The president repeated false claims related to the 2020 US election in addition to unfounded allegations against immigration.
Donald Trump made several false and misleading claims in his first address after being sworn in for a second term as president, some of which go as far back as his first time in office.
They included claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles and the Panama Canal, and were followed by yet more dubious statements as he delivered remarks at the US Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, such as misleading allegations about the pardons made by President Joe Biden as he left office.
Here’s a summary of some of the most egregious claims.
No, Biden didn’t pardon 33 murderers
In his Emancipation Hall speech, Trump said that Biden pardoned “33 murderers, absolute murderers, the worst murderers” who were on death row.
This isn’t true; the outgoing president said on 23 December that he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on the US’s federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment.
Commuting a sentence is not the same as a pardon — the individual is still convicted, but they receive a lesser sentence.
“These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” Biden said at the time.
The move spared the lives of people convicted in killings, including the slayings of police and military officers, people on federal land and those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the killings of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.
The three federal inmates that now face execution are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history.
No, the 2020 presidential election wasn’t rigged
Trump once again alleged in his Emancipation Hall remarks that the 2020 election, which saw him lose to Biden, was “totally rigged”.
There has never been any evidence that this was the case. Authorities who reviewed the election — including Trump’s own attorney general — have concluded the election was fair.
Biden won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, and the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots. Recounts in key states affirmed Biden’s victory, and lawsuits challenging the results were unsuccessful.
Trump repeats unfounded claim about immigrants
The Republican president said in his inaugural address that the previous Democratic government “fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world”.
Yet there is no evidence that other countries are sending their criminals or the mentally ill across the border.
Trump frequently brought up this claim during his most recent campaign.
China doesn’t operate the Panama Canal
Discussing his desire for the US to take back the Panama Canal, Trump said in his inaugural address that “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form, and that includes the United States Navy. And, above all, China is operating the Panama Canal”.
Officials in Panama have denied Trump’s claims that China is operating the canal and that the US is being overcharged. Ricaurte Vásquez, administrator of the canal, said in an AP interview that “there’s no discrimination in the fees”.
“The price rules are uniform for absolutely all those who transit the canal and clearly defined,” he said.
He also said China was not operating the canal, noting that Chinese companies operating in the ports on either end of the canal were part of a Hong Kong consortium that won a bidding process in 1997.
Vásquez added that US and Taiwanese companies are operating other ports along the canal as well, and stressed that the canal can’t give special treatment to US-flagged ships because of a neutrality treaty.
He said requests for exceptions are routinely rejected because the process is clear and there mustn’t be arbitrary variations. The only exception in the neutrality treaty is for American warships, which receive expedited passage.
Trump, complaining about rising charges for ships transiting the canal, has refused to rule out the use of military force to seize control of the canal.
The US built the canal in the early 1900s as it looked for ways to facilitate the transit of commercial and military vessels between its coasts. Washington relinquished control of the waterway to Panama on 31 December 1999, under a treaty signed in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
The US didn’t split the atom first
Trump claimed that Americans “split the Atom”, alongside a raft of other claims that they “crossed deserts, scaled mountains … launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand”.
New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom.
The achievement is also credited to English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland’s Ernest Walton, researchers in 1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford. It is not attributed to Americans.
A website for the US Department of Energy’s Office of History and Heritage Resources credits Cockroft and Walton with the milestone, although it describes Rutherford’s earlier achievements in mapping the structure of the atom, postulating a central nucleus and identifying the proton.
New Zealand politician Nick Smith, the mayor of Nelson, where Rutherford was born and educated, said he was “a bit surprised” by the claim.
“Rutherford’s ground breaking research on radio communication, radioactivity, the structure of the atom and ultra sound technology were done at Cambridge and Manchester Universities in the UK and McGill University in Montreal Canada,” Smith wrote on Facebook.
Smith said he would invite the next US ambassador to New Zealand to visit Rutherford’s birthplace memorial “so we can keep the historic record on who split the atom first accurate”.
