7. “We have ended the war on American energy — and we have ended the war on beautiful clean coal. We are now an exporter of energy to the world.”
Ah, beautiful clean coal! While Trump likes to talk about “clean coal” as though it’s an actual object with a sparkling cartoon gleam on it, you cannot really hold “clean coal” in your hand because it doesn’t exist. “Clean coal” refers to procedures at coal plants that reduce emissions, not the actual coal itself. Also, we are not a net energy exporter and probably won’t be for a decade or so.
8. “Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we have not seen for decades. Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan.”
Seems like Trump missed the whole part of the Obama presidency where he saved the American auto industry, but whatever. More importantly, there are plenty of car companies building plants in the United States and the Chrysler move Trump is desperately trying to take credit for was planned before the 2016 election.
We haven’t seen car companies building plants in the US in a long time? Really? You should visit the south!
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 31, 2018
9. “America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year — isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take 10 years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?”
First of all, it took over a year for the Empire State Building to be constructed. Secondly, this conflates construction time with the overall process of securing permits, etc. etc. Thirdly, and while this isn’t entirely the point here, the Empire State Building was actually built by a bunch of unskilled immigrants:
Programming note: the low-wage immigrants Trump just warned us about built the Empire State Building the President was just bragging about
— janu-erin (@morninggloria) January 31, 2018
10. “The third pillar [of our immigration plan] ends the visa lottery — a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit or the safety of our people.”
People who enter the country by visa lottery have to apply, pass a background check, and are scrutinized further if they’re suspected of being a risk to national security.
11. “The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration. Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”
If you have a green card you can only sponsor your spouse or your unmarried children. If you’re a full-fledged citizen, you can sponsor spouses, children, parents, and siblings. Also the whole process takes a long time, it’s not like immigrants are just letting clown cars full of family members cut in line or something.