Trump's White House speech

Yesterday, President Trump gave a political speech (with expensive visual aids) in the rose garden (which is supposed to be non-partisan) about deregulation.

On South Lawn, WH seeks to make a political point by setting up a crane lifting the weights of regulation from the bed of a "red" truck, while showing the burden of regulations weighing down a "blue" truck. pic.twitter.com/OoWmRPnWum

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) July 16, 2020

Senator Capito does her job

Earlier today, West Virginia's Republican senator, Shelley Moore Capito, passed along the Republican talking points:

This administration is committed to cutting burdensome, job-reducing regulations. The time of federal government overreach is OVER! https://t.co/FTGcY6cFkl

— Shelley Moore Capito (@SenCapito) July 17, 2020

Trump fact checked by Fox News!

But not everyone thought that the President was being honest with his audience. Fox News, for example, as Mediaite reported:

Fox News host Neil Cavuto cut away from a speech by President Donald Trump on deregulation to fact-check his claims regarding the economy of his predecessor.

Trump went after the regulations put in place by former President Barack Obama following the 2008 financial crisis — calling them “job destroying regulations” — in his speech from the Rose Garden on Thursday.

“I do want to clarify a couple of things he said, that no president in history has cut regulations as much as he has. That is true,” Cavuto said, before stating Trump had “mischaracterized the regulations that were added under Barack Obama — they were largely financial related.”

“You might recall we had this little thing called the financial meltdown,” Cavuto explained, “and much of those regulations were geared to preventing banks from ever investing in things like risky mortgage securities, pooling them, selling them off.”

The Fox News anchor also rejected Trump’s premise that those financial regulations yielded devastating results.

But has Trump's deregulation really helped the country?

Washington Post columnist, Catherine Rampell wrote about this in May:

White House aides love to brag that Trump’s regulatory rollbacks have unshackled entrepreneurs and boosted the economy. They’re always a little vague on details, alas; they have yet to explain how allowing power plants to dump more arsenic into the water supply or legalizing a pesticide that gives children brain damage (yes, these are real Trump administration rules) is likely to turbocharge economic growth.

That’s because the pretense was nonsense from the start. Trump’s regulatory agenda was never about helping the economy; it was always about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. White House officials have weaponized the “administrative state” they claim to hate and have repeatedly tried to strangle disfavored groups with regulations and red tape.

Additionally, Capito had nothing to say about other parts of Trump's speech

For example, the not-very-subtle racist parts:

“The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions,” Trump said. “They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.”

“What will be the end result,” he added a bit later, “is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs. The suburb destruction will end with us.

Nor did our senator mention Trump's take on some of the most pressing issues of the day: faucets, showers and lightbulbs

What is wrong with the president?pic.twitter.com/UeNpSo72Pb

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 17, 2020