President Trump loves to blame his predecessor, Barack Obama, for many things. But a recent statement while signing an executive order on police brutality really took the cake. “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period,” Trump said. “The reason they didn’t try is because they had no idea how to do it.”
This was a needlessly false statement. Obama faced his own uproar over police brutality in 2014, after the shooting death of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Obama took a number of steps in response, such limiting the distribution of military-style gear to local police departments and pursuing consent decrees, approved by courts, in which police departments agreed to a road map of changes and reforms.
Trump should have known about these actions because his administration rolled many of them back. He earned Four Pinocchios — and then immediately repeated the false claim on the Sean Hannity Show.
