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In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz repeated some of the same false and misleading talking points that he and his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made before, including in recent debates.
Manufacturing jobs: Walz, who on Oct. 6 made his first appearance on Fox News since joining the Democratic ticket, misleadingly said former President “Donald Trump’s policies led to 180,000 manufacturing jobs leaving.”
Harris made a similar claim during her Sept. 10 debate with Trump. As we wrote at that time, the U.S. lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs during Trump’s term, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the vast majority of those job losses were due to the COVID-19 pandemic — not “Trump’s policies,” as Walz claimed. The U.S. added 419,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first three years in office.
Unemployment rate: Walz also falsely claimed that when Trump “left office we had more people unemployed percentage-wise than the Great Depression.” Again, Harris made a similar claim during the presidential debate, when she said “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”
When Trump left office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4% — down from a pandemic peak of 14.8% in April 2020, when businesses, schools and other employers shut down to slow the spread of COVID-19. That’s not close to the high unemployment rate during the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1941.
BLS did not develop a methodology for defining unemployment and calculating the nation’s unemployment rate until the 1940s, but it has estimated that the unemployment rate during the Great Depression peaked in 1933 at 24.9%.
And, as we noted in our article on the presidential debate, the unemployment rate topped 6.4% for 65 straight months from October 2008 until March 2014, peaking at 10% in October 2009. That string of high unemployment was triggered by the so-called Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.
Trump’s border wall: As he did in the vice presidential debate, Walz said Trump didn’t keep his promise to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, falsely saying that the former president only built 2% of the border wall.
“He told us for four years that he would deal with this. He didn’t,” Walz said. “He didn’t build his wall — 2%. Mexico didn’t pay for it”
Mexico didn’t pay for the wall, but Trump built more than 2% of new wall across the border. As we wrote after the vice presidential debate, Walz arrived at his 2% figure by dividing 52 miles of new primary border wall (where none existed before) by 1,954 miles, which is the full length of the southwest land border. But Trump did not promise to build a wall across the entire border.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly spoke about the need for 1,000 miles of border wall. But since there was already 650 miles of fencing in place, Trump would have needed to build about 350 miles to keep his promise. By that measure, Trump completed almost 15% of the border wall he promised.
Walz’s comment also discounts the hundreds of miles of modern, 30-foot tall border barriers built to replace dilapidated or inadequate fencing, such as vehicle barriers that people can walk right through.
In all, Trump built 458 miles of a “border wall system,” including 373 miles of new fencing to replace existing primary and secondary border barriers, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection report on Jan. 22, 2021. In addition to the 52 miles of new primary wall, 33 miles of new secondary wall were built under Trump where no secondary wall existed before, the report said.
In vitro fertilization: On a few occasions, Walz has inaccurately stated that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to conceive their children, when in fact the couple used intrauterine insemination, or IUI. When asked about that, Walz repeated a false claim about Trump opposing IVF.
“I don’t think people care whether I used IUI or IVF when we talk about this,” Walz said. “What they understand is Donald Trump would resist those things.”
As we’ve written, Trump has repeatedly expressed support for IVF.
The use of IVF treatments became an issue this campaign cycle in February after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in IVF are children, and that couples could sue for the wrongful death of a minor when test tubes with frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed. Trump spoke out in a Feb. 23 social media post against the all-Republican court’s ruling, and has been consistent in his support since then.
“I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” he said in a campaign video in April.
In August, Trump even proposed mandating that the federal government or health insurance companies “pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.”
The IUI treatments are not affected by the court ruling, because, as the name implies, the sperm is placed in the uterus during ovulation, so there are no frozen embryos that would be discarded if not used.
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