Final Night of the GOP Convention

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Summary

For the first half hour of former President Donald Trump’s speech, when he discussed the attempt to assassinate him in Pennsylvania on July 13 and the need for unity in the country, we didn’t have much to fact-check. But then Trump launched into a greatest hits of false and misleading claims we have been writing about for months, if not years.

Here are just some of the claims, along with a few noteworthy remarks by other speakers:

• Trump said his life was saved because he had turned to look at a chart on illegal immigration when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear. The chart is highly misleading. Trump wrongly claimed the arrow pointing to a low point showed his “last week in office.” It points to April 2020, when apprehensions at the border plummeted during the height of the pandemic.

• Trump revisited one of his most frequent claims, the falsehood that “cheating” caused him to lose the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. Courts across the country have rejected his claims, and election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

• Trump’s son Eric Trump falsely claimed that in 2016, before his father took office, “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” There had been 76 straight months of job growth, and job openings were near record levels.

• The former president falsely claimed that “107%” of U.S. jobs are “taken by illegal aliens,” and added that Black and Hispanic Americans are “being hurt the most.” Since Biden has been in office, employment of native-born workers has increased more than foreign-born workers, which includes people in the country legally. The Black and Hispanic populations also have experienced employment gains in that time.

• Trump falsely claimed Democrats “are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare” because of illegal immigration. In fact, workers who are not authorized to be in the U.S. bolster the finances of both programs rather than draining from them. 

• He falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.

• Trump once again made the unsupported claim that other countries are “emptying out” their prisons and “mental institutions and insane asylums” and sending people to the U.S. Experts say there is no evidence of that.

• Former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan wrongly said “crime is out of control” under Biden, while “we had safe streets” under Trump. Violent crime has gone down.

• Eric Trump and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson referred to drug overdose deaths, falsely claiming the Biden administration or others have done nothing to tackle the problem.

• Trump warned that Biden wants to “raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,” but Biden has not proposed anything like that.

• The former president repeated a familiar falsehood, claiming, “We gave you the largest tax cut.” But, as we’ve written before, the 2017 tax cuts were not the largest.

• Trump misleadingly said the IRS “just hired 88,000 agents to go after” middle-income American workers. Additional funding for the IRS will be used for hiring mainly customer service staff, and increased IRS enforcement will focus on those earning more than $400,000.

• Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo falsely claimed, “President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” by Hamas in Gaza. Biden has spoken about efforts to release the U.S. hostages several times since Oct. 7.

• Trump incorrectly claimed that an electric vehicle “mandate” is devastating the U.S. auto industry.

• He made exaggerated claims about the defeat of ISIS and military equipment left in Afghanistan.

• Trump said his administration was “keeping” Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, while Biden gave it up. Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all bases.

• He wrongly said the U.S. had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” during his presidency.

All of our Republican National Convention coverage can be found here. Next month, we will be fact-checking what the Democrats have to say in their convention on Aug. 19 to 22.

Analysis

The Misleading Chart that Trump Says Saved His Life

Trump described it as “the chart that saved my life.” While recounting the events that unfolded during his attempted assassination on July 13 at a western Pennsylvania rally, Trump said it was only because he had turned to look at a chart on apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border — displayed on a large screen behind him — that the bullet that struck his ear did not kill him.

We’ve written about this chart before, and it is grossly misleading. An arrow that points to a low point in apprehensions purports to show “when Trump leaves office.” But the arrow is actually pointing to April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. Apprehensions grew after that, and had more than quadrupled by his last month in office, to a level higher than the month he took office.

Trump never got to that false talking point in the rally. But he did in his speech at the convention.

“I never got to see it [the chart] that day,” Trump said. “But I’m seeing it now and I was very proud. And if you look at the arrow on the bottom … that’s the lowest level of illegal immigrants ever to come into our country in recorded history right there. And that was my last week in office. And then you see what happened after I left.”

Here’s the chart:

April 2020 was not the lowest point in history. The lowest since 2000 came in April 2017, shortly after Trump took office and before an ensuing spike.

In his convention speech, Trump claimed the chart showed that “I handed this administration the strongest border in American history.” But as we have written, apprehensions at the southwest border were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in. However, it is true that illegal immigration soared after Biden took office, jumping by over 300% in Biden’s first year compared with Trump’s last.

False Claim About ‘Cheating’ in Elections

Trump also touched on one of his most frequently repeated false claims — that “cheating” was the reason he lost the 2020 election to Biden.

Democrats are only “fierce,” he said, “when it comes to cheating on elections and a couple of other things.”

There’s no evidence that Trump’s defeat was due to fraud or cheating. State and federal judges have rejected Trump’s claims, often saying that his legal team provided no evidence of fraud. And Trump’s own election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

Trump’s aides in the White House told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless, too, according to testimony given to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. What Trump characterized as “fraud” was just part of the “normal process,” as former Attorney General William Barr said in one instance.

“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr told the committee. 

Jobs Weren’t ‘Scarce’ in 2016

Eric Trump claimed that in 2016 — before his father took office — “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” That’s false.

As we wrote in “What President Trump Inherits,” the U.S. economy in 2016 was “experiencing steady if unspectacular growth,” and job openings were “at near record levels.”

In President Barack Obama’s last 12 months in office, the U.S. economy added more than 2.4 million jobs, as measured from January 2016 to January 2017, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The economy under Obama experienced 76 straight months of job growth, from October 2010 through January 2017, the longest streak on record at that time. The streak ended under Trump at 113 months in March 2020, as the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

In Obama’s last four years, the economy added 10.4 million jobs, an average of 216,000 jobs per month. By contrast, in Trump’s first 37 months — up until the pandemic ended job growth — the U.S. added only 180,000 jobs per month.

The job growth under Obama led to a worker shortage.

The number of unfilled job openings more than doubled during Obama’s time in office, reaching a record-high 6.1 million in July 2015. The Labor Department had only begun tracking job openings in December 2000, but the only other time job openings topped 5 million was January and February 2001. 

When Obama left office in January 2017, there were still 5.6 million openings, an increase of 105% above the month he took office, and job openings exceeded 5 million for 28 months under Obama. 

All Jobs Not Going to ‘Illegal Aliens’

Turning to illegal immigration, Trump falsely claimed that Americans are being completely “squeezed out of the labor force” by people in the country illegally.

“By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? 107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens,” Trump said, repeating a similar claim that he made at a July 9 rally in which he referred to “net job creation” in the last year.

At the convention, he went on to claim that Black and Hispanic Americans are “being hurt the most” by illegal immigration “because they’re taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population.”

As of June, employment of native-born workers over the prior 12 months went down by 943,000 and employment of foreign-born workers went up by more than 1.1 million, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the foreign-born workers category refers to anyone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen at birth, including legal immigrants. It’s not just people in the U.S. illegally, as Trump suggested. BLS doesn’t have a separate breakdown for employed people who do not have legal status.

Furthermore, as we wrote on the opening night of the convention, over Biden’s entire presidency, employment of people born in the U.S has increased by more than 7.8 million while employment of foreign-born workers grew by 5.5 million. Foreign-born workers have seen larger employment gains than native-born workers since February 2020, the month before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was not more than 100% of the job growth in that time period.

As for Trump’s claim that “illegal immigrants” are taking jobs from Black and Hispanic people, both demographics have seen an increase in employment over the last year, since Biden took office, and compared with February 2020. Also, as of June, the Black unemployment rate was 6.3%, down from 9.3% when Biden was inaugurated. For Hispanics and Latinos, the unemployment rate was 4.9%, down from 8.5% at the start of Biden’s term.

Social Security And Medicare Claim

Trump claimed, once again, that Democrats “are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare” because of illegal immigration. “All of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it,” he said. 

That is not correct. As we and others have explained, workers who are not authorized to be in the U.S. actually improve the finances of Social Security and Medicare, since even though they have to pay a percentage of their paychecks to both programs, they can’t receive any of the benefits. Biden has said he will “keep strengthening” the programs. 

Inflation Not ‘Worst Ever’

Trump falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.

The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes.

Under Biden, the biggest increase occurred during a 12-month period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment). BLS said it was the biggest increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has cooled since then. More recently, the CPI rose 3% in the 12 months ending in June, according to the BLS.

Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero.

As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the CPI rose 7.6% under Trump — an average of 1.9% in each of his four years in office. That continued a long period of low inflation, including during the Obama administration (1.8% annual average) and under George W. Bush (2.4% average).

No Evidence Countries Are Emptying Prisons

As he has in virtually every speech for more than a year, Trump made the unsupported claim that other countries are “emptying out” their prisons and “mental institutions and insane asylums” and sending those people to the U.S.

“Meanwhile, our crime rate is going up while crime statistics all over the world are going down because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country,” Trump said.

As we have written, crime in the U.S. has been trending down for two years. And experts say that while there have been individual incidents of violent crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally, existing data does not indicate a migrant crime wave, as Trump says.

As he often does, Trump singled out Venezuela, where he said crime is down 72% “because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America.” As we have written, reported crime is trending down in Venezuela — though not nearly as dramatically as Trump claims — but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

“Crime is reduced in Venezuela due to a reduction in crime opportunities: bank robberies disappear because there is no money to steal; kidnappings are reduced because there is no cash to pay ransoms; robberies on public transportation cease because travelers have no money in their pockets and old, worthless cell phones; and assaults on bank money dispensers disappear because the cash they can give to their clients has not exceeded twenty US dollars,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Briceño-León said.

“This claim has come up repeatedly about various countries,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “While the actions of institutions in Venezuela is not our specialty, we are unaware of any action by Venezuelan authorities (or those of any other country) to empty its jails and prisons or its mental-health institutions to send criminals or people with mental-health issues to the U.S.”

Trump, Hogan Wrong on Crime

Repeating an inaccurate theme of the convention, which Trump also mentioned, former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan claimed that “crime is out of control” under Biden, while “we had safe streets” under Trump. Violent crime and murders in the U.S. have gone down during Biden’s term, according to the FBI and other crime data sources.

Trump’s son Eric Trump also wrongly suggested a rise in crime under the administration, when he said that “crime terrorizes our cities and our suburbs.”

As we wrote on the second night of the convention, in Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for the first quarter of 2023 show further declines in violent crimes and murders.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association has more recent figures that show an 8.6% decline in murders in 69 large U.S. cities from 2020 to 2023, as we’ve written before. And figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, show murders in more than 200 U.S. cities have continued to drop this year overall.

Fentanyl and Drug Overdose Deaths

Eric Trump misled about the Biden administration’s response to the fentanyl crisis.

“To the parents who lost a son or daughter to fentanyl … while an administration does absolutely nothing. I’m sorry,” he said. “Your government can do so much better — and it will.”

Earlier in the evening, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson made a similar, but broader, claim.

“We’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II,” he said. “Does anybody care? It is pathetic. It is pathetic. And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it?”

Drug overdose deaths, including those from fentanyl, are indeed high, but they have been on the rise for many years — and it’s false to suggest that no one in the Biden administration or Washington, D.C., has done anything about it.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System show that overdose deaths in the U.S. totaled about 65,000 to 70,000 a year during Trump’s first three years in office, before rising sharply in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic to around 110,000 a year by 2022. Deaths have plateaued since then, with a possible slight decline in late 2023. Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, the class of drugs that includes fentanyl, have followed a similar trend.

The Biden administration’s approach to drug overdoses has included funding of more than $1.5 billion to expand access to treatment and harm reduction strategies, such as increasing access to naloxone, a medication that can reverse opioid overdose. The administration has also made agreements with China and Mexico to try to reduce the flow of fentanyl.

In his first mention of fentanyl, Eric Trump even went so far as to baselessly suggest that the Biden administration was not addressing the issue because it would prove to benefit Democrats at the ballot box.

“Fentanyl is killing our youth and destroying families while the current administration stands idly by hoping their inaction will import illegal votes,” he said. 

Former President Trump also implied that illegal immigration is responsible for many drug overdose deaths in his own remarks, when he said, “We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

But in addition to his death tally being too high, it’s not the case that illegal immigration is a primary source of illicit drugs. As we’ve written, the vast majority of fentanyl is smuggled into the country by people who are legally entering the U.S. And there’s no evidence that large numbers of illegal immigrants have or could vote in U.S. elections. A federal law enacted in 1996 prohibits anyone but U.S. citizens from voting in elections at the federal level.

Trump, notably, opposed — and effectively ended — bipartisan legislation that aimed to stem the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. by adding more machines to detect the drug at border crossings, among other measures.

Biden Not Proposing to Raise Taxes ‘Four Times’ Higher

Trump warned, “This is the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”

“And people are supposed to vote for them?” Trump asked rhetorically. “I’ve never heard it.”

While Trump regularly warns of massive tax hikes for “everybody,” should Biden be reelected, that doesn’t jibe with anything Biden has proposed.

In his more than three years as president, Biden’s major tax changes have included setting a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% and lowering taxes for some families by expanding the child tax credit and, for a time, making it fully refundable, meaning families could still receive a refund even if they no longer owe additional taxes.

As we wrote in 2020, when Trump made a similar claim, Biden proposed during that campaign to raise an additional $4 trillion in taxes over the next decade, although the increases would have fallen mainly on very high-income earners and corporations. The plan would not have doubled or tripled people’s taxes at any income level (on average), according to analyses of Biden’s plan by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation.

In March 2023, the TPC’s Howard Gleckman wrote that Biden proposed a 2024 budget that would, on average, increase after-tax incomes for low-income households and “leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households.” The Tax Policy Center noted, “The top 1 percent, with at least roughly $1 million in income, would pay an average of $300,000 more than under current law, dropping their after-tax incomes by 14 percent.”

This March, Biden released his fiscal year 2025 budget, which contains many of the same proposals and adds a few new wrinkles. But it still does not contain any “colossal tax hikes” on typical American families, as Trump has said.

Biden’s latest plan proposes — as he has in the past — to increase the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%, and to restore the top individual tax rate of 39.6% from the current rate of 37%. It would also increase the corporate minimum tax rate from 15% to 21% for companies that report average profits in excess of $1 billion over a three-year period. And the plan would impose a 25% minimum tax on very wealthy individuals. The plan also proposes to extend the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan through 2025, and to make the child tax credit fully refundable on a permanent basis.

Biden has said he would only allow individual tax cuts enacted by Trump to expire for filers earning more than $400,000 and married couples making more than $450,000.

2017 Tax Cuts Not the Largest

Trump repeated another one of his favorite claims when he told the crowd, “We gave you the largest tax cut.”

But the 2017 tax cuts were not the largest, as we’ve explained many times before. There have been pricier tax laws both as a percentage of gross domestic product and inflation-adjusted dollars.

In his acceptance speech, though, Trump went even further and said, “people don’t realize, I brought taxes way down — way, way down. And yet we took in more revenues the following year than we did when the tax rate was much higher.”

But that’s not true, either.

The tax cuts were enacted in December 2017 and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the revenues for fiscal year 2017 (the year before the tax law took effect) were $3.3 trillion. The following year (after the tax law took effect), revenues remained at $3.3 trillion. In fiscal year 2019, revenues rose modestly to nearly $3.5 trillion.

“Revenues in fiscal years 2018 and 2019 were a bit lower than the Congressional Budget Office anticipated in early 2018, but whether that result is related to the effects of the tax act is unknown,” the CBO wrote in 2019, responding to Sen. Mike Braun, a Republican from Indiana who had requested information on the effect of the tax cuts on federal revenues.

William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote that the amount of actual revenues collected in fiscal year 2018 was “$275 billion, or 7.6% of revenues that were expected [by the CBO] before the tax cuts took place.”

Misleading IRS Talking Point

Addressing the issue of taxes paid by working Americans, Trump misleadingly said, “And they’ve just hired, as you know, 88,000 agents to go after them even more.”

Trump was referring to part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed into law in 2022, which included about $79 billion for the IRS for hiring staff and other resources over 10 years, as we’ve written.

An earlier proposed plan would have included the hiring of 86,852 full-time employees, which is where the claim about hiring “88,000 agents” apparently comes from.

“The majority of hires made with these resources fill positions of the 50,000 IRS employees who are on the verge of retirement. Of the net new hires, the majority are hired to improve customer services – from upgrading IT to answering phone calls,” a Treasury Department spokesperson told us.

In addition, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen directed IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig not to use the new funding to increase enforcement of taxpayers earning less than $400,000. 

So the hires Trump was referring to are not all “agents,” but staff who will assist taxpayers, and the IRS will not “go after” middle-income earners.

Pompeo Wrong on Biden Hostages Comments

Addressing some of the current conflicts around the world, Mike Pompeo, who served as Trump’s secretary of state, made a false claim about Biden’s statements about the war in Gaza.

The fighting began Oct. 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is supported by Iran, killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took about 250 hostages, including U.S. citizens. There are eight Americans still being held in Gaza, including three who are believed dead, the Associated Press reported. More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Pompeo falsely claimed, “President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held there by the Iranian regime.” But Biden has repeatedly spoken about U.S. efforts to reach a deal that would free all the hostages and he has focused specifically on the Americans.

Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, Biden said at a press conference, “We’re also working around the clock, together with our partners in the region, to secure the release of hostages and — including American citizens … held by Hamas and the safe passage of foreign nationals out of Gaza.”

On Nov. 26, Biden talked about successful negotiations with Hamas that led to the release of a 4-year-old American girl. He said, “She’s now safely in Israel, and we continue to press and expect for additional Americans will be released as well. And we will not stop working until every hostage is returned to their loved ones.”

On May 31, Biden spoke about the ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. The first phase of the deal, he said, would include the release of American hostages. “We want them home,” Biden said.

More Repeats from Trump

Electric Vehicles. Trump repeated a favored line of his about environmental regulations the Biden administration has imposed to reduce carbon emissions and other pollution from cars and trucks. “And I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one,” he said, “thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now, and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car.”

As we’ve written before, there isn’t a mandate for electric vehicles. Instead, it’s up to each carmaker how to comply with the pollution standards across their entire fleets. The rules are expected to greatly increase the number of electric vehicles, but they are not a requirement, as Trump claims.

Nor are the standards expected to decimate the auto industry. In March, after the regulations were finalized, Car and Driver reported that the overall response from the auto industry was “generally positive, if cautious.”

ISIS. According to Trump’s own administration, about half of the territory held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in Iraq and Syria had been regained by coalition forces while Obama was president. But Trump glossed over that and exaggerated his administration’s accomplishments, saying, “We defeated 100% of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was said to take five years. ‘Sir, it’ll take five years, sir.’ We did it in a matter of a couple of months.” The final stronghold was retaken by the Syrian Democratic Forces in March 2019, more than two years after Trump was inaugurated.

Afghanistan. Trump repeated the gross exaggeration that the U.S. “left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment” in withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 2021. That figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.

Bagram Air Base. Also in speaking about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Trump said, “And they also gave up Bagram, one of the biggest … air bases anywhere in the world. … We gave it up and I liked it not because of Afghanistan. I liked it because of China. … We were keeping that.”

As we wrote on the third night of the convention, Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all bases. The Doha agreement included a “complete withdrawal of all remaining [Coalition] forces from Afghanistan” by May 1, 2021. The pact also said, “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all forces from remaining bases.”

Trump did not say the U.S. should have kept Bagram until months after he left office.

Economy. Contrary to Trump’s recurrent claims, the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy in the history of the world” during his presidency. As we have written previously, economists favor real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth as a measure of economic health. The real GDP during Trump’s term grew at most 3% per year. Every president since the 1930s except for Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover has seen a year with greater than 3% growth in GDP.

Trump went on to claim that “we were beating every country, including China, by leaps and bounds.” But during each year of Trump’s presidency, GDP growth was at least twice as high in China as in the U.S.

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