Billionaire tycoon-turned-politician Donald Trump on Friday formally accepted his nomination as the Republican Party's candidate for the U.S. presidential elections, slated for later this year. However, in his speech at the Republican National Convention, he managed to resort to several instances of prevarication, exaggeration or outright untruth, despite promising "there will be no lies."
It did not help matters that the tweet of a White Supremacist was shown during his speech, as it added to the persistently perceived racial and religious bias that has marked Trump's campaign. However, he did make some marked departures from the known Republican stance, like not mentioning the perennial anti-abortion lines, and even supporting the LGBTQ community.
He also condemned the "15 years of wars in the Middle East," which was started by George W Bush — another Republican candidate who was the President of the U.S.
However, those seemed to be just the silver linings of a much darker cloud, which is threatening enough precipitation to wash away a lot of reason and logic among Americans. For example, Trump at one point during the speech said: "Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration's rollback of criminal enforcement."
While crime data for 2015 is not available for the U.S. as a whole, the data for 2014, as released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, disclosed that instances of murder, non-negligent manslaughter, burglaries, larceny-thefts and motor vehicle thefts actually decreased, while instances of only rape and aggravated assault increased.
Also, there seems to be not much evidence of the "rollback of criminal enforcement" by the Barack Obama administration that Trump said was happening.
At another point, Trump said: "The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015." However, according to a Vox report, the numbers Trump is referring to are misleading. He is apparently referring to immigrant families caught at the borders, and not all of them are illegal, as they can legally cross into the U.S. and seek asylum.
In yet another section of his speech, Trump said at least "58 percent of African-American youth are not employed." The Vox report pointed out that while this may be technically true, a good portion of these people can actually be students or people not looking for work, so while they are not technically unemployed, they are definitely not the without-a-job strugglers the speech conjured up images of.
On another instance, Trump said: "Our trade deficit in goods reached — think of this — our trade deficit is $800 billion last year alone." However, the Economic Policy Institute quoted the U.S. Census Bureau as saying the country's trade deficit in goods and services was $531.5 billion in 2014.
