Speaking to a roomful of CEOs Tuesday, President Donald Trump repeated a claim for which fact-checkers in the past have found scant evidence: that he has won environmental awards.
During a town hall with business leaders, Trump said that his administration aimed to significantly cut back on “90, 95 percent of” regulations on unspecified industries, “and still have the same kind of protection.”
“And we want safety,” he said. “And we want environmental – we want environmental protection. I mean, I have won awards on environmental protection. I’m a big believer, believe it or not.”
Trump made a similar claim days into his administration, telling business leaders on Jan. 23 that “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment. I have received awards on the environment.” In 2011, the Washington Post further noted, he told “Fox and Friends” that he had received “many, many environmental awards.”
The Post subsequently found little evidence to support Trump’s claims in media reports over the past 10 years. Several large environmental groups similarly found no evidence of Trump’s multiple environmental awards, according to the same report.
Readers of the Post, after the article was published, submitted one: The Friends of Westchester County Parks, Inc. awarded Trump a “Green Space Award” in 2007 for his gift of 436 acres of land to establish Donald J. Trump State Park – land that the Post reported was originally intended for a golf course project that Trump eventually abandoned. Lacking maintenance funds, Atlas Obscura reported, the park shut down in 2010.
And Chelsea Henderson, formerly a policy adviser to three Republican senators now a consultant on conservation issues, wrote in an August 2016 op-ed in the Post that she had found evidence of just one environmental prize, awarded to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, from the Metropolitan Golf Association Foundation.
“Four years later,” she noted, “the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection cited the course for environmental violations.”
The White House directed TPM to the Trump Organization in response to requests to list Trump’s environmental awards. The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for a list of awards.
This post has been updated.
