WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is looking for a fix to a problem that doesn’t exist — stopping foreign countries from picking out troublesome people for a lottery to move to the U.S. They don’t get to do that.

He’s talking about the diversity visa program, which bears little resemblance to his common portrayal of it. Trump’s mischaracterization of the program on the weekend followed a speech to conservatives Friday that drifted off the facts on the economy, the environment and more.

A look at his recent rhetoric:

TRUMP: “I mean we actually have lottery systems where you go to countries and they do lotteries for who comes into the United States. Now, you know they are not going to have their best people in the lottery, because they’re not going to put their best people in a lottery. They don’t want to have their good people to leave. … We want people based on merit. Not based on the fact they are thrown into a bin and many of those people are not the people you want in the country, believe me.” — Fox News phone interview Saturday night.

THE FACTS: That’s not how it works.

The lottery program is run by the U.S. government, not foreign governments. Other countries do not get to sort through their populations looking for bad apples to put in a “bin” for export to the U.S. Citizens of qualifying countries are the ones who decide to bid for visas under the program.

The program requires applicants to have completed a high school education or have at least two years of experience in the last five years in a selection of fields identified by the Labor Department. Out of that pool of people from certain countries who meet those conditions, the State Department randomly selects a much smaller pool of winners. Not all winners will have visas ultimately approved, because they still must compete for a smaller number of slots by getting their applications in quickly. Those who are ultimately offered visas still need to go through background checks, like other immigrants.

The lottery is extended to citizens of most countries, except about 20. The primary goal is to diversify the immigrant population by creating slots for underrepresented parts of the world.

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TRUMP on the Obama-era mandate to buy health insurance or pay a fine: “That’s gone.” — Conservative Political Action Conference, Friday.

THE FACTS: It’s not gone. People still risk fines this year if they go without health insurance. Under a law that has been enacted, the fines will disappear in 2019.

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TRUMP: “We passed the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country.” — CPAC speech.

THE FACTS: Trump’s tax cuts are not the largest in history, despite his frequent claims that they are.

In comparisons using 2012 inflation-adjusted dollars, his cuts average about $130 billion a year, compared with $208 billion a year for President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut package, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget of the Senate proposal that shaped the final overhaul. President Barack Obama cut taxes by a larger average than Trump, in 2010 and 2013, when he made permanent the temporary cuts enacted by President George W. Bush.

Analyses of earlier versions of Trump’s tax cut proposals, when they were considerably larger than they eventually became, found that his package lagged Reagan’s, post-World War II tax cuts and at least several others when measured as a percentage of the gross domestic product. That’s another common yardstick used by economists for historical comparisons.