Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for the first time at a rally in Philadelphia on Aug. 6. We found some misleading claims and assertions that required context in their remarks, which featured more hopeful pronouncements than pointed attacks on the Republican ticket.
- Walz made the unsupported claim that Trump will “gut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump has not released any detailed proposals to cut either program. In fact, he has promised to protect both.
- Walz said that “violent crime was up under Donald Trump.” Murders and aggravated assaults were up due to a spike in 2020. But the overall violent crime rate went down from 2016 to 2020.
- Walz claimed Trump “said he’d ban abortion across this country.” Trump once supported legislation that included a federal 20-week ban on abortions, with some exceptions. But Trump now says it is entirely a state issue, and that he does not support a national abortion ban and would veto such a bill.
- Harris claimed Trump wants to “punish women” who get an abortion. Trump once said that in a 2016 interview, but he then quickly retracted the statement, saying that the physician performing the procedure in violation of a state or federal ban should be held legally responsible. He recently said states would decide whom to hold responsible.
- Harris and Walz both claimed that Trump would end the Affordable Care Act, with Harris saying this would “take us back to a time when insurance companies have the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.” We’ll provide some context. Trump, who has supported ending the law or weakening its preexisting condition protections, has said he wants to make the law “better” and cheaper. He hasn’t released a plan to do so.
Harris, who officially declared her candidacy on July 26, picked Walz less than two weeks later. At the Philadelphia rally, Harris said the delegates to the Democratic National Convention had finished a virtual vote for the party’s presidential candidate the night before. “And so I stand before you today to proudly announce I am now officially the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.”
Social Security and Medicare
Walz made a litany of assumptions about what Trump will do if he returns to office, saying the former president is “going to pick up exactly where he left off four years ago, only this time it will be much worse.” In doing so, Walz made the unsupported claim that Trump will “gut Social Security and Medicare.”
As we’ve written before, Trump did not propose any cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits as president, although his budgets did contain proposals to cut the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. His budgets also included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits.
As a candidate, Trump has not released any detailed proposals to cut either program, although he suggested a tax change that could result in less benefits in the next decade.
Trump has promised, if elected, to protect both programs. In January 2023, when House Republicans were discussing ways to cut government spending, Trump warned Republicans in a video not to cut Social Security and Medicare.
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree,” Trump said, adding that Republicans should not cut “benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives.”
In early July, the Republican Party released its platform, which says that the party will “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE.”
Since then, Trump has gone even further by suggesting he will seek to repeal the income tax on Social Security benefits. “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY,” Trump said in a July 31 post on Truth Social.
Trump provided no details for such a proposal, which the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimated would cost the government $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion in revenues over 10 years. The CRFB also noted that repealing the tax on Social Security benefits could result in both programs becoming insolvent sooner than scheduled, meaning future Social Security and Medicare benefits would be reduced unless Trump provides a plan to replace the lost revenues or a future Congress and president act to replace the lost funds.
Earlier this year, Democrats accused Trump of plotting to cut Social Security and Medicare based on a statement that he made during a March 11 interview with CNBC. When asked how he would handle the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare, Trump said: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.” His campaign said Trump was talking about cutting waste and fraud — not benefits.
Crime
Walz claimed: “And make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump.” Murders and aggravated assaults were up, though it should be noted the increase all came in 2020.
The murder rate increased from 5.4 per 100,000 population in 2016, the year before Trump took office, to 6.8 in 2020, according to the FBI’s 2022 Crime in the United States report, the most recent report available. (See Table 1 after downloading the CIUS Estimations file.) The aggravated assault rate went from 250.4 to 277.2. Other categories of crime, including rape, robbery and property crime rates, went down.
The big increase in murders came in 2020, when the number of murders in the country rose 32.2%.
The overall violent crime rate, however, went down, from 389.9 in 2016 to 385.2 in 2020.
Experts have told us before that several factors were likely behind the increase in murders in 2020 and 2021, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a loss of jobs and disproportionately affected vulnerable populations.
Experts also said that presidents, regardless of party, have little to do with notable changes in violent crime and murder during their time in office.
Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who wrote about crime trends for the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice at the end of his long career in this field, told us in 2021 that presidents “can facilitate a response,” citing an initiative by President Joe Biden at the time to work with cities to reduce gun violence. “But no president, in my memory, has ever single-handedly been responsible for a sharp crime increase or for that matter a sharp crime decline. Crime is driven by other factors and the president has little control over those factors.”
National Abortion Ban
Walz said Trump “said he’d ban abortion across this country,” though Trump now says he does not support a national abortion ban and would veto such a bill if Congress passed it. Rather, Trump says the issue ought to be left entirely up to individual states to decide.
It is true, however, that when Trump was a candidate in 2016 and again when he was president, he said he would support a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
In his speech in Philadelphia, Walz said, “And when somebody tells you who they are, believe them. He said he’d ban abortion across this country, and he’ll do it whether or not Congress is there or not.”
In a letter sent to anti-abortion leaders while he was running for president in September 2016, Trump promised that he would “[sign] into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide.” That legislation sought to ban abortions nationwide beyond 20 weeks, with some exceptions for victims of rape or incest and if the mother’s life is in danger.
In that letter, Trump also vowed to nominate only “pro-life justices” to the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump kept that promise. His three appointments to the Supreme Court paved the way for overturning Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Since the court overruled Roe in June 2022, the jurisdiction on abortion rights has returned to the states. Earlier this year, Trump said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe v. Wade.
As president, while speaking to March for Life participants in January 2018, Trump said he “strongly supported the House of Representative’s Pain-Capable bill, which would end painful, late-term abortions nationwide. And I call upon the Senate to pass this important law and send it to my desk for signing.” Although the bill had passed the House in late 2017, it never passed the Senate.
Trump has since changed course.
On April 8, Trump released a four-minute video on Truth Social outlining his position on abortion, saying that he would leave the issue to the states. Two days later, he definitively said “no” when asked whether he would sign a national abortion ban if Congress passed one.
“The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” Trump said in the video. “In this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.”
The 2024 Republican platform affirmed that state, rather than federal, approach on abortion stating, “Republicans Will Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life.” However, the platform adds a reference to laws that would grant fetuses the same rights as people, saying, “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”
While the language about leaving the abortion issue to states upset some anti-abortion activists who advocated a national ban, the news site the 19th wrote that if states passed the so-called fetal “personhood” laws, it “would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.”
‘Punishing’ Women
“Donald Trump said he wants to punish women,” Harris said, “and as a result of his actions, today in America 1 out of 3 women live in a state with a Trump abortion ban, 1 out of 3. Some of these bans go back to the 1800s even before women had a right to vote.”
As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump once said — and then quickly walked back — that women needed to face “some form of punishment” for violating abortion bans. After facing criticism from groups both for and against abortion rights, Trump retracted the statement the same day, saying that the physician performing the procedure in violation of a federal or state ban should be held legally responsible — not the woman.
“The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb,” Trump said in a March 30, 2016, statement.
More recently, in an interview with Time in April, Trump was asked, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, if states should monitor women’s pregnancies and/or prosecute women who get an abortion in violation of state law. Trump said “they might,” but that’s for each state to decide.
As we have written, President Joe Biden and some other Democrats twisted Trump’s words by claiming that Trump said “states should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.” (Emphasis is ours.) In the Time interview, Trump said his opinion about what ought to happen is “totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.” As we’ve noted before, it’s also true that in his Time interview, Trump didn’t advocate that women should not be prosecuted – which was his position in the first campaign.
While no states currently have laws that explicitly call for prosecuting women who get abortions in violation of state abortion bans, some state elected officials are advocating that. And some abortion rights advocates worry that since some state laws do not contain specific prohibitions against prosecuting women who get abortions, aggressive prosecutors might attempt to do that. Others are concerned that states with fetal “personhood” laws might have left the door open for prosecutors to seek criminal punishment of women, particularly those who self-manage abortions through medication.
As for Harris’ claim that due to Trump’s actions “1 out of 3 women live in a state with a Trump abortion ban,” the health policy research group KFF reports that, as of July 29 and with some exceptions, 14 states have banned abortions at any stage; another six states have set a gestational limit of between six to 12 weeks; and five states have set a gestational limit between 15 weeks and 22 weeks.
PolitiFact did the math on women of reproductive age in states that have some sort of abortion ban and concluded Harris’ estimate was accurate.
Affordable Care Act
Harris and Walz both claimed that Trump would end the Affordable Care Act. He wasn’t able to do so when he was in office — even when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. But Trump has indicated that he may try again.
He posted on social media in November that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the law. In late March, Trump said he wanted to make the ACA “better” and cheaper. But he hasn’t released a health care plan.
“If Donald Trump gets the chance, he will end the Affordable Care Act and take us back to a time when insurance companies have the power to deny people with preexisting conditions,” Harris said.
Ending the ACA would reduce the protections for people with preexisting conditions considerably. We can’t say how Trump might change or replace the ACA. He has expressed support for protecting those with preexisting conditions, but his record shows he hasn’t supported keeping all of the law’s provisions.
The ACA prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their health status, provisions that most notably have affected those seeking to buy their own coverage on the individual market. Before the ACA, insurance rates on the individual market could vary substantially; women were charged more to get coverage for a possible future pregnancy; and insurers, in many states, could simply deny a policy to some consumers altogether.
The ACA also bars insurers from refusing to cover a certain condition, and it requires plans to cover 10 essential benefits.
As we’ve explained before, as of 2022, 20 million people, or about 6.3% of the U.S. population, got coverage on the individual market, where, again, these protections are a significant change from the pre-ACA insurance market. However, people who lose their jobs or retire early could also end up seeking insurance on the individual market.
Before the ACA, employer plans still had some preexisting condition protections: They couldn’t deny a policy to an employee. But if a new employee had a lapse in insurance coverage, employer plans could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period.
In the face of court challenges to the ACA — including a lawsuit backed by the Trump administration that would have nullified the entire law — several states have enacted laws to mimic some, or all, of the ACA’s preexisting condition protections. But experts say even in the 10 states, as of 2020, that enacted all of the law’s protections, it’s not enough to maintain what the ACA has done.
“Even when a state has adopted all four protections, without financial help from the federal government to make coverage affordable, the individual health insurance market will become dysfunctional, with fewer plans participating and spiraling premiums,” researchers with Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms wrote in an Oct. 29, 2020, report published by the Commonwealth Fund. They noted that billions in federal subsidies helped millions enroll in individual market plans on the ACA exchanges. “These subsidies have kept the individual market stable and affordable. Few, if any, states will be able to replace these federal dollars. Without this funding, the preexisting condition protections that have been adopted into state law will largely be meaningless.”
At the time, another 15 states had enacted at least one, but not all, of the ACA protections. “In these states, insurers will continue to be able to discourage enrollment of people with preexisting conditions if the ACA is struck down,” the report said.
As we said, Trump hasn’t put forth a health care plan. And several top Republicans have said his call to not give up on ending the ACA is a non-starter in Congress.
In the past, Trump supported a 2017 GOP bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections. He also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.
In late September 2020, Trump signed an executive order that made the general proclamation: “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”
It did not. Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us at the time that the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”
Correction, Aug. 8: We originally reported that the overall violent crime rate went up slightly from 2016 to 2020, based on the FBI’s 2020 annual report. Updated statistics in the FBI’s 2022 report show the rate went down. We also updated that section with the most recent numbers for murders and aggravated assaults.
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