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In an interview two days after an attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden drew contrasts between himself, his Republican challenger, and Trump’s newly selected vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. We found that Biden made some claims that were misleading, exaggerated or out of context.
- Biden said Trump “wants a $5 trillion tax cut for people who are making a lot of money.” But some of that $5 trillion would go to taxpayers earning less than $400,000 — a policy that Biden himself has proposed.
- The president misleadingly claimed that Vance “has adopted” a policy of “no exceptions on abortion.” Vance initially suggested that he may not support abortion laws with exceptions for rape or incest. He has since said, like Trump, that he is open to allowing “reasonable exceptions” for abortion.
- Biden also said that Vance “says there’s no climate change happening.” But the senator acknowledged in November 2022 that “climate change is certainly happening,” which was a few months after he said there was no “climate crisis” and questioned how much humans contribute to the changing climate.
- Biden glossed over the details of the special counsel report on his handling of classified documents after he was vice president, saying it “concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.” The report said criminal charges were not “warranted,” because the “evidence” that was found of Biden retaining classified material didn’t establish “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
- He cited Trump’s statement that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses the election as evidence of the former president inciting violence. But in context, Trump seemed to be talking about the possibility of an economic bloodbath if he is not elected.
- Biden, referring to Trump, said, “I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1.’” Trump, who later claimed he was joking, said he would be a dictator for one day so he can close the southern border with Mexico and increase drilling in the U.S.
The full 18-minute interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, which was taped on July 15, aired unedited later that night, during the prime-time portion of Day 1 of the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Extending Trump-Era Tax Cuts
Biden said Trump “wants a $5 trillion tax cut for people who are making a lot of money.” But not all of that money would go to wealthy Americans.
The president is referring to Trump’s proposal — enshrined in the Republican platform — to extend the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump signed into law. Biden supports extending the Trump-era tax cuts for those earning less than $400,000 — so the $5 trillion figure cited by the president will also go to people he’s targeting for tax cuts.
When we asked the White House about the $5 trillion figure, it referred us to a June 13 memo issued by the director of the White House National Economic Council on the expiring Trump tax cuts. The NEC analysis, which is based on Congressional Budget Office projections released in May, shows that extending all of the expiring tax cuts would cost $4.9 trillion over 10 years.
The $4.9 trillion includes $3.26 trillion over 10 years for extending the individual tax provisions of the 2017 law. The CBO’s $3.26 trillion projection includes “the statutory tax rates and brackets, the allowable deductions, the size and refundability of the child tax credit, the 20 percent deduction for certain business income, and the income levels at which the alternative minimum tax takes effect.”
Under the 2017 law, the child tax credit doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and the first $1,400 was made refundable, meaning the credit could reduce a family’s tax liability to zero and it would still be able to receive a tax refund, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income cutoff for the child tax credit, or CTC, also increased from $110,000 to $400,000 for married couples filing jointly.
The expanded child tax credit ends after 2025, and extending it would cost nearly $750 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO — see “supplemental data“. (Under Biden, the child tax credit was expanded again and made fully refundable, policies that Biden also wants to extend.)
Those earning less than $400,000 also benefit from changes made in 2017 to the individual tax rates and brackets — which also will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts.
In a July 8 blog item, Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote that extending the expiring tax cut provisions in the TCJA would cost more than $4 trillion over 10 years, citing the CBO’s May report. Gleckman wrote that a TPC distributional analysis found that less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more.
“It also would create winners and losers within income groups,” Gleckman wrote. “For example, TPC found that while about 86 percent of middle-income households would get a tax cut, about 13 percent would see their taxes rise. Among the top 1 percent, taxes would fall for about 81 percent, while they’d rise for 19 percent.”
However, Biden did not mention in his interview that any part of Trump’s plan to extend the expiring tax cuts would benefit taxpayers whom Biden himself is targeting for tax relief.
Vance on Abortion Exceptions
When asked about Trump selecting Vance to join him on the Republican presidential ticket, Biden said he was not surprised by the choice.
“He’s going to surround himself with people who agree completely with him, have a voting record, that support him,” Biden said of Trump. The president went on to claim that Vance “has adopted the same policies, no exceptions on abortion.”
That’s misleading. For starters, Biden is wrong about Trump’s position. As we wrote in April, Trump has said that he is “strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” And Vance, after initially suggesting he may not support exceptions in cases of rape or incest, specifically, has since said that he agrees with Trump that there need to be some exceptions.
When a reporter in Ohio asked Vance in a September 2021 interview if laws restricting abortion access should include exemptions for rape and incest, he started by saying: “Look, I don’t think two wrongs make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”
Vance expanded on his answer when the reporter followed up by asking if women should be forced to deliver a child conceived due to rape or incest.
“Look, my view on this has been very clear, and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong,” he said. “It’s not whether a woman should bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society. The question, really, to me, is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities. We want women to have choices. But above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life. Right now, our society does not afford that, and I think it’s a tragedy and I think we could do better.”
But a year later, Vance, while running for the U.S. Senate, said during an October 2022 debate that he’s “always believed in reasonable exceptions,” pushing back on then-Rep. Tim Ryan’s claim that Vance wanted “no exceptions for rape and incest.” Vance said that he thought the 10-year-old Ohio girl who became pregnant after being raped should have been allowed to have an abortion in the state.
Then, in November 2023, after Ohioans voted to amend the state’s constitution to guarantee abortion access, Vance offered this as part of his post-election analysis on X: “As Donald Trump has said, ‘you’ve got to have the exceptions.’ I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible. This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality. I’ve seen dozens of good polls on the abortion question in the last few months, many of them done in Ohio. Give people a choice between abortion restrictions very early in pregnancy with exceptions, or the pro choice position, and the pro life view has a fighting chance. Give people a heartbeat bill with no exceptions and it loses 65-35.”
This year, Vance has continued to indicate that he would support allowing exceptions. In a May 19 interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Vance said this about a national standard on abortion: “What I’ve said consistently is the gross majority of policy here is going to be set by the states. I am pro-life. I want to save as many babies as possible. And sure, I think it’s totally reasonable to say that late-term abortions should not happen with reasonable exceptions. But I think Trump’s approach here is trying to settle a very tough issue and actually empower the American people to decide it for themselves.”
Vance on Climate Change
Biden also said Vance “says there’s no climate change happening,” presumably a reference to Vance saying he questions how much humans contribute to climate change.
In a July 15 article, the New York Times said that Vance “appears to have undergone an evolution on the issue of climate change,” noting that, in a 2020 speech, Vance had said, “We have a climate problem in our society.”
His position changed when Vance sought Trump’s endorsement for his 2022 Senate race, the Times reported. At an October 2021 forum hosted by the American Leadership Forum, Vance, after criticizing Democratic climate proposals, said, “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man, and that’s basically the argument they are making.”
Democrats have also pointed to comments Vance made in a July 2022 radio interview, in which he agreed with a co-host of the program who said there is no climate crisis.
“No, I don’t think there is, either,” Vance responded. “And even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles.”
But in November 2022, Vance told the Columbus Dispatch that he had “become persuaded that climate change is certainly happening,” although “some of the alarmism is a little overstated.”
“That said, if you’re going to address this problem, one is technology,” he said. “You have to create new energy sources that are lower emissions. Number two, you have to deal with the consequences of a changing climate, whatever those consequences ultimately look like.”
Classified Documents
Biden said the special counsel that investigated his handling of classified documents after he was vice president “concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.” Not quite. The special counsel’s report said that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” It said there was “evidence” that Biden retained and disclosed classified materials after he left office, but the “evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
In the NBC News interview, Biden was asked about the July 15 dismissal of the federal classified documents case against Trump by a judge in Florida, who said the appointment of a special counsel by the federal government in that case was “unlawful.” In answering, Biden pivoted to his own classified documents case.
“I had an independent prosecutor look at me,” Biden said. “I was totally cooperative.” He said there were “10, 12 agents in my house for nine hours unaccompanied going through every single thing I had. That’s appropriate. And they looked at me and concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur said in his report that the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents” about Afghanistan and handwritten notebooks Biden had kept. But Hur outlined several reasons why he concluded a jury was unlikely to find that Biden “willfully” broke the law.
Those reasons included Biden’s cooperation with investigators, a lack of corroborating evidence that would conclusively place documents concerning Afghanistan at Biden’s Virginia home in 2017, Biden’s belief that his handwritten notebooks were his personal property, and Biden’s “limited” memory in his interviews with investigators.
For more on the special counsel report, see our Feb. 9 story, published the day after the report was released.
‘Bloodbath’ Comment in Context
Biden again cited Trump’s statement that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses the election as evidence of the former president inciting violence. But in context, Trump seemed to be talking about the possibility of an economic bloodbath if he is not elected.
Trump was speaking during a March 16 rally in Ohio about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, when he said that if he isn’t elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
Since then, Biden has repeatedly cited the comment to accuse Trump of fomenting violence. And he did so again in his interview with NBC News.
Holt asked, in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, whether Biden had “taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced.”
“Look, I’m not engaged in that rhetoric,” Biden said. “Now, my opponent is engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there’d be a bloodbath if he loses.”
On Truth Social on March 18, Trump wrote that Biden and others were purposely misconstruing his words.
“The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry,” Trump wrote.
The Trump campaign also noted — rightly — that one of the definitions of “bloodbath,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a major economic disaster.”
That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.
Speaking at a rally on the grounds of the Dayton International Airport in Ohio, Trump said that over the last three decades, Mexico has siphoned off U.S. auto manufacturing jobs, and he accused China of building car manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cost U.S. autoworkers their jobs. “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected,” Trump said. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”
The Chinese electric vehicle company BYD says it is planning to build an EV plant in Mexico. But the company says it intends to sell the cars locally to consumers in Mexico and has no plans to sell any across the border in the U.S.
Trump’s Dictator Comment
While contrasting comments that he and Trump have made during the campaign, Biden again said that Trump plans to be a dictator if elected.
“Look, I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1,'” Biden said, paraphrasing a comment that Trump made in a December town hall hosted by Fox News.
Sean Hannity, who was interviewing Trump, gave the former president the opportunity to promise Americans that, if elected, he would “never abuse power as retribution against anybody.” Trump’s response was, “Except for Day 1.”
He then explained what he planned to do as a “dictator” on the first day of a potential second term as president. “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,” he said.
About two months later, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo was interviewing Trump and asked about his remarks, Trump claimed that he had been kidding.
He said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”
After Bartiromo prompted him to be more specific, Trump again said that he only intended to close the border and drill. “That’s all. And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator,” Trump said, adding that his original comments were “said in jest.”
Ben Cohen contributed to this article.
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