Chart of the Day: 90,000 People Are Affected By Trump’s Travel Ban. About 87,000 Are Muslim.

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The Fact Checker Full Employment Act of 2016, sometimes known as Election Day, has been a resounding success. Our nation’s fact checkers have hired thousands of new employees,1 and the United States is now the world leader in fact checking.2 Donald Trump is yet again fulfilling his promise to put America back to work.3

Today, for example, Glenn Kessler and his staff of 247 university-trained fact checkers4 looked into Trump’s claim that only 109 people were detained as part of the chaos of his immigration order. Even on its own terms, this number appears to have been plucked from nowhere. Kessler figures the real number is several hundred, maybe as many as a thousand. But as he says, that doesn’t provide the full picture anyway. Here’s the real impact of the immigration order:

Collectively, these countries are 97 percent Muslim, so about 87,000 of those affected are Muslim. Please don’t call it a Muslim ban, though.

1Fact check: Too good to check.

2Fact check: Probably true.

3Fact check: False. Obama put America back to work.

4Fact check: False. Kessler actually has a staff of 246.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

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