Trump’s claim doesn’t line up with White House investment list

President Donald Trump has reported various amounts when citing the value of investments secured by the U.S. Lately, it’s $18 trillion.

“We’ve got $18 trillion coming into our country … I think because of tariffs and Nov. 5 election,” Trump said during a Dec. 9 interview with journalist Dasha Burns from Politico.

But the president’s math is off, according to PolitiFact. The White House website has the investment amount at about half of Trump’s total.

To begin his second term, Trump said the U.S. had “already secured nearly $3 trillion of new investments.” On May 8 it was “close to $10 trillion,” and on Oct. 29, he said “I think by the end of my first term, we should have $21 or $22 trillion invested in the United States from other people and countries.”

The White House has a webpage that tracks Trump’s “economic policies (which) have sparked trillions of dollars in new investment in U.S. manufacturing, technology, and infrastructure.”

The amount is currently $9.6 trillion.

Those figures also include “aspirational goals over multiple years” and are often based on future purchases of products, PolitiFact said.

An economic analysis from Bloomberg found that, “Many of the pledges cited by the White House are part of overlapping multi-company projects, making it difficult to determine how much may be counted more than once.”

Walz takes credit for federal prosecution

A recent report outlined a fraud scheme in Minnesota which involved stealing taxpayer money during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a recent interview on “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker asked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about the people charged with fraud.

“Do you take responsibility for failing to stop this fraud in your state?” Welker asked.

“Well, certainly, I take responsibility for putting people in jail,” Walz said. “Governors don't get to just talk theoretically. We have to solve problems.”

But that’s a little misleading, according to PolitiFact. Walz appears to be overstating his role.

State officials were not involved in the prosecution of these crimes. It was federal prosecutors that investigated the fraud and brought the charges.

Although some state agencies provided information, the convictions were led by federal investigators who built the case from scratch.

Some media reports actually criticized Minnesota officials, claiming the state should have done more to detect the fraud earlier, PolitiFact said.

Lost kiosks are fake

A recent social media post appeared to show an innovative answer to lost and found.

“In Germany, lost wallets is dropped in robotic mailboxes — scanned, anonymized, and sent directly to registered owners,” headlined the Nov. 22 Facebook post which shows a person near a bank of kiosks.

The text claims robotic mailboxes are “designed to accept lost items like wallets, keys, or IDs and return them to their rightful owners without human involvement.”

Sounds like a great system, but it’s not real, according to LeadStories.

The idea of this system is fake and the photo was generated using artificial intelligence, or AI.

There are a variety of inconsistencies that show the image was created with AI, such as:

Signs in the backgrounds are just blurred out letters.

A bike rack across the street is a mass of wheels and frames, no actual bicycles.

The kiosks have inconsistent instruction stickers.

The person using the kiosk has an abnormally flat face.

Tupac wasn’t on ‘Sesame Street’

A video posted on social media in October appears to show late rapper Tupac Shakur on an episode of the children’s TV program “Sesame Street.”

The clip, which includes the text “UNAIRED EPISODE,” supposedly shows Tupac singing with children and Big Bird, hanging with Oscar the Grouch, counting with the Count, dancing with Elmo and eating cookies with a character who resembles Cookie Monster.

It’s great viewing, but it’s all fake, according to Snopes.

There is no other evidence that Tupac was ever on the show, and his name isn’t included in a list of the hundreds of guest stars who appeared on episodes of “Sesame Street.”

The video was created using artificial intelligence.

There are a variety of inconsistencies in the clip, including the top of Tupac’s head is missing at one point, Big Bird has a nose at the end of his beak, and Cookie Monster, who is normally noseless, has an orange nose.

• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.