— Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee
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This is exaggerated.
President Trump’s relationship with law enforcement is complicated and certainly not all positive. He has was won endorsements from police unions, like the powerful Fraternal Order of Police, and he has readily expressed support for police officers while emphasizing a law-and-order agenda. But Mr. Trump has also made sharp, public attacks on the nation’s top law enforcement officers — including on his own former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as well as the former deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein. His pointed criticism of institutions like the Justice Department and F.B.I. — especially in the context of the special counsel inquiry focused on Russia’s interference in the election — has prompted Democrats and Republicans alike to express concern that he has eroded public confidence in law enforcement. And he has mercilessly mocked F.B.I. agents who investigated his campaign’s contacts with Russia, accusing them repeatedly of law breaking, even treason.
— Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence
This is misleading.
The Trump administration has budgeted more than $2 trillion to the defense budgets for the past three fiscal years: $671 billion in 2018, $685 billion in 2019 and $713 billion in 2020. But Mr. Kellogg’s suggestion that the military spending was declining before Mr. Trump took office and had seldom received such a large amount of money is wrong.
Adjusted for inflation, the Pentagon operated with larger budgets every year from the 2007 fiscal year to 2012 fiscal year, peaking at $848 billion in 2008. Under Mr. Trump, the amount appropriated for procurement — buying and upgrading equipment — averaged $132 billion over the past three fiscal years. That is lower than the annual averages of $134 billion under President Barack Obama and $140 billion under President George W. Bush.
Though the Trump administration has invested in operational readiness, there are signs that the military continues to face substantial challenges in addressing an array of threats from around the world. For example, the military earned a middling grade of “marginal” last year in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s annual index of military strength, based on factors like shortages in personnel and aging equipment. The think tank noted that American forces are probably capable of meeting the demands of a single major regional conflict but “would be very hard-pressed to do more and certainly would be ill-equipped to handle two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies.”
— Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee
This is exaggerated.
Ms. Blackburn is painting the Democratic Party with too broad of a stroke and oversimplifying positions held by some members of its progressive wing. Calls to defund the police generally refer to shifting some resources out of police departments and reinvesting them into other services — not eliminating police departments all together. The Democratic Party’s nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has specifically said he does not agree with this aim. Similarly, some Democrats and liberals have criticized military budgets as too large, but there are no examples national party leaders calling for its elimination. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, recently proposed a bill reducing the military budget by 10 percent; it failed 23 votes to 77. And calls to abolish Immigrations and Custom Enforcement — which became a symbol of President Trump’s immigration policies — have also divided Democrats, with some supporters proposing to eliminate the agency and replace it with two new agencies.
— Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas
This is exaggerated.
While the Islamic State has been pushed out of its so-called caliphate, the extremist group continues to carry out attacks in Iraq and Syria. And some of the territorial gains made by American troops and their allies predate the Trump administration.
The research firm IHS Markit estimated that the Islamic State lost about a third of its territory from January 2015 to January 2017, when President Trump took office. Brett McGurk, the former special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the group, has said 50 percent of those losses occurred before 2017.
Officials and experts had always anticipated that the campaign, which started in 2014 during the Obama administration, would result in pushing the extremist group out of its self-declared caliphate. Mr. Trump took undue credit for defeating ISIS in a tweet last October.
“When I arrived in Washington, ISIS was running rampant in the area,” Trump said. “We quickly defeated 100% of the ISIS Caliphate.” Mr. McGurk responded to the president on Twitter that “none of this is true.”