FACT FOCUS: A look at false claims and misinformation by Trump and Harris before their first debate
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet face-to-face for the first time in a highly-anticipated debate Tuesday night. The two presidential candidates describe the state of the country in starkly different terms. Trump often paints a dark picture centered around issues such as immigration and high inflation, while Harris focuses on optimism for the future, promising that “we’re not going back.”
The first debate of the 2024 election in June — at which President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance ultimately forced him from the race — featured multiple false and misleading claims from both candidates and it’s likely that Tuesday’s match-up will include much of the same.
Here’s a look at some of the false and misleading statements made by Trump and Harris during recent appearances.
Abortion remains a top issue
The unprecedented Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade more than two years ago has made abortion a key issue in the 2024 election. As a result of the ruling, abortion is now banned at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, in 14 Republican-controlled states. It’s barred after about the first six weeks, which is before many know they are pregnant, in three other states.
Trump often tries to portray Democrats as radical on abortion. He has falsely claimed on multiple occasions, including the debate in June, that some states allow women to get an abortion after their baby is born. This is in not true. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.
During her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Harris said Trump would “enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congress.” Trump said in an Aug. 22 appearance on ”Fox & Friends": “I would never. There will not be a federal ban. This is now back in the states where it belongs.” However, as recently as March he suggested he’d support a national ban on abortion around 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Blame for the Afghanistan withdrawal
Trump has repeatedly tried to link Harris to the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which saw the Taliban take over the country again before the last American troops even flew out of the Kabul airport in August 2021.
Most assessments have concluded that Trump and Biden share blame for the disastrous end to America’s longest war. The main U.S. government watchdog for the war points to Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces and military contractors as “the single most important factor” in the collapse of U.S.-allied Afghan security forces and the Taliban takeover.
Biden’s April 2021 announcement that he would proceed with the withdrawal set in motion by Trump was the second-biggest factor, the watchdog said. Harris has said she was the last person in the room when Biden made his decision, but neither watchdog reviews nor a more than 18-month investigation by House Republicans have identified any instance where the vice president had a significant impact on decision-making.
A suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport during the withdrawal killed 13 service members and more than 170 Afghans.
Differing views on the economy
Voters rank the economy and inflation as major concerns going into the election, with both Trump and Harris making a case for how they’re better for the country’s wallet.
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Democrats, including Harris, have claimed that Trump’s proposal to impose a tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports — and up to 60% on imports from China — would cost the average family $3,900 a year. Most economists do expect it would raise prices on many goods. The $3,900 figure comes from the Center for American Progress, a progressive advocacy group. However, Trump has said the tariff revenue could be used to cut other taxes, which would reduce the overall cost of the policy.
One of Harris’ major policy proposals would provide $25,000 in down payment assistance to certain first-time homebuyers and tax incentives to builders of starter homes. Experts say these promises could end up working at cross-purposes, as help with down payment assistance would almost certainly increase demand when estimates of the U.S. housing shortage already range from 3 million to 7 million homes.
Trump consistently touts the economy under his administration as the best in the country’s history, highlighting high levels of inflation under Biden.
But it’s inaccurate to claim that the economy was at its best under Trump. First, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive recession during his presidency. If issues caused by the pandemic are removed, economic growth averaged 2.67% during Trump’s first three years. That’s pretty solid, but nowhere near the 4% average under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
And while inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 after rising steadily in the first 17 months of Biden’s presidency from a low of 0.1% in May 2020, it’s now seeing a downward trend. The most recent data shows that as of July it had fallen to 2.9%, with year-over-year inflation at its lowest level in more than three years.
Energy, inflation and a flip-flop on fracking
Trump has long promised to “drill, baby, drill,” in order to ramp up oil production and bring down inflation. But oil production in the U.S. hit an all-time high under Biden’s administration and inflation is already on the way down. Moreover, gas prices are declining across the U.S. The average cost of regular gas was $3.27 on Monday, down significantly from a high of $5.01 in June 2022, according to the American Automobile Association.
Trump recently claimed that all coal-fired power plants will be forced to close in the next few years due to a rule issued in April by the Environmental Protection Agency. But that’s false. Coal-fired power plants will be forced to capture 90% of smokestack emissions by 2032 or shut down. Plants already closing are doing so largely because of economic reasons — they cannot compete with natural gas, solar and wind.
Harris’ shifting views on fracking have been put under the microscope in recent weeks. The vice president said at a Democratic presidential town hall in 2019, during her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, that she opposed fracking. But her current campaign clarified that she no longer supports a ban on the practice.
During her first sit-down interview since she announced her 2024 candidacy, Harris said she made her position to not ban fracking “clear on the debate stage in 2020” when she faced off with then-Vice President Mike Pence. A review of the debate found she said, “Joe Biden will not end fracking.”
Violent crime rates under Trump and Biden-Harris
Democrats have pointed to high violent crime rates under Trump as the former president — who was convicted on 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election — calls for law and order, claiming that violent crime has flourished during the Biden administration.
Violent crime decreased throughout most of Trump’s presidency, according to FBI data that uses information provided by law enforcement agencies. However, it spiked in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has trended downward since 2020 across the U.S., nearing pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Preliminary FBI data for 2023 shows that violent crime overall was down another 6% that year.
The Department of Justice’s most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, on the other hand, found that violent crime both reported and not reported to police rose from 2021 to 2022 by 42.4% for people age 12 or older. Unlike the FBI statistics, which cover victims of all ages, the survey uses self-reported data and does not include murders.
Continued attacks on border security
Trump is expected to once again attack Harris on border security. He claimed in a press conference last month that 20 million people, perhaps more, have come across the U.S.-Mexico border during the current administration. But that number is unsubstantiated at best.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024. That’s arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.
Including the number of times migrants were stopped at official land crossings, as well as migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who were admitted to the country under presidential authority, the number of encounters rises to 8.7 million. CBP does not publish its estimates of people who eluded capture.
Allegations that illegal immigration has caused a spike in violent crime are also unfounded. A number of heinous and high-profile crimes involving people in the U.S. illegally have been in the news in recent months, but there is nothing to support the claim that it is widespread. FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, and there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York.
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