it is based upon instilling fear without any regard for the truth. A recent fact-checking report determined that Trump’s claims are false or mostly false a whopping 78 percent of the time. Conway reinforces this cult of egregious lying.

Clinton, on the other hand, is a decided policy wonk who has offered a healthy abundance of facts and policy proposals during the course of her campaign.

It is obvious to see that Trump’s forte is casting insults whereas Clinton’s forte is substance and policy.

Conway’s utter lack of regard for honesty is simply breathtaking. She seems to feel completely free to say anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it has any basis in truth. She appears to have absolutely no concern that lying is morally wrong. It’s like she is missing the morality gene. She will say whatever portrays Trump in the most favorable light at a particular moment, regardless of whether it is accurate.

In fact, the overall message about Trump that Conway presented to the public when she took over as  campaign manager seems to have been based upon deceit as well. She announced that her new strategy would be to let Trump be Trump. This was clearly designed to reassure Trump’s core supporters that they could count on the candidate remaining true to the principles that had attracted them in the first place.

But in practice, Conway has done the exact opposite. If Trump were being his true self, he would be giving unscripted speeches off the top of his head and insulting all sorts of people. But Conway now has Trump chained to a teleprompter. This is hardly letting Trump be Trump. His “softening” on immigration is not Trump being Trump but clearly is aimed at attempting to attract Latino voters. And scaling back Trump’s insults is certainly not letting Trump be Trump.

Instead, Conway is attempting to change Trump’s behavior and positions in order to attract more voters, while simultaneously reassuring his base of supporters that Trump is not changing at all. She is speaking out of two sides of her mouth, and these two opposing positions cannot both be true.

Considering that she’s been on the job only two weeks, that sure is a whole lot of lying.

Clearly, Conway has no regard for the principle of conducting oneself with honor and integrity. As a result of her actions, she now has zero credibility. Not a single word that passes through her teeth can be trusted. If Trump were to win the election, all the lying and deception would be rewarded. This would be horrendous. For one thing, it would be morally unjust.

In fact, the lying alone provides sufficient justification for not voting for Trump. Furthermore, a win by Trump would lead to a proliferation of more and more deceitful campaigns and candidates, and thus politics in general would undergo a disastrous downward spiral.

If, on the other hand, Trump were to lose the election in an enormous landslide, this would send a very clear message that voters will not tolerate egregious lying. Subsequent candidates would be on notice that they will pay a price for waging campaigns of deceit. Voters possess the power to fix this problem at the polls by rejecting candidates who lie and casting ballots in favor of the virtue of telling the truth.

Trump on Clinton’s Emails

By Eugene Kiely

August 24, 2016

Donald Trump distorted the facts about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails when he said in Texas that “the FBI found thousands [of emails] she never turned over, and now just recently found another 15,000 more.”

Trump is right that the FBI recovered “several thousand work-related emails” that Clinton did not turn over to the State Department, as FBI Director James Comey disclosed in July. But the FBI did not “just recently” find “another 15,000 more.”

Instead, it was recently announced that the FBI recovered a total of about 14,900 emails during its year-long investigation of Clinton, including the “several thousand work-related emails” that Comey cited in July.

Also, Trump claimed that Clinton deleted her emails to “cover up her crimes,” but Comey said the FBI found “no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails [that the FBI found] were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

Trump made his remarks (at the 45:34 mark) during a rally in Austin, Texas, where he talked about the “new revelations about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”

Trump, Aug. 23: She said she turned over all of her work-related emails. But the FBI found thousands she never turned over, and now just recently found another 15,000 more. That was another lie.

The 15,000 emails weren’t “just recently found,” and they are not all work-related.

Let’s recap what happened, beginning with Comey’s announcement on July 5 that the FBI had completed its investigation of Clinton’s use of personal email for government business while secretary of state. The FBI investigation concerned whether there were any violations of federal law on the handling of classified information, and whether there had been any hacking of the email server by foreign or hostile powers.

Comey announced that day that the FBI would not recommend that criminal charges be filed against Clinton or any State Department staffers for mishandling classified information. During his announcement, Comey said that Clinton turned over about 30,000 emails to the State Department in December 2014, but that the FBI “also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”

Comey at the time didn’t say how many total emails the FBI had recovered or exactly how many of them were work-related. However, it was disclosed at a court hearing on Aug. 22 that the FBI had turned over about 14,900 emails to the State Department that it had uncovered during the course of its investigation. The judge, who is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative Judicial Watch, ordered the State Department to expedite its review process and release any emails that are responsive to the group’s FOIA request.

In a statement to us, the State Department said the 14,900 emails included the “several thousand work-related emails” that Comey mentioned at his July 5 press briefing. A department official told us that the FBI turned over the documents in two batches on July 21 and Aug. 5, and not all of the emails are work-related. The State Department needs to determine how many of them are work-related, although the FBI has said that “several thousand” are work-related. It may also turn out that some of these documents were already released.

“State has not yet had the opportunity to complete a review of the documents to determine whether they are agency records or if they are duplicative of documents State has already produced through the Freedom of Information Act,” the State Department said in its statement.

Trump also suggested that Clinton intentionally deleted emails to “cover up her crimes.” But the FBI found no evidence of a coverup.

Comey explained how the FBI recovered the emails that Clinton did not turn over to the State Department in December 2014:

Comey, July 5: We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond. …  Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.

Comey said the FBI “found no evidence” that she deleted emails intentionally to conceal them, saying it was “not surprising” that the FBI found emails that Clinton did not turn over to the State Department:

Comey, July 5: I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account — or even a commercial account like Gmail — there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

So, Trump is not only wrong that the FBI “just recently found another 15,000 more” emails, but he is making an unsupported claim that she deleted the emails to “cover up her crimes.”

Trump’s fuzzy math on undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee 

September 2, 2016

“According to federal data, there are at least 2 million, 2 million, think of it, criminal aliens now inside of our country, 2 million people, criminal aliens. … Since 2013 alone, the Obama administration has allowed 300,000 criminal aliens to return back into United States communities. These are individuals encountered or identified by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but who were not detained or processed for deportation because it wouldn’t have been politically correct.”

— Donald Trump, immigration speech in Phoenix, Aug. 31, 2016

We fact-checked many claims from Trump’s 75-minute speech introducing his 10-point immigration plan in a roundup, but his claims about the number of “criminal aliens” released by ICE called for a deeper dive.

Trump used these figures to argue his proposal for “zero tolerance for criminal aliens,” vowing to remove them from the country. Trump has proposed the mandatory return of all criminal aliens since he released an immigration plan on Aug. 20, 2015. “Criminal aliens” refers to noncitizens convicted of a crime.

We were curious: Are his figures correct?

The Facts

This proposal is framed around deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes. Trump said he would push for two new laws aimed at punishing criminal aliens convicted of illegal reentry and removing “criminal immigrants and terrorists,” including previously deported unauthorized immigrants. He said he would name these laws after victims killed by people in the United States illegally.

Trump cites federal data, saying there are at least 2 million criminal aliens in the country. This number comes from a Department of Homeland Security fiscal 2013 report saying there were 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens.”

But this figure refers to a broader population of non-U.S. citizens with criminal convictions. It includes undocumented immigrants and people who are lawful permanent residents, or those who have temporary visas. Lawfully present people in the United States who are convicted of serious crimes are subject to removal from the country.

The exact number of illegally present non-citizens within that 1.9 million figure is not clear. Calculations by the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that doesn’t take positions on immigration legislation, show about 820,000 (43 percent) of the 1.9 million are unauthorized immigrants with criminal convictions.

But Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration, said most of that 1.9 million figure are undocumented, but she did not provide any specific data. She said it was based on information she received from a DHS source she could not reveal, which we can’t independently verify. The Trump campaign consulted Vaughan on the speech and used her calculations for statistics on criminal aliens.

Trump says 300,000 criminal aliens were released by ICE since 2013, and they were not detained or processed for deportation. This figure lacks a lot of context.

ICE has provided its estimates for released criminal convictions to the House Judiciary Committee. Between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2015, there were 82,288 criminal aliens that ICE released into non-custodial settings.

Vaughan added an additional 200,000 based on her calculation of the number of people ICE released per prosecutorial discretion guidelines. Most of these encounters were in jails, of people who were arrested and were identified by ICE  as a “criminal threat.” Once ICE decides not to pursue deportation, the local law enforcement would release them from jail. They are not technically classified as the same “criminal alien” definition by ICE at that point.

Then she added an additional 18,646 “deportable aliens that ICE was seeking” but were ignored by state and local law enforcement. That adds up to just over 300,000.

We ran Vaughan’s calculations by ICE, which declined to confirm “a number calculated by an external group.”

Immigrants can pay bond out of ICE custody. They may be lawful residents who are granted some type of relief under the law, or people granted asylum for fleeing persecution, said Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California at Davis School of Law. He added: “U.S. authorities may decide not to seek removal of low-level criminal offenders. It is known as prosecutorial discretion. Some minor crimes, for example, might not warrant destroying families.”

Trump says ICE didn’t deport the 300,000 people out of “political correctness.” This is an attack against discretion guidelines and the 2014 ICE deportation reprioritization, which Vaughan said “excuses too many offenders from deportation.” ICE says the new priorities focus on removing undocumented immigrants who pose the most serious public safety and national security threats.

“The idea behind the 300,000 number is to reflect the number of criminal aliens who were avoiding deportation, or were not held in custody despite the fact that they are considered criminals [or a criminal threat],” Vaughan said. 

There are people ICE must release, based on orders from an immigration judge. Federal courts and the Supreme Court have requirements dating to 2001 that limit how long ICE can detain people who are ordered to be removed.

Of the 82,288 released criminal aliens reported by ICE, 56 percent (46,422) were released based on discretion. An additional 38 percent (31,314) paid bond. The rest were released under legal requirements or because they couldn’t get travel documents to leave the country. So not all are because of Obama administration decisions.

Trump also proposed to “issue detainers for illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever, and they will be placed into immediate removal proceedings if we even have to do that.”

A “detainer” is a term for a request by ICE to a local or state agency to hold a person (usually in jail) until ICE can take over custody. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person is present illegally, and detainers don’t begin deportation proceedings, according to the American Immigration Council.

Under Trump’s proposal, a person arrested by police — regardless of how serious the crime is, without knowing whether they are present illegally — would be held in jail, and their removal proceeding would begin without due process. Such an approach to enforcement is consistent with Trump’s call to bring back two DHS enforcement programs that rely on local governments, which are being phased out because they didn’t effectively target violent criminals, and opened up the potential of racial profiling.

“This is going to be a real problem,” said Marie Provine, an Arizona State University professor who co-authored a book on local police and immigration enforcement, “Policing Immigrants.” She said Trump’s proposal would overwhelm local law enforcement and federal immigration courts, without effectively targeting people who committed serious crimes.

The Pinocchio Test

Trump used fuzzy math to back up his proposal to remove criminals who are in the country illegally. The 2 million figure refers to the total number of “removable criminal aliens” as determined by DHS, and refers to convicted non-citizens in the country legally and illegally. While he states it as fact, an independent think tank analyzing immigration policy estimated that more than half of the 2 million are convicted criminals who are not U.S. citizens, but lawfully in the country.

Trump’s other figure is a complex calculation by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration. In general, figures provided by organizations with a goal to change policy should be viewed with skepticism. The number that directly fits the ICE definition of “criminal aliens” released into the community is 82,228 – about 27 percent of Trump’s figure — that the agency reported to Congress. Of that figure, 56 percent were released based on ICE’s discretion, or “being politically correct,” as Trump would say. The rest adding up to 300,000 includes a variety of calculations, including those considered a “criminal threat,” not necessarily “criminal aliens.”

Federal immigration enforcement data, especially relating to illegal immigration, are not always transparent or reliable. That leads to outside groups recalculating federal data to make their point — which then gets elevated when a prominent person is willing to cite it in a major speech, such as Trump’s immigration address in Phoenix. Trump states both figures as simple fact, when both calculations are much more complex than that.

Two Pinocchios

Trump’s ‘Two Americas’

By Brooks Jackson

August 31, 2016

Donald Trump’s new TV ad promises a bright future if he’s elected, and a gloomy one if Hillary Clinton wins. But that’s based on murky evidence and misrepresentations.

The Trump campaign released the ad, called “Two Americas: Economy,” Aug. 29, and said it would run in nine battleground states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.

Disappearing Jobs?

One big misrepresentation is a claim that “hundreds of thousands of jobs [would] disappear” as a result of Clinton’s proposal to raise taxes. The campaign cites a study by the Tax Foundation, which predicted no such thing.

The study actually found that Clinton’s plan would result in slightly less job growth than would be the case under current law. No jobs would “disappear.”

The Tax Foundation study said Clinton’s plan would result in “311,000 fewer full-time equivalent jobs” over the next 10 years, but that doesn’t mean fewer than now — it means fewer than currently projected.

Alan Cole, an economist with the Tax Foundation, told us the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a gain of about 7 million new jobs under current law. “We see Hillary Clinton’s tax proposals as maybe dialing that back to 6.7 million.”

And that’s just one study, by a pro-business group that looked at only the impact of Clinton’s tax plan. Another study, by Clinton supporter Mark Zandi and his colleagues at Moody’s Analytics, considered the impact of all of Clinton’s policy proposals, projecting a gain of 19 million jobs over 10 years, or 6 million more than under current law. Take your pick.

Middle Class ‘Crushed’?

The ad also claims that “the middle class gets crushed” under Clinton, based on the same Tax Foundation study, which found that her tax policies would reduce wages by 0.8 percent. Again, however, that’s a reduction in future growth, not a reduction in current wages.

The Tax Foundation’s Cole told us, “CBO expects wages to rise about 36 percent over the next 10 years, or 12 percent after adjusting for inflation. The tax increases dial that back to about 11 percent.”

So under this pro-business group’s projection, real wages would increase under Clinton by 11 percent instead of 12 percent. Whether that’s being “crushed” or not is a matter of opinion.

‘Millions’ of New Jobs?

After painting its bleak picture of life under Clinton using pictures of gloomy people in tones of gray, the ad shifts to full-color pictures of smiling people enjoying life under Trump.

But the ad’s colors are brighter than the murky evidence cited by the campaign.

To support a claim that “wages go up” and “millions of new jobs” would appear under Trump, the ad cites a Tax Foundation study of Trump’s original proposal for a huge, nearly $12 trillion tax cut over 10 years. Not mentioned is that Trump has since abandoned that plan and proposed a different tax plan with higher tax rates than he proposed at first. The Tax Foundation has not analyzed his latest plan, as it lacks sufficient detail, Cole told us.

The Trump plan is similar in some respects to a more detailed tax plan put forth by House Republicans. That plan calls for a cut less than one-fourth as large as Trump’s original proposal; the Tax Foundation estimated it would reduce government revenues by $2.4 trillion over 10 years, compared with Trump’s abandoned $12 trillion cut.

The Tax Foundation said the House GOP’s plan would result in an “additional 1.7 million full-time equivalent jobs” over 10 years. If one rounds that up to 2 million, it would be correct grammar to use the plural “millions” as the Trump ad does — but just barely. And in any case, Trump has yet to endorse that plan.

Cuts for ‘Working Families’?

The ad claims “working families” would get tax relief under Trump. But that’s not entirely clear from what he has said most recently.

In his original plan, married couples filing jointly would have paid zero tax on taxable income up to $50,000. But as mentioned, Trump has set that plan aside, and it’s unclear how his latest plan would affect middle-income workers. The Tax Foundation notes that Trump’s most recent tax speech “did not address whether the revised tax plan would retain this large tax cut for middle-income taxpayers.”

Trump has specified that he would create three federal income tax rates for individuals of 12 percent, 25 percent and 33 percent. But he hasn’t said which earners would fall into those brackets.

In that respect, Trump is a little like Clinton, who also has been promising tax cuts for the “middle class,” but without as yet providing any details.

What we know is that what Clinton has proposed so far is a $1.1 trillion, 10-year tax increase that would fall mostly on the very highest incomes. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that nearly 78 percent of the increase would be paid by the top 1 percent of earners, who are making more than about $732,000.

That top 1 percent, on the other hand, would have received 35 percent of the tax cuts Trump originally proposed, according to TPC’s analysis. They would have seen an average tax cut of over $275,000, and a 17 percent increase in after-tax income in 2017.

Trump goes south of the border — and of the truth

By Scot Lehigh 

SEPTEMBER 01, 2016

Talk about grading on the curve.

Trump supporters are now proudly proclaiming him presidential.

Because . . . because . . .

Well, because he managed a trip to Mexico without committing a major fox paw, as George Wallace used to call embarrassing utterances. And then came home to give a speech in Arizona that excited the Trumpkins.

C’mon, guys.

Remember the movie “Being There”? This was “Standing There.”

No, he didn’t insult Mexico or Mexicans to their face. But Trump did engage in a little of the truth-trimming that would drive conservatives bonkers if, say, done by a Clinton.

That, of course, came on the matter of whether he and the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, discussed who will pay for the Great Wall of Trump. Trump said “we didn’t discuss” that. But Peña Nieto later said he had told Trump Mexico wouldn’t pay for the project. So this is apparently a matter of what the real meaning of “discuss” is.

It sounds as though what happened is that the Mexican president stated his position up front, and the Republican presidential nominee kept his mouth shut. That was probably smart, given Trump’s various ill-considered ideas on how he might force that payment, though it hardly makes him seem like the blunt, tough, bend-the-world-to-his-will leader he has long styled himself. Still, if Hillary Clinton had engaged in that semantic hair-splitting, Fox News would have blown a fuse, and Congressmen Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz would likely be standing on the Capitol steps calling for an investigation.

As for his Arizona speech, for all the sturm und drang, all the bluster, all the posture and posing, here’s one easy-to-miss thing that Trump did: He walked back his oft-repeated assertion that he would in short order deport all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in this country. By The Washington Post’s estimate, he has now cut that to about six million.

That, of course, would still be a gargantuan, hugely expensive, logistically confounding undertaking. Still, it’s important to recognize what happened here: Under cover of all his political pyrotechnics, Trump retreated about halfway on his previous promise. I doubt his supporters will care, but the fact remains that they had their pockets picked during the primaries.

Trump’s speech also demonstrated the extent to which he lives in a world of his own devising, an alternative reality where truth and facts just don’t matter. Luckily, his campaign has created a virtual WPA project for fact-checkers, who are steadily catching up with the various misstatements, mistakes, and mendacities in Wednesday’s address. Again, this apparently doesn’t matter for many of his supporters. But for those who see a certain value in electing a president who has a basic grasp of reality and who feels constrained by the facts, it’s worth scrolling through what fact-checkers at the Associated Press and PolitiFact and Factcheck.org and NPR and The Washington Post say about Trump’s various assertions on immigration. (Hint: They aren’t inclined to grade on the curve.) And no, he and Hillary Clinton aren’t two peas in a political pod. She is not just as bad. Trump’s liberties with the truth make her seem like a piker.

Finally, there’s the issue of temperament.

If his appearance with President Peña Nieto represented the way Trump usually comports himself, there would indeed be some reason for optimism. But it isn’t. Voters have now seen enough and heard enough and read enough to know what the real Trump is like. He’s bullying, belligerent, and bombastic, demeaning, divisive, and demagogic. He’s not, in short, the kind of serious, mature, thoughtful, even-tempered leader that a great nation elects as its president.

He hasn’t changed. He won’t change. He can’t change.

He’s Donald Trump.

Fact check: Trump wrong on Clinton's plans for family farms

Eugene Emery Jr., PolitiFact

August 31, 2016

Examining comments from Donald Trump at Saturday's Roast and Ride hosted by Sen. Joni Ernst in Des Moines.

Inch by inch, row by row, time to see if Donald Trump's claims will grow.

At Saturday's Roast and Ride hosted by Sen. Joni Ernst in Des Moines, Trump proclaimed that he was "going to end this war on the American farmer" and accused Hillary Clinton of wanting to shut down family farms.

"Almost 97 percent of farms in this country are family owned and family managed. It’s not only a great American tradition, but a vital component of America’s economic and national security," Trump said.

"Yet, Hillary Clinton wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the mines and the steelworkers," he continued. "She will do this not only through radical regulation, but also by raising taxes on family farms — and all businesses — to rates as high as nearly 50 percent. Adding to the pain, she will tax family farms again at death by as much as 45 percent."

There are four elements here. We'll take them in order.

Clinton wants to shut down family farms?

There is no evidence this is true.

Clinton, in fact, talks about a strong agricultural economy on her website.

"A strong agricultural economy remains a critical cornerstone of a vibrant rural economy," Clinton’s website says. "Farmers and ranchers supply food for America's dinner tables, invest in farm machinery and supplies, and provide domestic energy resources that fuel small businesses. The agriculture economy also drives America's larger economic success."

Her site talks about "raising agricultural production and profitability for family farms," offering "support (for) the next generation of farmers," and providing "a focused safety net for farmers and ranchers."

So what's Trump talking about? His campaign declined to offer details, but based on his speech, that's where regulations, the business tax and the death tax come in.

'Radical regulations'

We asked the Trump campaign for specifics about what Trump meant by "radical regulations." They declined to cite specifics, saying it's been outlined in his speeches.

We searched the "Congressional Quarterly" database of Trump speeches since January. We found two other instances where the candidate talked about "radical regulations." Like his speech in Iowa, neither said what they were.

Raising taxes as high as nearly 50 percent

Trump is plowing familiar ground here claiming that Clinton would raise taxes on family farms — and all businesses — to rates as high as nearly 50 percent

We rated a different version of this statement Mostly False.

The Trump campaign is talking about Clinton's proposal to raise the tax rate for taxpayers who have an adjusted gross income of more than $5 million.

Currently, taxpayers with adjusted gross income of more than $5 million have a tax rate of about 43.4 percent. Clinton wants to raise the rate by 4 percentage points, to 47.4 percent.

Income above $5 million would potentially be subject to the additional 4 percent tax.

And to be sure, that would not affect the vast majority of people who own small businesses or family farms.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, of the 2.1 million farms in the country in 2012, only 0.3 percent of family farms were large enough to have gross cash income of $5 million or more. The vast majority — 88 percent — reported less than $350,000 in income.

Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said, "Very few people make enough to be affected by the surtax and only a tiny fraction, if any, are traditional family farmers."

'Death' tax

This is another cornfield we've visited before.

The "death tax" is formally known as the estate tax, which applies to inherited assets such as cash, stock and real estate. The problem with Trump's assertion is that only the wealthiest Americans are subject to the tax and only a tiny fraction of those are farmers.

The tax doesn't kick in until an individual's estate is worth $5.45 million and the 40 percent tax applies only to amounts over that limit, which is indexed for inflation.

At first blush, this would seem like an area where family farms might be hit particularly hard. Given the price of land and the expensive machinery used to farm it, it would seem that even the value of a small farm would likely exceed the $5.45 million exemption.

But in reality, in 2013 only 16 to 24 small businesses and farm estates owed any estate taxes, and the actual tax amounted to just 4.9 percent of the estate's total value, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Many of those may actually have been businesses, not farms.

Not only that, the exemption doubles for a farm owned by a couple, there is an additional $1.5 million exception for closely held family farms, and the tax code allows farms to spread their payments over 15 years at a low interest rate.

That number prompted comedian Bill Maher to joke that, "More astronauts have been to the moon than farmers who paid the inheritance tax in 2013," a statement we rated as Mostly True.

But, as we reported in 2014, there are countervailing forces at work here.

For example, if you want to take advantage of the tax breaks, the property has to be held and used for farming for 10 years, and using it as collateral for a loan becomes more difficult because the IRS places a lien on the property to make sure it's used for crops or livestock.

The estate tax was more of an issue for family farms years ago when the exemption was much lower. In 2001, during the Bush administration, for example, only the first $1.5 million was exempt from the tax. Now it’s $5.45 million.

President Barack Obama has tried to get the exemption brought down to $3.5 million. Trump, like most Republicans, wants to eliminate the estate tax entirely. That would leave the treasury short by about $19 billion.

"Note that years ago, opponents of the estate tax who asserted that families had to sell their farms to pay the estate tax were unable to find a single case where that happened," said Williams, the Tax Policy Center expert. "I expect that finding family farms that would be driven out of business by the surtax would be just as hard."

Our ruling

Trump said, "Hillary Clinton wants to shut down family farms" using "radical regulation," by raising tax "rates as high as nearly 50 percent" and through a death tax as high as 45 percent.

So let's harvest the arguments.

Clinton wants to shut down family farms? We've seen no evidence she's ever said that.

Radical regulation? Trump's not providing any evidence to evaluate.

Raising taxes to nearly 50 percent? Clinton's proposing an extra 4 percent increase, but that's on the wealthiest Americans, and very few family farms will face it.

Death tax? Family farms have been surviving with the death tax for years, and the best data suggest that it affects no more than about 20 estates nationwide per year, if that.

We rate this combination of claims as False.