Get PolitiFact in your inbox.

A primer on Trump before his second Georgia visit

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Eric Schultz) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Eric Schultz)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Eric Schultz)

April Hunt
By April Hunt November 29, 2015

Donald Trump will make his second visit to the Peach State on Monday, in his ongoing bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

The billionaire real estate developer will speak at 7 p.m. at a campaign rally at the Macon Coliseum. The event, which is free but requires a ticket, is expected to last about an hour.

Trump’s first visit to Georgia was a Norcross rally last month that drew 7,700. He’s been building an SEC Primary following in the past couple weeks with visits to AlabamaTennessee and Texas.

And all along, the former reality star has generated plenty of media coverage, and fact-checks, with his comments.

You can read all of our fact checks on Trump’s claims here. Three of his recent claims, all scorchers on the Truth-O-Meter, are:

Says crime statistics show blacks kill 81 percent of white homicide victims.  

Trump on Nov. 22, 2015 in a Tweet

Trump posted a racially tinged Tweet the day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a one of his campaign rallies in Alabama.

The image on the Tweet shows a masked, dark-skinned man with a handgun and a set of points, ostensibly about deaths in 2015:

  • "Blacks killed by whites -- 2%"
  • "Blacks killed by police -- 1%"
  • "Whites killed by police -- 3%"
  • "Whites killed by whites -- 16%"
  • "Whites killed by blacks -- 81%"
  • "Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%

None of the numbers are supported by official sources. The figures on black-on-white homicides and white-on-white homicides are wildly inaccurate. And, as several news organizations quickly noted, the "Crime Statistics Bureau" doesn’t exist. We looked for that agency as well and the closest we found in San Francisco were a number of crime scene clean-up services.

While the image references 2015, the year is not over, and no official numbers have been released. The latest data comes from the FBI for 2014. The accurate figures:

  • "Blacks killed by whites -- 8%"
  • "Whites killed by whites -- 82%"
  • "Whites killed by blacks -- 15%"
  • "Blacks killed by blacks -- 90%

In other words, the statistics on white victims are exaggerated five-fold.

The official tally of deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers is well known to be incomplete.

One of the official, and incomplete, sources for people killed at the hands of police is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention violent death database. It shows a ratio of about 1.5 white deaths for each black death, in the period 2009 to 2013.

Trump’s number is about double the most accurate figures we could find. That makes him about 100 percent off.

The statistical claims are so off, we rated this claim Pants on Fire.

"I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering" as the World Trade Center collapsed.    

Trump in a Nov. 21 speech

At that Alabama rally, Trump said he saw "thousands" of New Jerseyans celebrating after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down," he told the crowd. "And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."

The next day, ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump if he misspoke, noting that "the police say that didn't happen."

But Trump doubled down on his claim.

But the statement defies basic logic. If thousands and thousands of people were celebrating the 9/11 attacks on American soil, many people beyond Trump would remember it. And in the 21st century, there would be video or visual evidence.

Instead, all we found were a couple of news articles that described rumors of celebrations that were either debunked or unproven.

Trump’s recollection of events in New Jersey in the hours after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks flies in the face of all the evidence we could find.

We rated it Pants on Fire.

The federal government is sending refugees to states with governors who are "Republicans, not to the Democrats."

Trump on Nov. 17, 2015 in an interview on Laura Ingraham's radio show

As governors in more than half the U.S. states – including Georgia – expressed opposition to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their state, Trump raised the ante in an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham.

Trump charged that the Obama administration is deliberately trying to resettle Syrian refugees in states with Republican governors while sparing states that have Democratic governors.

"They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know, because they know the problems," Trump said.

The numbers show that GOP-led states recently received slightly more than those governed by Democrats, though the Democrats received more on a per-capita basis.

Beyond that, though, Trump is wrong to say that refugees are resettled as a form of partisan political vendetta. People who have taken part in the process say that the administration leaves it up to private groups, mostly faith-based groups, to determine where refugees should go, with the decision based on family links, the availability of language resources locally and the ability of local groups to handle the new workload -- not politics.

We again rated his statement Pants on Fire.

Sign Up For Our Weekly Newsletter

Our Sources

See individual reports.

Browse the Truth-O-Meter

More by April Hunt

A primer on Trump before his second Georgia visit