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In his third campaign for the nation’s top office, former President Donald Trump’s closing messages have run the gamut, touching on the economy, immigration, the military, crime, taxes and more. In lengthy speeches, he rattles off a stream of claims, citing his time as president and drawing contrasts with Vice President Kamala Harris.
We reviewed Trump’s remarks from Oct. 18 through Oct. 22, which included four rallies — in Detroit; Latrobe, Pennsylvania; and Greensboro and Greenville, North Carolina — a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and roundtable events in Miami and Auburn Hills, Michigan. We identified more than 60 false, misleading and unsupported claims, many that we have fact-checked weeks, months and sometimes even years ago.
We also fact-checked Harris’ remarks over the same time period. (See: “Kamala Harris’ Closing Arguments.”)
In contrast to Harris’ rallies, Trump spoke for an average of about an hour and a half, three times longer than Harris. Still, we flagged about five times as many factual inaccuracies by Trump.
In 2015, Trump’s first year as a politician, we named him the “king of whoppers” in our annual recap of the worst falsehoods of the year, saying that we had “never seen his match” — both in terms of the large number of inaccurate statements he makes and his propensity to double-down on claims that have been shown to be wrong. Nine years later, that’s still the case.
Reading about more than 60 claims in one story is exhausting — we get it. But it is what it is.
We have organized the claims by topic:
Election Integrity
Economic Issues
Immigration
Energy
Taxes
Defense/Military
Crime/Guns
Miscellaneous
Election Integrity
Trump has continued to peddle the falsehood that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, and suggested President Joe Biden’s win was the result of cheating.
“You know, we won twice here,” Trump said in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Oct. 22, adding, “and we won twice everywhere, if you want to really know.” Trump did win North Carolina in both 2016 and 2020, but contrary to his many assertions, he didn’t win twice “everywhere.”
In Greenville on Oct. 21, Trump said of Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, “He’s going to stop the cheating. … Are they cheating? They’re trying, but they will not get away with it, right? They didn’t get away with it in this state. They got away with it in plenty of places.”
As we have written, there’s no evidence that Trump’s defeat was due to fraud or cheating. State and federal judges around the country 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.
In two of his speeches, Trump also suggested that immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally are “undercutting the voting power of our own citizens” and that Democrats are “trying to get them to vote.”
But as we have written, noncitizens are not legally permitted to vote in presidential elections, and there is no evidence — contrary to Trump’s repeated claims — that it is happening on any wide scale. As immigration experts have explained to us, the disincentives for it are enormous. Aside from being illegal, it is a deportable offense that makes a person permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S.
Economic Issues
Not the ‘Greatest Economy’
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” Trump wrongly said at the town hall in Lancaster on Oct. 20.
We consider this among Trump’s Greatest Hits, as he has been repeating it, frequently since he left office, and even before. In fact, it was one of the claims we wrote about in our last “Trump on the Stump” story during the 2020 campaign.
As we wrote most recently, the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” during the Trump administration. Economists look to real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth to measure economic health, and that figure exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth more than a dozen times before he took office.
Every president since the 1930s except for Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover has seen a year with at least 3% growth in GDP.
Didn’t ‘Destroy’ the Economy
In several rallies, Trump falsely said that Harris “destroyed our economy.” Aside from inflation, which has moderated greatly since 2022, several economic measures show a strong economy under the Biden-Harris administration.
GDP growth has been strong: 6.1% in 2021, 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% for the third quarter of 2024, the latest estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. As we said, the highest annual GDP growth under Trump was 3%, and the lowest was -2.2% in 2020.
The unemployment rate went down under the Biden-Harris administration and has stayed lower for longer than at any point of the Trump administration. The latest figure was 4.1% in September, 2.3 percentage points below where it was when Biden took office.
Job growth has been strong. More than 15 million jobs have been added, and employment is now about 6 million higher than it was pre-pandemic (and that’s accounting for revisions to the employment figures that the Bureau of Labor Statistics likely will do next year).
On the negative side, inflation went up. During Biden’s presidency, the Consumer Price Index has gone up 19.9%. Inflation has moderated greatly since hitting a 9.1% increase for the 12 months ending in June 2022. The CPI rose only 2.4% in the 12 months ending in September, the most recent figure available.
Wages have gone up, but haven’t quite kept pace with inflation. Average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers have gone up 18% during this administration, but when adjusted for inflation, wages are down 1.8% as of September.
Causes of Inflation
Trump has misleadingly blamed Harris for inflation, claiming it was caused by “what they did with energy,” as he claimed in Lancaster. The primary cause of high inflation, notably in 2022, was the unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflation rose in countries around the world.
Experts told us that the economic fallout from the pandemic created issues with supply and demand, as well as labor, and inflation was further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and subsequent sanctions the U.S. (and other countries) put on Russian oil.
Pandemic stimulus spending under Biden also contributed, but wasn’t the root of the matter. Economists also said some level of stimulus was needed for a robust economic recovery.
Energy prices went up, but that, too, was a pandemic fallout issue. Demand, and supply, fell in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The subsequent supply crunch, when demand returned, caused prices to go up.
Not the ‘Worst’ Inflation
Trump said in Lancaster that the economy is the biggest election issue for voters partly because of inflation, which he falsely said “is the worst we’ve ever had.” He also wrongly said in Greenville that “we had no inflation” when he was president.
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 12-month increase occurred during the period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment).
As of September, the CPI rose 2.4% in the 12 months ending that month. That’s only 0.1 percentage point higher than the 2.3% increase for the 12 months ending in February 2020, which was before the COVID-19 pandemic helped send the annual rate of inflation to under 2% for several months. Under Trump, the largest annual increase was 2.9% for the 12-month periods ending in June and July 2018.
Tariffs on China
Trump said in Greensboro that he will make U.S. companies that don’t manufacture their products in the country “pay a quite stiff tariff,” and he mentioned imports from China as an example.
“You know how much China paid us during my time?” he asked. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. No other president got them to pay, not 10 cents. … China didn’t pay 10 cents.”
Trump’s claim is false. The amount of customs duties on Chinese imports increased after Trump raised tariffs, but the U.S. already had been collecting billions in customs duties for years. As we’ve reported, in 2016, the year before Trump took office, the U.S. collected $13.3 billion in customs duties on Chinese imports.
Furthermore, that money did not come from China, as Trump falsely claimed. The tariffs are paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, and at least part of those costs are passed on to U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.
Black and Hispanic Jobs
In Detroit on Oct. 18, Trump claimed that “Kamala’s migrant invasion is also devastating our great African American community” because “they’re taking their jobs.” He also said people who immigrated illegally are “taking a lot of Hispanic jobs” as well. But Trump’s campaign has not provided evidence of this, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data do not support his claims, as we’ve written.
The Black unemployment rate in September was 5.7%, which is lower than the 9.3% rate in January 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, and lower than the 6.1% rate in February 2020, just before the pandemic began. The rate was as low as 4.8% in April 2023.
As for Hispanics or Latinos, the unemployment rate in September was 5.1%, which is lower than the 8.5% rate in January 2021, but higher than the 4.3% rate in February 2020. In September 2022, the rate was 3.9%, which tied the record low first hit under the Trump administration.
Also, the number of Black and Hispanic or Latino people who are unemployed is down from when Biden and Harris took office. There were even fewer Black people unemployed in September than there were in February 2020.
Native- and Foreign-Born Employment
Trump followed his unsupported remarks about migrants taking Black and Hispanic jobs by falsely claiming that “the jobs created by Biden are all being taken by people coming into the country illegally.”
In September, employment of native-born workers was up nearly 7.6 million from January 2021. Meanwhile, employment of foreign-born workers increased by roughly 6.1 million in that period.
BLS says the foreign-born population, meaning those who weren’t citizens at birth, includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.” There is no employment breakdown for only people in the U.S. illegally.
Manufacturing jobs
Trump cherry-picked the data when he claimed in Michigan and North Carolina that “under Kamala Harris, this year alone, the United States has lost nearly 50,000 manufacturing jobs.”
It’s true that manufacturing jobs have declined by 49,000 since January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s also true that 778,000 manufacturing jobs were added in the three years prior to that, going back to the start of Biden’s presidency.
As we wrote, the trend for manufacturing jobs under both Presidents Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth after an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.
Price Increases
At multiple events, Trump misleadingly claimed that the typical family’s costs have increased by tens of thousands of dollars under Harris. For example, in Greenville, he said, “Kamala’s inflation has already cost the typical family over $30,000 in higher prices.”
According to a state inflation tracker produced by the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee, as of September, average household costs in the United States have risen by about $30,000 since January 2021. The estimate is based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data for state-level personal consumption expenditures, including food, shelter, energy and transportation.
But some economists have said that ignores the fact that real incomes have risen as well, minimizing the increase in prices. In an email, Gary Burtless, senior fellow emeritus in economic studies for the Brookings Institution, made the point to us that the BEA’s seasonally adjusted estimate of real disposable personal income, in 2017 dollars, is currently higher than it was at the end of Trump’s presidency. “[T]hese numbers show that Americans’ real (inflation-adjusted) after-tax incomes have been higher in the Biden Administration than they were at the close of the Trump Administration,” he said.
In addition, in July, the Treasury Department updated a report on “The Purchasing Power of American Households” that said, based on new earnings and consumer price data, “We find that in the year ending in the second quarter of 2024, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, plus an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year.”
Car Sales
In Detroit, Trump claimed: “U.S. car sales are down 38% since I left office.” Passenger cars have declined since 2020, although not as much as Trump claimed. Trump also ignores the rise in domestic light-weight trucks, including popular minivans and sport utility vehicles, or SUVs.
Average monthly retail sales of domestic passenger cars went down by 20.6% from 2020, Trump’s last year in office, to the first nine months of 2024, while sales of domestic light-weight trucks went up by 15.5%.
Retail sales of domestic cars generally have been on a downward trajectory for many years. Sales declined by 50.3% during Trump’s term, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (The figures on “domestic” cars include those assembled in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.) Meanwhile, sales of domestic light-weight trucks have been increasing. Those sales went up by 2.1% under Trump.
We can get approximately to Trump’s 38% figure by discounting 2020 entirely, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when sales of both cars and trucks went down. Measuring from 2019 to 2024, sales of domestic cars declined by 42.7%, but they also went down by 31.1% during Trump’s term through 2019.
Light-weight truck sales went up by 14% under Trump up until 2019, and they climbed another 3.4% since then.
Sales of all cars and light trucks in the U.S., domestic or foreign, declined under Trump and have gone up a bit under Biden. Sales totaled 15.5 million in 2023, up from 14.5 million in 2020 — but down from nearly 17 million in 2019. This year’s figures so far indicate a slight increase from 2023.
Mortgage Rates
As he does when he compares other statistics under his administration and Biden’s — see gas prices, below — Trump cherry-picks and exaggerates when it comes to mortgage interest rates.
In Lancaster and Greensboro, Trump wrongly claimed “when I was president, interest was 2.2%. Now it’s 10% and you can’t get any money, so it’s much higher than 10%.”
According to the Federal Reserve’s 30-year fixed rate mortgage average in the U.S., the rate hit a weekly low of 2.65% the first week of Jan. 7, 2021. That’s the lowest weekly rate in the Federal Reserve’s chart going back to 1971. Two weeks later, it was 2.77% in Trump’s last week in office. (The average rate during Trump’s presidency was 3.87%.)
Mortgage rates rose dramatically in 2022 and 2023, reaching a weekly peak of 7.79% in October 2023 (so, well short of 10%). The average rate was down to 6.44% for the week ending Oct. 17.
Immigration
Misleading Immigration Chart
At all of his rallies, Trump displayed a misleadingly labeled chart on illegal border crossings. Trump referred to the chart as “My all-time favorite graph,” because he had turned to gesture to it at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear.
The data in the chart is accurate, but some of the labeling is not.
“See that arrow on the bottom?” Trump said in Lancaster. “That arrow was my final day in office, and we had the lowest illegal immigration that we have had in the recorded history of our country,”
As we wrote in April when Trump began referring to the chart at rallies, the arrow on the chart that purports to point to when “Trump leaves office” actually points to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic.
They rose every month after that. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled and were higher than the month he took office.
In fact, apprehensions during the last three full months of Trump’s presidency were about 24.4% higher than the last three months under Biden, ending in September. The total number of apprehensions was also higher during Trump’s presidency than either of President Barack Obama’s four-year terms.
Apprehensions went up substantially under the Biden administration, but have dropped in recent months after Biden implemented new emergency policies to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally once apprehensions reach a certain level.
Emptying Jails/Mental Institutions
As he has in virtually every public speech over the past couple of years, Trump made the unsupported claim in all of his appearances we reviewed that other countries, such as Venezuela and Congo, are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.
In Greensboro, Trump called the U.S. a “dumping ground for the whole world to put their criminals into.”
Immigration experts told us there’s simply no evidence for that. One expert said Trump’s claim appeared to be “a total fabrication.” Trump hasn’t provided any credible support for it.
In Lancaster, Trump repeatedly singled out Venezuela, where, he said, “they opened up their prisons and they allowed the people to come out.” In his Oct. 18 Auburn Hills roundtable event, Trump added this as evidence: “Their crime is down 72% in Venezuela.”
As we have written, reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, 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.
“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,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.
He said the drop in crime is partly due to worsening economic and living conditions, which have caused nearly 8 million people to leave the country since 2014. The vast majority have settled in nearby South American countries.
False Convicted Murderers Claim
In virtually all of his recent appearances, Trump has offered some variation of the false claim that “under Kamala Harris 13,099 illegal alien convicted murderers are on the loose right now in the United States of America.” That’s the number of noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the vast majority entered before Biden took office. Many are in prison.
Here’s how Trump put it in Miami on Oct. 22: “We have 13,099, exactly. … This is during their three and a half year that they’ve been there. … These are people that were in prison, and they’re murderers. Some are up for the death penalty but some killed far more than one person. … Every one of them has been released into the United States of America.”
ICE’s non-detained docket, as it is known, shows that there were 13,099 noncitizens, who had been convicted of murder, in the U.S. but not in ICE custody, as of July 21, according to a letter sent by the ICE acting director to a Republican congressman on Sept. 25.
But as we wrote last month, the “vast majority” of these noncitizens — not just those who entered the country illegally — came to the United States prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” as the Department of Homeland Security said.
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” DHS said in a statement. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
Springfield, Ohio
In Lancaster, Trump said, “In one town in Ohio, a town of — think of this, a town of 52,000 people, they put 32,000 illegal migrants in this town, right? 32,000 illegal migrants into a 52,000-people town.”
There are several things wrong in Trump’s claim. First, he inflates the number of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. As we have written, Mayor Rob Rue put the city’s total immigrant population at between 12,000 and 15,000, which is also on the city’s FAQ page.
Also, no one “put” the mostly Haitian immigrants in Springfield. On its website, the city says, “No government entity is responsible for the influx of Haitians into Clark County. Once a person with Temporary Protected Status enters the country, they are free to locate wherever they choose.”
The influx of immigrants helped solve a labor shortage, the Wall Street Journal reported, but also strained the city’s services. In early September, Gov. Mike DeWine announced that the state would provide state troopers to help with traffic control and enforcement in Springfield and $2.5 million to help the city expand primary health care for its residents.
Finally, while Trump called them “illegal immigrants,” a city commissioner told us that “most of the Haitians living in Springfield do have Federal documents as well that allow them to be here.”
Aurora, Colorado
Trump claimed in multiple appearances that members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) have taken over communities like Aurora, Colorado. Trump’s claims were sparked by a viral video that showed heavily armed men entering an apartment complex in the city. And as we have reported, there is evidence that numerous Tren de Aragua gang members have been arrested trying to illegally cross the border into the U.S. Nonetheless, Aurora’s mayor and police chief say claims like Trump’s about the gang taking over the city are overblown.
“It’s the savage Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua,” Trump said in Detroit. “They were gang members in Venezuela. We let them into our country. By the way, they’re taking over parts of cities all over the place. But in Aurora, Colorado, and communities in all 50 states, this gang is terrorizing law-abiding citizens, including taking over multiple apartment complexes.”
In Lancaster, Trump said of the gang, “They’re taking over like Aurora and in Colorado.”
A press release issued on Sept. 11 by Aurora’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, and other city officials stated, “As for the perception and reality of public safety in Aurora, please understand that issues experienced at a select few properties do not apply to the city as a whole or large portions of it. TdA has not ‘taken over’ the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. Again, TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months.”
To that point, they wrote, the Aurora Police Department had “linked 10 people to TdA and has arrested eight of those people. Two of the eight individuals who were taken into custody were involved in a July shooting at one of the specific properties in the city that have experienced issues with TdA activity. In line with these arrests, we can also now confirm that criminal activity, including TdA issues, had significantly affected those properties.”
In August, the Aurora Police Department announced that while it considered TdA’s criminal activity in Aurora to be “isolated,” a regional task force was formed to address the gang’s growing criminal activities.
Nonetheless, Coffman and the police chief say the problems in Aurora are being overblown for political purposes.
“It’s a political environment right now going into the election,” Coffman said at a town hall on Oct. 26. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem. There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. … And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”
“Is there a problem now? … I don’t believe there is,” Coffman said.
“We did have a problem, there’s no question about it,” Coffman said. “There was a problem, but there was a law enforcement response to that problem. And I think there are are those who would like to say we have a problem and run that narrative all the way through the election.”
Police Chief Todd Chamberlain echoed that sentiment.
“This city is not overrun by TdA,” Chamberlain said at the town hall meeting. “This city is not controlled by TdA. I’m going to stand up in front of you right now and say that is an incredibly false narrative. It is a narrative that is not validated or backed up by any statistics, any data, any information.”
Closing the Border
Trump claimed that, without a bill from Congress, he was able to unilaterally “close the border.” He claimed that Harris “could walk into the White House, say ‘Wake Biden up, I want him to sign something’ and all he has to do is say, ‘close the border.’ He doesn’t need a bill.”
Actually, Trump tried that very thing as president — to bar migrants caught crossing into the U.S. illegally from pursuing asylum — and the courts blocked him.
In November 2018, as reports circulated about a “caravan” of migrants from Central America making their way through Mexico en route to the U.S. border, Trump issued a proclamation barring the entry of migrants unless they entered at ports of entry. The same day, the administration issued new regulations making those who entered the U.S. illegally between ports of entry ineligible for asylum.
A federal District Court judge in California temporarily halted Trump’s effort, after concluding that barring migrants who enter outside of designated ports of entry from seeking asylum violated federal immigration law, international law and “the expressed intent of Congress.”
Ultimately, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but its motion to stay the District Court ruling blocking enforcement of the policy was denied.
A little over a year later, as the pandemic hit, Trump invoked Title 42, a public health law that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally, even those who sought asylum. That proclamation was also being challenged in court and was heading toward the Supreme Court when the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended, and Biden lifted Title 42 in May 2023.
Immigration law experts told us the bipartisan Senate border bill Trump helped to kill would have granted the authority Trump talked about, in emergency situations.
In June, Biden enacted new measures to restrict asylum eligibility for those apprehended while trying to enter the U.S. illegally across the southern border. The order, as the Department of Homeland Security explained, “generally restricts asylum eligibility” when the number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally reaches a daily average of 2,500 encounters or more for seven straight days. That provision has contributed to a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings ever since.
A number of immigrant rights groups are challenging Biden’s emergency border measures in court.
Inflating Illegal Immigration Numbers
Trump repeatedly inflated the number of immigrants who crossed into the country illegally during the Biden administration.
“Twenty-one million people came in under their rule,” he said in Detroit. He added in Latrobe the following day, “What they’ve done to our country is unbelievable, allowing more than 21 million people into our country.”
As we have written, that’s double the total number of people caught trying to enter the country illegally (7.1 million, which includes repeat attempts), those who came to legal ports of entry without authorization to enter (1.2 million), and the estimated number who evaded capture (2 million). Comprehensive DHS data on the initial processing of these encounters shows that 2.9 million were removed by CBP and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or given other classifications, such as parole.
Opposition to Bipartisan Border Bill
In a bit of revisionist history, Trump mocked Democrats for saying he told senators to vote against the bipartisan border bill that failed in late January. “Ted, did I ever tell you not to sign that bill?” Trump said in Greenville, gesturing to North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd. “No, right? I didn’t tell anybody.” In Greensboro, Trump claimed that “the truth is I had nothing to do with” killing the bill.
Trump made it well known at the time that he opposed the bill, calling it “a great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party” and saying “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat” would vote for the bill.
In a Fox News interview in April, Republican Sen. James Lankford, one of the architects of the bill, said it was “painful” to watch as it “got stirred up in all the presidential politics, and several of my colleagues started looking for ways — after President Trump said, ‘Don’t fix anything during the presidential election. It’s the single biggest issue during the election. Don’t resolve this. We’ll resolve it next year.’ — Quite a few of my colleagues backed up, looked for a reason to shoot against it and then walked away.”
“Former President Trump has indicated to senators that he does not want us to solve the problem at the border,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said in late January. “He wants to lay the blame at the border at Biden.”
Indeed, in a speech in Las Vegas on Jan. 27, Trump seemed happy to take credit for killing the bill.
“I noticed a lot of the senators, a lot of the senators are trying to say respectfully, they’re blaming it on me,” Trump said of the death of the bill. “I said, ‘That’s okay. Please blame it on me, please,’ because they were getting ready to pass a very bad bill.”
Border Bill Misinformation
In Miami, Trump wrongly said of the Senate bipartisan border bill, “They keep bringing up a phony bill, that bill. The bill was horrible, 2 million people are allowed in.”
As we wrote earlier this year, much of the controversy centered on a section of the bill that would have provided emergency authority to the administration to “summarily remove” people who cross into the U.S. illegally between ports of entry, even if they are seeking asylum. Trump and other Republicans claimed the bill would have permitted up to 5,000 illegal entries per day — or 1,825,000 per year, which Trump rounded up to 2 million. That’s not accurate.
We’ll let Lankford, one of the architects of the bill and one of the most conservative members of the Senate, explain.
“This common misnomer of the 5,000 a day — some of my [Republican] colleagues have mentioned this — that’s actually factually not true,” Lankford said in a Fox News interview in April. “The way the bill was set up is the very first person that came across would have been detained, quickly screened and deported. So it was a very rapid turnaround from the very first person that came across the border. But it also did set up an extreme measure that if we had these large caravans and other folks that come in and we get 5,000, it takes away due process when you get to that number and they’re just detained and deported. So the first person detained, screened quickly and deported. If you get to 5,000 they’re just detained and deported. But it doesn’t wait till 5,000 to do something. It did it at the very first moment. That was the great misnomer.”
Migrants and Medicare, Social Security
In Latrobe, while talking about illegal immigration, Trump falsely claimed that “Kamala’s invasion is also bankrupting Medicare and Social Security.”
The fact that the trust funds for the Medicare and Social Security programs are financially unstable is not because of illegal immigration. People in the country illegally are generally not eligible to receive benefits through either entitlement program. However, millions of those individuals contribute to those programs anyway by paying payroll taxes on their earned wages.
Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors reduced immigration, reported in 2023, “Illegal immigration improves the finances of Social Security and Medicare for a simple reason: Although illegal immigrants are generally not eligible to collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, many still pay taxes into the system. These taxes function as free contributions to the trust funds, as long as the illegal immigrants remain ineligible for benefits.”
If people in the country illegally were granted amnesty, allowing them to permanently live in the U.S., and made eligible for benefits, they would become a net drain on the programs, the CIS said, because they would receive more in benefits than the pay in taxes. On her campaign website, Harris says she supports “an earned pathway to citizenship” for people illegally in the country, but she has not detailed how that would work. It’s also not clear that Congress would support such a plan.
Human Trafficking
Trump claimed that human trafficking was 10 times, 12 times, or 15 or 16 times higher than the level it was when he left office. We found no evidence for such figures, and his campaign didn’t provide any evidence.
In Greenville, Trump claimed that his administration had “stopped” human trafficking, saying “we would check in every car, every trunk in every car where they put a lot of them,” but now the number was up “10 times more.” At the Detroit rally, he said the day he left office, “They had human trafficking at a level, the lowest level. Now it’s about 12 times higher.” And at the Miami event, he said that trafficking was up “15 or 16 times” the level of four years ago, again saying, “they put them mostly in trunks of cars.” Trump made those comments when talking about illegal immigration at the southern border.
Amy Farrell, director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, researches human trafficking and the criminal justice system. She told us she had “no idea” where Trump’s figures were coming from. There’s “no good measure of the phenomenon,” she explained.
We can look at prosecutions, arrests and other response measures. However, the data we have on arrests or prosecutions of human trafficking don’t show us what’s happening at the border. Farrell said most federally prosecuted sex trafficking cases, and those identified locally, are domestic cases, not cases involving foreign nationals. Sex trafficking cases have been steadily rising over a decade or so, due to more investigation and prosecution of human trafficking, she said.
Farrell also said Trump’s description of stopping trafficking by finding victims in the trunks of cars at the border “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” as that’s not what typically happens. “We very rarely interdict people who are victims of trafficking at the border,” she said. People can illegally cross the border and later be exploited by nefarious people.
In 2019, when we looked into Trump’s claims tying illegal immigration to human trafficking, experts told us that typically the cases they deal with concerning foreign nationals are people brought through legal ports of entry, such as airports and land border control points.
Applications for T nonimmigrant status, known as the T visa, have increased significantly, but nowhere near the levels Trump cited. The T visa is for noncitizen victims who are in the U.S. or at a legal port of entry and have assisted authorities, when requested, with the investigation or prosecution of trafficking crimes. The visa is granted for up to four years, and approvals are capped at 5,000 per year, a figure that has never been reached.
The numbers are tricky, because it takes more than a year on average for applications for be adjudicated, so approvals for one year represent mostly applications that had been received in prior years. Approvals in fiscal year 2023 — 2,181 — were only 9% higher than in fiscal 2020. Applications, however, tripled from 2,150 in 2020 to 8,598 in 2023.
Martina Vandenberg, founder and president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, referred us to data available in State Department reports on investigations opened by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security. There were 1,282 investigations by DHS in fiscal year 2023, a 35% increase from the number in fiscal 2020. The DOJ investigations were nearly the same in those years: 664 and 663. There was about a 72% increase in new clients served by DOJ-funded programs, but funding for those programs also increased.
Figures from the National Human Trafficking Hotline don’t indicate a 10-fold or more increase in trafficking, or any measurable increase for that matter. The hotline has figures on the “signals” it receives, meaning calls, texts and other tips on trafficking instances, and the number of signals that come from victims or survivors of trafficking. Those numbers were actually lower in 2023 than they were in 2020, though the figures fluctuate and we don’t think much should be read into that.
The increase in immigration flows and apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border overall under the Biden administration could indicate that more people are at risk of trafficking. The most recent State Department report said: “Regional instability combined with U.S. asylum policies and processes resulting in large numbers of migrants and asylum-seekers along the southern border contributes to increased risks of human trafficking by establishing high concentrations of vulnerable populations, including many unaccompanied migrant children.”
Migrant Children ‘Missing’
“Do you know that … 325,000 children are dead or missing under their [watch]. They came across the border or they didn’t,” Trump said at the town hall in Lancaster, distorting a report from DHS. “They’re all dead, missing, or into sex slavery or slavery.” Trump repeated the talking point in Miami, saying, “It’s actually 325,000 children are missing, sex slaves, slaves — or dead.”
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said about that many unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. The report did not say they were “missing.”
The report said that more than 32,000 minors did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, which includes time during the Trump and Biden administrations. In addition, as of May 2024, ICE had not issued a Notice to Appear in court to more than 291,000 minors, the report said. Such notices are sent at the start of removal proceedings.
“By not issuing NTAs to all UCs [unaccompanied children], ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety,” the report said. “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
In a response letter included as an appendix to the report, ICE indicated that it may delay sending notices for various reasons, including if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Noncitizens and ‘Welfare’
In Greensboro, Trump claimed that “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense.” Meanwhile, in Greenville, he promised that he “will ban all welfare and federal benefits for illegals” if elected.
But, under a 1996 federal law, people in the U.S. illegally are already broadly disqualified from collecting federal benefits from government programs, with only limited exceptions.
As the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that researches immigration issues, said in an October explainer: “Noncitizens — a term that covers immigrants of all statuses except for naturalized citizens — are generally ineligible for federally funded programs including the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) if they are not refugees or in a refugee-like status and have not spent five years with a green card (or other such status). Children can access SNAP during their first five years on a green card, and in some states that have elected to supplement federal coverage with their own resources, children and pregnant women can access Medicaid and/or CHIP during their first five years as legal permanent residents.”
Other than the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, which provides nutrition and health services for pregnant and postpartum women and young children, the policy institute said, “unauthorized immigrants are generally ineligible for federally funded supports except for emergency Medicaid, primary and preventive health care at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), free/reduced school lunch, and short-term access to shelters and soup kitchens in emergency situations.”
Trump’s Wall
Trump wrongly said he built 571 miles of wall. It was 458 miles and most of it, 373 miles, was replacement barriers for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated, according to a January 2021 Customs and Border Protection status report. Just 52 miles of it was added in places where there was no wall before.
Trump also falsely said he “built much more than I said I was going to build.”
The border is significantly more robust than when Trump took office, but including barriers that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers, covering about 36% of the total southwest border. That is far less than the 1,000-mile-long wall that Trump promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign.
Trump went on to claim that “we had the safest border in the history of our country.” As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year of Obama’s term.
CBP One App
In Latrobe, Trump misrepresented the CBP One App, which he said the Biden administration created “for the criminal cartels to call up” and ask “where do I dispose of my illegal migrants and they tell you where to drop them off.” That’s not the app’s purpose.
The CBP One app was launched in January 2023 for migrants in Mexico who want to make an appointment to request asylum or parole at a legal port of entry in the U.S. DHS says the process is “safer, humane, and more orderly” than processing between ports of entry, where migrants illegally cross the border and wait to be apprehended by border officials.
To get an appointment, migrants must submit information about themselves, including contact information and a photo. At the appointment, they are screened and could be subject to expedited removal, but the majority are released into the U.S. with a notice to appear in immigration court, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that researches immigration issues, told us when we wrote about immigration in February.
CBP says, through September, more than 852,000 people have made appointments with the app.
Harris on ICE
Trump wrongly claimed “Kamala Harris vowed to abolish ICE. … And she wants to get rid of them. She wants to get rid of ICE.”
While serving as a senator in June 2018, Harris was critical of the way ICE operated during the Trump administration — such as its enforcement of Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents who were detained for entering the U.S. illegally. Harris said the government should “critically reexamine” ICE’s role, adding that might mean “starting from scratch.”
In a subsequent interview in July 2019, Harris was asked if she would get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
“I would not,” Harris said. “We need to restructure and reform it. … We need to deal with it and fix it, but I do not believe in getting rid of it.” Several times, Harris added, “I believe in border security.”
Harris called for reexamining the way ICE was functioning under the Trump administration, and she talked about the possibility of “starting from scratch.” But she never called for abolishing the agency and its functions altogether.
Border Czar
Trump repeated the false claim that Harris was the “border czar” in charge of illegal immigration at the U.S. border with Mexico.
“She doesn’t want to be called border czar. But you know what? I don’t care,” Trump said in Latrobe. Biden “put her in charge of the border,” he said.
As we’ve written, Biden asked Harris in March 2021 to lead federal efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.
Harris’ responsibility did not include security at the southern border, as the “border czar” title implies. That’s the job of DHS, which has been led by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas since February 2021.
Decriminalizing Border Crossings
A video played at several Trump rallies includes a quote from Harris saying, “I am in favor of saying that we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented and cross the border as criminals.”
That comes from a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View.” Harris went on to say, “I would not make it a crime punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue, but not a criminal enforcement issue.”
That was her position in 2019. But Harris has made it clear that is no longer her position.
“I do not believe in decriminalizing border crossings and I’ve not done that as vice president,” Harris said in an interview on Fox News on Oct. 17. ”I will not do that as president.”
Energy
Energy Price Promise
In multiple rallies, Trump has made the dubious pledge that, if elected, he would “cut your energy prices in half within 12 months” of taking office by increasing energy production. “We will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in Detroit. “I will cut your energy prices in half within 12 months. … That’s going to bring everything down.” Experts we interviewed didn’t see a way for Trump to cut energy bills by that much.
As we’ve written, economists and energy experts said increasing the domestic supply of oil and natural gas — if worldwide demand stayed constant — could lower prices, at least somewhat or for a short period of time. But ramping up the supply is a decision oil and gas companies have to make, and they wouldn’t be inclined to produce more for a lower price. And even if they could be incentivized to produce more oil and gas for less in profit, international producers would react to the increased U.S. supply by pulling back on their production.
Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us: “My net-net is that Trump would not be able to deliver on this promise unless the global economy craters, the US cuts itself off from global energy markets, and US producers are convinced to produce at price levels that would not sustain operations.”
Energy Independence
As he often does, Trump in Greenville and at other rallies misleadingly contrasted his administration with Biden and Harris’ saying, “Four years ago, we were energy independent. Can you believe it? … Now we’re buying tar from Venezuela.” But by Trump’s definition, the country remains energy independent under the Biden-Harris administration.
What Trump likely means is that the U.S. either produced more energy than it consumed, or exported more energy than it imported. But as we’ve written, the U.S. never stopped importing sources of energy, including crude oil, from other countries during Trump’s administration.
During Trump’s presidency, after years trending in that direction, the U.S. did hit a tipping point where exports of primary energy exceeded energy imports from foreign sources in 2019 — the first time that had happened since 1952, according to the Energy Information Administration. It happened again in 2020.
But contrary to Trump’s suggestion, the U.S., during Biden’s presidency, continues to export more energy, including petroleum, than it imports, and it produces more energy than it consumes. Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas under Biden.
Gas Price Comparison
“Our energy was incredible,” Trump said in Greenville. “We had it down to $1.87 a gallon, and it went up to five and a half dollars.” He’s cherry-picking on the front end and exaggerating on the back end.
Gasoline prices did dip to $1.87 in May 2020 when Trump was president, but that was during the pandemic when gasoline usage plummeted. Prices were the lowest in Trump’s presidency that month and the month before, according to the EIA. Prices rose to $2.33 per gallon in January 2021, when Trump left office. That’s almost exactly the price of gasoline when Trump took office in January 2017, $2.35.
Under Biden, the price of gas rose to a peak of $4.93 in June 2022, mostly as a result of post-pandemic global supply issues and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has dropped since, and was $3.14 this month. Importantly, as we have written numerous times, U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline.
Crude Oil Reserves
In his Greensboro remarks, Trump said that during his administration drilling would increase because “we have more liquid gold than anybody in the world.” That’s not accurate.
The U.S. already produces more crude oil than any other country. But it does not have more proven crude oil reserves than any other country – a false claim that Trump regularly makes.
The EIA says proved reserves “are the estimated quantities of all liquids defined as crude oil, which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions.”
As of 2023, Venezuela, with approximately 303 billion barrels, had the largest estimated proven crude oil reserves, according to the EIA’s February 2024 country analysis brief on Venezuela, which cited 2023 data from the Oil & Gas Journal. Russia and Saudi Arabia are two of the seven other countries ahead of the U.S, which had fewer than 100 billion barrels and ranked ninth.
Harris on Fracking
“She wants to ban fracking,” Trump said in Detroit, adding in Pennsylvania, “you know she’s going to ban fracking, right? 100%.”
When she was a candidate in the 2020 race for president, Harris said that she was opposed to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. During a September 2019 CNN town hall, Harris was asked by a climate activist if she would commit to a federal ban on fracking because of environmental concerns for local communities. Harris answered, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, so yes.”
Harris has since changed her position. In an Aug. 29 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris said, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
In Miami, Trump repeated his false claim that the Biden administration “spent $9 billion for eight charging stations” for electric vehicles, adding that “if you did the whole country, you would have spent $30 trillion.”
Trump appears to be distorting media articles from earlier this year on the slow progress at that point of building charging stations with $7.5 billion approved by Congress to help construct a network of EV chargers across the country over five years. It’s enough money to help build thousands of charging stations and more than 30,000 individual charging ports, experts said.
The new charging stations are being built with the federal money awarded to states, as well as private funding, and not all of the $7.5 billion has been awarded yet.
In mid-August, when we wrote about this claim, the Federal Highway Administration told us the funding had helped build 15 charging stations that had 61 charging ports, and another 14,900 ports were in progress.
As for Trump’s claim that it would cost $30 trillion to build EV stations across the country, that’s a significant inflation of his already false claims this summer that it would cost $5 trillion or $10 trillion. Pete Gould, a policy expert in transportation and a lobbyist for the EV and charging industry, told E&E News that Trump’s multitrillion figures “sound too ridiculous to be true … because they aren’t true.”
At the Miami event, Trump went on to make the false claim that EV semi-trucks would “weigh two and a half” times the weight of regular gasoline or diesel trucks and, therefore, “you’d have to rebuild every bridge in the United States.” The Washington Post Fact Checker called that claim “nonsense,” writing that there’s a legal weight limit for all semi-trucks, EV or otherwise, of 80,000 pounds, a weight that bridges are constructed to withstand.
More on EVs
In Detroit and Greenville, Trump said, if elected, he “will terminate Kamala’s insane electric vehicle mandate.” But there is no such EV mandate.
In March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its finalized fuel efficiency standards for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles. The new standards are for model years 2027 through 2032 and will remain in place thereafter unless the rules are rescinded or new ones are adopted.
Those Biden administration regulations, which aim to reduce pollution from tailpipe emissions, could greatly increase the number of electric vehicles sold in the U.S. But the regulations do not mean that U.S. residents will only be allowed to buy and drive EVs. Policy experts previously told us that carmakers would have flexibility in how they meet the new federal standards, including by making gas-powered vehicles, or those with internal combustion engines, more efficient.
Sea Level Rise
Trump cast doubt on climate change by telling his Greensboro audience that “nuclear weapons and having stupid people running our country” is “the real global warming, not this nonsense of the ocean’s going to rise over the next 400 years by one-eighth of an inch, and we’re going to be wiped out.”
But the claim that the ocean will rise by less than an inch over four centuries is false. As we’ve reported, the current rate of sea level rise is already a little more than one-eighth of an inch annually. According to the latest data from NASA, the current rate of global sea level rise is 4.2 millimeters, or 0.17 inches, per year.
Taxes
80% Tax Rate Falsehood
Harris “wants to raise your taxes to 70% or 80%,” Trump falsely said in Lancaster.
At rallies, Trump also has been playing a video montage that includes a clip of Megan McCain on ABC’s “The View” saying, “Everything from a 70 to 80% tax rate,” followed by Harris saying, “I think that’s fantastic.”
Harris didn’t endorse that top federal tax rate. And the video is clipped in a very misleading way.
Trump’s claim is also based on that January 2019 interview of Harris on “The View,” and here’s how it actually played out: McCain asked Harris if she believed that “socialist left” policies proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, such as a “70% to 80% tax rate,” could splinter the Democratic Party.
“No.” Harris said. “I think she is challenging the status quo. I think that’s fantastic.”
“I think that she is introducing bold ideas that should be discussed,” Harris said. “And I think it’s good for the party, and frankly I think it’s good for the country. Let’s look at the bold ideas and I’m eager that we have those discussions. And when we are able to defend the status quo, then do it. And if there’s not merit to that, then let’s explore new ideas.”
At the time, Ocasio-Cortez had floated increasing the top income tax rate to 70% or more — but only for U.S. residents making at least $10 million annually. But Harris never said she supported that hypothetical policy.
While running for president in 2019, Harris proposed raising the top income tax rate on the top 1% of earners back to 39.6%. This election, she has similarly proposed increasing the top rate back to 39.6% for individuals earning more than $400,000 or married couples making more than $450,000. Trump reduced the top rate to 37% in 2017, when he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Video Distorts Harris’ Tax Comments
At several rallies, Trump directed the audience’s attention to a video of an ad that we fact-checked in early October. We concluded it was a “classic example of how political ads mislead viewers by using out-of-context quotes.”
The ad includes a truncated quote from the New York Times saying Harris “is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” The rest of that sentence in the Times said: “on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.” The ad also features a clip of Harris saying, “Taxes are going to have to go up.” In the July 2019 event, Harris actually said, “Estate taxes are going to have to go up for the richest Americans.”
A narrator in the video says, “Kamala’s plan will raise families’ taxes by nearly $2,600 a year,” citing the Tax Foundation on May 7. As we wrote, “That’s not what the Tax Foundation said.”
Instead, the Tax Foundation article analyzed the impact on taxpayers if the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire at the end of 2025, as scheduled. “Without congressional action, most taxpayers will see a notable tax increase relative to current policy in 2026,” the Tax Foundation said.
The video assumes — without explicitly saying so — that Harris’ “plan” is to let all of the individual tax cuts in the 2017 act expire. But while Harris hasn’t detailed how she would handle that expiration, she has said she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans,” as her economic policy book says.
Looking at the entirety of Harris’ proposals — and not including an extension of the TCJA cuts, the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Harris’ tax proposals on Oct. 16 found that her plans generally “would redistribute income from high earners to low earners.”
Misleading Jobs Claim
In Detroit, Trump said Harris’ “proposals are estimated to kill almost a million full-time jobs” and that if he is elected, “You’re going to have jobs coming in like never before.”
Trump is referring to an analysis of Harris’ tax plans from the Tax Foundation, which concluded her policies would lead to 786,000 fewer jobs over 10 years. So Trump’s claim of 1 million is a very healthy rounding up.
By contrast, the Tax Foundation concluded that Trump’s tax proposals would increase employment by 597,000 full-time equivalent jobs (though it estimated Trump’s plans would add more than Harris’ to the country’s budget deficits).
But one of the major wild cards in estimating the impact of Harris’ plans is the uncertainty of how she would handle the expiring individual tax cuts contained in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Harris has not specifically addressed her position on the tax cuts set to expire at the end of 2025, saying only that she supports Biden’s pledge that “when it relates to anybody making less than $400,000 a year, your taxes will not go up.” When we asked the Harris campaign in early October about her position, the campaign pointed us to a line in Harris’ economic policy book that says she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans.”
If that means Harris would allow the tax cuts to expire only for those making more than $400,000, that could impact the Tax Foundation’s estimates for jobs lost under her policies, Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation told us via email. But a lot would depend on how she implemented the cutoffs, York said, and the extent of any tax hikes Harris might propose to offset the loss in revenue.
“Harris has not provided enough specifics on how she would address the expirations for us to be able to model it,” York said.
Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget clearly stated that he supported extending the TCJA tax cuts for people earning less than $400,000, and that he would offset the cost by enacting new taxes on “wealthy people and big corporations” so that the tax extensions would not add to the debt.
“Harris would presumably do something along those lines but has not specified whether that means extending all the expiring provisions, including the offsets that could potentially raise taxes on some of those taxpayers, nor specified what tax increases she would use to pay for that partial extension,” York said. “It is possible that the tax increases used to pay for the extension could offset the economic boost from continuing the tax cuts, but since none of it has been spelled out in detail, we simply don’t know.”
What if Harris simply extended the tax cuts to people making less than $400,000 without any commensurate tax hikes to offset the cost?
“Adding $2 trillion of deficit-financed individual income tax cuts would reduce the projected decline in jobs,” York said.
Some economists have reached different conclusions about the impact of Harris’ and Trump’s policy proposals on jobs.
“Job growth is expected to continue under either Harris or Trump due to underlying secular trends, regardless of their policies,” Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told us via email. “However, if the question is whether their plans would create additional jobs, the answer is no.”
An analysis of the candidates’ tax plans by the Penn Wharton Budget Model projected “a reduction in total hours worked of 0.7% under Harris after 10 years and 0.3% under Trump,” Smetters said.
An analysis of the economic consequences of the Trump and Harris proposals by Moody’s Analytics concluded that there would be more jobs under a Harris administration, if there is a divided Congress.
Corporate Tax Rate
In Detroit, Trump claimed, “So we brought the rate down and you saw this from close to 40% to 21%.” As we wrote recently, while Trump often says he cut the corporate tax rate from 39% to 21%, the federal statutory corporate tax rate was actually 35% prior to the implementation of the TCJA, which lowered the rate to 21%. Trump is including the federal tax plus the average of state and local taxes to get to “close to 40%.” But if those are included, then the current rate is roughly 25.8%, not 21%.
Not the ‘Largest Tax Cut’
Sheer repetition has not made Trump’s claim to have delivered the largest tax cut in American history true.
It is one of Trump’s most enduring claims. 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 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
In Miami, Trump insisted, “We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.” But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in 2017 that Reagan still holds the modern record for the largest tax cut as a percentage of GDP.
Defense/Military
ISIS
Trump boasted, “I’m the one that defeated ISIS. … And I did it in a matter of weeks. It’s supposed to take five years, seven years.” It took a lot longer than “weeks.”
As we wrote in 2018, a U.S.-led coalition had retaken about 50% of the land controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, prior to Trump taking office on Jan. 20, 2017. In Trump’s first year, the coalition had recaptured nearly all of the remaining land.
But it wasn’t until late March 2019 — more than two years into the Trump presidency — that the 79-member U.S.-led coalition took control of all ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.
Missile Defense Shield
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to build a missile defense system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome to protect the U.S. from attack, as he did again in Detroit and Greenville. But experts told us such a system would not be practical in defending the U.S.
The system used by Israel in defense against its neighboring adversaries “detects, assesses and intercepts a variety of shorter-range targets such as rockets, artillery and mortars,” according to Raytheon, the company that works with Israel on its defense system. “Iron Dome’s Tamir missile knocks down incoming threats launched from ranges” of 2.5 to 43.5 miles.
Stephen Biddle, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that “against the normal threats to U.S. security, the Iron Dome is not a useful system.” Biddle said, “Iron Dome is designed to deal with short-range threats,” not long-range ballistic missiles fired from adversaries such as China, Russia or North Korea. “If the North Koreans launched intercontinental ballistic missiles at the U.S., an Iron Dome would not be able to intercept” the missiles reentering the atmosphere aimed at a target in the U.S., Biddle explained.
Military Deaths in Afghanistan
While speaking in Greensboro about the Biden administration’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, which resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers at the hands of suicide bombers, Trump repeated a false claim that the U.S. “didn’t lose one soldier in 18 months” at the end of Trump’s presidency.
In fact, there were 12 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan in the last six months of 2019 and another 11 killed in 2020, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. Eight of the deaths in the second half of 2019 were in combat and four of the deaths in 2020 were in combat.
Military Spending
As he has often over the years, Trump in Detroit claimed, “I rebuilt our military.” But as we have written, the U.S. under Trump didn’t really spend much more on the military than it did under his predecessor, Obama.
The Defense Department budgets passed under Trump totaled $2.9 trillion. That’s larger, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the $2.7 trillion budgeted in the last four years under Obama, but the budgets in Obama’s first four years were nearly $3.3 trillion.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told PolitiFact Trump’s claim amounts to hyperbole, that the net increase in military spending under Trump was about “$400 billion total compared with earlier expectations.”
“Most weapons are the same as before,” O’Hanlon told PolitiFact. “There is more continuity than change in defense policy from Obama to Trump.”
O’Hanlon told us via email that the state of the military during Trump’s four years in office was “a solid step due to the work of two [secretaries of defense] that he fired! But things were pretty good before him and continued to improve after.”
VA Choice
As he has numerous times in the past, Trump falsely claimed that he got VA Choice approved after “they [had] been trying for 58 years.” As we have written, the bipartisan Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act was signed in 2014 by Obama, giving veterans facing long wait times an option to get care outside the VA system.
“We did Choice,” Trump said in Greensboro. “So if … one of our great heroes had to wait for a doctor, they could go out if they had to wait more than one day. They go out and they get a doctor, we pay the bill,” eliminating the sometimes monthslong delays.
As we said, the Veterans Choice Program was created by legislation in 2014. It garnered a 91-3 vote in the Senate and a 420-5 vote in the House, and came after a scandal over wait times at Veterans Affairs facilities.
When Trump took office, he continued the program, signing legislation to provide funding and to eliminate the expiration date. In June 2018, Trump signed the bipartisan VA MISSION Act, which called for consolidating the Veterans Choice program and other private-care options into a new Veterans Community Care Program.
Bagram Air Base
In Lancaster, Trump repeated the false claim that the U.S. would never have abandoned Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan if he had remained president.
“And we were going to keep the big air base at Bagram because it’s one hour away, spent billions and billions of dollars, just about the biggest, most powerful longest runways in the world,” Trump said. “We gave it to China. They gave it to China. China is now operating. We were one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it up. Would have never happened, all of these things.”
As we’ve written before, in 2020 Trump had reached a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from all bases in Afghanistan. The Doha agreement said the U.S. and coalition forces “will complete the withdrawal of their remaining forces from Afghanistan” by May 1, 2021 — which Biden delayed until Aug. 31, 2021. A State Department statement issued on the day the deal was signed in February 2020 said, “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all forces from remaining bases.”
On July 6, 2021, U.S. forces were pulled out of Bagram, as we’ve written.
Days before the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, Trump said, “We should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China.” But we could find no statements by Trump while he was in office about maintaining an American presence at Bagram. The pact he reached with the Taliban called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all the bases in Afghanistan.
Military Equipment Left in Afghanistan
Trump greatly exaggerated the amount of equipment left to the Taliban after the military withdrawal from Afghanistan — a withdrawal that, again, was initiated by his administration but completed by the Biden administration in August 2021.
“We gave them tens of billions of dollars worth of brand new military equipment that I bought, I bought, and they gave it away to the Taliban,” Trump said in Detroit.
Trump often cites a figure of $85 billion, but that is nearly the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. That wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.
In Detroit, Trump said more vaguely, “tens of billions of dollars,” but that’s still a gross exaggeration. CNN reported in April 2022 that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.
Crime/Guns
Falsehood on Gun Ban
In nearly all of his events, Trump made some version of the claim that Harris will take away people’s guns.
“She pledged to confiscate your guns and endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership,” Trump said in Greenville. “She’s going to do it 100%.”
But Harris has never proposed a federal ban on handguns, although, as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2005, she supported a local ballot measure that would have banned residents from possessing handguns.
Also, she previously called for a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” only. Her campaign told us that she said no longer supports requiring the buyback program she proposed during her 2020 presidential campaign.
During a Sept. 17 event with the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris said, “I am a gun owner, and Tim Walz is a gun owner, and we’re not trying to take anybody’s guns away from them. But we do need an assault weapons ban.”
Nonviolent Crimes in California
In Detroit and Greensboro, Trump distorted the facts when he claimed that Harris, as the attorney general of California, “redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon and rape of an unconscious person as a totally nonviolent crime.”
As we’ve written, Harris did no such thing. The California penal code specifies 23 crimes as a “violent felony,” saying they “merit special consideration when imposing a sentence to display society’s condemnation for these extraordinary crimes of violence against the person.” The list includes sexual abuse of a child, rape and “great bodily injury,” as violations of specific laws. Not everything that would be considered violent is on the list, which makes any felonies not specified technically “nonviolent.”
Nationwide Crime
Trump falsely insisted in Lancaster, despite FBI crime data to the contrary, “We had the worst crime that we have ever had in the last year.” In that same speech, as well as in Greensboro, Trump claimed crime is up 45% and that FBI data only showed crime going down because “they didn’t report certain little areas of the country like the worst areas in the country for crime.”
Crime statistics compiled by the FBI and other sources show an increase in violent crime, notably murders, in 2020 — Trump’s last year in office — and a decline since. The FBI recently revised its 2021 and 2022 figures, but that doesn’t change that overall trend. (We detailed the revisions in our recent story “Crime Stats Still Show a Decline Since 2020.” Part of the reason for the size of the revision was the switch to a new reporting system, and low participation rates in the first year of the switch. But contrary to Trump’s claim, the participation rates for the most recent years is much higher.)
The number and rate per 100,000 population for violent crime overall, as well as for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, all went down from 2020 to 2023, according to the FBI-compiled statistics. The violent crime rate dropped by 22.5 points and the murder rate declined by 0.9 points. The number of murders decreased by 14.5%. (For these figures, see the Crime in the United States Annual Reports here and download the CIUS Estimations file for 2023. See Table 1.)
As we have reported, other sources of crime stats show the same trend. The Major Cities Chiefs Association reports, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show a 9.1% decrease in the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities from 2020 to 2023, and a further decline for the first half of 2024. As of early this month, AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, reported a 17.9% decrease in murders in more than 250 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same points in 2023.
As for Trump’s claim that crime last year was the worst that it has ever been — not only is it slightly lower than 2020, it is far, far lower than it was in the 1990s.
Trump has criticized the FBI data as “fake” — it is not — and often instead cites data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks a sample of people if they have been the victim of various crimes. (The FBI statistics are based on crimes reported to state and local law enforcement.)
The NCVS indicates that violent crimes dropped a bit between 2022 and 2023. The number of crimes was about 41% higher between 2020 and 2023 — which is perhaps where Trump derived his figure — but the number of violent crimes in 2023 was nearly identical to the number in 2018. The survey also has its own limitations, and it doesn’t measure murder, as we’ve explained.
‘Defund the Police’
In multiple appearances, Trump falsely claimed that Harris “was an original creator of the defund the police movement,” adding “and anybody who wants to defund the police even for a day or a week is not worthy of being president of the United States.” In other speeches, Trump described Harris as “one of the leaders” of the defund the police movement.
As we have written, there is no agreed upon definition for the term “defund the police.” Some critics of the police, who believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement, really do want to abolish police forces and replace them with other community safety entities. Others advocate shifting some money and functions away from police departments to social service agencies.
In a series of interviews in mid-June 2020, Harris carefully drew out her position on the defund the police movement that arose in the wake of protests and riots in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed after a white police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
In her interviews, Harris talked about “reimagining public safety and how we achieve it.” The answer, she said, is not “more police on the streets” but rather investing more in struggling communities — in things such as education, job creation, affordable housing and health care — as a way to make them safer. She never agreed that that meant slashing or eliminating police budgets.
“We have to stop militarization of police,” Harris said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on June 9, 2020. “But that doesn’t mean we get rid of police. Of course not. We have to be practical about this.”
In that same interview, however, she said she applauded then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposal to reallocate about $150 million from policing to health and youth initiatives. And she again stressed the need to “invest in communities” to make them healthy and safer.
Miscellaneous
FEMA
While talking about Hurricane Helene in Greensboro, Trump falsely claimed that Harris spent federal funding intended for disaster relief “to provide shelter and benefits to illegal aliens.”
“You know, they’re going to probably have to call an emergency meeting, a special session of Congress, because the illegal migrants, many of them killers, many of them drug dealers, many of them released from prison, have taken the money,” Trump said. “Money that they were supposed to spend in North Carolina and Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina. The money was supposed to be spent in those states and they don’t have the money now.”
As we’ve written, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that no funds intended for hurricane recovery have been diverted to programs that respond to illegal immigration. Money for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is appropriated by Congress separately from money that lawmakers also authorize for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which makes payments to state and local entities that provide housing and other services to migrants processed and released by DHS. FEMA helps administer the grants for the Shelter and Services Program, but the funds come from the budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a different agency.
FEMA said it has “enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs,” but may need additional federal funding in the future.
Transgender Surgeries
In Miami, Trump falsely claimed that Harris “was in favor of sex changes for prisoners at their will, paid for by the government.” Harris expressed support in a 2019 candidate questionnaire for “medically necessary” gender-affirming care, including surgical care, for federal prisoners and detainees — not operations at will. Legal rulings have found the government is obligated to provide such medically necessary care.
Trump similarly said in Greenville that Harris “called for free sex changes for illegal aliens in detention. … They’re in detention, they want to have the operation,” suggesting migrants in detention could have the operation if they wanted it.
As we’ve explained, the Constitution obligates the government to provide necessary medical care for prisoners. Two federal transgender prisoners have received gender-affirming surgery, after suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The surgeries occurred during the Biden administration. But as the New York Times recently reported, a 2018 BOP budget memo — issued during Trump’s administration — indicated that the agency considered the government “obligated to pay for a prisoner’s ‘surgery’ if it was deemed medically necessary.”
The memo said: “Medical care may include pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., cross-gender hormone therapy), hair removal and surgery (if individualized assessment indicates surgical intervention is applicable).” The Times said that federal inmates received gender-affirming hormone therapy during the Trump administration.
In Miami, Trump also claimed that Harris had changed her position. “And now, she says, ‘No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.’” But that’s not what she said. In an Oct. 16 Fox News interview, she said she would “follow the law.”
We didn’t find any record of immigrant detainees having received these surgeries. Time spent in ICE custody is typically shorter than two months. Federal inmates have a one-year waiting period before they can seek gender-affirming surgery.
Right to Try
In Lancaster, Trump touted the Right to Try Act that he signed into law in 2018, saying: “And nobody really wanted to do it, but we did it. I forced it on them. We have saved thousands and thousands of lives.” But there is no evidence that the program that allows patients to request access to experimental medical products has led to “thousands and thousands of lives” being saved.
Before Trump made the Right to Try legislation law, the Food and Drug Administration already approved applications from patients seeking access to investigational drugs through the agency’s “expanded access” program, which oversees the use of such medicines for patients who are not able to participate in clinical trials. The new law circumvents the FDA and gives terminally ill patients access to unapproved drugs more quickly than through the FDA’s expanded access program.
While the FDA has reported that 16 medical products were used under Right to Try between 2018 and 2023, the agency has not said how many patients have been treated with those products.
“Moreover, the number of people treated is far less important than the number helped,” wrote Alison Bateman-House, assistant professor of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Holly Fernandez Lynch, associate professor of medical ethics and law at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in an August opinion piece for the health publication STAT. “Unfortunately, Right to Try does not require companies to report on patient benefit, leaving substantial room for exaggerated claims,” they said.
McDonald’s
As he has in virtually every stump speech in recent weeks, Trump claimed, without evidence, that Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s.” Harris has claimed numerous times that she worked at McDonald’s in the Bay Area of California in between her first and second year of college.
Reporters at the Washington Free Beacon in late August raised some questions about Harris’ claim, noting that her employment at McDonald’s was not mentioned in her two memoirs, nor in an October 1987 job application — and attached resume — for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office while she was a law student at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. (The resume lists her work as a law clerk, an operator at Charles Schwab & Co., a student assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and as an intern for a U.S. senator.)
In an internal statement, McDonald’s has since noted, “we and our franchises don’t have records for all our positions dating back to the early ’80s.”
In a Sept. 25 interview on MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris about Trump’s repeated claims about her lying about working at McDonald’s. Harris reiterated that she did work at a McDonald’s and “part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.”
Harris and her campaign have not provided any evidence that she worked at McDonald’s, but importantly, Trump has not provided any evidence that she didn’t.
Harris Is Not a ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist’
Trump, who often refers to Harris as “Comrade Kamala,” frequently and falsely branded Harris “a radical left Marxist,” saying in Detroit that Harris is “a Marxist, communist, fascist, anything you want.”
In an interview on Oct. 23, Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro noted that Trump’s labels resonate with some Latino voters who escaped from socialist countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and so he asked Harris how she defined herself.
“I am a capitalist,” Harris said. “I am a pragmatic capitalist. I believe that we need a new generation of leadership in America that actively works with the private sector to build up the new industries of America, to build up small business owners, to allow us to increase home ownership, to allow people and their families to build intergenerational wealth. … I am a capitalist who believes not everyone starts out on the same base, but that everyone has the drive, the grit, the work ethic to succeed. And we have to create an economy that gives people an opportunity.”
We reached out to Mitchell Orenstein, a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program and professor and chair of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Here is a relatively simple and common-sense definition of Communism,” Orenstein told us via email, “a. Communists support a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist political and economic system. b. Communists believe in the abolition of private property and its replacement by state or communal ownership. c. Communists believe in a government led by a single party (often called ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘people’s’ that rules dictatorially for the benefit of the working class) d. Communists generally take inspiration from the writings of Karl Marx and seek to faithfully implement aspects of the Communist Manifesto, though aspects may differ.”
“Since none of these apply to her, we can say with confidence that Kamala Harris is not a communist,” Orenstein said. “In fact, she describes herself as a capitalist and her policies reflect that.”
Critical Race Theory
In Detroit and Greenville, Trump promised to “get critical race theory … the hell out of our schools.” But as we have written, it’s a college-level theory that educators say is already not being taught in K-12 public schools.
In a September 2021 letter to Biden, the National School Boards Association wrote that the “propaganda” around critical race theory “continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.”
Critical race theory started as an advanced legal theory taught at Harvard University in the 1980s by law professor Derrick Bell. It accepts that institutional racism exists and needs to be better understood in order to address racial inequality
In 2021, the Association of American Educators surveyed more than 1,000 educators, and 96% of those surveyed said they were not required to teach it. In a 2022 report on state efforts to ban critical race theory in public schools, UCLA education researchers wrote that critical race theory isn’t being taught in K-12 schools. They said the term “critical race theory” has been co-opted by conservative activists who seek “to restrict or ‘ban’ curriculum, lessons, professional development, and district equity and diversity efforts addressing … race, racism, diversity, and inclusion.”
2020 Democratic Primary
In Greensboro, Trump argued that Harris “doesn’t deserve to be able to run” for president, and claimed that “she came in last in the primary” for Democratic candidates in 2020. “She was the first to lose” out of “22 people,” Trump said in Greenville.
Harris suspended her 2020 presidential campaign on Dec. 3, 2019, before the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest for Democrats in that election cycle. But she was not the first person out of the Democratic primary. Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Rep. Seth Moulton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, are some of the Democratic candidates who exited the race before Harris.
Crowd Size
Although Trump frequently exaggerates the size of crowds at his rallies, we rarely write about it — an exception was the controversy over the attendance at his inauguration in 2017 — because it seems relatively inconsequential. But at his rally in Detroit, Trump again exaggerated crowd size when he claimed that “101,000 people showed up” to his Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, his first appearance there since an assassination attempt on July 13. He repeated the figure twice more for effect.
Using aerial photos, Newsweek employed crowd-mapping software and expert analysis and concluded the attendance was far fewer than that, with one expert putting the number at about 30,000.
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