He was also inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. That doesn't mean he was a great wrestler.
You mean like when in 1986 he won an Ellis Island Award for contributing to the conditions of inner city black youths?
CLAIM: Donald Trump, pictured with boxing legend Muhammad Ali and civil rights activist Rosa Parks, received the Ellis Island Award in 1986 for contributing to the conditions of inner city black youths.
AP ASSESSMENT: Mixture. The photo is authentic, but only half of the claim about Trump’s award is true. The caption on a photo circulating widely on Facebook correctly claims that now-President Trump was one of 87 people given the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1986 along with recipients Ali and Parks. However he was not being honored for his work with “inner city black youths,” as the photo caption falsely claims.
Trump was honored for his work as a successful developer in New York City and his German heritage, Coca said, not for helping inner city youth.
but rarely does Trump put his supposed “wins” in context. For example, Trump often tries to take credit for a decline in violent crime, though the
downward trend predates him by many years.
Trump passed a significant criminal justice reform measure, but his administration has worked to undo it
Standing before hundreds of Black and brown supporters earlier this month, Trump said that America has reached a “historic reduction of violent crime” during his presidency. “We signed a landmark criminal justice reform bill that nobody thought was possible to think about. I did that. I did that. I got that done,” he said.
In December 2018, Trump did indeed sign
the First Step Act, which made “
the most substantial changes in a generation” to “tough on crime” laws that increased the federal prison population by
700 percent since 1970.
Since Trump signed the measure into law, more than 3,000 people have been released from federal prison due to the law’s “good time credits,” which provide early release for well-behaved inmates; hundreds have been released into the elderly home confinement pilot program, which places older federal inmates in home confinement before the end of their prison term; and more than 2,000 people — 91 percent of whom are Black — received sentencing reductions because the First Step Act retroactively applied the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (a law Obama passed), reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine charges.
While these changes are substantial, many have pointed to the areas where the act fails — and why Trump can’t take full credit for the initiative.
As Catherine Kim
reported for Vox, Trump’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Bill Barr’s direction, has “attempted to block hundreds of eligible beneficiaries” from being released and has tried to send those who have been released back behind bars, according to the
Sentencing Project. “The department has tried to freeze applications or re-incarcerate former inmates by
setting higher standards for their release,” Kim wrote.
Moreover, Trump has failed to mention how the bill was the “culmination of several years of congressional debate” over how to reduce the size of the federal prison population and maintain public safety,
according to the Congressional Research Service. The law is basically a scaled-down iteration of the Sentencing and Reform Corrections Act that was introduced in Congress in 2015.
Proponents of the law have also pointed out that its effects on the size of the federal prison system will ultimately be minimal. Vox’s German Lopez
reported:
While much of what Trump has touted did not originate with him, this summer he had the opportunity to create his own criminal justice agenda when protests swept the country over the police shootings of Black Americans like
Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, and
Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old who survived after police shot him in the back several times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Instead, Trump claimed that the phrase “Black lives matter” is a
symbol of hate and responded to the unrest by celebrating law enforcement, directing them to meet the protesters with force and violence.
Trump’s dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement’s repeated calls for police and criminal justice reform, coupled with his “law and order” rhetoric — rhetoric that
incites violence and that has
long been racist — counters the police reform efforts he touts. In June, Trump
signed an executive order that called for more training for police officers and the establishment of a national database of police misconduct, among other actions — all steps that fall far short of the
transformative changes that activists have called for.
Early on, Trump made his tone clear when he tweeted, “When the looting starts the shooting starts,” focusing on the small number of people ransacking property and giving very little attention to the families burdened by police violence.
Trump has also tried to take credit for the reduction in violent crime nationwide, but he
inherited the downward trend that has been in effect since 2000. Trump has tried to argue that because he expresses support for and honors police officers — supposedly unlike Obama — criminals have been less inclined to commit crimes. Yet researchers haven’t been able to establish a link between rises in homicides and “disrespect for the police.” According to
economists at the Brennan Center, by claiming that he is responsible for lower crime rates, Trump is promoting dangerous misconceptions about the relationship between crime and policing.
Black employment gains before the pandemic were real — but not the result of Trump’s presidential term
Here’s what Trump has — and hasn’t — done for Black communities in the past four years.
www.vox.com
