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This week, New York City officials said the city had received two payments from the federal government as reimbursement for expenses the city incurred while providing services to migrants who arrived in New York, including $19 million for hotel expenses. But Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, claimed, without evidence, that $59 million “meant for American disaster relief” was sent to “luxury hotels.”

Musk’s claims, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, echoed false claims made by President Donald Trump and others last year that Federal Emergency Management Agency money for hurricane relief had been used to house people in the country illegally. As we reported then, Congress had appropriated money for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which awards money to nonfederal entities to provide housing and other services for migrants awaiting an immigration hearing. FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is funded by Congress separately.

But in an early morning post on Feb. 10, Musk wrote, “The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.” His post went on to say, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!”

The White House has not provided evidence that the funds were originally “meant for American disaster relief,” as Musk said. The White House press office did not respond to our inquiry about this.

The Associated Press and the New York Times reported that the money that FEMA paid to the city — not directly to hotels — came from the Shelter and Services Program. The money for that program comes from the budget for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA and CBP, both DHS agencies, coordinate to administer the grants.

However, a DHS official previously told reporters that the money is “completely separate” from funding that Congress allocates to FEMA to help U.S. residents affected by natural disasters.

In addition, a city spokesperson, Liz Garcia, told the AP that only some of the $59 million was for hotel costs.

She said that the mayor’s office recently received two payments from the federal government totaling about $81 million for immigration-related services. One of the payments was for roughly $59 million, of which $19 million was for hotel stays, as the city has had to accommodate more than 200,000 migrants who arrived there since the spring of 2022.

A group of migrants wait outside of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on July 31, 2023. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.“The payments of $81 million, Garcia said, covered reimbursements for November 2023 to October 2024, including hotel, security, food, and other costs,” the AP reported. “She said the city applied in April, the money was appropriated last year by Congress, and FEMA allocated it last year.”

Garcia also told the AP that the city did not pay “luxury” rates for the hotels.

A July report from the New York City Comptroller’s Office said that during fiscal year 2024, the city spent an average of $156 per night on hotel rooms for migrants. That average rate, negotiated with the Hotel Association of New York City, was “$1.50 more expensive than the market economy rate, and $27 less expensive than the upscale rate,” the report said. Most of the hotels were in city boroughs outside of Manhattan.

We contacted the city about the payments, but have not received a response. FEMA also did not answer our specific questions about the funds, but a DHS spokesperson emailed us a statement saying that DHS has “clawed back the full payment” from the city and fired four FEMA employees responsible for making the payments.

In a statement posted on Feb. 12, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander called the revocation of over $80 million in congressionally appropriated funds illegal, and advised Eric Adams, the city’s mayor, to pursue legal action.

“This is money that the federal government previously disbursed for shelter and services and is now missing,” he said. “This highway robbery of our funds directly out of our bank account is a betrayal of everyone who calls New York City home.”

Adams said in a Feb. 12 post on X that his office had already been in contact with the White House about recouping the money.

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Quick TakeBoth the Biden and Trump administrations subscribed to Politico and other news services. But President Donald Trump and online posts have misleadingly claimed the media outlets were being funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The payments from USAID and other federal departments or agencies were for subscriptions.

Full StoryThe Trump administration’s efforts to reduce spending by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and other government departments has fueled misleading and unsupported claims about the recipients of the assistance, the funding sources and the amounts of federal aid spent, as we’ve written.

Now, claims by President Donald Trump and social media posts have spread misinformation about money spent by the government on media resources, misrepresenting subscriptions to news services as a “payoff” or as “funding” for media outlets. An examination of government spending records shows that media subscription services targeted by Trump also were used and paid for by his administration during his first term in office.

In a Feb. 6 post on X, Trump misleadingly said, “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

Trump amplified his misleading claims about the government payments to media outlets on his platform Truth Social on Feb. 13, saying, “Why was Politico paid Millions of Dollars for NOTHING.”

Other social media posts have made similar claims. Conservative commentator Benny Johnson said in an Instagram post: “Now we learn Politico — ‘a news company’ — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.” The post received more than 100,000 likes. Another post claimed, “And now we find out the regime was funneling tens of millions of dollars of our money to Politico?”

Rob Smith, who identifies himself as “The OG Black Gay Republican Icon,” posted an Instagram video citing Johnson’s post and claiming, Politico is “COMPLETELY FUNDED BY USAID!”

Rather than being “completely” or “massively funded” by USAID, Politico received two payments specifically through that government agency in 2023 and 2024 totaling $44,000, according to USA Spending, a U.S. government website that tracks federal spending.

Politico did receive more than $8 million in fiscal year 2024 from other federal departments and agencies, USA Spending records show. Whether that amounts to wasteful spending is a matter of opinion, and we take no position on that. The money, however, was to pay for Politico subscriptions and access to Politico Pro, which provides “non-partisan news, real-time intelligence, in-depth analysis, government directories, stakeholder management solutions, policy monitoring tools” and other customized services, according to its website.

In total, the USA Spending database reported 646 transactions between the federal government and Politico since fiscal year 2015. The transactions are classified as contracts, not as grants, loans or direct payments, which are types of government spending categories on the site.

Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris responded to the claims on social media with a statement on Feb. 6, saying, “POLITICO is a privately owned company. We have never received any government funding — no subsidies, no grants, no handouts. Not one dime, ever, in 18 years. … It is supported by advertising and sponsorships.”

“POLITICO Pro is different,” the statement continued. “It is a professional subscription service used by companies, organizations, and, yes, some government agencies. They subscribe because it makes them better at their jobs — helping them track policy, legislation and regulations in real-time with news, intelligence and a suite of data products.”

The federal government constitutes a small portion of Politico Pro’s subscriber base. In a Feb. 6 interview, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Politico’s parent company, Axel Springer, told CNN that Politico Pro currently has about 5,000 subscribers, about 6% of whom work in government.

Politico does not report the cost of each Politico Pro subscription. We asked Politico for the range of subscription costs, but didnot get a response.

Some transactions listed on USA Spending include the number of subscriptions purchased, allowing us to estimate the cost of single subscriptions. For example, the Federal Trade Commission spent $45,378 to renew 14 annual subscriptions to Politico Pro Plus in October 2024, at a cost of about $3,200 per person for an annual subscription. The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, spent $143,203 in June 2024 to renew 49 annual subscriptions to Politico Pro, at a cost of about $2,900 per person per year.

In recent days, the Trump administration has terminated multiple contracts between the federal government and Politico initiated by the Biden administration. The subscriptions purchased by HHS were terminated on Feb. 5.The New York Times reported on Feb. 6 that the Department of Agriculture canceled its Politico Pro subscriptions, and Fox News reported on Feb. 10 that the Department of Veterans Affairs also canceled its Politico Pro subscriptions.

Payments During Trump’s First TermSubscriptions to Politico Pro were not unique to the Biden administration. The government also paid for subscriptions in fiscal years 2017 through 2020, when Trump was in office. (The government’s fiscal year is from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, so FY 2017 included nearly four months under the Obama administration.)

According to USA Spending, during Trump’s first term, the federal government agreed to $10.2 million in contract obligations to Politico.

While total spending on Politico by USAID was relatively minuscule under the Biden administration and nonexistent under Trump’s, both presidents’ executive offices agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Politico during their respective terms. The Executive Office of the President includes the set of offices and agencies that support the agenda of the executive branch, such as the Council of Economic Advisors, the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget.

Under the first Trump administration, the Executive Office of the President accrued $880,000 in obligations to Politico. The other government agencies spending the most on Politico subscriptions in fiscal years 2017 through 2020 were HHS, whose obligations to Politico totaled about $3.2 million, followed by the Department of Energy, which spent more than $710,000.

Payments During Biden’s TermBy comparison, total federal obligations to Politico were more than twice as high during President Joe Biden’s administration as compared with Trump’s first administration. In FY 2021 through 2024, the federal government accrued $22.8 million in total financial obligations to Politico. (FY 2021 included nearly four months under the Trump administration.)

HHS also spent the most money among all government departments on Politico during the Biden administration, with obligations totaling $3.5 million in FY 2021 through 2024. The next highest spending agencies during this period were the Department of the Interior ($3.4 million), the Department of Energy ($2.9 million) and the Department of Agriculture ($2 million). The Executive Office of the President’s total obligations reached $1.3 million during the Biden years.

As we said, USAID’s spending on Politico during the Biden administration was small by comparison. In total, the agency purchased $44,000 in subscriptions to E&E News, a subsidiary of Politico focused on energy and environmental issues, in FY 2023 and 2024.

To analyze total federal spending on media organizations during the Biden and first Trump administrations, we collated total financial obligations for transactions reported on USA Spending. To classify the date of each transaction, we used the fiscal year of each transaction’s base action date, defined by USA Spending as “the date the action being reported was issued / signed by the Government or a binding agreement was reached.”

This classification means that contracts initiated under the Trump administration that extended into the beginning of the Biden administration count as spending under the Trump years, and contracts initiated during the Biden administration that continue to the present count as obligations under the Biden years.

We also collated federal spending on the New York Times, Associated Press and Reuters using the same methodology.

In total, the federal government’s obligations to the Times totaled $1.3 million under the Biden administration, as compared with $610,000 under the Trump administration. Obligations to the Associated Press totaled $6.8 million under Biden and $24 million under Trump. Obligations to Reuters totaled $9.7 million under Biden and $1.5 million under Trump.

Subscription Contracts, Not GrantsAs opposed to funding or a financial award, the federal government’s payments to Politico under the Trump and Biden administrations constituted a contractual agreement to provide a service in exchange for a subscription fee.

Politico’s statement explains, “Government agencies that subscribe do so through standard public procurement processes — just like any other tool they buy to work smarter and be more efficient. This is not funding. It is a transaction — just as the government buys research, equipment, software and industry reports. Some online voices are deliberately spreading falsehoods. Let’s be clear: POLITICO has no financial dependence on the government and no hidden agenda.”

Similarly, the $2 million in obligations to the New York Times accrued by the federal government since FY 2017 were also contracts in exchange for subscriptions, and not funding. A Feb. 6 statement posted on X by the Times said, “Federal funds received by The Times are payments for subscriptions that government offices and agencies have purchased to better understand the world.” The statement also said, “There are no federal grants made to The Times.”

Associated Press spokesperson Lauren Easton said on Feb. 6 that “the U.S. government has long been an AP customer — through both Democratic and Republican administrations. It licenses AP’s nonpartisan journalism, just like thousands of news outlets and customers around the world. It’s quite common for governments to have contracts with news organizations for their content.”

Subscriptions to news media are valuable tools for government employees, Steven Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard University, told us in an email. “These are ways for government officials to learn more about things going on in the government in general, which helps them do their jobs better,” Kelman said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Meta to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Meta has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesHale Spencer, Saranac. “Sorting Out the Facts on ‘Waste and Abuse’ at USAID.” FactCheck.org. 8 Feb 2025.

Jaffe, Alan. “Trump Administration Makes Unsupported Claim About $50 Million for Condoms to Gaza.” FactCheck.org. 30 Jan 2025.

Sheikholeslami, Goli and John F. Harris. “Note to Our Readers.” Politico. 6 Feb 2025.

USASpending.gov. Payments from U.S. Agency for International Development. Recipient: Politico. Accessed 10 Feb 2025.

USASpending.gov. Definitive Contract, PIID 29FTC122C0002. Accessed 10 Feb 2025.

USASpending.gov. Purchase Order, PIID 75F40120P00453. Accessed 10 Feb 2025.

Mullin, Benjamin and Flavelle, Christopher. “White House Cracks Down on News Subscriptions.” New York Times. 6 Feb 2025.

Hagstrom, Anders. “Department of Veterans Affairs cancels $178K in subscriptions to Politico Pro”. Fox News. 10 Feb 2025.

USASpending.gov. Prime Award Results, Politico, LLC. Accessed 7 Feb 2025.

USASpending.gov. Prime Award Results, Politico, The New York Times, Reuters, AP. Accessed 7 Feb 2025.

“Executive Office of the President.” White House Archives, President Barack Obama. Accessed 11 Feb 2025.

NY Times Communications. X. 6 Feb 2025.

Bauder, David. “Trump promotes misleading claims about federal government’s media subscriptions.” AP News. 6 Feb 2025.

Kelman, Steven. Professor of public management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Email to FactCheck.org. 10 Feb 2025.

Forbes. Mathias Doepfner. Accessed 12 Feb 2025.

Reilly, Liam. “CEO of Politico’s parent company to Trump: ‘It’s not subsidies; it’s capitalism.’” CNN. 6 Feb 2025.

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Days before he ordered, and then paused, new tariffs on U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump argued that the U.S. does not need imported products such as crude oil and lumber from those countries.

Experts told us that, in theory, if the U.S. stopped importing crude oil and lumber from Canada and Mexico, it still would be able to meet domestic demand using natural resources available in the U.S. But, in reality, they said, the transition would be costly and take some time to implement, among other complications.

On Jan. 30, while talking with reporters about the tariffs he would announce two days later, Trump said: “Look, Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade and we will be able to make that up very quickly because we don’t need the products that they have. We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the lumber. We have more than almost anybody in those two categories, and oil we have more than anybody and we don’t need anybody’s trees.”

A week earlier, while delivering virtual remarks to the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23, Trump singled out Canada specifically.

“Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit,” Trump said. “We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have our — we have more than anybody.”

In fact, the U.S. had a roughly $41 billion trade deficit in goods and services with Canada in 2023, according to the most recent annual data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. If Trump was only referring to the deficit in goods with Canada, it was about $72 billion in 2023, still significantly lower than what Trump said.

And while the U.S. is producing the most crude oil in its history – and more than any country ever – there are several reasons why the U.S. currently needs crude oil imports from Canada, Mexico and other countries. Without those imports, refiners that rely on them to make gasoline and other refined products would have to make infrastructure changes that experts said would take time and significant financial investments.

Rejecting imports of lumber would pose other issues, such as higher prices and environmental concerns, experts said.

Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported products from Canada and Mexico via executive order on Feb. 1, with a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil. But a few days later, on Feb. 3, the president agreed to pause the tariffs for 30 days.

Crude OilOn paper, it may appear that the U.S. does not need imports of oil from Canada or Mexico. But the imports are of heavier crude oil than what the U.S. mostly extracts.

In 2023, the U.S. produced a record of more than 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day, which increased to a new high of more than 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration. The country also has tens of billions of barrels of proven oil reserves that are likely recoverable, according to the EIA, and Trump has said he wants American companies to “drill, baby, drill” to boost production further.

Carey W. King, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and assistant director of its Energy Institute, also told us in an email that the U.S. “extracts more ‘crude oil’ and natural gas liquids than it consumes as refined oil products.” And he noted that the U.S. also exports crude oil — almost 4.1 million barrels per day in 2023, according to the most recent annual EIA data.

“So it seems the U.S. doesn’t need oil from other countries,” King said.

But in a report updated this month, the Congressional Research Service explained that, generally, U.S. oil trade with Canada and Mexico “is motivated by factors including geographic proximity, refinery configurations, crude oil quality, and an integrated pipeline network.” Not all crude oil is the same, the CRS noted, nor are the refineries that process the crude into consumable products such as transportation fuels and heating oil.

That’s why eliminating imports from those countries may be easier said than done.

The U.S. got about 3.9 million barrels per day from Canada in 2023, while Mexico was the source of about 733,000 barrels per day. Combined, they accounted for more than 70% of all U.S. imports of crude oil that year.

“The U.S. could, if necessary, become self-sufficient,” David Gantz, a fellow in trade and international economics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an interview. However, he said “it would require significant and expensive modifications” to U.S. refineries.

Changes would be required because, as the EIA has written, the U.S. mostly produces lighter, or less dense, forms of crude oil. In contrast, many refineries in the U.S. have been configured to process the heavier crude oils, which the EIA says are generally cheaper and are produced in Canada, Mexico and other countries. Most American refineries were built decades ago, before the U.S. “shale boom” in the 2000s led to greater production of more light crude.

That makes imports vital to the U.S. refining industry.

“From a practical standpoint, oil refiners have made capital investments that have tuned their refineries to take a certain mix (within a range) of crude oil inputs as feedstocks,” King said in his email to us. “If this crude oil mix changes, their refinery is not as well configured for that new crude oil mix.”

He said this is also one of the reasons why U.S. companies export crude oil, because oil refiners in other countries are better configured to use the lighter crude oils extracted from drilling in the U.S. Meanwhile, “more than 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude,” according to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group that represents fuel makers.

Retooling American refineries to use more U.S.-sourced oil, in addition to potentially taking years to complete, “would cost billions,” the AFPM said in an explainer on the issue, posted to its site on Jan. 24. Also, transporting oil products across the U.S. would be an issue, the AFPM said, because “[w]e lack the infrastructure (like pipelines) needed to cost effectively supply U.S crude oil and refined products to every region” of the country.

For example, in an August post about Canadian crude oil’s “increasingly significant role in U.S. refineries,” the EIA said: “Geographic proximity allows Canada’s pipelines to transport crude oil from the western provinces, mainly from Alberta’s large crude oil production region, to refineries in the United States. Inland regions of the United States, particularly the Midwest … and Rocky Mountains …, are closely connected to Canada’s oil markets via pipeline and rail networks.”

Still, “theoretically,” Gantz said, Trump’s claim that the U.S. could do without oil imports from Canada and Mexico is “true” – if refineries are retrofitted and companies come up with a transportation plan.

On the other hand, “in a practical matter, it’s not true at all,” he said of Trump’s claim.

“In the short and medium term, the refineries are set up to use a particular grade of crude oil, and they can’t easily or quickly switch,” Gantz explained.

He said the fact that Trump initially ordered a lower 10% tariff on imports of crude oil from Canada – compared with a 25% tariff on all other products – “suggested somebody in the Trump administration understands that this is not a product which can be easily replaced.”

LumberThe situation with lumber is similar, experts said.

“Sure: we could probably meet most of our lumber needs domestically,” Marc McDill, an associate professor of forest management at Penn State University, told us in an email. “The reasons why we don’t basically boil down to two things: 1) sometimes imports are cheaper than our own suppliers, and 2) we value our forests for a lot of other things besides producing lumber.”

He added that without lumber from Canada, which is the largest source of U.S. imports of forest products, “we would adjust in three ways: 1) prices would go up (which would increase housing costs), 2) we would harvest more of our own trees (which might have negative environmental consequences), and 3) we would import more from countries other than Canada.”

A truck carrying wood drives down a highway in Quebec, Canada, on Sept. 8, 2021. Photo by Andrej Ivanov/AFP via Getty Images.As for Mexico, it’s “our fourth largest trading partner when it comes to lumber or wood products, in general, including paper,” McDill said in an interview. “So, they’re important, but considerably smaller” in terms of imports than Canada.

In 2023, the U.S. imported $51.5 billion worth of forest products, 40.5% of which came from Canada and 6% came from Mexico, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission.

JensPeter Barynin, an economist and a former executive at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, had a take similar to McDill’s.

“In theory,” what Trump said “is true,” Barynin wrote in a Jan. 27 opinion piece published by the Financial Post. “U.S. forests could meet domestic demand. In 2024, the southeastern U.S. harvested nearly twice as much timber as Canada, primarily due to the region’s productive Southern Yellow Pine plantation forests. Add in the untapped state-owned forests of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and self-sufficiency becomes a plausible goal.

“However, ramping up harvesting from publicly owned forests, most of which are currently protected, would provoke fierce public backlash, conflict with the Environmental Protection Act and clash with the interests of both large and small private timberland owners,” he said. “Even if Trump were to push for increased harvesting, the U.S. lacks the logging and mill capacity to process the trees into lumber.”

In addition, C. Rhett Jackson, a professor of water resources at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia, told us that differences in the lumber produced in the U.S. and Canada may be problematic.

“US lumber is comprised largely of loblolly pine, slash pine, and Douglas Fir,” he said in an email. “Canadian softwoods come from different species with different properties. Depending on what you are building, you might prefer the Canadian softwood lumber choices. Also, depending on where you are in the country, the haul distances for Canadian lumber can be much shorter.”

Putting tariffs on imports from Canada would be troublesome for U.S. businesses and consumers, Jackson said, adding that prices on all lumber would increase and the selection of available lumber would decrease.

“So, the President’s statement is not wrong but still misleading,” he wrote. “All lumber is not created equally.”

The White House did not address our questions about how Trump planned to supplement any lost imports from Canada and Mexico.

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As President Donald Trump’s administration targets the U.S. Agency for International Development for closure or major downsizing, the White House and social media posts have highlighted four projects as examples of the agency’s “waste and abuse.” But only one was funded by USAID.

We’ll explain the programs and provide context on USAID’s total budget.

A worker removes the U.S. Agency for International Development sign on its headquarters on Feb. 7 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images.Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — led by billionaire Elon Musk — swung its focus to USAID in late January. The agency was created in 1961 and charged with carrying out foreign social and economic development projects. It “provides assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, on Feb. 2. “Time for it to die.”

The following day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed the acting administrator of USAID. The agency’s website was taken down, and on Feb. 7, it showed a notice that said: “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.”

In response to a lawsuit filed by organizations representing USAID workers, a federal judge on Feb. 7 temporarily blocked the Trump administration from immediately placing more than 2,000 workers on administrative leave. As of Feb. 8, the website was blank.

It is unclear what the future of USAID will be. The Congressional Research Service wrote in a Feb. 3 memo that the agency was created as an independent establishment within the executive branch and “the President does not have the authority to abolish it.”

More than 100 House Democrats signed a letter dated Feb. 4 raising the same point to Rubio. “By law, USAID is an independent entity separate from the State Department, and any changes to that structure would require legislative approval from Congress,” it said.

The White House has publicized claims about the agency to justify its action. In a statement issued on Feb. 3, it listed several programs it claimed were funded by USAID and said, “For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.”

Later that day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted four that she said were emblematic of “the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years”: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going toward this crap,” Leavitt said. “And I know the American people don’t either. That’s exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do, to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.”

A clip of that portion of her comments was shared widely on social media — the version shared by the White House’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X garnered more than a million views, alone. Other posts shared lists of projects that included the four highlighted by Leavitt.

But some of those projects weren’t described accurately. And only the first was funded by USAID; the rest were funded by the State Department. Each of the projects highlighted represents a relatively small amount of money — the entire amount managed by USAID was about $40 billion in fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year with complete data), according to a Congressional Research Service report. That amount is less than 1% of the total federal budget.

Whether or not these programs demonstrate “waste and abuse,” as described by the Trump administration, is a matter of opinion. We’ll lay out what we know about each one.

Serbian ‘DEI’ ProjectAn LGBTQ advocacy organization in Serbia — a country that fares poorly compared with other European countries on measures of LGBTQ rights, according to data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights — hosted a three-year program aimed at improving the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the workplace.

From February 2023 to October 2024, USAID committed to spending about $1.5 million — in three roughly $500,000 installments — to support the program.

At a program conference in September 2023, mission director for USAID in Serbia, Brooke Isham, said, “At USAID, we know that inclusive development is important for driving economic growth and also for creating a healthier democracy.”

A ‘DEI Musical’ in IrelandThe State Department committed to provide $70,844 in September 2022 to an Irish organization called Ceiliuradh, which is part of the Irish South Wind Blows production company. The money wasn’t for a “musical,” but rather a musical event.

That company’s musical component, called Other Voices, put together a program called “Other Voices: Dignity – Towards a More Equitable Future” for the U.S. Embassy in Dublin on Sept. 15, 2022.

The announcement for the event said it “will showcase the very best of American and Irish talent with a diverse programme which aims to fulfil the U.S. Embassy Dublin’s mission to promote diversity, inclusion, and equality.”

The event was streamed live on YouTube and featured several Irish and American artists.

USAID isn’t listed as providing any money for the event.

A ‘Transgender Opera’ in ColombiaOn April 28, 2022, the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, put on a performance of the opera “As One.” The show, which was written in the U.S. and debuted in 2014, features a transgender protagonist.

A program for the university’s production of the opera said the show had the support of the university, the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the “Small Grants Program of the Embassy of the United States in Colombia.”

The Department of State committed $25,000 to fund the project, and the website USAspending.gov also noted that there was $22,020 of “non-federal funding” for the project, making a total of $47,020 listed on the site. The federal funding for this project also came from the State Department, not USAID.

A ‘Transgender Comic Book’ in PeruIn 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Peru introduced a comic book called “The Power of Education,” which it used to promote education and exchange programs in the U.S.

The following year, the embassy commissioned a second volume.

“The Embassy asked us to introduce a gay student in #2 to show his personal struggle coming out to his parents, but that has zero to do with being transgender,” David Campiti, who owns the company that produced the comic book, told us in an email. “The comics were about scholarships and furthering education.”

The series ended up including three comic books, each one showing an aspect of cultural exchange and education. View them here, here and here.

The second one is what was highlighted by the Trump administration as a “transgender comic book.” But volume 2 of “The Power of Education” does not include a transgender character. Rather, as Campiti said, it featured a hero who was gay.

The writer of the comic, David Lawrence, said the same thing in a post on his Facebook page on Feb. 4, explaining why the embassy had requested an LGBTQ character. “The US embassy in Peru requested that as a small response to anti gay prejudice in the country,” he wrote.

We reached out to the embassy for comment and were referred to the State Department, which did not respond to us.

Like the first volume, the second one was used to promote education and exchange programs. And, incidentally, it won two awards in 2023, including comic of the year, from a Peruvian organization called Chronicles of Diversity.

The funding for this project didn’t come from USAID, either, but, again, from the State Department.

So, funding for three of the four projects highlighted by the White House came from the State Department for funding cultural activities on behalf of various embassies.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

As justification for dismantling the federal Department of Education, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that U.S. schools are “ranked 40 out of 40” in educational outcomes compared with other countries, while the U.S. “ranked No. 1 in cost per pupil.” Neither claim is accurate.

U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

During the campaign, Trump made no secret of his desire to dismantle the federal Department of Education. As president, Trump said that remains his goal.

Trump told reporters on Feb. 4 that he had said to Linda McMahon, his nominee to be Education secretary, “‘Linda I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.'”

Trump said he wants to “let the states run schools,” and that he would funnel most of the funding for the Department of Education to states. As a technical matter, states and local communities already run the schools — setting the curriculum and teacher certification standards. As the Department of Education explains, “the Federal role in education [is] as a kind of ’emergency response system,’ a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise.” In practice, FindLaw explains, “the federal government focuses on providing supplementary support and coordination at the national level. For instance, it implements programs and provides crucial services to disadvantaged populations” and it recommends teaching strategies.

According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, federal government funding made up about 11% of the revenues for elementary and secondary public schools in the 2020-21 school year. The rest of the revenues come from state and local funding. Trump has said his plan is to effect a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington” and instead give federal education funds directly to states.

In response to a reporter’s question on Feb. 4 about whether he intended to shutter the Department of Education, Trump repeatedly came back to his false claims about the U.S. ranking in educational achievement and the country’s per pupil spending.

“We spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world, and yet we’re rated No. 40,” Trump said. “The last rating just came out, you saw them. So they talk about 40 countries, we’re rated No. 40. … We have to tell the teachers union, we’re rated last in the world in education, of the Top 40. … The thing just came out. That’s under [former President Joe] Biden, remember that.”

We should note that Trump has been making these same claims for years, as far back as when he was running for president in 2016. As we wrote in May 2016, he was wrong on both counts, as he is now. His campaign at the time did not respond when we asked for a source for the claims, and neither did the White House press office when we made a similar request this week.

Educational OutcomesWe could find no international ranking of education outcomes that has the U.S. dead last, as Trump claimed.

When Trump mentions 40 peer countries, he appears to be talking about the 37 OECD countries that participate in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which the NCES conducts in coordination with the OECD every three years in reading, math and science for 15-year-old students. The latest results are from 2022.

In no PISA category, however, does the U.S. rank last. Rather, the U.S. scored above average among OECD countries in reading and science (subjects in which the U.S. ranked 6th and 12th, respectively). The average U.S. score in math was lower, but not significantly, than the OECD average. The U.S. ranking in math was 28th.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the PISA results:

• In reading, the U.S. average score of 504 was higher than the OECD average score of 476. Compared with the other 36 participating OECD members, the U.S. ranked 6th. Ireland and Japan were tied for the top ranking with an average score of 516, and Colombia was lowest with a score of 409. Looking at all of the 81 countries in the dataset, including non-OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 9th.
• In science, the U.S. score of 499 was higher than the OECD average of 485. Among the 37 participating OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 12th. Japan was highest with a score of 547, and Mexico was lowest with a score of 410. Looking at all 81 countries in the PISA study, the U.S. ranked 16th.
• In math, the U.S. average score of 465 ranked 28th out of 37 OECD countries. The U.S. score was lower than the OECD average of 472, though the difference was not statistically significant. The country with the highest average score was Japan (536), and the lowest was Colombia (383). Looking at all of the 81 countries in the PISA data, the U.S. math literacy score ranked 34th.

Notably, the situation was very similar in the 2018 PISA assessment during Trump’s first term in office. As in 2022, the U.S. performed above the OECD average in reading and science, and below the OECD average in math.

Photo by gpointstudio/stock.adobe.com.We should also note that U.S. scores in math, science and reading in 2022 were all lower than in 2018. But the U.S. ranking compared with other OECD countries was relatively the same or better, because scores around the world dipped post-pandemic.

From 2018 to 2022, the OECD average in PISA dropped by almost 15 points in math (it dropped by 13 points in the U.S.), by about 10 points in reading (though by just 1 point in the U.S.) and “remained stable” in science (though it dropped by 3 points in the U.S.). According to the OECD, “The unprecedented drops in mathematics and reading point to the shock effect of COVID-19 on most countries.”

A second international assessment of students is known as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is given every four years to fourth- and eighth-grade students.

In 2023, with an average score of 517 in math, U.S. fourth graders scored 14 points above the international average, and ranked 28th out of 63 countries. In science, the U.S. average score of 532 was also above the international average, by 38 points, and the U.S. ranked 15th out of 63 countries.

For eighth graders in the TIMSS assessment, the U.S. average in 2023 in math (488) was 10 points above the international average and ranked 24th out of 45 countries. In science, U.S. eighth graders’ average score (513) was 47 points above the international average and ranked 16th out of 45 countries.

The third and final assessment we reviewed is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which is administered every five years to fourth-grade students. In 2021, the latest data available, the U.S. had an average score of 548, which was 48 points above the median, and the U.S. ranked 6th out of 33 countries. Ireland (577) was tops, and South Africa (288) was lowest.

In short, the U.S. was not last by any of these measures.

Spending Per PupilTrump was also wrong to say that the U.S. spends the most per pupil.

The cost of higher education — college-level education — is very high in the U.S. According to the OECD, U.S. expenditures for tertiary education (post-high school, including college) were the highest among OECD countries in 2021. At $36,274 per pupil, that was 77% higher than the OECD average. According to the OECD, 39% of U.S. spending for higher education was public expenditure (compared with an OECD average of 68%).

But a handful of other countries spent more than the U.S. on primary and secondary schooling.

For example, while the total spending per pupil at the primary level — elementary school — in the U.S. ($15,270) was 28% higher than the OECD average ($11,902), the U.S. ranked 6th behind Luxembourg ($25,584), Norway ($18,037), Iceland ($16,786), Denmark ($15,598) and Austria ($15,415). According to the OECD, 93% of total expenditure on primary institutions comes from public sources in the U.S.

Looking at secondary education — high school — the U.S. per pupil expenditure ($16,301) was 22% higher than the OECD average but below Norway ($19,831), Austria ($19,049), South Korea ($19,299), the Netherlands ($17,909), Belgium ($17,525), Germany ($17,077) and Australia ($16,498).

Another way to look at education spending is as a percentage of gross domestic product. By that measure, according to OECD data, the U.S. again is nearly tops for postsecondary education. But at the primary and secondary school levels, U.S. per pupil spending in 2021 was below that of more than a dozen countries, including Israel, Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Costa Rica.

“The U.S. spends a lot on education if you include all the money spent on higher education,” Andrew Crook, press secretary for the American Federation of Teachers, told us via email. “If you only consider K-12 education, U.S. expenditures are very close to the OECD average.”

OECD data indicate that while the U.S. prioritizes higher education, “other countries invest more comprehensively across all levels of education,” Crook said.

Crook also warned that international spending comparisons “aren’t always straightforward.”

“Many services that American schools provide are not part of other countries’ educational expenditures,” Crook said. “For instance, many countries provide universal healthcare, which is funded separately from their education budgets, whereas in the U.S., healthcare costs for students and staff may be partially covered within school funding. Additionally, expenditures on services like student transportation, social programs, and other support systems vary widely across countries, further complicating a one-to-one comparison of education spending.”

Regardless, U.S. spending per pupil is not — as Trump repeatedly claims — higher than all other nations, nor does the U.S. rank last in educational outcomes.

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In our earlier coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, we focused on his familiar claims about vaccines and chronic disease, along with his citation of a flawed paper that claimed to identify a link between vaccines and autism.

But in his more than six hours of testimony, Kennedy made other incorrect or misleading claims, including on obesity treatments for kids and National Institutes of Health funding.

• Sparring with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, Kennedy claimed that research backed up his earlier assertion that Black people need a different vaccine schedule than whites “because their immune system is better than ours.” Scientists say he’s distorting that work.
• Kennedy impossibly claimed that his 2021 petition to pull authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines was filed because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the vaccines for 6-year-olds “without any scientific basis.” The CDC did not recommend vaccines for that age group until months after the petition was filed — and did so based on positive clinical trial results.
• He claimed GLP-1 weight loss drugs were being used as the “first front-line intervention” to treat obesity in 6-year-old kids. They’re not. Guidelines recommend intensive behavioral therapy for children that age.
• Kennedy accused the National Institutes of Health of spending “almost nothing” on research investigating the causes of chronic diseases because the “money is going to infectious disease.” Each year, billions in NIH funds are devoted to chronic conditions.
• Defending his false claim that the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy cited an increased number of unvetted reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Increased reporting to VAERS was expected with a new, widely distributed vaccine and doesn’t mean a vaccine is unsafe.
• He incorrectly said that 12-step programs were a “gold standard” approach for treating opioid addiction.

On Feb. 4, after Kennedy won the support of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who had previously said he was “struggling” with the pick, the Senate Finance committee voted 14-13 along party lines to advance the nomination.

After the vote, Cassidy spoke on the Senate floor, saying that he had spoken with Kennedy repeatedly over the weekend and had received commitments from him and the administration that Kennedy would “work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems,” maintain the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee “without changes” and would not take down CDC webpages that state vaccines don’t cause autism.

Kennedy also pledged to meet regularly with and “have an unprecedently close collaborative working relationship” with Cassidy.

With that hurdle cleared, Kennedy’s nomination heads to the full Senate. If all Democrats oppose him, he can afford to lose three Republican votes and still be confirmed with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President JD Vance.

Studies Don’t Support Claim That Black People Need Different Vaccine ScheduleIn a contentious exchange with Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, of Maryland, during his second confirmation hearing, Kennedy insisted that scientific research, including by Mayo Clinic vaccinologist Dr. Gregory Poland, supported his previous claim in 2021 that “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.” When making that claim, Kennedy alleged that vaccines were “overloading” Black boys and causing autism. Kennedy, however, misinterpreted the research.

“There’s a series of studies, I think most of them by Poland, that show that to particular antigens that Blacks have a much stronger reaction,” Kennedy said, when Alsobrooks asked him to explain his earlier remarks. “There’s differences in reaction to different products by different races.”

Alsobrooks, who is Black, then asked Kennedy which “different vaccine schedule” she should have received.

“Well, I mean, the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens than — for,” Kennedy said, before Alsobrooks cut him off to say that his comments were “so dangerous.”

“Well, it’s the truth. It’s the science,” Kennedy fired back. After Alsobrooks said she would not vote to confirm him because his views are dangerous, he added, “Do you think science is dangerous, senator? This is published peer-reviewed studies.”

Kennedy is correct that some research has shown that for certain vaccines and for specific aspects of the immune system, people of African descent have demonstrated a stronger immune response, on average, than other ethnicities. A 2014 study by Poland and others at the Mayo Clinic, for example, found that African Americans, including Somali Americans, produced more neutralizing antibodies after rubella vaccination compared with people of European or Hispanic descent.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks with Sen. Bill Cassidy after testifying in his second confirmation hearing on Jan. 30. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.But that is very different from Kennedy’s conclusion that it means that Black people “need fewer antigens” or that they need a different immunization schedule to avoid harm from vaccines.

Dr. Janet A Englund, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told us that it was “not correct” that Poland’s research “suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens.”

“I have never seen data suggesting this in the peer-reviewed literature coming from North America or Africa,” she told us in an email. “I am familiar with Dr. Poland’s work on vaccines, and do not know of Dr. Poland ever stating this.” She added that Black children do not need a different vaccination schedule than other children.

Poland was not available for an interview, but he previously told us for a 2021 story, when Kennedy made similar claims about his 2014 rubella vaccine study in a video discouraging Black people from getting the COVID-19 vaccine, that his study was being distorted.

“We do not have a study that shows African Americans need half the dose,” he said, explaining that his study was “preliminary” and it was not yet clear why people of different ethnicities had different antibody responses. “We do not have a study that shows African American children are being overdosed.”

At the time, Poland described the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory — it contains a grain of truth with a lot of speculations around it.”

Dr. Richard Kennedy, a Mayo Clinic co-author on the 2014 rubella study who is not related to the HHS nominee, also told NPR that suggesting that Black people should have a different vaccination schedule was “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate.”

Kennedy’s earlier suggestion that Black people have a superior immune system across the board is also incorrect. A 2013 study by Poland, for instance, found that people of European descent mounted stronger immune responses to the smallpox vaccine than people of African or Hispanic descent.

The remarks Alsobrooks highlighted, notably, were made during a 2021 event in which Kennedy first brought up Poland’s research to explain why, in his view, Black children were more likely than whites to be harmed by vaccines and develop autism.

That faulty premise was based on a study he claimed found Black boys who received the MMR vaccine on time were at 336% higher risk of autism than children who did not get it on time. But as we’ve explained before, including when writing about the 2021 video, the cited paper was a reanalysis of a 2004 CDC study that was performed by a known vaccine opponent and was retracted. There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy’s False Petition ClaimsIn both of his confirmation hearings, Kennedy deflected and mischaracterized his 2021 effort to petition the government to remove access to lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. He incorrectly claimed it was related to the CDC’s decision to recommend the vaccines for 6-year-olds. No COVID-19 vaccines were available for that age group until months after the petition was filed.

“We brought that petition after CDC recommended COVID vaccine without any scientific basis for 6-year-old children,” Kennedy said in response to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden during his first confirmation hearing on Jan. 29. “Most experts agree today — even the people who did it back then — that COVID vaccines are inappropriate for 6-year-old children who basically have zero risk from COVID. That’s why I brought that lawsuit.”

Kennedy filed the petition, along with a colleague, on behalf of the anti-vaccination group he founded, asking the FDA to revoke authorization of all COVID-19 vaccines and to “refrain” from issuing any future authorizations or approvals of COVID-19 vaccines “for all demographic groups.”

In the hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee the following day, Kennedy used nearly the same line again in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

“I filed that lawsuit after CDC recommended the vaccine for 6-year-old children without any evidence that it would benefit them and without testing on 6-year-old children,” he said. “And that was my reason for filing that lawsuit.”

None of those claims is true. In the case of Kennedy’s purported rationale for filing the petition, we cannot know his thinking. But the timeline of events contradicts his account.

Kennedy filed his petition in May 2021, around the time that healthy, non-prioritized people were beginning to gain access to the vaccines in most states. The CDC did not make its recommendation that 5- to 11-year-old children get vaccinated against COVID-19 until Nov. 2. That occurred only after clinical trials testing a pediatric version of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had been done and the Food and Drug Administration had reviewed the results and decided to authorize the vaccine. In addition, an independent panel of scientists advising the CDC had voted unanimously to recommend the vaccine to children.

Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that the vaccine had not been tested in 6-year-olds, the placebo-controlled trial included 4,600 children ages 5 through 11 years, 3,100 of whom received the vaccine. The trial found that compared with young adults given the adult vaccine, the kids’ vaccine produced a comparable immune response and was 90.7% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, with no identified serious safety risks.

It’s possible that Kennedy is thinking of a different CDC decision regarding minors and the COVID-19 vaccine. Six days before he filed the petition, the FDA amended its authorization for Pfizer/BioNTech’s adult vaccine, which was originally authorized for people 16 years of age and older, to include teens ages 12 to 15. Two days later, the CDC recommended that those younger teens get the vaccine.

But here, too, the decision was based on positive clinical trial results — so it was not “without any scientific basis,” as Kennedy claimed.

It’s worth noting that Kennedy’s petition claimed that the vaccine authorizations should be revoked because of safety issues and because “existing, approved” drugs, including chloroquine drugs and ivermectin, effectively treated and prevented COVID-19. But in fact, at the time, there already were multiple studies showing hydroxychloroquine didn’t work for COVID-19, and there wasn’t good evidence for ivermectin (randomized controlled studies have since shown that it doesn’t work, either). Serious side effects of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines occur but are rare.

The petition also called on the FDA to “amend” its guidance on the unproven drugs and to state that no one should be required to get a COVID-19 vaccine to keep a job or go to school.

The petition further requested that the FDA not allow children to participate in any vaccine clinical trials due to “the extremely low risk” of severe COVID-19 in kids.

As for that notion, which Kennedy repeated in the hearings, it’s true that children are generally at low risk of severe disease. Some children, however, have medical conditions that put them at higher risk, and at the time, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death of children. About a third of children who were hospitalized with COVID-19 had been previously healthy.

Many experts still recommend that children, including 6-year-old children, get a COVID-19 shot every year, recognizing that it is not as important for most children as it is for higher-risk groups.

Some experts may have changed or appeared to have changed their recommendations, but part of that is related to the fact that the coronavirus is no longer so new.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, for example, who was a strong proponent of all children receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, previously told us he does not think all children need an annual COVID-19 vaccine, although they can opt for one if they wish. He does, however, think any child who has never received a COVID-19 vaccine should get one.

Medication Is Not Front-line Obesity Treatment for KidsDuring an exchange with Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, Kennedy falsely claimed that new drugs to treat obesity were being used as the “first front-line intervention” for young children.

“GLP-1 drugs — the GLP drugs, the class of drugs — are miracle drugs,” he said, referring to the newer class of glucagon-like peptide-1 medications for type 2 diabetes and obesity. “But I do not think they should be the first front-line intervention for 6-year-old kids, for whom they are currently, that is the, that is the standard of practice now.”

But neither the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the US Preventive Services Task Forces, a federally funded panel of independent national experts in disease prevention, recommend the drugs at all in children as young as 6.

The USPSTF recommendations, issued in June 2024, favor “comprehensive, intensive behavioral interventions” over medication for children and adolescents age 6 and up. Such interventions include at least 26 hours a year of counseling, coaching and physical activity sessions supervised by health care providers.

The task force called the “totality of the evidence” on GLP-1 drugs for kids and adolescents “inadequate,” noting that there was only one trial per medication that was longer than two months, limited evidence on weight maintenance after stopping the drugs and no evidence on the potential harms of using the medications for a long time. It also highlighted the drugs’ known gastrointestinal side effects.

“Therefore, the USPSTF encourages clinicians to promote behavioral interventions as the primary effective intervention for weight loss in children and adolescents,” the recommendation statement reads.

The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, issued in January 2023, recommend that providers consider using medications for weight loss, but only for older children and only in conjunction with intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment. That latter treatment, which AAP calls “foundational,” is what the group recommends for all children 6 years of age and older with obesity or who are overweight — and can be considered for younger children down to the age of 2.

The AAP guidance says pediatricians “should offer” teens 12 years and older and “[m]ay offer” kids 8 through 11 years of age weight loss drugs, “according to medication indications, risks, and benefits, as an adjunct to health behavior and lifestyle treatment.”

“In particular, children with more immediate and life-threatening comorbidities, those who are older, and those affected by more severe obesity may require additional therapeutic options,” the guidelines read.

NIH Funding for Chronic DiseaseIn both confirmation hearings, Kennedy misleadingly said that the National Institutes of Health spent “almost nothing” on researching the causes of chronic disease, focusing instead on infectious disease.

Kennedy told Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, during his first hearing that his previous call for NIH scientists to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases for eight years was because those diseases have “been the principal preoccupation.”

“Almost nothing is studied at NIH about the etiology of our chronic disease epidemic,” he continued, referring to the causes of the conditions. “The money is going to infectious disease.”

Similarly, the next day, during an exchange with Sen. Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican who was appointed to replace Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy said that the NIH “has been diverted … away” from “studying the etiology of chronic diseases.”

“So there’s almost nothing at NIH — very, very little, a low percentage of its budget, a $42 billion budget, that is devoted to … finding out why we’re having this obesity epidemic,” he said. “The focus is on infectious disease,” he added later, “and we almost altogether ignore chronic disease.”

It’s difficult to say how much funding specifically goes to projects that investigate the root causes of chronic diseases. But it’s not true that there isn’t much funding for them.

According to an estimate of NIH funding by research and disease areas published on the agency’s website in May 2024, “infectious diseases” received $8.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 — the eighth largest single category on the list.

For comparison, cancer, a disease the CDC considers a chronic disease, received only a bit less — $7.9 billion. Other chronic diseases receiving $1 billion or more that year included Alzheimer’s disease ($3.5 billion), heart disease ($1.8 billion), obesity ($1.1 billion) and diabetes ($1.1 billion).

In fiscal year 2023, smaller amounts were spent on other chronic diseases, including chronic pain ($823 million), kidney disease ($703 million), hypertension ($462 million), stroke ($443 million), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis ($447 million), arthritis ($321 million), autism ($306 million), asthma ($274 million), epilepsy ($245 million), inflammatory bowel disease ($199 million), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ($148 million), and food allergies ($86 million).

Kennedy’s rhetoric also fails to recognize that there is not always a clear distinction between chronic and infectious diseases. Someone living with HIV, of course, is dealing with an infectious disease, but thanks to treatment advancements, it’s now a chronic condition that can be managed.

Cancer can be caused by viruses and bacteria. This includes cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV, and can be prevented with a vaccine that Kennedy has previously opposed. Many other chronic diseases are associated with infections or can be triggered by infections, including autoimmune diseases. Emerging evidence also suggests Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by infections, although that is still far from clear.

“The evidence is mounting, for many of the chronic conditions, that there is an infectious etiology,” Garth Ehrlich, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, told NBC News. “To me, chronic disease and infectious disease almost go hand in hand.”

As we’ve written before, Kennedy has put forth unsupported narratives on the causes of chronic disease in children.

Vaccine Safety and VAERSDuring the second hearing, Sanders asked Kennedy if the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” as Kennedy has falsely claimed in the past.

“The reason I said that, Sen. Sanders, is because there were more reports on the VAERS system, on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System … than any other — than all other vaccines combined,” he said. He then claimed we don’t know if the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives “because we don’t have a good surveillance system” and “because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”

But a large body of work across the globe has confirmed the overall safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which only rarely cause serious side effects. VAERS, as we’ve explained numerous times, is an early warning system for vaccines that quickly flags potential safety concerns. The system collects reports of potential side effects, but the reports aren’t vetted for accuracy and they do not mean the vaccine caused a particular problem. Scientists and regulators then follow up on any concerning patterns, using several other safety surveillance systems to identify real concerns.

As we explained back in 2021, when Kennedy’s nonprofit was making the same claim, simply having more reports in VAERS, as the COVID-19 vaccines do, is not evidence of a safety issue. With more people getting vaccinated all at once, with a new vaccine that is under intense scrutiny, it’s expected that there would be an unusually large number of reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, the government expanded the reporting requirements specifically for the COVID-19 vaccines.

False Claim About ‘Gold Standard’ Opioid Addiction TreatmentKennedy replied in the affirmative when Kim asked him whether he supported medications such as buprenorphine and methadone to treat opioid addiction. The drugs help manage withdrawal symptoms and have been shown in numerous studies to reduce opioid use.

But when asked if those medicines are safe and considered the “gold standard” approach, Kennedy demurred.

“The Cochrane Collaboration, which is the most prestigious scientific — or scientific research organization — has said that the … gold standard is 12 step programs,” he said.

That’s wrong. A 2020 Cochrane review on alcohol use disorder found that Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs were similar or more effective at reducing drinking than other psychological clinical interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. But the review did not compare the strategy to medication — and it did not apply to opioid use disorder.

For the latter, medications are widely recognized as the most effective options, although not everyone wants or needs to use them. On its website, the American Psychiatric Association specifically refers to the medications as “the ‘gold-standard’ of treatment.”

Kennedy, who regularly attends AA meetings and has been in recovery for a heroin addiction for decades, went on to acknowledge that many people “will not respond immediately, at least, to 12 step programs,” and that “suboxone and other and even methadone are critical interventions that save lives, that get addicts off the street, and they should be available as a treatment option.”

“I wouldn’t describe them as gold standard, but I would describe them as medically necessary,” he added.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick TakeThe U.S. Army identified one of the Black Hawk helicopter pilots killed in the midair crash with a passenger jet on Jan. 29 as Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach. But social media posts have falsely identified two different women to claim the pilot was either a transgender woman or a former White House press aide.

Full StoryDuring his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump issued executive orders that placed a freeze on hiring federal employees, banned transgender people from serving in the military and ended any federal programs or policies aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

As we’ve written, diversity initiatives and Trump’s executive orders have been cited, without evidence, by the president and social media posts as factors in the midair collision of a passenger jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Jan. 29. All 64 people aboard the jet coming from Wichita, Kansas, and the three soldiers in the helicopter were killed.

Partisan politics and references to Trump’s policies have surfaced again in social media posts that have misidentified one of the helicopter pilots killed in the crash.

In the days immediately after the collision, online posts falsely claimed that one of the dead helicopter pilots was a transgender woman named Jo Ellis. “Was this … why Trump said what he said?” a Threads post asked.

Ellis, a helicopter pilot who has served for 15 years in the Virginia Army National Guard, took to social media herself to show that she was not involved in the collision, sharing a “proof of life” video and statement on her Facebook page on Jan. 31. In addition, Ellis appeared in an interview with commentator Michael Smerconish on CNN on Feb. 1.

Also on Feb. 1, the U.S. Army issued a statement identifying a female pilot killed in the helicopter as Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach of Durham, North Carolina. The statement said Lobach had served as an aviation officer in the Army since July 2019 and was assigned to the 12th Aviation Battalion, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. Lobach’s awards included the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal and Army Service Ribbon.

The other two soldiers killed in the crash, both men, were identified by the Army as Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, a helicopter repairer, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, a pilot.

Misidentified Again OnlineDespite the Army’s Feb. 1 statement identifying Lobach and sharing her photo, subsequent social media posts included a photo of another woman and wrongly claimed she was the soldier killed in the crash.

A Feb. 2 Threads post claimed, “It’s being reported that the Blackhawk pilot responsible for killing 64 civilians in DC on Wednesday night is Rebecca Lobach. She worked for Karine Jean-Pierre in the Press shop at the White House during the Biden administration. She was not a full-time pilot.”

The post gets the pilot’s name right, but Lobach did not serve in the White House press office, and she does not appear in a photo in the Threads post that shows former President Joe Biden and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with a group of young people.

A Feb. 3 Instagram post shows the same photo of young people with Biden, with a red circle around one young woman. The text on the post says, “BLACK HAWK PILOT: She spent the last two years at the White House instead of flying? Why?”

The photo was indeed included in a Jan. 2 Instagram post by Jean-Pierre, who said, “Here’s to the best team in the business. I couldn’t do it without you. … Let’s run though the tape!”

But the fact-checking website Lead Stories identified the woman highlighted in the Feb. 3 Instagram post photo as Chloe Kellison, whose LinkedIn and Instagram accounts identify her as a press assistant at the White House.

While Lobach is not the woman in the photo shared in the social media posts, she did serve as a White House military social aide. Social aides assist with “diplomatic protocol at state events, at annual meetings with the leaders of Congress and the federal judiciary, and at other significant social events,” according to the White House Historical Association website.

A statement from the Lobach family included with the Army’s Feb. 1 statement said: “Rebecca was a warrior and would not hesitate to defend her country in battle. But she was as graceful as she was fierce: in addition to her duties as an Army aviator, Rebecca was honored to serve as a White House Military Social Aide, volunteering to support the President and First Lady in hosting countless White House events, including ceremonies awarding the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

The family’s statement also said, “Rebecca began her career in the United States Army as a distinguished military graduate in ROTC at the University of North Carolina, and was in the top 20% of cadets nationwide. She achieved the rank of Captain, having twice served as a Platoon Leader and as a Company Executive Officer in the 12th Aviation Battalion, Davison Army Airfield, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. With more than 450 hours of flight time, she earned certification as a pilot-in-command after extensive testing by the most senior and experienced pilots in her battalion.”

Social media posts highlighted a former White House press aide, Chloe Kellison, (left) and misidentified her as Capt. Rebecca Lobach (right), a pilot killed in the Jan. 29 midair collision, seen in a photo provided by the U.S. Army.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Meta to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Meta has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesCNN. “Trans Army Pilot: ‘I was not surprised by the hate. This is my reality.'” Smerconish. 1 Feb 2025.

Hale Spencer, Saranac and D’Angelo Gore. “No Evidence for the Political Finger-Pointing Over D.C. Plane Crash.” FactCheck.org. 31 Jan 2025.

Raby, John. “What is known about the deadly collision between a passenger jet and Army helicopter.” Associated Press. 4 Feb 2025.

Shapiro, Emily. “DC plane crash live updates: Crews hope to recover cockpit on Tuesday.” ABC News. 4 Feb 2025.

Simmons-Duffin, Selena. “Trump issues order to ban transgender troops from serving openly in the military.” NPR. 28 Jan 2025.

Thompson, Stuart A. “Virginia Pilot Responds After She Is Falsely Targeted Over Black Hawk Crash.” New York Times. Updated 3 Feb 2025.

U.S. Army. “Army identifies Third Soldier involved in Helicopter Crash.” Army Public Affairs. 1 Feb 2025.

White House Historical Association. “White House Military Social Aides.” Accessed 4 Feb 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Hiring Freeze.” Executive Order. 20 Jan 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs.” Executive Order. 20 Jan 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” Executive Order. 27 Jan 2025.

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On his first day in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that attempts to slow the growth in the country’s wind generation capacity.

The order paused all leasing of federal waters for offshore wind and paused new or renewed approvals for onshore or offshore wind projects on federal land until the outcome of a “comprehensive assessment and review of federal wind leases and permitting practices.” The order also suspended a large and previously approved project in Idaho. Although the order described the provisions as temporary, no end date is specified.

“We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration on Jan. 20 during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”

Also on Jan. 20, the Department of Interior issued a broader order for a 60-day suspension of “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”

That same day, in a separate executive order, Trump declared a national energy emergency based on the nation’s “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure.” While the order discussed the need for “a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy,” it also blamed the previous administration for creating “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid” – which mirrors some of Trump’s misleading criticisms about wind energy being unreliable.

Trump’s attacks against wind power are not new. We’ve been fact-checking his false and misleading claims for nearly a decade. He has said, for example, that wind energy doesn’t work, either because it’s unreliable or because it needs subsidies. But as we’ve explained, electrical grids are able to manage the variability of wind power due to fluctuations in weather. And while subsidies have played an important role in building the wind industry, onshore wind — the type that makes up the vast majority of wind turbines in the U.S. — is on par with or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants.

We have also explained that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims on wind energy development killing whales. Scientists link the deaths, which are at unusual rates since 2016, to different factors including an increase of commercial activity in areas where whales eat or migrate.

He repeated some of these and other claims in a rally right after his inauguration address, as well as in his executive order itself.

For example, the executive order stated that the pause is subject to a review that will consider the environmental impact of wind projects in land and water “upon wildlife, including, but not limited to, birds and marine mammals” and “the economic costs associated with the intermittent generation of electricity and the effect of subsidies on the viability of the wind industry.”

Wind turbines in a field at sunrise on June 28, 2024, in Nolan, Texas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.Wind is the largest renewable source of electricity generation in the U.S., providing over 10% of the country’s electricity. More than 73,000 wind turbines generate a total of 153,000 megawatts, which is enough to power 46 million homes, according to American Clean Power, a clean energy trade group. The wind industry invested $10 billion in new projects in 2023, and it employed over 131,000 workers, according to American Clean Power and the Department of Energy, respectively.

Trump’s energy emergency executive order excludes wind from its definition of the terms “energy” or “energy resources.” Included are “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.”

What did the order on wind energy do?The order stopped new approvals, and renewals, of wind energy projects on federal land and waters.

It removed “all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” for consideration of any wind energy leasing intended to generate electricity or any other related use of wind.

The outer continental shelf consists of more than 3 billion offshore acres along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; around the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; and in the Gulf of Mexico (which the federal government is renaming the Gulf of America) and along the coast of Alaska. States have jurisdiction over 3 nautical miles from the coastline, with some exceptions, and the federal jurisdiction extends from there to roughly 200 nautical miles.

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is responsible for all OCS leasing policy, including offshore renewable energy developments in federal waters.

The order also directed all federal agencies to pause all “new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects” until the secretary of the Interior completes a “comprehensive” review of the federal “leasing and permitting practices.”

As reasons for the directive, the order cited “deficiencies” in the leasing and permitting process that “may lead to grave harm” to the country’s interests and marine mammals, and “potential inadequacies in various environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act to lease or permit wind projects.”

“This concern directly conflicts with the objective of other EOs to potentially accelerate or avoid both NEPA and Endangered Species Act review to spur fossil energy production, including oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf,” Carrie Jenks and Sara Dewey, from Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program, wrote in an explainer.

In addition, the order placed a “temporary moratorium on all activities and rights” related to the construction and operation of the Lava Ridge Wind Project, a 1,000-megawatt project proposed and approved in Idaho (more on this later).

“The order is extremely expansive,” Matthew B. Eisenson, senior fellow at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told us in an email.

A last provision allows — “and seems to encourage,” according to Eisenson — the attorney general to decide if a court where litigation is pending against onshore or offshore projects should, as the order said, “stay the litigation or otherwise delay further litigation, or seek other appropriate relief consistent with this order” until the completion of the Interior secretary’s review.

“This suggests that the federal government may change its position in ongoing lawsuits. Instead of continuing to defend the permits issued by federal agencies, the federal government may seek to delay or settle those lawsuits,” Eisenson told us.

How could this impact the industry?The order could potentially undermine the growth of the industry in the U.S.

The country’s installed wind power generating capacity has gone from 2.4 gigawatts in 2000 to 150.1 gigawatts in April 2024, when electricity generated from wind established a new record in the U.S. and exceeded coal-fired generation for a second month in a row, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Yet, the development of wind energy in the U.S. has had a number of challenges in the last years — opposition from local communities who don’t want to see the turbines, misinformation campaigns and increasing costs due to inflation and supply chain disruptions, to name some.

“It is very disappointing,” Mads Nipper, CEO of Orsted, said of the challenges in recent years, on an investors and analysts call on Jan. 21.

Orsted is a Danish multinational energy corporation and one of the world’s largest developers of offshore wind power, which owns wind projects in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. In late 2023, Orsted canceled two massive offshore projects in New Jersey, Ocean Wind 1 and 2, citing high inflation and problems with supply chains. In a Jan. 20 statement, the company reported a decline in the value of its U.S. portfolio due to rate increases and loss of land value due to “market uncertainties among other factors.”

During the call, which happened after Trump’s orders, Nipper said the company is still making a profit in the U.S. market and remains “committed to” it, but said he would not comment on Trump’s executive order until Feb. 6, when the company will present yearly results.

“We’ve of course taken note of the executive order,” Nipper said during the call. “We’re in the process of reviewing it to assess the impact of our portfolio,” he said. “I can confirm that both Sunrise and Revolution Wind have all federal permits in place,” he added later in the call. Sunrise Wind, is a 924-megawatt project offshore of New York, while Revolution Wind is a 704-megawatt project offshore of Rhode Island.

Jeremy Slayton, a press officer for Dominion Energy, whose 2,587-megawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is projected to produce enough electricity to power up to 660,000 homes and is expected to complete construction by 2026, told us the project “is fully permitted and nearly halfway through construction.”

“We’re confident CVOW will be completed on-time, and that Virginia’s clean energy transition will continue with bipartisan support for many years to come,” he said in an email.

According to a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as of May 2024 there were offshore projects with 80,000 megawatt capacity in the pipeline, 90% of which were either in the permitting phase or earlier in the process.

Last week, during his confirmation hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said about offshore wind projects in the Gulf of Maine, “I’m not familiar with every project that the Interior has underway, but I’ll certainly be taking a look at all of those, and if they make sense and they’re already in law, then they’ll continue.”

During Biden’s administration, the Interior Department approved 11 commercial offshore wind projects.

How does the order impact approved wind projects?While the order said that the withdrawal of the outer continental shelf areas from consideration for new leasing does not affect any rights under existing leases, it directed the secretary of the Interior to conduct a “comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” them and to identify “any legal bases for such removal.”

“This suggests that we may see future attempts to interfere with rights under existing leases,” Eisenson told us. He added that the provision directing all federal agencies not to issue any “‘new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects’ is so expansive that it could cause trouble to projects that have received all major approvals if unforeseen circumstances force them to make minor modifications to project design that require approval from federal agencies.”

How could it impact projects on private land?Private developers don’t usually need permitting from the federal government, but some projects are required to get federal approvals for studies on the impacts to wetlands and endangered or protected species on private land.

The vast majority of onshore wind projects — about 99% of them — are on private land, according to the American Clean Power Association.

Overall, including both onshore and offshore projects, the group told us the top state for operating wind capacity is Texas (which is also first in solar capacity), and wind is supplying about half of the electric power in other conservative-leaning states, such as Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota, and about 40% of the electric power in Oklahoma.

Could it stop the Lava Ridge Wind project?The proposed 1,000-megawatt project to be developed on federal land in Idaho was approved on Dec. 6 by the Bureau of Land Management. The project has faced significant opposition by some community groups, farmers and Republicans, with one of the loudest criticisms being that the wind turbines would be visible from a historic site where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. In response, the company behind the project, Magic Valley Energy, committed to reducing the number of turbines and moving them 9 miles away from the Minidoka National Historic Site.

BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said his decision to approve the project “reflects a comprehensive evaluation of environmental impacts, community input, and the potential benefits of the project” and “represents a rational compromise between important competing interests under a multiple use mandate as it results in the smallest project footprint on public lands and the lowest number of acres disturbed out of all action alternatives and still advances national directives and policy … regarding the promotion and expansion of renewable energy on public lands.”

Trump’s executive order, however, said the decision “is allegedly contrary to the public interest and suffers from legal deficiencies” and directed the Interior secretary to halt “all activities and rights” of the development. It also instructs Interior to review BLM’s decision and “as appropriate, conduct a new, comprehensive analysis of the various interests implicated by the Lava Ridge Wind Project and the potential environmental impacts.”

Following the executive order, Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed a complementary executive order titled “Gone with the Lava Ridge Wind Project Act,” which directs state agencies to “fully cooperate” with the new assessment.

Eisenson told us the abrupt reversal of the decision to permit Lava Ridge Wind could be challenged in court.

Magic Valley Energy told us in an email the company has no comment or statement “[a]t this time.” Lava Ridge Wind could provide power to 300,000 homes. A second project from the company in Idaho could provide an additional 800 megawatts.

What has Trump said about wind energy?As we mentioned, Trump’s animosity against wind is not new, nor are the false and misleading claims he mentioned in a rally after his inauguration.

Trump, Jan 20: We’re not going to do the wind thing. Wind … big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood, they ruin your — If you have a house that’s near a windmill, guess what? Your house is worth less than half. And did you see up in New England with the whales? You see what’s happening? So, they had two whales killed in about 14 years. Last year and the year before total, they had 28. So, if you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills either. And they’re the most expensive form of energy that you can have, by far. And they’re all made in China, by the way, practically all of them. And they kill your birds, and they ruin your beautiful landscapes. But other than that, I think they’re quite good, right? No, remember when we used to joke and kid — when we were kidding, but we don’t kid anymore — they want to watch the debates on television, they want to watch your favorite president on television, but the wind isn’t blowing, so we can’t watch television that night, “Gladys, remember? Gladys, I’m sorry, the wind is just not blowing, we’re not watching Trump tonight.”

We’ve written about some of these claims before.

Wind and property values: As we wrote when Trump claimed in 2023 that “windmills” lower property values by 65% or 75%, no studies suggest such big declines in property values. According to a 2024 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, most studies show no or small changes in property values, and mostly in urban areas.

Wind and the environment: As we recently explained, wind farms do have some negative environmental impacts, but wind energy generation has dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions than energy coming from fossil fuels.

Wind and whales: There is still “no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.” As we wrote in 2023, scientists suspect a variety of factors are behind whale strandings on the East Coast, including at an ongoing “unusual mortality event” that goes back to 2016. Climate change has affected the distribution of the prey whales rely on, leading to altered migration routes where there could be more vessel strikes of whales and entanglement with fishing gear.

Wind and birds: As we explained in 2016 and most recently in 2024, wind turbines do kill a number of birds, but buildings and cats pose larger threats. Estimates vary, but a 2020 report concluded the median was 1.3 bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year. That’s about 200,000 birds per year based on the U.S. total wind power capacity. For context, 600 million birds die annually from collisions against glass buildings; 2.4 billion per year are killed by cats, and 750,000 die per year in pits filled with oil or other fluids in oil production operations, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Cost: As we’ve explained, offshore wind energy is currently very expensive, but nuclear energy is typically the most expensive power type. Power generated from wind turbines on land is cheaper and has a similar cost as natural gas and coal plants, even without subsidies.

Made in China: It is true that China dominates the wind turbine manufacturing market, but it doesn’t produce all of them. China accounted for 65% of the global wind capacity in 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie. American Clean Power’s annual market report shows there are almost 450 wind-related manufacturing facilities in the U.S.

Intermittency: As we‘ve explained several times, wind power does come with an extra variability, since the wind is not always blowing. Intermittency “would be a problem if we were trying to build an energy system that relied 100% on wind power,” Columbia’s Eisenson told us. “But nobody is trying to do that.” People don’t lose power when the wind isn’t blowing because wind is one of many energy sources coming into the electrical grid.

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In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to force TikTok’s parent company to sell its popular app or cease operating in the U.S., citing the need to “take aggressive action … to protect our national security.”

But in his return to the Oval Office, Trump delayed enforcement of a law that would have forced TikTok to shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. And, in a Jan. 22 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump downplayed concerns he once raised about TikTok as a national security risk, saying he is “starting to have a very warm spot” for TikTok because he did well with young voters.

“You know, the interesting thing with TikTok though is you’re dealing with a lot of young people,” Trump told Hannity. “So, is it that important for China to be spying … on young kids watching crazy videos?”

The answer for some members of Congress and cybersecurity experts is a resounding yes.

“Let’s be clear, TikTok is absolutely a national security threat,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 26. Turner, a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cited the vast amount of data that TikTok collects on U.S. users and Chinese laws that require TikTok to turn over that data to the Chinese Communist Party upon request.

In the first of two executive orders he issued in August 2020 to address the alleged threat posed by TikTok, Trump explained how TikTok data could be used against the U.S. government, residents and companies.

“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” an Aug. 6, 2020, executive order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Others, however, say the U.S. has failed to provide evidence that TikTok poses an actual threat, as opposed to a theoretical threat. They also question how the forced sale of TikTok would protect U.S. user data if China can still purchase it from private data brokers that collect and sell such information.

“China is unquestionably a foreign adversary, and the threats posed by TikTok’s popularity and China’s theoretical ability to demand huge amounts of data about American citizens are real,” Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Jan. 17 blog post shortly before Trump delayed enforcement of the TikTok law for 75 days.

But, she wrote, “[i]f Congress is going to force the sale of a platform used by more than 170 million Americans to share and receive information—which generates billions of dollars in revenue for U.S. small businesses and creators—Americans deserve more than, ‘Trust us!’ and generalized national security warnings.”

Here, we will summarize the facts about TikTok and the national security concerns that some have about a Chinese company operating the app in the U.S.

The Rise of TikTok and Concerns About National SecurityByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, China, first released the TikTok app in September 2016. But it wasn’t available in the United States until August 2018 – nine months after ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based video-sharing app that operated in the U.S. and had an office in California, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok to form one very popular app known for its addictive short-form videos. It wasn’t long after the August 2018 merger that concerns about TikTok surfaced.

“I and others were raising alarms in 2019 when we noticed that the popularity of TikTok was growing,” Lindsay Gorman, managing director and senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund’s Technology Program, told us in an interview.

What concerned Gorman at that time was the curious absence of TikTok videos about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protests, which started in the spring of 2019, were in response to a bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China.

In September 2019, the Washington Post reported that the pro-democracy hashtag #hongkong was prevalent on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but not on TikTok. That raised concerns, the Post wrote, that TikTok was censoring “sympathetic memes and imagery from the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy marchers.”

Days after the Post article, the Guardian reported that TikTok’s content moderation policy “instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” citing internal company guidelines.

The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019: The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.

Two weeks later, then-Sen. Marco Rubio – who is now secretary of state in the Trump administration – asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to review “the national security implications” of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.

“According to reports, TikTok acquired Musical.ly, a video-sharing platform, without any oversight and relaunched the service for Western markets,” Rubio wrote. “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Communist Party. These topics include Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other issues.”

TikTok denied allegations of censorship. “Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China,” the company said in a blog post, adding that it is “not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”

CFIUS did the review that Rubio had requested. On Aug. 14, 2020, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the committee unanimously recommended to Trump that he force ByteDance to divest from TikTok. On that same day, Trump issued an order requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok and destroy data it had collected on TikTok users in the United States. It was the second time that month that Trump had issued an executive order calling for action against TikTok’s owners.

However, as we have written, TikTok and TikTok users successfully challenged Trump’s order, stopping it from taking effect. “The courts ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and issued preliminary injunctions temporarily barring the United States from enforcing the restrictions,” CRS said in a September 2023 report.

After he assumed the presidency in 2021, Joe Biden withdrew Trump’s executive orders on TikTok, and the lawsuits were dismissed, CRS said in its report. But TikTok would continue to grow in popularity, and the effort to force the sale of TikTok would continue.

In March, the House overwhelmingly passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a vote of 352 to 65. A month later, it became law as part of an emergency supplemental bill that Biden signed April 24.

The new law gave ByteDance 270 days, or nine months, to sell TikTok, and an extension of no more than three months if it can show “significant progress” toward complying with the law.

Instead of initiating a sale, TikTok went to court to argue that the law violated the constitutional right to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in a Jan. 17 decision.

If TikTok continued to operate beyond Jan. 19, U.S. companies that provide services to TikTok, such as those that host TikTok’s data and distribute its app, could be fined $5,000 for each TikTok user in the U.S. Although it briefly shut down its app on Jan. 19, TikTok was back online after gaining assurances from Trump that he would not enforce the law.

On Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the U.S. attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days “to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”

On Feb. 3, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund. At the signing, Trump said the government-owned investment fund might be used to purchase TikTok.

“We’re going to be doing something perhaps with TikTok, perhaps not,” Trump said. “If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t. … Or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people, a lot of options. But we could put that, as an example, in the fund.”

TikTok Data CollectionAsked if TikTok poses a national security threat, Gorman, the German Marshall Fund senior fellow, told us that the app poses “two key threats.”

The first, she said, is about data – a massive collection of information that has grown in size since Trump last held office. In 2020, TikTok had about 49 million U.S. users. Since then, TikTok says it has more than tripled its number of U.S. users to more than 150 million.

“TikTok collects a range of user information, including location data and internet address, keystroke patterns, and the type of device being used to access the app,” CRS said in a June 2023 report. “The app also collects and stores a user’s browsing and search history within the app, as well as the content of any messages exchanged using the app.

“Additional information can be collected based on user permission: phone number, phone book, and social-network contacts; GPS data; user age; user-generated content (e.g., photos and videos); store payment information; and the videos ‘liked,’ shared, watched all the way through, and re-watched,” the CRS report said.

CRS said TikTok’s data collection “appears to be comparable to what other social media companies gather and use,” but it noted that the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China “requires Chinese companies to cooperate with government intelligence operations if so requested.”

Gorman said the fact that TikTok must give China its user data upon request is a national security concern.

“In the U.S.,” she said, “there has to be a court order,” backed by evidence and signed by a judge, before a company is forced to turn over such data to the government.

In its June 2023 report, CRS said, “TikTok forcefully states that it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.” But the report added that “TikTok did admit that employees in China had accessed the data of a few U.S. journalists in 2022.”

In that case, four ByteDance employees who were investigating internal leaks to the media improperly accessed TikTok data on reporters for BuzzFeed and Financial Times. After an internal investigation, ByteDance fired four employees, including two based in China, and imposed tougher restrictions on access to user data, CNN reported.

BuzzFeed said ByteDance’s targeting of its reporter “comes in the wake of a series of reports by BuzzFeed News that exposed major issues within its parent company, from employees accessing American users’ data from China to ByteDance’s attempts to push pro-China messaging to Americans.” The Financial Times said its reporter had written stories about a staff exodus at TikTok’s London office over working conditions.

Is TikTok a Propaganda Threat? The second threat to U.S. national security, Gorman said, is the potential for the Chinese Communist Party to use TikTok data for covert or overt propaganda campaigns aimed at U.S. citizens.

Although Trump dismissed TikTok users as “kids watching crazy videos,” Gorman cited a rise in the percentage of U.S. residents who get their news from TikTok and an increase in politicians using the popular app to reach voters.

In two surveys taken in the last two years, Pew found that most younger adults in the U.S. use TikTok and a growing percentage of younger adults say they get their news from the app.

“TikTok use is especially prevalent among younger adults – 56% of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 say they use the platform,” according to a Pew Research Center survey taken in August 2023.

In a separate survey last year, Pew Research Center found that 17% of U.S. adults regularly get their news from TikTok, including 39% of young adults under 30 years old who cited TikTok as their news source. By comparison, Pew found that only 3% of all U.S. adults and 9% of adults under 30 years got their news from TikTok in 2020.

“More and more people are getting their news on TikTok – 30% of Americans under a certain age get news from TikTok,” Gorman told us. “At the height of the Cold War, I don’t think we would have allowed the Soviet Union to own a social media site that delivers news to 30% of Americans.”

Gorman also said a report she co-authored last year found that 27% of all candidates in 2024 for Congress and two statewide races (gubernatorial and secretary of state) had TikTok accounts — an increase from 23% in the 2022 campaigns. “It’s no longer just this fun, viral thing,” she said of TikTok.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Ford School in December 2022 that the Chinese government has the potential to control TikTok’s algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content and, if they want to, to use it for influence operations [that] are a lot more worrisome in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party than whether or not you’re steering somebody as an influencer to one product or another.”

Gorman recalled how Russia’s Internet Research Agency carried out a covert propaganda campaign on Facebook to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Now, just imagine if Russia owned Facebook,” she said.

A more recent example may have occurred in Romania, but this time on TikTok.

“Romania just set aside its entire presidential election because of concerns that TikTok has manipulated data and propaganda with respect to its presidential election,” Turner said on “Face the Nation.”

The Ohio congressman was referring to Calin Georgescu’s surprising victory on Nov. 24 in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, which has been tossed out by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Romanian officials claim that the far-right, pro-Russia candidate benefited “from a Russia-style booster campaign involving TikTok, according to declassified Romanian intelligence documents,” Politico reported. A new election will take place in May, Politico said.

Both TikTok and Russia have denied interfering in the election to help Georgescu.

Mark Scott, a senior resident fellow at the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, agreed with Gorman that “[d]ata that falls into the hands of an adversarial country may pose a direct national security threat, including via data brokers.”

“What we’ve seen, based on what information can be collected, including people’s geolocation, contacts, and data about their devices, is that such data can help adversarial countries garner an in-depth understanding of American citizens,” Scott told us in an email. “Such insight can then be fed into efforts, either via overt propaganda or covert influence campaigns, that target Americans.”

However, Scott wrote in a Jan. 9 post on the Atlantic Council website that forcing ByteDance to sell or shut down TikTok in the U.S. won’t “make Americans’ data more private and secure.”

“While US officials have raised concerns about how Americans’ data may be accessed by Chinese government officials via TikTok, such personal information—from people’s phone numbers and home addresses to internet activity to consumer purchasing history—is already available commercially, via so-called domestic data brokers,” he wrote. “The outgoing Biden administration tried to tackle that problem with the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act and prohibitions placed on these data brokers from transferring such sensitive data to foreign adversaries like China.”

The House unanimously passed the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act in March, but the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.

Gorman agreed that Congress should pass that legislation, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve what we can.” Forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app is a good first step in protecting user data, she said.

“These are two separate problems. They are not at all the same,” Gorman said, referring to data brokers and a Chinese company owning TikTok. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need a data broker if it has TikTok.”

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After the deadly collision between a passenger plane and a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., politicians and political commentators were quick to cast blame. President Donald Trump suggested diversity initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration were at fault for the crash, and his critics pointed to a hiring freeze that Trump instituted on Jan. 20.

A helicopter flies on Jan. 30 near the crash site of the American Airlines plane with a military helicopter near Reagan National Airport. Photo by Andrew Harnik via Getty Images.But neither side has evidence that those actions contributed to the crash.

The midair collision on Jan. 29 near Reagan Washington National Airport left no survivors. A total of 67 people reportedly died — 64 who were on the plane coming from Wichita, Kansas, and three soldiers who were in the helicopter.

The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into what caused the crash. In a press conference on Jan. 30, leaders stressed that the case was just beginning, and they had no answers yet.

Trump Blames His PredecessorsAt a press conference on Jan. 30, Trump told reporters, “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions.”

The president then went on to suggest that diversity hiring programs were to blame. He referred to a memo he signed on Jan. 21, eight days before the crash, titled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation.”

The memo incorrectly attributed a long-standing policy of the FAA only to former President Joe Biden’s administration, saying that “the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.”

At the press conference, Trump, again, made the same claim. He read aloud a headline that had been published by the New York Post and Fox News a year earlier. The headline said, “The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” The president added, “They can be air traffic controllers — I don’t think so.”

That story was published in January 2024, following an incident in Oregon when an emergency exit door flew off of a Boeing 737 while it was in flight. Trump wrongly indicated that the story was published in January 2025, weeks before he took office.

The Fox News story had linked to a page on the FAA website about diversity and inclusion initiatives that had been active since at least 2013, according to the Internet Archive, and as Snopes discovered last year. Notably, that page had also been active — and carried the same language — through Trump’s first administration.

“The initiative is part of the FAA’s Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel,” Trump read at the press conference, adding: “I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

Citing the FAA website, Trump said the federal government had identified certain disabilities “for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” saying they included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis” and more. All of that language was on the FAA’s website during Trump’s first term.

The Washington Post Fact Checker also noted that during Trump’s first administration, in 2019, the FAA announced a new program “to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.”

In his Jan. 21 memo, however, the president said that “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring … penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

At the press conference, when a reporter asked Trump why he thought the reason for the crash was diversity among air traffic controllers, the president said, “Because I have common sense.”

Later on Jan. 30, a reporter asked if Trump was saying that “race or gender played a role in this tragedy.” Trump said: “It may have. I don’t know. Incompetence might have played a role. We’ll let you know that, but we want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are. We want the most competent people especially in those positions.”

Critics Blame TrumpMeanwhile, on social media, some critics of Trump are claiming or suggesting — also without proof — that he is the one responsible for the deadly crash.

An account belonging to Trill Clinton, whose bio says he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban and Development during the Obama administration, published a Jan. 30 post on X saying, “You dont get to: 1. Fire the head of the TSA, and the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. 2. Freeze hiring of all Air Traffic Controllers. 3. Fire 100 top FAA security officers. And then claim a plane crash a week later is ‘a tragic accident.’”

Sawyer Hackett, a democratic strategist and consultant, similarly wrote on X, “If a Democrat fired 100 FAA employees and put a freeze on hiring air traffic controllers 8 days before an airport plane crash, there would be a right-wing and media frenzy for weeks.” In another post, Hackett said, “The plane crash in DC was Trump’s fault.”

But there is no evidence that any recent executive actions taken by Trump played a role in the incident.

On his first day back in office as president, Trump did sign an executive order putting a temporary freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees.

“As part of this freeze, no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law,” the order said.

However, the order also said that the hiring freeze does not apply to “military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.” The White House told us in an email that the freeze did not apply to air traffic control specialists because of the public safety exemption. A spokesperson also said that no air traffic controllers were fired.

On Jan. 30, the New York Times, citing an internal FAA report on safety, reported that staffing at Reagan National Airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” But an Associated Press source later contradicted that FAA report, telling the AP that staffing was normal the night of Jan. 29.

But the Reagan airport tower “has been understaffed for years” and “was nearly a third below targeted staff levels,” as of September 2023, the Times said in its report.

It’s also true that after he took office, Trump removed the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard and eliminated members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee — although it’s not clear that those decisions had a direct connection to the Jan. 29 crash, either.

In a story addressing claims that Trump is at fault, PolitiFact quoted Jim Cardoso, a former U.S. Air Force colonel and pilot who directs the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, as saying that “the actions by President Trump would not have led to such an immediate impact.”

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Quick TakeVice President Kamala Harris received many celebrity endorsements leading up to the election, including from Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Eminem, Megan Thee Stallion and Lizzo. Social media posts have made the unfounded claim that these celebrities were collectively paid $20 million for their endorsements. We’ve found no evidence to support the claim.

Full StoryIn the months leading up to the election, Vice President Kamala Harris received several high-profile celebrity endorsements.

In July, rapper Megan Thee Stallion appeared with Harris at a rally in Atlanta.

Television host Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, where she endorsed Harris for president: “What we’re going to do is elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States,” Winfrey said.

In October, rappers Eminem and Lizzo both spoke at rallies for the vice president in Detroit.

Singer-songwriter Beyoncé endorsed Harris later that month at a rally in Houston.

Social media users have claimed, without any evidence, that these celebrities were collectively paid around $20 million for their endorsements.

We previously wrote about the unfounded claim that Beyoncé was paid $10 million, which a Harris campaign official said “is not true.” Now, posts are claiming others were paid millions.

A Nov. 12 Instagram post shared a clip from Fox News, in which anchor Harris Faulkner claimed that Beyoncé received $10 million from the Harris campaign for her endorsement, Megan Thee Stallion received $5 million, Lizzo received $3 million and Eminem received $1.8 million.

In a caption, the user claimed that Oprah received $1 million for her endorsement.

“Is that normally how it goes — you spend $20 million, you get yourself in debt to try to get a bunch of rich celebrities on stage?” Faulkner asks in the clip, referencing a claim from a Democratic National Committee member that the Harris campaign ended this election cycle with $20 million in debt.

Federal Election Commission records for the Harris campaign are only available through Oct. 16 and show no debts are owed. Unnamed sources close to the campaign told NBC News that some debt has been accrued.

Former professional basketball player Rod Benson shared the claim on Threads, writing, “We donated $1B to the Kamala campaign and a few days later they ask for more money cause they ended up with $20M in debt paying for celebrity endorsements.”

In a separate post, Benson added: “They paid Oprah $1M to endorse the campaign.”

Other users shared the same or similar numbers.

We’ve found no evidence to support the claim that these celebrities were paid anything in exchange for their endorsements.

As we’ve written, political campaigns are required to publicly disclose any paid endorsements. But the Harris campaign, through Oct. 16, lists only one endorsement-related expenditure — for $75 — in its FEC financial reports. It was made to the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, a pro-environment political action committee, in June 2023, when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection.

The Harris campaign did make two payments totaling $1 million to Harpo Productions Inc., Oprah Winfrey’s production company, on Oct. 15, for “event production.” Winfrey said in an Instagram comment that she was “not paid a dime” and that the payments went toward production fees for her interview with Harris in September. “I did not take any personal fee. However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story,” Winfrey wrote.

We found no record of Harris’ campaign paying Beyoncé, Eminem, Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, or their production companies, anything.

We asked the Harris campaign about these claims regarding the endorsements, but we haven’t received a response.

Claims about paid celebrity endorsements have been circulating in the weeks leading up to and following the election. On Nov. 14, rapper Cardi B responded on X to the claim that she was paid for her endorsement of Harris, writing, “I didn’t get paid a dollar.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources Breuninger, Kevin. “Oprah Winfrey endorses Kamala Harris, saying she represents ‘the best of America.'” CNBC. 21 Aug 2024.

Cappelletti, Joey. “At Detroit Rally for Kamala Harris, Eminem Endorses and Obama Reps.” Time. 23 Oct 2024.

Epstein, Reid J., et al. “Beyoncé Rallies for Harris in Houston With a Message for the Battlegrounds.” New York Times. 26 Oct 2024.

Gore, D’Angelo. “League of Conservation Voters.” FactCheck.org. 5 Sep 2024.

Korecki, Natasha. “Clashes, confusion and secrecy consume the Harris campaign’s finances.” NBC. 14 Nov 2024.

Levy, Piet, and Jay Stahl. “Cardi B supports Kamala Harris at campaign rally in Wisconsin: ‘Ready to make history?‘” USA Today. 2 Nov 2024.

Moorman, Taijuan, and KiMi Robinson. “Megan Thee Stallion performs ‘Savage’ at Kamala Harris rally: ‘Hotties for Harris.'” USA Today. 30 Jul 2024.

Nicholas, Peter, and Dareh Gregorian. “President Joe Biden drops out of 2024 presidential race.” NBC. 21 Jul 2024.

Nichols, Anna Liz. “‘It’s about damn time’ to elect Harris as president, Lizzo says.” Alabama Reflector. 20 Oct 2024.

Vakil, Caroline. “DNC critic sparks discussions about what went wrong for Harris.” The Hill. 13 Nov 2024.

Zinsner, Hadleigh. “Posts Make Unfounded Claim About Beyoncé’s Endorsement of Harris.” FactCheck.org. 31 Oct 2024.

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President-elect Donald Trump, who will return to office for a second term on Jan. 20, 2025, recently reignited a constitutional debate about whether a twice-elected president can serve a third term.

“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,'” Trump told House Republicans on Nov. 13, perhaps jokingly.

The 22nd Amendment, which was ratified in 1951, states that “[n]o person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” The amendment was spurred by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected president an unprecedented four times, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a 2019 report.

The 22nd Amendment would block Trump, who at 78 is the oldest person to be elected president in U.S. history, from running for a third term — unless it was repealed, which is highly unlikely.

“I don’t think there’s any realistic possibility that the 22nd Amendment could be repealed,” Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, told us in an email. “That would take another amendment (like the 21st, repealing the 18th) and I don’t think it would get 2/3 of both houses of congress, much less 3/4 of the states.”

To add an amendment to the Constitution, the House and the Senate both need to approve a joint resolution with a two-thirds majority, and then 75% of the states must ratify the amendment. The 18th Amendment, which ushered in the Prohibition Era, is the only amendment ever to be repealed.

But, as the CRS stated in a 2009 report, there has been a debate “as to whether the 22nd Amendment is an absolute limit on service as President.” While it is clear that a person cannot be elected to a third term, whether a twice-elected president can serve a third term as president or acting president is an unresolved constitutional question, the CRS report said. (Emphasis is ours.)

“[L]egal scholars Bruce Peabody and Scott Gant asserted in a 1999 article that a former President could also succeed to the presidency, or be ‘acting President’ from the wide range of positions covered in the Presidential Succession Act,” the 2019 CRS report said. “By their reasoning, a former President serving as Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, or as a Cabinet officer would also be able to assume the office of President or act as President under the ‘service vs. election’ interpretation of the Twenty-Second Amendment.”

Under the Presidential Succession Act, the vice president is the first of 18 people in line to replace a president who dies, resigns or is otherwise unable to hold office. The House speaker is second in line, and it is worth noting, the Republicans retained control of the House after the 2024 election. (Trump entertained the thought of become House speaker last year when the House Republicans were divided on who should replace deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.)

Peabody and Gant wrote the 1999 article for the Minnesota Law Review at a time when then-President Bill Clinton was nearing the completion of his second term. “It appears to be a commonly held view that when Bill Clinton’s second term expires, he will be constitutionally prohibited from serving again as President of the United States. This, we believe, is decidedly incorrect,” they wrote.

“While there is plenty of debate on the matter, the language of the 22nd Amendment talks only about limiting who ‘shall be elected to the office of the President’ (emphasis added),” Peabody, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, told us in an email. “In my analysis, therefore, the 22nd Amendment does not prohibit a person from becoming or acting as president so long as this person is not elected to a third term as president.”

Peabody also told us in an email that a twice-elected president could run for vice president and serve as president if the president dies, resigns or is removed from office.

Peabody, email to FactCheck.org, Nov. 15: There are actually five fairly clear scenarios through which a twice-elected president could again become or act as president:

Such a person could[:]

(1) serve as Vice President and then become President in the case of removal, death or resignation of the President

(2) serve as Vice President and then act as President during a period in which the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the Office, as authorized by (a) a written declaration from the President him or herself, or (b) through the VP and a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments” or some other authorized body indicating that the President is disabled/unable to discharge the duties of the office (25th Amendment)

(3) become Vice President-elect and then President if “at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died” (20th Amendment)

(4) become Vice President-elect and then act as President if “a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of [the] term, or if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify” (20th Amendment)

(5) act as President under circumstances provided for by the Succession Act of 1947 which kicks in [when] both the President and the VP are unable to discharge their duties

Roosevelt, the University of Pennsylvania law professor, said any attempt to circumvent the 22nd Amendment in those ways would be challenged in court. “I think the odds of that [being successful] are extremely low,” he said.

“Obviously the concern the 22nd Amendment is addressing is that someone who serves more than two terms as president might accumulate too much power,” Roosevelt said. “That concern has nothing to do with how the person takes office the third (or fourth, or fifth) time.”

Why, then, does the 22nd Amendment say “be elected” instead of “serve”?

“[T]he answer is probably that the only other way to become president is by moving through the vice-presidency and they thought the 12th Amendment took care of that,” Roosevelt said.

The 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804, appears to disqualify a two-term president from being vice president. It extended the qualifications for presidents, such as age and residency requirements, to the vice presidency. It also states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

Peabody interprets the 12th Amendment more narrowly than Roosevelt.

“The most obvious reading of this provision is that it applies to the Article II language discussing eligibility: ‘No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.’ Someone who is not a ‘natural born Citizen’ or someone who is 34 can’t come in the ‘back door’ by being, say, a VP and then becoming president,” Peabody said.

“But, in my view, those are the only ‘eligibility’ restrictions mentioned in the Constitution. And, of course, Mr. Trump meets the Article II eligibility language,” he added. “Bottom line: A plausible reading of the Constitution is that Trump could serve out his second term and still become or act as president through one of the scenarios described above.”

The 2009 CRS report weighed both of these arguments and concluded, “It seems unlikely that this question will be answered conclusively barring an actual occurrence of the as-yet hypothetical situation.”

At least one Democrat wants to prevent such an occurrence. Rep. Dan Goldman of New York has said he would introduce a House resolution barring Trump from serving more than two terms. NBC News, which obtained a copy of the resolution, wrote that it “reaffirms that the 22nd Amendment ‘applies to two terms in the aggregate as President of the United States’ and reaffirms that it ‘applies to President-elect Trump.'”

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Quick TakeSocial media posts falsely claim that Elon Musk banned author Stephen King from X, the social media platform owned by Musk. The rumor that King was banned originated on a satirical website.King’s X account remains active, and he used it on Nov. 13 to debunk the claim.

Full StoryWhile Vice President Kamala Harris drew support from progressive celebrities during her campaign, President-elect Donald Trump had the support of conservative figures, including Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X.

Musk’s support of Trump has frequently drawn the fire of author Stephen King, a longtime critic of Trump. Recently, social media posts falsely claimed Musk banned King from X after the author insulted him online.

A Nov. 10 Threads post showed photos of Musk and King, with text that claimed, “Elon Musk Bans Stephen King Permanently From Platform X After He Trolled the Tech Mogul.”

Many of the social media posts baselessly claimed Musk had banned King from X after the author allegedly called him “The First Lady.” Posts on Threads mocked Musk for allegedly silencing his critic, with one reading, “So Stephen King was permanently banned from Twitter for calling Mr. Free Speech himself Elon Musk, ‘The First Lady.’ That’s funny.”

But King has not been exiled from X; his account is still active. King responded to the claim on a Nov. 13 post on X, saying, “I see there’s a rumor going around that I called the Musk-man Trump’s new first lady. I didn’t, but only because I didn’t think of it. There’s also a rumor going around that Muskie kicked me off Twitter. Yet here I am.”

The claim that King had been banned from the platform seems to have stemmed from a satirical article posted in July on the website Esspots, with the headline, “Elon Musk Bans Stephen King Permanently From Platform X After He Trolled the Tech Mogul.” The site had labeled it satire — a detail lost on many who reshared it as fact.

Esspots is a subsidiary of the satire website SpaceXMania, which “orbits around Elon Musk.” SpaceXMania doesn’t disclose publisher information on its website, but the New York Times reported that the site’s operator is based in Pakistan. The link was shared by the Facebook handle SpaceX Fanclub, which also noted that it was satire.

King, who has a history of criticizing Musk, has been the subject of previous rumors that he left the platform. In January 2023, King wrote on X: “There are persistent rumors that I have left Twitter. I have not. I may do so eventually, there are many things about the Musk iteration of the site that I don’t care for, but that day is not today. You don’t fix a thing by leaving it.”

King has trolled Musk over his political leanings and pro-Trump posts on X. On Nov. 3, King wrote, “The Musk-man has posted 3,000 times on Twitter in the last month. Most are pro-Trump disinformation and outright lies. Remember, he has skin in the game. Consider his posts accordingly.”

Earlier this year, King also suggested that President Joe Biden should step aside in favor of a new Democratic candidate, prompting Musk to reply, “Even Stephen King is voting for Trump!” That, too, isn’t true. King supported Harris.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesCollins, Kaitlin. “Elon Musk exerts deepening influence on Donald Trump’s presidential transition.” CNN. 10 Nov 2024.

Gomez, Dessi and Tom Tapp. “Trump Celebrity Endorsements: A List Of Celebrities Supporting The Ex-POTUS.” Deadline. 5 Nov 2024.

Kurtz, Judy and Amie Parnes. “A-list celebrity endorsements boomerang on Harris, Democrats.” The Hill. 9 Nov 2024.

Ramachandrian, Naman. “‘Trump Was a Horrible President and Is a Horrible Person,’ Says Stephen King.” Variety. 15 Aug 2022.

Specter, Emma. “From the Obamas to Charli XCX, 16 Celebrities Who Have Endorsed Kamala Harris for President.” Vogue. 24 Jul 2024.

Stephen King (@StephenKing). “I see there’s a rumor going around that I called the Musk-man Trump’s new first lady. I didn’t, but only because I didn’t think of it. There’s also a rumor going around that Muskie kicked me off Twitter. Yet here I am.” X. 13 Nov 2024.

Stephen King (@StephenKing). “There are persistent rumors that I have left Twitter. I have not. I may do so eventually; there are many things about the Musk iteration of the site that I don’t care for, but that day is not today. You don’t fix a thing by leaving it.” X. 8 Jan 2023.

Thompson, Stuart A. “Fake News Still Has a Home on Facebook.” New York Times. 13 Jun 2024.

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Quick TakeSome social media posts falsely claimed that CBS News reported there was “cheating” in the 2024 presidential election that benefitted President-elect Donald Trump. We found no evidence of such a report, and a CBS News spokesperson said the outlet “did not report or say there was cheating in the election.”

Full StoryThe 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump on Nov. 6, with the president-elect winning 312 electoral votes and Vice President Kamala Harris receiving 226. The elections also saw Republicans regain control of the Senate and likely keep control of the House of Representatives, although several congressional districts have yet to be decided as of Nov. 12.

But social media posts, falsely citing CBS News, have made unfounded claims that the presidential election outcome may have been the result of cheating.

A Nov. 10 post on Threads claimed, “CBS is reporting cheating in the election. If the accusations are true. There could be a recount. This will change everything. Let’s cross our fingers!”

A similar post on X on Nov. 6 said, “CBS News is currently accusing Donald Trump of cheating his victory over the 2024 Presidential Election.” As of Nov. 11, the post was viewed 2.7 million times and received 43,000 likes, according to the platform.

We couldn’t find any stories posted by CBS News on its website, X account, or its Threads account that reported cheating during the elections.

CBS News spokesperson Hugo Rojo told us in an emailed statement, “CBS News did not report or say there was cheating in the election.”

While there was no evidence of cheating, there was a considerable amount of disinformation before, during and after the elections.

CBS News reported on Nov. 5, Election Day, that the FBI warned of fabricated videos using the agency’s name and insignia, including one that alleged voter fraud at prisons in three swing states. “The videos were likely created by the same Russian disinformation group that released two additional fabricated FBI videos in recent days, according to Antibot4Navalny, a collective of researchers that tracks online Russian disinformation,” CBS News reported.

Trump has repeatedly made baseless, false and misleading claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged,” citing conspiracies involving the Department of Justice, Dominion Voting Systems and local election officials, among others. State and federal judges repeatedly rejected Trump’s claims, saying the Trump legal team provided no evidence of fraud.

On Election Day this year, while the polls were still open, Trump once again posted unfounded claims on social media about “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, adding “Law Enforcement coming!!!” As we wrote, city and state officials, including the Philadelphia district attorney, city commissioner and the Pennsylvania Department of State, denied any allegations of election impropriety. The Philadelphia Police Department also told CNN they were not aware of any election-related issues that had prompted a law enforcement response.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. “2024 Presidential Election Results.” Accessed 11 Nov 2024.

CBS News. “Homepage.” Accessed 11 Nov 2024.

Rojo, Hugo, Spokesperson, CBS News. Email to FactCheck.org. 11 Nov 2024.

Delzer, Erielle and Kerry Breen. “FBI warns that fake videos using its name, insignia are spreading election misinformation.” CBS News. 5 Nov 2024.

FBI. Press release. “FBI Statement on Inauthentic Use of Bureau Name, Insignia in Promoting False Election-Related Narratives.” 5 Nov 2024.

@antibot4navalny. “None of the fake videos published by Matryoshka after the poll stations got closed were made with an assumption that any particular candidate won… Moreover, most were still seeking to target the voting… And all of them either used FBI branding or falsely quoted FBI as saying.” X. 6 Nov 2024.

McLean, Danielle. “Post Misrepresents Impact of Voter Registrations Delivered to Maricopa County.” 15 Oct 2024.

Quinn, Melissa. “These 14 House seats are still undecided, with 2024 results outstanding a week after Election Day.” CBS News. 12 Nov 2024.

Robertson, Lori, et al. “Trump Repeats Baseless, False Claims About the Election.” FactCheck.org. 1 Dec 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Makes Unsupported Claim About ‘Massive CHEATING’ in Philadelphia.” FactCheck.org. 5 Nov 2024.

Lybrand, Holmes, et al. “Philadelphia authorities shut down claims of “massive CHEATING” Trump referenced in Truth Social post.” CNN. 5 Nov 2024.

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Q: What will happen in Donald Trump’s New York state criminal case now that he is president-elect?

A: Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 26, but the judge could decide that sentencing is no longer appropriate. If Trump does receive a sentence, it could be appealed, or the judgment could be deferred until 2029, when Trump would be out of office.

FULL QUESTIONWhat happens if Trump wins the election and then he gets sentenced at the end of the month?

FULL ANSWERPresident-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in Manhattan on Nov. 26, after being convicted in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal election law violations stemming from an effort to keep quiet an alleged extramarital affair. Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s New York trial, already has twice postponed the sentencing, which was originally scheduled for July 11.

Now that Trump has been elected the next U.S. president, it’s possible that he may not be sentenced at all.

Trump appears in court for his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty Images.Before Trump’s sentencing hearing, Merchan, on Nov. 12, is scheduled to decide whether to completely dismiss the conviction based on a motion that Trump’s legal team filed after the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling that presidents have immunity for certain official actions while in office.

However, CNN has reported that before Nov. 12, Trump’s attorneys are planning to try to get the sentencing cancelled by filing a motion “arguing that as a president-elect, he is entitled to the same constitutional protections as a sitting president and should be protected from any action by state prosecutors.”

If either motion is granted, the charges would be dismissed.

“But if the judge decides to keep the conviction intact, the former president’s lawyers are expected to ask Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing so they can appeal,” CNN said. “And if that’s not granted, his attorneys are planning to appeal the immunity decision to state appellate courts and potentially all the way to the US Supreme Court to ask the courts to delay Trump’s sentencing until all appeals are exhausted, which could take months.”

If Merchan does proceed with sentencing, he has multiple options, as we’ve written.

Trump could get prison time, but that’s not likely, Cheryl Bader, a clinical associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, told us in a June interview.

For a first-time convicted felon, with a low-level, nonviolent felony and a person of advanced age, “under any circumstance like that, there’d be a relatively low chance of incarceration,” she said.

Other sentencing possibilities include probation or a “conditional discharge” with conditions other than incarceration or probation. The “simplest” option, she said, might be for the judge to fine Trump.

“He has not wanted to put his thumb on the scale during the election but now that the election is over, it will be interesting to see whether Judge Merchan will feel any pull to defer to the political process or will see this as perhaps the only opportunity for a judge to hold Trump accountable for his criminal conduct,” Bader said in an email to us on Nov. 7.

If any sentence of confinement is rendered, the judge could order that the penalty be imposed after Trump completes his four-year term as president in 2029. The Trump team could also appeal a leveled punishment.

But some legal experts don’t see it going that way.

“I think any reasonable judge wouldn’t sentence the president-elect,” Jill Konviser, a retired New York trial judge, told Politico for a story that said the “sentencing hearing in the hush money case almost certainly won’t happen.”

And Greg Germain, a corporate attorney and Syracuse University professor of law, told Newsweek that the hush money case needs to be “stayed,” or stopped. “If Judge Merchan tries to proceed with it, or even sets it for sentencing, the Department of Justice will intervene and ultimately the Supreme court will slap him down,” he was quoted saying.

But Germain said he doesn’t believe the judge will try to sentence Trump.

Unlike the pending federal prosecutions against him, Trump can’t pardon himself for state offenses.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

SourcesBader, Cheryl, clinical associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 7 Nov 2024.

Farley, Robert, et al. “Q&A on Trump’s Criminal Conviction.” FactCheck.org. 31 May 2024.

O’Driscoll, Sean. “Supreme Court Will ‘Slap Down’ Donald Trump Hush Money Case — Attorney.” Newsweek. 7 Nov 2024.

Orden, Erica. “Trump is due to be sentenced in 3 weeks. It probably won’t happen.” Politico. 6 Nov 2024.

Cole, Devan, et al. “What happens to Trump’s criminal and civil cases now that he’s been reelected.” CNN. 6 Nov 2024.

Reiss, Adam. “Judge delays Trump sentencing in hush money case until after November election.” NBC News. 6 Sep 2024.

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Quick TakeSocial media users alleged bias against former President Donald Trump when a Google search on Election Day for “where to vote” returned an interactive map to find a person’s polling station when including the word “Harris” but not “Trump.” The reason is because “Harris” is a county in Texas, whereas “Trump” is not a location.

Full StoryAs millions of Americans were headed to the polls to cast their ballots on Nov. 5, social media accounts were falsely claiming Google was trying to interfere with the election by providing different search results for Vice President Kamala Harris than it did for Trump.

In late October, the company had rolled out a map search result feature, as it had in previous years, to provide voters with locations when they searched for terms such as “where to vote” or “ballot dropboxes.”

It turned out the interactive map, allowing a person to put in their address, also appeared when querying “where can I vote for Harris,” but not when searching “where can I vote for Trump.”

A screenshot of Google’s “where to vote” panel. The interactive map appeared when adding the words “Harris” or “Vance,” but not “Trump,” since only the former two are location names.Several social media accounts jumped to the conclusion that the differing search results were an effort by the tech behemoth to swing the election.

“BREAKING: Google shows a ‘Where to Vote’ section with a map for Kamala Harris, but not for Donald Trump,” wrote one influential post on X. “Google is the biggest corporate donor to the Democratic Party.”

X owner Elon Musk, a prominent supporter of Trump, reshared the post, asking, “Are others seeing this too?” He proceeded to post about it two more times within about 30 minutes, including a now-deleted post that read, “This is so messed up.”

But the discrepancy came down to the simple fact that only one candidate has a location-based name. Harris is a county in Texas; Trump is not a location.

Indeed, while we could replicate the results, we also found that we did not get the map result when adding Harris’ first name. We also found that the map appeared when adding a variety of common names that happen to be places: Jones, Davis, Williams, Franklin and Johnson — or when keeping the search terms simple, and just typing “where can I vote.”

Less than an hour after Musk’s reshare, Google had responded and explained the issue.

“The ‘where to vote’ panel is triggering for some specific searches bc Harris is also the name of a county in TX,” the company said in an X post. “Happens for ‘Vance’ too bc it’s also the name of a county. Fix is coming. Note very few people actually search for voting places this way.”

Vance County is in North Carolina.

Google implemented a fix shortly. According to a company blog post, the map search result feature uses information from the Voting Information Project, which is a collaboration between state and local election officials and Democracy Works, a nonpartisan civic technology nonprofit. Google helps fund the project.

As for the claim that Google is “the biggest corporate donor” to Democrats, the company itself can’t contribute money to candidates. Its political action committee contributed a slightly greater percentage of its donations to Republicans in this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political contributions. Individual contributions from the employees of Google parent company Alphabet favored Democrats overall, but the total amount donated ranked 49th among the organizations OpenSecrets tracks.

Musk did reshare Google’s post, adding, “Thanks for the clarification.” A reader’s note was also appended to the original post he had shared. It explained that a variety of location names work, but not “if there is no city / county / state with the same name,” such as Kamala, Trump and Walz.

But even after the explanation, claims of election interference continued to circulate — and proceeded to distort Google’s response into an admission of wrongdoing.

“Google admits to Trump and Harris search engine discrepancy, says ‘fix is coming,’” read one X post. “This is ABSOLUTELY INTERFERING WITH THE US ELECTION.”

In the wee hours of the morning the day after the election — shortly before the Associated Press called the race for Trump — the same account continued to insist on malfeasance.

“Guess what happens to Google once the Trump administration investigates them for election interference?” a post read.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

SourcesKitchen, Geordy. “Find voting information on Google Search and Maps.” The Keyword (Google company blog). 21 Oct 2024.

News from Google (@NewsFromGoogle). “The ‘where to vote’ panel is triggering for some specific searches bc Harris is also the name of a county in TX. Happens for ‘Vance’ too bc it’s also the name of a county. Fix is coming. Note very few people actually search for voting places this way.” X. 5 Nov 2024.

News from Google (@NewsFromGoogle). “Update: This is now fixed.” X. 5 Nov 2024.

“PAC Profile: Google Inc.” Open Secrets. Accessed 6 Nov 2024.

“Alphabet Inc.” Open Secrets. Accessed 6 Nov 2024.

Yoon, Robert. “Why AP called Wisconsin and the White House for Donald Trump.” AP. 6 Nov 2024.

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Quick TakeSocial media users have spread a quote attributed to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, claiming he said “we won’t be certifying the election” if former President Donald Trump wins. Raskin responded, saying the quote is “100% fabricated” and that “America is having a free and fair election and Congress will certify the winner.” The origin of the posts appears to be a misleading account of Raskin’s comments in February.

Full StoryIn the days leading up to Election Day, a supposed quote from Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland began spreading on social media, sometimes under the label of “breaking,” as in breaking news. No source was cited for the quote, and Raskin, in a Nov. 5 post on X, said it was “fabricated.”

The bogus quote read: “Let folks cast their votes for Trump if that’s their choice. But mark my words, we won’t be certifying the election. He might win, but we’ll ensure he doesn’t step foot in the Oval Office.”

Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who was the lead impeachment manager for the Trump impeachment related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, responded: “This fictional ‘quote’ is 100% fabricated. It’s one more lie in the stream of right-wing lies designed to undermine our election. Despite this actionable libel and all the disinformation, America is having a free and fair election and Congress will certify the winner.”

Another version of the circulating quote used nearly the same words, but claimed Raskin had said Trump “may be elected but we are not going to let him be inaugurated.” We traced that quote back to an Oct. 28 podcast episode, in which Mike Benz, who worked in the State Department during the Trump administration, gave his interpretation of something Raskin said in February about a case that was before the Supreme Court at the time. Benz’s paraphrase of Raskin’s remarks is missing some important context.

The podcast showed a clip of Raskin, labeled with the date “Aug. 5, 2024,” but the clip actually comes from a Feb. 17 event at the Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics and Prose. The Supreme Court then was considering Trump’s appeal of a Colorado state Supreme Court ruling that said Trump was disqualified from the presidency based on Section 3, the insurrection clause, of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and shouldn’t appear on the state’s 2024 election ballot. The insurrection clause says that a person can’t hold state or federal office if they had previously held office and sworn an oath to support the Constitution and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The state court ruled that Trump had engaged in insurrection based on his actions around Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol and attempted to derail the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. At the time of the U.S. Supreme Court case, challenges had been filed in many other states to also remove Trump from the ballot.

At the February bookstore event, Raskin expressed concern about what would happen if the U.S. Supreme Court “decision says that it’s really up to Congress on Jan. 5 or Jan. 6, 2025, to disqualify him at the counting of the Electoral College votes, which really could lead to something akin to Civil War, if that’s, if that’s what the suggestion is, which is what I think I heard when I went to the oral argument.”

The podcast didn’t use that clip, but showed Raskin again addressing the issue later at the same event. He said that “what can be put into the Constitution can slip away from you very quickly” and talked about what the court might do.

Raskin, Feb. 7: And the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes is section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which they’re just disappearing with a magic wand as if it doesn’t exist, even though it could not be clearer what it’s stating. And so you know they want to kick it to Congress so it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified. And then we need bodyguards for everybody in Civil War conditions. All because the nine justices, not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection, simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great 14th Amendment means.

The Supreme Court ruled the next month, on March 4, that Colorado couldn’t remove Trump from the ballot, with a majority saying that the “responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.” The justices said that Congress would have to pass legislation to enforce the insurrection clause. They didn’t say that Congress would decide such issues on Jan. 6 when the electoral votes are certified, as Raskin had feared in his remarks at the bookstore.

On the day of the ruling, Raskin told Axios that he was working on legislation so that Congress could “act.” But Congress didn’t act; Trump was on the ballot and became the Republican presidential nominee.

In the podcast, Benz claimed that “they’re going to make the argument that Donald Trump is disqualified under the 14th Amendment.”

We didn’t find an instance of Raskin saying anything like that recently. We asked his office about the February remarks, but we haven’t received a response.

Raskin told Axios last month that if Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it.” But the news site reported that Raskin said Trump “is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we’re talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments.”

The congressman also said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Nov. 2: “So when I say we will support a free and fair election, no, we won’t allow them to steal it in the states or steal it in the Department of Justice or steal it with any other election official in the country. If it’s a free and fair election, we will do what we’ve always done, we will honor it.”

In an email sent to us and others, Raskin’s office said that he “has always remained committed to certifying the results of a free and fair election,” pointing to his Nov. 5 statement on the viral claims.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

SourcesRaskin, Jamie (@RepRaskin). “This fictional ‘quote’ is 100% fabricated. It’s one more lie in the stream of right-wing lies designed to undermine our election. Despite this actionable libel and all the disinformation, America is having a free and fair election and Congress will certify the winner.” X. 5 Nov 2024.

@LarryDJonesJr. “BREAKING: Jamie Raskin said, ‘Let folks cast their votes for Trump if that’s their choice. But mark my words, we won’t be certifying the election. He might win, but we’ll ensure he doesn’t step foot in the Oval Office.’” X. 4 Nov 2024.

@realTrumpNewsX. “Jamie Raskin : Let people vote for Trump if they want, we’re not gonna certify the election anyways, so he may be elected but we are not going to let him be inaugurated.” X. 31 Oct 2024.

PBD Podcast. YouTube.com. 28 Oct 2024.

Constitution Annotated. Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights. Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office. Constitution.congress.gov. Accessed 6 Nov 2024.

Supreme Court of the State of Colorado. Supreme Court Case No. 23SA300. 19 Dec 2023.

Gamio, Lazaro et. al. “Tracking Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 Ballot.” New York Times. updated 4 Mar 2024.

Politics and Prose. “Rick Hasen — A Real Right to Vote – with Representative Jamie Raskin and Sherrilyn Ifill.” YouTube.com. 17 Feb 2024.

Howe, Amy. “Supreme Court rules states cannot remove Trump from ballot for insurrection.” SCOTUSblog. 4 Mar 2024.

Donald J. Trump v. Norma Anderson. No. 23-719. Supreme Court of the United States. 4 Mar 2024.

Solender, Andrew. “Scoop: Top Democrat ‘working on’ bill responding to Trump ballot ruling.” Axios. 4 Mar 2024.

Solender, Andrew. “Scoop: Some top Dems won’t commit to certifying a Trump win.” Axios. 10 Oct 2024.

Raskin, Jamie. HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Grabien.com. 2 Nov 2024.

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Late in the afternoon on Election Day, former President Donald Trump posted to social media an unsupported claim about “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, which he claimed had drawn the attention of law enforcement.

The Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia district attorney, a Republican city commissioner and the Pennsylvania Department of State all refuted the claim.

“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social at 4:39 p.m. on Election Day.

We reached out to the Trump campaign for information about where the alleged cheating was occurring and what law enforcement was responding, but we did not receive a response.

The Philadelphia Police Department told CNN it was not aware of any election-related issues that had prompted a law enforcement response.

Responding to Trump’s post, Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, posted on X, “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation.”

“It is yet another example of disinformation,” wrote Bluestein, who is also a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s task force on elections. “Voting in Philadelphia has been safe and secure.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner also weighed in via X, calling Trump’s claim “unfounded.”

“The only talk about massive cheating has come from one of the candidates, Donald J. Trump,” Krasner wrote. “There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation. We have invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day. If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath.”

Asked to comment on Trump’s post, the press office for the Pennsylvania Department of State — which oversees the state’s elections — sent us this statement: “Pennsylvania counties, including Philadelphia, are running a safe and secure election.”

Trump has made unsubstantiated claims about Philadelphia before. In September, Trump cited the dubious results of a poll commissioned by a conservative group as the foundation for his claim of rampant voter fraud among mail-in voters in Pennsylvania.

We will update this story if Trump or his campaign provides any details to support the claim.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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Quick TakePosts shared on Facebook make an unfounded claim of racially motivated threats of violence in Gwinnett County, Georgia, “from now until the Inauguration.” The county sheriff’s office said it had “not received any information indicating threats to any group(s) on or after election day.”

Full StoryThe 2024 election season has seen a rash of political violence. There were two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump, one of which resulted in the death of a campaign rally attendee. An office used by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team in Tempe, Arizona, was damaged by gunfire three times. Law enforcement officials also have seen a wave of threats against poll workers and political activists ahead of Election Day, the New York Times reported.

Amid that atmosphere of violence and threats of violence, a chain of Facebook posts — citing an unnamed deputy in the Gwinnett County, Georgia, sheriff’s office — spread an unfounded claim of threats against Black women in Georgia.

The Facebook user who shared the post on Nov. 1 wrote, in part: “‘Hey ladies, I just received this from a friend who works in the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s office!!! Be on Alert… Last night, a deputy told a family that local White Supremacists/ KKK members originating out of Lexington, NC, are planning to attack from now until the Inauguration. They are plotting against Blacks, especially black women because in their eyes, we are easy targets! Please be vigilant! Try not to do anything alone, especially after dark! This is not a hoax or a rumor! The deputy showed paperwork that the police department has.”

Similar text was shared by other users on Facebook.

But the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office said on its Facebook page on Nov. 2 that it has not received any information on such threats.

“The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office has been made aware of a circulating text thread suggesting potential attacks on African American women ‘from now through the inauguration.’ We have not received any information indicating threats to any group(s) on or after election day,” the sheriff’s office said.

“Hateful discourse such as this aims to instill fear in the community and disrupt us from exercising our constitutional rights. The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office remains dedicated to protecting all citizens and we will continue to monitor and respond accordingly to all suspicious and threatening behavior.”

The sheriff’s office also said it is working with “local, state, and federal authorities to stay current on any potential threats surrounding the general election,” and it directed reports of threats to local law enforcement or the tip line, 770-619-6655.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFarrow, Fritz. “Harris campaign office in Arizona shot at for third time in a month, police say.” ABC News. 9 Oct 2024.

Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. Facebook post. 2 Nov 2024.

McLean, Danielle. “Posts Misrepresent Police Reports Preceding Trump Rally in New York.” FactCheck.org. Updated 26 Sep 2024.

Thrush, Glenn, Adam Goldman, Alan Feuer and Eileen Sullivan. “Election Officials Face Torrent of Threats as Nov. 5 Looms.” New York Times. 25 Oct 2024.

Parker, Ned and Peter Eisler. “New cases of political violence roil U.S. ahead of contentious election.” Reuters. 21 Oct 2024.

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Quick TakeA misspelling of former President Donald Trump’s name occurred on an optional ballot review screen in Virginia, prompting an unfounded claim on social media of “election fraud.” The error was a typo that appeared only on the ballot review screen, not on actual ballots, and would not affect any votes, election officials said.

Full StoryVirginia’s voting process includes an optional ballot review screen, which is designed to display a voter’s selections before a ballot is cast. The optional screen helps voters verify their choices and correct any errors.

But a video shared on social media that shows a misspelling on a ballot review screen has raised unfounded allegations of voter fraud in Virginia’s Washington County.

An Oct. 29 post on Instagram shows a video with former President Donald Trump’s name misspelled as “Triump” on a ballot review screen. The accompanying text claims, “This was a voter in Virginia 4 days ago. Why is there an I in Donald J Trump’s name?”

The X account RealAF Patriot shared the video with a message that read, “ELECTION FRAUD IN VIRGINIA!? A voter shows that they have Trump spelled incorrectly as Triump. Is that so votes won’t register for Trump?” The post received more than 3 million views, according to the platform.

Andrea M. Gaines, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Elections, told us in an email that the misspelling of Trump’s name occurred on equipment in Washington County. “We cannot confirm the origin of the video,” she said.

But Gaines said the “review screen does not affect tabulation of ballots or reporting of results.”

Derek N. Lyall, director of elections and general registrar for Washington County, told us in an email, “All Washington County voters cast their votes on paper ballots. The names of all candidates are spelled properly on the paper ballots.”

Lyall explained that the misspelling was a typographical error on the optional ballot review screen, which only activates if a voter specifically requests it before inserting a ballot. “Out of 10,000+ voters who have cast their ballots in Washington County, fewer than twenty voters have requested to utilize this optional ballot review screen,” he noted.

Lyall said the error was discovered too late to reprogram the voting equipment for the election. However, he said all voting equipment had been thoroughly tested and was operating as intended. “Our equipment is operating as designed and is tabulating ballots in accordance with voters’ choices. The single typographical error on the optional ballot review screen will have no effect on anyone’s vote,” he said.

Lyall also said a notice would be posted in every polling place advising voters of this error on Election Day.

Virginia has voted for a Democrat in the last four presidential elections. In 2020, Trump lost the state by 10 percentage points, but overwhelmingly won Washington County with 75.6% of the vote.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources270 to Win. “Virginia: Recent Presidential Elections.” Accessed 5 Nov 2024.

Murphy, Joe. “Two charts and a map to help make sense of all the early voting data.” NBC News. 4 Nov 2024.

Gaines, Andrea. External affairs manager, Virginia Department of Elections. Email to FactCheck.org. 4 Nov 2024.

Lyall, Derek N. Director of elections and general registrar, Washington County, Virginia. Email to FactCheck.org. 4 Nov 2024.

Virginia Public Access Project. “Early Voting in Virginia.” Accessed 5 Nov 2024.

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SummaryWe’ll know soon enough who won the 2024 general elections for president, Congress and other important positions. But we don’t have to wait a second longer to find out this year’s FactCheck Award winners.

On Election Day, we take a (short) break from the serious work of fact-checking to highlight unusual political ads from the campaign cycle. The prizes, which are just for much needed kicks, are traditionally presented to ads that stood out for various reasons.

For instance, one of the recognized ads was about Bigfoot looking for a man who didn’t want to be found. And another honoree featured people who badly needed more to wear than hospital gowns.

Thanks for reading!

AnalysisCheekiest Ad About Health Care ReformWinner: Nadia Milleron, candidate for U.S. House in MassachusettsMilleron, an independent, wants to make sure U.S. residents, particularly those in Massachusetts’ 1st Congressional District, can obtain, or obtain better, health insurance. This ad from her campaign helps voters visualize how bad it is for the uninsured or underinsured.

“It’s embarrassing. People all over western Massachusetts suffering from poor coverage,” the narrator says. “Poor coverage for prescription drugs and medical visits, if you can even get in to see a doctor. Some of us have no coverage at all.”

As the narrator goes on about the dire situation, people are shown going about their day, wearing those unflattering hospital gowns that leave them exposed. There are blurred buttocks everywhere you turn.

Things “will never change as long as we keep electing the same old Democrats and Republicans,” Milleron says in the ad, which could be on to something. Maybe politicians would be more motivated to expand access to quality health care if they had to look at people’s bare backsides all day.

Steamiest Ad About ContraceptionWinner: Progress Action FundMSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said this ad about birth control – and voyeurism? – is “an instant finalist for the political ad hall of fame.” We don’t disagree. It’s also a little spicy, and NSFW (not safe for work), so we’ve taken precautions and did not embed it in this story.

The “Republican congressman” in the Progress Action Fund ad.It starts with a man and woman kissing in bed, about to do the deed, and they decide to use protection before they go any further. But as the man reaches for a condom from the bedside table, it’s intercepted by a disapproving “Republican congressman,” who somehow has been in the room and observing the whole time. The frightened pair tell the unwelcome onlooker to mind his business and leave, but he doesn’t.

“I won the last election. I’m not going anywhere,” the pretend politician says. “I’m just going to watch and make sure you don’t do anything illegal.” Kinky!

The liberal Progress Action Fund released the ad in July 2023, urging Ohioans to “keep Republicans out of your bedroom” by voting against a ballot measure that critics said aimed to roll back reproductive rights. The group has since created several spinoffs accusing conservative lawmakers of going after abortion, the morning-after pill, Medicare and pornography. Some of those ads are racier, so we won’t be embedding those either.

Achievement in Ad UpcyclingWinner: Rep. Dean Phillips of MinnesotaIf this ad looks familiar, that’s probably because it features some of the same footage from a popular ad that Phillips ran during his 2018 campaign for Congress. The original starred Bigfoot, “an expert on elusive creatures,” searching for Republican incumbent Erik Paulsen, who the ad suggested may not exist. In the reworked version, the mythical icon is on the hunt for President Joe Biden in New Hampshire, where Biden skipped the state’s Democratic primary this year to protest it being scheduled before South Carolina’s.

“I mean, how can you have tens of thousands of people looking for you all the time and not one person finds you?” a not-self-aware Bigfoot asks. It looked all over for Biden, but never found him, which was not surprising. But Bigfoot did see Phillips, who made New Hampshire the focus of his longshot campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

The 2018 ad, which went viral, may have played a role in Phillips defeating Paulsen. The 2024 ad, which was just as good if not better, couldn’t do the same for Phillips against the sitting president. But, in the end, the congressman got what he wanted anyway: someone other than Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Most Dramatic Solar EclipseWinner: Former President Donald TrumpWay back in 2017, from the White House balcony, then-President Donald Trump memorably flouted safety guidance and stared directly at a solar eclipse without the recommended eyewear. He took his rebel status further with this ad, getting an even closer look at the sun.

As Ric Flair’s wrestling entrance music plays, and after the words “The most important moment in human history is taking place in 2024” appear on screen, a large figure begins to slowly move into the path of a beaming sun. It soon becomes apparent to those watching the ad, and the excited people in the ad wearing solar viewers, that it’s a silhouette of Trump’s head, not the moon, causing the temporary darkness.

“We will save America and make it great again,” the on-screen text later says. The ad ends with repeated chants of “USA” and the words “Trump 2024” on a black background.

This could have been a cool way to announce his third presidential campaign, rather than a fact-challenged speech from Mar-a-Lago. Instead, the ad, which was posted on Truth Social, capitalized on the public’s obsession with the actual total solar eclipse that took place in April. Coincidentally, the next visible eclipse of that kind in the U.S. is not until 2044, a year that will feature another presidential election.

The Mike Gundy Award for Being a Man Winner: Creatives for HarrisGundy, the coach of Oklahoma State University’s football team, got heated defending his players in a press conference years ago and told reporters, “Come after me. I’m a man. I’m 40.” The opening of this pro-Kamala Harris ad reminded us of that famous rant about manhood.

The six guys in this ad all make it known that they are men, too, and then explain some of the reasons they are “man enough” to support a female candidate for president, including an ability to braid hair; admit when they’re lost; and not be afraid of bears, women or showing emotion. One of the manly men is so fearless that he says not only can he fix carburetors, but eats them for breakfast, which sounds unhealthy and dangerous.

Not everyone was a fan of the video, with at least one person on social media calling it “the cringiest political ad ever created.” Whatever you think of the ad, let us be clear about one thing: It wasn’t produced by the Harris-Walz campaign, as some have wrongly claimed. It was created by Jacob Reed, a comedy producer, director and writer, for an unaffiliated group called Creatives for Harris.

“I think we’re overdue for a redefinition of what it means to be a man in America and I hope this campaign can start to shape that conversation,” Reed wrote in a Substack post about the video. “Because even though it’s more sketch comedy than political ad, what these men are saying is true — except being afraid of bears.

“A bear will straight-up kill you,” he warned.

The Ad Keeping It 100% WeirdWinner: Won’t PAC DownIf the men in the last ad were cringy, those in this one could be called creepy. That was by design, as the ad, from another group supporting Harris, is titled “These Guys Are Just Weird,” which is what Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has been saying about Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, for months. Let’s just say that the actors in the ad – playing “MAGA Republicans” overly concerned with Americans’ sex lives – understood the assignment.

For example, the way the first guy turns around to the camera is hardly normal, and don’t get us started on what’s happening with his lips. It gets stranger from there. Another guy, a heavy sweater with strong opinions about in vitro fertilization, says he’s “definitely not a serial killer,” but we’re definitely not convinced. The men also bring up an unfortunate case of oversharing by House Speaker Mike Johnson, but the less said about that the better.

The liberal super PAC behind the ad, Won’t PAC Down, was originally created to help Biden, who was then on his way to wrapping up the Democratic nomination, reach a younger demographic of voters. We don’t know if the ad helped the group reach its intended audience, but it definitely got our attention.

The B-roll Blues AwardWinner: Derrick Anderson, candidate for U.S. House in VirginiaNo one has said a word about the first five minutes and 27 seconds of this nearly six-minute video of b-roll that Anderson’s campaign posted online to legally provide footage of the Republican candidate that political action committees could use in their own ads supporting him. It’s the last 24 seconds that have caused all the “family” drama.

At that point, Anderson is seen talking and/or posing with a woman and three young girls. If you thought they were his wife and kids, they’re not. Anderson is engaged. But his fiancee is not in the video, and he has no children. Now, Democrats won’t let Anderson or Virginia’s 7th District voters forget it.

A screen capture from the House Majority PAC’s anti-Derrick Anderson TV ad“Anderson got caught lying again, faking a family,” says an ad that the campaign of Anderson’s opponent, Eugene Vindman, began running last month. House Majority PAC, a super PAC supporting Democratic House candidates, released its own ad that says “Anderson was caught using a fake wife and kids for his campaign.” It features scenes of an Anderson stand-in interacting with cardboard versions of the woman and children from the campaign video.

The criticism has frustrated Anderson so much that his campaign sent cease and desist letters to TV stations airing such ads. “It’s absolutely unbelievable that this is what my opponent is focusing on,” he said in an interview last month, noting that he’s friends with the family in the video. “Look, it’s b-roll footage. Every campaign in the nation, including my opponent, takes pictures and videos with people throughout the district.”

Honestly, we also can’t remember this much attention being paid to b-roll – at least, not since 2014, when Sen. Mitch McConnell’s campaign posted a roughly two-minute video that began with about 12 seconds too many of him smiling awkwardly. Anderson probably could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had just done the same.

Saddest Donald Trump ImpressionWinner: Rep. Eric Swalwell of CaliforniaSwalwell doesn’t portray Trump in this ad, but he’s still responsible. The congressman’s campaign paid for this ad mocking the former president for some of his outrageous statements. The ad suggests that Trump’s outbursts, such as his false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” make him more qualified to live in a retirement community than reoccupy the White House.

But of all the Trump impressions that we’ve seen, this one may be our least favorite. The actor channeling Trump has his signature blue suit, red tie, blonde hair and orangish face. He also has some of his mannerisms, his impressive memory and even his intense dislike of Taylor Swift. However, he doesn’t really sound like him, which is kind of important.

Think of it. If you’re going to do a Trump impression, you have to get his voice, or at least something close to it. This version is a yuge miss the likes of which we’ve never seen in the history of our country.

Grossest Attack AdWinner: MAGA Inc.New York magazine predicted in March 2023 that “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid” to become the Republican nominee for president. Not quite, but this ad, from the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc., didn’t do him any favors.

“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong. And we’re not just talking about pudding,” the ad’s narrator says, referring to a March 2023 Daily Beast story about what purportedly happened when DeSantis got hungry on a private jet in 2019. While the ad goes on to say that DeSantis put his “dirty fingers all over senior entitlements,” a claim that we wrote about, the most damning – and disgusting – part may be the images of, and the sounds made by, a man devouring a cup of pudding with his fingers.

Interestingly, when given the opportunity, DeSantis didn’t deny enjoying the dessert snack sans spoon. “I don’t remember ever doing that,” he said in a “Piers Morgan Uncensored” interview, suggesting that it may have happened when he was just a child.

Regrettably, we remember the images from the ad very well.

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In the waning days of his campaign, former President Donald Trump has further embraced some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s incorrect or controversial views on health, including vaccines and fluoride.

In a Nov. 3 telephone interview with NBC News’ Dasha Burns, Trump appeared open to removing fluoride in the nation’s water supply and taking action to limit vaccines.

When asked if “banning certain vaccines might be on the table,” Trump replied, “Well, I’m going to talk to him and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision, but he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” referring to Kennedy.

Trump similarly said he hadn’t discussed fluoride yet with Kennedy, but when asked about Kennedy’s announcement that the Trump administration would advise against water fluoridation on Day One, he said, “it sounds OK to me.”

Small amounts of fluoride are added to drinking water in much of the U.S. to prevent tooth decay and are accepted as safe and effective by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and expert groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The founder of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that spreads anti-vaccine misinformation, Kennedy has been an outspoken opponent of vaccines and water fluoridation for many years. He has continued to make false and misleading claims about vaccines — including the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism — during his presidential run, first as a Democrat, and later as an independent.

In August, Kennedy endorsed Trump for president and has since become part of the candidate’s transition team. He’s also partnered with Trump on the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, much of which is focused on chronic disease. There’s no question that Americans suffer too much from chronic conditions, but as we’ve written, Kennedy has a history of blaming such diseases on the wrong exposures, oversimplifying their causes and implausibly claiming that he can end the chronic disease epidemic “overnight.”

With Kennedy and on his own, Trump has previously repeated vaccine falsehoods. In a July telephone call with Kennedy, which one of Kennedy’s sons posted to social media, Trump incorrectly suggested that childhood vaccine doses are too large and are dangerous to kids. There’s no evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harmful to children.

In the phone call, which occurred prior to Kennedy’s decision to suspend his campaign and back Trump, the former president appeared to want to collaborate, telling Kennedy, “I would love you to do something.” Since the endorsement, there has been speculation that Kennedy might serve in a top health-related position in Trump’s government, much to the consternation of many scientists and public health experts.

“I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines,” Trump said of Kennedy during an Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden.

“I said he could do it. He could do anything he wants,” Trump said at an event in Arizona on Oct. 31. “He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants everything. I think it’s great.”

Trump embraces Kennedy during a campaign rally on Aug. 23 in Glendale, Arizona. Kennedy announced that day that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Trump. Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images.In a video call with members of the campaign that circulated online, Kennedy said that Trump had “promised” him “control” of the nation’s public health agencies, mentioning Health and Human Services and some of its subagencies, the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

The campaign, however, would not confirm Kennedy’s claims — and called discussions of who would serve in the administration “premature.” Anonymous sources told NBC News that Kennedy would get a different kind of position focused on childhood chronic diseases.

In his Nov. 3 interview with Burns, Trump declined to specify Kennedy’s future position.

“I’m not going to talk about that but he’s going to have a big role in the administration,” Trump said, when asked whether he wanted Kennedy in a Cabinet position — and whether he thought Kennedy would make it through Senate confirmation.

In an Oct. 30 interview on CNN, Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and head of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, said that Kennedy did not want — nor would he get — the secretary of Health and Human Services position.

“Here’s what he wants to do. He said, ‘I want data,’” Lutnick said of Kennedy and vaccines. “He wants the data so he can say these things are unsafe.”

Lutnick said he had spoken with Kennedy for two and a half hours, and proceeded to recite several of Kennedy’s go-to talking points about vaccines, including the idea that vaccines are responsible for the rise in the prevalence of autism over time and that vaccines are unsafe because of a 1986 law removing product liability.

“Why do you think vaccines are safe? There’s no product liability anymore,” Lutnick said. “We all know so many more people with autism than had it when we were young.”

As we’ve written, autism diagnoses have gone up over time, but much of that is related to more awareness and changing definitions of the condition. Study after study has failed to find a link between vaccines and autism.

A 1986 law did remove most liability for vaccine makers, but this did not alter the process for reviewing the safety and efficacy of vaccines. At the time, vaccine makers were increasingly being sued for alleged harms that were later found not to be due to vaccines — with large awards threatening the vaccine supply. In recognition that vaccines are highly beneficial, but do rarely cause serious side effects, such as allergic reactions, the government stepped in and set up an alternate compensation system for people with reasonable claims of harm.

Lutnick later posted on X that he and his wife “trust our doctors” and “have vaccinated our children and ourselves,” but said “not everybody trusts such advice or the FDA.”

“We would be doing everyone a service if the government respected Bobby Kennedy’s request to make the full data available,” he added.

There is no evidence, however, that there is any data being hidden that would show vaccines are unsafe.

In an Oct. 31 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, also spoke negatively of vaccines.

“The moment where I really started to get redpilled on the whole vax thing was, the sickest I had been in the last 15 years, by far, was when I took the vaccine,” Vance said of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Compared with other vaccines, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines tend to produce more of the temporary, expected side effects, such as pain at the injection site, fever and headache — particularly in younger people. While this can be unpleasant, it does not mean the vaccines are unsafe.

In the same Nov. 3 interview with Burns, Trump also indicated that he might go along with a Kennedy plan to stop water fluoridation in the U.S.

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump said, when asked about whether he was “on board” with such a plan. “You know, it’s possible.”

The day before, Kennedy had written on X that on Trump’s first day in office, his administration “will advise all U.S​. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” The post went on to call fluoride an “industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.” While high amounts of fluoride have been linked to some of these health problems, the relatively low levels of fluoride currently recommended in the U.S. generally have not. In some cases, the evidence is unclear.

Fluoride occurs naturally in some water systems. The CDC recommends that communities adjust the levels of fluoride in their water to optimal levels to prevent tooth decay, a suggestion supported by various expert groups. The CDC website states that there is “strong evidence of community water fluoridation’s safety and effectiveness.” As of 2022, around 63% of Americans received fluoridated water.

As we have written previously, there’s evidence that water fluoridation has had a positive impact on dental health. Most recently, a review study published in the Cochrane Library found that fluoridation may “lead to slightly more children being free of tooth decay,” although the addition of fluoride to toothpaste may have lessened the effects of fluoridating tap water.

Ingesting too much fluoride has a couple well-accepted harms. CDC and EPA recommendations and regulations attempt to ensure that people are exposed to only a safe level of fluoride.

High levels of fluoride exposure can lead to bone problems. To prevent these issues, the Environmental Protection Agency requires that public water systems keep fluoride levels below 4 mg per liter. Fluoride exposure during early life also can lead to dental fluorosis, a condition that typically just involves tooth discoloration. To protect against dental fluorosis, the EPA recommends a fluoride limit of 2 mg per liter. The CDC-recommended level of fluoride to improve dental health is below these limits — at 0.7 mg per liter.

Some studies — many including people exposed to water with very high levels of naturally occurring fluoride — also have indicated that exposure to fluoride during pregnancy may be associated with reduced IQ in children. As we have written, there is considerable uncertainty about whether the fluoride exposure caused the reduced IQ scores and what level of fluoride exposure might have a detrimental effect.

Experts differ on how communities should respond to this research on the potential effects of fluoride on the brain. As we’ve said, the CDC and various expert groups continue to recommend water fluoridation at optimal levels. However, some researchers have expressed concerns about the effects of fluoridation on child development.

Based on this body of work on fluoride and child brain development, anti-fluoridation groups sued the EPA. In September, a federal District Court judge ruled that the EPA must further regulate fluoride in drinking water. The judge concluded that fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children,” based on uncertainty about whether fluoride might affect brain development when added to water at recommended levels of 0.7 mg per liter.

Responses could range from banning fluoride in public drinking water to simply issuing a warning. The EPA has not yet said how it intends to respond.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

It is possible, even likely, that we will not have a projected winner of the presidential race on Nov. 5 – Election Day. And that doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious going on with the vote-counting.

Election experts say when a winner is projected will largely depend on how close the race is. The closer the race, the longer it is likely to take to declare a winner. Delays are also tied to counting mail-in ballots and the state rules about when and how they can be counted.

In 2020, the Associated Press and other major news outlets did not call the race for Joe Biden until Nov. 7 – four days after Election Day.

“This year, it could go either way,” John Lapinski, director of elections at NBC News, and Charles Riemann, the senior analytics manager for elections at NBC News, wrote on Oct. 30. “It may take as long as a week for the NBC News Decision Desk to project a presidential winner, or it could happen as early as Wednesday, even by Wednesday morning.”

But, they wrote, “The days of projecting a winner on election night itself are almost certainly over.”

Polling suggests the race is extremely close, particularly in a handful of swing states that may decide the election.

In 2020, not only was the race in some swing states extremely close — Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes and Arizona by 10,457 — but vote-counting took longer than usual because so many mail-in ballots were cast due to the pandemic. Nearly 70 million people voted via mail-in ballot in 2020, constituting 43.1% of the electorate and roughly 20 percentage points more than in 2016, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. As of Nov. 4, 67.2 million mail-in ballots had been requested for 2024, and 36.7 million had been returned, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Election personnel sort absentee ballot applications for storage at the Gwinnett County Board of Voter Registrations and Elections offices on Nov. 7, 2020, in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Several counties in Georgia continued to count ballots even as news outlets declared Joe Biden the winner of the race for president. Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.While states have taken steps to speed up the processing of mail-in ballots, Pennsylvania — arguably considered the most important swing state in this election — is one of the few states that still do not allow the pre-canvassing of ballots prior to Election Day. (Pre-canvassing means that outer envelopes are opened and ballots are extracted and flattened to prepare them for counting machines. In addition, an initial scan is performed to identify any ballots missing a signature. The actual counting of mail-in ballots doesn’t begin until Election Day.) As a result, if the vote counts are close after the tallies on Election Day in Pennsylvania, it could take an extra day, or even several days, to determine a winner as all of the mail-in ballots are counted.

On Election Day, “there are five or six or seven [counties in Pennsylvania] that are not going to be able to do that [finish counting mail-in ballots] because of volume,” Eric Kraeutler, chair of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based election watchdog, said at an election law forum sponsored by the Knight Foundation on Oct. 4.

Those include Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, both of which have a strong Democratic voter registration advantage. Pittsburgh, the state’s second most populous city after Philadelphia, is in Allegheny County.

“In an election as close as what is being forecast for Pennsylvania, that almost certainly means that by the end of Election Day, Donald Trump will be ahead in Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler said. “It is very important that the public understands” that vote counting is expected to extend beyond Election Day, “and that is a function of the volume of the votes.”

The New York Times mapped out when seven swing states are likely to finish counting votes, with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin likely expecting to finish after election night and Arizona and Nevada expecting to take several days. The Times also surveyed election officials in every state, and among those who answered, most expected to finish counting the day after the election. Officials in several states said it could take days to count all of their ballots. But again, all of that is expected.

In a CNN podcast, CNN Vice President and Political Director David Chalian said “given that Arizona and Nevada and Pennsylvania are likely to take some time to count all of their votes, I would say Tuesday night is not likely, but I don’t rule out a Wednesday resolution.”

‘Stop the Count’It was widely reported in 2020 that it would take longer than usual to declare a winner, particularly because many states expanded mail-in voting due to the pandemic. When Trump repeatedly and baselessly suggested in the days before the election that counting mail-in ballots after Election Day would result in fraud, we wrote a story on Oct. 29, 2020, “Nothing Untoward About Counting Ballots After Election Day.”

Nonetheless, two days before the election, Trump insisted, “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3 — the evening of Nov. 3. That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be. What’s going on in this country? What’s going on?”

On election night in 2020, several of Trump’s campaign advisers warned him not to declare victory because the results were still very much in doubt.

In an interview he gave to the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump Campaign Manager William Stepien said he met with Trump and others at the president’s residence on election night and he recommended that Trump tell the nation that “votes were still being counted. It’s … too early to call the race.”

“The president disagreed with that” advice, he told the committee. “He thought I was wrong.”

Trump declared victory shortly before 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4.

“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said of the ongoing vote-counting. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”

According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Trump’s decision to falsely declare victory on election night was “premeditated” and part of his strategy.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted at 9:12 a.m. on Nov. 5.

Even after Biden was projected the winner, in the weeks and months that followed, Trump continued to peddle the falsehood that votes counted after election night were somehow fraudulent.

“We were up by 293,000 votes in Michigan, 112,000 votes in Wisconsin, 356,000 votes in Georgia, and nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania, all swing states,” Trump said in late December of that year. “These numbers were absolutely impossible for Joe Biden to overcome, and the Democrats knew it and everybody forecasting knew it and understood it well.

“Our nation’s greatest political professionals were calling to congratulate me on our victory,” Trump said. “Then suddenly everything started to disappear. Everything started to change. The vote counting abruptly stopped in multiple states. In the middle of the night, a series of massive and statistically inconceivable vote dumps overturned the results in state after state.”

But what Trump called “vote dumps” were just the routine reporting of the results of mail-in ballots. And experts say if the election is close enough this time around, it could again take days to count enough votes to declare a winner. (It will take weeks for states to officially certify results.)

This election, Trump has said he’ll immediately accept the results “if it’s a fair election.” But he is also falsely suggesting there is something wrong with counting votes beyond election night. At a Nov. 3 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said he had heard it would take weeks to determine a winner. “They’re going to say we may take an extra 12 days. … And what do you think happens during that 12 days? What do you think happens? These elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 on Tuesday night. Bunch of crooked people.”

“What we saw in 2020 is … that window of time between the polls being closed at 8 p.m. on election night and the race being called as a period of vulnerability where people were seeking to undermine confidence in the results,” Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt told NPR.

If the result in any particular state is essentially tied, nearly all the votes need to be counted before a winner can be confidently projected, Lapinski and Riemann of the NBC News elections team wrote. And that can take days.

States That Could Hold Up Projecting a WinnerAs was the case in 2020, Pennsylvania could again tip the scale for one candidate or the other. Lapinski and Riemann said they expect 98% to 99% of the vote in Pennsylvania to be counted by Wednesday morning. Whether that is enough to call the race remains to be seen.

“It’s difficult to predict when there will be a projected winner in Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler told us via email. “I expect we will know the results of in-person voting no later than 1:00 or 2:00 am on Wednesday. The canvassing of mail-in ballots is likely to go on throughout the early morning hours and possibly into the next day or two days. The timing of any projected result will depend not only on the number of ballots counted, but also the closeness of the margin. The closer the margin, the more votes will need to be counted to project a winner.”

Nearly 2.2 million mail-in ballots have been requested and nearly 1.8 million of them have been cast as of Nov. 4 in Pennsylvania, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Part of the delay in counting mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania is that it is one of only seven states — Wisconsin is the only other considered a swing state — that cannot begin processing early ballots before Election Day. Michigan changed its laws after the 2020 election to allow large counties to begin processing mail-in ballots eight days before Election Day, although the counting of ballots cannot start until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

The Pennsylvania House, which is controlled by Democrats, passed legislation in May to allow pre-canvassing, but the bill stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Republicans blocked a similar effort in Wisconsin.

“If you’re ever wondering why Pennsylvania takes some time to come up with the results, if you have millions of ballots that you can’t start [preparing and counting] until Election Day, guess what, that’s going to take some time,” Kathy Boockvar, who served as the secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, said in an election law webinar with reporters last month.

Since 2020, Philadelphia and Allegheny counties among others in Pennsylvania have increased their workforce and acquired new processing machines that will make counting of mail-in ballots go quicker, Kraeutler said. “But so long as Pennsylvania law does not allow the canvassing process to start until Election Day, there is a possibility that election results will not be known until one or two days later,” he added.

“There’s also a real possibility that the entire national election comes down to getting vote totals for Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler said.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Trump and Harris are virtually tied in Pennsylvania.

But Pennsylvania isn’t the only state that could hold up media companies from projecting a winner. Lapinski and Riemann warn that if the election comes down to very close votes in Arizona and Nevada, “forget any thoughts of a Wednesday resolution.”

“Typically, Arizona has as much as 20% of its vote still to count after election night — mainly late-arriving mail ballots,” they wrote. “And there are very substantial differences between Republicans and Democrats in terms of who votes when (early versus on Election Day). This makes it nearly impossible to project a winner in Arizona on election night.”

Indeed, in Maricopa County, where more than half of the state’s residents reside, Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer told KPNX 12News election officials expect it will take “between 10 and 13 days to complete tabulation of all of the ballots,” in part because of a high voter interest in the race and because of a lengthy ballot that will take more time for election workers to tabulate.

That doesn’t mean it will take that long for media companies to declare a winner, but it could if Arizona’s electoral votes end up deciding the race and the results are exceedingly close.

As for Nevada, it is “a state that has a large amount of early voting, both absentee and in person, that is not counted on election night,” Lapinski and Riemann wrote. “In the past, nearly a quarter of the vote is still not counted by the Wednesday morning after Election Day. Given that the state has been historically close in presidential elections, the probability of calling a close race with a large amount of uncounted vote is very low.

“The bottom line: In Arizona and Nevada, it will likely take a few days, perhaps longer, to know the winner.”

None of that is indicative of voter fraud.

“When [we] will know has nothing to do with vote tampering, it has to do with how close the election is,” Lapinski, who also is the director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told us via email.

Correction, Nov. 5: We initially misspelled Kathy Boockvar’s name. We have corrected the error.

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Quick TakeSpringfield, Ohio, has been the target of misinformation about its Haitian immigrant population. Conservative commentators are now falsely claiming the mayor traveled to Haiti and he and other city officials received “kick-backs” for “importing” immigrants to Springfield. The mayor told us he has never been to Haiti nor has he received any “kickbacks.”

Full StoryFormer President Donald Trump has spread misinformation about immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the U.S. border over the past several years. During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, as we wrote, Trump made the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, also claimed on X that there had been reports of Haitians eating people’s pets in Springfield. In addition, Vance made an unfounded claim that immigrants were responsible for an 81% increase in murders in Springfield, as we’ve written.

Springfield has experienced an influx of immigrants who legally entered the country and moved to the city over the past few years. The city estimates about 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants now live in Ohio’s Clark County, where Springfield is located. Of that group, an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 are Haitian, according to the county’s health commissioner, CNN reported.

But the political discourse has prompted accounts on social media to espouse conspiracies to explain the immigration influx.

The conservative podcast Chicks on the Right posted a screenshot from a Sept. 12 post on X by former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros. Without providing any evidence, Tantaros claimed, “The Mayor of Springfield, OH has made multiple trips to Haiti. He, and the entire City Council, received financial kick-backs for importing $20,000+ illegal aliens. Its why they ignore the pleas of residents. Nationwide, politicians are profiting from mass illegal migration.”

The Chicks on the Right Instagram post received more than 28,000 likes.

Neither Chicks on the Right nor Andrea Tantaros responded to our requests for information to support their claims.

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue told us in an emailed statement: “I have never been to Haiti and I have never received financial ‘kick backs’ or even [been] involved with the transportation of immigrants into our city or even the US.”

Asked in a phone interview if he or the city of Springfield ever received any funding, grants or money related to bringing new Haitian residents to the city, Rue said: “No, absolutely not.”

Rue told us he spoke earlier this year with Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio about the need for federal funding that would allow the city to “reinforce” its infrastructure due to “a rapid increase” of its population. The mayor said the city is seeking additional support for its hospitals, school system, public safety forces, and infrastructure to accommodate the new residents, including additional translation support.

Rue said the city was not looking for a “bailout” or a per-resident fee when it asked for help. “We just need to be able to communicate with the individuals who are here and for the infrastructure,” he said.

After Springfield was thrust into the national spotlight by Trump and Vance, the city also asked Turner and other federal officials for additional funding to pay for increased security and police overtime to secure its schools, Rue told us. The false claims about the Haitian immigrants sparked a series of bomb threats that led to evacuations and the closing of city schools.

Rue said as a part-time mayor — who earns $14,680 annually — he does not have the ability to influence whether immigrants should move to the city, or even keep track of who’s coming. “No local government has that kind of control. That’s not how it works,” he said.

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.”

Only Congress is authorized to write laws affecting immigration, and the president has broad legal authority to control how immigration laws are enforced. Federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of State, and Citizenship and Immigration Services have the authority to enforce immigration laws, or permit immigrants or foreign visitors to live and work in the U.S.

Rue hasn’t received any campaign contributions since 2021, when he ran for reelection to the city commission and received 13 donations, ranging between $50 and $500 each, totaling $2,750, mostly from Springfield residents, according to his campaign filings with the Clark County Board of Elections.

Rue said as far as he’s aware, no one from the city manager’s office or the city commission – which is similar to a city council — has been to Haiti either.

Bridget Houston, a city commissioner, told us in an emailed statement responding to the social media claims: “Mayor Rue has never been to Haiti. Additionally, none of us ever have, or are currently receiving any financial kickbacks.”

“There has been no ‘importing’ immigrants as well — we are a city and cannot control our physical border and cannot control who lives or visits here. In fact, our Federal allocated dollars have gone down year over year. Most of the Haitians living in Springfield do have Federal documents as well that allow them to be here. Last, I will add that we are also required by the State of Ohio to undergo fraud training every year, and have to disclose all investments to the State of Ohio as well,” Houston said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAstor, Maggie. “Trump Doubles Down on Migrants ‘Poisoning’ the Country.” New York Times. 17 Mar 2024.

Brewster, Shaquille, Peter Shaw and Daniella Silva. “Springfield children ‘fearful’ amid dozens of bomb threats after false migrant rumors.” NBC News. 19 Sep 2024.

Catalini, Mike, Julie Carr Smyth and Bruce Shipkowski. “Trump falsely accuses immigrants in Ohio of abducting and eating pets.” Associated Press. 11 Sep 2024.

City of Springfield. “Immigration FAQs.” Accessed 30 Sep 2024.

Clark County Board of Elections. “Campaign Finance Committee Information.” Accessed: 27 Sep 2024.

Forrest, Vicky. “Springfield mayor: Investigation into businesses, immigration continues.” Springfield News Sun. 12 Jul 2024.

Houston, Bridget. City commissioner, Springfield, Ohio. Email to FactCheck.org. 30 Sep 2024.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “FactChecking the Harris-Trump Debate.” FactCheck.org. 11 Sep 2024.

Kiely, Eugene. “Vance’s Misleading Claim About Immigrants and Murders in Springfield, Ohio.” FactCheck.org. 20 Sep 2024.

National Immigration Law Center. “The President’s Broad Legal Authority to Act on Immigration.” 20 Aug 2014.

Rue, Rob. Mayor, Springfield, Ohio. Email and phone interview with FactCheck.org. 27 Sep 2024.

Shoichet, Catherine E. “‘Why Springfield?’ How a small Ohio city became home for thousands of Haitians.” CNN. 19 Sep 2024.

Thomas, Merlyn and Mike Wendling. “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets.” BBC. 15 Sep 2024.

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Quick TakeProject 2025 proposes dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some social media posts misleadingly claim the project calls for closing the National Hurricane Center, a part of NOAA. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson said Project 2025 “does not call for eliminating the NHC,” though climate experts warned that the project’s proposals would hamper the NHC’s operations.

Full StoryMore than 180 people have been confirmed dead as of Oct. 2 across six states following the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Helene, stretching from Florida’s Gulf Coast to the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, according to CNN.

The National Hurricane Center, which is part of the National Weather Service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has issued advisories and forecasts about the storm. In the midst of the hurricane, discussions about the future of the National Hurricane Center, or NHC, circulated on social media.

Some social media users misleadingly claimed that Project 2025, a policy agenda aimed at downsizing the federal government, has specifically called for the elimination of the NHC. Project 2025 was created and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank, as we’ve written.

“As Hurricane Helene is upgraded to a Category 4, it might be a good time to remind you Project 2025 intends to close the National Hurricane Center,” posts on Threads and Instagram claimed on Sept. 26.

Project 2025 provides a blueprint for “the next conservative President” on federal operations, the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs, and energy policy, particularly regarding climate change.

Former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025. “I’m not going to read it,” Trump said during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. He also claimed to be unaware of who was behind the initiative, though portions of the plan were developed by advisers who served during Trump’s first term.

Trump has not publicly called for eliminating or dismantling the National Hurricane Center. But when he was president, he did propose deep cuts to NOAA, including smaller cuts to the National Weather Service.

Project 2025 talks about NOAA in its policy agenda published online, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” It proposes plans for the agency under the chapter “Department of Commerce,” written by Thomas F. Gilman, who was chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the Department of Commerce during the Trump administration.

The project proposes that NOAA be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

However, Heritage Foundation spokesperson Ellen Keenan told us in an email, “Project 2025 does not call for eliminating the NHC or the NOAA. Those claims are false.”

Here’s what Project 2025 writes about the NHC:

Project 2025: The National Hurricane Center and National Environmental Satellite Service data centers provide important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions, and are used by forecasting agencies and scientists internationally. Data continuity is an important issue in climate science. Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.

Project 2025 calls NOAA “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It criticized the administration’s efforts to predict and manage major weather events as “the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

The project argues that the “current organization corrupts its useful functions” and suggests that “it should be broken up and downsized.”

Experts Warn of Impact on NHCClimate experts are questioning the motivations behind Project 2025’s proposal for the NOAA and the impact it would have on the National Hurricane Center.

“There are lots of ways they go after an agency without calling for its immediate elimination, and I think they are hiding behind the fact that they haven’t explicitly called for elimination,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told us. “But they’re calling for the kind of destructive actions that would seriously hobble the agency’s ability to do its job,” she said.

NOAA’s ability to predict major storms like Hurricane Helene depends on its various offices working together to provide real-time weather data as well as long-term climate trend data. “These different offices are working together very closely to provide … both short-term as well as long-range information to help inform weather and climate predictions,” Cleetus added. “So the idea that you would dismantle it and it would still continue to be able to provide the service, that’s just not accurate.”

Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, also told us the language in Project 2025 makes it “clear that NHC would be axed, at least in its current form. … It would create all sorts of confusion, uncertainty, disruption, etc. and the idea that the NHC could continue to fulfill its mission is absurd.”

“Without NOAA and the critical data [they] collect and maintain, NHC will be unable to operate in any useful capacity,” Mann said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesCleetus, Rachel. Policy director, Climate and Energy program, Union of Concerned Scientists. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 1 Oct 2024.

Contorno, Steve. “Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved.” 11 Jul 2024.

Hoffman, Riley. “Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript.” ABC News. 10 Sep 2024.

Keenan, Ellen. Senior communications manager, Special Initiatives. Heritage Foundation. Email to FactCheck.org. 30 Sep 2024.

Kiely, Eugene, D’Angelo Gore and Robert Farley. “A Guide to Project 2025.” FactCheck.org. 10 Sep 2024.

Mann Michael. Director, Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media, Department of Earth & Environmental Science/Annenberg School for Communication. University of Pennsylvania. Emails to FactCheck.org. 30 Sep 2024.

Mufson, Steven, Jason Samenow and Brady Dennis. “White House proposes steep budget cuts leading climate science agency.” Washington Post. 3 Mar 2017.

Project 2025. “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” Accessed 30 Sep 2024.

U.S. Department of Commerce. National Hurricane Center. Accessed 1 Oct 2024.

Wolfe, Elizabeth, et al. “Relief efforts continue after Hurricane Helene kills at least 180.” CNN. 2 Oct 2024.

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SummaryDespite a mostly civil debate between Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the two disagreed repeatedly not just on policy, but also on the facts. We referee some of those competing claims, and other factual missteps by the vice presidential candidates.

• Vance claimed that housing “is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” But economists and housing experts say that the primary reason for the tight housing market is the decline in new residential construction that followed the Great Recession.
• Walz misleadingly linked former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts to “an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.” But trillions of that debt were due to bipartisan COVID-19 relief packages. And the debt increase so far under the Biden administration is nearly as high.
• In describing an abortion law Walz signed in Minnesota, Vance said physicians were no longer required to provide life-saving care to infants “born alive.” But he neglected to say that the law still requires such infants to be given proper medical care and be “accorded immediate protection under the law.” Such cases pertain to situations involving induced labor for medical reasons such as fetal abnormalities.
• Vance claimed that “we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.” An August inspector general report 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 “lost.”
• Walz falsely claimed that “their” Project 2025 will establish a registry of pregnancies, referring to what might happen under a Trump-Vance administration. However, the Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025. The conservative document advocates mandatory state reporting of abortions and miscarriages, but not the tracking of pregnancy in general.
• Walz said that Project 2025 “is going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.” Some policies in the document could in effect limit contraception and infertility treatments, but Trump has said he does not want to restrict access to contraception and that he would expand access to in vitro fertilization.
• Vance incorrectly claimed the U.S. has the “cleanest economy,” while falsely hinting that carbon emissions might not be driving climate change.
• Vance claimed that because of Vice President “Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels.” But the concern of the U.S. and Mexican governments has been American-made guns trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico.
• Walz said “less than 2%” of the border wall that Trump promised “got built.” That undersells the amount of wall built during the Trump administration relative to what was promised.
• Vance blamed Harris for “letting in … 25 million illegal aliens.” That’s a grossly exaggerated figure.
• Walz countered that illegal border “crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office,” which is true when comparing the last two months to the last two months under Trump. But looking at Harris’ entire time as vice president, illegal border crossings are up substantially.
• Vance claimed that Harris “let fentanyl into our communities at record levels.” That’s not clear. The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials has increased during the Biden administration, which may indicate that more fentanyl is crossing the border undetected.
• Walz said that the “last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history.” Provisional data show that reported opioid deaths have declined significantly in the 12 months ending in April. But the figure is still higher than it was at the start of the Biden-Harris administration.
• Vance claimed that Trump “could have destroyed” the Affordable Care Act, but instead “worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” Trump did try to destroy the ACA, including by backing a lawsuit that would have nullified it.
• Walz said that if Trump had repealed the ACA “you lose your preexisting conditions,” adding that if you’ve “got asthma, too bad.” Ending the law would significantly reduce protections for those with preexisting conditions, but before the ACA, employer-based plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy.
• Vance slightly overstated the inflation rate for groceries under Biden and ignored macroeconomic causes for rising prices when blaming Biden and Harris for food inflation.
• Walz claimed that “Donald Trump hasn’t paid any federal tax in the last 15 years,” but that’s not quite right. The former president didn’t pay federal income taxes in 2020, but he did pay various amounts between 2015 and 2018. Trump also did not pay taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he became president.
• Vance said that Trump told his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to “protest peacefully.” Vance ignored Trump’s role in mobilizing his supporters to gather at the Capitol, and the overall tone and tenor of Trump’s defiant speech.
• Vance falsely claimed that Harris “became the appointed border czar” as vice president. However, Harris was specifically tasked with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from three Central American countries and was never put in charge of U.S. border security.

The Oct. 1 debate was hosted by CBS News.

AnalysisVance Brings Immigration to Housing DebateVance brought one of his campaign’s key issues — immigration — to the discussion on housing prices, claiming, “You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

For support, the Ohio senator later cited a “Federal Reserve study that we’re happy to share after the debate — we’ll put it up on social media, actually — that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices.”

But the link he provided on his X account after the debate wasn’t a report from the central bank. Instead, it was the written remarks — about 10 paragraphs long — delivered in May at the annual convention of the Massachusetts Bankers Association by Michelle Bowman, who is on the board of governors for the Federal Reserve.

In her remarks, Bowman offered an overview of the current economy, noting at one point, “Payroll employment has increased at a strong pace through April this year, partly reflecting increased immigrant labor supply.” And, in the same cursory way a couple of paragraphs later, Bowman said, “Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize.”

So, Vance overstated it when he claimed that this document “really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices.” Her brief remarks recognized a demographic reality that has often been noted by researchers.

Economists and housing experts have agreed that immigration is one of many contributing factors to the tight housing market. But the biggest contributor to the problem is the slowdown in new home construction that followed the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009. “Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s,” according to Fannie Mae.

Similarly, a report released earlier this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found, “In the homebuying market, a decade plus of underbuilding, elevated mortgage interest rates, and shifting demographics has left homebuyers with few affordable options as home prices continue to rise.”

Vance wasn’t wrong that immigrants — along with growing Gen Z and Millennial households — are part of the demographic changes that have contributed to the tight housing market. But he overstated their impact. As we said, the biggest part of the housing puzzle is the slowdown in home construction after the 2008 recession.

Deficit Under TrumpWalz claimed that Trump “gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top class. What happened there was an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.”

As we have written before, the amount of total national debt is correct; however, Trump is not singlehandedly responsible for this increase — nor is the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trillions of dollars of debt were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief packages.

Also, the total national debt has gone up nearly as much under the Biden administration. During Trump’s term, the total debt went up by $7.8 trillion. So far under President Joe Biden, it has risen by $7.7 trillion, with more than three months until the end of Biden’s term.

The 2017 tax cuts did go “predominantly,” as Walz said, to upper-income groups, but most households paid less in taxes under the law, according to Tax Policy Center estimates. In 2018, 63.6% of the benefits of the law went to the top quintile of earners, but 82% of middle-income earners got a tax cut, the TPC estimated.

The tax cut law added to the debt. Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us when we wrote about this issue a few years ago that the tax cut law could account for about $1 trillion of the debt increase under Trump.

But then there were bipartisan bills that added to spending. Trump signed bipartisan budget acts for 2018 and 2019 that “dramatically increased discretionary spending,” Goldwein said. And there were the bipartisan bills to help the U.S. cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects. A ProPublica/Washington Post report estimated more than $3 trillion went to COVID-19 relief spending.

Scuffle Over Minnesota Abortion LawIn one of the more heated exchanges of the evening, Walz and Vance argued over the text of an abortion law passed in Minnesota after Roe v. Wade was overturned and ended a constitutional right to abortion.

“The statute that you signed into law,” Vance said of Walz. “It says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

Walz quickly interjected, “That’s not true,” while Vance added, “That is fundamentally barbaric.”

As the two men discussed the issue of abortion more broadly over the next couple of minutes, they again tussled over whether Vance’s description was accurate, with Vance repeatedly asking Walz to explain how he was wrong, and Walz saying it was incorrect and had been fact-checked in the Trump-Harris debate.

The issue came up tangentially in the last debate when Trump said that Walz “says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says, execution after birth — it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born — is OK.”

As we explained before, killing a baby after birth is illegal in all states and is considered infanticide.

Minnesota’s abortion law, which was passed in 2023, does not have gestational limits, so an abortion can legally occur at any time during pregnancy. This does not mean, however, that women are commonly getting abortions very late in pregnancy.

According to the latest available data from the Minnesota Department of Health, for 2022, 88% of induced abortions in the state occurred at or before 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only two abortions were performed at or after 25 weeks — and none occurred in the ninth month.

Vance’s comments refer to a small change in a provision of the law that eliminated the requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and health” of an infant “born alive.”

The law still says that such infants “shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law” and that “[a]ll reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice … shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.”

While Vance refers to “botched” abortions, doctors have said such “born alive” measures pertain to situations involving induced labor for medical reasons such as fetal abnormalities. When we wrote about a federal “born alive” bill, Dr. Colleen McNicholas, an obstetrician and gynecologist speaking on behalf of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told us the “vast majority” of abortions later in pregnancy would be performed with dilation and evacuation, which “is not survivable.” The “only conceivable situation” she could imagine the federal bill being relevant would be “catastrophic pregnancies” in which the parents and care team “intend to deliver the baby,” but know that there’s a chance the baby won’t survive.

Citing an obstetrician, an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune explains that the rationale for the removal of mandatory life-saving care is “rooted in compassion for parents who face a devastating diagnosis late in a pregnancy” — and allows, for example, a family to hold a dying child and say goodbye, instead of being forced to provide futile medical care.

“It’s important to note that the 2023 law does not prevent a parent or a doctor from pursuing all medical options,” the editorial notes. “Nor does it remove or reduce the ethical and legal obligations of doctors and hospitals toward any child.”

320,000 ‘Lost’ Children?While criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies, Vance claimed that hundreds of thousands of children who illegally came to the U.S. without an adult were missing because of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said. “Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them, hopefully, are at homes with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules. The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.”

Vance appeared to be referring to figures in a report the office of the DHS inspector general published in August. In a summary, the report said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, “could not monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children” who were released from Department of Health and Human Services custody from fiscal years 2019 to 2023, “or initiate removal proceedings as needed.”

The report later 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 migrant 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.”

But the report did not say that all the children were missing, or “lost,” as Vance claimed.

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.

Exaggerated Claims About Project 2025 and PregnancyWalz’s statements about Project 2025 and pregnancy misstate or overstate what the document proposes. “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said. “It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.”

The Trump-Vance campaign has attempted to distance itself from Project 2025, a document from the conservative Heritage Foundation laying out policies for a future conservative administration. “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” campaign spokespeople said in a July 30 statement.

As we’ve written, the 887-page document suggests expanded tracking of abortions and miscarriages, making it mandatory for states to report these events to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the document does not mention a registry of pregnancies in general. Nearly all states already report anonymous data on abortions to the CDC, although such reporting is not mandatory. Trump has stated that he does not want to monitor women’s pregnancies.

Trump also has said in the past that he does not want to limit access to contraceptives. Project 2025 does directly advocate eliminating the mandate for insurance coverage of an emergency contraceptive, called Ella, while incorrectly suggesting that the pill causes abortions. The document does not comment on more typical contraceptives, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices. But some recommendations, if followed, could indirectly reduce access. For instance, it calls for ending taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood, which people use to access contraceptives.

Project 2025 also does not directly mention infertility treatment, although, as we have written, it expresses support for the concept of fetal personhood, or the idea that embryos and fetuses have rights starting at “the moment of conception.” These ideas could be used to justify further laws that could reduce access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, on the basis that embryos created in a lab are people with rights.

Trump has expressed support for IVF, recently saying that under his administration insurance companies would be required to pay for it.

‘Weird Science’ and Not the Cleanest EconomyWhen the moderators broached the subject of climate change, Vance backed into the issue, making a show of agreeing for a moment that carbon emissions cause climate change — as if the science is not, in fact, settled.

“This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he said. “Let’s just say that’s true.”

Vance also said that the U.S. had “the cleanest economy in the entire world.” He later specified he was talking about “the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.”

To be clear, there is no question that carbon dioxide emissions, along with emissions of other heat-trapping greenhouse gases — many of them due to the burning of fossil fuels — are primarily responsible for climate change.

Vance is wrong to claim that the U.S. has the “cleanest economy.” According to the most recent figures from Our World in Data, the United States’ carbon intensity, or CO2 emissions emitted per dollar of gross domestic product, is middling, similar to Mexico’s and India’s. American carbon intensity is better than China’s — and is significantly better than places such as Venezuela and Libya — but is worse than all of Western Europe and much of Africa.

Before mentioning climate change, Vance said he and Trump “support clean air, clean water.” It’s worth noting that while Trump has long claimed to be in favor of clean air and water — often when asked about the issue of climate change — his administration rolled back some 100 environmental protection rules.

Illegal FirearmsWhile the candidates were talking about the rash of gun violence and illegal firearms in the U.S., Vance said: “We know that thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels.”

But we could find no evidence that there has been a “massive influx” of guns brought into the U.S. by the cartels. Instead, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the problem is the flow of American-made weapons into Mexico.

The ATF describes its anti-firearms trafficking campaign as an “ongoing problem of firearms smuggling at the northern and southern borders. Firearms trafficking occurs when individuals illegally purchase firearms in the United States and smuggle the weapons across the southern U.S. border into Mexico and into other countries.”

“A large number of firearms are procured in the U.S. by straw purchasing cells operating at the direction of cartels which are then smuggled across the southern U.S. border and into Mexico,” the ATF website explains.

A New York Times report on American gun ownership said Mexico’s “cartels and their traffickers are overwhelmingly armed with American guns. They are also armed with American ammunition. Much of the ammunition that cartels rely on is unavailable in Mexico’s legal markets, but anyone can buy a truckload in the United States without even so much as a background check.”

In addition, the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, said in a February 2024 report that the U.S. and Mexico “have grappled with increasing arms and drug trafficking for several years.” A joint effort to track the origin and number of guns in Mexico found that 70% to 90% of “traced firearms originated from and passed through” the U.S.

As for crime guns used in the U.S., the ATF said in a March 2024 report that U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2021 submitted 460,024 requests for the bureau to trace guns used in the commission of a crime. The ATF was able to trace 365,501, or 79.5%, of the guns to the purchaser. “Nearly all crime guns” it was able to trace came from a licensed U.S. firearm dealer, the report said.

We reached out to the Trump-Vance campaign for evidence to support Vance’s claim, but we didn’t receive a reply.

Border WallWalz ridiculed Trump’s progress toward building a border wall, saying, “Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this, and he promised you, America, how easy it would be. ‘I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it.’ Less than 2% of that wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.”

As we have written, Trump fell well short of the border wall he promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. But Walz is significantly minimizing the amount of wall that Trump actually got built.

In our report on “Trump’s Final Numbers” we noted that, in total, 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the Trump administration, according to a CBP status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before.

Walz’s “less than 2%” calculation is based on 52 miles of new wall where there wasn’t any before across a southwest land border that is 1,954 miles long (which actually comes to 2.6%). But Trump did not promise to build a wall across the entire border. During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly talked about needing 1,000 miles of wall, or about 350 miles more than existed when he took office. (After he took office, Trump attempted to move the goalpost to fewer than 1,000 miles.)

So one could argue Trump only got 15% of the way toward the 350 miles of wall needed to complete the wall he promised during the campaign.

Walz’s comment also underplays the sheer amount of wall built during the Trump administration — more than under any other U.S. president. Specifically, Walz’s estimate minimizes the hundreds of miles of replacement border fencing.

As we wrote in December 2020, “[B]order experts warn not to minimize the impact of the replacement fencing. In some cases, the new barriers erected replaced fencing made from Vietnam-era landing mats. U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has replaced nearly 200 miles of vehicle barriers — the type that people could walk right through — with 30-foot-high steel bollards, lighting and other technology.”

As for Trump’s claim that Mexico would pay for the wall, Walz is correct that that never materialized, despite Trump’s false claims that Mexico was paying through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or via a border toll.

According to CBP data provided to FactCheck.org, the Trump administration secured a total of $15 billion during his presidency for wall construction. Some of it was appropriated in annual budgets by Congress, and some was diverted by Trump from counternarcotics and military construction funding. But it was all borne by American taxpayers.

Illegal Immigration Vance argued that Harris is to blame for “letting in … 25 million illegal aliens.” (Earlier in the debate, Vance put the number at 20 million to 25 million.) Either way, that’s a grossly inflated figure for the number of immigrants who have entered the country illegally during the Biden-Harris administration.

We last wrote about this when, during his debate with Biden in June, Trump put the number at 18 million to 20 million.

We took a deep dive into the immigration numbers in February, and again in mid-June, and we came up with an estimate of at most a third of Trump’s number, and a quarter of the figure cited by Vance in his debate.

Here’s the breakdown:

Department of Homeland Security data show nearly 8 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border between February 2021, the month after Biden took office, and May, according to monthly data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s a figure that includes both the 6.9 million apprehensions of migrants caught between legal ports of entry – the number typically used for illegal immigration – and nearly 1.1 million encounters of migrants who arrived at ports of entry without authorization to enter the U.S.

DHS also has comprehensive data, through February, of the initial processing of these encounters. That information shows 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. (Encounters do not represent the total number of people, because some people attempt multiple crossings. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to CBP.)

As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024. The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total about 5 million.

There were also 407,500 transfers of unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services and 883,000 transfers to ICE. The ICE transfers include those who are then placed in ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention,” which include technological monitoring, or released by ICE. We don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near the 25 million cited by Vance.

And we should note that these figures do not reflect whether a migrant may ultimately be allowed to stay or will be deported, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.

Border ApprehensionsAsked if he wanted to respond to Vance’s claim about the number of people who crossed the border illegally and were “let in” by Harris, Walz responded, “I guess we agreed not to fact-check. I’ll check it. Look, crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.”

It’s true that the number of apprehensions of immigrants caught illegally crossing into the U.S. was lower in July and August — the latest two months of available data — than the last two months under Trump.

The number of apprehensions of immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally has dropped dramatically after Biden announced a series of executive actions on June 4 designed to address “substantial levels of migration” due to “global conditions,” including “failing regimes and dire economic conditions,” “violence linked to transnational criminal organizations” and “natural disasters” in some countries in Central and South America. Specifically, the proclamation directs border officials to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally between ports of entry when the daily average of encounters reaches 2,500 or more for seven straight days. The policy was immediately implemented on June 5 because levels were already well above that. (For more on the policy, see our story “Q&A on Biden’s Border Order.”)

But comparing the last two months of data under Biden to the last two months under Trump involves some cherry-picking. Prior to the new policies enacted by Biden in June, illegal immigration had soared under the current administration.

In our latest “Biden’s Numbers” update in July, for example, we noted that for the 12 months ending in June, apprehensions totaled 1,894,715, according to Customs and Border Protection. That’s 273% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Fentanyl SeizuresWhile talking about drug addiction, Vance claimed that more fentanyl than ever before has entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration.

“I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels,” he said.

But we don’t know how much illicit fentanyl enters the country each year, because that data is not tracked by the federal government. As the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2020 report, “There are no comprehensive data on the total quantity of foreign-produced illicit drugs smuggled into the United States at or between official ports of entry (POEs) because these are drugs that have generally evaded seizure by border officials.”

For a 2021 story, Bryce Pardo, a drug policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told us that he sensed that Mexican drug trafficking organizations were producing more fentanyl and that flows of the drug, which is lethal in small doses, were increasing to the U.S. “But we don’t know that for sure,” Pardo said.

What we do know is how much fentanyl is seized by federal officials at the border, most of which is captured in vehicles crossing at legal ports of entry — not on people illegally crossing between those ports. Before fiscal year 2024, which is on track for a year-over-year decrease in fentanyl seized, annual figures had been increasing for several years.

As we’ve written before, the amount of fentanyl seized by border officials had increased by about 462% under Biden and Harris, going from almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal year 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal year 2023. Through August, there had been about 19,700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.

When Trump left office, there had been a 586% increase from the 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal year 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before the start of his presidency.

Some critics believe that an increase in fentanyl seizures means that more of the drug, not less, is entering the country illegally.

Opioid DeathsWhen Walz got a chance to respond to Vance’s claim about an increase of fentanyl coming into the country, the governor said, “And the good news on this is the last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history, 30% decrease in Ohio.”

Opioid deaths in the U.S. are currently trending down, according to provisional data from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System. There were 72,603 reported opioid deaths in the 12 months ending in April, which was down more than 14% from 84,186 reported deaths for the 12 months ending April 2023, according to the figures.

In Ohio, the figures show a 24.5% decline over the same period, dropping from 4,273 reported deaths to 3,268.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, and synthetic opioids account for the vast majority of all opioid-related deaths, as well as most of all drug overdose deaths.

But the decrease in opioid deaths in the U.S., at least based on the provisional data, comes after years of almost annual increases. From 1999 to 2022, opioid deaths increased every year except 2018, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the CDC.

Also, the 72,063 reported opioid overdose deaths for the 12 months ending in April is still higher than the 68,630 opioid-related deaths in 2020, the year before Biden and Harris took office.

In his remarks, Walz did acknowledge that “there is still more work to do” to get overdose deaths down.

Affordable Care ActEchoing a claim Trump made in the presidential debate, Vance said that the Affordable Care Act “was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along” and that Trump “could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” Trump did try to destroy the ACA. In addition to trying to repeal and replace it, Trump’s administration supported a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law.

The lawsuit ultimately failed in 2021.

As we wrote after the last debate, Trump supported a 2017 Republican bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. 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. His administration also slashed advertising and outreach aimed at enrolling people in ACA plans.

Under Trump, the number of people without health insurance went up by 3 million, and the percentage of the uninsured went up by about a half a percentage point.

Preexisting ConditionsWalz countered that if Trump had repealed the ACA “you lose your preexisting conditions” protections. Ending the ACA would reduce the protections for people with preexisting conditions considerably, but there were some protections for those with employer-based plans even before the ACA.

“If you’re sitting at home and you got asthma, too bad,” Walz said of losing the ACA’s protections. “If you’re a woman, probably not. Broke your foot during football? Might kick you out.”

The ACA prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their health status. The law also bars insurers from refusing to cover a certain condition, and it requires plans to cover 10 essential benefits.

But before the ACA, the type of coverage denial Walz described would have happened on the individual market, where people buy their own insurance. Pre-ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage, 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.

The ACA’s expanded protections would benefit people who lost their jobs, retired early or became self-employed and found themselves seeking insurance on the individual market.

Grocery InflationVance repeatedly focused on the theme of food prices being too high because of the Biden-Harris administration.

“Because she’s been the vice president for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies, and what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%,” Vance said. Later he referred to “Kamala Harris’ atrocious record, which has made gas, groceries and housing unaffordable for American citizens.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for food at home, the indexed price of groceries increased by 6.5% in total under the Trump administration and 20.9% in total under the Biden administration so far. The inflation rate has slowed in recent months, with grocery prices increasing by only 1.1% over the last year.

However, as we’ve written before, economists we’ve interviewed say that while Biden’s policies bear some responsibility for rising inflation under his administration, other external factors played a larger role in raising prices. Economists primarily blame rising inflation on the disruptions inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as supply shortages, labor market distortions and increased consumer spending on goods, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rising inflation was a global phenomenon in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Trump’s TaxesDuring a discussion about the economy, Walz called out teachers, nurses and truck drivers, asking how it was fair for them to pay taxes while “Donald Trump hasn’t paid any federal tax in the last 15 years.”

But that’s not quite right.

Trump didn’t release his tax returns when he ran for president in 2016, and he continued to keep them private during his presidency, so we don’t know about many years of his tax filings.

But the House Committee on Ways and Means reviewed Trump’s returns for tax years 2015 through 2020 after Trump lost a legal battle in 2022 to keep them confidential. On Dec. 15, 2022, the committee released a report, which showed:

• In 2015, Trump reported losses of about $32 million and paid $641,931 in federal income tax;
• In 2016, Trump again reported losses of about $32 million, but paid $750 in federal income tax;
• In 2017, Trump reported losses of about $13 million and, again, paid $750 in federal income tax;
• In 2018, Trump reported an income of about $24 million and paid $999,466 in federal income tax;
• In 2019, Trump reported an income of about $4 million and paid $133,445 in federal income tax;
• In 2020, Trump reported losses of about $5 million and paid no federal income tax.

Previous reporting from the New York Times in 2020 had also detailed some of Trump’s tax returns and found that in 10 of the 15 years before Trump ran for office, he hadn’t paid income taxes. But, for five of them, he had.

Revisionist HistoryVance and Walz had a lengthy back-and-forth over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Vance engaged in revisionist history in his defense of his running mate. Vance said that Trump told his supporters in a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, to “peacefully protest.” But Vance ignored Trump’s role in mobilizing his supporters to gather at the Capitol, and the tone and tenor of Trump’s defiant speech.

As we’ve written, Trump spoke for more than an hour on Jan. 6, 2021, on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol, where members of Congress were gathering to begin the process of accepting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. Trump started his speech by accusing the “radical left Democrats” and the “fake news media” of stealing the election, and urging his supporters not to concede or give up.

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing, and stolen by the fake news media,” Trump said. “That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

He went on to make numerous false and unsupported claims about election fraud in swing states, and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject electoral votes for Biden, so that Trump could remain president. He criticized other Republicans for being “weak,” threatening to “primary” them “if they don’t fight.”

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump said.

Trump did — as Vance said — use the word “peacefully” once in his speech. Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said.

But the former president spent most of the speech telling his supporters that Republicans needed to fight back, and he closed by telling them to “fight like hell.”

“Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait,” Trump said. “I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.’ And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

After the speech, many of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, attacked law enforcement officers and interrupted the counting of the electoral votes, which wasn’t completed until the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.

Trump also heavily promoted the Jan. 6, 2021, protest on social media, telling his followers in one post: “Be there, will be wild!”

During the debate, Vance focused on the one time that Trump used the word “peacefully.” Vance said, “Remember, he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully, and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell remembered that day differently. In a Feb. 13, 2021, floor speech in the Senate, McConnell blamed Trump for provoking what he called an act of “terrorism” to prevent Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, from certifying Biden as winner of the 2020 election.

“They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said. “Former President Trump’s actions [that] preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

Vance engaged in false equivalency by saying, “We have to remember that for years in this country, Democrats protested the results of elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads. This has been going on for a long time.”

Unlike Trump, Clinton conceded the 2016 election to Trump in less than 24 hours after the polls closed, despite having won the popular vote in a race that turned on the outcome in three states that she lost by less than 80,000 votes. Subsequently, Clinton did criticize Putin for interfering in the 2016 election, which was well documented in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and went far beyond Facebook ads. The federal investigation uncovered Russia’s sophisticated computer hacking operation designed to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Vance Wrongly Repeats ‘Border Czar’ TitleVance falsely claimed that when Harris was vice president, she “became the appointed border czar.” She did not.

As we have written, in March 2021 Biden tasked Harris with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative, known as the “Root Causes Strategy,” 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 was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security, currently led by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

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Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz falsely claimed that Project 2025 calls for the tracking of “all pregnancies” and would require people “to register with a new federal agency” upon getting pregnant. The conservative playbook advocates the reporting of all miscarriages and abortions but does not stipulate the monitoring of all pregnancies.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, inaccurately described Project 2025’s policies at a rally in Superior, Wisconsin, on Sept. 14. “By the way, Project 2025. … They’ve got a national pregnancy coordinator that tracks all pregnancies,” he said. He then went further to claim that if the ideas in the plan were implemented, people would have to let the government know every time they get pregnant.

“Think about what they’re saying in Project 2025. You’re going to have to register with a new federal agency when you get pregnant? This is personal, people,” he said.

Three days later, at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, Walz similarly said: “Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion ban.”

As PolitiFact and others have noted, no such policy is included in Project 2025’s 887-page book. What Project 2025 recommends, as we’ve written previously and as we will explain in more detail below, is to expand the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion data collection from states and to make it mandatory. Currently, states are not required to report abortion data to the CDC, but most of them, including Minnesota, do.

Project 2025, which was funded and led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is meant to be a plan for “the next conservative President.” Many of those who worked on Project 2025 have close ties with former President Donald Trump, but the Republican presidential nominee has said he has “nothing to do with” it. Trump’s campaign has stressed the plan “should not be associated with the campaign.”

As we’ve written, the plan includes proposals to significantly curtail abortion rights. It calls for the president to “enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support” and deploy “existing federal powers to protect innocent life.” The playbook suggests blocking the mailing of abortion pills, which are used in more than half of U.S. abortions, by enforcing an anti-vice law from 1873; ending mandatory insurance coverage of the emergency contraceptive Ella; and ending federal funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers.” (Planned Parenthood provides many services, including tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screenings and contraception services, but Republicans have long sought to eliminate funding for the organization, because it provides abortion services.)

The plan even calls for deleting the word “abortion” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.” But it doesn’t force families to disclose their pregnancies to a federal agency.

Walz’s inaccurate claims come after a series of similar statements by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over the summer.

At the Democratic National Convention, on Aug. 22, Harris said Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” As we wrote at the time, Trump hasn’t proposed that, but some of it matches what’s in Project 2025. Days later, on X, she went further, falsely saying that “Trump’s Project 2025” included “monitoring pregnancies and prosecuting women if they have an abortion.”

On Sept. 9, the campaign released an ad that says Project 2025 would “require states to monitor women’s pregnancies” and “bans abortions.” And during the presidential debate, on Sept. 10, the vice president said: “Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.”

There is no mention in Project 2025 about prosecuting women who had abortions, and a spokesperson for the plan told us “there is no call for a national abortion ban in any form.” That’s true, although, as we just described, the proposal suggests numerous policy changes to curtail access to abortion. And again, the plan does not propose monitoring all pregnancies.

The Project 2025 spokesperson directed us to a Sept. 10 X post by Roger Severino, a Heritage Foundation vice president who authored the relevant section on abortion and who led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights under Trump.

Claims that Project 2025 “would establish a ‘national abortion monitor’” are “[f]alse,” Severino said in the post. The plan “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling anonymous abortion statistics for all states,” he wrote, adding that the Harris-Walz campaign claims were “hypocritical” and “misleading” since Minnesota already collects such data.

To be clear, it has never been mandatory for states to report abortion data, although in the past, the CDC received data from or estimated the number of legal abortions performed in each state. The agency’s latest annual report, for 2021, includes data from every state except California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.

Project 2025 does mention a “dedicated Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health” in the Department of Health and Human Services who would “lead on all matters of federal domestic policy development related to life and family.”

The description of the role occurs in a section that states HHS “should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’” But it does not specify any kind of pregnancy monitoring. (In a different chapter, Project 2025 also includes a “pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” which some of our fact-checking colleagues have noted. But the proposed position, which would exist under the U.S. Agency for International Development, does not involve domestic abortion data collection.)

As for Trump’s position, in April, Time magazine asked Trump if he thought “states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” He replied, “I think they might do that,” but said it would be left up to individual states. Trump iterated that would be a decision for each state to make in an interview with WGAL, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, in May.

More recently, in a rally in Arizona on Sept. 15, Trump explicitly said he was opposed to tracking pregnancies. “She claimed I want to monitor women’s pregnancies,” he said of Harris. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to. It’s a total lie. I don’t want to do that. Women, I won’t be following you around to the hospital monitoring.”

Project 2025 on Abortion Data Collection As we said, Project 2025 calls for making it mandatory for states to report miscarriages and abortions — but not pregnancies — to the CDC. The CDC has been collecting anonymous data of legal induced abortions and some characteristics of patients since 1969.

The proposal comes in a chapter about HHS, under recommendations for the CDC, which also include eliminating “programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.”

Under a subhead on data collection, it reads:

Project 2025, page 455: The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.

“This section might be best described as disinformation,” Amanda Jean Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the impacts of abortion, told us in an email.

Stevenson said the text rejects “decades of high-quality peer-reviewed science on abortion,” adding that the language reflects either unfamiliarity with the meaning of certain medical terms or an intention to “misrepresent and stigmatize abortion.”

“For example, the proposed distinction between ‘procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life’ (sic) and the rest of medicine for pregnant people is ill-defined and contrary to the experiences of patients and physicians,” she wrote.

Stevenson also objected to the suggestion that complications of abortion are not currently sufficiently captured. “Our systems already monitor for abortion complications at least as well as we do for any other outpatient procedures,” noting that the existing systems monitor for abortion mortality “with a high degree of sensitivity.”

“Evidence points to our system overestimating maternal death – of which abortion death is a part,” she said. “We have no reason to think that we underestimate maternal death after abortion.” Moreover, she said, better monitoring would require the type of data integration that is only possible with a nationalized health system.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, as of September 2023, 46 states and D.C. require providers to submit regular and confidential reports to the state. The data is collected in a form that typically includes the name of the physician and the facility where the procedure was performed; age, race, ethnicity, marital status and number of previous live births of the patient; gestational age and abortion procedure used, including the use of medication.

The exact data collected, however, is up to the state — and not all abortions are reported. “In most states and jurisdictions, the collection of abortion data is facilitated by a legal requirement for hospitals, facilities, or physicians to report abortions to a central health agency; however, reporting is not complete in all areas, including in certain areas with reporting requirements,” the latest annual CDC report explains.

Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, told us abortion reporting should remain voluntary. Even though having data on abortion is important, the reporting has often been used with political reasons, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s research. For example, asking for the patient’s reason for a procedure, as Project 2025 suggests, can provide data that could be useful to push certain agendas. (Sixteen states, including Minnesota, already collect some data on reasons for a procedure.)

“A common anti-abortion tactic is to claim that most abortions are not for health-related reasons but for personal preference or even convenience, and therefore do not constitute necessary health care,” he told us in an email, referring us to a post by the anti-abortion rights organization Charlotte Lozier Institute as an example.

When reporting is used for political reasons the questions can get “highly intrusive into patient privacy and risk patient confidentiality,” he wrote, which in turn could discourage people from getting needed care. After the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, several states stopped collecting these data partly because of privacy concerns, he added.

Project 2025’s suggestion to collect data on miscarriage is also “unusual,” Maddow-Zimet wrote. Most pregnancy losses occur during the first weeks of gestation and “often don’t result in contact with the health care system,” he wrote, so it’s “unclear how these statistics would be collected.”

In a phone interview, Severino told us miscarriage data would only be collected if patients seek medical attention, adding that Walz’s state of Minnesota already collects such data.

Amy Friedrich-Karnik, Guttmacher’s director of federal policy told us the group “cannot speak directly to what parts of the Project 2025” plan support Harris’ and Walz’s claims. But she noted that it is “very likely” the document is not mentioning all the ways in which the pregnancy outcome data it intends to collect would be used.

“In the context of an overarching goal to make any and all abortion care unavailable, there are numerous potential ways this trove of data could be used, including potentially increased efforts to criminalize and prosecute people for their pregnancy outcomes,” she told us in an email.

Severino, however, emphasized that the data would be anonymous — and just as important as a variety of other public health statistics, such as the number of deaths each year from guns or traffic accidents.

“Nothing about individuals. Nothing about tracking people. Nothing about law enforcement,” he said. “That’s not what anonymous statistics are used for.”

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In campaign appearances over the weekend in the swing state of Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of letting more than 13,000 “illegal immigrant murderers” into the United States.

It’s true that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder, as of July 21, who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.

Trump and Vance distorted the contents of a Sept. 25 letter that Patrick Lechleitner, the acting director of ICE, sent to Rep. Tony Gonzales. The Republican congressman had requested the number of noncitizens who had committed a crime but were not in ICE custody — a list known as the agency’s non-detained docket.

Lechleitner’s response included a chart that showed there are 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by ICE. Homeland Security later clarified in its statement that “many” are in prisons, although it did not tell us how many are incarcerated when we inquired.

Gonzales posted Lechleitner’s letter to X on Sept. 27. The next day, Vance referenced the 13,099 murderers at a campaign event in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and Trump did the same in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. A day later, Trump repeated the claim in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Vance, Sept. 28: Do you know that there are 13,000 — I know some of you are nodding because some of you saw this — 13,000 illegal immigrant murderers in the United States of America right now. They’re in this country because Kamala Harris let them in this country.

Trump, Sept. 29: During her term, it’s not even believable, she let in 13,099 convicted murderers. Some of them had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven. One murdered six.

In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security said data in Lechleitner’s letter had been “misinterpreted.”

“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration,” the statement said. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Similarly, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us that people have been on the non-detained docket “for decades.”

“There is a lot of confusion around the non-detained docket,” including “who is on it and how long they’ve been on it,” Mittelstadt said in an email. “This docket has grown under multiple administrations, including the Trump one. Significant numbers of people on the docket have been on it for decades.”

For example, the ICE acting director said in his letter that there are 425,431 convicted criminals on the agency’s non-detained docket as of July 21. But, as Mittelstadt noted, ICE reported in a budget document “that there were 405,786 convicted criminal noncitizens on the non-detained docket in June 2021 – so the vast majority would have gotten on during the prior administrations as the Biden administration by then was just five months old.” The number of people on the docket has increased by nearly 5% in about three years.

She also told us that “the non-detained docket includes not just unauthorized immigrants but green-card holders and noncitizens on long-term non-immigrant visas who have made themselves removable by virtue of a criminal conviction.”

The ICE letter to Gonzales did show that, as of July 21, there were an additional 1,845 noncitizens on the non-detained docket who face murder charges. But, again, we don’t know when those 1,845 people entered the United States, how many of them may have entered illegally and when they committed their alleged crimes. We also do not know if they are being held by other local, state or federal law enforcement agencies. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond when we asked for such information.

We asked the Trump campaign to respond to the evidence that contradicts its candidates’ claims that Harris let 13,099 “illegal immigrant murderers” into the United States. We also asked it to supply information about Trump’s claim that some of the 13,099 “had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven.” In response, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary, said Trump “will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one.”

Mittelstadt said some murderers and other criminals cannot be deported “because their country will not accept their return.” In addition, she said, a 2001 Supreme Court ruling generally bars ICE from detaining noncitizens for more than six months if they are unlikely to be deported. As a result, ICE says on its website that it “has been legally required to release thousands of noncitizens, including those with serious criminal convictions.”

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Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats are “getting ready to CHEAT” by encouraging overseas citizens to vote, falsely saying that ballots are being sent overseas “without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever,” and warning of “foreign interference.”

Trump then went on to say, “Remember, IF YOU VOTE ILLEGALLY, YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL.” In fact, it is perfectly legal for U.S. citizens living outside the U.S. to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that Democrats are trying to appeal to anyone other than legal voters. Also, while Democrats have been more active this year trying to encourage more citizens living abroad to vote, Republicans have made efforts to mobilize overseas voters as well.

Here’s the full message Trump posted to Truth Social on Sept. 23: “The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT! They are going to use UOCAVA [The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act] to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever. (Foreign interference?) Remember they say, we have the ‘most secure elections in history,’ and anyone can get a ballot emailed to them! They want to dilute the TRUE vote of our beautiful military and their families, who Comrade Kamala has totally disrespected and abandoned. Republicans must act to stop them from stealing our military votes. WATCH! Remember, IF YOU VOTE ILLEGALLY, YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL.”

With polls showing a very tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, both parties are fighting for every vote, and Democrats see overseas citizens as a largely untapped constituency that is likely to lean Democratic.

Data from the Election Assistance Commission’s 2020 voting survey found that nearly 890,000 overseas ballots were counted in the 2020 election, a nearly 74% increase from 2016. That includes both uniformed service members and their families but also civilian overseas citizens. That second batch — which includes dual citizens, students spending a semester abroad, businesspeople on overseas assignments and those who have retired abroad — drove most of the growth, and is the constituency Democrats are focusing on.

Despite the large jump in overseas voting in 2020, those voters represent just a fraction of the eligible overseas voters scattered around the globe.

There is some uncertainty about the number of U.S. citizens living abroad. In its report, the EAC said an estimated 1.4 million uniformed service members and about 600,000 military spouses and voting age dependents were stationed abroad. It also reported an estimated 2.9 million voting age civilian citizens living abroad. With fewer than 890,000 total overseas votes counted in the 2020 presidential election, the voting participation rate among overseas residents was about a quarter of the participation rate among domestic voters, which was 66%.

Democrats have stepped up their efforts this year to find overseas citizens and to direct them to resources to vote. According to Politico, the Democratic National Committee and private donors have raised $450,000 to mobilize Americans from swing states living abroad. Politico said that effort “includes direct advertising on traditional media and social media, billboards across Canada, mailers and in-person gatherings.”

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Corey Booker were two of the headliners for an online campaign event on Zoom promoting voting among overseas citizens in early September. Some 60 politicians, social media influencers and actors — such as Jane Fonda, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick and Lynda Carter — also participated in the event, which was viewed by 33,000 people, according to Democrats Abroad.

So Trump is right that Democrats are “working so hard” to get votes “from Americans living overseas.” But Trump’s post could leave the false impression that overseas citizens can’t vote. The right for overseas citizens to vote — whether they are temporarily, permanently or indefinitely living abroad — is enshrined in federal law.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, enacted by Congress and signed by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, consolidated and upgraded existing laws to require states to allow American citizens living abroad to register and vote absentee in federal elections. Among its provisions was a federal postcard application that allowed service members and overseas citizens to register to vote and request an absentee ballot simultaneously.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed a bill that included major revisions to the UOCAVA that required states to provide overseas voters with the option to request and receive voter registration and ballot applications via “electronic transmission.” It also created the option to electronically transmit absentee ballots to eligible overseas voters (though most states require that the ballots be mailed back). And the changes required states to provide ballots to overseas voters no later than 45 days before the election, in order to give adequate time for ballots to be mailed back by Election Day.

The Wake County Board of Elections in North Carolina prepares to send out absentee ballots to military and overseas citizens. Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images.The methods of verifying an overseas voter’s identity and eligibility vary by state, but most require either a valid state driver’s license or the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number, according to the U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonpartisan group that provides online tools to assist U.S. citizens living abroad in registering to vote and requesting their absentee ballot using their state’s specific voter forms. Registrants must provide a valid signature under penalty of perjury. Most states also require overseas voters to sign their ballots, and the signature is matched against the signature from the voter’s registration. A handful of states further require witnesses to sign a voter’s ballot documents.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of the U.S. Vote Foundation and Overseas Vote, told us in a phone interview from Germany that the rules would make it “nearly impossible” to pull off widespread fraud through overseas voting. Votes are cast in thousands of voting jurisdictions, she said, and so you’d have to track down not only the identity of people living overseas, but also the jurisdiction of a state where they are eligible to vote.

“The ballots are highly scrutinized by election officials,” she said. “And any sudden increase [in a voting jurisdiction] would be a huge red flag.

“The program has been going on for decades, and the only time I’ve heard of fraud was in 2022 when an election official in Wisconsin fraudulently obtained a ballot to prove the system could be duped,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. (She is referring to the case of Kimberly Zapata, who was serving as deputy director at the Milwaukee Election Commission in 2022 and obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers, the Associated Press reported. Though Zapata said she was simply trying to expose flaws in the system, she was convicted of election fraud. She lost her job, was fined $3,000 and was ordered to perform 120 hours of community service.)

“It’s not an area where you’re going to find a long history of voter fraud,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. “There are all kinds of checks and balances.”

Responding to Trump’s post, a press release from Democrats Abroad — the official Democratic Party arm for Americans living outside the United States — said, “Ballots are only sent to people whose registration has been confirmed and validated by their local elections office. This latest baseless accusation of fraud is yet more desperate fear-mongering by a man whose political playbook is grounded in preemptively delegitimizing the votes of Americans he assumes are less likely to support him.”

Jay Sexton, a history professor and director of the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute, said “there are many wrinkles and variations in how mail ballots work” because states run the processes for mail-in ballots that are sent overseas.

“Voters must affirm their identity (signing outside of the envelope, which is matched to voter registration card signature, for example),” Sexton told us in an email. “This is an example of a verification process for mail in ballots. I have not seen any evidence of widespread electoral fraud related to overseas ballots since I started following this topic in 2014.”

Could Overseas Votes Swing the Outcome of the Election?As we said, nearly 890,000 overseas votes were counted in the 2020 election, a nearly 74% increase from 2016, according to the Election Assistance Commission.

Although most overseas ballots were historically cast by uniformed service members and their families, that changed in 2016, when a majority were cast by civilian overseas citizens. In 2020, overseas citizens made up 57.4% of overseas registered voters, compared with 42.3% who were uniformed service members.

Democrats point to Biden’s razor-thin margins of victory in 2020 in Arizona and Georgia –10,457 votes and 11,779 votes, respectively — as evidence that overseas absentee ballots make a difference. According to EAC, 18,435 overseas absentee ballots were counted in Arizona, and 18,475 in Georgia. (That includes both uniformed service members and their families as well as civilian overseas citizens.)

“Your votes from abroad truly have the power to change the outcome of the election,” Hillary Clinton said in a video made for Democrats Abroad, appealing to Americans living overseas to vote. “Just think, in 2020 votes from abroad helped to deliver Georgia and Arizona for President Biden and Vice President Harris.”

Overseas votes also played a prominent role in the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, the closest in U.S. history. After counting nearly 2,500 absentee overseas votes in Florida, Republican George W. Bush ended up beating Democrat Al Gore in the state by 537 votes, giving Bush the presidency.

A New York Times analysis of the overseas votes in Florida concluded that 680 of them were “questionable,” for reasons such as ballots lacking postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots lacking witness signatures and ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States. The analysis did not identify that these votes were cast illegally, but the Times concluded they should have been disqualified according to Florida election law. Although the Times could not say whom those votes were for, the vast majority were in counties won by Bush. However, the story notes, “The Times study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party.”

Republicans Wooing Overseas Voters, TooTrump commented on Democrats, but Republicans have also made efforts to mobilize overseas citizen voters.

“The RNC is working hand-in-glove with the Trump Campaign to reach all eligible voters — including those abroad — to turn out the GOP electorate for an unprecedented win on Nov. 5,” RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly told Politico.

The website for Republicans Overseas, which has no official affiliation with the GOP, provides information on overseas voter eligibility and voter registration.

Greg Swenson, chair of Republicans Overseas UK, told the Financial Times that his group actively promotes Trump’s campaign on social media and in press engagements, in addition to hosting a fundraising event for its 1,500 members. Swenson boasted that the fundraising event raised $2.5 million and was the largest fundraiser ever held outside the U.S.

“We’ve hired 20 paid employees in the UK, in addition to volunteers, just to chase ballots and help with voter registration,” Swenson said.

Nonetheless, Democrats have generally been more aggressive about courting overseas votes.

“Democrats have done more to organize themselves in overseas groups,” Sexton, from the University of Missouri, said. “This is the most recent phase of a better Dem organization overseas that dates back decades, including overseas voters having representation at the party convention.”

“Republicans have attempted to catch up in recent cycles,” he said, but it may be more difficult for Republicans to woo overseas voters who traditionally lean left.

Partisan Leaning of Overseas VotersConventional wisdom holds that overseas ballots cast by uniformed service members and their families skew Republican, while votes cast by overseas civilians favor Democrats. But there is no solid data on that.

According to AP VoteCast surveys, 59% of U.S. military veterans supported Trump in the 2020 election.

“Every vote is going to matter in this close election,” Sexton told us via email. “I don’t have firm polling data on this cycle, but it is reasonable to predict that Democrats carry more overseas ballots than do Republicans among non-military voters abroad. … Just remember that US expats are a very diverse group: study abroad students, transient businesspeople, artists/authors, dual citizens, return migrants, retirees in Panama, etc, etc.”

“From all the analysis that we’ve done and seen, something like 80 percent of Americans abroad vote Democrat,” Bruce Heyman, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada who is co-heading the Americans Abroad for Harris-Walz, a branch of Democrats Abroad, told Politico. “It’s because they care about foreign policy and the stature of America in the world and are very worried about a potential Trump return.“

DNC officials told Reuters there are more than 1.6 million Americans living overseas who are eligible to vote in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But the actual number of eligible overseas voters and their partisan breakdown is largely unknown, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. U.S. citizens are not required to register their location with the U.S. government. While the Federal Voting Assistance Program estimates there are just under 3 million American citizens of voting age living abroad, that’s a pre-pandemic calculation, she said, and many believe there are far more who have left the U.S. since the pandemic.

“I’m not upset that there has been an increased emphasis on overseas voting,” said Dzieduszycka-Suinat, a U.S. citizen who has been living abroad for 30 years. “We might live abroad, but we really do care. We know how foreign policy affects things. We see it every day.”

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In recent remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris has cited several economic analyses, claiming they found her plan would “strengthen the economy” and former President Donald Trump’s plan would “weaken it.” But that’s not exactly what some of those reports said.

In a Sept. 19 campaign event with former talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Harris criticized Trump’s economic plans, saying that he wanted to give “another tax break for billionaires and the biggest corporations that would add $5 trillion to our deficit” and that he had proposed “what I call a Trump sales tax, which is basically he’s going to put a 20% tax on everyday necessities, that economists have estimated will cost the average American $4,000 more a year, which is why Goldman Sachs, which is why Moody’s, which is why Wharton School of Business, which is why 16 Nobel laureates have collectively determined after analyzing our plans, one, mine would strengthen the economy, his would weaken it. Two, that on his plan, he would actually blow up inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year.”

We’ve written before about Harris’ characterization of Trump’s plans. The $5 trillion figure is the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups — not only billionaires and big corporations. Harris’ reference to “a Trump sales tax” costing average Americans $4,000 a year is a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

Harris again cited the Nobel laureates, Goldman Sachs and Moody’s in an interview that aired Sept. 25 on MSNBC, saying they found that “my plan would grow the economy, his would shrink the economy,” and the same day in a speech in Pittsburgh, she referred to “a survey of top economists by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago,” saying it “found that, by an overwhelming 70 to 3% margin, my plan would be better for keeping inflation low.”

Harris was mostly correct in her description of Moody’s Analytics, the Financial Times survey and the 16 Nobel laureates, except the latter commented on President Joe Biden’s economic policies, not Harris’ proposals since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. But she is wrong about the Wharton analysis and exaggerates what Goldman Sachs said.

We’ll explain what each economic group determined.

Penn Wharton Budget ModelIn the campaign event with Winfrey, Harris cited the “Wharton School of Business.” She is referring to analyses performed by the Penn Wharton Budget Model of Harris’ and Trump’s tax and spending plans, and PWBM did not conclude that her plan “would strengthen the economy, his would weaken it,” as she said.

PWBM found that Harris’ plan would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product more than Trump’s, and would reduce workers’ wages more.

PWBM did conclude that Trump’s plan would add about twice as much to the nation’s debt, but PWBM warned that the debt added by both candidates’ plans would fall on “future generations who must finance almost the entirety of the tax decreases” each has proposed.

PWBM determined that under Harris’ tax and spending plan, “Relative to current law, GDP falls by 1.3 percent by 2034 and by 4 percent within 30 years (year 2054). Capital investment and working hours fall, thereby reducing wages by 0.8 percent in 2034 and by 3.3 percent in 2054.”

It also found that Harris’ plans would increase cumulative deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $2 trillion on a dynamic basis. (Dynamic forecasts take into account the policies’ expected effects on economic activity.)

More generally, PWBM concluded: “Lower and middle-income households generally benefit from increased transfers and credits on a conventional basis, while higher-income households are worse off.”

PWBM’s analysis of Trump’s tax and spending plans concluded that his would cause even bigger deficits.

“We estimate that the Trump Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $4.1 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes economic feedback effects,” the analysis stated.

But it found that the Trump plan’s impact on the GDP, while still negative, was not as bad as Harris’.

PWBM concluded that while GDP would increase during the first part of the next decade under Trump’s plan, “GDP eventually falls relative to current law, falling by 0.4 percent in 2034 and by 2.1 percent in 30 years.” In addition, “After initially increasing, capital investment and working hours eventually fall, leaving average wages unchanged in 2034 and lower by 1.7 percent in 2054.”

“Low, middle, and high-income households in 2026 and 2034 all fare better under the campaign proposals on a conventional basis,” PWBM concluded.

The analyses of Harris’ and Trump’s plans did not include their call to eliminate the taxation of tips earned by service workers. Both campaigns would have to offer “a considerable number of additional details” in order to analyze their plans, PWBM said.

Similarly, PWBM did not include Trump’s proposal to impose across-the-board tariffs of between 10% to 20% on all imported goods. “Key implementation details” are missing from Trump’s plan, the PWBM analysis stated. “While new import taxes and tariffs could raise several trillion dollars in new revenue over the next decade, they could also lead to revenue losses due to potential retaliatory actions from other governments and other economic dynamics.”

Goldman SachsIn her interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Harris said analysts at Goldman Sachs, a global investment and wealth management firm, “said my plan would grow the economy” and Trump’s “would shrink the economy.”

In fact, the analysts found that the economy would continue to grow under both candidates. If Trump wins, the growth would be a bit smaller in Trump’s first year, but that “abates in 2026,” the report said. If Harris wins, there would be at best a “very slight boost to GDP growth” in the first two years, the report said, referring to the real GDP, which is adjusted for inflation.

The company’s chief executive officer suggested the difference in the economic impact between the two candidates isn’t significant.

“I think a lot more has been made of this than should be,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in a Sept. 11 interview on CNBC, when he was asked about similar remarks that Harris made the previous night during the presidential debate.

The Harris campaign referred us to news articles about a Sept. 3 research note written by several Goldman Sachs research analysts, including Alec Phillips, the firm’s chief political economist. The Harris campaign did not provide us with a copy of the analysis, but we did obtain a copy of the 23-page report.

Here we will summarize the analysis, and what the company’s CEO said about it.

The researchers said they reviewed “likely changes to trade, immigration, and fiscal policy” by both candidates and estimated “the effects on inflation, labor force growth, GDP, and the deficit” under different election outcomes — a Republican sweep, a Democratic sweep or divided government.

For Trump, the analysis assumed that the former president will raise tariffs on Chinese goods by an average of 20 percentage points, and increase tariffs on auto imports from Mexico and the European Union. It also assumed Trump will reduce immigration and extend the expiring provisions of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, while discounting other Trump tax cuts as unlikely to pass Congress.

The analysts assumed that Harris, on the other hand, will not raise tariffs and immigration will slow but remain “above the pre-pandemic trend.” They also assumed that Harris would seek to extend some, but not all, of the 2017 tax cuts, as well as increase the child tax credit and propose a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

What would be the net impact of these plans on the nation’s economic growth?

First, it’s important to note that the analysis includes a chart that shows Goldman Sachs estimates that the nation’s real GDP will increase by 2% or more in 2025, 2026 and 2027. The net effect of Trump’s immigration, trade and fiscal policies would slightly reduce that growth in 2025, the report said.

“We estimate that if Trump wins in a sweep or with divided government, the hit to growth from tariffs and tighter immigration policy would outweigh the positive fiscal impulse, resulting in a peak hit to GDP growth of -0.5pp in 2025H2 that abates in 2026,” the report said.

In short, real GDP would continue to grow, but at 0.5 percentage point less than it otherwise would in the second half of 2025.

As for a Harris victory, the analysts at Goldman Sachs said: “If Democrats sweep, new spending and expanded middle-income tax credits would slightly more than offset lower investment due to higher corporate tax rates, resulting in a very slight boost to GDP growth on average over 2025-2026. If Harris wins with divided government, the effects of policy changes would be small and neutral on net.”

In the CNBC interview, Solomon was asked about Harris’ use of his company’s report during the debate. Harris said, “What Goldman Sachs has said is that Donald Trump’s plan would make the economy worse. Mine would strengthen the economy.”

“I think a lot more has been made of this than should be,” Solomon said. “What the report did is it looked at a handful of policy issues that have been put out by both sides, and it tried to model their impact on GDP growth. The reason I say a bigger deal has been made of it is what it showed is the difference between the sets of policies that they put forward was about two-tenths of 1%, OK? So [the] economy grows, OK, if you took these particular sets of policies they looked at.”

Moody’s AnalyticsMark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has said that if Harris and Trump were able to get all their policies enacted, the economy would thrive more under a Harris administration.

“Assuming Harris and Trump are able to fully implement the policies they have proposed when they take office, the economy will perform better under Harris than under Trump in their terms,” Zandi told Newsweek in a Sept. 20 article. “That is, real economic growth will be stronger, inflation and interest rates lower and budget deficits and debt lower under Harris’ policies than under Trump’s policies,” he said.

However, a Moody’s Analytics report published in early August said that it’s most likely if Harris wins the election, she will have to deal with a divided Congress – making it difficult to execute her full agenda, which Moody’s assumed would be similar to what was in the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025. But that scenario would still work out better for the economy than if Trump becomes president with a Republican-controlled Congress, the second likeliest outcome, the analysis said.

Even with a split Congress, Moody’s economists projected that Harris’ proposals would lead to average annual economic growth of 2.1% from 2024 to 2028. The economy would still grow under Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress – contrary to Harris’ suggestion in the MSNBC interview that the economy would “shrink” – but the increase would occur at a slower average rate of 1.3% annually.

Moody’s also said that “under the Republican sweep scenario,” consumer price inflation increases from 3% in 2024 to 3.5% in 2025, “fueled by the higher tariffs, outflow of foreign immigrants, the resulting tighter labor market and more quickly rising labor costs, and tax-cut-fueled fiscal stimulus.” Real incomes and consumer and business sentiment would be weighed down by the higher inflation and interest rates, starting a recession by the middle of 2025, the analysis said, as Harris indicated in her remarks about Trump’s plans.

“While the economy recovers beginning in mid-2026,” the analysis said, “employment is still 3.2 million jobs lower and the unemployment rate is nearly half a percentage point higher by the end of Trump’s term” than it would be at the end of a four-year Harris term.

On the other hand, under a Harris presidency with Republicans running the Senate, the annual rate of inflation would decline to 2.4% in 2025, and interest rates would fall to about 3% before the start of 2027. Annual deficits also would be lower under Harris and a divided Congress, Moody’s said, as would the ratio of debt to GDP.

Notably, Moody’s said that a “lack of transparency and specificity” made it difficult to analyze the macroeconomic impact of Trump’s policies, and a wide range of proposals by the Biden-Harris administration complicated the analysis of potential Harris policies.

Financial Times/Chicago Booth SurveyIn Pittsburgh, Harris correctly cited a survey by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “A survey of top economists by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago found that, by an overwhelming 70 to 3% margin, my plan would be better for keeping inflation low,” she said.

The survey, which the Financial Times wrote about on Sept. 14, asked 37 economists: “If the Harris or Trump economic platforms were to be enacted, which do you think would be more inflationary in the medium term?” In response, 70% said Trump’s plans would be more inflationary; 27% said that there would be “no material difference in their inflationary consequences,” and 3% said Harris’ plans would be more inflationary.

There was a similar response to the question about federal deficits: 70% said Trump’s plans would lead to larger deficits; 19% said there would be “no material difference,” and 11% said Harris’ plans would “produce larger federal budget deficits in the medium term.”

Those two questions were the only ones in the survey that asked about the presidential candidates.

Nobel LaureatesHarris referred to “16 Nobel laureates” in the event with Winfrey and other events. Those Nobel Prize-winning economists commented on Biden’s record in office, not future plans by Harris. But they did praise the Biden administration, while saying they were “deeply concerned about the risks of a second Trump administration for the U.S. economy.”

The 16 economists wrote a letter in June, when Biden was still running for reelection, saying: “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s. In his first four years as President, Joe Biden signed into law major investments in the U.S. economy, including in infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and climate. Together, these investments are likely to increase productivity and economic growth while lowering long-term inflationary pressures and facilitating the clean energy transition. … An additional four years of Joe Biden’s presidency would allow him to continue supporting an inclusive U.S. economic recovery.”

On Trump’s plans, the letter said: “Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation. … We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

As vice president, Harris clearly supports the actions of the Biden administration and many of the same economic policies as the president, but the Nobel laureates didn’t analyze her plan, as she said.

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Quick TakeIn an interview, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said some people in his state think former President Donald Trump is a “terrible person” but they say “I will still vote for him.” A social media post misrepresents Fetterman’s comments to claim he supports Trump. The senator supports Vice President Kamala Harris.

Full StoryPennsylvania is one of the critical battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential election, with its 19 electoral votes making it a key state for the Republican and Democratic candidates. The state has seen the highest spending on television and radio ads, with over $138 million reserved by groups supporting the two presidential candidates.

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has been vocal about supporting Vice President Kamala Harris since President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race on July 21. In a July 22 post on X, Fetterman expressed his backing for Harris, writing, “Proud to support and be all in for the next president, @KamalaHarris.”

Despite this clear endorsement, a Sept. 23 post on Threads misrepresents Fetterman’s comments, suggesting he was shifting his support to former President Donald Trump. The post says, “Wait! Did John Fetterman just say he’s voting For Trump[?] Dude was voted in as a lobotomized Dem and came out a based Republican lol[.] He really should just switch parties at this point.” Text on a video embedded in the post reads, “DEMOCRATS PANIC: John Fetterman makes SHOCKING admission on Trump! BAD NEWS FOR KAMALA!”

This mischaracterization of Fetterman’s remarks stemmed from his interview at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 19. Fetterman was speaking with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, when he discussed how some voters continue to support Trump despite his controversial history.

In a short clip of the interview shared on the Threads post, Goldberg asked Fetterman what people see “in Donald Trump that makes them want to vote for him?”

Fetterman responded, “I know some people that are like, ‘I personally think he’s a terrible person, or I am appalled by some of these things. But I fundamentally think that I will still vote for him.'”

In his response, Fetterman also said, “There is energy and there’s kinds of anger on the ground in Pennsylvania, and people are very committed, and Trump is going to be strong, and we have to respect that.”

Trump has been competitive in Pennsylvania in the last two presidential elections. He barely won Pennsylvania in 2016 and lost the state by a slim margin in 2020.

When asked for comment on the social media post, a spokesperson for Fetterman told us in a Sept. 26 email, “He’s not saying he feels this way, he is saying this is how people feel.”

“In this same interview, he spoke at length about his support for VP Harris. He also campaigned for her in Pennsylvania this weekend and has campaigned with her in the commonwealth multiple times in the past month,” the spokesperson added.

Earlier in the Atlantic interview, Fetterman said Pennsylvanians will have to decide if they want four years of Trump’s “kind of chaos” or Harris’ “new way forward.” He added, “And it’s going to be close, and she will prevail.”

On Sept. 5, Fetterman shared a photo alongside Kamala Harris, saying, “Wheels down in Pixburgh with our NEXT PRESIDENT, @KamalaHarris!”

He reiterated his commitment to the Democratic ticket in a post on Sept. 26, saying, “Tonight, I’m in Butler County in a room with the @TheButlerDems. The message: fight for every vote in every county. The mission: President @KamalaHarris.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBidgood, Jess. “The Four Swing States That Could Matter Most.” New York Times. 25 Sep 2024.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “President of the United States, County Breakdown.” 8 Nov 2016.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “President of the United States, County Breakdown.” 3 Nov 2020.

Sen. John Fetterman. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Sep 2024.

John Fetterman. “Proud to support and be all in for the next president, @KamalaHarris.” X. 22 Jul 2024.

John Fetterman. “Tonight, I’m in Butler County in a room with the @TheButlerDems. The message: fight for every vote in every county. The mission: President @KamalaHarris.” X. 26 Sep 2024.

John Fetterman. “Wheels down in Pixburgh with our NEXT PRESIDENT, @KamalaHarris!” X. 5 Sep 2024.

The Atlantic. “The Rise of Political Polarization With Senator John Fetterman | The Atlantic Festival 2024.” 20 Sep 2024.

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Political leanings: Pro-Israel

2022 Spending: $32.9 million

United Democracy Project is a nonpartisan super PAC created to advocate for political organizations and candidates that support the United States’ partnership with Israel. The super PAC “works to help elect candidates that share our vision and will be strong supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress,” according to its website.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group established in 1959, historically refused to contribute funds to individual candidates’ campaigns. However, AIPAC announced its plans to launch a political action committee, or PAC, and a super PAC ahead of the 2022 election cycle in December 2021.

AIPAC PAC, which was created Dec. 15, 2021, has become the biggest pro-Israel PAC in the U.S., ahead of the Joint Action Committee for Public Affairs and JStreetPAC. United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, was established on Jan. 3, 2022.

AIPAC PAC is limited to donating no more than $5,000 per election to a candidate’s campaign committee, according to federal contribution limits for the 2024 election. As a super PAC, United Democracy Project cannot donate to candidates directly, but it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money expressly advocating for or against federal candidates — spending the Federal Election Commission defines as “independent expenditures.” Both the PAC and super PACs are required to disclose their donors in reports to the FEC.

In March, Politico reported that AIPAC’s organizations are “expected to spend $100 million across its political entities in 2024.”

Through August, United Democracy Project had raised about $68.4 million during the 2024 cycle. The group’s largest contributor, so far, is billionaire Jan Koum, the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, who donated $5 million. Other major donors include financier Jonathon Jacobson, GreenSky CEO and co-founder David Zalik, and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. Jacobson gave nearly $4.6 million, Marcus donated $3 million, and Zalik contributed $2 million.

United Democracy Project also has spent about $56 million, and, as of Sept. 22, more than $35.6 million of it was on independent expenditures, the ninth most of any super PAC this cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

United Democracy Project has focused primarily on Democratic House primary races, spending nearly $12.4 million supporting some Democratic candidates, while spending more than $20 million opposing other Democrats. Just over $3 million of its spending has been against four Republican House candidates — two of whom, John Hostettler of Indiana and Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, lost in GOP primaries.

The group spent heavily on the Democratic primary election in New York’s 16th Congressional District between incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman and his challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer. United Democracy Project spent almost $9.9 million to oppose Bowman and nearly $4.8 million to support Latimer. The New York Times reported that the super PAC’s expenditures on the race “eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race.”

On June 25, Latimer defeated Bowman in the primary, earning over 58% of the vote to about 41% for Bowman.

Bowman has sharply criticized Israel, calling the country an “apartheid state” and falsely referring to reports of rape perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women in October as “lies” and “propaganda.” Bowman later walked back his comments, saying that the United Nations had confirmed instances of sexual violence.

In a United Democracy Project ad in May, Elisha Wiesel, son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, asked voters to “stand up to Jamaal Bowman’s lies and conspiracy theories.” Later, Bowman told supporters in a June speech that he was being “attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.”

After Latimer’s victory over Bowman, AIPAC announced that “UDP will continue to support leaders who promote our partnership with Israel and oppose detractors, regardless of political party.”

In addition to the New York race, United Democracy Project spent more than $5.2 million against Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who has been a vocal critic of the Israeli government’s response to attacks by Hamas last fall. Bush was defeated in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary for her 1st Congressional District seat by St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. United Democracy Project spent an additional $3.3 million on independent expenditures backing Bell’s candidacy.

Bowman and Bush are both members of a group of progressive House lawmakers collectively known as “The Squad.”

United Democracy Project also spent about $4.6 million trying to defeat California state Sen. Dave Min in the primary for the state’s 47th Congressional District. Min, a Democrat, finished in the top two, and will face Republican Scott Baugh in the general election.

During the 2022 election cycle, the super PAC raised more than $35.9 million and spent over $32.9 million, including $26.1 million on independent expenditures either promoting or opposing Democratic House candidates.

Explaining the group’s strategy at the time, United Democracy Project spokesman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in July 2022: “There was rising concern in the pro-Israel community about candidates for Congress who held radical anti-Israel views. What we’re trying to do is build the broadest bipartisan pro-Israel coalition in Congress possible.”

FactCheck.org Undergraduate Fellow Ben Cohen contributed to this article.

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Quick TakeMontana temporarily took down its online system used by citizens and military personnel voting abroad to fix a technical glitch that omitted the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates. Social media posts baselessly claimed that the Republican secretary of state purposely and illegally omitted the Democrats.

Full StoryMontana has supported the Republican candidate for president in every election since 1996. It doesn’t appear Montana’s presidential voting pattern will change in November. Former President Donald Trump leads his Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, by about 17 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.

But there have been concerns about efforts to prevent voters from successfully casting a ballot during this year’s election.

Earlier this year, the state’s Supreme Court struck down four laws passed in 2021 by the Republican-led state legislature that placed restrictions on voting. The restrictions — including largely ending same-day voter registration and eliminating student ID cards as a form of voter identification — were considered “unconstitutional” by the state’s high court.

Now, some social media posts are making the unfounded claim that the Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, purposely and illegally left Harris’ name off ballots on the electronic system used by voters living overseas.

Comedian and Harris supporter D.L. Hughley shared a post from Occupy Democrats that read, “If a state left Trump off the ballot, do you think the media would respond with a shrug of the shoulders? The Montana secretary of state left Kamala Harris off the ballot. … They should be forced to start over, and the secretary of state should be jailed.”

A post on Threads said, in part, “Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen left Kamala Harris’s name OFF the Montana absentee ballot! …Republicans out here using weaponized incompetence to steal the election.”

However, the posts have mischaracterized a glitch in Montana’s electronic system for voters eligible to vote early under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. Such eligible voters are U.S. citizens living abroad and military members and their spouses. Montana reported that the state received 4,368 UOCAVA ballots in the 2020 election, according to the Election Assistance Commission.

The technical problem, which was resolved within hours, caused the names of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, not to appear on the electronic ballot on the first day of early voting, Sept. 20.

A Sept. 23 press release from Jacobsen’s office said, “No, Montana did not leave a candidate off the 2024 General Election ballot. Contrary to egregious misinformation campaigns circulating online, the Montana Secretary of State’s Office certified all qualified candidates to appear on its 2024 General Election ballot on August 22.”

The press release went on to say that the “2024 General Election officially began [Sept. 20] for eligible voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). Shortly after going live at 8 a.m., election officials were notified about Montana’s Electronic Absentee System (EAS), which is the system exclusively used by a small number of eligible UOCAVA (e.g. Military serving abroad and overseas citizens) voters to access and mark their ballot. The Secretary of State’s Office took the EAS offline while working with the vendor until troubleshooting was completed.” [Emphasis is theirs.]

By the afternoon of Sept. 20, “the system was back online and available to eligible UOCAVA voters, including those few voters who may have been impacted,” the statement said.

“No [print] ballots were affected, including those that will be sent to registered absentee voters and those that will be presented to voters at the polling place on Election Day,” the release said.

The Office of the Secretary of State told us that it had received a report on Sept. 20 of a ballot not displaying properly for a UOCAVA voter who was using the electronic voting system.

In an email to FactCheck.org on Sept. 25, the office said: “As mentioned, the system was taken offline in the morning for troubleshooting with the vendor, and it was back online in the afternoon. The potentially impacted UOCAVA voter who submitted a ballot has since been contacted, and no further action is required.”

The office later clarified: “The report we received [Sept. 20] from one of our counties stated that a voter had called them and reported that the system had not displayed Vice President Harris (and Tim Walz) under the race for President.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources270towin.com. “Montana.” Accessed 25 Sep 2024.

Five Thirty Eight. Montana : U.S. Senate : 2024. Accessed 25 Sep 2024.

Montana Democratic Party v. Christie Jacobsen. DA 22-0667. Montana Supreme Court. 27 Mar 2024.

NBC Montana Staff. “Montana Secretary of State served lawsuit for illegal removal of voter signatures.” NBC Montana. 10 Jul 2024.

Montana Secretary of State. Military & Overseas Voters. “UOCAVA Eligible Voters.” Accessed 26 Sep 2024.

Montana Secretary of State. Bulletin. “No, Montana did not leave a candidate off the 2024 General Election ballot.” 23 Sep 2024.

Montana Secretary of State Office. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Sep 2024.

Montana Secretary of State Office. Email to FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2024.

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In Michigan, former President Donald Trump has courted voters in the auto industry with false and no-evidence claims about Chinese auto plants in Mexico and auto industry growth under his administration.

• He has claimed that Chinese companies didn’t build auto plants in Mexico when he was in office because he threatened them with high tariffs, “but right now they’re building some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world ever built” and they will “wipe you out.” There is only one, small Chinese car manufacturing plant in Mexico right now, experts say, and it was announced in 2017, during Trump’s term. Other companies say they plan to build plants, but they haven’t done so yet.
• Trump has promised “to get the autoworkers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago and 40 years ago before everybody left,” saying “we were all set to” bring back the industry “and then we had the COVID disaster come in.” We can’t predict the future, but auto industry jobs declined between 2019 and 2020, before the pandemic, showing no evidence of a pending boom, as Trump said.

Both the Trump campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign are focusing on Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. Trump will visit the state again on Sept. 27. His claims about the auto industry in the state fit a pattern of Trump making false claims about how the industry fared under his presidency compared with Democrats.

Chinese Plants in MexicoSeveral Chinese auto companies have said they want to build car manufacturing plants in Mexico, which has raised concerns within the industry and among politicians about those potential plants trying to export the cars to the U.S., particularly cheap electric vehicles that could present stiff competition for the nascent EV industry in this country.

There are few cars exported to the U.S. from China, and the actions and statements by President Joe Biden’s administration, and Trump, indicate they both would like to keep it that way. Cars from China made up 0.49% of U.S. imported vehicles in 2019 and 0.66% in 2023, according to International Trade Commission data. (There is greater trade in automotive parts from China; the share of U.S. imports was 9.96% in 2019 and 9.26% in 2023 for Chinese auto parts.)

In May, the Biden administration increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported from China to 100%; the tariff for all cars, and certain other products, from China had been 25%, set by the Trump administration. Imports of passenger cars from China face an additional 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff.

But those are tariffs on cars coming from China, not China-made goods exported from other countries. This week, the Biden administration proposed banning Chinese-made hardware and software for cars, citing national security concerns, a ban that would apply to Chinese cars no matter where they are produced — such as Mexico.

But so far, the potential threat of China-owned auto plants south of the border remains just that — a threat. There’s only one Chinese auto assembly plant for passenger cars operating in the country now, selling vehicles in Mexico, experts say. Trump, however, has claimed that he put a stop to Chinese auto plant construction in Mexico by threatening 200% tariffs if the cars were to be exported to the U.S. He further claims that such construction on large plants started once he left office and is nearly finished. But experts told us there aren’t auto manufacturing plants under construction right now.

At an Aug. 29 campaign event at Alro Steel in Potterville, Michigan, Trump said, “They’re building, I don’t know if you know, numerous of the biggest auto plants in the world right now … right near the border in Mexico, owned by China. They think they’re going to build the cars and send them in” to the United States. “They’ll take every single job. You’re not going to have any autoworkers within two years, maybe three years. Nobody’s going to be making cars here.”

Trump continued, “I told them, ‘If you do that, we’re going to put tariffs on at 200, 250%. You’re never going to sell one car in this country.’ And they didn’t build them. … As soon as I was gone, they started construction and they’re almost finished, and that’s going to wipe you out.”

At a Sept. 17 town hall event in Flint, Michigan, Trump made the same claims, saying there were “a number of them going up right now,” referring to China-owned plants in Mexico. “They weren’t building anything in Mexico having to do with cars with me, because I said, ‘If you build it, we’re going to put a 200%. You’re not going to sell one car into this country, and but right now they’re building some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world ever built,” Trump claimed.

Trump made the claim again in Savannah, Georgia, on Sept. 24.

“There’s one Chinese auto plant in Mexico,” Susan Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University who researches U.S. manufacturing and global supply chains, told us. The company is called Jianghuai Automobile Group, or JAC, and the car plant is “tiny.” JAC’s Mexico factory made 22,000 vehicles last year, or 0.6% of Mexican production, Helper, who worked on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama and Biden administrations, said.

Those figures are in a report by Scotiabank Economics that shows General Motors was the largest producer of light vehicles in Mexico last year, followed by Nissan and Chrysler.

The Associated Press also reported that the JAC plant was the only Chinese assembly plant in operation in Mexico. The AP fact-checked similar comments Trump made in his speech at the Republican National Convention. “Jeff Schuster, vice president of automotive research for analytics firm Global Data who tracks auto production, said he knows of no Chinese auto assembly plants under construction in Mexico,” the AP reported.

The JAC investment, in an existing facility near Mexico City, was announced in 2017, early in the Trump administration, and production of its vehicles began not long after, according to media reports.

“Right now, they’re considering it,” Bruce Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures, a research group in Ann Arbor, told us of Chinese car companies wanting to set up shop in Mexico. “They haven’t built any yet.”

A 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee L goes through assembly at the Stellantis Detroit Assembly Complex-Mack on June 10, 2021. The plant was the first new auto assembly plant in Detroit in 30 years. Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.As for Trump’s claim that he threatened 200% tariffs only for Chinese cars coming from Mexico, Belzowski said, “I have intimate knowledge of the Mexican auto industry, and no one ever mentioned that.”

“The auto reporters are usually pretty thorough about this stuff, if they knew about it,” he said. Unless it was “behind closed doors. I don’t know. Who knows.”

We asked the Trump campaign about these claims, but we haven’t received a response.

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which Trump negotiated, doesn’t allow for a 200% tariff only on Chinese cars exported from Mexico. Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us in an email that Trump could impose such tariffs, but it “would violate the USMCA” and “Mexico could retaliate according to its choosing. Probably US agricultural exports would be the first hit. Obviously, tariffs of the magnitude indicated by Trump would seriously damage US-Mexico relations, with lots of repercussions.”

The USMCA, which went into force on July 1, 2020, allows for tariff-free exports from Mexico if they meet requirements for components or materials originating in North America and labor wage requirements. At least 70% to 75% of the content of cars and light trucks would have to be from North America — that’s up from 60% to 62.5% under the North American Free Trade Agreement, which USMCA replaced. Products that don’t qualify for tariff-free export would face a 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff for passenger vehicles, as a Congressional Research Service report explains. (The MFN tariff rate for trucks is 25%.)

There is a “joint review” of the USMCA in 2026, so U.S. and Mexico could come to a new agreement.

If future Chinese auto plants were allowed to export tariff-free to the U.S., “will they kill the US industry?” Belzowski said. “They would be a huge challenge for the U.S. industry, for EVs.” But, he said, such competition “would also jumpstart the U.S. industry to get going” on EVs.

There are incentives in place to boost EV production in the U.S., including tax credits of up to $7,500 for consumers to buy them, if the final assembly of the car was in North America, per the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by Biden in 2022. “The Chinese did this like in 2014, 2015. They’ve been giving incentives for consumers and for the rest of their country to build EVs,” Belzowski said. “So we’re about 10 years behind, and we’re trying to catch up.”

BYD, a Chinese company that makes inexpensive EVs, is one of the companies that has said it is looking to build a plant in Mexico for the Mexican market. Its small Dolphin model retails for $10,000-$12,000 in China, a price that suggests a 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff for future exports from Mexico, under the USMCA now, wouldn’t be much of a deterrent. But Jeff Walling, chief of the advanced technology and machinery division at the U.S. International Trade Commission, said in a March presentation for a bipartisan think tank that there were other reasons such a car wouldn’t make for easy inroads in the U.S. market.

In the presentation — which noted that Walling was expressing his own views, not necessarily the ITC’s — he said, “I feel like we often have these news coverage pieces that come out that are like, China’s going to be able to export duty-free from Mexico or that vehicles are going to be so inexpensive that you don’t care about the tariff. And the example that’s often thrown around is like if you have a $10,000 car,” and a 2.5% tariff wouldn’t add much to the cost of the car. But, Walling said, “the $10,000 car is probably just not a vehicle that’s in high demand in the United States,” because of “a really low mileage threshold,” meaning the distance the car can be driven before it needs to be recharged, or a small size that’s not popular in the U.S.

“I think there would be a couple of different things that China would need to overcome to make a vehicle that meets our rules, is affordable and is desirable,” he said.

That presentation also noted that Chinese companies have been saying since the mid-2000s that they plan to export (generally, not from Mexico) to the U.S. market, and it took some time for other countries, like Japan, to gain a market share in the U.S.

Polestar, an EV made by a Chinese-owned company through a joint venture with Volvo, was being imported into the U.S. Last month, the company opened a factory in South Carolina to produce its electric SUV for the U.S. and for export to Europe.

Auto Industry JobsAt the Aug. 29 campaign event, Trump also promised to bring auto jobs, or the industry, back to the levels they were 25, 30 or 40 years ago, saying this type of growth was set to happen before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m here today with a simple message for the American autoworker and for the American worker: Your long economic nightmare will very soon be over,” Trump said. “Within two, three years, you’re not going to have autoworkers in this. If they vote for Trump, we’re going to bring in factories at levels that you’ve never seen before. We’re going to get the autoworkers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago and 40 years ago before everybody left. We’re going to get it back at levels that you’ve never seen. …

“We’re going to bring back your car industry,” he continued. “We’re going to let them build plants, but they’re not building them in Mexico, they’re going to build them in the United States of America. And they’re going to be fired up by our autoworkers. And we’re going to bring them back in numbers that nobody can believe, and I can do it so easily. We were all set to do it, and then we had the COVID disaster come in.”

We can’t predict the future, but we can provide the facts on auto industry jobs.

Nationwide, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs have been generally trending up — leaving the pandemic aside — since about 2010, after the administrations of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama provided federal assistance under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to save General Motors and Chrysler, which were facing bankruptcy.

In Georgia on Sept. 24, Trump left the misleading impression that this wasn’t the case, saying the auto industry “has been decimated by many decades of incompetent leadership both political and at your company.”

Over Obama’s entire eight-year term, starting in January 2009, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs went up by 265,800 jobs, or 38.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The growth came after job losses during the 2007-2009 Great Recession and the implementation of TARP.

When Trump took office, there were 957,100 motor vehicle and parts jobs. In February 2020, before the pandemic hit, that figure was 29,700 higher. Two months later, the number of jobs had plummeted by 358,200. By the time Trump left office, most of those jobs had come back. He ended his term with a loss of 7,800 jobs in the industry.

Under Biden, the general upward trend has continued. Motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs have gone up by 128,800, or 13.6%. As of August, there were 1,078,100 jobs. In May, the industry hit the highest level of jobs since July 2006 and has remained above that threshold.

The peak for these jobs, dating back to 1990, was in June 2000, at 1,333,600 jobs. (The long-term peak was in the late 1970s, but the historical data can’t be directly compared with the more recent figures because of a change in industry classifications.)

Trump claimed that a growth in jobs or auto plants was set to happen when he was president, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. We asked the Trump campaign for support for his claim, but we haven’t received a response. The data on jobs don’t show evidence of a pending growth spurt.

In fact, before the pandemic, motor vehicle and parts jobs declined by 25,700 from January 2019, when those jobs hit their peak under Trump, to February 2020, before the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures, told us there’s no evidence that auto industry jobs were set to reach the levels of decades ago before the pandemic. Belzowski said the “only thing he could have done … while he was president, but he did not do it, was bring jobs back from Mexico.” Instead, the USMCA “kept jobs in Mexico.” U.S. automakers were in the country because of lower labor rates and to avoid emissions fines from the Environmental Protection Agency, he said.

Domestic auto production figures also run counter to the idea that the industry was about to return to the levels of decades ago before the pandemic. Production declined every year under Trump. It dropped again in Biden’s first year and increased slightly in 2022 and 2023, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Domestic production has been on a steady decline over the last three decades, with the exception of growth during the first half or so of Obama’s time in office.

As for Michigan specifically, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs went down under Trump, even before the pandemic.

Between January 2017, when Trump took office, and February 2020, before the pandemic caused job losses, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had declined by 3,700, according to BLS data, with 1,800 of those job losses in vehicle manufacturing.

The pandemic then caused large job losses for a few months. Most of those jobs had been recovered by January 2021, when Trump left office, but over his entire term, the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had dropped by 8,700, with the vast majority of that loss in parts manufacturing.

Under Biden’s presidency, motor vehicle manufacturing jobs in the state have gone up by 6,900, as of August, but parts manufacturing jobs have decreased by 7,400. So, altogether, manufacturing jobs in the industry in Michigan have dropped by 500.

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Quick TakeFollowing the arrest of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs for sex trafficking and other charges, social media users — including former President Donald Trump — shared a digitally altered photo that purports to show Combs with Vice President Kamala Harris. The original image actually shows Harris with then-talk show host Montel Williams in 2001.

Full StoryRapper and record producer Sean Combs, also known by his stage name P. Diddy, was arrested in New York on Sept. 16 and charged with “racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution,” according to the indictment unsealed the following day.

Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a Sept. 17 press conference, “The indictment alleges that between at least 2008 and the present, Combs abused, threatened, and coerced victims to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct.”

On Sept. 17, Combs pleaded not guilty to the charges. The following day, U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. denied Combs’ petition for bail.

Since his arrest, social media users have spread an altered photo to baselessly claim a relationship between Combs and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A Sept. 21 Facebook post shared a photo which appears to show Combs and Harris posing together, along with the caption, “P. DIDDY & KAMALA ‘hanging out’ back in the day. Wonder if any ‘Crazy Stuff’ was going on then?”

The photo was also shared to Instagram with the caption, “Could this be our next president. A picture speaks 1000 words.”

Former President Donald Trump reposted the photo on Truth Social on Sept. 20, where it was captioned, “Madam Vice President, have you ever been involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddies freak offs?” The post was later deleted.

But the photo shared on social media has been digitally altered. The original photo, taken May 18, 2001, shows Harris with then-talk show host Montel Williams at that year’s Race to Erase Multiple Sclerosis gala. The photo appears in a file of images taken by photographer Ron Galella for Getty Images. In the altered image shared to social media, Williams’ face has been replaced with Combs’ face.

The original image on the right shows Montel Williams with his daughter, Ashley (left), and Kamala Harris in 2001. Photo by Ron Galella/Getty Images.Williams tweeted in 2019 that he and Harris had dated 20 years earlier.

This is not the first time Harris has been falsely linked to an accused sex-trafficker. In December 2023, social media users shared a digitally altered photo that appears to show Harris with Jeffrey Epstein, as we wrote. The original photo shows Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFaheid, Dalia, and Kara Scannell. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs to remain in custody after judge denies bail appeal in racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking case.” CNN. 18 Sep 2024.

Growcoot, Matt. “Trump Shares Doctored Photo of Kamala With Diddy Before Deleting It.” PetaPixel. 23 Sep 2024.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Posts Use Transposed Mugshot of Epstein to Target Kamala Harris.” FactCheck.org. 21 Dec 2024.

Jimmy Kimmel Live. “Trump WON’T STOP Pushing Pet Eating Lies, Oprah Surprises Audience and Clooney & Pitt Help Jimmy.” Video. YouTube. 17 Sep 2024.

Montel Williams @Montel_Williams. “@KamalaHarris and I briefly dated about 20 years ago when we were both single. So what? I have great respect for Sen. Harris. I have to wonder if the same stories about her dating history would have been written if she were a male candidate?” X. 7 Aug 2019.

Scannell, Kate, et al. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs to remain in custody after judge denies bail appeal in racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking case.” CNN. 18 Sep 2024.

“Sean Combs Arrest Press Conference.” Transcript. Rev. 18 Sep 2024.

“Sean Combs Charged In Manhattan Federal Court With Sex Trafficking And Other Federal Offenses.” Press Release. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. 17 Sep 2024.

Tolentino, Daysia. “Trump shares fake photo of Harris with Diddy in now-deleted Truth Social post.” NBC. 20 Sep 2024.

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Quick TakeSen. JD Vance introduced his dog during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson in an effort to debunk rumors that the family pet was rented to enhance the Republican vice presidential nominee’s image. But social media posts are highlighting a brief clip of the interview to falsely claim Vance “admits he has a ‘rent-a-dog.'”

Full StorySen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, has made comments that have drawn him into a vortex of controversies involving pets.

In a 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when he was running for a Senate seat in Ohio, Vance called prominent Democrats, including then-Vice President Kamala Harris, “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” Those comments were revived and went viral in July.

More recently, Vance come under fire for spreading the unfounded claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets, as we wrote. In a post on X on Sept. 9, Vance said, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

Former President Donald Trump repeated the falsehood during the presidential debate held on Sept. 10.

Now, Vance has become the target of misinformation about his own pet.

Vance appeared in a Sept. 18 video on Rumble, again with Tucker Carlson, and joked with the host about online rumors that his campaign had rented a German Shepherd in order to enhance Vance’s image.

Social media users then shared a snippet of the interview to amplify the rumors. A Threads post on Sept. 21 shows a clip from the video in which Vance is heard saying, “a rent-a-dog that was given to me by the campaign to make me seem like I’m a dog fan.” Carlson replies: “How weird.” The caption on the Threads post reads: “The campaign got JD a dog to make him appear more human. We must rescue that dog.”

Another post on Threads claims, “JD Vance admits he has a ‘rent-a-dog’ and the dog is to ‘ …make me seem like I’m a dog fan.’ Where is the ASPCA when you need them to step in and remove the poor dog?”

A longer clip from the interview, which shares the complete quote from Vance, was posted by the Tucker Carlson Network on Instagram with the caption, “JD Vance introduces us to his supposed ‘rent-a-dog’ as the Left likes to claim.”

On the Instagram post, Vance introduces his dog, Atlas, and laughingly says, “I found out on the internet a few weeks ago that he’s actually a rent-a-dog that was given to me by the campaign to make me seem like I’m a dog fan.”

Vance then tells Carlson that his family “got him when he was an eight-week-old puppy.” Vance adds, “It’s like shocking to me that anybody would think that he’s not our puppy.”

Vance also mentions that the dog accompanies him on the campaign trail. “He’s on the road with us,” he tells Carlson.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFox News Network. “Tucker Carlson sits down with JD Vance (September 18, 2024).” Rumble. 18 Sep 2024.

Kiely, Eugene. “Vance’s Misleading Claim About Immigrants and Murders in Springfield, Ohio.” FactCheck.org. 20 Sep 2024.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “FactChecking the Harris-Trump Debate.” FactCheck.org. 11 Sep 2024.

McDonald, Jessica. “Vance Wrong On Child Tax Credit, Harris’ Remarks About Climate Change and Having Kids.” Factcheck.org. 2 Aug 2024.

Penley, Taylor. “JD Vance says ‘anti-family’ Dems took ‘childless cat lady’ remark out of context: ‘Lie of the left.'” Fox News. 29 Jul 2024.

Tucker Carlson Network. “JD Vance introduces us to his supposed “rent-a-dog” as the Left likes to claim.” Instagram. 20 Sep 2024.

Tucker Carlson Tonight. Interview with JD Vance. Fox News. 29 Jul 2021.

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Quick TakeVice President Kamala Harris supports a ban on the sale of so-called assault weapons, but no longer supports a mandatory buyback program for such guns. The National Rifle Association misleadingly claims that Harris will “ban law-abiding Americans from owning” guns and “seize your legally owned guns.” Her proposal would not ban all guns or seize any guns.

Full StoryDuring the 2020 presidential race, then-Sen. Kamala Harris came out in support of a mandatory buyback program for so-called assault weapons. At a gun safety forum in Las Vegas, Harris said, “we have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory buyback program.”

Harris also said that such weapons “should not be on the streets of a civil society” in a November 2019 NBC News interview.

As the current Democratic nominee for president, Harris continues to support a ban on purchasing certain semiautomatic weapons. But her campaign told us she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to give up weapons that they had legally purchased.

Harris was questioned about her policy changes on guns and other issues during the Sept. 10 debate with former President Donald Trump. She said that her “values have not changed,” but did not comment more specifically on her position. Later in the debate, Harris said, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”

But a Sept. 17 Instagram post by the National Rifle Association falsely claims, “All Kamala Harris knows about guns is that she wants to ban them.” In the video, Harris can be heard calling for universal background checks and closing the so-called gun-show loophole that allows unlicensed individuals to sell firearms without performing background checks.

The post claims that Harris wants to “ban law-abiding Americans from owning [guns].” Another Instagram post by the NRA on Sept. 18 claims, “Kamala Harris will seize your legally owned guns.”

But the claims misrepresent the vice president’s position on firearms. While Harris supports a ban on so-called assault weapons, her plan would not apply to such weapons purchased before the proposed ban would take effect. The U.S. had a similar ban in place for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004, on the sale of certain semiautomatic weapons, as we have written before.

When asked for comment about the claim that Harris wants to “ban law-abiding Americans from owning” guns, an NRA spokesperson directed us to a recent post on X by Harris’ official vice presidential account that reads, “Congress must renew the assault weapons ban.”

At a Sept. 19 campaign event with former talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Harris told families of school shooting victims that “for far too long on the issue of gun violence, some people have been pushing a really false choice to suggest you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, and I’m in favor of assault weapons bans, universal background checks, red flag laws, and these are just common sense.”

The policy section of Harris’ campaign website also reflects this position, stating that, “She’ll ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.”

On the campaign trail in 2019, Harris said that she owned a gun for “personal safety.” During the presidential debate, she said, “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.” And she told Winfrey, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesCBS Chicago. “Presidential Debate Between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.” YouTube. 10 Sep 2024.

Chu, Vivian. “Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Legal Issues.” Congressional Research Service. 14 Feb 2013.

Epstein, Reid. “Why the Kamala Harris of Four Years Ago Could Haunt Her in 2024.” New York Times. 29 Jul 2024.

Farley, Robert. “FactChecking Biden’s Claim that Assault Weapons Ban Worked.” FactCheck.org. 26 Mar 2021.

Folk, Zachary. “Biden Closes ’Gun Show Loophole’-Here’s What to Know and When Rule Comes into Effect.” Forbes. 8 May 2024.

Harris, Kamala. (@VP). “Congress must renew the assault weapons ban.” X. 14 Sep 2024.

Kamala Harris. “Unite for America Rally with Vice President Kamala Harris and Oprah Winfrey.” YouTube. 19 Sep 2024.

KamalaHarris.com. “Make Our Communities Safer from Gun Violence and Crime.” Accessed 23 Sep 2024.

Lah, Kyung. “Kamala Harris talks about owning a gun: ‘I was a career prosecutor’.” CNN.com. 11 Apr 2019.

MSNBC. “Watch Live: Gun Safety Forum 2020 In Las Vegas | MSNBC.” YouTube. 2 Oct 2019.

NBC Nightly News. “Sen. Kamala Harris speaks to @HarrySmith about gun control in our series #WhatMatters where we take voters’ questions to the candidates.” 19 Nov 2019.

Robertson, Lori and D’Angelo Gore. “Trump Distorts the Facts in Attacks on Harris.” FactCheck.org. 1 Aug 2024.

White House. “Remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris at a Political Event Houston, TX.” 31 Jul 2024.

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Vice President Kamala Harris has said that she will not attempt to ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of a position that she took during her 2020 presidential campaign. But a TV ad from Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick claims that Harris “would make” hundreds of thousands of fracking-dependent jobs in Pennsylvania “disappear.”

Even if Harris wanted to ban fracking, which she now says she doesn’t, she alone would only be able to do so on federal land, where presidents have the authority to restrict drilling for oil and natural gas, experts told us. A ban on state or private land, where the vast majority of oil and natural gas production in the country takes place, would require an act of Congress.

It’s also questionable that more than 300,000 jobs in Pennsylvania “depend on fracking,” as the ad claims. That estimate of indirect and induced jobs attached to the state’s wider oil and natural gas industry comes from a 2023 report commissioned by an industry trade association. Others say the estimate is inflated.

The McCormick ad, released in tandem with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, began airing across the Keystone State on Sept. 17, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact. The ad starts with a nearly 5-year-old video of Harris talking about fracking, known formally as hydraulic fracturing.

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris says in the clip, which was her response in a 2019 climate town hall to a question about a potential fracking prohibition.

The ad’s narrator then goes on to say: “Harris would make these Pennsylvania jobs disappear. But that’s not all. Three hundred thousand Pennsylvania jobs that depend on fracking would also disappear.” After that, McCormick appears in the ad and says that means “truck drivers, hard-working people like mechanics, even bartenders,” would be out of work.

McCormick then asks, “And what’s Bob Casey say about Kamala?” That’s followed by a clip of Sen. Casey of Pennsylvania, McCormick’s Democratic opponent, saying in a July MSNBC interview that Harris is “prepared right now to do this job.” At the end of the ad, the Republican businessman calls Casey and Harris “too weak.”

To be clear, Casey is against banning fracking, and Harris now says she is, too.

“As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris responded when asked in an Aug. 29 CNN interview if she still wanted to ban the procedure that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. In that interview, Harris said her position changed when she realized that it is possible to achieve certain climate goals “without banning fracking” — a drilling process that can negatively impact the environment, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Harris reiterated her promise not to ban fracking at the Sept. 10 presidential debate, in which her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, claimed — as he often has — that Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania” if she becomes president.

“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said, after noting that she voted for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among other things, that law requires the Department of Interior to make at least some federal land and offshore waters available for leasing by oil and gas companies to do drilling.

Furthermore, no president can unilaterally ban all fracking, experts told us.

“The President would only be able to truly ban fracking on federal lands, where it can fully control land and resource use,” Jennifer Baka, an associate professor of geography at Penn State University, said in an email to us. “On state and private lands, where most fracking occurs, fracking is regulated by the states through their authority to govern land and resource use.”

Presidents could try to further limit fracking through executive actions or regulations, but such measures would have to survive expected legal challenges and also could be overturned by a future president. “It would require an act of Congress to ban it nationwide,” said Timothy W. Kelsey, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State, in an email to us.

In recent years, Congress has failed to pass bills eliminating fracking nationwide.

Fracking Jobs in PennsylvaniaFracking has helped produce record amounts of crude oil and natural gas in the U.S., which is currently the world leader in production of both energy sources. The technology also has contributed to Pennsylvania becoming the second-largest producer of natural gas behind Texas.

The ad’s narrator says that a ban would mean Pennsylvania fracking jobs would no longer exist, and “300,000 Pennsylvania jobs that depend on fracking also would disappear.” But the number of jobs in Pennsylvania that rely on fracking is debatable.

Text on screen in the ad says, “Harris Fracking Ban 330,640 lost jobs,” although no source is cited. Supporting documentation that an NRSC spokesperson provided to FactCheck.org shows the figure comes from a 2023 report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and natural gas trade association.

The report, produced by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that there were 423,700 jobs tied to Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas industry in 2021, including 93,060 direct jobs, 143,530 indirect jobs at businesses within the industry’s supply chain and 187,110 induced jobs from the spending of wages made by people employed directly or indirectly in the industry. (The indirect and induced jobs figures add up to 330,640.)

So, the ad’s figure for fracking-dependent jobs at risk if a total ban were implemented is an estimate of the economic impact for the broader oil and gas industry. It’s also an overestimate, according to Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank that focuses on clean energy policy and economics.

In an August 2023 blog post, he argued that the estimate of indirect and induced jobs in the API report was derived using “exaggerated multipliers” and “double counting.” In an email to us, O’Leary — using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the partially labor union-funded Economic Policy Institute — estimated that there were 55,509 fracking-related jobs in Pennsylvania in 2023, of which 18,636 were direct jobs and the rest were indirect and induced jobs.

His estimate was based on employment in five BLS categories that could “reasonably be associated with the fracking industry,” he said, including oil and gas extraction, drilling for oil and gas, support services for oil and gas, oil and gas pipeline construction, and pipeline transportation. Meanwhile, the API’s report mostly relied on data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and included additional employment sectors.

O’Leary said many jobs that API counted, such as clerks at gas stations with and without convenience stores, are “not specifically associated with fracking.”

Kelsey also said in an email to us that the API figure “seems pretty high” compared with jobs estimates from studies done years ago when “natural gas development was much more robust in PA than it has been for the past few years.”

As for state government data, the 2022 Pennsylvania Energy Employment Report, produced for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Energy Programs Office by the consulting firm BW Research Partnership, said that in 2021 there were a combined 40,684 petroleum and natural gas jobs in the state, including jobs across sectors for fuel extraction and mining, power line transmission and wholesale trade and distribution, fuel storage, and electricity generation. The report did not mention fracking, explicitly.

However, Kelsey noted that state employment figures do not account for indirect and induced jobs, and thus are “almost always less than the total economic impact of a sector.”

So, the number of jobs in Pennsylvania that “depend on fracking” may be lower than the ad claims, but it also may be higher than state data suggest.

Correction, Sept. 24: We originally reported the wrong figure from O’Leary for fracking-related jobs. We have corrected the error.

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Quick TakeRumors about Ryan Wesley Routh, who staked out Trump International Golf Club in Florida on Sept. 15, have been flying on social media. Some claim he “is a registered democrat.” Others claim he “is a Republican.” Routh was once registered as a Democrat, but said he voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He is not currently registered with any party.

Full StoryRyan Wesley Routh, 58, is facing two federal gun charges after authorities say he may have been planning to assassinate former President Donald Trump. The investigation is continuing and more charges may be filed.

Update, Sept. 26: Routh was indicted on Sept. 24 for the attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate.

Routh didn’t fire any shots, but cell phone data collected by police showed that he had situated himself in a wooded area near the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, for about 12 hours before a Secret Service agent noticed a rifle “poking out of the tree line” on Sept. 15, while Trump was there playing golf. Routh fled after the agent fired in the direction of the rifle, according to the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Ryan Wesley Routh, a suspect in an apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Florida on Sept. 15, is placed under arrest. Photo by Martin County Sheriff’s Office / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images. Police arrested Routh on I-95 and found a loaded semiautomatic rifle with a scope near where he allegedly had been by the golf course.

Routh has been charged in federal court with possession of a firearm by a felon and possession and receipt of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

Following Routh’s arrest, Trump wrote a series of posts on his social media platform, Truth Social. He first thanked law enforcement officers for their work that day. The next day he sought campaign donations with the message, “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!!!!!” and blamed Democratic politicians and “Communist Left Rhetoric” for getting “bullets … flying.”

Other social media users took the political associations further, posting claims that Routh “looks like a MAGA republican but is a registered democrat” and that he “is intimately connected to the highest echelons of the Democratic Party.” The only evidence offered to support the claim of Routh’s connection to Democratic leaders was a photo of Routh with chef José Andrés, whom President Joe Biden appointed as the co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition.

Those on the left made claims emphasizing parts of Routh’s background that make him seem conservative. One post, for example, said that Routh “voted for Trump in 2016, was a huge anti-vaxx conspiracy nut,” and “showed support for Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.” Another went even further and falsely claimed that Routh is a registered Republican. “MAGA’s can try to spin this all they want, but Ryan Wesley Routh (today’s shooter) is a Republican and voted for Trump in 2016,” one post on Threads claimed.

Here’s what we know about Routh and his political affiliations:

Routh first registered to vote in North Carolina in 1988 as a Democrat, according to records provided to FactCheck.org by the North Carolina State Board of Elections. He changed his party affiliation to “unaffiliated” in 2002 and was removed from the voter rolls the following year due to a felony conviction.

Routh had pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction in December 2002 for an incident involving an explosive device described in court records as a binary explosive (which means there were two components that would be mixed together to cause an explosion) with a blasting cap, or detonator. Publicly available records do not explain the circumstances of the arrest. We reached out to the lawyer who defended Routh in the case and the prosecutor who handled it, but we didn’t hear back from either one.

In North Carolina, felons can register to vote again after they have served their sentence. Routh re-registered in 2005 and remained unaffiliated with a party, according to the records provided by the state board of elections.

Routh was again removed from the voter rolls in 2010 following another felony conviction.

He pleaded guilty to three counts of possession of stolen property in March 2010, involving the possession of two marble bathroom sinks worth $180, possession of welding equipment worth more than $1,000, and three kayaks worth more than $1,000.

According to the application for a search warrant included in the court records, Routh, who owned a roofing company, had kept the stolen items in a trailer on his property and in a warehouse associated with his business.

Routh re-registered to vote again in 2012 and was, again, unaffiliated with a political party.

Sometime around 2018, Routh moved to Hawaii and started a business that would build simple structures to house homeless people.

Voting records aren’t public in Hawaii, but Vaughn Cotham, a senior elections clerk in Honolulu’s election division, confirmed to us in a phone interview that Routh is actively registered to vote. He is not registered with a party, Cotham said, explaining that Hawaii doesn’t keep party affiliation on record. Hawaii has open primaries, which means that voters can cast ballots in either party’s primary elections. Cotham was unable to provide the date when Routh registered or in which elections Routh had voted.

According to public records, Routh voted in the Democratic primary in North Carolina in March. North Carolina allows unaffiliated voters to choose which party’s primary to vote in, but those voters can participate in only one primary election.

For most of the time Routh was registered to vote, he didn’t make contributions to federal campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records. But, starting in 2019, Routh began making modest donations — totaling about $140 — to support Democrats.

The political views that Routh expressed on social media were varied. He reportedly wrote on his now-suspended X account in 2020 that he had voted for Trump in 2016, but had become disappointed with the former president. He also expressed support at the time for independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom had sought the Democratic nomination for president that year. Gabbard has since left the Democratic Party to become an independent.

In January, Routh reportedly expressed support for Vivek Ramaswamy, who was seeking the Republican nomination for president.

Routh had also developed strong views about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, in February 2023, published an e-book on Amazon that is generally supportive of Ukraine.

So, Routh has a mixed political history. What we do know is that he has not been a registered member of a political party since 2002.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFederal Bureau of Investigation. Press release. “FBI Statement on Incident in West Palm Beach, Florida.” 15 Sep 2024.

News Conference on Investigation Into Apparent Assassination Attempt on Former President Trump. C-SPAN. 16 Sep 2024.

U.S. v. Ryan Wesley Routh. Case no. 9:24-mj-08441. Criminal complaint. U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. 16 Sep 2024.

Gannon, Patrick. Spokesman, North Carolina State Board of Elections. Email to FactCheck.org. 16 Sep 2024.

State of North Carolina v. Ryan Wesley Routh. Case No. 02CR083088-400. Docket. Guilford Superior Court. Disposed 20 Dec 2002.

State of North Carolina v. Ryan Wesley Routh. Case No. 02CR083088-400. Guilford Superior Court. Disposed 20 Dec 2002.

State of North Carolina v. Ryan Wesley Routh. Case No. 10CR068060-400. Docket. Guilford Superior Court. Disposed 3 Mar 2010.

State of North Caroline v. Ryan Wesley Routh. Case No. 10CR068059-400. Guilford Superior Court. Disposed 3 Mar 2010.

Huff, Daryl. “Suspect in Trump’s apparent assassination attempt had no ties to Ukraine peace movement in Hawaii.” Hawaii News Now. 16 Sep 2024.

Cotham, Vaughn. Senior elections clerk, Honolulu Election Division. Telephone interview with FactCheck.org. 16 Sep 2024.

North Carolina State Board of Elections. Ryan Wesley Routh voter details. Accessed 16 Sep 2024.

Federal Election Commission. Individual contributions — Routh, Ryan. Accessed 19 Sep 2024.

Brennan, David, Chris Looft and Julia Reinstein. “Trump suspect told Iran ‘you are free to assassinate Trump’ in apparent self-published book.” ABC News. 16 Sep 2024.

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Quick TakeThe arrest of Ryan Wesley Routh in an apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has sparked unfounded claims online that Routh had “inside” knowledge of Trump’s plans. Public reports about Trump’s schedule indicated his likely whereabouts, and evidence shows Routh staked out the site for about 12 hours.

Full StoryFormer President Donald Trump was golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sept. 15, when authorities fired shots at Ryan Wesley Routh, who is now under investigation for an apparent assassination attempt on Trump’s life.

Update, Sept. 26: Routh was indicted on Sept. 24 for the attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate.

Routh, 58, was apprehended after a Secret Service agent spotted what appeared to be a rifle poking out of shrubbery several hundred yards from where Trump was playing. The agent discharged his firearm when he saw the rifle but, the gunman fled the scene in a sport utility vehicle. He was later captured by local sheriffs’ officers, according to the criminal complaint.

Agents who searched the area on the golf course perimeter recovered a digital camera, a backpack, a loaded SKS-style semiautomatic rifle with a scope and a black plastic bag containing food. Routh was charged with possessing a firearm by a convicted felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number, the criminal complaint said.

The FBI is leading the ongoing investigation into the incident, and more charges could be filed.

The former president was unharmed, and he later posted on social media, thanking the Secret Service and law enforcement for their work. He wrote, “It was certainly an interesting day!”

“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there,” Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the Secret Service, said at a news conference on Sept. 16, referring to the golf course. “It was not on his official schedule.”

This marked the apparent second assassination attempt on Trump in recent months. The first occurred on July 13 during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman gained a clear sight line to fire several shots, one of which grazed Trump’s ear. The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene. We’ve previously written about misinformation that followed the shooting, in which one rally attendee was killed and two others were wounded.

The recent incident in Florida has fueled unfounded claims that Routh must have had inside knowledge of Trump’s whereabouts and schedule.

A Sept. 16 post on Threads read, “How does someone who’s from North Carolina and lives in Hawaii know where to be in Florida, at the exact location, at the exact golf course, where 45 made a last minute decision to play golf?”

Conservative commentator Graham Allen posted a video on Instagram on Sept. 16 saying, “How did the shooter know the location of the President when it was a NON public/LAST minute decision?! INSIDE JOB!!!!”

However, there is no evidence to support the claims that Routh had “inside” information about Trump. Deducing where Trump would be on Sept. 15, a Sunday, was not difficult, even without notice on an official schedule.

On Sept. 12, Trump posted on X about a planned livestreaming event from his residence and golf club at Mar-a-Lago at 8 p.m. on Sept. 16 to introduce the crypto platform World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial also publicized Trump’s involvement in the livestream, making his likely location public knowledge.

There are also online accounts that track the movement of Trump’s planes. This kind of public tracking adds to the available information about Trump’s location and activities.

In addition, news reports have noted that Trump frequently plays golf at his course when he’s in Florida. A BBC article from West Palm Beach reported, “Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.”

The criminal complaint against Routh suggests that he arrived at the tree-lined fence of the golf course’s southern perimeter at 1:59 a.m. on Sept. 15, based on the location data from his cell phone.

“Agents requested T-Mobile, on an emergency basis, to provide law enforcement with information pertaining to Routh’s mobile phone usage. Those records indicated that Routh’s mobile phone was located in the vicinity of the area along the tree line described above from approximately 1:59 am until approximately 1:31 pm on September 15,” the complaint says. Routh apparently didn’t know the exact time Trump would be there since he staked out the golf course for nearly 12 hours.

The Secret Service has had concerns about Trump’s vulnerability while golfing, particularly at his own clubs, because they are near public roads. According to the Washington Post, Secret Service agents presented Trump with photos taken by news photographers with long-range lenses to capture images of Trump golfing at his club in Sterling, Virginia. Officials told Trump that if photographers could get clear shots of the president, potential gunmen could do the same.

“He selects locations to golf — his own clubs — that are particularly difficult to secure. And then he follows a highly predictable routine on any given weekend,” the Post reported.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. ”LIVE: Secret Service press conference after Trump apparent assassination attempt.” YouTube. 16 Sep 2024.

FactCheck.org. “Misinformation Swirls After Attempted Assassination.” 19 Jul 2024.

FBI. Press release. “Update on the FBI investigation of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.” 15 Jul 2024.

Halpert, Madeline. “Gunman lurked for hours before Trump’s last-minute game of golf.” BBC News. 16 Sep 2024.

Herb, Jeremy. “Inside the fateful 12 hours of an apparent assassination attempt outside the Trump International Golf Club.” CNN. 17 Sep 2024.

Kelly, Kate, Eileen Sullivan and Luke Broadwater. “Secret Service Scrambled After Trump’s Short Notice on Golf Outing.” New York Times. 17 Sep 2024.

Leonnig, Carol D., Josh Dawsey and Isaac Stanley-Becker. “Trump’s golf outings have long concerned Secret Service.” Washington Post. 16 Sep 2024.

Trump Jet (Tracking). bsky.app/profile/trumpjet.grndcntrl.net. Accessed 19 Sep 2024.

United States District Court, Southern District of Florida. Criminal Cover Sheet. “United States of America vs. Ryan Wesley Routh.” 15 Sep 2024.

WLFI (@worldlibertyfi). “Join us live from Mar-A-Lago on September 16 at 8 pm EST with Donald J. Trump! Tune in to hear our vision for making finance great again.” X. 12 Sep 2024.

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Quick TakePop star Taylor Swift endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president on Sept. 10. Social media posts falsely claim that, as a result, Swift’s ticket sales have plummeted and some of her concerts and a major endorsement deal have been canceled. The remaining U.S. shows on Swift’s Eras tour are all sold out, and she has not lost her partnership with Coca-Cola.

Full StoryIn October 2020, just hours before the 2020 vice presidential debate, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift announced her support for the Democratic presidential ticket of then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-Sen. Kamala Harris in an issue of V Magazine.

Swift shared the magazine cover to Instagram, writing, “So apt that it’s come out on the night of the VP debate. Gonna be watching and supporting @KamalaHarris by yelling at the tv a lot.”

Swift’s endorsement for the 2024 presidential election was much anticipated by both sides. Swift was among the rumored special guests for the Democratic National Convention. On the eve of the DNC, former President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of the singer endorsing him to Truth Social, writing, “I accept!”

But on Sept. 10, minutes after the presidential debate between Harris and Trump concluded, Swift took to Instagram to announce her support for the Democratic presidential ticket.

“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election,” she wrote in her post, which has received more than 11 million likes.

Swift, who often has been the subject of political misinformation, as we’ve written, said in her post that she was inspired to make a public endorsement after Trump shared the AI image of her. “The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” she wrote.

But, once again, Swift has become the target of misinformation. Several social media posts have falsely claimed that backlash from Swift’s endorsement has caused her ticket sales to plummet and cost her a major sponsor.

A Sept. 16 Facebook post, which has received more than 25,000 interactions, shared an article headline claiming Swift has canceled tour dates due to low ticket sales: “Taylor Swift Forced to Cancel Eras Tour Dates Following Endorsement Backlash: ‘Only 2,300 Tickets Sold.'”

The headline was originally published on Esspots, a self-described “fake news” site, on Sept. 14, where it was tagged as satire. But other websites and social media posts have published the same or similar headlines without labeling it as satire.

A Facebook post from Sept. 16, for example, shared an article headline saying, “Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Faces Devastating Blow: A Mere 2,000 Tickets Sold Amid Backlash Over Controversial Endorsement.” And a Sept. 18 Facebook post, which received 6,700 interactions, shared the headline: “SHOCK SHOWDOWN: Taylor Swift Cancels Eras Tour Dates Amid Backlash – Only 2,300 Tickets Sold!”

But none of Swift’s scheduled tour dates have been canceled, according to her website, which lists concerts planned in Miami, New Orleans and Indianapolis in October and November. All of those dates are sold out.

We reached out to Swift’s representatives for comment on the social media posts, but we didn’t get a response.

Other social media posts have shared headlines claiming Coca-Cola has ended the company’s long-term partnership with Swift, a claim which also originated on Esspots, where it was tagged as satire. A Sept. 16 Instagram post shared an article headline saying, “Coca-Cola Cuts Ties, Deal Worth $625 Million cut off From Taylor Swift Over Harris Endorsement, ‘We Don’t Support Her Endorsement.'”

A representative for Coca-Cola told us in a Sept. 20 email that this claim is false.

Swift did face some criticism from Trump and conservative media personalities following her endorsement. On Sept. 11, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly reacted to the endorsement, posting on X, “You can kiss your sales to the Republican audience goodbye, Taylor.” On Sept. 15, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesCoca-Cola. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 20 Sep 2024.

Jaffe, Alan. “Online Posts Share Altered Photo of Taylor Swift With Bogus Political Sign.” FactCheck.org. 2 Feb 2024.

Jaffe, Alan. “Posts Make Unfounded Claim About Swift and Kelce’s Post-Election Plans.” FactCheck.org. 16 Feb 2024.

Nehamas, Nicholas, et al. “Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris.” New York Times. 10 Sep 2024.

Rosenzweig, Mathias. “V127: The Thought Leaders Issue With Taylor Swift.” V Magazine. 7 Oct 2020.

Taylor Swift. “International Dates.” taylorswift.com. Accessed 20 Sep 2024.

Taylor Swift. “U.S. Dates.” taylorswift.com. Accessed 20 Sep 2024.

Tenbarge, Kat. “Trump shares AI-generated images of Taylor Swift and her fans supporting him.” NBC. 19 Aug 2024.

Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Truth Social. 15 Sep 2024.

Via y Radá, Nicole and Marianne Sotomayor. “Taylor Swift endorses Joe Biden for President.” NBC. 7 Oct 2020.

Wagmeister, Elizabeth, et al. “Hollywood heads to Chicago for the Democratic convention, as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift speculation swirls.” CNN. 18 Aug 2024.

Weisholtz, Drew and Candice Williams. “Taylor Swift to bring ‘Eras Tour’ to more US cities and Canada.” Today. 3 Aug 2023.

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Delivering remarks at a labor union conference in California, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz stretched the facts with several labor-related claims.

• Walz said Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance “has never cast a vote on a pro-worker bill in his life.” Walz was referring to the AFL-CIO scorecard, which lists legislation supported by the union. Vance, who has been in the Senate for less than two years, cast five votes opposed by the union.
• Walz said that former President Donald Trump “cut overtime benefits for millions of workers.” The Trump administration actually extended the number of salaried employees eligible for overtime pay, but not to nearly as many workers as his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had sought. No one had their existing overtime benefits cut.
• Walz falsely claimed to be “the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan.” Trump, a three-time GOP presidential nominee, was a member of a labor union that represents tens of thousands of media professionals.

Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president and a former member of a teachers’ union, spoke to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union at its convention in Los Angeles on Aug. 13.

‘Pro-Worker’ VotesWalz said Vance is “one of four senators – four – that has never cast a vote on a pro-worker bill in his life. Not once.”

That’s a bit of an overstatement that requires some context.

For starters, Vance never held public office until his election to the U.S. Senate in November 2022. Vance took office on Jan. 3, 2023.

So, Walz was talking about less than two years when he said “his life.”

As for Vance’s voting record, the Harris campaign told Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler that Walz was referring to Vance’s AFL-CIO scorecard, which lists just seven “key votes” on legislation supported by the union. Vance didn’t cast a vote in two of the seven instances. Of Vance’s five votes, four of them were against President Joe Biden’s nominees, and one was in support of a House resolution that sought to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program.

So, Walz was referring to a few votes in less than two years.

We also note that Vance, who represents Ohio, has taken some actions that some might consider “pro-worker.”

In October, Vance visited striking members of the United Auto Workers in Toledo, Ohio.

“Today, I will join striking UAW workers on the picket line in Toledo and stand with them in their fight for higher wages and long-term survival,” Vance wrote in an opinion piece for Newsweek.

Vance, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, also issued a press release last spring in support of a bipartisan bill – the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act. The bill, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, would have required “federal regulators to claw back up to three years of compensation received by big bank executives, board members, controlling shareholders, and other key decision-makers in the event of a failure or resolution,” according to a press release issued by Warren.

Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, supported the bill, writing on X that “[t]axpayers and working people should not foot the bill for mismanagement.”

In March 2023, Vance also joined as an original co-sponsor of the Railway Safety Act of 2023 – a bipartisan bill that was introduced by Ohio’s senior senator, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

That legislation was designed to improve “safety requirements for rail carriers and trains transporting hazardous materials,” according to a legislative summary of the bill.

The bill, which included a requirement that each train have at least two crew members, had the support of the Transportation Workers Union.

“The whole industry is a disastrous, dangerous mess with derailments every day, staff shortages and many other problems caused by terrible management and greedy owners,” John Feltz, TWU’s railroad director, said at the time. “Congress must pass the Railway Safety Act as quickly as possible.”

Trump’s Overtime Pay RuleWalz said, “As president, he [Trump] cut overtime benefits for millions of workers.” That’s not quite right. More accurately, Trump did not extend overtime benefits to as many workers as his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had sought. No one had their existing overtime benefits cut.

Although federal law generally guarantees hourly workers overtime pay — time-and-a-half for any hours worked over 40 hours in a week — there is a so-called “white-collar exemption” for salaried workers who earn more than a certain threshold. In May 2016, the Obama administration issued a rule that sought to double that salary threshold from $23,660 to $47,476 per year (and automatically update it every three years to keep pace with rising salaries). That would have made an additional 4.2 million salaried U.S. employees eligible for overtime pay, according to Labor Department estimates at the time.

The rule was scheduled to become effective on Dec. 1 of that year, but it never went into effect due to lawsuits filed by 21 states against the Labor Department that claimed the rule was unconstitutional. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found the rule was unlawful and granted a nationwide preliminary injunction.

The Trump administration delayed the case before finally squashing the Obama administration rule and finalized its own rule in September 2019, increasing the salary threshold for guaranteed overtime pay to $35,568 per year.

Then-acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella boasted that, “For the first time in over 15 years, America’s workers will have an update to overtime regulations that will put overtime pay into the pockets of more than a million working Americans.”

As Vox wrote on Sept. 24, 2019, “It’s a win for the estimated 1.3 million workers who will now be compensated for putting in long hours — but it’s a bitter defeat for the 2.8 million others who would’ve also gotten overtime under the original rule proposed by the Obama administration.”

“While the administration may be trumpeting this rule as a good thing for workers, that is a ruse,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank partly funded by labor unions, wrote in a statement issued the same day. “In reality, the rule leaves behind millions of workers who would have received overtime protections under the much stronger rule, published in 2016, that Trump administration abandoned.”

“It’s worth noting that if the rule had simply been adjusted for inflation since 1975, today it would be roughly $56,500,” Shierholz wrote. “This is more than $20,000 higher than the Trump administration’s level! I estimate that roughly 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the 2016 rule will be left behind by the Trump administration’s rule.”

The Biden administration subsequently issued a rule, to raise the salary threshold for overtime pay to those earning up to $43,888 per year, effective July 1, and to $58,656 per year on July 1, 2025. The rule faces legal challenge from employer groups.

There is certainly room for political disagreement about whether the Trump rule went far enough in raising the salary threshold for overtime pay guarantees. But it is misleading for Walz to say that Trump “cut overtime benefits for millions of workers.” Workers who were guaranteed overtime pay under existing law did not have their overtime benefits cut. The Trump administration rule extended overtime pay to more workers, just not to nearly as many workers as Obama had proposed.

Candidates Who Were Union MembersWalz, a former teacher who was once a member of the National Education Association, wrongly claimed to be the only presidential or vice presidential nominee for a political party to be a member of a labor union since the 1980s.

“[H]ere’s a fact they shared with me as I came here to make this opportunity to say thank you,” Walz said. “I happen to be the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan.”

ABC News reported that Walz repeated the claim at a fundraiser later that day, “apparently unaware it was false.”

Until February 2021, Trump, who has been the GOP presidential nominee three times, was a member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a union that represents about 160,000 media professionals, including actors, recording artists and broadcast journalists.

Trump quit the union when faced with potential expulsion for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Your organization has done little for its members, and nothing for me – besides collecting
dues and promoting dangerous un-American policies and ideas,” Trump wrote in his resignation letter.

After his resignation, he was barred from being able to rejoin the union in the future.

Trump, who has appeared in dozens of TV shows and movies, first joined the SAG in 1989, before SAG and AFTRA merged in 2012. Former President Ronald Reagan, who was an actor before going into politics, served seven terms SAG president.

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For years, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been criticized by some for his response to riots in his state after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. That criticism picked up again this month when Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz to be her running mate on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket.

“Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020,” Sen. JD Vance, Walz’s vice presidential opponent, told reporters on Aug. 6.

Three days later, former President Donald Trump, the head of the Republican presidential slate, made the same claim about Walz at a rally in Montana. Trump, on multiple occasions, has even falsely claimed that he, not Walz, called in the Minnesota National Guard after rioters in Minneapolis and St. Paul began looting stores and committing arson.

It was Walz who issued the executive order activating the guard — although he didn’t do so as quickly as some thought he should have. According to local reporting, the approval came about 20 hours after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey first phoned Walz on the evening of May 27, 2020, to ask that members of the state-based military force be sent to help local law enforcement. Some protests had turned violent on May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, and the civil unrest continued the next day.

“He did not say yes,” Frey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an Aug. 3, 2020, interview, about his May 27 conversation with Walz. “He said he would consider it.”

The governor later said that Frey, in his initial call, did not provide the specifics necessary for deployment at the time — so he did not activate the guard until the following day, when city officials submitted a formal written request and provided a more detailed plan.

“I don’t think the mayor knew what he was asking for,” Walz said about Frey, in an Aug. 4, 2020, press briefing, according to press accounts. “I think the mayor said, ‘I request the National Guard, whew, this is great. We’re going to have massively trained troops.’ No. You’re going to have 19 year olds who are cooks.”

Walz, who served 24 years in the National Guard, added: “I asked, what do you want out of the guard? It’s not like pulling a can out. What units do you want? What do their capabilities need to be? How are you going to deploy them.”

A group of protesters surround National Guard vehicles that were driving on Lake Street in Minneapolis on May 29, 2020. Photo by Renee Jones Schneider/Star Tribune via Getty Images.An October 2020 report issued by Minnesota state Senate committees controlled by Republicans argued that if Walz “had acted in a decisive manner by activating the Minnesota National Guard when requested, the riots would have been brought under control much faster.”

The report said that, throughout Minnesota, there was an estimated $500 million in property damage, including more than 1,500 businesses and buildings that were burned. There also were more than 160 fires, some which were investigated as arson, according to news reports.

Meanwhile, an independent “after-action review” commissioned by Minneapolis concluded that the delayed deployment of the state National Guard was at least partly the result of inexperienced city officials not following the proper protocols when Walz was first contacted about providing military assistance.

Notably, while Trump has often publicly criticized Walz’s response, an audio recording obtained by ABC News this month documents Trump telling Walz in a June 1, 2020, call with governors that he was “very happy” with how Walz responded in the days after protests turned violent.

“You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump said on the call, according to ABC News.

Below, we provide a brief timeline of events in May 2020 as a guide for readers:

May 25Floyd, a Black man, is arrested in the evening on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill to make a purchase at a Minneapolis convenience store. He dies after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on his neck during the arrest for more than nine minutes, ignoring Floyd’s pleas that he could not breathe while being pinned to the ground.

May 26The Minneapolis Police Department releases a statement saying that Floyd “resisted arrest” and died following a “medical incident during police interaction.” The statement is countered by video of the arrest, which was recorded by a bystander and posted on social media.

The MPD later updates its statement to add that the incident, because “additional information has been made available,” is under investigation with FBI assistance.

Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, announces that four officers who were involved in Floyd’s arrest and subsequent death were terminated.

People start protesting in response to Floyd’s death. Some demonstrations turn violent, with participants damaging property, including a police station that was vandalized.

May 27Protests and riots continue throughout the day, with some individuals looting stores, including a Target near Minneapolis’ Third Precinct police station.

Medaria Arradondo, then the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, determines that officers are overwhelmed and, according to the Star Tribune, calls the mayor at 6:23 p.m. to ask for assistance from the Minnesota National Guard. Minutes later, Frey calls to relay that information to Walz, who, according to Frey, was noncommittal about sending in guard soldiers.

Frey later told the newspaper that the phone conversation with Walz was a formal request for National Guard support. Walz and his office countered that it wasn’t.

At 9:11 p.m., Arradondo also forwards an email, from then-MPD Commander Scott Gerlicher, to John Harrington, then the state’s public safety commissioner. The message reportedly includes a document with the outline of a plan asking for 600 National Guard troops.

Also that night, rioters in Minneapolis set fire to an AutoZone and other businesses.

May 28Frey submits a written request for the National Guard at about 10:55 a.m. He also issues a local emergency declaration.

In the afternoon, at about 2:30 p.m., Walz issues an executive order activating his state’s National Guard, which, according to reports, had been notified earlier of a possible deployment. The executive order says that Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter both requested assistance “to help provide security and restore safety.”

At 11:41 p.m., the guard tweets that it has “activated more than 500 soldiers to St. Paul, Minneapolis and surrounding communities.”

But that was after rioters took over the MPD’s Third Precinct station, which officers were ordered to evacuate earlier that night. Rioters went on to set fire to the police station and nearby buildings.

May 29At 12:53 a.m., more than an hour after the state guard posted about the deployment, Trump tweets: “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”

By that point, Walz had already activated the guard.

About seven hours later, Trump’s then-White House Twitter account quotes him saying: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

In the afternoon, Chauvin is arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

An 8 p.m. curfew ordered by Walz goes into effect, but rioting in Minneapolis and St. Paul continues.

May 30Walz orders a full mobilization of the guard.

In a post at 10:33 p.m., the guard writes, “We now have more than 4,100 — quickly moving toward 10,800 — Minnesota Citizen-Soldiers and Airmen supporting our friends and neighbors in the Twin Cities.” That was up from about 700 on duty, as of May 29.

June 1The violent protests begin to ease. By this point, about 7,000 guard members had been deployed, a guard spokesperson told us for a June 2020 story.

In a phone call with Walz and other governors, Trump compliments Walz for bringing in military support.

“I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said, according to audio obtained by ABC News.

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In recent speeches, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Biden administration has spent $9 billion to build only eight electric vehicle charging stations — or even, just eight chargers. That’s not accurate.

Trump is likely referring to $7.5 billion approved by Congress to help build a network of EV chargers across the U.S. over five years. But not all of the money hasbeen spent, or even made available to statesyet. Experts say the funds are expected to help build thousands of charging stations and more than 30,000 individual charging ports.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, as of mid-August, the funds that have been deployed have helped produce 61 charging ports at 15 stations, with another 14,900 ports in progress.

Some news outlets have reported that Trump’s tone on EVs has softened a notch lately,after a July 13 endorsement from Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, which manufactures and sells electric cars. Yet, he has continued to spread misinformation about electric vehicle infrastructure.

On atleasteightoccasions in the last two months, Trump has wildly exaggerated the government’s costs of building EV chargers.

“They built eight chargers … for $9 billion! Think of them as a tank for filling up your gas. Think of it. They spent $9 billion on eight chargers! Three of which didn’t work,” Trump falsely claimed during his speech at the Republican National Convention on July 19.

At a conservative conference in Florida on July 26, Trump said it would cost the U.S. government $5 trillion to build the EV chargers at the designated locations countrywide.

Trump, July 26: I said, you know, Elon, remember, I love electric cars, I think your car is great, I love it! But it’s not for everybody. … Like sometimes you want to drive long distances, you don’t want to stop. You know, in the Midwest, someplace in the Midwest, they put up eight charging stations, you know that, right? They spent $9 billion! Now, you know what a charging station is, it’s like a gas pump, it’s the equivalent of a gas pump for electricity, right? It’s a little thing. They spent $9 billion. That would mean that if they did it throughout the country, all the locations designated, it would cost $5 trillion. So our country would have to file for bankruptcy, they would have to file bankruptcy protection to build them. The whole thing is crazy!

He recitednearly the same remarks the next day, at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, except he increased the total cost to $10 trillion — and pledged to “end the Biden-Harris electric vehicle mandate on Day 1.”

More recently, in Atlanta on Aug. 5, Trump once again repeated the claim. “For eight chargers, they spent $9 billion. Is that a good deal? So at that rate, it would be $10 trillion to charge up the country,” he said.

Pete Gould, a policy expert in transportation and mobility technology and a lobbyist for the EV and charging industry, told E&E News that Trump’s calculations “sound too ridiculous to be true … because they aren’t true.”

We asked the Trump campaign about his claims, but we haven’t received a response.Trump appears to be distorting media articles about the $7.5 billion, five-year investment plan to help create an EV charging network. The funds were allocated by Congress through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.

On March 29, the Washington Post published a story with the headline “Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years.” Later in May, Autoweek published an article with the headline “$7.5 Billion In Federal Funds Yield Only 8 EV Charging Stations.” Both stories reported on criticism of the slow pace at which the program was rolling out — but they didn’t claim the funds were fully spent. Not all the stations were in the Midwest, either. The articles said the stations had opened in Hawaii, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

As we mentioned, the federal funding has helped build 61 charging ports at 15 stations as of mid-August, and 14,900 more ports are currently in some stage of development. Under the funding, each charging station, or location, is required to have at least four charging ports.

A person charging an electric vehicle at a public station. Photo by astrosystem/ stock.adobe.com.Michelle Levinson, senior manager of eMobility finance and policy at the World Resources Institute, told us the number of stations that are open right now represents “a small fraction of what the program is expected to accomplish” and that in “terms of awarding funding, the Biden Administration has made good progress.”

The Federal Highway Administration, which doesn’t entirely fund each project, couldn’t tell us how many charging stations or ports ultimately could be built with the $7.5 billion, because it “ultimately depends on how states and communities plan to use their funding,” a FHWA spokesperson said in an email. The new charging stations use both the federal money awarded to states and private funding.

But the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy told the Washington Post in March that the $7.5 billion should be enough for “up to 20,000 charging spots or around 5,000 stations.” Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, told us that his group has since revised those estimates upward.

Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.

Levinson, of the World Resources Institute, told us that’s a reasonable estimation “and our experience with similar projects would yield similar numbers.”

The Biden administration’s goal is to have 500,000 chargers by 2030, with additional public and private funding. As of Aug. 14, there were 65,904 public station locations available in the U.S. with a total of 179,547 EV charging ports, according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.

Funding Process and ProgressOf the $7.5 billion in funding, $5 billion will go to the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which will award money to states to build chargers along the nation’s major highways, according to a statement FHWA sent us. So far, approximately $2.4 billion has been made available to all 50 states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico. But that money hasn’t all been spent yet — and states haven’t even necessarily given out their awards. According to a National Association of State Energy Officials report, as of mid-April, 19 states had awarded $287.6 million in NEVI funds.

FHWA told us states are in various stages of deploying the funding received based on their state plans. So far, NEVI-awarded funds have resulted in the 15 operational charging stations and 61 ports across eight states. The agency said that number is expected to “grow rapidly with 28 states having announced conditional or final awards for 719 charging stations.”

In addition, approximately $623 million has been awarded for 47 projects through the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, which received the remaining $2.5 billion in funding allocated by the infrastructure law, according to FHWA. The first round of funding awarded through the CFI program in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 is expected to result in approximately 7,500 EV charging ports in states and localities where people live and work, the agency said.

Finally, approximately $148.8 million was awarded in grants for 24 projects in 20 states through the Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility Accelerator Program, which is for states and localities that need additional help. That funding, which comes from the NEVI program, is expected “to repair or replace approximately 4,500 EV charging ports,” FHWA told us.

To access federal funds to build EV chargers, states have to submit plans to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation each year before August, and then, if the plans are approved, solicit bids and award the funds for the work to be done.

“There is certainly still a long way to go in terms of getting the projects up and running, and we would love to see states move faster, but this is not out of line with what we expected for such a massive undertaking,” Levinson said. “Some states are further along than others, but all participants must navigate a complicated landscape of considerations such as siting and permitting challenges, ensuring adequate infrastructure is in place to handle this new technology, and tailoring projects to their communities’ unique needs. These processes can take time—it is not uncommon for it to take 2-3 years to build a new charging station—but we are encouraged to see that 36 states have released their first-round funding solicitations.”

Government officials and experts also have said that Biden’s plan has taken time to roll out because of other factors, including the creation of guidelines, new and strict standards and requirements to build these charging stations, and partnerships with states that in most cases had no previous experience with EV charging stations.

As for Trump’s claim of a Biden-Harris “electric vehicle mandate,” which he repeated at a rally in North Carolina on Aug. 14 and at a news conference in New Jersey on Aug. 15, the administration can’t mandate how many cars must be electric, as we’ve explained before.

Biden’s goal is to have EVs make up 50% of new car sales by 2030. A new Environmental Protection Agency vehicle emissions rule that limits tailpipe pollution could increase the percentage of new car sales that are EVs above Biden’s goal by 2032. Vehicle makers would be required to comply with the standards, but would have flexibility in how they meet them. For example, they could choose to make more efficient internal combustion engines for gas-powered or hybrid vehicles.

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Quick TakeThe Trump campaign showed a video of Celine Dion singing the theme from “Titanic” at a rally in Montana, sparking a rebuke from Dion for unauthorized use of the video. A post on Threads then shared a fake quote from Lara Trump responding to Dion saying, “We don’t give a damn” and “I’ll sing the song myself.” The quote originated on a satirical X account.

Full StoryFormer President Donald Trump held a campaign rally on Aug. 9 to boost support for himself and Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in Bozeman, Montana. During the rally, a video was shown of Canadian performer Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme of the film “Titanic.”

The next day, a post on Dion’s X account said: “Today, Celine Dion’s management team and her record label, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., became aware of the unauthorized usage of the video, recording, musical performance, and likeness of Celine Dion singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ at a Donald Trump / JD Vance campaign rally in Montana. In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use.” The post ended with a dig at the musical choice: “And really, THAT song?”

The Trump campaign did not respond to Dion, the BBC reported.

But an Aug. 10 post on Threads falsely claimed that Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, issued a reply to Dion’s statement. According to the post, “A defiant Laura Trump” said, “We don’t give a damn about a letter from Non-American Celine Dion. I’ll sing the song myself. No one can stop this Titanic.” The post shows images of Lara Trump at a campaign rally, with a sinking ship labeled “Trump” in the background.

An RNC spokesperson told USA Today that Lara Trump, who has released a couple of songs on Spotify and other music streaming platforms, did not say any of that. The quote originated on an X account called @NotHoodlum, which describes its content as “Commentary” and “Satirical Emeritus” and is often critical of Donald Trump. The Threads post that shared the content did not include a satire label.

The former president’s unauthorized use of songs at his rallies has upset some musicians. The Rolling Stones and R.E.M., among other musicians or their estates, have threatened to sue Trump for using their songs at his 2016 or 2020 election campaign events. More recently, the family of Isaac Hayes demanded Trump pay $3 million in licensing fees for his use of the song “Hold On, I’m Coming,” which was co-written by Hayes, at his rallies and to stop playing the song at future events.

Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University, explains in an article on the school’s news site that political campaigns are generally required to obtain the right to use specific songs at rallies. “They do need to pay for it; they do need to get those permissions,” according to Roberts. “Usually, the event organizers secure a license from the rights holders, and they have to make sure the license covers the songs that they want and that it doesn’t exclude political use.”

Musicians can claim unauthorized use of their music may imply a false endorsement under the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, Roberts explains.

“The idea is that the political use of a song is going to create the impression among consumers that the artist actually endorses that politician, is on board with that use, is a fan of that message,” Roberts says in the article. “If a politician is really tying a song to their image or to their message, like they use it as their walk-on music all the time … then I think false endorsement claims might be possible.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBBC. “Celine Dion ‘does not endorse’ Trump use of Titanic song.” 14 Aug 2024.

Byik, Andre. “‘Titanic’ quote wrongly attributed to Lara Trump | Fact check.” USA Today. 14 Aug 2024.

Celine Dion. @celinedion. “Today, Celine Dion’s management team and her record label, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., became aware of the unauthorized usage of the video, recording, musical performance, and likeness of Celine Dion singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ at a Donald Trump / JD Vance campaign rally in Montana. In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use. …And really, THAT song?” X. 10 Aug 2024.

Earls, Maya. “R.E.M. bassist calls Trump ‘con man,’ threatens legal action over campaign rally music.” McClatchy DC. 17 Jan 2020.

Levenson, Eric. “The Rolling Stones tell Trump campaign to stop playing their songs at rallies.” CNN. 28 Jun 2020.

Limehouse, Jonathan. “The beat goes on: Trump keeps dancing as artists get outraged over his use of their songs.” USA Today. Updated 15 Aug 2024.

Mello-Klein, Cody. “Can Donald Trump or Joe Biden play whatever music they want at a rally or convention? Legal expert says it’s more complicated.” Northeastern Global News. 17 Jul 2024.

Miller, Blair. “Trump rallies thousands in Bozeman in support of GOP Senate candidate Sheehy.” Daily Montanan. 10 Aug 2024.

Republican National Committee. RNC Leaders. Lara Trump. Accessed 15 Aug 2024.

Tanyos, Faris. “Use of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ at Trump Rally was ‘unauthorized,’ reps say.” CBS News. 11 Aug 2024.

Timotija, Filip. “Lara Trump drops single, teases future songs for ‘liberal media.'” The Hill. 29 Mar 2024.

U.S. Trademark Law. Federal Statues. Section 43 (15 U.S.C. Section 1125). False designations of origin; false description or representation. Accessed 15 Aug 2024.

Yilek, Caitlin. “Family of Isaac Hayes threatens to sue Trump for using his song at rallies.” CBS News. 12 Aug 2024.

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In a campaign rally in Atlanta and other venues, former President Donald Trump has tried to paint Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, as being soft on crime. Several of his claims go beyond the facts or distort her positions.

• Trump falsely said that Harris supports “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals … even criminals.” The Trump campaign pointed to past proposals that Harris has supported, but none would have done that.
• He wrongly claimed that there was “no crime” if someone stole less than $1,000 worth of goods, and he was wrong again in saying that Harris “started” such a policy. In California, it’s a felony if someone shoplifts more than $950 worth of goods, but it’s a misdemeanor for values below that.
• In discussing crimes committed by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, Trump falsely claimed that Harris, when she was the San Francisco DA, “wouldn’t arrest murderers. She wouldn’t arrest anybody.”
• Trump claimed that Harris “supports mandatory gun confiscation” that would leave Americans “defenseless in your house.” Harris hasn’t called for confiscating all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports the mandatory buyback program for “assault weapons” that she called for during her last presidential campaign.
• He claimed that Harris “urged for followers to donate to bail rapists and murderers out of jail” and said “that the violent mobs should not stop.” In June 2020, Harris asked for donations to a bail fund to help people protesting against police brutality, not rapists and murderers. She also said that “protests,” not riots, are “not going to stop” and “should not” stop.
• Trump said Harris “supports abolishing cash bail, which means bloodthirsty criminals that just killed somebody can immediately leave custody, go out and kill somebody else.” But ending money bail does not mean accused murders would automatically be released from jail before trial.
• He distorted the facts in claiming that Harris, as California attorney general, “defined and redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon, and rape of a unconscious person … as nonviolent.” A 2016 ballot referendum used the term “nonviolent felonies” without defining them, while the state penal code only specifies 23 crimes as a “violent felony.”
• Violent crime and murders nationwide have gone down during the Biden/Harris administration, according to FBI and other crime data. But Trump has taken to citing a different set of data to claim “there’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office.”

Comprehensive Immigration ReformIn Atlanta on Aug. 3, Trump wrongly claimed that Harris supports “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals … even criminals.”

Trump, Aug. 3: And the main thing, think of this, she wants to let mass amnesty and citizenship, she wants all illegals to have mass amnesty. Everybody, even criminals.

The Trump campaign referred us to past proposals that Harris has supported, but none of them would have given “mass amnesty and citizenship” to “all illegals,” including criminals.

Specifically, the Trump campaign cited Harris’ support in 2015 as California attorney general for then-President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA defers deportation proceedings for two years, subject to renewal, for qualified individuals — known as Dreamers — who were brought to the U.S. illegally prior to 2007 when they were children.

But these so-called Dreamers are a sliver of the illegal immigrant population, and they are subject to eligibility requirements, including criminal background checks that could result in deportation. As of March 31, there were more than 528,00 active DACA recipients, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

As a senator, Harris co-sponsored a bipartisan bill introduced by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin — the Dream Act of 2017 — that would have made an estimated 2.14 million eligible for conditional legal status and 1.73 million eligible for lawful permanent residence status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The bill would have required a criminal background check, among other stipulations. As she did as a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris has continued to support “legislation that creates a path for citizenship” for Dreamers as vice president.

The Trump campaign also cited Harris’ support for comprehensive immigration proposals that would provide permanent legal status or a path to citizenship for more than just Dreamers.

The campaign’s “official war room” account on X recently posted an eight-year-old clip of Harris saying she supports “comprehensive immigration reform.” But supporting “comprehensive immigration reform” isn’t the same as wanting “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals,” including criminals.

In the video clip circulated by the Trump campaign, Harris is shown speaking on the night that she won her U.S. Senate race in California in 2016. “I intend to fight for a state that has the largest number of immigrants, documented and undocumented, of any state in this country, and do everything we can to bring them justice and dignity and fairness under the law and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Bring them out from under the shadows,” she said.

As a senator, Harris did not introduce or co-sponsor a comprehensive immigration bill, according to Congress.gov, but she supported a comprehensive immigration bill as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Trump campaign also cited Harris’ support for the U.S. Citizenship Act — a comprehensive immigration bill that the Biden-Harris administration sent to Congress in 2021.

The bill — which was introduced in the Senate and House but failed to advance — would have provided a path to citizenship for the 11 million “unauthorized immigrants” that the Department of Homeland Security estimates live in the United States. But certain criminals would be ineligible, and not all eligible immigrants would attain or even seek citizenship. A Pew Research Center study in 2013 found that just 46% of Hispanic immigrants who were eligible to become citizens actually did, for a variety of reasons, such as balking at the English requirement for the citizenship test.

The bill said immigrants had to satisfy “the eligibility requirements set forth in section 245G(b), including all criminal and national security background checks and the payment of all applicable fees.” Section 245G(b) says immigrants are ineligible if they have a felony conviction or three or more misdemeanors. Another section of the bill said that the secretary of Homeland Security shall “determine whether there is any criminal, national security, or other factor that would render the noncitizen ineligible for status under section 245B.”

In its announcement of the bill, the White House said: “The bill allows undocumented individuals to apply for temporary legal status, with the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes.”

ShopliftingTrump also wrongly claimed at his Atlanta rally that there was “no crime” if someone stole less than $1,000 worth of goods, and he was wrong again in saying that Harris “started” such a policy.

“It used to be that if somebody robbed your store, you would be very tough about it right?” Trump said. “Now, Kamala started this, anything under $1,000, you can do whatever you want. … There’s no crime if it’s less than $1,000. She’s the one who started it.”

He repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 news conference in New Jersey, saying, “You’re allowed to rob a store as long as it’s not more than $950. … They can rob it and not get charged. That was her that did that.”

Trump is referring to a 2014 state law, approved in a referendum by California voters, that reduced the penalties for certain nonviolent property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. At the time, a 2010 state law had already increased the dollar threshold for a grand theft violation, a felony, from $400 to $950. That meant that thefts of lesser amounts were typically misdemeanors.

The 2014 referendum, called Proposition 47, codified that shoplifting property of $950 or less would always be a misdemeanor, with exceptions for offenders who had prior convictions for certain violent or serious crimes. The measure did not say that thefts under that amount wouldn’t be prosecuted at all. Proposition 47 was proposed at a time of prison overcrowding in California, when the state was under federal court orders to reduce the prison population due to violations of the Constitution’s cruel and unusual punishments clause.

“Prop. 47 created a new category of theft — ‘shoplifting’ (for thefts from retail establishments) — but did not change the dollar threshold” for felony thefts, Michael S. Romano, director of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project and chair of the California Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, told us in an email.

Harris wasn’t responsible for the 2010 law. That legislation was signed into law by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sept. 30, 2010. Harris was the state’s attorney general from January 2011 until January 2017. And we couldn’t find any record of Harris taking a position on Proposition 47, which 60% of voters approved in the November 2014 general election.

Romano told us attorneys general usually don’t take positions on ballot referendums. “Kamala Harris had no role in Prop. 47. In California, the Attorney General has responsibility for writing the summary of all propositions that appear on voter ballots. This is a purely ministerial role,” he said. “Given this responsibility, California Attorneys General rarely, if ever, weigh in on ballot measures. Harris certainly did not take any position on Prop. 47.”

Even if she had, the proposition didn’t say there would be “no crime” if the amount of a theft was “less than $1,000,” as Trump claimed.

It’s worth noting that the threshold for charging property theft as a felony varies by state, but many have set the mark at $1,000 or more, at least for first-time offenders, according to a list of such thresholds, updated as of July, provided to us by the National Conference of State Legislatures. There are several conservative states on that list, including Arkansas, Nebraska and Texas.

The Trump campaign acknowledged to us that Harris didn’t take a public position on the referendum, and it wrongly claimed that “her office misled voters by titling Proposition 47 as the innocuous ‘Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,'” pointing to a Spectrum News story in which a Republican state assemblymember made that claim. The supporters of the measure are the ones who called it the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” as shown on the December 2013 letter the supporters sent to the attorney general’s office, asking that the attorney general “prepare a circulating title and summary” for the initiative to appear on the ballot.

The official title of Prop 47, written by Harris’ office, was: “Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute.”

Harris’ office was responsible for the 100-word summary of the proposition that also appeared on the ballot. The Trump campaign pointed to a Sacramento Bee editorial in 2015 that took Harris to task for not mentioning in the summary that Prop 47 could lead to a reduction in DNA samples collected from crime scenes, because more crimes would be misdemeanors. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether that should’ve been in the summary.

But, regardless, it doesn’t show that Harris “started” a policy of “no crime” for shoplifting “anything under $1,000,” which was the false claim that Trump made.

Critics of Prop 47 have backed a new referendum, which will be on the ballot in November, to increase the punishment for some of the crimes Prop 47 affected. Shoplifting goods worth $950 or less would still be a misdemeanor for first-time offenders, under the new Prop 36, but it would be a felony “if the person has two or more past convictions for certain theft crimes (such as shoplifting, burglary, or carjacking),” according to a summary posted by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office in California.

Harris as San Francisco’s District AttorneyHarris was San Francisco’s district attorney for eight years, from January 2004 until January 2011. The city, for a period of that time, followed a sanctuary city policy that prevented city officials from turning over minors living in the U.S. illegally to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even if they had been convicted of a felony.

That policy changed in 2008, with Harris’ support, to allow city law enforcement officials to notify ICE when minors were arrested — and not yet convicted — of a felony crime.

In Atlanta, Trump criticized Harris for shielding “illegal alien, crack dealers from deportation,” and falsely claimed that Harris, when she was the city’s DA, “wouldn’t arrest murderers. She wouldn’t arrest anybody.”

When we asked the Trump campaign for evidence that supported the former president’s statements, we were given links to two news articles from 2008. Both articles contradict Trump’s claim that Harris “wouldn’t arrest murderers” and “wouldn’t arrest anyone.”

The news articles were published during a debate in the city over San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance, which dates to 1985. The ordinance initially covered only “immigrants seeking asylum from El Salvador and Guatemala,” but was extended in 1989 to include all immigrants, according to a 2011 article in the UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy on the city’s policy.

“At that time, San Francisco officials interpreted the ordinance and state juvenile law as preventing them from referring undocumented immigrants in the juvenile justice system to federal authorities for deportation,” the journal article said.

It is that exception for minors that became an issue in 2008 and that Trump referenced in his Atlanta speech.

The Trump campaign sent us a July 1, 2008, story by the San Francisco Chronicle about eight minors from Honduras who were “convicted of dealing drugs.” The minors were not deported, and they escaped from a group home.

The campaign also referred us to a July 31, 2008, Chronicle article about a protest against San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy. That article mentioned that Edwin Ramos, a Salvadoran migrant who was living in the U.S. illegally, was “charged with three counts of murder” in a triple homicide. “Ramos, now 21, was convicted for an assault and an attempted robbery when he was 17, but city officials did not turn him over to federal immigration authorities,” the article said. Ramos was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

As those articles show, Trump was wrong. Harris’ office prosecuted and convicted the eight Honduran drug dealers and Ramos.

Those two incidents in 2008 prompted then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to change San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy over the objection of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Newsom directed city officials to report juveniles arrested on felony charges to ICE. In response, the supervisors adopted a new ordinance that allowed the city to report juveniles to immigration officials only after they had been convicted — an ordinance that Newsom vetoed and then ignored after his veto was overridden by the board.

Harris supported Newsom’s policy position, which became an issue for her when she unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

As for shielding undocumented minors from deportation, Harris said in 2008 that the city’s “custodial agencies” — specifically the city’s sheriff’s office — were responsible for making referrals to federal immigration officials, not prosecutors.

That appears to be the case. In 2008, Newsom wrote an opinion piece for the Chronicle that indicated the sheriff’s office was responsible for making referrals to ICE.

“Newsom acknowledged that ‘[t]he system failed’ in the case of Edwin Ramos. However, he also emphasized that ‘[o]n a monthly basis, the sheriff refers to ICE some 80 to 100 undocumented individuals arrested for felonies,'” according to the 2011 UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy article.

GunsTrump claimed that Harris would make Americans “defenseless in your house” by banning guns.

“She supports mandatory gun confiscation,” Trump said in Atlanta. “Would anybody mind if they came into your house and took away your gun or your guns? … She’s for taking away all of your guns.”

In Montana on Aug. 9, Trump said four times throughout his speech that Harris wanted to “take away your guns,” once saying this would include “all of your guns.”

That’s misleading. While running for president in 2019, Harris said multiple times that she would support a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” — but not all firearms.

In a November 2019 NBC News interview, for example, Harris said “there are certain types of weapons that should not be on the streets of a civil society,” referring to assault weapons, which she called “weapons of war.” She said she rejected the idea that “either you’re in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”

As of 2024, Harris still supports a ban on purchasing assault weapons. However, her campaign told us that she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to turn in assault weapons that they already own.

ProtestsTrump distorted the facts by claiming that Harris raised money to bail out “rapists and murders” and that she said people “should not stop” rioting in 2020.

“And during the left-wing riots of 2020, you saw that, she urged for followers to donate to bail rapists and murderers out of jail while saying that the violent mobs should not stop,” Trump said in Atlanta. “And she said, ‘Violent mobs, let the violent mobs keep going.’”

That’s not what Harris did or said.

As we’ve written, days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, Harris and other well-known figures asked the public to help protesters who had been arrested by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit that pays bail for individuals in jail while their court cases are pending. Harris posted on social media: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”

The organization said it used some of the money it raised to pay bail and legal expenses for people who were arrested while protesting, but it also covered bail for some people who were jailed for other reasons. However, Harris only asked for donations to help protesters — not “rapists and murderers,” or people charged with committing other crimes.

Harris also did not encourage people to riot after Floyd’s murder. Trump was likely referring to comments that she made in a June 18, 2020, appearance on Stephen Colbert’s CBS talk show. During part of the interview, Harris, who said she participated in protests in Washington, D.C., after Floyd’s death, talked about the role that demonstrations play in getting the government to address social inequities.

After Harris answered his question about the importance of sustaining protests to affect change, Colbert said he had noticed a lack of media coverage of demonstrations that were still happening. That’s when Harris said: “They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels. They’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”

But Harris never mentioned “violent mobs” or encouraged rioters to continue that kind of behavior. She and Colbert only talked about protests, which were overwhelmingly peaceful in the three months following Floyd’s death, according to a September 2020 analysis by the U.S. Crisis Monitor project. Harris even spoke out against violent protests in remarks on Aug. 27, 2020, after demonstrations following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, led to two deaths.

Ending Cash BailTrump accused Harris of backing a plan that allows accused murderers to get out of jail before trial.

“Like other Marxist DAs, Kamala supports abolishing cash bail, which means bloodthirsty criminals that just killed somebody can immediately leave custody, go out and kill somebody else, which, by the way, they often do,” Trump said in Atlanta. He repeated the claim in an Aug. 13 interview on X with the platform’s owner and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, saying “cashless bail” meant that “you kill somebody and they let you out right away. … And then they never find the people unless they kill again, and then they let them out again.”

In 2019, Harris released a plan “to fundamentally transform our criminal justice system” that said cash bail should be ended. Bail, which is often set by a judge, is the amount of money that a person accused of a crime must pay in order to be released from pre-trial detention while the case is pending.

Harris argued that excessive money bail is unjust and discriminates against “low-income communities and communities of color” who are less likely to be able to afford it. But ending cash bail does not necessarily mean that people charged with murder would be released from custody, as Trump said.

“As you note, it depends on what cash bail is replaced with,” Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in an email. “No serious commentator or politician has proposed eliminating cash bail and replacing it only with automatic release.”

Funk said proposals often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.

For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”

Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Justice Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, made a similar point in a phone interview. He told us that policies eliminating cash bail are typically aimed at lower-level offenses, not murder.

“It’s just not the case that bail reform somehow makes it automatic that someone is released, especially if they are accused of a very serious offense,” Grawert said.

Harris’ 2019 proposal mentioned the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act, which she and Republican Sen. Rand Paul introduced in the Senate in 2017. The bill authorized grants for states to reform or replace their cash bail systems with “individualized, pretrial assessments” that factor in the “risk of flight and risk of anticipated criminal conduct posed by a defendant while on pretrial release.”

Although the bill said there would be a “presumption of release in most cases,” a “preventative detention protocol” could be implemented “for cases in which a judicial officer determines, by clear and convincing evidence and after a hearing during which the defendant is represented by counsel, that the appearance of the defendant in court and the safety of the community cannot reasonably be assured through the use of any combination of [release] conditions.”

In other words, a suspect could be detained if a judge found that it was warranted.

Nonviolent CrimesIn Atlanta, Trump distorted the facts in claiming that Harris, as California attorney general, “defined and redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon, and rape of a unconscious person — an unconscious person raped — as nonviolent. These were nonviolent crimes,” adding that this was done “to help spring child predators and dangerous criminals out of prison all over the state.”

Harris didn’t define those things as “nonviolent.” 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. That means the list doesn’t cover everything that would be considered violent, and any felonies not specified are technically “nonviolent.”

As support for Trump’s claim, the campaign points to another ballot referendum, Proposition 57 in 2016, which also sought to deal with prison overcrowding by, among other things, allowing people convicted of “nonviolent felonies” to be considered for early-release parole. As the attorney general, Harris was responsible for writing the summary for Prop 57. That summary said: “Allows parole consideration for persons convicted of nonviolent felonies, upon completion of prison term for their primary offense as defined.”

An analysis of the measure by the state Legislative Analyst said: “The measure requires CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] to adopt regulations to implement these changes. Although the measure and current law do not specify which felony crimes are defined as nonviolent, this analysis assumes a nonviolent felony offense would include any felony offense that is not specifically defined in statute as violent.”

Prop 57 was approved by 64% of voters. CDCR did later issue regulations, saying that cases involving people registering as sex offenders couldn’t be considered by the parole board for early release under Prop 57. But the state Supreme Court struck down those regulations in 2020, saying they violated Prop 57.

That doesn’t mean sex offenders had to be released – it was up to the parole board. But they had to be considered for early release. “We emphasize that this determination does not require the release on parole of any inmate,” the court’s ruling said. “The evaluation of an inmate’s suitability for parole and the processes involved in conducting that evaluation remain squarely within the purview of the Department and the Board of Parole Hearings. … The Department is not permitted, however, to entirely exclude from parole consideration an entire class of inmates when those inmates have been convicted of nonviolent felony offenses.”

At any rate, Harris didn’t “define” or “redefine” the crimes Trump listed.

Nationwide Crime DataViolent crime and murders nationwide have gone down during President Joe Biden’s term, according to FBI and other crime data, as we’ve written. But Trump has taken to citing a different set of data, the National Crime Victimization Survey.

“Nationwide, there’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58% increase in rape, 89% increase in aggravated assault, and a 56% increase in stone-cold robbery,” Trump said in Atlanta, comparing data from 2020 to 2022 in the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey.

Typically, experts cite crime trends based on data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which informs the annual Uniform Crime Report. Those are the statistics about crimes recorded by local and state law enforcement agencies around the country, and weighted to compensate for agencies that don’t provide data.

By contrast, the National Crime Victimization Survey provides estimates of crime based on interviews with a sample of people age 12 or older about crimes they experienced in the previous six months. It therefore captures many crimes that are never reported to police.

Experts who track crime in the U.S. say both are useful — albeit flawed — tools to capture the contours of crimes committed in the U.S. But as we said, experts typically refer to the FBI data when reporting crime trends. And, in fact, in past years when criticizing Biden for rising crime in 2021, Trump regularly cited that FBI data. Now that FBI data show violent crime decreasing, Trump has taken to calling those statistics “fake numbers.” They’re not.

“The victimization data and the FBI UCR measure different things,” Richard Berk, emeritus professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told us via email. “The victimization data come from surveys in which respondents report if they have been ‘victimized’ by ‘crimes’ asked about in very simple ways. Whether those victimizations were really crimes is hard to determine. And many of those ‘crimes’ are not reported to the police. Also, the willingness to report crime to the police can change rapidly over time depending on such things are media coverage. The UCR is based on crimes reported to the police and depends on voluntary cooperation from departments all over the county. Compliance has long been an issue because some department[s] do not cooperate. Of late, however, compliance has been improving substantially.”

While the two datasets usually follow the same trend lines, experts said, some years they do not. And 2022 was one of those years. The FBI reported that the rate of violent crimes — including murder — decreased in 2022, but the NCVS for 2022 — the latest year available — showed the serious violent crime victimization rate — which includes rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault — rose from 5.6 the year before to 9.8 violent crimes per 1,000 population age 12 and older.

In an October report, criminologists at the Council on Criminal Justice wrote that the divergence between the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the NCVS “makes it uncertain whether violent crime actually went up or down in 2022.”

Nonetheless, crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the New Orleans firm AH Datalytics, warned it would be “best to avoid using NCVS to make declarative statements about crime trends,” as Trump did.

For starters, Asher told us via email, “it’s 2024 and the most recent NCVS covers 2022. Reported crime data does a much better job of highlighting current trends than NCVS.”

According to the FBI’s preliminary 2023 crime report, violent crimes dropped 5.7% between 2022 and 2023, and the number of murders declined 13.2%. The official 2023 report will be released this fall.

Asher also warned that NCVS is a survey “and 2020 and 2021 were particularly hard years to survey. The rise in violent crime in NCVS is predicated on violent crime being at historic lows in 2020 and 2021, and I’m skeptical that was the case.”

Asher also notes that NCVS doesn’t include murder — it’s a survey based on interviews with people, which by definition excludes those who have been murdered — “and murder is the crime with the highest societal cost. It’s also the crime that suffers the least from underreporting, so we have a good understanding of the murder trend which is a historic decline in 2023 and 2024.”

“The main weakness of the UCR is that it can only include crimes reported to the police,” Berk concurred. “So, both statistics have flaws, but those flaws differ. The best way to overcome these measurement problems is to focus on crimes that are NOT underreported and quite easily defined. Homicide is a good example because there is a body. A bad example is sexual assault because it is so underreported and can be hard to easily define from survey responses except in extreme cases.”

Data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show the number of murders has gone down by 9.1% from 2020 to 2023 in 70 large U.S. cities. Data collected by Asher show a 17.6% decline in murders so far this year, compared with the same point in 2023, in more than 250 cities.

And because it is a survey, Asher said, “NCVS has margins of error that add a ton of uncertainty. The rise in violent crime measured in NCVS can vary from an increase in the teens to a 60 to 70 percent increase.”

Finally, Asher said, “NCVS measures from year of survey rather than year of offense which makes picking up suddenly changing crime trends very difficult through NCVS. The survey asks if people have been the victim of a crime in the preceding six months, so it includes crimes from July 2021 to November 2022.”

“Put together, these factors make it particularly challenging to describe the exact shape of crime trends with strong confidence,” Asher said of using only the NCVS.

Berk recommended that people focus on local, rather than national, crime rates.

“Crime is a local issue,” Berk said. “The amount of crime and the kinds of crimes differ enormously in different regions of the country, different urban areas and different neighborhoods within those urban areas. So does citizen cooperation, police resources and police practices. To understand crime and the risks, citizens have to look at the data from their neighborhoods. … All the talk about crime at a national level is statistical nonsense that is nothing more than a political football. And it is a football in a political game over which national level policy can have little to no real effect. Local policies and practices can matter.”

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Quick TakeVice President Kamala Harris drew a large crowd at a campaign rally near Detroit, according to photos, videos and press reports. But posts circulating online make the baseless claim — amplified by former President Donald Trump — that an image of the event was fabricated or manipulated by artificial intelligence to inflate the crowd size.

Full StoryFormer President Donald Trump has often focused on the size of crowds at various events. In fact, he started his term in office with false claims that inflated the number of people who attended his inauguration.

People cheer and hold signs at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, at the Detroit Metro Airport on Aug. 7. Photo by Katie McTiernan/Anadolu via Getty Images.Now, facing Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election, Trump has amplified false claims diminishing the attendance at Harris’ recent events, which have drawn arena–filling crowds since she took over the top of the Democratic ticket in July.

When Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held a rally at a Detroit Metro Airport hangar on Aug. 7, they drew a crowd of 15,000, according to media reports — one of which attributed the number to Harris’ campaign.

Despite that, social media accounts supportive of the former president quickly began spreading the baseless claim that a photo from the rally was created or manipulated using artificial intelligence to manufacture a crowd. Trump himself amplified the claim, posting on his own platform, Truth Social, “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

The crowd clearly existed, as is shown in the Getty Images photo above, and in multiple photos and videos reporting on the event.

Some of those who claimed that the photo was digitally created or altered — including the self-described “social media strategist” Chuck Callesto, whom Trump cited in his post — pointed to the lack of the crowd’s reflection in Harris’ plane, which parked near the hangar.

But Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, explained in a post on LinkedIn that the crowd wouldn’t be reflected in the belly of the plane, providing a 3D rendering of the location of the plane, crowd and camera. “[E]ven the large ‘crowd’ in my rendering manifests as only a tiny sliver in the reflective surface,” he said.

It’s also worth noting that the crowd wasn’t reflected in the belly of the plane in photos taken of some Trump rallies that have been held at similar venues.

Also, Farid analyzed the photo image with two computer models that can detect patterns associated with AI-generated images. “Both of these models reveal no evidence of AI-generation,” he wrote. “In addition, the text on the signs and plane show none of the usual signs of generative AI,” which can often garble the details in images.

So, the crowd was clearly present at Harris’ Detroit-area rally, and there’s no evidence to suggest that the image shown on social media was created or altered with AI. It was actually taken by a Harris campaign worker.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesRobertson, Lori and Robert Farley. “The Facts on Crowd Size.” FactCheck.org. 23 Jan 2017.

Weissert, Will, Bill Barrow and Colleen Long. “At boisterous Georgia rally, Harris dares Trump to ‘say it to my face’ and show up for their debate.” Associated Press. 30 Jul 2024.

Cooper, Kenny. “‘Democrats are in array’: Harris and Walz energize Democratic Pa. voters in first campaign rally.” WHYY. 6 Aug 2024.

Schaeffer, James. “Las Vegas event center ‘reaches capacity’ during Kamala Harris campaign rally.” 8newsnow.com. Updated 11 Aug 2024.

Wisely, John, Todd Spangler and Jenna Prestininzi. “Harris, Walz bring historic campaign to Michigan, rallying at Detroit Metro Airport.” Detroit Free Press. 8 Aug 2024.

MLive.com. “Kamala Harris, Tim Walz rally crowd of 15,000 at Detroit airport.” YouTube. 8 Aug 2024.

Herman, Alice and Lois Beckett. “‘We’re not going back’: thousands rally for Harris and Walz in Wisconsin and Michigan.” The Guardian. 7 Aug 2024.

The Detroit News (@DetroitNews). “For those inquiring about Kamala Harris’ Michigan rally crowd size — here is the view of both inside and outside the hangar at DTW before, during and after the rally.” X. 7 Aug 2024.

C-SPAN. “Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz Campaign in Detroit.” 7 Aug 2024.

Farid, Hany. “I am fielding questions about this image from a Harris/Walz rally.” LinkedIn. 9 Aug 2024.

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On Aug. 1, a second round welterweight women’s boxing match at the Paris Olympics between Italy and Algeria sparked a controversy over gender eligibility and led to a profusion of misinformation about the winning boxer, Algerian Imane Khelif. Contrary to the claims of many, including former President Donald Trump, Khelif is a woman and is not transgender.

Much of the speculation about Khelif’s gender stems from a disqualification at the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association for an unspecified gender eligibility test. The IBA, which has ties to the Kremlin and does not oversee boxing at the Olympics, has suggested that Khelif and another boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, have XY chromosomes and/or have elevated testosterone levels.

It is unclear how legitimate these claims are. The IBA has released few details of the testing, and the International Olympic Committee, which no longer recognizes the organization as the global federation for boxing, has condemned the IBA’s testing process, calling it “arbitrary” and “flawed.” Even if the IBA’s claims are true, however, it’s incorrect to call Khelif and Lin men or transgender women.

“The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said in an Aug. 2 press conference.

The Carini-Khelif BoutThe bout that initiated the controversy lasted just 46 seconds. In it, the two boxers fought for about 40 seconds before Italian Angela Carini went to her corner to have her head guard tightened. Khelif then landed one strong punch to Carini’s face, and Carini walked over to her ropes to abandon the match. Visibly upset while still in the ring, Carini can be heard saying, “it’s not fair” in Italian. She did not shake hands with Khelif.

After the fight, Carini told reporters that she had “never felt a punch like this” and that she quit because “one punch hurt too much.” She also told the BBC in a post-bout interview that she “felt a strong pain to my nose” and “had to preserve my life.”

Later, speaking to an Italian newspaper, Carini apologized to Khelif for not shaking her hand. “All this controversy certainly made me sad, and I also felt sorry for my opponent, she had nothing to do with it and like me was only here to fight,” Carini said. “I was angry, because my Games had already gone up in smoke. I have nothing against Khelif, and on the contrary if I happened to meet her again I would give her a hug.”

The optics of the match, however, proved irresistible to many online. Numerous false or unproven claims about Khelif’s gender began circulating widely on social media.

Algeria’s Imane Khelif (in red) during a women’s 66kg preliminary round boxing match against Angela Carini of Italy (in blue) on Aug. 1 at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France. Photo by Fabio Bozzani/Anadolu via Getty Images.One Aug. 1 Instagram post incorrectly called Khelif a “transsexual,” an older term for transgender that many in the community reject.

A Threads post using a manipulated image purportedly showing Khelif with Vice President Kamala Harris falsely claims Khelif “used to be a man” and refers to her as “He/she.”

Several other posts shared screenshots of a Daily Mail story that referred to Khelif as “biologically male.” As we said, the IBA has suggested Khelif has XY chromosomes, which are typical of males, but it’s unclear if that is really true.

Trump also weighed in, sharing a clip of the short fight the same day on his social media platform, Truth Social, and pledging to “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!”

He again referenced the fight in an interview with Fox Business that aired the next day, Aug. 2, stating, “There will be no men playing in women’s sports when we’re elected.”

The U.S. president, of course, has no say in the gender eligibility rules at contests such as the Olympics. The IOC follows the eligibility rules set by each sport’s international federation.

During a rally in Atlanta on Aug. 3, Trump again brought up the Carini-Khelif fight, this time falsely claiming that Khelif is trans.

“This young girl from Italy, a champion boxer. She got hit so hard, she didn’t know what the hell hit her. It’s a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer,” Trump said. “And she didn’t even go down. He hit her with two jabs and she said, ‘I’m out.’”

The day of the fight, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, also reshared a clip of the match on X from conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, adding, “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”

Khelif Isn’t TransEligibility for women’s boxing in Paris — as it has been for past Olympic Games — is based on the gender listed on a person’s passport. There is no evidence that Khelif identifies as trans, and Algeria does not legally allow people to change genders, according to the advocacy group Outright International and Equaldex, a crowdsourced database measuring the progress of LGBTQ+ rights worldwide.

Following the uproar about her eligibility, Khelif has denied allegations that she is not a woman. “I want to tell the entire world that I am a female, and I will remain a female,” she told reporters after her Aug. 3 win against a boxer from Hungary. Khelif has since won her semifinal match against her opponent from Thailand and is slated to box for gold against a woman from China on Aug. 9. She has boxed in international women’s competitions since 2018, when she started in the lightweight division, including a loss in the quarterfinals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Her amateur record prior to this Olympics is 38-9, according to BoxRec.

Update, Aug. 9: Khelif bested her opponent and won her gold medal match.

Khelif’s father has also said that his daughter is a woman, showing Reuters a document with her name, birthday and listed sex as female. “Imane is a little girl that has loved sport since she was six-years-old,” he told the news outlet. He similarly told Sky Sports, “My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl. She’s a strong girl.”

Transgender refers to a person’s gender identity not matching their assigned sex at birth. Since Khelif was born female and considers herself a woman, she is by definition not trans.

If Khelif has XY chromosomes — as alleged, but not proven by the IBA — this does not mean she is a man or is trans, Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and expert on the genetics of sex, told us in an email. That’s because, he said, “chromosomes are only one part of several biological parameters different between men and women. A good example are women with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. They are born and raised as girls.”

As the Endocrine Society explains, differences of sexual development, or DSD, can occur such that the chromosomal sex of a baby doesn’t match their genitals. A child with XY chromosomes, for example, can have ambiguous or female genitals if the testicles don’t develop properly or if the body doesn’t respond properly to the sex hormone testosterone. This is known as 46,XY DSD.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome is the most common cause of 46,XY DSD, according to the National Institutes of Health’s MedlinePlus. In this condition, “the body’s cells and tissues are unable to respond to certain male sex hormones (called androgens) that are important for normal male sexual development before birth and during puberty. As a result, affected individuals may have external sex characteristics that are typical for females or have features of both male and female sexual development.”

It’s not a given that a woman with XY chromosomes would necessarily have an unfair advantage over a woman with XX chromosomes. “If we speculate that a woman boxer has XY chromosomes, there is little evidence that it would provide a disproportionate advantage,” Vilain said, being careful with his language and citing the IOC’s framework for fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variation, which uses the phrase “disproportionate advantage.”

“The real question is whether it would provide a consistent, unfair, dangerous and disproportionate advantage. For this,” he added, “there is little evidence it does.”

Again, we don’t know if Khelif or Lin has XY chromosomes. The IBA has not been transparent about its gender eligibility findings. The organization disqualified Khelif from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi mid-tournament, after she won against a Russian boxer who had been undefeated.

IBA’s president, Umar Kremlev, an acquaintance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, told a state-owned media outlet at the time that his organization “identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women” through DNA tests that showed they had XY chromosomes.

In a July 31 statement, the IBA said that Khelif and Lin, who was also disqualified from the same competition, “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test” that found “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Days later, in a widely panned and chaotic press conference, IBA officials referenced male chromosomes and high levels of testosterone, but failed to provide specifics, saying they could not say more because they did not have permission to do so, and suggested that reporters “read between the lines.” A subsequent statement did not mention testosterone and cited IBA eligibility rules amended in May 2023 that define men as individuals with XY chromosomes and women as individuals with XX chromosomes.

Vilain said that the IBA’s definitions are “very simple” and go “against the scientific mainstream” definition of sex, “which is a composite of a number of biological parameters (chromosomes, hormones, hormone receptors, external genitalia, internal genitalia, gonads).” He noted that a number of sport federations use testosterone tests to declare some athletes ineligible, but do not use sex chromosomes as a primary factor. For example, he said, World Athletics, which oversees track and field, will declare women with specific DSDs ineligible for female competitions only if they also have a testosterone level above a certain limit.

The IBA has explained the timing of Khelif and Lin’s 2023 disqualifications as being due to when a second test result for each came back.

The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 and formally withdrew the organization in 2023 due to concerns about governance, integrity of the fights and the group’s financing from Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy company. The IOC has said that boxing will need a new international federation in order to be included in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Update, Aug. 14: After Khelif won her gold medal match on Aug. 9, Trump once again repeated his false claim. “And I’d like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer,” he said later that evening during a rally in Montana. “You saw he won. She won the gold medal.”

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Quick TakeU.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband adopted two infants in 2021. Social media posts use an altered photo to imply Buttigieg is “weird” and that he used a strap-on device developed so men can breastfeed babies. The original photo is from a 2019 article about the device.

Full StoryIn an election season that has already included a barrage of accusatory labels and name-calling, both political parties have taken to branding the opposition as “weird.”

The Democrats latched on to the word first. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen as her running mate, started referring to former President Donald Trump and other Republicans as “just weird” in July, the Associated Press reported. Walz used the word again at the Aug. 6 rally in Philadelphia, where Harris introduced him as her vice presidential pick. Their Republican opponents are “creepy and yes, just weird as hell,” Walz said.

Trump has responded by denying that he and Sen. JD Vance, his vice presidential running mate, are weird. “They’re the weird ones,” he said of the Democrats.

The “weird” war of words has expanded to a manipulated image on social media.

A July 29 post on X shows an altered photo of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg using a device to simulate breastfeeding a baby. “JD Vance is just weird,” the post reads, with the quote attributed to Buttigieg. (We couldn’t find a report of Buttigieg saying those exact words attributed to him in the posts. In a July 29 interview on MSNBC, however, Buttigieg did say Vance has “said a lot of things that are weird.”)

The post received more than 13,000 views, according to the platform, and the manipulated image has spread to Instagram.

But the original photo used in the posts comes from a Japanese company that makes a wearable, breast-shaped device that allows a man to feed a baby through a tank containing milk or formula. Images of the product provided by the company have appeared in American media, includingan article that appeared in 2019 on the website Mother after the company showed its device at the annual SXSW festival in Austin that year. The photo shows an unidentified man using the device.

Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, adopted two infants, a boy and a girl, in 2021.

But the photo shared in the social media posts was digitally altered to add Buttigieg’s face.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

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Dentsu. “A desire to create commonplace products led to an innovative device that lets a father nurse and put his baby to sleep.” 1 Jul 2019.

Feher, Erin. “A New Device Lets Dads Breastfeed Their Babies.” Mother. 1 Apr 2019.

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Lebowitz, Megan and Vaughn Hillyard. “Trump leans into divisive rhetoric in first rally since assassination attempt.” NBC News. 20 Jul 2024.

MSNBC. “Pete Buttigieg blasts JD Vance’s ‘strange worldview’ and bizarre GOP agenda.” YouTube.com. 29 Jul 2024.

Tasolides, Justin. “‘They’re the weird ones’: Trump attempts to hit back on ‘weird’ attack from Democrats.” Spectrum News NY1. 9 Aug 2024.

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In introducing her pick for vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris has prominently touted Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. Now, however, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance and the Trump campaign are attacking Walz on his military record, accusing the Minnesota governor of “stolen valor.”

We’ll sort through the facts surrounding the three main attacks on Walz’s military record and let readers decide their merit. The claims include:

• Vance claimed that Walz “dropped out” of the National Guard when he learned his battalion was slated to be deployed to Iraq. Walz retired to focus on a run for Congress two months before his unit got official word of impending deployment, though the possibility had been rumored for months.
• Vance also accused Walz of having once claimed to have served in combat, when he did not. While advocating a ban on assault-style weapons, Walz said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Update, Aug. 12: The Harris campaign says that Walz “misspoke.”
• The Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for misrepresenting his military rank in campaign materials. The Harris campaign website salutes Walz for “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.” Walz did rise to that rank, but he retired as a master sergeant because he had not completed the requirements of a command sergeant major.

A native of West Point, Nebraska, Walz joined the Nebraska Army National Guard in April 1981, two days after his 17th birthday. When Walz and his wife moved to Minnesota in 1996, he transferred to the Minnesota National Guard, where he served in 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery.

“While serving in Minnesota, his military occupational specialties were 13B – a cannon crewmember who operates and maintains cannons and 13Z -field artillery senior sergeant,” according to a statement released by Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer.

According to MPR News, Walz suffered some hearing impairment related to exposure to cannon booms during training over the years, and he underwent some corrective surgery to address it.

On Aug. 3, 2003, “Walz mobilized with the Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery … to support Operation Enduring Freedom. The battalion supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey. Governor Walz was stationed at Vicenza, Italy, during his deployment,” Augé stated. The deployment lasted about eight months.

“For 24 years I proudly wore the uniform of this nation,” Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia where he was announced as Harris’ running mate on Aug. 6. “The National Guard gave me purpose. It gave me the strength of a shared commitment to something greater than ourselves.”

Walz’s Retirement from the National GuardIn recent years, however, several of his fellow guard members have taken issue with the timing of Walz’s retirement from the National Guard in May 2005, claiming he left to avoid a deployment to Iraq.

Vance, who served a four-year active duty enlistment in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent, serving in Iraq for six months in 2005, advanced that argument at a campaign event on Aug. 7.

“When the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance said. “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with. I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

In early 2005, Walz, then a high school geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, decided to run for public office. In a 2009 interview Walz provided as part of the Library of Congress’ veterans oral history project, Walz said he made the decision to retire from the National Guard to “focus full time” on a run for the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District (which he ultimately won in 2006). Walz said he was “really concerned” about trying to seek public office and serve in the National Guard at the same time without running afoul of the Hatch Act, which limits political speech by federal employees, including members of the National Guard.

Federal Election Commission records show that Walz filed to run for Congress on Feb. 10, 2005.

On March 20, 2005, Walz’s campaign put out a press release titled “Walz Still Planning to Run for Congress Despite Possible Call to Duty in Iraq.”

Three days prior, the release said, “the National Guard Public Affairs Office announced a possible partial mobilization of roughly 2,000 troops from the Minnesota National Guard. … The announcement from the National Guard PAO specified that all or a portion of Walz’s battalion could be mobilized to serve in Iraq within the next two years.”

According to the release, “When asked about his possible deployment to Iraq Walz said, ‘I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilization and I am unable to comment further on specifics of the deployment.’ Although his tour of duty in Iraq might coincide with his campaign for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional seat, Walz is determined to stay in the race. ‘As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq.'”

On March 23, 2005, the Pipestone County Star reported, “Detachments of the Minnesota National Guard have been ‘alerted’ of possible deployment to Iraq in mid-to-late 2006.”

“Major Kevin Olson of the Minnesota National Guard said a brigade-sized contingent of soldiers could be expected to be called to Iraq, but he was not, at this time, aware of which batteries would be called,” the story said. “All soldiers in the First Brigade combat team of the 34th Division, Minnesota National Guard, could be eligible for call-up. ‘We don’t know yet what the force is like’ he said. ‘It’s too early to speculate, if the (soldiers) do go.’

“He added: ‘We will have a major announcement if and when the alert order moves ahead.’”

ABC News spoke to Joseph Eustice, a retired command sergeant major who served with Walz, and he told the news organization this week that “he remembers Walz struggling with the timing of wanting to serve as a lawmaker but also avoiding asking for a deferment so he could do so.”

“He had a window of time,” Eustice told ABC News. “He had to decide. And in his deciding, we were not on notice to be deployed. There were rumors. There were lots of rumors, and we didn’t know where we were going until it was later that, early summer, I believe.”

Al Bonnifield, who served under Walz, also recalled Walz agonizing over the decision.

“It was a very long conversation behind closed doors,” Bonnifield told the Washington Post this week. “He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time.”

In 2018, Bonnifield told MPR News that Walz worried in early 2005, “Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t. He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”

But not all of Walz’s fellow Guard members felt that way.

In a paid letter to the West Central Tribune in Minnesota in November 2018, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr — both retired command sergeants major in the Minnesota National Guard — wrote, “On May 16th, 2005 he [Walz] quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have.”

“For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening,” they wrote. “When the nation called, he quit.”

Walz retired on May 16, 2005. Walz’s brigade received alert orders for mobilization on July 14, 2005, according to the National Guard and MPR News. The official mobilization report came the following month, and the unit mobilized and trained through the fall. It was finally deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2006.

The unit was originally scheduled to return in February 2007, but its tour was extended four months as part of President George W. Bush’s “surge” strategy, the National Guard reported. In all, the soldiers were mobilized for 22 months.

Responding to Vance’s claim that Walz retired to avoid deploying to Iraq, the Harris-Walz campaign released a statement saying, “After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform – and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”

Walz on Carrying a Weapon ‘in War’Vance also called Walz “dishonest” for a claim that Walz made in 2018 while speaking to a group about gun control.

“He made this interesting comment that the Kamala Harris campaign put out there,” Vance said, referring to a video of Walz that the Harris campaign posted to X on Aug. 6. “He said, ‘We shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets.’ Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone.”

In the video, Walz, who was campaigning for governor at the time, talked about pushing back on the National Rifle Association and said: “I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. … I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] research. We can make sure we don’t have reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

But, as Vance indicated, there is no evidence that Walz carried a weapon “in war.”

Update, Aug. 12: In an Aug. 10 statement to CNN, the Harris campaign told CNN that Walz “misspoke.”

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in the statement. “He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them.”

As we said, Augé, in her statement, said Walz’s battalion deployed “to support Operation Enduring Freedom” on Aug. 3, 2003, and “supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey.” During his deployment, Walz was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, and he returned to Minnesota in April 2004, Augé said. There was no mention of Walz serving in Afghanistan, Iraq or another combat zone.

In the 2009 interview for the veterans history project, Walz said he and members of his battalion initially thought they would “shoot artillery in Afghanistan,” as they had trained to do. That didn’t happen, he said, explaining that his group ended up helping with security and training while stationed at an Army base in Vicenza.

“I think in the beginning, many of my troops were disappointed,” Walz said in the interview. “I think they felt a little guilty, many of them, that they weren’t in the fight up front as this was happening.”

In an Aug. 8 statement addressing his claim about carrying weapons “in war,” the Harris campaign noted that Walz, whose military occupational specialties included field artillery senior sergeant, “fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times” in his 24 years of service.

Walz’s National Guard RankThe Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for saying “in campaign materials that he is a former ‘Command Sergeant Major’ in the Army National Guard despite not completing the requirements to hold the rank into retirement.”

Walz’s biography on the Harris campaign website correctly says that the governor “served for 24 years” in the National Guard, “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.”

Walz’s official biography on the Minnesota state website goes further, referring to the governor as “Command Sergeant Major Walz.”

“After 24 years in the Army National Guard, Command Sergeant Major Walz retired from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005,” the state website says.

Walz did serve as command sergeant major, but Walz did not complete the requirements to retire with the rank of command sergeant, Augé told us in an email.

“He held multiple positions within field artillery such as firing battery chief, operations sergeant, first sergeant, and culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion,” Augé said. “He retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy.”

This isn’t the first time that Walz’s National Guard rank has come up in a campaign.

In their 2018 paid letter to the West Central Tribune, when Walz was running for governor, the two Minnesota National Guard retired command sergeants major who criticized Walz for retiring before the Iraq deployment also wrote: “Yes, he served at that rank, but was never qualified at that rank, and will receive retirement benefits at one rank below. You be the judge.”

Correction, Aug. 9: We mistakenly said a 2007 “surge” strategy in Iraq occurred under President Barack Obama. It was President George W. Bush.

Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt was an undergraduate intern at FactCheck.org from 2010 to 2011.

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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 MedicareWalz 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.

CrimeWalz 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 BanWalz 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 ActHarris 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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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick TakeVice President Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with powerful California politician Willie Brown in the 1990s. But claims on social media that she broke up his marriage misrepresent the facts. Brown had separated from his wife years before he and Harris had dated.

Full StoryFalse and misleading claims targeting Vice President Kamala Harris intensified as she drew closer to formally becoming the Democratic nominee for president on Aug. 5.

We’ve written about the false narrative that Harris only recently began identifying as Black.

Another viral claim circulating on social media rehashes old rumors about Harris’ relationship with the influential California Democrat Willie Brown in the 1990s while Harris was working as an assistant district attorney. These posts misleadingly claimed that Harris “started her career” by sleeping with a married man or that she “stole a black womans husband.”

Here is what we know about Harris’ relationship with Brown.

Harris was 29 in March 1994 when a San Francisco Chronicle columnist described her as Brown’s “new steady,” going on to say that she was “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.” At the time, Brown, who was then 60 years old and speaker of the California State Assembly, had been estranged from his wife for more than a decade.

As speaker, Brown appointed Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission later that year, which provides the basis for claims that Brown helped Harris’ career that sometimes accompany the claims suggesting that she broke up his marriage. (Brown left the Assembly in 1995, and became mayor of San Francisco until 2004.)

Brown had married Blanche Vitero in 1957 and the couple had three children. But by the early 1970s, Brown was frequently seen around town with young women and his marriage collapsed, according to a 1996 biography written by James Richardson, a senior writer at the Sacramento Bee. It was at this time that Brown got the first of a “series of apartments” of his own, while his “relationship with his wife settled into a mutually beneficial friendship,” Richardson wrote.

A 1984 profile published in the New York Times described Brown as an “escort for attractive women” and “good friend of his former wife,” from whom it says he “separated amicably” two years earlier.

“I don’t know whether the marriage failed and the relationship survived or vice versa, but something very valuable lasted,” Brown wrote in his own 2008 autobiography, explaining that he and his wife had celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2007, although they hadn’t lived together in 25 years.

“Although Blanche and I led very different lives, there was never a breakup,” he wrote. “The two of us kept the family circle going. We’ve always been in each other’s lives. We’re friends.”

Indeed, as we said, Brown had developed a reputation for dating around and, in 2001, he welcomed a fourth child, a daughter, with his then-girlfriend Carolyn Carpeneti.

Harris and Brown reportedly ended their relationship by the end of 1995 or the beginning of 1996. But it has come up repeatedly since Harris first sought public office as San Francisco district attorney, which she won in 2003. During that campaign, Harris was trying to distance herself from Brown, telling SF Weekly, “His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing.” She called him an “albatross hanging around my neck.”

But, 20 years later, claims about that relationship continue to shadow Harris as she seeks higher office.

Clarification, Aug. 8: We updated this story to better reflect the time frame for when Harris and Brown reportedly ended their relationship.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesKim, Seung Min. “Kamala Harris is now Democratic presidential nominee, will face off against Donald Trump this fall.” Associated Press. 6 Aug 2014.

Britannica.com. Willie Brown — American politician. Updated 5 Aug 2024.

State of California Department of Justice. Kamala D. Harris, 32nd Attorney General. Accessed 6 Aug 2024.

Farley, Robert. “Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black.” FactCheck.org. 1 Aug 2024.

Christopher, Ben. “The real Kamala Harris: What her California years reveal.” CalMatters. 16 Jul 2024.

Morain, Dan. “2 More Brown Associates Get Well-Paid Posts : Government: The Speaker appoints his frequent companion and a longtime friend to state boards as his hold on his own powerful position wanes.” Los Angeles Times. 29 Nov 1994.

Brown, Willie L. “Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times.” Simon & Schuster. 2008.

Richardson, James. “Willie Brown, A Biography.” University of California Press. 1996.

Turner, Wallace. “For A Politician, Power and Riches Go Together.” New York Times. 16 Jun 1984.

Epstein, Edward. “Glad Dad Brown Makes Up With Daly / Newborn has mayor in conciliatory mood.” San Francisco Chronicle. 10 Apr 2001.

Caen, Herb. “‘Twas the Day After.” San Francisco Chronicle. 26 Dec 1995.

Byrne, Peter. “Kamala’s Karma.” SF Weekly. 24 Sep 2003.

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Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has launched a new general election ad that falsely labels Vice President Kamala Harris the “border czar” and falsely suggests that 10 million people illegally crossed the southern border on her watch and are still “here.”

As we’ve written before, Harris was specifically tasked with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from three countries in Central America. She was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Also, during the Biden-Harris administration, there have been nearly 7 million apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally through June, according to the most recent figures available from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Another 1.1 million people arrived at legal ports of entry without authorization to enter the U.S. There may have been nearly 2 million who illegally crossed and were not caught.

But data on the initial action taken at the border, available only through March, shows that in about 3 million cases, the encountered individuals were either quickly removed or denied entry.

The Trump campaign released the 30-second ad, titled “I Don’t Understand,” on July 30 and said it “will run across six battleground states.”

Not the ‘Border Czar’The ad begins with a video of Harris dancing while a narrator says, “This is America’s border czar and she’s failed us.” But the claim that Harris is the “border czar” is false.

Not long after taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden appointed Harris to head up the “Root Causes Strategy,” an effort to “improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions” in Central American countries. The strategy included a number of actions designed to “address the root causes of migration” from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, specifically. The synopsis released by the White House said that the strategy would focus on tackling economic insecurity and inequality, confronting corruption, and reducing violence, among other things.

Biden did not put Harris in charge of issues at the border. (Another Trump ad claims that “Biden made Kamala Harris border czar to fix immigration.”)

Harris addressed her role in a June 2021 NBC News interview with Lester Holt in Guatemala. A clip from that interview is featured in the campaign ad embedded above.

“Well, Lester, here’s the thing,” Harris began, as she explained why she had said that migrants should not come to the U.S. illegally. “I’ve been working on this issue for a very long time, and the kind of violence and danger that is associated with that trek, especially when we are talking about from Guatemala through Mexico to the United States. It’s extremely dangerous, and the reason that I am in Guatemala is to address the reasons people leave home, flee. … They want to stay. They don’t want to leave, but they need opportunity, they need assistance, they need support and we have the ability to give them that.”

Later in the interview, when Holt pressed her about not having gone to the U.S.-Mexico border by that point in her vice presidency, Harris said that she believed the border and the underlying reasons for illegal immigration are both important.

“I care about what’s happening at the border,” she said. “I’m in Guatemala, because my focus is dealing with the root causes of migration. There may be some who think that that is not important, but it is my firm belief that if we care about what’s happening at the border, we’d better care about the root causes and address them. And so that’s what I’m doing.”

About two weeks after that interview, Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did travel to part of the border in El Paso, Texas. In remarks made at a press conference during the trip, Mayorkas talked about the administration’s plan to address a surge in migration and who would take on what role.

“The vice president is leading our nation’s effort to tackle the root causes of migration — why people leave their home in the first place,” Mayorkas said. “I and my colleagues in the Cabinet have been directed to execute the rest of the plan: to build safe and legal pathways for people who qualify for humanitarian relief under the laws our Congress has passed; to rebuild our country’s asylum system that was dismantled under the prior administration; in an orderly and just way, to remove those whose claims for relief do not qualify.”

He went on to say that he and DHS had the “responsibility to secure the border.”

Border CrossingsThe ad also gives the false impression that, during the Biden-Harris administration, 10 million people entered the U.S. illegally and remain in the country.

A graphic on screen reads, “over 10 million illegal border crossings.” Meanwhile, the ad’s narrator says, “under Harris, over 10 million illegally here.”

But all the people who were encountered at the border are not still here; millions were removed or denied entry, almost immediately.

From February 2021 to June 2024, there were nearly 7 million apprehensions of people crossing the border illegally, according to CBP data. There were another 1.1 million instances of individuals who showed up at a legal port of entry but were “inadmissible,” meaning they did not have legal permission to enter the country. Also, based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, according to DHS, there were an estimated nearly 2 million “gotaways” who illegally entered the country and avoided being detected by authorities.

Adding those all together gets to 10 million border crossings, although each one does not necessarily represent a different person because some people may have been encountered more than once due to repeated attempts to gain entry into the country.

However, for the people encountered at the border, many of them did not get to stay.

We have comprehensive data on what happened after initial border evaluations only through March. For the nearly three-year period of February 2021 through March 2024, there were about 3 million removals or repatriations by CBP, according to monthly figures from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics.

Another 3.3 million were released into the country with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole. There were also 414,900 transfers to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for unaccompanied children who cross the border without adult family members or legal guardians, and about 910,000 transfers to ICE. The transfers to ICE include those who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE. So, we don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice and how many are still in ICE custody.

Also, these figures are for the initial dispositions of migrants encountered at the border, as we’ve explained before. Some of the people released into the country still may be removed later, if they do not qualify for asylum or another form of protection from removal. That would further subtract from the “10 million” the ad falsely suggests have stayed in the country.

Fentanyl and ISISThe ad also says that there have been 250,000 deaths from fentanyl “on Harris’s watch,” suggesting that those deaths are connected to illegal immigration. Then the ad goes on to say, “ISIS now here,” citing a news story about men who entered the U.S. through the southern border and were later arrested because they may be connected to the Islamic State terrorist group.

First, there is not an exact count of deaths from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is lethal in small doses, a spokesperson for the National Center for Health Statistics told us in an email.

The NCHS does report overdose deaths from synthetic opioids other than methadone, a category that includes deaths due to fentanyl or fentanyl analogs. In 2021 and 2022, there were a combined 144,439 overdose deaths from synthetic opioids other than methadone, according to finalized NCHS data based on death certificates for U.S. residents. There were an additional 74,702 estimated deaths from the use of those drugs in 2023, according to NCHS provisional data released in May.

Although not official, that’s a total of 219,141 overdose deaths, which could exceed 250,000 once the final figures for 2023 and 2024 are known.

Overdose deaths from non-methadone synthetic opioids have been rising for several years, including during the Trump administration. The estimated deaths for 2021-2023 are about 44% higher than the 152,676 deaths over Trump’s four years as president, and the total under Trump had increased about 306% from the 37,642 deaths during Barack Obama’s last four years as president.

Furthermore, as we’ve written, the vast majority of fentanyl is smuggled into the U.S. by American citizens coming through legal ports of entry — not people illegally crossing the border between those ports.

As for ISIS being “here,” according to the ad, that’s based on a June 14 CNN article about eight Tajikistan nationals who entered the U.S. through the southern border seeking asylum. They were screened by border officials and allowed into the country, but they were later arrested for potentially having ties with the terrorist group.

CNN reported: “Though there is no hard evidence indicating they were sent to the US as part of a terror plot, at least some of the Tajik nationals had expressed extremist rhetoric in their communications, either on social media or in direct private communications that US intelligence was able to monitor, three officials said.”

The arrests “heightened concerns among national security officials that a dangerous affiliate of the now-splintered terror group could potentially carry out an attack on US soil,” CNN said.

But the story noted that the men would be held in federal custody on immigration charges until they are deported after a counterterrorism investigation is completed.

It’s not clear if all eight men entered the country illegally, as at least one of them reportedly used the CBP One app, which launched in January 2023 to accept appointments for migrants who are in Mexico and want to request asylum or parole in the U.S.

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In defending his “childless cat lady” comments, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance wrongly claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is calling for an end to the child tax credit.” He also incorrectly claimed that Harris said “it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”

Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has a record of working to expand the child tax credit, which reduces taxes for families with dependent children. Her tiebreaking vote in the Senate was essential to moving forward legislation in 2021 that temporarily increased the child tax credit and also made it fully refundable, meaning that poor people who don’t owe taxes can still get the money. She has since supported making those changes permanent.

During a college tour last year, Harris said that young climate leaders had spoken to her about “climate change anxiety,” which included their concerns about having kids in the future. But she did not endorse the notion of not having children because of environmental concerns. Rather, she mentioned several ways in which the Biden administration was addressing climate change.

Vance’s claims came in a July 28 interview on Fox News, in which he addressed his “childless cat lady” remarks from 2021 that have now gone viral. In those comments, Vance, then running for a Senate seat in Ohio, referred to prominent Democrats, including Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and argued that the country would be better off being led by people with children.

Harris has no biological children, but is a stepmother of two; Buttigieg adopted twins soon after Vance’s remarks in 2021.

In Vance’s July 28 interview, host Trey Gowdy asked him whether childless people can still be invested in America’s future. Vance, who is a father of three, responded, “of course,” and accused Democrats of blowing his remarks “out of proportion.”

“And if you look at what the American people are most concerned about, Trey, it’s not an out of context quip that I made three years ago. It’s the fact that Kamala Harris, the border czar, opened the American southern border,” he said, using a moniker for Harris that, as we’ve explained, is inaccurate. “It’s the fact that the Democratic Party has become explicitly anti-family in some of their policies. In fact, you just heard Kamala Harris in a surfaced clip recently talk about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety. So, really, what I’m trying to get at here, Trey, is that it’s important for us to be pro-family as a country.”

“I think a lot of parents and a lot of non-parents look at our public policy over the last four years and ask, how did we get to this place?” he continued. “How did we get to a place where Kamala Harris is calling for an end to the child tax credit?”

Vance made the same child tax credit claim in an interview with Megyn Kelly on July 26: “Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

False Tax Credit ClaimWe found no evidence of Harris stating she is opposed to the child tax credit and would like to end it. As we said, she has a long history of supporting the child tax credit and has worked to expand it.

When we asked about Vance’s claim, the Trump campaign pointed us to a July 26 tweet from a Harris campaign staffer.

The tweet, from the Harris campaign’s rapid response director, Ammar Moussa, shares an ABC News story about remarks Vance made on a podcast in 2021, in which he discussed lowering tax rates for people with kids.

“JD Vance’s attacks on childless Americans is even vile,” it reads. “He called for HIGHER taxes on those without children.”

A Vance spokesperson told ABC News, “The policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support.”

The child tax credit does lower the effective tax rate for people with kids. But it’s always framed as a benefit to those with children, not as a penalty to those without. In his podcast remarks, Vance did not mention the child tax credit. Instead, he spoke of future policy changes that would “reward” some and “punish” others.

“We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” Vance said during a discussion with conservative podcast host Charlie Kirk about how to make “unthinkable” Republican ideas popular and ultimately put them into practice with policy. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”

The child tax credit began in 1997 as a $400 credit per child under 17 years old and has a history of bipartisan support. Over the years, the amount has increased and eligibility has changed.

Currently, due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which will expire in 2025, the full credit is $2,000 per child under 17, with $1,400 of the credit being refundable. Households eligible for the full credit are single filers making $200,000 a year or less and joint filers making $400,000 a year or less.

For 2021, the American Rescue Plan, which Harris helped pass, temporarily increased the child tax credit to $3,600 per child under age 6 and $3,000 for older kids under age 18. The credit was fully refundable, which helped poorer people who do not make enough money to be eligible for the full credit. Half of the credit could be received in advance in monthly installments.

The Census Bureau estimated that the 2021 child tax credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty, with the expansion accounting for 2.1 million of those children.

Harris has been a vocal supporter of the expanded child tax credit and has advocated for it to become permanent. As a senator, she also co-sponsored bills that increased the credit and made it fully refundable.

Just days prior to Vance’s claim, Harris touted the success of the 2021 child tax credit. “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, which is why I helped pass the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half — and cut Black child poverty even more,” she said in a July 24 speech before a Black sorority.

A bipartisan bill expanding the child tax credit failed to advance in the Senate on Aug. 1. The bill had overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans when it passed the House in January. Vance, who voted against the American Rescue Plan, which was a $1.9 trillion bill that included many provisions besides the child tax credit expansion, was not present for the vote.

Vance has not said if he supports the bill, and his campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond when we asked. Earlier this year, Vance said the bill was “by and large good policy,” but he also considered some Republican objections “reasonable.” Speaking to NBC News about the missed vote, Vance said that “unless we get a better president, there’s almost nothing that Congress can pass that is really going to improve the lives of the American people.” He also called the child tax credit “a great thing,” and said he supported expanding it. Former President Donald Trump has called for, and the GOP platform supports, making the 2017 tax cuts, which doubled the child tax credit, permanent.

Distortion of Harris’ Climate Change CommentAs part of casting Democratic policies as “anti-family,” Vance incorrectly claimed that Harris, in a recently surfaced clip, talked “about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”

A 15-second video clip of Harris mentioning “climate change anxiety” has indeed recently been spreading online.

Donald Trump Jr. shared the clip on X on July 27, falsely claiming Harris was suggesting “young people should not have children due to climate change.” Vance retweeted Trump’s post the same day, adding: “It’s almost like these people don’t want young people starting families or something. Really weird stuff.”

But in the clip, Harris is simply explaining what she had heard from young people — not agreeing that people shouldn’t have kids.

Harris was speaking at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania on her “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour” last year, and she brought up climate concerns after praising a “record turnout in 2020 of young voters” who voted for her and President Joe Biden.

Harris, Sept. 19, 2023: Because young people — and, in particular, young voters — said, “We are going to direct and decide what is the direction of our country” … Because young people said, “We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis” — you know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called “climate anxiety.”

Right? Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?

But because people voted, we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like environmental justice.

Later, she mentioned climate change again, emphasizing that there are things that can be done to mitigate the problem.

“The climate crisis is a threat to us as a species and this planet that God gave us to live on,” she said. “And we need to take this issue seriously and understand that the clock is not just ticking, it is banging. And on this issue, there are things we as human beings can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to help communities deal with extreme climate experiences so that they are not facing peril.”

As we have written before, scientists do not think the human species as a whole is at risk of dying out because of climate change, but the warming of the planet from heat-trapping pollution is a real problem that poses risks to many people and ecosystems. Taking aggressive action sooner rather than later will make it easier to address climate change in the future.

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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has given children’s health and the “chronic disease epidemic” a prominent role in his campaign. We’ve written about some of Kennedy’s claims on chronic disease in the past, particularly as they pertain to the debunked link between autism and childhood vaccines.

But to what degree are Kennedy’s other claims on chronic disease grounded in science?

Recently, Kennedy repeatedly has said chronic disease in children has dramatically increased, while using statistics with unclear sources and putting forward unsupported narratives on the causes. Diagnoses of a variety of chronic conditions in children have increased in recent decades, but likely not to the extent that Kennedy claims or for the reasons he gives.

“When John F. Kennedy was president, 6% of American kids had a chronic health condition,” reads a page on Kennedy’s campaign website detailing his intention to “end the chronic disease epidemic” in the U.S. “Today it is 60%. Rates of autoimmune disease, diabetes, ADD and ADHD, autism, obesity, asthma, food allergies, and other chronic health conditions have been skyrocketing.”

Kennedy recently has repeated the latter statistic on the campaign trail. In a June 4 interview with USA Today, he listed “ending this chronic disease that is now debilitating 60% of our kids” as one of the “issues at the core of people’s concerns about what’s happening to America today.” He told the paper he had a plan for ending the chronic disease epidemic “overnight.”

On June 12, at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Kennedy spoke of a rise in diabetes and autism in children, before saying, “An entire generation, 60% of these kids — and that’s a conservative estimate — now have autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, obesity, peanut allergies, food allergies.”

He went on to say that the cause “has to be” an “environmental toxin” while claiming that “NIH will not identify which exposures are contributing or causing this,” referring to the National Institutes of Health. “Once you do that, once NIH does that, you can end them,” he said.

Certain chronic health conditions — including obesity, both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism and food allergies — have been increasingly reported in American children in recent decades. Incidence of asthma has increased globally in the past half century but recently seems to have leveled off in the U.S. and some other countries.

However, there’s no good way to track chronic conditions in U.S. kids over the more than 60-year span Kennedy refers to, given changes in how chronic conditions are diagnosed, tracked and defined. Nor is there a single, standard definition today of what counts as a chronic condition.

We reached out to the Kennedy campaign to ask for the source of his statistics but did not receive an answer. A possible source of Kennedy’s reference to the current statistic is a 2011 study we covered in a previous article, showing that 43% of U.S. kids had at least one of a list of 20 chronic conditions, as reported by their parents in a 2007 survey. This number rose to 54% under a very broad definition that included those who were overweight, obese or were “at risk” for developmental delay. Children’s Health Defense, an organization founded by Kennedy that spreads anti-vaccine content, has cited the 54% figure, and Kennedy uses the same percentage in a video included at the bottom of his campaign’s chronic disease page.

But experts we consulted considered Kennedy’s 60% statistic to likely be an overestimate — and not a “conservative estimate,” as he claims, nor evidence that chronic conditions are “debilitating” a majority of children. Measures of chronic disease that only count children with conditions that limit their activity or require special support have yielded far lower estimates. And as we have previously written, there is evidence that chronic conditions in children are not necessarily permanent.

Paul Newacheck, a professor emeritus who studied children’s health policy at the University of California, San Francisco for multiple decades, said it was “unrealistic” to claim that 60% of U.S. children have chronic health conditions. “The big growth areas are obesity and mental/behavioral conditions,” Newacheck told us via email. “But they don’t add up to 60% of kids.”

Chronic disease can have different definitions, Dr. James Perrin, who studies chronic health conditions in children and adolescents at Harvard Medical School and MassGeneral Hospital for Children, told us via email. It is difficult to place an upper limit on the chronic disease rate, he said, given that one could include very mild conditions, such as relatively minor allergies. But “most analysts,” he said, would say there have been “really huge increases, but not to the level that Mr Kennedy claims.”

In his focus on an “environmental toxin,” Kennedy also provides an incomplete picture of the causes and suspected causes of these trends.

“The patterns and risk factors do really vary by disease,” said Stephanie Eick, an environmental epidemiologist at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. For instance, obesity and Type 2 diabetes come with different risk factors than autism, she said, and there have also been improvements over time in diagnosis that mean fewer children with certain chronic conditions are now being missed.

Eick added via email that Kennedy’s promises of ending the chronic disease epidemic overnight appear overblown. “In my opinion, I do not think it’s possible to stop the chronic disease epidemic overnight,” she said.

And she said the NIH does support research into environmental risk factors for chronic disease, including chemical exposures. For example, the NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program is looking at “the effects of early environmental influences—including, for example, biological, behavioral, psychological, chemical, physical, and social factors—on child health and development,” an NIH spokesperson told us via email.

Kennedy is not alone in mentioning chronic disease as part of his agenda. In video from his website — posted over a year ago but shared widely on social media in July — former President Donald Trump discusses “an unexplained and alarming growth in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children” — although, as we’ve said, the growth in diagnoses of chronic conditions is not entirely unexplained and unstudied.

Trump vows to “establish a special presidential commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by big pharma” to look into the problem, implying without clear evidence or explanation that pharmaceutical companies’ influence is responsible for impeding progress on childhood chronic disease.

Kennedy took note, writing on X, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and that “talk is cheap.”

Recently, Kennedy has indicated a desire to take his chronic disease agenda to a Trump White House, reportedly discussing a deal in which he might endorse Trump in return for a role involving health issues. In a leaked July 14 phone call between the two men, Trump repeated falsehoods about vaccination and health effects on children.

Unsupported Statistics on Childhood Chronic DiseaseThe source of Kennedy’s statistical claim — that chronic disease in U.S. children increased from 6% during his uncle’s presidency to 60% today — is unclear.

The Kennedy campaign website links to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page that states that “more than 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition,” citing data from the 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health.

Christina Bethell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us in an email that she did not know of data that supports Kennedy’s claim of an increase in the chronic condition rate from 6% to 60%.

Photo by AnnaStills / stock.adobe.comIt’s “all about” how chronic conditions are “defined and measured and I am not aware of any comparable data between 1960 and today,” Bethell said. Bethell is director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, founded to support the use of data from the NSCH, versions of which have been conducted since 2003. The NSCH, a survey carried out by the federal government, is the source of the 54% figure cited by Children’s Health Defense.

The most recent NSCH data, from 2022, show that per parent reports, around 41% of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions,” when asked about 25 health conditions.

These conditions encompass those called out by Kennedy on his website, as well as multiple others. These include some very specific diagnoses, such as cystic fibrosis or Down syndrome, as well as much broader categories such as allergies.

Obesity is the only condition listed by Kennedy as “skyrocketing” that is not included in the NSCH’s 25-condition list. However, “adding in obesity would not increase the chronic condition list to 60%–many with obesity also have another chronic condition among those that are asked about,” Bethell said.

Bethell was a co-author of the 2011 paper — based on 2007 NSCH data — that is the source of the notion that 54% of U.S. children have chronic conditions. As we explained, this was based on a broad definition that included obesity, overweight and “risk for developmental delay.”Bethell said that adding in both overweight and obesity to the current 25-condition list would raise the health condition rate to around 65% for adolescents (12 to 17 years old), but that it would remain “much lower for young children” and would not rise to 60% for children overall. The “risk for developmental delay” item is no longer part of the NSCH, she said.

The expanded definition of chronic conditions was included in the 2011 paper “just to make a point that the majority of children have some high risk or an actual condition,” Bethell said. “This is still true in the US. My point back then was that most children have needs that point to the importance of prevention, health promotion and integrated health and social services to support them.”

Other ways of measuring chronic conditions give more conservative estimates.

One measure, which is part of the NSCH, seeks to identify children with special health care needs. The 2022 data indicate that around 21% of U.S. children have an ongoing health condition that requires above-routine services.

To give a sense of the rate of chronic conditions dating back to when John F. Kennedy was president, Perrin cited data from the National Health Interview Survey, which for many years asked parents about activity limitations in their children caused by chronic conditions — a relatively narrow definition capturing children whose conditions affected their day-to-day lives.

The NHIS data indicate that activity-limiting chronic conditions in children rose over the decades, from around 2% in the early 1960s to 4% in 1981, 7% in 1992 through 1994 and 8% in 2010. The latest available data, from the 2018 NHIS, suggest that 8% of children and 11% of adolescents had activity-limiting chronic conditions. In 2019, the NHIS questionnaire was redesigned, and so the most recent versions lack “a comparable estimate,” a CDC spokesperson told us in an email.

Chronic Conditions Have Increased for Various ReasonsKennedy often reduces the causes or suspected causes of chronic disease to a list of specific chemicals and other exposures, implying that the solution is simply eliminating these exposures. But while some of these substances potentially play a partial role in certain diseases, experts painted a different and more complex picture of the causes of childhood chronic disease.

In his Nixon library speech, for instance, Kennedy spoke about the rise in diabetes and autism in children, before continuing: “We know what’s causing it. It has to be an environmental toxin. Genes don’t cause epidemics.” As we’ve discussed, he went on to list autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, obesity and food allergies as affecting 60% of American children.

“All this happened beginning around 1989,” Kennedy continued. “We know what the suspects are. You know, it’s glyphosate [an herbicide], it’s neonicotinoids [pesticides], it’s atrazine [an herbicide], PFOA flame retardants, cell phone radiation, high fructose corn syrup.”

In an interview with Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, Kennedy mentioned a similar list of substances as causes for chronic disease. “It’s not rocket science,” Kennedy said in a podcast episode posted July 9. “It’s glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup. It’s neonicotinoid pesticides, it’s atrazine, it’s PFOAs — the forever chemicals that are in all of our child’s pajamas, they’re in our furniture.” He went on to mention high fructose corn syrup and “a thousand ingredients in our food that are banned in Europe,” concluding that “we’re mass poisoning an entire generation of kids.”

Some exposures Kennedy mentions may be linked to specific conditions under specific circumstances, but they do not tell the full story of why diagnoses of childhood chronic conditions have increased. And cell phone radiation has not been linked to health effects, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Bethell said there are risks “we know are HIGHLY associated with having health conditions – social risks (poverty, food insecurity, discrimination, unsafe neighborhoods) and family/relational risks (adverse childhood experiences, parents that are mentally unwell and not coping well, etc).”

Eick, the environmental epidemiologist from Emory, emphasized the variety of environmental factors that can be risk factors for disease — including specific chemical exposures but also changes in physical activity, diet, poverty, and changes in diagnosis. “I do think that there is a role for chemicals in some of these things, however I think that chemicals are really not the only risk factors here and it’s really in combination with a lot of these other things,” she said.

For instance, obesity in U.S. children has increased “dramatically” since the Kennedy presidency, from around 4% in the 1960s to around 20% in 2020, Izzuddin Aris, an epidemiologist at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, told us in an email. The increase has been especially pronounced in school-aged children, he said.

“The causes of childhood obesity are complex and multifactorial, including social, behavioral, environmental, and genetic factors operating across the life course,” he said.

These causes could include some environmental exposures Kennedy mentions. For example, research from Aris and others has indicated a link between prenatal exposure to PFAS — including PFOA — and obesity. But for the most part, there’s little evidence that the specific culprits Kennedy highlights are driving an increase in childhood chronic disease.

Dietary components can also play a role in obesity. For instance, Aris and colleagues have done work linking obesity risk in children to overconsumption of sugar-sweetened beverages or non-nutritive sweeteners during pregnancy. Eick mentioned more generally the role of eating more processed foods and reduced physical activity, as children spend more time on phones and tablets and less time outside.

Aris’s work has also shown evidence linking obesity in children to “residence in disadvantaged neighborhood environments that lack access to health care services or have higher rates of crime and unemployment.”

“However, I am not aware of any evidence that has linked glyphosate, neonicotinoids, atrazine, or cell phone radiation with child obesity risk,” he said.

Other environmental influences may be implicated in food allergy. One factor is timing of early-life dietary exposures. For many years, experts told parents to avoid feeding their babies peanuts and other potential allergens in order to prevent food allergy. Then evidence emerged that delaying exposure to peanuts and other foods could lead to an increased risk of food allergy. Today, parents are recommended to introduce peanuts and other potentially allergenic foods starting at four to six months of age, when other foods are introduced.

Understanding the rise in mental and behavioral conditions involves still other considerations, Newacheck said. “Clearly some is due to greater awareness on the part of parents, health care providers and schools, such that we are counting conditions that were always present but previously underreported,” he said. “Some would argue the increased availability of public funds/programs for enhanced services over the past half century has contributed to rising numbers of cases. Some of the increase is likely to be environmental or genetic,” he continued, meaning that changing environmental factors could interact with genes to cause disease. “But how much isn’t clear.”

For instance, as we have written previously, there has been an increase in recorded cases of autism in younger generations. But changes in awareness and diagnosis of the condition have played a major role in its growing prevalence.

Known autism risk factors, such as an increase in children born to older parents and an increase in children born with complications who survive, have likely contributed to a small increase in autism.

A CDC spokesperson told us via email that an increase in ADHD awareness “over the past few decades,” especially in girls, also has contributed to a rise in the condition in children and adolescents.

There are some possible environmental exposures associated with neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD.

For example, Eick said, there’s some evidence “pesticides are risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, so things like ADHD, but again, I think that’s really only in populations that have extremely high levels of exposure,” adding that this is not “a major risk factor on the population level.”

Researchers also expressed confusion about Kennedy’s reference to the year 1989 as a turning point in the chronic disease epidemic. “I can’t think of anything special about the year 1989,” Eick said.

Aris said, “there is nothing special about the year 1989 in relation to child obesity.”

In other contexts, Kennedy has more specifically referred to 1989 as a turning point in the prevalence of autism. But as we’ve discussed previously, the idea that this year marked the beginning of the “autism epidemic” is also unsupported by the data.

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Quick TakeNetflix Co-founder and Executive Chairman Reed Hastings reportedly made a $7 million donation to a super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But some social media posts inaccurately claim that “Netflix just donated 7 million to Kamala.” The contribution was from Hastings, not the company.

Full StoryReed Hastings, the co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix, reportedly told technology news publication the Information that he contributed $7 million in July to a super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

But a viral social media post calling for the streaming service’s customers to cancel their subscriptions suggests that the company donated to Harris.

“Netflix just donated 7 million to Kamala. Bye bye Netflix! They need to feel this people! Cancel today!” reads the post that has been shared by numerous accounts on multiple platforms.

That post is inaccurate. The news article — which requires a subscription to read in full — said Hastings personally donated to a group working to elect Harris. There is a difference.

Hastings speaking at TED2018 from Vancouver in April 2018. Photo by Ryan Lash/TED via Flickr.Corporations like Netflix are generally prohibited from directly donating to federal candidates, according to the Federal Election Commission.

“Campaigns may not accept contributions from the treasury funds of corporations, labor organizations or national banks,” the FEC says on its website. “This prohibition applies to any incorporated organization, including a nonstock corporation, a trade association, an incorporated membership organization and an incorporated cooperative.”

Netflix does have a corporate political action committee, Netflix Inc PAC (FLIXPAC), that is allowed to raise money and make contributions to candidates and other PACs. But it has not given money to a candidate since the 2018 election cycle, when it donated $5,000 to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, its latest FEC filings show. During the 2016 election cycle, it contributed about $30,000, split almost evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates and groups.

If the PAC contributes to federal candidates, it can contribute only thousands of dollars per candidate because of election contribution limits.

No one can donate millions of dollars to a federal candidate’s campaign committee. For example, individual contributions to candidates are limited to $3,300 per election for this election cycle.

Instead, the Information said Hastings donated to the Republican Accountability PAC, an anti-Donald Trump super PAC now trying to increase Harris’ support among conservative voters in swing states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Super PACs cannot donate to a candidate’s campaign, but they “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates,” according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

Hastings, who has long made political donations to Democrats, and a few Republicans, told the publication that $7 million is his largest contribution in support of a single candidate. He said he was encouraged to donate by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and major Democratic donor, who has given at least $6 million this election cycle to the political committee opposing the former president.

The Republican Accountability PAC’s most recent FEC filing submitted in July covers donations only through June 30, so Hastings does not appear on its list of contributors. The group files required financial reports quarterly, so it may be three months before his contribution appears in the FEC database.

We contacted a spokesperson for the Republican Accountability PAC to confirm his July donation, but we have not received a response. A Netflix official also did not reply to an inquiry.

Earlier this month, in a statement to the New York Times, Hastings called on President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign “to allow a vigorous Democratic leader” to go up against Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, in the general election. After Biden exited the race on July 21, and Harris secured enough support from Democratic delegates to become the presumptive nominee on July 22, Hastings posted on X: “Congrats to Kamala Harris — now it is time to win.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBlack, Julia. “Reed Hastings Backs Pro-Kamala Harris PAC with $7 Million Donation.” Theinformation.com. 23 Jul 2024

Republican Voters Against Trump. “$500K ‘Republicans for Kamala Harris’ Campaign Launches in Swing States.” Press release. 25 Jul 2024.

Schleifer, Theodore. “Netflix Co-Founder Becomes One of the Biggest Democratic Donors to Call for Biden to Step Aside.” New York Times. 3 Jul 2024.

U.S. Federal Election Commission. “Who can and can’t contribute.” Accessed 26 Jul 2024.

OpenSecrets. Super PACs. Accessed 26 Jul 2024.

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Quick TakeWhen Vice President Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California in 2014, she announced a program to help young people transitioning out of the criminal justice system. She glibly referred to the 18-24 age group as “stupid,” saying people that age “make really bad decisions.” But social media posts have taken her words out of context.

Full StoryNow that Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, online posts have begun to focus on comments she has made in various settings over the years.

One popular video clip that’s been circulating came from a 2014 speech Harris gave at a symposium hosted by the Ford Foundation. At the time, Harris was California’s attorney general, and she was announcing a new program, “Back on Track,” aimed at reducing recidivism among young, nonviolent offenders.

Harris described it as “a new approach to criminal justice policy.” The program was based, in part, on an initiative she had implemented in 2005 as the district attorney in San Francisco. In explaining that initiative, she pointed out the difference in how young people who go to college are characterized compared with how young people in the criminal justice system are characterized.

“When I was at Howard University,” Harris said, “we were 18 through 24 and you know what we were called? College kids. But when you turn 18 and you’re in the [criminal justice] system, you are considered an adult — period — without any regard to the fact that that is the very phase of life in which we have invested billions of dollars in colleges and universities knowing that is the prime phase of life during which we mold and shape and direct someone to become a productive adult.”

Harris continued, “What’s the other thing we know about this population? And it’s a specific phase of life — remember, age is more than a chronological fact. What else do we know about this population, 18 through 24? They are stupid.” The audience laughed, and Harris continued, “That is why we put them in dormitories and they have a resident assistant! They make really bad decisions.”

She then explained how the San Francisco initiative had worked — bringing in social workers and financial literacy teachers to help direct young offenders who were leaving prison toward jobs as a way to keep them from reoffending.

But social media posts have used clips of Harris’ speech that include only the last paragraph above and highlight the phrase, “They are stupid,” suggesting that she was insulting the intelligence of that age group as a whole.

Not only do those posts take her words out of context, but they also ignore an underlying issue reflected in Harris’ remarks — brain development isn’t complete until around age 24. Young people may continue to need some guidance until then.

“The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s,” according to the National Institute of Mental Health. “The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”

So, Harris may have been a little glib in her 2014 speech. But she was addressing the fact that young people who are in the criminal justice system are still developing, and she was advocating programs that would help them develop responsible skills. The posts circulating online take her words out of context and miss the larger point she was making.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFord Foundation. “California State Attorney General Kamala D. Harris on the importance of prison education.” 8 May 2014.

California Office of the Attorney General. Press release. “Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Announces Los Angeles Recidivism Reduction Pilot Program.” 8 May 2014.

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance. “Back on Track: A Problem-Solving Reentry Court.” Sep 2009.

Sawyer, Susan, et al. “The age of adolescence.” Lancet, Child & Adolescent Health. 17 Jan 2018.

Garner, Andrew. “What’s Going On in the Teenage Brain?” American Academy of Pediatrics. Updated 27 Sep 2023.

National Institute of Mental Health. The Teen Brain: 7 Things to Know. Accessed 25 Jul 2024.

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In his first two solo rallies as the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance took aim at Vice President Kamala Harris. But in several instances, Vance twisted Harris’ words or her record.

• Vance said Harris “supported abolishing ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].” Back in 2018, Harris said elected leaders should “critically reexamine ICE and its role” but she did not call for abolishing the agency and all its functions.
• He said Harris “wanted to defund the police.” Harris talked repeatedly about “reimagining public safety and how we achieve it” but she never advocated slashing or cutting police budgets altogether.
• Vance said Harris had failed as “America’s border czar,” but Harris’ role in the Biden administration was to address the “root causes” of immigration in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
• Vance said Harris “called Joe Biden a racist and then ran with him two months later.” During a Democratic primary debate in 2019, Harris criticized Biden’s position on two race-related issues, but she began her comments, “I do not believe you are a racist.”
• Vance said that Harris “voted to eliminate the filibuster and pass the green new scam.” Harris said in 2019 that she was “prepared to get rid of” the procedural rule to pass the so-called “Green New Deal,” but that nonbinding resolution never received a vote.

In back-to-back solo rallies on July 22, Vance spoke in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, and then in Radford, Virginia. Many of Vance’s attack lines parroted the talking points contained in a National Republican Senatorial Committee memo that paints Harris as “an avowed radical.”

Harris on ICEIn his speech in Virginia, Vance distorted the facts in claiming that Harris “supported abolishing ICE.” He’s referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security agency charged with “enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”

Back in 2018, several Democratic leaders were making calls to abolish ICE. On her campaign website when she ran for a House seat in New York in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that ICE represented “part of an unchecked expansion of executive powers that led to the widespread erosion of Americans’ civil rights.” In calling for abolishment of the agency, Ocasio-Cortez claimed ICE “operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States.”

While serving as a senator in June 2018, Harris was also critical of the way ICE operated during former President Donald 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.” Here’s the relevant part of a June 2018 interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt (starting at the 8:55 mark).

Hunt, MSNBC, June 24, 2018: A lot of the signs at the rally you just held were people standing there saying, ‘Abolish ICE.’ Is that a position that you agree with?

Harris: Listen, I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch, because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that it’s conducting itself. And we need to deal with that.

Hunt: What do you think should be the alternative to ICE?

Harris: Well, first of all, I don’t think that the government should be in the position of separating families. And that is clearly what is part of what’s happening at ICE and DHS. You look at what’s happening, again, in terms of how they’re conducting their perspective on asylum seekers. That is a real problem and is contrary to all of the spirit and the reason that we even have the asylum rules and laws in the first place. So their mission, I think, is very much in question, and has to be reexamined.

In an interview on “The View” 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.”

So 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.

Harris on Defunding the PoliceVance said Harris “wanted to defund the police,” adding, “even Joe Biden never went so far as to say he wanted to defund the police.” Neither did Harris.

Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, speaks at a campaign rally on July 22 in Radford, Virginia. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.Rather, 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, 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.

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.

Amid the Floyd protests, Harris put herself at the forefront of the debate about police conduct. On June 8, 2020, she co-sponsored a bill that sought to increase accountability for law enforcement misconduct and to eliminate discriminatory policing practices. At that time, Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee. Harris was picked as Biden’s vice presidential running mate until August.

In an interview on ABC’s “The View” the same day, June 8, 2020, Meghan McCain asked if Harris supported “defunding and removing police from American communities.”

Harris, ABC’s “The View,” June 8, 2020: I think that a big part of this conversation really is about reimagining how we do public safety in America. Which I support, which is this: We have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities you put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access to capital for small businesses and access to health care regardless of how much money people have. That’s how you achieve safe and healthy communities. …

Here’s the other thing, when I talk to law enforcement, they know that they don’t want to be nor are they skilled to be the ones who are responding to someone with mental illness or substance abuse or–or the homeless population, but in many cities, that’s what’s happening because we are not directing those resources, those public resources to where they need to go, which is addressing mental health, homelessness, substance abuse, so that we don’t have to have a police response because we are smarter.

McCain: … Are you for defunding the police?

Harris: How are you defining “defund the police”?

McCain: Well, I’m not for anything remotely for that, so I would ask the protesters the same thing, but I … assume it’s removing police, and as congresswoman Ilhan Omar said, bringing in a whole new way of governing and a law and order into a community.

Harris: … So, again, we need to reimagine how we are achieving public safety in America and to have cities where one-third of their entire budget is going to policing but yet there is a dire need in those same cities for mental health resources, for resources going into public schools, resources going into job training and job creation.

Harris hit the same themes in an interview the same day on MSNBC, adding, “We don’t want police officers to be dealing with the homeless issue. We don’t want police officers to be dealing with substance abuse and mental health. No — we should be putting those resources into our public health systems, we should be looking at our budgets and asking, ‘Are we getting the best return on our investment as taxpayers?’”

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the following day, June 9, 2020, Harris said accusations from Trump that radical left Democrats supported defunding the police, Harris characterized that as “creating fear where none is necessary.” In that same interview, 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.

“We have to stop militarization of police,” Harris said. “But that doesn’t mean we get rid of police. Of course not. We have to be practical about this.”

In a Sept. 6, 2020, interview on CNN, after she was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Harris was asked about a quote from her 2009 book about support for more police on the streets, and how that jibed with her more recent position that increasing the number of police officers was not the answer for safer communities.

“What I would say now is what I would say then, which is I want to make sure that if a woman is raped, a child is molested, one human being murders another human being, that there will be a police officer that responds to that case and that there will be accountability and consequence for the offender,” Harris responded.

So Harris advocated investing more in struggling communities as a means to make them safer, and she discussed redefining government roles so that social service and mental health agencies respond to some emergencies rather than police. But she didn’t call for eliminating police departments, as the “defund the police” phrase suggests.

Harris Was Not Named ‘Border Czar’Vance said Harris failed as “America’s border czar,” attaching a title to her — as Trump has as well — that is not accurate.

“Kamala Harris is America’s border czar,” Vance said in Virginia, “and how’s our border doing, ladies and gentlemen? She hasn’t talked to the chief of Border Patrol a single time in her entire tenure as border czar. Remember, on her very first day in office, she and Biden suspended deportations, they stopped construction of the border wall, and they reimplemented catch and release. The border crisis is a Kamala Harris crisis.”

As we wrote on the third night of the Republican National Convention when Rep. Matt Gaetz and others wrongly said Harris was appointed a “border czar,” Harris was not appointed to be the person in charge of border security.

In 2021, Biden tapped Harris to head up a Central American initiative called the “Roots Causes Strategy,” an effort to “address the root causes of migration” from “from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” It 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.

In a meeting on immigration on March 24, 2021, Biden announced that he had tapped Harris to “help in stemming the movement of so many folks” from Mexico and the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras).

Harris said she looked “forward to engaging in diplomacy with government, with private sector, with civil society, and — and the leaders of each in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, and ensure shared prosperity in the region.”

The following month, when a reporter asked Harris if she had a trip planned to the southern border, Harris responded, “The president has asked Secretary Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border.” She clarified that “I have been asked to lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle, similar to what then-vice president did many years ago.”

When Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas did visit the border in El Paso in June 2021, Mayorkas noted, “The vice president is leading our nation’s effort to tackle the root causes of migration — why people leave their home in the first place.” Mayorkas said it was his responsibility to “secure the border.”

A big part of Harris’ efforts have been focused on encouraging private sector investment in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Mexico, which, as of March had resulted in “more than $5.2 billion in private sector commitments for northern Central America,” according to a White House press release. Harris has also met with Central American leaders to encourage a “focus on good governance and labor rights,” again with the aim of addressing some of the root causes of migration.

Although it is difficult to measure the success of those programs in stemming migration, Customs and Border Protection statistics show that illegal immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has decreased since 2021. Illegal border-crossing attempts by Mexicans, however, have risen since 2021.

Harris Did Not Call Biden a RacistVance tried to turn the tables on Democrats pointing out that he once made numerous biting comments criticizing Trump, by wrongly claiming that Harris once called Biden a racist.

“You know, it’s so funny,” Vance said. “The media says, ‘Well, you know, JD said some critical things about President Trump 10 years ago.’ And Kamala Harris, of course, called Joe Biden a racist and then ran with him two months later.”

Vance’s past criticisms of Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign are well-documented. In 2016, Vance wrote an opinion piece that likened Trump to “cultural heroin,” and in an interview that year he flatly said, “I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.” In a July 2021 interview on Fox News, Vance said he regretted those comments and he regretted “being wrong about the guy.”

As for Harris, she did provide one of the more contentious moments of a June 27, 2019, Democratic primary debate, aggressively confronting Biden on two race-related issues: Biden’s past opposition to school busing and his comments about working with “some civility” in the 1970s with two segregationist southern Democrats, Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.

As we wrote, Harris began her comments by saying to Biden, “I do not believe you are a racist.” But Harris, who is Black, said that “it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.” Biden responded by saying, “I did not praise racists.” Harris didn’t say he did. She said he talked about their reputations, and Biden did say that he was able to work with them in a civil way to get things done in the Senate, despite their political and personal differences.

Harris on the ‘Green New Deal’Vance accused Harris of voting to end a Senate procedural rule so that Democratic lawmakers could pass climate change legislation.

“She voted to eliminate the filibuster and pass the green new scam, destroying energy jobs in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and driving up the cost of goods,” Vance said. “That’s why we’ve got an affordability crisis in this country, my friends, because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they’d rather buy oil and gas from tin-pot dictators all over the world. I say they should buy it right here, from American workers.”

Vance appeared to be referring to the “Green New Deal,” a nonbinding resolution that outlined ways the U.S. should address climate change. However, it never received a vote in the House or the Senate after being introduced in February 2019.

At a September 2019 town hall, Harris, then a U.S. senator running for president, did say she would be willing to eliminate the Senate filibuster, a rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on most legislation, to enact the measure into law. “Here’s my point: If they [Congress] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” she said while answering a question.

But, as we said, the resolution was not brought to the Senate floor, so there was no filibuster to end. And there is no way that legislation could have “destroyed energy jobs” and increased “the cost of goods,” as Vance claimed, since it didn’t become law. The NRSC memo itself said Harris “pledged to eliminate the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal.”

His other claim that Biden and Harris would “rather buy oil and gas from tin-pot dictators” than “American workers” is also misleading.

Under the Biden administration, more crude oil and natural gas is being produced in the U.S. than ever before. Besides, while natural gas and crude oil are imported to the U.S. from other countries to help meet domestic demand, “these are all [business] decisions made by private companies,” not the federal government, Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in a phone interview. “There’s not a lot of space for the administration to impact that.”

In addition, about 99% of natural gas imports to the U.S. come from Canada, which does not have a dictatorship. Canada also has consistently been the source of about 60% of crude oil imports to the U.S. in recent years. After Canada, the main suppliers of U.S. crude oil imports are Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Colombia — the same top five countries for imports during the Trump administration.

Vance may have been referring to the fact that in 2023, the Biden administration temporarily lifted Trump-era energy sanctions on Venezuela, once again allowing imports from oil and gas companies in that nation, which is run by an authoritarian government. But the sanctions were reimposed in April, after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro went back on his agreement to work toward having free and fair elections in the country this year.

Even during the period when the sanctions were removed, less than 3% of U.S. crude oil imports were coming from Venezuela, according to federal data.

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SummaryPresident Joe Biden isn’t running for reelection, but his record will still be on the ballot in the fall. Here we look at how the U.S. has performed under the Democratic president:

• The economy added 15.7 million jobs. The number is now 6.3 million higher than before the pandemic.
• The unemployment rate dropped back and has stayed lower, longer than at any time during the previous administration.
• Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up more than 19% overall. Gasoline is up 46%.
• Average weekly earnings haven’t kept pace with prices. After adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings dropped 2.3%.
• The U.S. economy has continued to expand under Biden, growing at 2.8% in the second quarter estimate released July 25 — double the rate of growth in the first quarter.
• Violent crime has gone down. Figures from large cities show a 9.1% drop in murders from 2020 to 2023, and data from more than 200 cities show a continuing decline so far this year.
• Fewer people lack health insurance. The uninsured went down by 2.1 percentage points or 6.6 million people.
• Crude oil production increased. The daily average for the most recent 12 months is 15.3% higher than the average in 2020, and it’s higher than the pre-pandemic average.
• Apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally are up 273% for the 12 months ending in June, even as the monthly figure for June dropped significantly.
• The average number of refugees admitted per month is 117% higher than the average under his predecessor.
• Corporate profits are up 36%.
• The international trade deficit for goods and services went up 22.3%.
• The number of people receiving food stamps has decreased by more than half a million.
• The debt held by the public has grown by 28.5%
• The S&P 500 has increased 42.9%.

AnalysisOur latest quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we first published in January 2022, comes days after Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll publish one more update in October, before Election Day.

We published similar reports on “Trump’s Numbers” throughout former President Donald Trump’s time in office.

We present various statistical indicators of how the country has fared. As we’ve said before, we make no judgments as to how much credit or blame the president deserves for these metrics, and we caution that no single number can tell the whole story.

Jobs and UnemploymentThe number of people with jobs rebounded strongly during Biden’s time, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by more than 6 million.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 15,722,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and June, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The June figure is 6,329,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

Some occupations recovered more slowly, notably teaching. In June the number of local government education workers was only 29,000 higher than at the pre-pandemic peak. And employment in the leisure industry still hasn’t recovered; in June there were 161,000 fewer hotel and restaurant workers and others in the accommodation and food services industries than before the pandemic.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has been lower for longer under Biden than under his predecessor.

It hit the lowest point in over half a century in January 2023 and again in April 2023, when it was 3.4%, the lowest since June 1969.

The rate was back up to 4.1% last month, still 2.3 percentage points below where it was when Biden took office.

June also marked the 32nd consecutive month that the rate was at or below 4.1%. The longest such stretch under Donald Trump was 27 months, just before the pandemic sent the unemployment rate soaring.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March 2022, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs was still over 8.1 million as of the last business day of May, the most recent month on record. That’s an increase of 955,00 openings — over 13% — compared with January 2021, when Biden took office.

In May, there was an average of nearly 3 jobs for every 2 people seeking work. When Biden took office there were fewer openings than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in June is set to be released July 30.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has risen slowly during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in June.

That still leaves the rate 0.7 percentage points below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate has been trending generally down for nearly a quarter of a century. It peaked at 67.3% during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will continue to slide down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — but that hasn’t yet been achieved.

As of June, the U.S. added 762,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.3% increase in the space of 41 months, according to the BLS.

But compared with the highest level during Trump’s time in office — which was in January 2019 — manufacturing jobs are up only 122,000, or just under 1%.

Wages and InflationCPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden. During his time in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 19.2%.

For a time it was the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June 2022 saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the BLS said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI rose 3% in the 12 months ending in June, the most recent figure available.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline shot up even faster.

During the week ending July 22, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump was $3.47 per gallon. That’s $1.09 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 46%.

The price swung wildly during Biden’s first year and a half, hitting just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13, 2022. That’s the highest on record. The rise was propelled by worldwide supply and demand issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 17% during Biden’s first 41 months, according to figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. In June “real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, were still 2.3% below where they were when Biden took office.

That’s despite two years of recent improvement. Real earnings in June were 2.3% higher than the low point under Biden 24 months earlier.

Economic GrowthDespite concerns about high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising interest rates to slow inflation, the U.S. economy has continued to expand under Biden.

The real gross domestic product (which is adjusted for inflation) increased 5.8% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022 and 2.5% last year.

In the second quarter of this year, the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in a July 25 release announcing its “advance estimate.” (The advance estimate is the BEA’s first estimate for the second quarter, which could be adjusted Aug. 29 when the second estimate is released.)

The 2.8% second quarter estimate was double the first quarter growth and was slightly higher than expectations. A day earlier, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 2.6% for the quarter.

The BEA said the second-quarter figure “reflected increases in consumer spending, private inventory investment, and nonresidential fixed investment.” On the negative side, imports — “which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP” — increased, the BEA said.

Prior to the release of the second-quarter estimate, economists were seeing signs of a slowdown in the U.S. economy that could shrink the growth rate in the near future.

In its monthly economic forecast issued July 11, the Conference Board – a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies – said it expected the U.S. economy “to lose momentum near-term as high prices and elevated interest rates sap domestic demand.”

Vanguard said something similar in its July economic outlook released July 18.

“The productivity and labor supply gains that drove U.S. economic growth in 2023 lately show signs of subsiding, joining retail sales, capital expenditure, and other data that previously suggested a slowdown,” Vanguard said.

Still, economists for both said the labor market is strong, and a recession – once thought inevitable – is unlikely. Vanguard projects that the U.S. economy will grow by 2% for the full year in 2024.

CrimeContrary to claims by Trump and other Republicans, violent crime has gone down during Biden’s term. That’s according to crime data compiled by the FBI and other sources.

The 2022 FBI annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate of 0.5 point from 2020, the year before Biden took office, to 2022. The violent crime rate dropped by 15.4 points, to 369.8 per 100,000 population in 2022. (For these figures, see Table 1 in the CIUS Estimations download for the crime in the U.S. reports.)

Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. The number of violent crimes dropped 5.7% from 2022 to 2023, and from January to March of this year, violent crimes were down 15.2% compared with the same time period last year, according to the preliminary data (download the quarterly tables to see these figures). The FBI figures are based on voluntary reports by agencies nationwide.

The FBI’s official 2023 annual report should be released this fall.

Other reports show the same trend. Figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show the number of murders has gone down by 10.4% from 2022 to 2023 in 70 large U.S. cities. Since 2020, murders in those cities have dropped by 9.1%.

The latest Major Cities Chiefs Association report, for the first quarter of 2024, indicate that murders and other violent crimes dropped again, compared with the same time period last year.

As of July 23, figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, show a 17.3% decrease in murders in more than 200 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same point in 2023.

As we’ve explained in past reports, murders and violent crime went up in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first as president. But since then, crime has been going down.

Health InsuranceThe percentage of Americans lacking health insurance has declined by 2.1 percentage points under Biden, according to the National Health Interview Survey.

In 2023, 7.6% of the population was uninsured, according to the latest NHIS early release estimates. That’s down from 9.7% in 2020. In raw numbers, there were 6.6 million fewer people uninsured last year compared with the year before Biden became president.

The NHIS, a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, measures the uninsured at the time people were interviewed.

The Census Bureau’s annual reports, which measure those who lacked insurance for the entire year, show the uninsured decreased by 0.7 percentage points or 2.4 million people from 2020 to 2022. The 2023 annual report should be released in September.

We have been noting in these reports that the uninsured figures could begin to rise, since some Medicaid provisions that were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic started to be phased out at the end of March 2023. But so far, the available figures haven’t shown that. The latest NHIS report found the number and percentage of the uninsured declined from 2022 to 2023, though not significantly.

Under Biden, enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace plans has gone up by 10 million people. The administration enacted increased subsidies for ACA plan premiums. The expanded subsidies expire at the end of 2025.

Crude Oil Production and ImportsFor the most recent 12 months ending in April, the Energy Information Administration reported that average crude oil production in the U.S. increased to roughly 13 million barrels per day. That was about 15.3% more than the daily amount of crude oil produced on average in 2020. It’s also higher than the pre-pandemic average of 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019, which was the previous record.

As we noted three months ago, the EIA has said that oil production, despite declining drilling activity, has reached all-time highs during the Biden administration because new oil wells are more efficient due to advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. In fact, the U.S. is currently producing more crude oil than any nation in history, the EIA said in March, citing data from its International Energy Statistics.

The EIA projects that U.S. crude oil production will continue to break records. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the agency said it expects production to average 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024 and 13.8 million barrels a day in 2025.

Even though the country is still producing more crude oil than ever, as well as exporting more of it, U.S. imports are still up under Biden. Over the last 12 months through April, the U.S. imported an average of more than 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. That’s higher than any annual daily average during Biden’s term, and it’s about 12% above the 2020 average of approximately 5.9 million barrels daily. Notably, however, the average over the last 12 months is still below the annual average of 6.8 million barrels per day in 2019, before the start of the pandemic.

ImmigrationLooking at the number of apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally over the last year under Biden, the numbers remain historically high. But there are indications that is changing, as apprehensions plummeted in June after Biden implemented some new emergency policies to deal with high levels of illegal immigration.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year before Biden took office. And for the past 12 months ending in June, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 1,894,715, according to Customs and Border Protection. That’s 273% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

But the monthly number of apprehensions dropped to 83,536 in June, a little less than half the monthly average during Biden’s term, and the lowest total for a full month under Biden. (January 2021 was lower, 75,316, but Trump was still president for most of that month.)

On June 4, Biden announced a series of executive actions designed to address “substantial levels of migration” due to “global conditions” including “failing regimes and dire economic conditions,” “violence linked to transnational criminal organizations” and “natural disasters” in some countries in Central and South America. Specifically, the proclamation directs border officials to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally between ports of entry when the daily average of encounters reaches 2,500 or more for seven straight days. The policy was immediately implemented on June 5 because levels were already well above that. (For more on the policy, see our story “Q&A on Biden’s Border Order.”)

Three weeks later, on June 26, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reported that Border Patrol encounters of migrants had decreased by over 40% after the new policy was enacted and that in those three weeks more than 24,000 migrants had been removed or returned by the Department of Homeland Security.

There is some early indication the July number may drop even lower. A White House official told us via email that the seven-day average of southwest border encounters between legal ports of entry was 1,838 as of July 11. If it stays at that level, the July number could be lower than any of Trump’s final three months. (The temporary restrictions directed by Biden will continue until 14 calendar days after the daily average of people apprehended crossing the border illegally drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days.)

RefugeesWith three months left in fiscal year 2024, the Biden administration has already admitted more refugees than any administration has since 2016.

Still, the administration is likely to fall short once again of the president’s ambitious campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees a year.

On Sept. 29, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2024 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal years 2023 and 2022.

The administration admitted only 25,465 refugees in FY2022 and 60,014 in FY2023. In the first nine months of FY2024, the U.S. has admitted 68,291 refugees, according to State Department data.

In a November report to Congress, the State Department said it is making “significant progress” toward Biden’s goal for refugee admissions after “intensive efforts to restore, strengthen, and modernize the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 163,778 refugees in Biden’s first full 41 months in office, or nearly 4,000 refugees per month, the department’s data show. That’s 117% higher than the 1,845 monthly average under Trump, who drastically reduced the admission of refugees. The Trump administration admitted only 86,731 refugees in four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

Consumer SentimentAfter showing some life in the beginning of the year, consumer confidence in the economy is slipping again.

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its final Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 79 — the highest since July 2021. It remained little changed through April, historical survey data show.

But consumer sentiment dropped in May and has inched downward ever since. The preliminary index of consumer sentiment in July was 66 — continuing a trend that Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, described as “stubbornly subdued.”

“Although sentiment is more than 30% above the trough from June 2022, it remains stubbornly subdued,” Hsu said in a press release. “Nearly half of consumers still object to the impact of high prices, even as they expect inflation to continue moderating in the years ahead.”

As Hsu referenced, the preliminary July figure is 16 points higher than the low under Biden, which occurred in June 2022. But it is also 13 points lower than January 2021, when Biden took office and the index was 79, the data show.

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey also reported that consumer confidence weakened in June.

Corporate ProfitsAfter dipping slightly in 2023, after-tax corporate profits resumed their upward trajectory.

For the year, after-tax corporate profits set records in 2021 and 2022, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates. (See line 45.) The BEA estimated that profits in 2023 were $2.97 trillion — slightly lower than $2.98 trillion in 2022. Still, it was 36% higher than in 2020, the year before Biden took office.

However, corporate profits were running at an annual rate of nearly $3.17 trillion in the first quarter of 2024, according to the BEA’s most recent estimate.

TradeAs of May, the U.S. goods and services deficit over the last 12 months was $799.3 billion, according to figures the Bureau of Economic Analysis published in early July. The trade deficit that period was roughly $145.6 billion higher, or about 22.3% more, than in 2020.

The international trade gap in the most recent 12-month period is about $14.4 billion more than the calendar year 2023 deficit of $784.9 billion, which dropped nearly 17% from the record gap of nearly $944.8 billion in 2022.

So far this year, imports of goods and services have exceeded exports by about $14.4 billion, the BEA said, contributing to the increase in the trade deficit over the last 12 months.

Food StampsUnder Biden, fewer people are receiving benefits from the program formerly known as food stamps.

In April, the most recent figures available, there were nearly 41.6 million beneficiaries receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to preliminary statistics released July 12 by the Department of Agriculture.

At that time, SNAP enrollment had declined by 532,135, or nearly 1.3%, since Biden took office – although, April was the third consecutive month in which there was an increase in program participants. It’s been about two years since there were fewer than 41 million SNAP beneficiaries under Biden.

Debt and DeficitsDebt — The public debt, excluding money the government owes itself, increased to approximately $27.8 trillion, as of July 22. The public debt is now up almost 28.5% during Biden’s presidency.

Deficits — The Congressional Budget Office estimates that so far the budget deficit for fiscal year 2024 has declined slightly compared with the same period in the 2023 fiscal year, when the annual deficit was $1.7 trillion, according to the Department of Treasury.

Through the first nine months of the current fiscal year (October to June), the deficit was $1.3 trillion, or “$118 billion less than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year,” the CBO reported in its Monthly Budget Review for June.

However, the agency is still projecting that the overall deficit for the 2024 fiscal year will be at least $1.9 trillion, which would grow to $2 trillion if adjusted to exclude the effects of shifts in the timing of certain payments. CBO said its estimate includes “costs that have not yet been recorded,” such as potential outlays due to the cancellation of student loan debt as well as financial assistance to Israel, Ukraine and Indo-Pacific nations.

Stock MarketsThe S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which includes 30 large corporations, set new highs this month.

Even after a dreadful day for the market on July 24, the S&P is 42.9% higher than it was on Jan. 19, 2021, the day before Biden took office.

The Dow has seen smaller gains than the S&P 500. It has increased 28.8%under Biden — not much different from our last report.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index, which is made up of more than 2,500 companies, has experienced a strong quarter since our last report. Overall, it was up 31.4% under Biden, closing on July 24 at 17,342.41 — up more than 1,700 points since our April quarterly report.

Home Prices & HomeownershipHome prices — High mortgage rates put a chill on home prices for a while, but the cost of existing single-family homes in the U.S. have started to climb to record heights once again.

The preliminary median sales price of existing single-family homes in June was $432,700 — setting a new record and marking the fifth straight month of price increases, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Prices previously peaked under Biden at $420,900 in June 2022 – a record high at the time that was topped in May and June of this year, the NAR data show.

The preliminary June figure is a staggering 40.5% higher than the $308,000 median home price in January 2021, when Biden took office.

Home prices began to fall in part due to rising mortgage rates. In its ongoing attempt to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate in July 2023 for the 11th time since March 2022. In its latest economic outlook, which was released July 22, the investment research firm Morningstar forecast that the Fed will begin to cut rates by the end of 2024.

In our April report, we noted that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage average nationwide, as of April 18, topped 7% for the first time this year, according to Freddie Mac. The rate is currently 6.77% – which is below the historical norm of 7.74%, which is the weekly average rate since April 1971.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have barely budged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.6% in the first quarter of 2024 — a shade below the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office.

The rate under Trump peaked in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research warns that data from the second quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021 “should be viewed with caution” because restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic “prevented normal data collection.”

“These changes in survey methods,” including the suspension of in-person surveys in the second quarter of 2020, “likely contributed to wide swings in the data,” HUD’s policy and research arm says on its website. “For example, there was a sharp increase and following decline in the homeownership rate during that time frame. The national homeownership rate, at 65.3 percent in the first quarter of 2020, was estimated to have jumped to 67.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and decline to 65.4 percent by the second quarter of 2021.”

For this reason, the Census Bureau has warned against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020.

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Gun SalesThe latest estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation suggest that gun purchases again declined during the second quarter of 2024.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF, a gun industry trade group, estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. The data “provide an additional picture of current market conditions,” the NSSF says.

The group has reported that the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the second quarter of the year was nearly 3.4 million, which is down 7.9% from almost 3.7 million from the same period last year. It’s also roughly 40% lower than the more than 5.6 million in Trump’s last full quarter in 2020.

Through the first six months of 2024, there were over 7.3 million background checks for firearm sales. That’s the lowest total in the first half of the year since there were about 6.2 million in 2019.

Carbon EmissionsIn the most recent 12 months on record, there were about 4.80 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and petroleum products in the U.S., according to the EIA’s latest estimates. That’s up over 4.6% from the almost 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020, but still below the pre-pandemic total of about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

As of this month, the EIA forecast that there will be about 4.82 billion metric tons of emissions from energy consumption in 2024, which would be an increase of less than 1% from the 2023 total. The agency said the consumption of more jet fuel and diesel is expected to be “the largest driver of emissions increases” in 2024 and 2025.

Judiciary AppointmentsSupreme Court — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed by Biden and confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2022. She replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two Supreme Court justices at the same point of his tenure.

Court of Appeals — Biden has won confirmation for 43 U.S. Court of Appeals judges. Trump had won confirmation for 53 at the same point of his term.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 157 District Court judges (our count includes confirmation for the reappointment of the chief judge of the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands). At the same point in his presidency, Trump had won confirmation for 144 District Court judges.

Five U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges have also been confirmed under Biden, while five had been confirmed at the same point of Trump’s presidency. Each man had won the confirmation for two U.S. Court of International Trade judges at this stage of their terms.

As of July 24, there were 48federal court vacancies, with 12 nominees pending.

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Quick TakePresident Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on July 17. His symptoms remained mild and have since resolved, according to his treating physician. But fueled by days without a public sighting and Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, social media posts have baselessly claimed that Biden was gravely ill or had a medical emergency.

Full StoryOn July 21, President Joe Biden announced he was no longer running for president in the 2024 election. Just four days before, while campaigning in Las Vegas, he tested positive for COVID-19, leading him to fly to Delaware that evening to isolate. He remained in isolation at his beach house and was not seen in public again until July 23, when his symptoms had “resolved” and he tested negative for COVID-19, according to his physician.

Daily letters from Biden’s doctor show that the president never got seriously ill and he continued to perform his duties. But since his COVID-19 diagnosis — and particularly after his announcement that he would no longer seek the presidency — online posts have trafficked in unfounded rumors and speculation about Biden’s health.

“A verified source has informed the Global Press team that Joe Biden is currently in hospice care and is unlikely to survive the night,” proclaimed a July 22 X post later shared on Facebook. The “Global Press” account on X that made the original claim appeared to subsequently delete its account.

Some declared Biden to be terminally ill or even spread rumors that the president was dead.

Others, including conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, pointed to purported reports from local police in Las Vegas to suggest or claim that Biden had or might have had a medical emergency.

According to an unnamed source, Kirk said, “US Secret Service informed LV Metro that there was an emergency situation involving Joe Biden and to close necessary streets so that POTUS could be transported immediately to University Medical, which they began to do in earnest.”

“Then, mysteriously, there was a stand down order and the USSS informed local Vegas PD that they were going to ‘medivac’ POTUS to Johns Hopkins, which they presumed meant fly him back east ASAP,” Kirk’s post continued. “Apparently the rumor mill in the police department was that Joe Biden was dying or possibly already dead.”

Kirk’s speculations were later amplified in a Tucker Carlson video on Instagram. Citing an unnamed, non-medical source, another person online claimed Biden might have had a transient ischemic attack, or a mini stroke.

Former President Donald Trump also chimed in on July 21, baselessly saying on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Biden “never had Covid.”

It’s true, according to local media and a statement from the police department, that a hospital in Las Vegas was on standby to potentially receive the president after he tested positive for COVID-19, and that police proactively shut down roads to ensure safe passage. But this doesn’t mean Biden had a medical emergency. The president never went to the hospital, and according to a letter posted by his treating physician, he only ever experienced mild COVID-19 symptoms. In an email to FactCheck.org, the White House denied that Biden had any kind of medical emergency.

In the afternoon of July 23, Biden appeared on a tarmac and told reporters he was “feeling well” before ascending the stairs to Air Force One to fly back to the White House. This put to rest the most extreme claims about his health, although conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer continued to insist he was dying. Biden is scheduled to address the nation this evening to discuss his decision to exit the 2024 presidential race.

No Evidence of a Medical EmergencyWhile suspicion has focused on road closures and preparation for a hospital in Las Vegas to possibly receive the president, there’s no evidence that Biden experienced a medical emergency. Instead, the posts appear to have spun contingency plans following Biden’s positive COVID-19 test into conspiracy theories.

“President Joe Biden did not visit UMC last week,” Scott Kerbs, a public relations director for University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, said in a statement to FactCheck.org. “On July 17 at approximately 2:15 p.m., UMC received notification to prepare for a potential medical visit from the president. As Nevada’s only Level I Trauma Center and the hospital tasked with caring for the Commander-in-Chief during official visits to the area, UMC was fully prepared to provide the state’s highest level of care for the president.”

In a local news report on July 17, the hospital’s CEO, Mason Van Houweling, indicated that the hospital prepared for a “medical” issue, rather than a trauma or accident, but did not elaborate further. He praised his hospital’s response, but referred to it as a “non-event.”

Van Houweling echoed that sentiment in another article about the hospital’s preparations, published on July 19 in Becker’s Hospital Review, which noted that the hospital “adjusted its preparation to arrange an appropriate facility and team for medical care based on the specific potential needs identified — in this case, diagnostic requirements.”

Kerbs told us in an email that this was describing “the fact that UMC, as a Level I Trauma Center, adjusted its default preparations from trauma care to general medical care, which involves diagnostics.”

Local police similarly confirmed that they prepared for Biden to travel to the hospital, but explained that it was precautionary.

“The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was notified that President Joe Biden was sick on July 17th during his visit to Las Vegas. We did not know the nature of his illness,” the department told us in an email. “As a precaution, LVMPD proactively began to shut down roads leading to UMC Hospital. The Secret Service then advised LVMPD the President was going directly to Harry Reid International Airport and would be leaving Las Vegas.”

“It has been standard practice for many years, across administrations, for hospitals to be among the wide range of resources that are always put on standby when any president travels,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told us in an email.

Bates denied that the president experienced a medical emergency, including a mini stroke. “The only medical situation was his covid diagnosis, which was publicly announced,” he said.

A reporter who accompanied the president on the flight back to Delaware did not make note of any kind of medical emergency. Instead, he reported that the flight was “quite bumpy,” and that his request for an informal press briefing was denied. Upon landing, while not looking in the best of health — as might be expected for someone sick with COVID-19 — Biden was still able to walk and speak.

COVID-19 can be dangerous, particularly for older adults and those who have not been infected or vaccinated previously, but all available evidence points to the 81-year-old president’s case as being mild.

Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, Biden’s physician, provided daily updates on the president’s condition. In his last letter, on July 23, he reported that Biden had tested negative for the coronavirus and his symptoms, which had included a runny nose, cough and general malaise, had “resolved.”

“Over the course of his infection, he never manifested a fever, and his vital signs remained normal, to include pulse oximetry. His lungs remained clear,” O’Connor said of Biden, adding that the president “continues to perform all of his presidential duties.”

Although Biden did not make a public appearance until July 23, he called into his former campaign’s headquarters — now Vice President Kamala Harris’s HQ — on July 22. While in isolation, he also received briefings, spoke to a variety of politicians and supporters following the termination of his candidacy, and made a call to the head of the European Commission, according to White House officials.

As with his first bout of COVID-19 in 2022, Biden took the antiviral Paxlovid to treat his illness.

It’s not the first time that social media claims about Biden’s health have gone viral. Earlier this month, popular posts falsely claimed Biden had a “medical emergency” aboard Air Force One, the AP reported.

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Sources“Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.” Press release. White House. 17 Jul 2024.

Letters from Kevin C. O’Connor, Physician to the President. Available from WhiteHouse.gov. 18 Jul to 23 Jul 2024.

Drummond, Cristen. “Las Vegas hospital on standby to treat President Biden during COVID-19 diagnosis.” KSNV. 17 Jul 2024.

Madhani, Aamer. “Biden will address the nation Wednesday on his decision to drop his 2024 Democratic reelection bid.” AP. 23 Jul 2024.

President Biden (@POTUS). “Tomorrow evening at 8 PM ET, I will address the nation from the Oval Office on what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people.” X. 23 Jul 2024.

Kerbs, Scott. Brand and Public Relations Director, University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. Emails to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Gooch, Kelly. “A Las Vegas hospital’s playbook for presidential care.” Becker’s Hospital Review. 18 Jul 2024.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Office of Public Information. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Bates, Andrew. White House spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan. “Travel Pool Report #8 Dover landing.” White House pool report. 17 Jul 2024.

“Biden lands in Delaware after testing positive for COVID.” AP video. 18 Jul 2024.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan. “From Buoyant to Frail: Two Days in Las Vegas as Biden Tests Positive.” New York Times. 18 Jul 2024.

“The Changing Threat of COVID-19.” CDC. 23 Feb 2024.

“Remarks by President Biden and Vice President Harris at a Campaign Event | Wilmington, DE.” White House. 22 Jul 2024.

Miller, Zeke and Chris Megerian. “Biden tests positive for COVID.” AP. 21 Jul 2022.Goldin, Melissa. “FACT FOCUS: Online reports falsely claim Biden suffered a ‘medical emergency’ on Air Force One.” AP. 6 Jul 2024.

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Quick TakeOklahoma’s state superintendent ordered public schools to incorporate the Bible as “an instructional support into the curriculum.” But social media posts have shared the inaccurate claim that “Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Louisiana and Texas haven’t issued such an order.

Full StoryRyan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, issued a directive on June 27 that all the state’s public schools “incorporate the Bible … as an instructional support into the curriculum,” the New York Times reported.

Walters said the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” the Times reported. “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Walters said.

Walters’ directive and other recent efforts by conservative-led states to introduce religion into public schools — which are facing legal challenges — have generated attention on social media. But some posts mischaracterize what changes have been made to public school curricula and where these changes have taken place.

A July 11 Threads post misleadingly claimed, “States of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Similar posts have been shared on Facebook, including a post that shows a group of students praying in a classroom.

Conservative leaders in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas have all sought to expand the role of religion in public education, but only Oklahoma’s education department has ordered that the Bible be taught in classrooms.

Ten Commandments in LouisianaTwo weeks before Walters’ order in Oklahoma, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a requirement that classrooms in every public school and state-funded university display the text of the Ten Commandments by Jan. 1, 2025.

The law requires that the posters be at least 11 inches by 14 inches and that “the text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster.” The posters will also include a lengthy statement intended to provide context for the display, stating, “The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” The posters will be purchased with donations, and public schools are not required to spend money on the displays.

A suit challenging the law has been filed by some Louisiana parents represented by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of church and state.

They argue that the law violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent. A Kentucky statute similar to the one passed in Louisiana was the subject of the 1980 Supreme Court case, Stone v. Graham. The superintendent of Kentucky schools, James Graham, was sued by parents for an order that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The high court decided against Graham, ruling that the poster violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution — which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — and that displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms were “plainly religious in nature.”

In an interview with NewsNation at the Republican National Convention on July 18, Landry said, “I think this is one of the cases where the court has it wrong. And so here is the question: If the Supreme Court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected?”

Landry also said, “I would submit that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on [would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’] wall in the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot” at former President Donald Trump.

While Landry wants to display the Ten Commandments in Louisiana’s classrooms, the state of Louisiana has not “ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools,” as the social media posts claim.

Proposed Curriculum in TexasIn May, the Texas Education Agency introduced elementary school materials that include biblical and other religious references for public review and comment. The proposed materials include lessons on biblical stories and discussions about how early American political figures were shaped by their religious beliefs. The materials contain references to several religions, though Judeo-Christian religious material appears most frequently. The Texas Tribune reported that “districts will have the option of whether to use the materials, but will be incentivized to do so with up to $60 per student in additional funding.”

The 2024 platform of the Texas Republican Party, adopted days before the new educational materials were unveiled, includes a call for the state board of education to mandate teaching of the Bible. But no such guidelines have been put in place in Texas, contrary to the claim in the social media posts.

The state education board will vote on the proposed elementary school materials in November. If approved, the changes would be implemented in August 2025.

Last year, the Texas State Senate approved legislation that would place copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms — similar to the order in Louisiana — but the measure didn’t receive a final vote before the end of the legislative session.

Challenges to the Oklahoma DirectiveBefore the Oklahoma superintendent’s recent directive ordering that public schools incorporate the Bible into curricula, Walters was a proponent of state funding for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which supporters hoped would be the first religious charter school in the U.S.

However, the state Supreme Court ruled that the state’s charter school contract with the online Catholic school violated “Oklahoma statutes, the Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause.” Justice James Winchester wrote that public schools must be nonsectarian, but “St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State,” which violates the Establishment Clause.

The Establishment Clause has been at the center of many of the most significant Supreme Court decisions regulating the role of religion in schools. The 1962 case Engel v. Vitale banned school prayer for violating the Establishment Clause, even if the prayer was optional and nondenominational. In 1963, the court upheld Engel in Abington School District v. Schempp, when it decided that mandatory Bible readings in public schools are unconstitutional.

Michael Klarman, a professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School, told us in an email, “It’s pretty clear to me that these states are presenting the current [Supreme Court], dominated by conservative Catholics, with an opportunity to reconsider” the Engel and Schempp decisions.

Walters’ recent order for schools to incorporate the Bible calls for “immediate and strict compliance.” But a spokesperson for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office said that the superintendent does not have the power to issue a memo mandating that content must be included in the curriculum, NBC News reported.

Under current law, “public schools can include the Bible in discussions of secular subjects like history or literature,” but the Bible cannot be used “as a form of religious instruction” in the classroom, Rachel F. Moran, a law professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, told us in an email.

According to Oklahoma law, individual school districts can determine what instructional material is used in the classroom. “School districts shall exclusively determine the instruction, curriculum, reading lists and instructional materials and textbooks, subject to any applicable provisions or requirements as set forth in law, to be used in meeting the subject matter standards,” the law states.

Andrew Spiropoulos, a professor of constitutional law at Oklahoma City University School of Law, told us in an email, “Some public school districts will likely allege that the state department of education does not possess sufficient statutory authority over school curricula to issue these particular directives.”

As of July 19, none of Oklahoma’s schools had agreed to follow the state superintendent’s directive, saying instead that they would follow “the current regulations for academic standards which include not having a Bible in every class,” Oklahoma City news station KFOR reported.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesACLU. “Clergy, Public-School Parents Sue to Block Louisiana Law Requiring Public Schools to Display the Ten Commandments.” Press release. 24 Jun 2024.

Bolden, Bonnie and Shannon Heckt. “Louisiana governor: 10 Commandments in schools could have stopped Trump rally shooting.” BRProud. 18 Jul 2024.

Brown, Dylan. “No school districts have announced following Bible mandate, OSDE responds.” KFOR. 19 Jul 2024.

CBS News. “Lawsuit challenges Louisiana law requiring classrooms to display Ten Commandments.” 24 Jun 2024.

Constitution Annotated. First Amendment. Congress.gov.

Downen, Robert. “Bill requiring Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms fails in House after missing crucial deadline.” Texas Tribune. 24 May 2023.

Epstein, Lee and Eric Posner. “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait.” Supreme Court Review. 2022.

Evans, Murray. “3 Large OKC-area school districts among those that won’t follow Ryan Walters’ order to teach Bible.” The Oklahoman. 19 Jul 2024.

Jacobson, Linda. “Exclusive: Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program.” The 74 Million. 29 May 2024.

Kingkade, Tyler and Marissa Parra. “Oklahoma schools head Ryan Walters: Teachers who won’t teach Bible could lose license.” NBC News. 28 Jun 2024.

Klarman, Michael. Professor of American legal history, Harvard Law School. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah. “Oklahoma Supreme Court Says No to State Funding for a Religious Charter School.” New York Times. 25 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Elizabeth Dias. “Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible.” New York Times. 27 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Ruth Graham. “The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Limits of Long Tradition.” New York Times. 28 Jun 2024.

Moran, Rachel. Professor of law, Texas A&M University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Oklahoma State Department of Public Education. State Superintendent Ryan Walters.

Perez Jr., Juan. “Oklahoma high court rejects religious charter school contract.” Politico. 25 Jun 2024.

Republican Party of Texas. “Report of the 2024 Permanent Platform and Resolutions Committee of the Republican Party of Texas.” 23 May 2024.

Salhotra, Pooja and Robert Downen. “Texas education leaders unveil Bible-infused elementary school curriculum.” Texas Tribune. 30 May 2024.

Spiropoulos, Andrew. Professor of constitutional law, Oklahoma City University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Sy, Stephanie, et al. “Oklahoma education head discusses why he’s mandating public schools teach the Bible.” PBS. 1 Jul 2024.

Yoshonis, Scott. “Jeff Landry says benefit of defending La. Ten Commandments law ‘outweighs’ any cost.” KLFY. 18 Jul 2024.

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In about 48 hours, Vice President Kamala Harris went from No. 2 on the Democratic presidential ticket to the presumptive presidential nominee, after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her. Here, we fact-check some of Harris’ recent speeches — before and after Biden dropped out:

• Harris repeated the claim that former President Donald Trump “intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” even though he did not attempt to cut either retirement program when he was president, and he has said that he will not cut them in a second term.
• She referred to Project 2025 — a conservative plan for deeply cutting and overhauling the federal government — as Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Trump has disavowed the project, which he described as “seriously extreme.”
• The vice president repeated one of her favorite talking points when she claimed “Donald Trump openly vowed, if reelected, that he will be a dictator on Day 1.” He said he was joking when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”
• Harris left the misleading impression that Trump was to blame for the loss of “tens of thousands” of manufacturing jobs. The U.S. added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump — until the economic effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic reversed all those job gains.

A former U.S. senator from California who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris seemingly overnight became the Democratic Party’s last chance to stop Trump from regaining the White House.

Biden, who never recovered from a disastrous debate performance in late June, announced on July 21 that he would not seek reelection, saying it was in the “best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President.” Shortly after, Biden gave Harris his “full support and endorsement” for president.

The party quickly coalesced around Harris, who announced at a campaign event in Milwaukee on July 23: “I’m told as of this morning that we have earned the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.”

Harris needs 1,968 delegates to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, and the Associated Press reported that she has the support of more than 3,000 delegates.

Project 2025, Social Security and MedicareSince Biden dropped out and endorsed her, Harris has delivered two speeches and both times she referred to Project 2025 — a conservative plan for remaking the federal government — as Trump’s plan, even though the former president has disavowed it.

And in both speeches, she cited Project 2025 as evidence that Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, even though the former president has offered no plans to do so.

Harris, Wilmington, Delaware, July 22: He and his extreme Project 2025 will weaken the middle class and bring us backward — please do note that — back to the failed trickle-down policies that gave huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and made working families pay the cost; back to policies that put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block; back to policies that treat health care as only a privilege for the wealthy, instead of what we all know it should be, which is a right for every American.

Harris, Milwaukee, July 23: But Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages. But here’s the thing. When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.

As we have said before, Trump says he has no plans to cut Social Security or Medicare.

In his four years as president, Trump did not propose cutting Social Security’s retirement benefits, and his budgets included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. (For more, see our February 2020 article “Competing Claims on Trump’s Budget and Seniors.”)

After leaving office, Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security, most recently on July 20 in his first joint campaign appearance with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. “We will not cut one penny from Social Security and Medicare,” Trump said in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In January 2023, when House Republicans were discussing ways to cut government spending, Trump said in a video: “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.”

As for Project 2025, Trump described it at his Michigan rally as “seriously extreme.” He added, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Project 2025 lays out “four goals and principles” for Medicare “reform,” but there is nothing in the 900-plus page document that calls for cutting Social Security, which the authors of the project call a “myth.”

Harris and the Democrats link the project and its agenda to Trump because, as CNN has reported, there are more than 100 people involved in the project who have worked in the Trump administration. Prominent figures such as Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, a top aide who was involved in setting major immigration policy, are associated with conservative groups that advised the project.

Project 2025, which mentions Trump hundreds of times, includes concepts that Trump supports, including — as Harris alluded to — cutting business taxes and rewriting the nation’s health care laws. But it also proposes things that Trump did not do when he was president, such as setting just two individual tax brackets of 15% and 30% (down from seven) and eliminating or transforming entire government agencies.

There is no telling what parts of Project 2025 Trump would implement, if elected. But Project 2025 is not his “agenda” or “plan,” as Harris said.

Trump’s Dictator RemarksIn recent speeches this month, including in Philadelphia on July 13, Harris repeated a popular talking point that “Donald Trump openly vowed, if reelected, that he will be a dictator on Day 1.”

Harris was referring to a comment that Trump made at a Fox News town hall in December. At the event, Sean Hannity gave Trump the chance to respond to critics who warned that Trump would be a dictator if elected to a second term. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Hannity said. Trump responded, “Except for Day 1.”

Trump went on to say, “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Trump later claimed he was joking with Hannity. In a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

Trump repeated his intention to close the border and drill for oil. “That’s all. And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator,” Trump told Bartiromo, claiming his “dictator” comment was “said in jest.”

Manufacturing JobsIn a July 18 speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris left the misleading impression that Trump was to blame for the loss of “tens of thousands” of manufacturing jobs.

“So, Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing,” Harris said. “The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.”

The fact is, those jobs were lost during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As of February 2020, the U.S. had added 414,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But then the economic effects of the pandemic took hold. In April 2020 alone, the U.S. lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs.

Most of those jobs came back. But at the end of Trump’s four years, the U.S. had lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2017, when he took office.

Under Biden, the rest of the manufacturing jobs returned and then some. Since January 2021, the U.S. has added 762,000 manufacturing jobs.

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Election law experts say House Speaker Mike Johnson is wrong when he says it is “unlawful” for Democrats to “simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the … democratic process.”

Although President Joe Biden was chosen by the vast majority of primary and caucus voters, and amassed more than 99% of the pledged delegates who will meet at the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, he has not been formally nominated. And since he has voluntarily dropped out of the race, delegates pledged to him are no longer obligated to vote for him and can vote for someone else, experts told us.

The Associated Press reported that a survey of delegates found Vice President Kamala Harris is already closing in on the number of delegates she needs to win the nomination.

On July 21, Biden announced via X, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” In a message to Democrats a half hour later, Biden said, “I have decided not to accept the nomination,” and he offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.”

The same day Biden made his announcement, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison released a statement saying, “In the coming days, the Party will undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November. This process will be governed by established rules and procedures of the Party. Our delegates are prepared to take seriously their responsibility in swiftly delivering a candidate to the American people.”

Prominent Democrats have quickly coalesced around Harris as the nominee — including some who may have harbored their own presidential aspirations, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

On two political talk shows hours before Biden made his announcement, Johnson raised the issue of the legality of “switching” the Democratic nominee to someone other than Biden, and suggested Republicans would file legal challenges if the DNC attempted such a thing.

Johnson, ABC News’ “This Week,”* *July 21: Well, these elections are handled at the state level. Every state has its own system and in some of these, it’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the democratic, small D, democratic process over such a long period of time.

Fourteen million Democrats voted to make Joe Biden the nominee. So, it would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the back room and switch it out because they’re — they don’t like the candidate any longer. That’s not how this is supposed to work. So, I think they would run into some legal impediments in at least a few of these jurisdictions and I think there’ll be a compelling case to be made that that shouldn’t happen, and so I think they got legal trouble if that’s their — if that’s their intention and that’s their plan. So, we’ll how it plays out. We don’t know.

Johnson, CNN’s “State of the Union,” July 21: Look, I’m a former litigator, a constitutional law attorney. I just made note in some comments over the last week that they have real problems. I mean, every state has their own election system. That’s our constitutional system. That’s the way it’s done. And in some of these states, it’s a real hurdle. They have a real problem of replacing the nominee at the top of the ticket.

Remember, [host] Jake [Tapper], I mean, Joe Biden was chosen after a long small-D democratic process by 14 million people emerging through that primary. It will be very interesting to see if the so-called party of democracy, the Democrats, go into a back room somewhere and switch it out and put someone else at the top of the ticket. I mean, I think they have got legal hurdles in some of these states, and it’ll be litigated, I would expect, on the ground there and they will have to sort through that. They have got a real problem.

Election law experts said Johnson is incorrect.

“First of all, the Democratic Party is not ‘replacing or switch[ing] out’ its nominee,” Edward B. Foley, the director of the election law program at Ohio State University, told us via email. “Biden was never the official nominee, only the presumptive nominee. The nominee is chosen by the delegates to the convention, either at the convention or in a virtual roll call beforehand, neither of which has occurred yet.

“Moreover, political parties have the constitutional right to determine the procedure by which they select their nominees, as repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court,” Foley said, citing the Supreme Court cases Democratic Party of United States v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette and California Democratic Party v. Jones.

“The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law.”

Foley said there “would be no basis whatsoever for Republicans (or anyone else) to challenge the Democratic Party’s decision to follow its own rules in nominating someone other than Biden.”

According to the Democratic Party’s rules, Foley said, “the presidential preference primaries determined who the convention delegates are; the primary voters did not directly choose the party’s nominee. Biden’s now having voluntarily withdrawn from the race before the delegates nominated him based on his status as presumptive nominee as a result of the primaries, the delegates are free pursuant to the party’s own rules to choose a different person as their nominee. There has been no disenfranchisement of primary voters as a part of the process of the party following its own nomination rules.”

Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law, echoed that point via an email to us, saying, “Speaker Johnson’s claims are absolutely false.”

“Biden was not the official nominee,” Douglas said. “The nominee is not determined until the Convention when the delegates nominate someone. The claims that there is some kind of legal reason Biden must be on the ballot are simply wrong. Every state puts on the ballot the person who the parties nominate at their convention. Trump was not the official nominee until last week when the RNC formally nominated him. There is no basis whatsoever for states not to put whoever the Democrats nominate on the ballot.”

Nonetheless, the conservative Heritage Foundation told Newsweek it might spend millions to launch court challenges.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, told Newsweek some state laws may make it more difficult than others for Democrats to replace their candidate. For example, “Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal for any reason besides death,” a Heritage Foundation memo states.

That’s referring to language in the Wisconsin state candidate ballot access procedures, which states, “Any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot cannot withdraw their name from the ballot after filing. The name of that person shall appear upon the ballot except in case of death of the person.”

But whether Biden can remove his name from ballots is irrelevant, Foley told us.

“That section of Wisconsin law is inapplicable to the current context,” Foley said. “Biden has NOT been placed on the general election ballot in Wisconsin (or anywhere else). The relevant provision of Wisconsin law is this: ‘Each recognized political party must certify to the general accountability board no later than the first Tuesday in September preceding a presidential election the names of the candidates for president and vice-president.'”

There is a separate issue, Foley said, of state deadlines for getting the names of the party’s nominees on the ballot.

“The earliest deadline is Tuesday, August 20 (as far as I’m aware), now that Ohio has pushed its deadline back to September 1,” Foley said. “As long as the Democrats officially choose their nominees by that August 20 deadline, which is in Washington State, there is [no] basis for any argument to keep the party’s nominees off the ballot for timing reasons.”

In order to alleviate any of those concerns, the DNC had signaled that it intended to hold a virtual call of delegates to nominate a candidate before the convention. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago starts on Aug. 19 and ends Aug. 22.

“There is the implication [in Johnson’s comments] that states have different rules and the open convention will run afoul of those rules,” John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told us via email. “This concern is not relevant at the convention stage. But it would be relevant if President Biden had dropped out later, after the convention and as states were beginning to print their ballots. States have deadlines by which they need to know the names that will go on the ballot, and they have procedures for potentially changing a name on a ballot. But all of this would only apply after the convention when state deadlines for getting on the ballot would apply.”

Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias posted confidently on Threads, “Before the media gets rolling, let me be clear: The Democratic nominee for president will be on all 50 state ballots. There is no basis for any legal challenge. Period.”

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A shooter attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a rally in the western Pennsylvania town of Butler on July 13.

Former President Donald Trump is assisted offstage after shots were fired during a campaign rally on July 13, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and three rally attendees were shot — Corey Comperatore, 50, died, and David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, were injured.

Secret Service agents killed the suspect at the scene, and the FBI later identified him as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Investigators said that it appears Crooks acted alone.

But conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media began clouding coverage of the incident almost immediately after it happened.

These are some of the claims we’ve addressed:

• Viral online posts made the unfounded claim that a woman at the rally acted “suspicious,” suggesting that she might have been involved in a plot to assassinate Trump, and that a QAnon-related character may have also been involved. But the FBI has said that the “investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone.”

See “Posts Baselessly Suggest Others Were Involved in Trump’s Assassination Attempt” for more. * Extensive media coverage of the attempted assassination of Trump at the rally has shown his injury and the immediate response of Secret Service agents. But social media posts made the unsupported claims that Trump wasn’t shot and the agents’ response indicated the incident was “staged.”

See “Posts Make Unsupported Claims About Trump’s Wound and Secret Service Response” for more. * In the days following the assassination attempt, social media swirled with misinformation about the shooter. Crooks was a registered Republican, and there is no evidence he had a criminal record, contrary to popular claims online.

See “Misinformation Swirls About Trump Rally Shooter’s Identity” for more. * Posts from the anonymous online forum 4Chan spread the false claim that Secret Service officials prevented an agent named “Jonathan Willis” from shooting Trump’s attempted assassin. The Secret Service has no employee by that name, and the claim is “categorically false,” the agency said.

See “False Claim About Fake Secret Service Agent Contributes to Rally Conspiracy Theories” for more. * The actions of the Secret Service at the Pennsylvania rally are under review. But social media posts showed an altered photo to falsely claim agents were smiling while moving Trump to safety. The original Associated Press photo shows the agents weren’t smiling.

See “Posts Use Altered Image of Secret Service Agents Following Trump Shooting” for more.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

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

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

• Trump said his life was saved because he had turned to look at a chart on illegal immigration when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear. The chart is highly misleading. Trump wrongly claimed the arrow pointing to a low point showed his “last week in office.” It points to April 2020, when apprehensions at the border plummeted during the height of the pandemic.
• Trump revisited one of his most frequent claims, the falsehood that “cheating” caused him to lose the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. Courts across the country have rejected his claims, and election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
• Trump’s son Eric Trump falsely claimed that in 2016, before his father took office, “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” There had been 76 straight months of job growth, and job openings were near record levels.
• The former president falsely claimed that “107%” of U.S. jobs are “taken by illegal aliens,” and added that Black and Hispanic Americans are “being hurt the most.” Since Biden has been in office, employment of native-born workers has increased more than foreign-born workers, which includes people in the country legally. The Black and Hispanic populations also have experienced employment gains in that time.
• Trump falsely claimed Democrats “are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare” because of illegal immigration. In fact, workers who are not authorized to be in the U.S. bolster the finances of both programs rather than draining from them.
• He falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.
• Trump once again made the unsupported claim that other countries are “emptying out” their prisons and “mental institutions and insane asylums” and sending people to the U.S. Experts say there is no evidence of that.
• Former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan wrongly said “crime is out of control” under Biden, while “we had safe streets” under Trump. Violent crime has gone down.
• Eric Trump and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson referred to drug overdose deaths, falsely claiming the Biden administration or others have done nothing to tackle the problem.
• Trump warned that Biden wants to “raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,” but Biden has not proposed anything like that.
• The former president repeated a familiar falsehood, claiming, “We gave you the largest tax cut.” But, as we’ve written before, the 2017 tax cuts were not the largest.
• Trump misleadingly said the IRS “just hired 88,000 agents to go after” middle-income American workers. Additional funding for the IRS will be used for hiring mainly customer service staff, and increased IRS enforcement will focus on those earning more than $400,000.
• Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo falsely claimed, “President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” by Hamas in Gaza. Biden has spoken about efforts to release the U.S. hostages several times since Oct. 7.
• Trump incorrectly claimed that an electric vehicle “mandate” is devastating the U.S. auto industry.
• He made exaggerated claims about the defeat of ISIS and military equipment left in Afghanistan.
• Trump said his administration was “keeping” Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, while Biden gave it up. Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all bases.
• He wrongly said the U.S. had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” during his presidency.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the chart:

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

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

False Claim About ‘Cheating’ in ElectionsTrump also touched on one of his most frequently repeated false claims — that “cheating” was the reason he lost the 2020 election to Biden.

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

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

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

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

Jobs Weren’t ‘Scarce’ in 2016Eric Trump claimed that in 2016 — before his father took office — “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” That’s false.

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

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

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

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

The job growth under Obama led to a worker shortage.

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

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

All Jobs Not Going to ‘Illegal Aliens’Turning to illegal immigration, Trump falsely claimed that Americans are being completely “squeezed out of the labor force” by people in the country illegally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflation Not ‘Worst Ever’Trump falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.

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

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

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

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

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

No Evidence Countries Are Emptying PrisonsAs he has in virtually every speech for more than a year, Trump made the unsupported claim that other countries are “emptying out” their prisons and “mental institutions and insane asylums” and sending those people to the U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders.

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

Fentanyl and Drug Overdose DeathsEric Trump misled about the Biden administration’s response to the fentanyl crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden Not Proposing to Raise Taxes ‘Four Times’ HigherTrump warned, “This is the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2017 Tax Cuts Not the LargestTrump repeated another one of his favorite claims when he told the crowd, “We gave you the largest tax cut.”

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

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

But that’s not true, either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarification, July 24: We added information on preliminary FBI crime figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. That information was available when we published this story, but we did not include it.

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Quick TakeViral online posts make the unfounded claim that a woman at former President Donald Trump’s July 13 rally acted “suspicious,” suggesting that she might have been involved in a plot to assassinate Trump, and that a QAnon-related character may have also been involved. The FBI has said that the “investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone.”

Full StoryThe shooter who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a rally in western Pennsylvania on July 13 was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene.

He had carried no identification, but the FBI used photographs and DNA to confirm that he was Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

“While the investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone, the FBI continues to conduct logical investigative activity to determine if there were any co-conspirators associated with this attack,” the bureau said in a statement the day after the shooting.

The FBI has not changed that statement. Instead, it has added that agents have searched Crooks’ home and vehicle and are analyzing his electronic devices. The bureau continues to investigate the shooting as an assassination attempt and as “potential domestic terrorism.”

One of the shots fired by Crooks struck Trump’s right ear before the former president was rushed offstage by Secret Service agents. Three people in the crowd also were shot: Corey Comperatore, 50, died, and David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, were injured.

Despite the public statements from law enforcement, conspiracy theories have been developing online suggesting that the attack was part of a larger plot involving other people in the crowd. (We’ve written about many other unsupported and false claims surrounding the attempted assassination of the former president.)

Some of the most viral claims making this suggestion focus on a woman in the crowd who was seated behind Trump’s podium and was visible just to the right of the former president as he spoke. She appeared to be wearing a black hat that said, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” and she was recording the rally on her mobile phone. A person seated in front of her periodically held up a sign that said, “JOE BIDEN, YOU’RE FIRED!” The sign sometimes obscured part of the woman’s face.

After the first shots were fired, the woman appeared to duck down — as did many of the other attendees near her — and she continued recording with her phone.

Nothing about her behavior seemed out of the ordinary. But online posts have seized on a close-up video clip of her as she pulled out a mobile phone to tape the chaotic scene after the shooting — as if her filming was unusual, even though she had been taping earlier.

In one TikTok post, the clip has text above it that says, “This video of a woman located behind Donald Trump during his attempted assassination is HIGHLY suspicious.” An X post that shared the video added text that said, “Her body language & behavior seem to indicate she knew that something was coming.” The original version of that post, which has been copied and shared on other platforms, has amassed more than 12 million views on X.

The voices of two people narrating the clip say, “She sits down — watch this — puts the sign up. Shots go off. She’s completely normal — and then watch — what the f? What the f? People are freaking out and she… She’s filming.”

Comments on these posts say, “BECAUSE IT WAS STAAAAAAAAAAGED!!!!!!!!!” and, “This was the first person that caught my attention and I knew it was staged.”

But the full video shows the woman’s reaction is similar to the dozens of people around her, and there’s no evidence to support the claim that the shooting was staged.

A similar, but more niche, claim has also been circulating in some conspiracy groups online. This one features Vincent Fusca, whom some adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory believe is actually John F. Kennedy Jr. (who died in a plane crash in 1999).

Fusca, who was at the July 13 rally, regularly attends Trump rallies and events. Like the woman featured in the viral clip, Fusca was seated behind Trump’s podium. He could be seen just to the left of the former president, wearing a black fedora and dark blue blazer.

One post on Instagram said, “Look who it is front and center at what will likely be known as one of the biggest false flags – Vincent Fusca.”

Users have responded with posts such as, “As soon as i saw Vincent i knew something was up.”

Another post, this one on Facebook, noted Fusca’s appearance and suggested that “Trump and the military white hats staged this event to help people wake up to the dangers of the deep state who want to annihilate Trump.”

But, as we said, there’s been no evidence to suggest that the assassination attempt was staged or part of a larger plot.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesC-SPAN. “FBI Briefing on Trump Rally Shooting.” 13 Jul 2024.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Press release. “FBI Statement on Incident in Butler, Pennsylvania.” 14 Jul 2024.

McDonald, Jessica. “Misinformation Swirls About Trump Rally Shooter’s Identity.” FactCheck.org. 16 Jul 2024.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Press release. “Update on the FBI Investigation of the Attempted Assassination of Former President Donald Trump.” 14 Jul 2024.

C-SPAN. “Former President Donald Trump Removed From Stage After Shots Fired at Pennsylvania Rally.” 13 Jul 2024.

Potter, Chris. “Vince Fusca, who some suspect of being a Kennedy, is running for Senate as his own man.” WESA. 7 Mar 2022.

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Quick TakeA chart widely shared on social media comparing macroeconomic indicators purports to show the country fared better under former President Donald Trump than President Joe Biden. However, the chart cites some figures that are inaccurate, outdated or misleading.

Full StoryThe state of the economy is a key campaign issue for both candidates in the 2024 presidential election. The majority of likely voters in the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania said the economy will be a “major factor” in their vote for president, a CBS News/YouGov poll found in April.

Reflecting that concern, a June 25 Facebook post purports to show how Americans fared under former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden by comparing measurements of seven macroeconomic indicators under each administration. The title of the graphic reads, “In Case You’re Undecided.” Multiple other social media accounts reposted the graphic. We received numerous emailed questions from readers asking us to evaluate the data presented in the posts.

We cover many macroeconomic indicators in our quarterly reports of Biden’s Numbers and Trump’s Numbers, and we provide our sources for all of the data we use. We don’t know how all the statistics in the graphic were calculated, because the posts do not include any supporting information. However, we determined that many of the comparisons use misleading statistical methodologies, outdated time frames or dubious sources.

Additionally, reading a list of numbers and percentages alone does not provide a full explanation of how the economy’s health differed under Trump as compared with Biden. As we describe below, factors outside of any president’s control heavily influence many of the statistics cited in the graphic.

Using the most recently available data, we analyzed each of the seven macroeconomic metrics under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Here’s what we found.

Inflation RateClaim: 1.9% for Trump and 17% for Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic overstates inflation under Biden relative to Trump by using different methodologies to measure consumer prices**.

The graphic appears to use different methodologies to measure inflation under Biden and Trump, but misleadingly reports the two figures as if they were calculated in the same way. This makes the numbers look much worse for Biden than an equivalent comparison would.

It’s true that the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, increased an average of 1.9% in each of Trump’s four years in office (measured as the 12-month year-over-yearchange ending each January), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Using that methodology, the average annual inflation rate in Biden’s first three years, through January 2024, was 5.7% — not 17%. Over the last six months ending June 2024, prices have increased by an additional 1.4%.

Looking at total increases in consumer prices under both presidents, the CPI-U for all items increased by 7.8% over Trump’s four years in office. By comparison, the total increase in consumer prices thus far under Biden is 19.2%.

However, as we’ve written before, economists we’ve interviewed say that while Biden’s policies bear some responsibility for rising inflation under his administration, other external factors played a larger role in raising prices. Economists primarily blame rising inflation on the disruptions inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as supply shortages, labor market distortions and increased consumer spending on goods, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Because of these disruptions, rising inflation was a global phenomenon in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Gas PricesClaim: $2.17 for Trump and $3.96 for Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic both understates average gas prices under Trump and overstates average prices under Biden.

The gas prices cited in this graphic do not reflect the reality under both presidencies. Using data from the Energy Information Administration, we identified the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump averaged $2.48 under Trump. The highest recorded figure was $2.96 on May 28, 2018, and the lowest was $1.77 in April 2020, when the global economy nearly shut down because of the pandemic. Overall, the average nationwide gas price increased by 2.3% over the course of the Trump presidency.

Under Biden, the average nationwide price of regular gas throughout his presidency thus far is $3.50. The highest recorded price was $5.01 on June 13, 2022, and the lowest recorded price was $2.39 at the start of his presidency on Jan. 25, 2021. Overall, the average nationwide gas price has increased by 46.2% under Biden’s presidency.

Instead of citing the average price of gas over the two presidencies, the graphic apparently reported gas prices from a single month of Trump’s and Biden’s administrations. For example, the average nationwide price of regular gas was $2.18 in July 2020 and $3.98 in August 2022. However, the EIA explains that gas prices frequently fluctuate, making average prices over multiple months a more representative statistic than a single snapshot.

Similar to inflation, many factors outside of the president’s control play a significant role in altering gas prices. As we’ve written before, gas prices are primarily dictated by global crude oil markets, which fluctuate due to a myriad of international supply and demand factors. In particular, economists told us that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the U.S.’s subsequent sanctions against Russian oil exports played a significant role in increasing gas prices under Biden.

Average RentClaim: $1,096 for Trump and $2,395 for Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic overstates average rent prices under Biden.

No government source tracks nationwide average rent prices in current dollars, so we used data from private sector sources. First, Apartmentlist.com identified that the average overall rent price for apartments under Trump was $1,130. Under Biden, the average overall rent price was $1,360. The highest nationwide monthly average rent price for apartments recorded under Biden’s presidency so far was $1,442 in August 2022. Over their respective terms, overall apartment rent prices increased by 7.1% under Trump and by 23% under Biden, according to Apartmentlist.com.

We also looked at Zillow’s Observed Rent Index, which tracks changes in nationwide average rent prices of all single-family homes. Zillow’s index identified that the average home rent price under the Trump administration was $1,488, as compared with $1,884 under Biden. According to Zillow’s index, home rent prices increased by 15% over the entire Trump administration, and by 30% thus far during the Biden administration.

Finally, the BLS also tracks changes in rent prices for urban consumers as an indexed value within the CPI. The index determines the percentage change in nominal rent prices in each month relative to the average price in 1982-1984 dollars. According to this index, rent prices increased by 13.6% over the entire Trump administration, and by 21.5% thus far during the Biden administration.

Nasdaq Stock IndexClaim: Up 62% under Trump, and up 13.8% under Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic understates total increases in the Nasdaq for both Trump and Biden.

As described by Motley Fool, “The Nasdaq Composite is one of the most widely followed stock indexes in the U.S. and is usually one of the three ‘headline’ indexes that market commentators often cite — along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500.” The Nasdaq is focused on the technology sector.

Using data from Yahoo Finance, we identified that the Nasdaq Composite increased by 138% throughout the Trump presidency. By comparison, the Nasdaq has increased by 37.3% between the start of Biden’s presidency and July 15. Aggregated over a daily basis, the Nasdaq increased by about 0.14% per day under Trump, as compared with 0.04% per day thus far under Biden. The Nasdaq figures cited in the graphic are outdated and identical to information published by Axios on Jan. 1.

Whether the president’s actions significantly alter stock market outcomes remains a contested debate among economists. While Federal Reserve Board economists Sean Campbell and Canlin Li argue that “neither risk nor return varies significantly across the presidential cycle,” Utrecht University Associate Professor of Economics Maurizio Montone found that “large net disapproval over the U.S. president’s job is followed by low stock returns.”

Grocery PricesClaim: Up 3.5% under Trump and up 25% under Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic both understates total grocery price increases under Trump and slightly overstates total grocery price increases under Biden.

To measure increases in grocery prices, we once again turn to the BLS, evaluating changes in the CPI for food at home. Aggregating over each president’s entire tenure, the indexed price of groceries increased by 6.5% in total under the Trump administration and 20.9% in total under the Biden administration. The inflation rate has slowed in recent months, with grocery prices increasing by only 1.1% over the last year.

Electricity PricesClaim: No change under Trump, up 21.43% under Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic overstates electricity price increases under Biden relative to Trump by using different methodologies to measure price changes.

We used the BLS index of electricity prices for all urban consumers to evaluate this statistic. In total, electricity prices increased by 4% under the Trump administration, compared with 28.3% thus far under the Biden administration.

Similar to total inflation, it appears this graphic misleadingly attempted to compare average year-over-year price changes under Trump to total price changes under Biden. The BLS index shows that the annual year-over-year inflation rate for electricity costs was 1% under the Trump administration. By comparison, the average annual inflation rate for electricity costs was 8.6% under the Biden administration through January 2024. Over the last six months, electricity prices have increased by an additional 1.6%.

As we’ve written previously, economists told us that utility costs are primarily dictated by global markets for “feeder fuels” such as natural gas and coal, and are not controlled by the president.

Real Average Hourly EarningsClaim: Increased 7.1% under Trump and decreased 3.5% under Biden.

Our analysis: The graphic overstates decreases in real average hourly earnings under Biden by citing outdated information.

Using BLS data for nominal average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation using the CPI for all items, we calculated real (inflation-adjusted) average hourly earnings under both presidents. We found that real average hourly earnings have decreased by 1.9% in total thus far under the Biden administration, meaning inflation has outpaced wage gains for the average worker since the beginning of 2021. The 3.5% decrease reported by the graphic appears to cite outdated information evaluating changes in real hourly wages between January 2021 and February 2023. Under Trump’s presidency, real average hourly wages increased by 6.8% in total.

Just as with inflation, we’ve identified in a previous article that multiple factors outside of the president’s control affect measurements of real average hourly wages. In particular, the rapid exit and subsequent reentry of low-wage workers from the labor force during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted measurements of average wages, leading some economists to argue that 2021 is an unreliable starting point for evaluating changes in real wages under Biden.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

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Utrecht University. M. Montone. Accessed 12 Jul 2024.

Wile, Rob. “The U.S. is winning the inflation fight, setting scene for a long-awaited interest rate cut.” NBC News. 11 Jul 2024.

Yahoo Finance. “Nasdaq (^IXIC) historical data.” Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

Zillow. “Housing Data.” zillow.com. Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

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FactCheck.org staff writer Catalina Jaramillo spoke with La Red Hispana, a Spanish-language media network, about our efforts to combat misinformation in Spanish.

FactCheck.org started translating its articles about health and science in 2021 as part of SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The project’s goal was to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation. This is crucial, Jaramillo said in the interview, because when people make health “decisions based on false or distorted information … that can endanger entire communities.”

To read the interview in Spanish, go to “La lucha contra la desinformación de Catalina Jaramillo de FactCheck.org.” (You can read a translation by Google Translate here.)

The interview also launches our partnership with La Red Hispana, which serves 40 million Latinos and Hispanics living in the U.S. with over 300 affiliated Spanish-language radio stations and multiple digital channels, according to 2024 data provided by the organization. La Red Hispana, which translates as The Hispanic Network, is part of HCN, or the Hispanic Communications Network, a producer and distributor of educational and public interest content in Spanish with 40 years of experience, based in Washington, D.C.

La Red Hispana will publish shorter versions of our articles regularly. The posts will include an audio clip, which will air on its affiliated radio stations, and a reel to be shared on FactCheck.org’s and La Red Hispana’s social media channels. To see our first post in La Red Hispana go to “Solo los inmigrantes residiendo legalmente en EE. UU. pueden obtener un número de Seguridad Social y beneficios.” The post is a version of our article “Posts Misrepresent Immigrants’ Eligibility for Social Security Numbers, Benefits.”

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During his speech at the Republican National Convention, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota talked about “rioters” in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and misleadingly said that Vice President Kamala Harris “freed” from jail one of “the criminals” who “went on to murder a man” in neighboring St. Paul. Emmer is distorting the facts.

The congressman was referring to Shawn Michael Tillman, who in March was sentenced to prison for a 2022 murder. But he was not a protester Harris encouraged the public to help get out of jail in 2020.

“When Minneapolis was in flames and businesses were in ruins, Kamala Harris encouraged and enabled the criminals and the rioters,” Emmer, the House majority whip, said in his July 16 remarks. “She even promoted a fund to release the criminals from jail. It doesn’t get reported much in our media, but one criminal Kamala Harris freed in Minneapolis went on to murder a man in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

As we’ve written, Harris did use her social media accounts in June 2020 to encourage donations to a nonprofit, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” after the death of George Floyd, who was killed by a police officer the month prior. The nonprofit, founded in 2016, pays the bail amount — which is set by a judge — for individuals who would otherwise be unable to afford to secure their release from jail while they await their day in court.

After Harris and other public figures promoted the organization, MFF “raised nearly $40 million in donations from over one million individual donors in 2020,” Greg Lewin, the organization’s then-interim executive director, told us in an email for our 2020 article. He said that $1.5 million was set aside to financially assist protesters in Minnesota who were “fighting their cases,” but the nonprofit said many of those who were arrested while protesting “weren’t detained and instead were given citations then released, have been released with no bail, or held with no bail.”

When we heard Emmer’s convention remarks live on July 16, we reached out to his congressional office that night and asked for the name of the person he claimed that Harris allegedly “freed” from jail. We initially did not get a response. When we followed up on July 17, a spokesperson for Emmer’s reelection campaign replied to an email with a link to an August 2022 Fox News article about Shawn Michael Tillman.

The article mentioned that a Minnesota news outlet reported that month that Tillman, after being bailed out of jail by the Minnesota Freedom Fund on April 29, 2022, was arrested three weeks later for the murder of a man in St. Paul, later identified as Demitri Ellis-Strong. Nearly two years later, in March 2024, Tillman was convicted of first- and second-degree murder, as well as unlawful possession of a firearm, and sentenced to life in prison.

But prior to his April 2022 release, Tillman had been jailed on misdemeanor charges of indecent exposure, according to news reports and the MFF, which said it paid $2,000 in bail support for his release. There’s no indication that his arrest had anything to do with the protests, or riots, following Floyd’s death two years prior.

So, contrary to what Emmer suggested on stage at the RNC, Tillman is not one of the protesters whom Harris asked the public to help four years ago by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.

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In a leaked phone call with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former President Donald Trump incorrectly suggested that childhood vaccine doses are too large and are dangerous to kids.

Referring to a “massive” vaccine “that is like 38 different vaccines” and “looks like it’s meant for a horse” rather than a baby, Trump claimed in a video clip of the call that was shared online to have seen “too many times” vaccinated children “all of a sudden starting to change radically.”

Although Trump didn’t specify the “sudden” changes, the former president is likely referring to the long-debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, a falsehood he has previously shared. Furthermore, no childhood vaccine or combination of vaccines targets 38 diseases at once. There’s no evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harmful to children.

Trump’s false claims about vaccines immediately preceded an apparent offer to work in some way with Kennedy, who is well known for his anti-vaccine views. Trump also discussed aspects of the attempt on his life at a campaign rally on July 13.

Neither presidential campaign responded to requests for comment and clarification.

The Leaked CallThe video clip of the phone call, which runs under two minutes and shows Kennedy speaking to Trump over speakerphone, was first shared by Kennedy’s son Robert “Bobby” Kennedy III, on X, the Washington Post reported. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the wife of Bobby Kennedy III, is Kennedy’s campaign manager.

According to a screenshot of his original post, Bobby Kennedy III shared the clip of the call, which he said occurred on July 14, because he was upset that Trump had chosen Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate over his father. “He could have picked a unity ticket instead he picked JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance,” he wrote, alluding to a 2022 tweet from Vance about overwhelmed hospitals that included the line, “let’s fire thousands of nurses who refuse to get the vaccine.”

A screenshot from the video clip shared online of a July 14 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Bobby Kennedy III, however, seems to have misunderstood that Vance, who has a record of opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was being sarcastic in the tweet. Bobby Kennedy III subsequently removed his post with the video “for mistaking sarcasm for real life,” he said on X. But the video had already spread online and remains available on news sites, including NBC News and CNN.

On July 16, when the clip went viral, Robert F. Kennedy issued an apology. “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” he wrote on X. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

“I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system,” Trump said at the beginning of the video, presumably referring to vaccination. “Remember, I said you want to do small doses. Small doses.”

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you should be giving a horse this … And did you ever see the size of it, right? You know, it’s this massive,” Trump continued, trailing off. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy replied.

Trump then appeared to want to collaborate with Kennedy in some capacity. “Anyway … I would love you to do something,” he said. “And I think it would be so good for you. And so big for you. And we’re going to win. We’re going to win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”

Trump proceeded to recount how Biden had called him after the assassination attempt, saying the bullet that grazed him sounded like “the world’s largest mosquito.” The video abruptly ends with Trump commenting on the type of weapon used to shoot him — “an AR-15 or something,” he said, adding, “pretty tough guns, right?”

Throughout the clip of the call, Kennedy was largely silent, only occasionally responding.

Trump’s Vaccine FalsehoodsTrump’s comments in the leaked call are similar to his previous false statements about vaccines.

For example, in a 2015 Republican primary debate, he recounted an anecdote about a toddler who was vaccinated, developed a fever and went on to develop autism. During that debate, he also advocated “smaller doses over a longer period of time” and used his favored equine language to describe vaccines.

“I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me,” he said.

Earlier in the decade, he also was preoccupied with vaccine dose sizes or combinations.

“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism,” he falsely declared in a 2012 tweet.

Two years later, he insisted in a tweet that he wasn’t against “vaccinations for your children,” but was against vaccinations “in 1 massive dose.” “Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!” he added.

There has been intense scientific investigation into the issue, and there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. In fact, a significant body of work refutes the idea — first proposed by a now-retracted and fraudulent study — with study after study failing to find a link. The rise in autism cases in the last several decades is in large part thought to be due to awareness of the condition and changes in how it is defined.

Similarly, there is no evidence that the current vaccine dose sizes or combination vaccines are hazardous to children or that additional “spacing out” of vaccines is needed. As with all medical products, vaccines are not 100% safe, but serious side effects are rare. Deviating from the immunization schedule is risky because children go unprotected and can contract diseases before they are vaccinated.

Children, of course, do not receive all their vaccines in a single dose. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, the number of vaccines given to children has grown over time, as scientists have developed more vaccines that target more diseases, which ultimately prevents more childhood illness. In the process, several combination vaccines have also been developed, which reduces the total number of shots kids need.

For example, perhaps the best-known combination vaccine is the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. There’s also the DTap vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Sometimes children will receive as many as six shots in a single medical visit, CHOP notes. But no shot or combination of shots given in a single doctor’s visit protects against 38 different diseases. In fact, a child given all the vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 2 years of age will be protected against 14 diseases (15 if including COVID-19).

Getting several vaccines at once isn’t a problem. “A number of studies have been done to look at the effects of giving various combinations of vaccines, and when every new vaccine is licensed, it has been tested along with the vaccines already recommended for a particular aged child. The recommended vaccines have been shown to be as effective in combination as they are individually,” the CDC explains on a webpage about multiple vaccinations. “Sometimes, certain combinations of vaccines given together can cause fever, and occasionally febrile seizures; these are temporary and do not cause any lasting damage.”

Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that vaccine doses are too big for children, vaccines are designed to contain the smallest amount of antigen, or active ingredient, needed to mount a protective immune response. Typically, antigens are killed or weakened virus or bacteria, or only a piece of a pathogen, such as a viral protein. This means they actually contain very little antigen relative to an infection — with the added bonus that a person doesn’t need to get sick to develop immunity. (As we’ve written before, with vaccination, age is what matters for dose — not weight.)

“All vaccines expose recipients to a smaller number of antigens (parts of viruses or bacteria that generate an immune response) than the actual virus or bacteria,” CHOP’s website explains. “Even when multiple vaccines are given together, the number of antigens is limited compared with the number of pathogens to which infants are exposed during a normal day. The difference is we know when our children were exposed to antigens through a vaccine, but we aren’t always aware of their exposures to diseases.”

The benefits of vaccines are clear. Globally, childhood vaccinations prevent some 4 million deaths a year, according to the CDC. And in many places, such as the U.S., vaccines have made many childhood illnesses largely a thing of the past. That includes measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, as well as polio, which in mid-century America killed or paralyzed thousands of children a year.

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SummaryFormer President Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate, JD Vance, accepted the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination on the convention’s third night, which featured claims about the economy, immigration and foreign policy.

• Vance wrongly said that workers’ wages “stagnated” for much of his life until they “went through the roof” under Trump. Inflation-adjusted wages had been rising over several presidencies before Trump took office.
• Vance said “Trump was right” to oppose “the disastrous invasion of Iraq.” But there is no record of him opposing the war before it started in 2003 or the congressional resolution authorizing the war in 2002.
• Media personality Kimberly Guilfoyle said that “President Trump handed Biden a booming economy.” But when President Joe Biden took office, the U.S. had just experienced a rare drop in gross domestic product in 2020, related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and unemployment remained high.
• Rep. Matt Gaetz falsely said Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed a “border czar.” Harris wasn’t appointed to lead immigration issues. Instead, Biden assigned her to lead a group of actions intended to “address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich falsely claimed that Trump wanted to keep Bagram Air Base when U.S. troops were being withdrawn from Afghanistan. Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all bases.
• North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum misleadingly blamed “Biden’s red tape” for increasing the price of gasoline. The cost of gas is primarily fueled by global supply and demand factors beyond a president’s control, experts say.
• Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told the convention crowd that he “went to prison so you won’t have to.” Navarro was sentenced to prison after a jury convicted him in 2023 on two counts of contempt for refusing to comply with a 2022 subpoena from Congress.
• Vance noted then-Sen. Biden’s support for NAFTA in 1993 and called it “a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.” But economic studies say the trade deal had a relatively small overall impact on jobs.
• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed that Trump had succeeded as president in “eliminating illegal immigration.” That’s false. The number of border crossings did drop in his first year in office, but they were never eliminated. And they began growing in his second year.
• Abbott claimed that neither Biden nor Harris had visited the southern border before he began busing migrants to other parts of the country. But Harris had gone to El Paso, Texas, almost a year before his busing policy began.
• Rep. Michael Waltz channeled the false Trump talking point that Biden is converting the military to electric tanks. While the military is moving toward the electrification of its vehicle fleets, that does not apply to combat vehicles.

AnalysisWages Were Rising Before TrumpIn his speech accepting the vice presidential nomination, JD Vance falsely claimed that workers’ wages “stagnated” for much of his life until they “went through the roof” under Trump. Inflation-adjusted wages had been rising over several presidencies before Trump took office.

“There’s this chart that shows worker wages,” Vance said, “and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along — workers’ wages went through the roof.”

That’s not what this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows on real, meaning inflation-adjusted, average weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees.

Vance was born in 1984, when real wages were still generally falling after reaching their long-term peak in the early 1970s. But around the mid- to late 1990s, when Vance was 12 or so years old, real wages began to rise.

As the chart shows, wages have fluctuated, but they were on an upward trend before Trump took office. The noticeable spike in the chart came in April and May 2020, during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when unemployment also shot up and many lower-wage workers lost their jobs.

Over Trump’s four years, wage growth was solid. The average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers — who make up 81% of all private-sector workers — went up 9.6% under Trump. Before the pandemic hit, they had gone up 3.6%.

But as we’ve explained before, that rise extended a trend that started after the 2007-2009 recession. Over President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, real weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers rose 4%.

And wages had been climbing prior to that. Under President George W. Bush, real wages went up by 4.5%, and under President Bill Clinton, they rose by 6.4%.

Trump and the Iraq WarIn discussing decisions made by the “ruling class in Washington” that hurt people living in small towns in America, Vance criticized Biden for leading the U.S. into war in Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Vance said: “Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq” — which, as we wrote, is true. Biden voted in October 2002 for a joint resolution authorizing use of military force against Iraq, and spoke out in support of then-President George W. Bush immediately after the Republican president used that congressional authorization to invade Iraq on March 19, 2003.

Vance then contrasted Biden’s support for the war with Trump’s position, saying that “somehow a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right” about Iraq. But, as we also wrote, there is no evidence that Trump spoke against the war before it started, although we did find he expressed early concerns about the cost and direction of the war a few months after it started.

When Trump first ran for president, we did a deep dive into the subject of Trump’s position on the Iraq war after he repeatedly claimed to have opposed the Iraq war before it started. In a Sept. 16, 2015, debate, Trump claimed he “fought very, very hard against us … going into Iraq.” A few weeks later, Trump told Fox News that he was “visited by people from the White House” in an attempt to silence him, because, he said, he was getting “a disproportionate amount of publicity” for his opposition to the war.

The Trump campaign at the time provided no evidence of what Trump called his “loud and clear” opposition to invading Iraq. Other fact-checking organizations — including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — were also unable to find any evidence to support Trump’s claims. Around this time, BuzzFeed reported that Trump indicated his support for war in a radio interview with shock jock Howard Stern on Sept. 11, 2002 — a little more than six months before the war started. Stern asked Trump directly if he supported going to war with Iraq, and Trump hesitantly responded, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Our reporting found that Trump had a financial interest in opposing the war in the weeks leading up to the war, and that he expressed concerns about the financial cost of the war not long after it started. For example, Trump in July 2003 said in an interview that he wished the money being spent in Iraq could be spent in New York City.

By 2004, Trump’s opposition to the war was well documented, but there is no record that he opposed the war before it started in 2003 or the resolution authorizing the war in 2002.

Biden Inherited a Struggling EconomyMedia personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr., misrepresented the state of the U.S. economy when Biden took office in January 2021. “President Trump handed Biden a booming economy and a strong nation,” she said. “All Joe had to do was leave it alone and take a nap.”

But by some key measures, the economy was struggling when Biden took office and has improved since.

Unemployment in January 2021 was at 6.4% — an improvement from its pandemic-related peak of 14.8% in April 2020, but still above the historical norm of 5.6% and up 1.7 percentage points from when Trump’s term began. The unemployment rate under Biden as of June was 4.1%, below the historical norm.

Trump also presided over a net loss of 2.9 million jobs, largely due to the pandemic. As of last month, the U.S. has gained more than 15.7 million jobs under Biden.

Real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product has grown most years in modern history, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But it dropped by 2.2% with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, after growing modestly by 2.5% to 3% during Trump’s first three years in office. It went on to grow by 5.8% in 2021, amid the economic recovery, followed by increases of 1.9% and 2.5% in the subsequent two years of Biden’s term.

Harris Wasn’t Appointed ‘Border Czar’Rep. Matt Gaetz from Florida falsely claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed a “border czar.”

“Kamala Harris isn’t able to do any job,” he said while speaking about Biden’s ability to do his job. “She was appointed border czar — appointing Kamala Harris to oversee the border is like appointing Bernie Madoff to oversee your retirement plan.”

Harris was not appointed a “border czar” or a person in charge of immigration issues at the border. In 2021, Biden appointed Harris to lead an effort to “improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions” in Central America named the “Root Causes Strategy.” The strategy consisted of several actions intended to “address the root causes of migration” specifically “from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” The efforts to deter migration from those countries included funds for natural disasters and COVID-19 vaccines, the creation of task forces and plans to address security issues and fighting corruption, and partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

On Tuesday night, during the second night of the convention, Harris was repeatedly called a “border czar” by other Republican speakers. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida had previously called Harris a “border czar” in a letter he sent to Harris on Feb. 20 urging her to “fulfill your constitutional duty to serve as the presiding officer of Secretary Mayorkas’ impeachment trial.”

Trump’s Statements on Bagram Air BaseIn his remarks about foreign policy, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich misrepresented Trump’s actions and statements regarding the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. While referring to the Aug. 26, 2021, bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the final days of the withdrawal, Gingrich said, “Biden ordered a chaotic panic-filled withdrawal that left 13 American troops and hundreds of Afghans dead. Where President Trump insisted on keeping Bagram Air Base, which is located within one hour of the Chinese nuclear facilities, President Biden gave it to the Taliban.”

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

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 included a “complete withdrawal of all remaining [Coalition] forces from Afghanistan” by May 1, 2021. The pact also said, “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all forces from remaining bases.”

Biden pushed back the withdrawal date, with a plan to bring all troops home by Aug. 31. Trump criticized Biden’s delay, releasing a statement on April 18, 2021, that said, “we can and should get out earlier.”

At a rally in Ohio on June 26, 2021, Trump said “all the troops are coming back home” and the Biden administration “couldn’t stop the process.”

On July 6, 2021, U.S. forces were pulled out of Bagram, as we’ve written.

But days before the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Trump said, “we should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China.”

In an interview with Fox News on Nov. 7, 2021, Trump said after the withdrawal of troops that he would have maintained a military prison at the Bagram Air Base. “We would have kept Bagram because it is next to China,” Trump said. “And it is one hour away from their nuclear facility, and we gave that up too.”

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.

Gasoline PricesNorth Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the nomination, misleadingly claimed that “Biden’s red tape has raised the price of the gas in your car.”

While gasoline prices have risen under the Biden administration, experts told us that the increase is primarily fueled by global supply and demand factors beyond the president’s control, and not government actions.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump has increased by 47% under Biden’s presidency, rising from $2.38 when he first entered office in late January 2021 to $3.50 as of July 15. Economists primarily pointed to the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine for the increase under the Biden administration.

In 2020, gasoline prices dropped as economic activity declined sharply due to the pandemic. In 2021, as the global economy began to recover, people began to resume their regular activities, including travel, and the global demand for crude oil drove up prices rapidly, because the global supply was not able to keep pace.

Experts told us that oil and gasoline prices were pushed even higher when Russia, one of the world’s largest oil exporters, invaded Ukraine in late February 2022. In response to the attack, the U.S. and other nations put sanctions and bans on Russian oil, further restricting global supply.

Alan Reynolds, an economist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote in a May 2022 post that “what happened to crude oil and gasoline prices in 2022 was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though partisans falsely deny the link between war and oil markets and instead blame President Biden for U.S. gasoline prices.” The war is now in its third year.

Similarly, Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis and a co-founder of the Oil Price Information Service, told us in March 2022 that the price of oil “doesn’t really have much to do with US crude production,” and that “President Biden and his administration are being falsely accused of pursuing policies that led to rampant price inflation.”

In blaming “red tape,” Burgum may be referring to actions such as a pause in new leasing of federal land and water in 2021 — a decision that was then blocked by the courts. However, as we’ve written previously, experts told us that this decision did not significantly affect gasoline prices.

“The truth is that there’s not much Biden can do to make the situation better in the short term, nor have his policies to date made things worse,” Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative and a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told us in a March 2022 email. “Biden’s slowing of federal leasing is a SMALL issue for producers, and has made no difference at all in what is being produced today,” she said.

Why Navarro Went to PrisonPeter Navarro, Trump’s former White House adviser on trade, spoke at the convention several hours after being released from a prison in Miami. “Joe Biden and his department of injustice put me there,” Navarro said.

He warned convention attendees that “if they can come for me, and if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful, they will come for you.” And he later told them, “I went to prison so you won’t have to.” He went to prison for contempt of Congress. We’ll explain what happened.

Navarro reported to a federal prison in March to serve a four-month sentence. That was about six months after a jury found him guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress for not complying with a February 2022 subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The subpoena that Navarro ignored required him to appear for a deposition and produce documents to Congress, which he did not do. The committee said it believed Navarro had information relevant to its investigation because he played a role in “efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”

In court, Navarro said that he could not comply with the committee’s request because Trump had invoked executive privilege, precluding him from providing testimony to Congress. But a federal judge rejected that argument.

Navarro’s subsequent appeals of his conviction were denied by federal courts. And his emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court from prison was also denied.

NAFTAMaking the argument that Biden has a long history of destroying “middle class manufacturing jobs,” Vance noted then-Sen. Biden’s support in 1993 for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Vance said “sent countless good jobs to Mexico.” But economic studies say the trade deal had a relatively small overall impact on jobs.

“When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” Vance said.

As we have written, NAFTA was negotiated and signed by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the bill enabling NAFTA in 1993; however, it took Republican congressional support to get that bill to his desk. The Senate passed the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 61-38, in November 1993, with 34 Republican votes. Biden was among those who voted in favor of ratifying it. The House passed it 234-200, with 132 Republican votes.

Though Vance claimed NAFTA “sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” economic studies overall say NAFTA’s net impact on U.S. jobs was small.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service evaluated four studies in 2004 and concluded that “NAFTA had little or no impact on aggregate employment.” Thirteen years later, a 2017 report from the Congressional Research Service called the overall impact on the U.S. economy “relatively modest.”

That 2017 report also noted that it was difficult to gauge the overall economic impact “since trade and investment trends are influenced by numerous other economic variables, such as economic growth, inflation, and currency fluctuations.” CRS said: “The agreement likely accelerated and also locked in trade liberalization that was already taking place in Mexico, but many of these changes may have taken place without an agreement.”

Illegal Immigration Not Eliminated Under TrumpTexas Gov. Greg Abbott echoed a Republican talking point about border security under Trump. Abbott said, “The president’s most sacred duty is to secure our country. Donald Trump fulfilled that duty by eliminating illegal immigration. Under President Trump we had the lowest illegal border crossings in about four decades.”

But that’s not true. Trump did not eliminate illegal immigration.

As we’ve written before, illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year compared with the last full year before he took office.

As for Abbott’s claim that Trump brought illegal immigration to the lowest level in four decades, it’s true that illegal border crossings did drop dramatically in Trump’s first year in office, reaching the lowest level since the turn of the century. But that’s cherry picking.

The number of apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in Trump’s second year. And they peaked at nearly 800,000 in 2019, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection monthly data spanning fiscal years 2019 and 2020. That was the highest number of apprehensions since 2007. It was also higher than any year during Obama’s two terms in office.

Abbott went on to claim that “under Joe Biden, illegal immigration has skyrocketed. Under his watch around 11 million immigrants have crossed our border illegally.”

Illegal immigration certainly took off after Biden became president, jumping by over 300% in Biden’s first year compared with Trump’s last. And apprehensions have remained at those higher levels until very recently. But Abbott’s 11 million figure is inflated.

Abbott appears to be including people who arrived at legal ports of entry, but without authorization to enter the U.S. They weren’t crossing illegally. Also, millions of those who did cross illegally have been removed or returned under the Biden administration.

Since February 2021, the month after Biden took office, there have been nearly 7 million apprehensions on the southwest border of those trying to cross illegally. The figure doesn’t represent the total number of people, because some people attempt multiple crossings.

As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which Department of Homeland Security provided to us, that would mean there about 2 million gotaways.

After being processed by border officials, some of those apprehended are removed from the country, and some who are seeking asylum are given notices to appear in court.

When we looked though comprehensive data from DHS of the initial processing of encounters of migrants under Biden, through February of this year — both those apprehended and those arriving at legal ports of entry — we found that 2.9 million were removed by Customs and Border Protection and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.

There were also transfers of unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services and transfers to ICE, who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE.

Harris Visited BorderAbbott also claimed that Biden and Harris hadn’t visited the southern border until he started busing migrants out of the state. He’s wrong about Harris.

“When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and to see the border crisis that they created, I took the border to them. I began busing illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C.,” Abbott said, referencing a controversial policy under which his administration transports migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.

Harris visited El Paso, Texas, in June 2021, about six months after taking office and almost a year before Abbott began his busing policy.

It is true that Biden didn’t visit the border until after Abbott’s busing policy began.

The president has now visited the southern border twice, both times in Texas. He went to El Paso in January 2023, and he went to Brownsville in February.

No Electric TanksAfter praising Trump’s military leadership, Rep. Michael Waltz, a U.S. Army veteran, said that, by contrast, Biden is “focused on building electric tanks.” Waltz then added sarcastically, “Has anybody seen any charging stations in the Middle East for Biden electric tanks?”

The claim that Biden is converting the military to all-electric-powered tanks is a regular talking point in Trump’s rally speeches. But as we have written, it is false.

The military is moving toward the electrification of its vehicle fleets, starting with light-duty, non-tactical vehicles, citing not only environmental benefits but cost savings and operational advantages. As part of the military’s Climate Strategy released in 2022 — which talks about reducing national security risks posed by climate change — the military also aspires to move to “purpose-built hybrid-drive tactical vehicles by 2035 and fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050.”

Tactical vehicles are used on the battlefield, typically in support roles. Those are different from combat vehicles, which are the ones that shoot at the enemy, Fabian Villalobos, an associate engineer at the RAND Corporation and an expert in emerging technologies and the defense industrial base, told us in November. “Tactical definitely does not mean tanks,” he said.

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Quick TakeExtensive media coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally shows his injury and the immediate response of Secret Service agents. But social media posts make the unsupported claims that Trump wasn’t shot and the agents’ response indicates the incident was “staged.”

Full StoryThe attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 is being investigated as a possible act of domestic terrorism, though authorities said the gunman’s motive remains unknown.

Law enforcement officials identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who was fatally shot by Secret Service snipers. One spectator at the rally, Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter, was killed. The former president was hit in the right ear by a bullet and two rally attendees, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were injured.

The AR-15 style firearm Crooks used was legally purchased by his father in 2013, the Washington Post reported.

An FBI statement updated on July 15 said, “While the investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone, the FBI continues to conduct logical investigative activity to determine if there were any co-conspirators associated with this attack.”

In the wake of the shooting, misinformation about the shooting has flooded social media, as we’ve written. Recent posts make unsupported claims that Trump’s injuries were faked and that the actions of the Secret Service indicate the incident was “staged.”

A July 14 Threads post shows a screenshot of Trump with a bloodied ear and misleadingly suggests that injuries sustained by the former president are inconsistent with those from a bullet. Text on the post says, in part, “if this was a gun shot graze wouldn’t there be streaks of blood in his hair behind his ear?”

In a July 13 post on Truth Social, Trump described his wound: “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

Images published by the New York Times appear to show a bullet passing by Trump’s head. Following the shooting, he was taken to Butler Medical Center for treatment, according to a report by Pittsburgh-area news station KDKA.

In addition, in an interview with the New York Times, Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, said he changed the dressing on Trump’s wound a day after the attempted assassination. “The bullet took a little bit off the top of his ear in an area that, just by nature, bleeds like crazy,” Jackson said.

Other posts on social media cite the behavior of security personnel during the attempted assassination to make the unsupported claim the shooting was “staged.”

A July 15 Threads post inaccurately claims, “IT WAS STAGED. Nobody ran, he wasn’t hustled off.”

Another Threads post misleadingly claims, “[S]taged? When Secret Service went to move him to safety, they paused for him, head completely exposed, to fist pump and say ‘Fight!’ three times to the camera. There is zero chance Secret Service pauses for that unless it was scripted especially leaving his head exposed.”

But video of the incident shows people in the crowd ducking quickly toward the ground and Secret Service agents running up to Trump — and hustling to move him from the stage after the shooting.

At least four Secret Service agents can be seen rushing to Trump’s side and shielding the former president behind the podium within seconds of the gunshots being fired. Agents and other security personnel continued to surround the stage in the moments following the attempted assassination.

Before moving Trump offstage, one agent can be heard asking, “Are we good to move?” The agents confirmed that the area was clear. An agent told the former president that they should move to the motorcade, and Trump can be heard saying, “Let me get my shoes,” and asking them to wait. When Trump stood, several agents can be seen attempting to shield his head with their arms while escorting him to a waiting vehicle.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who has been criticized for security failures at the event, said in a July 15 statement, “Secret Service personnel on the ground moved quickly during the incident, with our counter sniper team neutralizing the shooter and our agents implementing protective measures to ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBiesecker, Michael et al. “Three days after attempted assassination, Trump shooter remains an elusive enigma.” Associated Press. 17 Jul 2024.

Brooks, Emily. “Speaker Johnson calls for Secret Service director’s resignation, promises task force.” The Hill. 17 July 2024.

Craig, Tim et al. “Rifle used by Trump rally shooter bought 11 years ago, person familiar says.” Washington Post. 15 Jul 2024.

FactCheck.org. “Issues: Attempted Assassination.”

FBI National Press Office. “Update on the FBI Investigation of the Attempted Assassination of Former President Donald Trump.” 15 Jul 2024.

Mokay, Erica, and Michael Guise. “Trump Taken to Butler Memorial Hospital after Shooting at Rally.” KDKA. CBS Pittsburgh. 13 Jul 2024.

Swan, Johnathan. “Former White House Doctor Describes Tending to Trump’s Wounded Ear.” New York Times. 16 Jul 2024.

Taft, Isabelle. “What We Know About the Trump Rally Shooting Victims So Far.” New York Times. 14 Jul 2024.

Tanyos, Faris. “Trump rally shooter killed by Secret Service sniper, officials say.” CBS News. 14 Jul 2024.

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SummaryEste artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

On a night when the focus was on safety and unity at the Republican convention, a number of GOP leaders also offered up some misleading and false claims we have seen before.

• Several people described “dramatic increases” in crime under President Joe Biden, as House Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But FBI and other crime data show that violent crime and murders have decreased under Biden.
• Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump said African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women all had “record low unemployment rates” under former President Donald Trump, ignoring the fact that most of those lows were surpassed or matched under Biden.
• Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake falsely claimed that Rep. Ruben Gallego recently “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.” Gallego voted against a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. A 1996 federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting.
• House Majority Leader Steve Scalise parroted the unfounded claim, repeated so often by Trump, that other countries’ “prisons are being emptied” and the inmates sent to the U.S. border.
• Rep. Elise Stefanik claimed that Trump had delivered “the most secure border in our nation’s history.” That’s inaccurate. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year compared with the year before he took office.
• Lara Trump also talked about “our energy independence” under Trump. While the U.S. became a net energy producer and exporter late in Trump’s presidency, that has continued during the Biden administration.

Several speakers also blamed Biden for high inflation — Stefanik called it “Biden-flation.” We wrote about that claim in our story on the first night of the convention, saying that economists point to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary reason for higher inflation.

AnalysisCrimeSeveral speakers falsely claimed or suggested violent crime had increased under President Joe Biden. Violent crime and murders nationwide have gone down, according to FBI and other crime data. Figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association show an 8.6% decline in murders in 69 large U.S. cities from 2020, the year before Biden took office, to 2023, as we’ve written before.

In former President Donald Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.

But that’s not the picture several convention speakers painted. House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.” Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri said that “the rule of law has disintegrated” under Biden and “crime is rampant.”

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said that his city “bucked national trends and achieved a remarkable three straight years of violent crime reduction.” The city did buck the national trend in 2021, when violent crime and murders went up overall. But Dallas’ violent crime reduction in 2022 and 2023 mirrors the national trend. (The number of murders in the city actually went up in 2023, according to Dallas’ crime analytics dashboard.)

In campaign rallies, Trump, too, has falsely claimed the country is seeing rising crime, and earlier this year, he called the FBI data that contradicted him “fake numbers.”

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate of 0.5 points from 2020, the year before Biden took office, to 2022. The violent crime rate dropped by 15.4 points, to 369.8 per 100,000 population in 2022. (For these figures, see Table 1 in the CIUS Estimations download for the crime in the U.S. reports.) The FBI figures are based on voluntary reports by agencies nationwide.

Preliminary FBI figures for the first quarter of 2023 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. We won’t have the full-year report for a few more months.

Other reports with more recent statistics show crime declining in 2023 and continuing to do so this year. The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association show a 10.4% decline in the number of murders from 2022 to 2023 in 69 large U.S. cities. Rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults also went down. Figures for the first quarter of 2024 indicate that violent crimes dropped again, compared with the same time period last year.

Figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, show a 17.5% reduction in murders in more than 200 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same point in 2023.

‘Record Low Unemployment Rates’Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said there were “record low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women” during her father-in-law’s presidency. But unemployment rates for three of those demographics were lower, or as low, under Biden.

African Americans: Under Trump, the lowest unemployment rate for African Americans was 5.3% in August 2019 – the lowest rate on record at that time, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data going back to 1972. But under Biden, the unemployment rate for African Americans reached a new low of 4.8% in April 2023.

Hispanic Americans: The unemployment rate for Hispanics also went down to a new low of 3.9% under Trump, according to BLS data going back to 1973. But the lowest Hispanic unemployment under Biden was also 3.9% in September 2022, tying the record during the Trump administration.

Women: For women, the lowest unemployment rate under Trump was 3.4%, and the lowest rate under Biden was 3.3%. Neither is lower than the record of 2.7% in May 1953 during the Eisenhower administration.

Asian Americans: Trump still has the record for the lowest unemployment rate for Asian Americans — 2% in June 2019, although BLS data for the Asian population only go back to 2003. The lowest the rate has been under Biden was 2.3% in July 2023.

Lake’s False Claim About GallegoKari Lake, who is running against Rep. Ruben Gallego in Arizona’s Senate race, falsely claimed that last week he “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

Gallego was one of the 198 Democrats who voted against the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 10 in a mostly party-line vote. The bill, which was introduced by House Republicans, primarily requires voters to provide proof of citizenship at the time they register to vote in federal elections.

But a “no” vote wouldn’t mean that people in the U.S. illegally can vote, as Lake wrongly claimed. A federal law enacted in 1996 already prohibits anyone but U.S. citizens from voting in elections at the federal level. Instances of noncitizens voting are rare, and violators can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to one year.

“Of course only U.S. citizens should vote,” Gallego said in a statement about his vote against the SAVE Act, which is opposed by Biden and unlikely to pass the Senate. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”

Scalise’s Unfounded Claim about ‘Prisons Being Emptied’ House Majority Leader Steve Scalise parroted the unfounded claim, repeated so often by Trump, that other countries’ “prisons are being emptied” and the inmates sent to the U.S. border.

“Biden and Harris opened it [the border] up to the entire world,” Scalise said. “Prisons are being emptied.”

Virtually every campaign speech Trump has delivered for more than a year has included some version of the unsupported claim that countries around the world are “emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.” As we have reported, immigration experts say they have not seen any evidence to support that claim.

Trump has provided scant evidence to support it. In June, we looked into Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because Trump has repeatedly cited a drop in crime as evidence for countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. It’s true that reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that — including an enormous emigration of citizens and a consolidation of gang activity — and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us poverty has also played a role.

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

Some criminals have left Venezuela “seeking to continue their criminal life in other places where they find greater opportunities for profit,” he said, but the vast majority of emigrants from Venezuela are “honest workers fleeing the country’s poverty, looking for a job and a better future.”

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

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

‘Most Secure Border’ Talking PointRep. Elise Stefanik, who is the House Republican Conference chair, claimed that Trump would “once again deliver the most secure border in our nation’s history.” It’s a popular talking point — one that the former president made in his debate against Biden. But it’s inaccurate.

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 compared with 2016 — the last full year before Trump took office.

After dropping dramatically in Trump’s first year in office to a level not seen since at least before 2000, the number of apprehensions began to rise in Trump’s second year. Apprehensions peaked under Trump in 2019, when nearly 800,000 people were caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southern border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection monthly data spanning fiscal years 2019 and 2020. That was higher than any year going back to 2007, and was higher than any year during President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, based on our review of monthly CBP data.

In 2020, aided in part by the pandemic, numbers fell from the 2019 totals, but they were still higher than all but one of Obama’s eight years.

Trump didn’t deliver on his campaign promise to build a 1,000-mile-long wall along the southwest border. Nonetheless, a substantial amount of fencing was constructed — mostly to replace dilapidated or outdated primary or secondary fencing. There were 458 miles of “border wall system” built during Trump’s term, including 373 miles of replacement barriers, according to a January 2021 Customs and Border Protection status report.

More Energy Independence ClaimsWhile continuing to talk about “what life actually looked like” under Trump, Lara Trump said the U.S. had “our energy independence,” suggesting that is no longer the case under Biden.

For starters, as we’ve written, the U.S. was never 100% energy self-sufficient, under Trump. The country continued to import foreign sources of energy, including oil.

During the Trump administration, the U.S. did produce more energy than it consumed and export more energy, including petroleum, than it imported. It had been decades since that last happened, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But since Biden has been president, the U.S. has continued to be a net energy producer and a net energy exporter. Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of crude oil and natural gas under Biden, contrary to claims that his policies have “crushed” American energy.

Clarification, July 17: In our item on the SAVE Act, we incorrectly referred once to “the bill’s defeat.” As we correctly reported elsewhere in the item, the SAVE Act passed the House. We also clarified that the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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Gore, D’Angelo. “Examining U.S. ‘Energy Independence’ Claims.” FactCheck.org. 9 Mar 2022.

U.S. Energy Information Administration. Table 1.1. Primary Energy Overview. Accessed 16 Jul 2024.

U.S. Energy Information Administration. Table 3.3a. Petroleum Trade: Overview. Accessed 16 Jul 2024.

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In an interview two days after an attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden drew contrasts between himself, his Republican challenger, and Trump’s newly selected vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. We found that Biden made some claims that were misleading, exaggerated or out of context.

• Biden said Trump “wants a $5 trillion tax cut for people who are making a lot of money.” But some of that $5 trillion would go to taxpayers earning less than $400,000 — a policy that Biden himself has proposed.
• The president misleadingly claimed that Vance “has adopted” a policy of “no exceptions on abortion.” Vance initially suggested that he may not support abortion laws with exceptions for rape or incest. He has since said, like Trump, that he is open to allowing “reasonable exceptions” for abortion.
• Biden also said that Vance “says there’s no climate change happening.” But the senator acknowledged in November 2022 that “climate change is certainly happening,” which was a few months after he said there was no “climate crisis” and questioned how much humans contribute to the changing climate.
• Biden glossed over the details of the special counsel report on his handling of classified documents after he was vice president, saying it “concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.” The report said criminal charges were not “warranted,” because the “evidence” that was found of Biden retaining classified material didn’t establish “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
• He cited Trump’s statement that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses the election as evidence of the former president inciting violence. But in context, Trump seemed to be talking about the possibility of an economic bloodbath if he is not elected.
• Biden, referring to Trump, said, “I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1.’” Trump, who later claimed he was joking, said he would be a dictator for one day so he can close the southern border with Mexico and increase drilling in the U.S.

The full 18-minute interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, which was taped on July 15, aired unedited later that night, during the prime-time portion of Day 1 of the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Extending Trump-Era Tax CutsBiden said Trump “wants a $5 trillion tax cut for people who are making a lot of money.” But not all of that money would go to wealthy Americans.

The president is referring to Trump’s proposal — enshrined in the Republican platform — to extend the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump signed into law. Biden supports extending the Trump-era tax cuts for those earning less than $400,000 — so the $5 trillion figure cited by the president will also go to people he’s targeting for tax cuts.

When we asked the White House about the $5 trillion figure, it referred us to a June 13 memo issued by the director of the White House National Economic Council on the expiring Trump tax cuts. The NEC analysis, which is based on Congressional Budget Office projections released in May, shows that extending all of the expiring tax cuts would cost $4.9 trillion over 10 years.

The $4.9 trillion includes $3.26 trillion over 10 years for extending the individual tax provisions of the 2017 law. The CBO’s $3.26 trillion projection includes “the statutory tax rates and brackets, the allowable deductions, the size and refundability of the child tax credit, the 20 percent deduction for certain business income, and the income levels at which the alternative minimum tax takes effect.”

Under the 2017 law, the child tax credit doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and the first $1,400 was made refundable, meaning the credit could reduce a family’s tax liability to zero and it would still be able to receive a tax refund, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income cutoff for the child tax credit, or CTC, also increased from $110,000 to $400,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The expanded child tax credit ends after 2025, and extending it would cost nearly $750 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO — see “supplemental data“. (Under Biden, the child tax credit was expanded again and made fully refundable, policies that Biden also wants to extend.)

Those earning less than $400,000 also benefit from changes made in 2017 to the individual tax rates and brackets — which also will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts.

In a July 8 blog item, Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote that extending the expiring tax cut provisions in the TCJA would cost more than $4 trillion over 10 years, citing the CBO’s May report. Gleckman wrote that a TPC distributional analysis found that less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more.

“It also would create winners and losers within income groups,” Gleckman wrote. “For example, TPC found that while about 86 percent of middle-income households would get a tax cut, about 13 percent would see their taxes rise. Among the top 1 percent, taxes would fall for about 81 percent, while they’d rise for 19 percent.”

However, Biden did not mention in his interview that any part of Trump’s plan to extend the expiring tax cuts would benefit taxpayers whom Biden himself is targeting for tax relief.

Vance on Abortion ExceptionsWhen asked about Trump selecting Vance to join him on the Republican presidential ticket, Biden said he was not surprised by the choice.

“He’s going to surround himself with people who agree completely with him, have a voting record, that support him,” Biden said of Trump. The president went on to claim that Vance “has adopted the same policies, no exceptions on abortion.”

That’s misleading. For starters, Biden is wrong about Trump’s position. As we wrote in April, Trump has said that he is “strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” And Vance, after initially suggesting he may not support exceptions in cases of rape or incest, specifically, has since said that he agrees with Trump that there need to be some exceptions.

When a reporter in Ohio asked Vance in a September 2021 interview if laws restricting abortion access should include exemptions for rape and incest, he started by saying: “Look, I don’t think two wrongs make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

Vance expanded on his answer when the reporter followed up by asking if women should be forced to deliver a child conceived due to rape or incest.

“Look, my view on this has been very clear, and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong,” he said. “It’s not whether a woman should bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society. The question, really, to me, is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities. We want women to have choices. But above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life. Right now, our society does not afford that, and I think it’s a tragedy and I think we could do better.”

But a year later, Vance, while running for the U.S. Senate, said during an October 2022 debate that he’s “always believed in reasonable exceptions,” pushing back on then-Rep. Tim Ryan’s claim that Vance wanted “no exceptions for rape and incest.” Vance said that he thought the 10-year-old Ohio girl who became pregnant after being raped should have been allowed to have an abortion in the state.

Then, in November 2023, after Ohioans voted to amend the state’s constitution to guarantee abortion access, Vance offered this as part of his post-election analysis on X: “As Donald Trump has said, ‘you’ve got to have the exceptions.’ I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible. This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality. I’ve seen dozens of good polls on the abortion question in the last few months, many of them done in Ohio. Give people a choice between abortion restrictions very early in pregnancy with exceptions, or the pro choice position, and the pro life view has a fighting chance. Give people a heartbeat bill with no exceptions and it loses 65-35.”

This year, Vance has continued to indicate that he would support allowing exceptions. In a May 19 interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Vance said this about a national standard on abortion: “What I’ve said consistently is the gross majority of policy here is going to be set by the states. I am pro-life. I want to save as many babies as possible. And sure, I think it’s totally reasonable to say that late-term abortions should not happen with reasonable exceptions. But I think Trump’s approach here is trying to settle a very tough issue and actually empower the American people to decide it for themselves.”

Vance on Climate ChangeBiden also said Vance “says there’s no climate change happening,” presumably a reference to Vance saying he questions how much humans contribute to climate change.

In a July 15 article, the New York Times said that Vance “appears to have undergone an evolution on the issue of climate change,” noting that, in a 2020 speech, Vance had said, “We have a climate problem in our society.”

His position changed when Vance sought Trump’s endorsement for his 2022 Senate race, the Times reported. At an October 2021 forum hosted by the American Leadership Forum, Vance, after criticizing Democratic climate proposals, said, “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man, and that’s basically the argument they are making.”

Democrats have also pointed to comments Vance made in a July 2022 radio interview, in which he agreed with a co-host of the program who said there is no climate crisis.

“No, I don’t think there is, either,” Vance responded. “And even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles.”

But in November 2022, Vance told the Columbus Dispatch that he had “become persuaded that climate change is certainly happening,” although “some of the alarmism is a little overstated.”

“That said, if you’re going to address this problem, one is technology,” he said. “You have to create new energy sources that are lower emissions. Number two, you have to deal with the consequences of a changing climate, whatever those consequences ultimately look like.”

Classified DocumentsBiden said the special counsel that investigated his handling of classified documents after he was vice president “concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.” Not quite. The special counsel’s report said that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” It said there was “evidence” that Biden retained and disclosed classified materials after he left office, but the “evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In the NBC News interview, Biden was asked about the July 15 dismissal of the federal classified documents case against Trump by a judge in Florida, who said the appointment of a special counsel by the federal government in that case was “unlawful.” In answering, Biden pivoted to his own classified documents case.

“I had an independent prosecutor look at me,” Biden said. “I was totally cooperative.” He said there were “10, 12 agents in my house for nine hours unaccompanied going through every single thing I had. That’s appropriate. And they looked at me and concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.”

Special Counsel Robert Hur said in his report that the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents” about Afghanistan and handwritten notebooks Biden had kept. But Hur outlined several reasons why he concluded a jury was unlikely to find that Biden “willfully” broke the law.

Those reasons included Biden’s cooperation with investigators, a lack of corroborating evidence that would conclusively place documents concerning Afghanistan at Biden’s Virginia home in 2017, Biden’s belief that his handwritten notebooks were his personal property, and Biden’s “limited” memory in his interviews with investigators.

For more on the special counsel report, see our Feb. 9 story, published the day after the report was released.

‘Bloodbath’ Comment in ContextBiden again cited Trump’s statement that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses the election as evidence of the former president inciting violence. But in context, Trump seemed to be talking about the possibility of an economic bloodbath if he is not elected.

Trump was speaking during a March 16 rally in Ohio about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, when he said that if he isn’t elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Since then, Biden has repeatedly cited the comment to accuse Trump of fomenting violence. And he did so again in his interview with NBC News.

Holt asked, in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, whether Biden had “taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced.”

“Look, I’m not engaged in that rhetoric,” Biden said. “Now, my opponent is engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there’d be a bloodbath if he loses.”

On Truth Social on March 18, Trump wrote that Biden and others were purposely misconstruing his words.

“The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry,” Trump wrote.

The Trump campaign also noted — rightly — that one of the definitions of “bloodbath,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a major economic disaster.”

That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.

Speaking at a rally on the grounds of the Dayton International Airport in Ohio, Trump said that over the last three decades, Mexico has siphoned off U.S. auto manufacturing jobs, and he accused China of building car manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cost U.S. autoworkers their jobs. “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected,” Trump said. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

The Chinese electric vehicle company BYD says it is planning to build an EV plant in Mexico. But the company says it intends to sell the cars locally to consumers in Mexico and has no plans to sell any across the border in the U.S.

Trump’s Dictator CommentWhile contrasting comments that he and Trump have made during the campaign, Biden again said that Trump plans to be a dictator if elected.

“Look, I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1,'” Biden said, paraphrasing a comment that Trump made in a December town hall hosted by Fox News.

Sean Hannity, who was interviewing Trump, gave the former president the opportunity to promise Americans that, if elected, he would “never abuse power as retribution against anybody.” Trump’s response was, “Except for Day 1.”

He then explained what he planned to do as a “dictator” on the first day of a potential second term as president. “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,” he said.

About two months later, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo was interviewing Trump and asked about his remarks, Trump claimed that he had been kidding.

He said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

After Bartiromo prompted him to be more specific, Trump again said that he only intended to close the border and drill. “That’s all. And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator,” Trump said, adding that his original comments were “said in jest.”

Ben Cohen contributed to this article.

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Quick TakeIn the days following an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, social media swirled with misinformation about the shooter. The 20-year-old gunman was a registered Republican and there is no evidence he had a criminal record, contrary to popular claims online.

Full StoryOn July 13, a gunman fired shots at Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a small city north of Pittsburgh, injuring the former president. One spectator at the rally was killed and two others were critically injured.

The FBI, which is investigating the incident as an assassination attempt and potential domestic terrorism, identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb south of Pittsburgh. Crooks was killed on the scene by the Secret Service.

As of July 15, the FBI had not identified a motive for the shooting and believed the shooter had acted alone.

“At present we have not identified an ideology associated with the subject, but I want to remind everyone that we’re still very early in this investigation,” Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge, said in a call with reporters on July 14, according to the Washington Post. Rojek added that there was “no indication of any mental health issues,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

As information about the gunman trickles out, social media has been flooded with false claims about the shooter.

Several posts include photos or video of a man who is not Crooks, but rather a similar-looking X user who pretended to be Crooks on social media.

“ANTIFA SCUM,” proclaims one Facebook Post, which features two such images. “He was a registered Democrat who voted for Clinton and Biden,” referring to the Democratic presidential nominees in 2016 and 2020, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, who ran against Trump.

Other posts have made similar false or unsupported claims, with and without inaccurate photos.

Yet another post alleged media bias by baselessly claiming that Crooks had been previously arrested.

“Look at the pictures they chose to share of this deplorable. High school pictures where he looks innocent,” reads one popular post on Threads. “The man was problematic, arrested more than once, why aren’t they sharing his mug shots?”

Crooks, in fact, was a registered Republican. A Pennsylvania voter registration record matching Crooks’ name, age and address lists his voting status as “active” and his party affiliation as Republican.

Crooks, however, did make a small donation to a Democratic-aligned political action committee before he could vote. Federal campaign finance filings show a person with Crooks’ name and address made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project on Inauguration Day in January 2021. The aim of that group is to rally Democrats to vote.

A spokesperson for the Progressive Turnout Project told CNN that the donation came in response to an inauguration-themed email, and that “the email address associated with the contribution only made the one contribution and was unsubscribed from our lists 2 years ago.”

Being just 20 years old at the time of the shooting, Crooks was not old enough to vote in the 2016 or 2020 elections, and could not have voted for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. An Allegheny County spokesperson told CNN that Crooks had voted just one time, in the 2022 midterm general election.

There is no evidence that Crooks participated in any protests or was part of the anti-fascist movement called antifa. On the contrary, the FBI has not readily been able to identify a motive or ideology. The individual whose image has appeared in many posts is an X user who goes by the handle @jewgazing who has since said that his posts were a joke, other fact-checking organizations have reported.

As for the claim about media bias, there are no mug shots because there’s no evidence Crooks had a criminal record. Per multiple news outlets, a search of Pennsylvania’s public court records for Crooks yields no results. USA Today also found no record of Crooks in federal databases. The FBI has similarly said that the suspect was not previously known to the agency. And the administrator of the skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility where Crooks worked noted in a statement that “his background check was clean.”

What’s Known About the GunmanCrooks worked as a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation, where he “performed his job without concern,” according to a statement released to numerous news outlets.

In May, Crooks earned an associate degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County. He also was a 2022 graduate of Bethel Park High School.

Former classmates and other acquaintances generally recall Crooks as a quiet, smart kid, per interviews with various news outlets, with some noting that he was bullied in school.

According to reporting by the Washington Post, Crooks lived at home with his parents, both of whom are licensed counselors, and he was a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, a nearby shooting range. The AR-style gun that Crooks used in the shooting had been legally purchased by his father in 2013. Crooks purchased 50 rounds of ammunition on the morning of July 13, the Post also reported.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources“Update on the FBI Investigation of the Attempted Assassination of Former President Donald Trump.” Press release. FBI. 15 Jul 2024.

“Pennsylvania State Police Identify Victims Shot During Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump.” Press release. Pennsylvania State Police. 14 Jul 2024.

“Secret Service Statements Regarding Violence at the July 13, 2024, Trump Campaign Rally.” Press release. United States Secret Service. 14 Jul 2024.

Davies, Emily et al. “Trump rally shooter appears to have acted alone, FBI says.” Washington Post. 14 Jul 2024.

Gurman, Sadie. “FBI on Shooter: ‘No indication of Any Mental Health Issues.’” Wall Street Journal. 15 Jul 2024.

Stiller, Jesse. “FACT CHECK: Viral Photo of Man is Not Trump Rally Shooter.” Check Your Fact. 14 Jul 2024.

Schenk, Maarten. “Fact Check: Photo and Video Do NOT Show Thomas Matthew Crooks — It Is X User ‘Jewgazing.’” Lead Stories. 14 Jul 2024.

Crooks, Thomas Matthew Voter Status Record. Department of State, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Search performed on 15 Jul 2024.

“Police present outside home of Trump shooter, Thomas Crooks.” USA Today. 15 Jul 2024.

Robertson, Campbell et al. “Here’s What Is Known About the Suspect Who Tried to Assassinate Trump.” New York Times. Updated 15 Jul 2024.

Tolan, Casey et al. “What we know about the Trump rally gunman so far.” CNN. 14 Jul 2024.

Jacoby, Kenny. “Trump rally shooter Thomas Crooks: Neighbors, classmates, employer speak.” USA Today. Updated 15 Jul 2024.

Diaz, Jaclyn and Dave Mistich. “What we know about the alleged Trump shooter.” NPR. Updated 15 Jul 2024.

Borter, Gabriella et al. “Suspect came within inches of killing Trump, but left few clues as to why.” Reuters. 15 Jul 2024.

“A Statement from the Bethel Park School District Regarding Thomas Matthew Crooks.” Press release. Bethel Park School District. 14 Jul 2024.

Marcius, Chelsia Rose et al. “Trump Rally Gunman ‘Didn’t Want Attention’ in School, Classmates Said.” New York Times. Updated 16 Jul 2024.

Debusmann, Bernd et al. “Thomas Matthew Crooks: What we know about the Trump attacker.” BBC. Updated 16 Jul 2024.

de Guzman, Chad. “What We Know—and Don’t Know—So Far About the Trump Rally Gunman.” Time. 15 Jul 2024.

Craig, Tom et al. “Rifle used by Trump rally shooter bought 11 years ago, person familiar says.” Washington Post. 15 Jul 2024.

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SummaryOn the first night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, some speakers offered false and misleading assessments of employment, tax cuts, inflation and more.

• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that “hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years” under Democrats, ignoring that, on net, employment of native-born workers increased under President Joe Biden.
• Sen. Katie Britt said that under Biden, Americans have the “tough choice” of choosing “which second job to take just to pay the bills,” and she suggested that wasn’t the case under former President Donald Trump. As a share of the employed population, the percentage of people working multiple jobs under Biden is nearly identical to what it was under Trump.
• A rule proposed by the Biden administration in 2023 would prohibit blanket bans on transgender athletes, but contrary to claims made by Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. John James, the rule would allow exceptions for competitive fairness, particularly for high school and college sports teams.
• Sen. Marsha Blackburn incorrectly claimed that the Trump-era tax cut was “the largest tax cut in American history.” She claimed Biden would “let them expire,” but the president has vowed not to raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000.
• A few speakers wrongly said that the U.S. had the “greatest” or “strongest” economy under Trump, as the former president himself has often said.
• Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Rep. Byron Donalds said inflation had been “unleashed” or “created” by the Biden administration. Economists say the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is the primary culprit for higher inflation.
• Greene misleadingly claimed that the “establishment in Washington … gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday.” For years, the day has been on March 31, which also happened to be Easter this year.
• Blackburn misleadingly claimed that Democrats hired “85,000 new IRS agents to harass hard-working Americans.” Most of those hires would replace outgoing workers and be in customer service, government officials said.

The convention kicked off on July 15 and will wrap up on July 18 with Trump accepting his party’s nomination less than a week after an assassination attempt on his life. We’ll monitor the speeches each night.

AnalysisAmerican-Born WorkersWhile talking about Democrats allowing “millions of illegal aliens” in the country, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that “hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years.”

“The Democrats’ economy is of, by and for illegal aliens,” she said.

But, on net, employment of people born in the U.S has increased by more than 7.8 million since Biden took office — going up from 123.1 million in January 2021 to 130.9 million in June 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment for the U.S.-born population is 586,000 above the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020.

By comparison, employment of foreign-born workers, a category that includes anyone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen at birth, increased, on net, by 5.5 million under Biden and 3.2 million from the pre-pandemic high. But BLS says the foreign-born population includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.”

There is no employment breakdown for just people in the U.S. illegally.

Multiple JobholdersAfter touting a strong economy under Trump, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt said: “With President Trump, the tough choice was which job offer to accept. Now, it’s which second job to take just to pay the bills. Your family can’t afford this costly and dangerous decline for four more years.”

But Britt’s comparison gives a false impression about the amount of people taking on more than one job under Biden and Trump.

As of June, there were about 8.3 million people in the U.S. who held multiple jobs, according to BLS data. That was up from about 6.6 million in January 2021 and roughly 8 million prior to the pandemic in February 2020. We also would note that there were three months under Trump when approximately 8.3 million people were working two or more jobs, as well.

Furthermore, as of last month, multiple jobholders accounted for 5.2% of the total employed population, which was nearly identical to the 5.1% share right before the pandemic four years ago. Over the most recent 12 months under Biden, the average has been 5.2%, which, again, is only 0.1 percentage points higher than the average of 5.1% in 2019 under Trump.

Transgender Policy and Girls’ AthleticsSen. Ron Johnson and Rep. John James talked about Democrats forcing girls to compete against transgender girls, whose sex assigned at birth was male. A rule proposed by the Biden administration in 2023 — which has not been finalized — would prohibit blanket bans on transgender athletes, but it includes exceptions for competitive fairness, particularly for high school and college sports teams.

Johnson said the Democrats’ “fringe agenda includes biological males competing against girls.” James said: “Our daughters were sold on hope [by Democrats] and now they’re being forced on the playing fields and changing rooms of biological males.”

The Department of Education proposed two sets of rules in April 2023 to expand the interpretation of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based not only on sex but also sexual orientation and gender identity.

In April, the department only moved forward with one of the rules, clarifying “that policies and practices that prevent a student from participating in a recipient’s education program or activity consistent with their gender identity impose more than de minimis harm on that student on the basis of sex, and therefore generally violate Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate,” according to an overview of key provisions of the Department of Education’s 2024 Title IX final rule. That doesn’t include sports but does include any other program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.

The department put off a final determination on the rule related to application of transgender student participation on athletic teams.

“The Department’s rulemaking process is still ongoing for a Title IX regulation related to athletics,” a Department of Education spokesperson told us via email. “The Department proposed amendments to its athletics regulations in April 2023 and received over 150,000 public comments, which by law must be carefully considered. We do not have information to share today on a timeline.”

Although some argued the rule that was finalized would require schools to allow transgender students to participate on sex-specific teams consistent with their identity, the Department of Education made clear that the rule “does not apply to permissible sex separation of athletic teams.”

“The Department intends to issue a separate final rule to address Title IX’s application to sex-separate athletic teams,” the overview states.

“Until that rule is finalized and issued, the current regulations on athletics continue to apply,” the department wrote in its final rule.

The proposed athletics rule did call for establishing that “policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are. The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation,” according to a Department of Education fact sheet released on April 6, 2023.

The fact sheet says that “the Department’s approach would allow schools flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria that serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury. These criteria would have to account for the sport, level of competition, and grade or education level to which they apply.”

For example, the fact sheet states, “elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for a school to justify excluding students immediately following elementary school from participating consistent with their gender identity.” Teams at those grade levels “often focus on building teamwork, fitness, and basic skills for students who are just learning about the sport,” the release states.

However, it states: “For older students, especially at the high school and college level, the Department expects that sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students may be permitted, in some cases, when they enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition, and meet the proposed regulation’s other requirements.”

Trump Tax CutSen. Marsha Blackburn incorrectly claimed that the Trump-era tax cut was “the largest tax cut in American history” and misleadingly added that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are “going to let them expire.”

As we’ve written before, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by Trump was not the largest tax cut either as a percentage of gross domestic product (the measure preferred by economists) or in inflation-adjusted dollars.

A 2013 Treasury Department analysis on the revenue effects of major tax legislation said then-President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 were the largest as a percentage of GDP — 2.89% of GDP over a four-year average. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 was the largest, costing $320.6 billion over a four-year average, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The 2017 tax law was initially projected to cost $1.49 trillion over 10 years, according to an estimate at the time by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

“That would make [the Trump-era] tax cut the 8th largest as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since 1918 and the 4th largest in inflation-adjusted dollars,” the CRFB wrote.

As for Blackburn’s claim that Biden and Harris will let the 2017 tax cuts “expire,” Biden has vowed not to increase taxes for taxpayers who earn less than $400,000. In order to keep his campaign promise, which he also made in 2020, Biden will have to extend the Trump-era tax cuts for those earning less than $400,000, which is what Biden has said he intends to do.

Not the ‘Greatest Economy’ Under TrumpA few speakers echoed a frequent, inaccurate talking point of Trump’s: that during his presidency, the U.S. had the “greatest” or “strongest” economy.

As we’ve written, most recently after the presidential debate in late June, economists’ preferred measure of the economy’s health is real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth. GDP growth exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth plenty of times before he took office.

Despite that, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said it was “the strongest economy in history” under Trump. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas called it “the greatest economy in our lifetime.”

Under Trump, real GDP grew annually by 2.5% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2.5% in 2019. It then declined by 2.2% during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Those figures come from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The annual growth rate has been higher than 3% 48 times and under every president before and after Trump dating to 1930, except Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover.

InflationInflation has gone up while Biden has been in office, but some speakers wrongly pinned all the blame on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The primary reason for higher inflation in the U.S. was the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, economists say. Those factors were then compounded by the Ukraine war, they said.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin referred to “the silent thief of inflation unleashed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida talked about “the massive inflation created by” Biden and Harris. Other speakers referred generally to higher inflation, suggesting Biden was to blame.

When we wrote about this before, economists told us that the American Rescue Plan, a pandemic relief measure that Biden signed into law in March 2021, had contributed to inflation — though estimates varied on how much. Jason Furman, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now a Harvard University professor, told us in the summer of 2022 that the ARP had contributed 1 to 4 percentage points to inflation and when “pressed for one number,” he said he used the midpoint of 2.5. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s — whose work is often cited by the White House — said the impact of the stimulus measure by then had “largely faded.”

Economists we spoke to cited several reasons for inflation, with the pandemic being the root cause.

The year-over-year increase in inflation peaked under Biden at 9.1% in June 2022 (before seasonal adjustment), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The 12-month percentage change had dropped to 3% in June 2023, and it was 3% again this June.

Transgender Day of VisibilityAs she has done before, Greene made a misleading claim about Transgender Day of Visibility.

“For far too long, the establishment in Washington has sold us out,” she said. “They promised normalcy and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday.”

The Biden administration issued a proclamation this year acknowledging March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility — as it has done in 2021, 2022 and 2023. It just so happens that this year Easter also fell on March 31, leading some Republicans to claim Biden “mocked” Christians, as Greene wrote on X at the time, for issuing an annual proclamation to mark the occasion. “Biden and the Democrats decided Easter – the Holy Day of our Savior’s Resurrection – as transgender day of visibility,” she wrote.

Biden had nothing to do with the creation or timing of Transgender Day of Visibility. As we have written, Rachel Crandall Crocker, executive director and co-founder of Transgender Michigan, is credited with being the founder of International Transgender Day of Visibility in 2009. She set March 31 as the date.

IRSBlackburn revived a misleading talking point when she claimed that Democrats hired “85,000 new IRS agents to harass hard-working Americans.” Most of the new IRS hires, funded by the Democratic-backed Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, were to be replacements for retiring or departing workers, and additional agents hired for tax enforcement were directed to target audits of high-income earners.

The Inflation Reduction Act — which passed in 2022 with only the support of Democrats and independents and was signed by Biden — was mainly a climate, health care and tax package. But it also included about $79.6 billion in additional IRS funding. IRS and Treasury Department officials said some of the money would go to hiring new employees, potentially as many as 87,000. While Republicans regularly claimed all of the new hires would target middle-class taxpayers with audits — Blackburn said “hard-working Americans” — government officials said most of the new hires would replace outgoing staff and would be on the customer service side of the IRS, doing tasks such as upgrading computer systems and answering phones.

Some of the new hires would be for tax enforcement, but administration officials said those employees would focus on auditing the tax filings of high-income individuals and businesses.

“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” then IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig wrote in an Aug. 4, 2022, letter to congressional lawmakers. “As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”

As we wrote in 2023, Republicans have already clawed back some of the IRS funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act, in part from the debt limit deal reached between Democrats and Republicans in June 2023. Budget experts told us those cuts would result in larger long-term deficits because tighter enforcement against high-income earners is expected to bring in well more than the cost of enforcement.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

SourcesU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Seas) Multiple Jobholders (LNS12026619). Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Seas) Multiple Jobholders as a Percent of Employed (LNS12026620). Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Level – Native Born (LNU02073413). Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 15 Jul 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Level – Foreign Born (LNU02073395). Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 15 Jul 2024.

Robertson, Lori et al. “GOP, Democrats Spin Tax Plan.” FactCheck.org. 3 Nov 2017.

White House. “A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2024.” 29 Mar 2024.

White House. “A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility.” 30 Mar 2023.

White House. “A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2022” 30 Mar 2022.

White House. “A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2021” 31 Mar 2021.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Partisan Controversy Over Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility.” FactCheck.org. 2 Apr 2024.

Department of Treasury. “Revenue Effects of Major Tax Bills.” Feb 2013.

The Joint Committee on Taxation. “Estimated Revenue Effects Of H.R. 1, The “Tax Cuts And Jobs Act,” Scheduled For Markup By The Committee On Ways And Means On November 6, 2017.” 2 Nov 2017.

Biden for President. “TRUMP WANTS ANOTHER BILLIONAIRE TAX BREAK, WHILE JOE BIDEN WILL CUT TAXES FOR TENS OF MILLIONS OF HARDWORKING AMERICANS.” Undated. Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Table 1.1.1. Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Gross Domestic Product. latest revision 27 Jun 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 12-month percentage change, Consumer Price Index, selected categories. updated Jun 2024.

Robertson, Lori. Stimulus Spending a Factor, But Far From Whole Story on Inflation. FactCheck.org. 30 Jun 2022.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick TakePosts from the anonymous online forum 4Chan have been spreading the false claim that Secret Service officials prevented an agent named “Jonathan Willis” from shooting former President Donald Trump’s attempted assassin. The Secret Service has no employee by that name, and the claim is “categorically false,” the agency said.

Full StoryNobody by the name of Jonathan Willis is employed by the U.S. Secret Service, agency spokesman Nate Herring told us via email.

But in the chaotic hours following the shooting at former President Donald Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an online post by an anonymous user who claimed to be “Jonathan Willis” began fueling nascent conspiracies about the shooting.

It said, “My name is Jonathan Willis, I’m the officer in the famous photo of the two snipers on the roof at Trump’s rally. I came here to inform the public that I had the assassin in my sights for at least 3 minutes, but the head of the secret service refused to give the order to take out the perp. 100% the top brass prevented me from killing the assassin before he took the shots at president Trump.”

The post, which originated on 4Chan — the anonymous forum best known for incubating the QAnon conspiracy theory — went up about eight hours after the shooting, when concrete information about the incident was scarce.

About 20 minutes later, the same anonymous user posted this message: “I didn’t follow the orders though, as soon as the shooter opened on Trump I returned fire despite strict orders to not engage. I had eyes on the shooter for three minutes watching him fiddle with his rifle and adjust the scope, it was obvious he was a shooter yet I wasn’t allowed to engage. After I killed the shooter I was arrested, questioned by the FBI, and just released an hour ago. Already lost my job for not following orders, but I’m glad I took the shots anyway.”

Screenshots of those posts quickly migrated to other social media platforms. One such post that has garnered more than 11 million views on X, for example, shared the 4Chan post with the message, “Big if true.” The same X account shared a video from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and quoted Jones as saying of the Secret Service response to the shooting, “That is not a failure of security; that is a stand down.”

Similar posts have spread across other major social media platforms, too, including Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

Commenters on those posts have said things such as, “I smell a government cover up that failed and is out in the open!!!” Another called for the director of the Secret Service to be “charged for Treason.”

But, as we said, the claims made on 4Chan were posted by an anonymous user, and the Secret Service doesn’t have any employees by the name of Jonathan Willis.

Herring, the Secret Service spokesman, told us, “This claim is categorically false.”

Secret Service snipers killed the shooter at the scene, and the FBI later identified him as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Three attendees were also shot — Corey Comperatore, 50, died, and David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, were injured.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesHerring, Nate. Spokesman, U.S. Secret Service. Email response to FactCheck.org. 15 Jul 2024.

Dewey, Caitlin. “Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman.” Washington Post. 25 Sep 2014.

Wendling, Mike. “QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?” BBC. 6 Jan 2021.

Rigdon, Renée, et al. “Minute-by-minute: Visual timeline of the Trump assassination attempt.” CNN. 15 Jul 2024.

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Quick TakeThe actions of the Secret Service at the Pennsylvania rally where former President Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt are under review. But social media posts show an altered photo to falsely claim agents were smiling while moving Trump to safety. The original Associated Press photo shows the agents weren’t smiling.

Full StoryPresident Joe Biden has called for an independent review and members of Congress plan an investigation into security measures taken — particularly by the Secret Service — at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where former President Donald Trump was wounded in an attempted assassination.

The Secret Service, whose duties include the protection of the president, is being questioned regarding preparations for the event, the size of the security perimeter and how the shooter, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was able to get access to a rooftop near the rally stage. Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was killed by Secret Service snipers at the scene. One man attending the rally was killed, and two others were injured during the shooting, Pennsylvania State Police said.

Video of the assassination attempt shows Trump addressing the crowd and reacting as a bullet strikes him in the ear, followed by Secret Service agents surrounding him and slowly helping him up and off the stage. Before being moved off the stage, Trump can be seen raising a fist in the air.

That image of Trump’s gesture has been altered, however, in social media posts to falsely show two of the agents smiling as they assisted Trump and to claim the incident was “STAGED.”

A July 14 Threads post shows the altered image with a caption that says, “Why are the secret service smiling? STAGED.”

A video in a July 14 Instagram post shows several photos from the shooting — including two versions of the image of Trump with his fist raised as the agents help him. One accurately shows the agents with concerned expressions on their faces, and the other, altered image shows them smiling. The narrator of the video claims, “Something doesn’t look right. … Is it fake?”

What is fake is the altered image of the Secret Service agents smiling.

The original image showing Trump raising his fist as the agents move him off the stage was taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, whose photos in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were published by the AP on July 14. The caption on the original photo reads: “Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).”

The social media posts use a doctored version of that AP photo to make the false claim about the agents. The original photo shows the agents with concerned looks on their faces.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle issued a statement on July 15 about the actions of agents on the scene in Butler and the investigation of the incident. Cheatle said, in part: “Secret Service personnel on the ground moved quickly during the incident, with our counter sniper team neutralizing the shooter and our agents implementing protective measures to ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump.”

“The Secret Service is working with all involved Federal, state and local agencies to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. We understand the importance of the independent review announced by President Biden yesterday and will participate fully. We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action,” Cheatle also said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. “AP PHOTOS: Shooting at Trump rally in Pennsylvania.” Updated 14 Jul 2024.

Associated Press. “Video captures shooting at Trump rally.” 13 Jul 2024.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “Pennsylvania State Police Identify Victims Shot During Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump.” 14 Jul 2024.

Kanno-Young, Zolan, et al. “Secret Service Under Scrutiny After Assassination Attempt on Trump.” New York Times. 14 Jul 2024.

Tolan, Casey. “What we know about the Trump rally gunman so far.” CNN 14 Jul 2024.

Tsirkin, Julie, et al. “Congress demands answers from Secret Service after Trump assassination attempt.” NBC News. 14 Jul 2024.

United States Secret Service. About Us. “Protecting Leaders.” Accessed 15 Jul 2024.

United States Secret Service. “Statement From U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.” 15 Jul 2024.

Wild, Whitney, Evan Perez and Tierney Sneed. “Secret Service faces serious questions about security footprint and rooftop access at Trump Event.” CNN. 15 Jul 2024.

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In a press conference in which President Joe Biden was repeatedly asked about whether he would — or should — stay in the presidential race, Biden made a few remarks that were misleading or could use more context.

• Biden said that border apprehensions were now “lower today than when Trump left office.” That refers to the latest seven-day average compared with former President Donald Trump’s last week in office. But apprehensions fluctuated wildly under Trump. The latest average is still 30% higher than the daily average over Trump’s entire term.
• The president left the misleading impression that his “initial initiatives” didn’t contribute to inflation or the debt or yearly deficits. Economists point to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic as the main cause of inflation, but many say a pandemic relief measure signed by Biden had some impact. And it did add to the deficit.
• Biden claimed there were “at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents” with lower polling numbers than he had at a later point in their campaigns. But the White House provided only one example of an incumbent who went on to win, trailing by a wider margin in the polls than Biden is now.
• He was largely accurate in describing comments Trump had made about NATO, Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provide the context to those remarks.

Some Democratic lawmakers have publicly called for Biden to step aside in the presidential race after his performance in the late June debate. “I’m determined I’m running,” Biden told reporters in his July 11 press conference, which was held during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington, D.C., on the 75th anniversary of the alliance.

Border ApprehensionsBiden claimed that due to executive actions he implemented in early June, “border encounters have gone down over 50%” and “the current level is lower today than when Trump left office.” Biden is comparing the seven-day average ending July 11 to the seven-day average of Trump’s last week in office. And by that measure, he’s right. But apprehensions of those trying to cross the border illegally — which are referred to as “encounters” by the federal government — fluctuated wildly over the course of Trump’s presidency. The current seven-day average is about 30% higher than the daily average over Trump’s entire four years.

“Our efforts to secure the … southern border is working,” Biden said in the press conference. “After Trump killed the bipartisan effort to secure the border the Republicans and Democrats had worked on because he thought it would benefit me and make him a loser, Republicans walked away. So, I took executive action last month. As a consequence, working with Mexico, border encounters have gone down over 50%. The current level is lower today than when Trump left office.”

On June 5, the Department of Homeland Security began implementing a Biden administration proclamation that allows border officials to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally between ports of entry when the daily average of encounters reaches 2,500 or more for seven straight days. The policy was immediately implemented because levels were already well above that.

Three weeks later, on June 26, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reported that Border Patrol encounters of migrants had decreased by over 40% after the new policy was enacted and that in those three weeks more than 24,000 migrants had been removed or returned by the Department of Homeland Security.

A White House official told us via email that the latest seven-day average of southwest border encounters between ports of entry was 1,838 as of July 11. The seven-day average was 2,415 as of Jan. 19, 2021, Trump’s last full day in office. (The temporary restrictions directed by Biden will continue until 14 calendar days after the daily average of people apprehended crossing the border illegally drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days.)

But as we have written, the number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly under Trump, from a monthly low of 11,127 in April 2017 shortly after he took office to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.

The daily average of southwest border apprehensions over the entirety of Trump’s presidency was just under 1,400. The current seven-day average is about 30% higher than that.

The White House also pointed us to preliminary data — not yet publicly released but leaked to a Washington Post columnist — that showed the number of apprehensions at the southwest border in June was 84,000. That’s a little higher than December 2020, Trump’s last month in office. The White House notes that the preliminary figure for June is lower than the same month in 2019, Trump’s final pre-pandemic year. That’s also true, but April, May and June 2019 were the high mark of Trump’s presidency.

The latest publicly available data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection on southwest border apprehensions only go through May, which does not provide any insight into the effect of Biden policies implemented in early June. Should the preliminary figures for June hold, it would mark the lowest monthly total of Biden’s presidency. We should note that over the entirety of Biden’s presidency so far, however, apprehensions have been significantly higher than under his predecessors.

Biden’s new policy may be having an impact, but it’s a small sample size so far. When we compare apprehensions under Biden to Trump, we look at the most recent 12 months on record, compared with the year before Biden took office, to even out the seasonal changes in border crossings. By that measure, apprehensions are still up considerably under the president.

InflationEconomists cited several reasons for higher inflation in the U.S. beginning in 2021, first and foremost among them: the unprecedented economic circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic. But economists also told us that the American Rescue Plan — a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure that Biden signed into law in March 2021 — contributed to inflation. Biden suggested that wasn’t the case.

“As you recall, understandably, many of you and many economists thought my initial, initi- initiatives that I put forward — ‘Can’t do that. It’s going to cause inflation. Things are going to skyrocket. The debt’s going to go up,'” Biden said. “What are you hearing now from mainstream economists? Sixteen economic Nobel laureates said I’ve done a hell of a job.”

The year-over-year increase in inflation peaked under Biden at 9.1% in June 2022 (before seasonal adjustment), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We looked into the causes that month and what impact the American Rescue Plan had. Jason Furman, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now a Harvard University professor, told us the ARP contributed 1 to 4 percentage points to inflation and when “pressed for one number,” he said he used the midpoint of 2.5. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s — whose work is often cited by the White House — said the impact of the stimulus measure by then had “largely faded.”

Most economists we spoke with said the ARP should have been smaller or the money spent more slowly, though they also said some level of stimulus was needed, noting positive economic effects that helped insure a robust recovery. As for the 16 Nobel-winning economists, their letter — released in late June — said they agreed that “Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s.”

The letter said Biden’s pandemic stimulus spending had “enabled” a “remarkably strong and equitable labor market recovery.”

The ARP also added to the deficit, contrary to Biden’s suggestion that it didn’t. Overall, the deficit declined in fiscal year 2021 and 2022, but as we’ve reported before, budget experts have said those deficits would have been even lower if the pandemic and infrastructure spending bills backed by Biden hadn’t been enacted.

Inflation has moderated since that 2022 peak. The 12-month percentage change in inflation overall had dropped to 3% in June 2023, and it was 3% again this June.

Biden correctly commented in his press conference that “core inflation is the lowest it’s been in three years.” Core inflation, which leaves out food and energy, went up 3.3% for the 12 months ending in June, which is the smallest growth since April 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Reelection PollingBiden claimed, “There were at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now later in a campaign.” But the White House provided only one example of an incumbent who went on to win, trailing by a wider margin in the polls than Biden is now.

Most of the examples the White House listed were presidential candidates at the time of the polls, but not incumbents.

An average of national polls compiled by ABC News’ 538 project shows Trump up by 1.9 points over Biden as of July 12. RealClear Polling’s average shows Trump up by 2.9 points for the period of June 28 to July 11.

In his 2004 reelection campaign, President George W. Bush lagged behind John Kerry by 2.5 points in the national average in August of that year.

The White House also cited President Barack Obama trailing his challenger, Mitt Romney, by 1 point in the national polling average in October 2012, according to RealClear Polling. That’s not more than the average for Biden — though it certainly occurred much later in the campaign, and we’d note that these averages are within the margin of error for most polls.

The White House pointed to wider gaps for John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Obama and Trump, but those instances were all when those men were first vying for the presidency.

Trump Remarks on NATO, Ukraine and PutinBiden was largely accurate in describing comments Trump had made about NATO, Ukraine and Putin. We’ll provide more context.

Ukraine invasion. While criticizing Trump for having “no commitment” to NATO, Biden said that Trump had even complimented Putin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

“In fact, the day after Putin invaded Ukraine, here’s what he said: It was ‘genius.’ It was ‘wonderful,’” Biden said of Trump. “Some of you forgot that, but that’s exactly what he said.”

Biden is right about what Trump said, although Trump made those exact comments before Russia launched its attack. In a Feb. 22, 2022, radio interview, Trump said: “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine. … Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.” A transcript of the radio interview posted on the website of “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” indicated that Trump said “wonderful” sarcastically.

The following day, at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Trump defended his comments. “I mean [Putin’s] taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump said. “He’s taking over a country — literally, a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.” Trump later said “it would have never happened” if he had been president instead of Biden.

Knowledge of NATO. Biden went on to critique Trump’s grasp of foreign policy, saying that Trump recently admitted that he “just learned” about NATO. Actually, Trump said he had limited knowledge of NATO before becoming president — not now.

“I think he said in one of his rallies — don’t hold me to this — recently, where NATO, ‘I just learned about NATO,’ or something to that effect,” Biden said.

At a July 9 campaign rally in Doral, Florida, Trump said he was not very familiar with the NATO alliance before he attended his first summit early in his presidency.

“Nobody was paying, but I didn’t want to be obnoxious because I felt it’s the first time I’d ever done this,” Trump said, recalling his thoughts about NATO before his first trip to speak before alliance members in May 2017. “I went. I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes.”

Trump wasn’t saying that he learned about NATO recently, as Biden’s remark may have suggested.

‘Do whatever.’ Biden also said that Trump “made it clear that [Trump] would feel no obligation to honor Article 5” of NATO’s founding agreement, which says an attack on one ally is an attack on all. He then added that Trump “already told Putin, and I quote, ‘do whatever the hell you want.'”

Biden was referring to an alleged exchange that Trump said he had with an unnamed president of an unnamed NATO nation.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia will you protect us?’” Trump said at a Feb. 10 campaign rally in South Carolina. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes. Let’s say that happened.’ ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills. And the money came flowing in.”

Trump did not directly tell Putin to “do whatever the hell you want,” but Putin could have interpreted Trump’s public remarks that way.

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Political leanings: Conservative/Republican

2022 Spending: $291 Million

The Senate Leadership Fund is a Republican super PAC that was established in 2015 by allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The group says its purpose is “to build a Republican Senate majority.” Its president is Steven Law, who served as McConnell’s chief of staff from 1991 to 1997. Law also serves as the president and CEO of both American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC, and One Nation, a conservative advocacy group registered with the IRS as a nonprofit. From 1998 to 2000, Law served as executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

As a super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund can accept unlimited contributions, but it must disclose its donors and cannot coordinate its spending with candidate campaigns. As of March 31, the super PAC had raised $64 million heading into the 2024 election, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission.

The group’s largest individual donor is Ken Griffin, the billionaire CEO of the Citadel hedge fund company, who has given $10 million. An additional $7.2 million was donated by One Nation, which is reportedly putting at least $70 million into key 2024 Senate races in swing states. The super PAC also received large contributions from the petroleum industry, including $4 million from Occidental Petroleum Corp. and $2.5 million from both the American Petroleum Institute and Chevron Corporation.

As of the end of March, Senate Leadership Fund reported spending nearly $8.2 million during the 2024 cycle, with almost $6.8 million of that total being used on operating expenditures. At the time, the super PAC had contributed about $1.4 million to other committees, including a $895,000 contribution to Conservative Americans PAC and a $500,000 contribution to Keystone Renewal PAC, which is supporting Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania.

SLF does plan to spend big later this year; it reportedly has reserved over $57 million in ads that will target Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana. Both are up for reelection in races that the Cook Political Report considers to be toss-ups. The ads are scheduled to run from Labor Day, on Sept. 3, until Election Day, on Nov. 5.

The super PAC also has reserved $24 million in ads to help McCormick in his race against incumbent Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. Those ads are scheduled to start in September as well.

That amount still isn’t close to the super PAC’s spending for the 2022 midterms. During that election cycle, it spent $291 million, including $246 million on independent expenditures that “expressly advocate” the election or defeat of a specific candidate. That included about $45.2 million against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who won reelection, and almost $47.6 million against Democrat John Fetterman, who won his race to become Pennsylvania’s junior U.S. senator.

FactCheck.org Undergraduate Fellow Logan Chapman contributed to this article.

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FactCheck.org has won the 2023 Sigma Delta Chi award for fact-checking from the Society of Professional Journalists. This is our third win in the fact-checking category and our fourth award from SPJ overall.

This year’s awards were announced on July 9. Our winning entry was Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley’s work fact-checking claims about the House investigation and impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.

The inquiry concerns Republican claims that Biden benefited from or assisted with his son Hunter’s business dealings with entities in other countries while Biden was vice president. In three articles in 2023, Rob found that, so far, Republicans haven’t been able to establish that Biden was involved in these business dealings, that he directly benefited from them or that he used his position as vice president to assist his family’s companies.

Previously, FactCheck.org won the 2019 and 2020 Sigma Delta Chi fact-checking awards for our in-depth stories about claims made by then-President Donald Trump. We also won a 2010 SDX non-deadline reporting award for independent news sites for our work on deceptive claims made about federal health care legislation.

The Society of Professional Journalists, originally founded as Sigma Delta Chi, has been honoring outstanding journalism since 1932.

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Political leanings: Pro-Joe Biden

2022 Spending: $5.8 million

Unite the Country is a single-candidate super PAC that supports President Joe Biden. It was started in 2019 by former Biden aides to help promote his 2020 presidential candidacy.

A video on the super PAC’s YouTube channel argues that Biden “laid out a better path for America” through the policy changes he enacted while in office and urges voters to “finish the job” by supporting his reelection in 2024.

The pro-Biden group is run by top Democratic strategists who previously worked on Biden’s presidential or vice presidential campaigns, including its CEO, Steve Schale. The organization’s board is chaired by Mark Doyle, CEO of consulting firm Prairie Avenue Advisors, who worked on Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign. Other board members include Austin Keyser, the former co-chair of climate, energy and environment policy for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, and political campaign strategist Michelle Maravich.

As of June 30, Unite the Country had raised about $4.4 million for the 2024 election through a combination of individual donations and contributions from other committees, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission. OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics, reports that the group has spent almost $1.2 million on pro-Biden independent expenditures, which are advertisements that “expressly advocate” for the election or defeat of a specific candidate.

For example, during the Democratic presidential primary, the group paid to run an ad featuring Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina talking about Biden eliminating billions of dollars in student loan debt for Americans and capping the cost of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries at $35.

FEC records show that the leading donor to Unite the Country during the 2024 election cycle has been ATU Action Fund, the super PAC of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which has contributed over $1 million. The largest individual donor thus far is California physician Kenneth Duda, who gave $500,000.

OpenSecrets reported in May 2020 that contributions to Unite the Country — which raised almost $50 million for the 2020 election cycle — started to decline after Biden’s campaign praised another pro-Biden super PAC, Priorities USA Action, which “was viewed as a signal to influential donors that they should bankroll” that group instead of United the Country. Then in July 2023, Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign indicated a preference for FF PAC, or Future Forward PAC, another super PAC supporting the president’s reelection.

However, NBC News reported in February that Unite the Country still “plans to spend upward of $40 million” to help Biden in 2024 by “focusing on Donald Trump’s mounting legal issues and his ‘threat to democracy.'” That’s roughly the same amount as the $38.9 million the super PAC spent on independent expenditures advocating for Biden’s election in 2020.

Because Unite the Country focuses on the presidential race, it spent significantly less during the 2022 election cycle — about $5.8 million. But the group placed multiple seven-figure ad buys that touted Biden’s American Rescue Plan in 2021 and his 2022 plans to address high inflation and supply-chain disruptions.

FactCheck.org Undergraduate Fellow Ben Cohen contributed to this article.

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Quick TakeThe judge in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump denied a defense request to ask jurors about their party registration, so their political affiliation is not known. But conservative commentator Tucker Carlson made the unsupported claim in a Facebook post that the jury was “stacked with Biden voters.” Both sides had the opportunity to reject jurors.

Full StoryOn May 30, former President Donald Trump was convicted in Manhattan on 34 felony counts of business fraud. (For more about the conviction, read our article “Q&A on Trump’s Criminal Conviction.”) As with all criminal prosecutions, the jury had to be unanimous in its verdict to find Trump guilty on each count.

Close to 300 people were initially screened as potential jurors and alternates, according to NPR. Dozens were dismissed after telling the court they could not be impartial, as the BBC reported, and those who remained were “grilled on 42 questions in the jury questionnaire, including on their news-reading habits, whether they had attended any Trump rallies or read any of the former president’s books.” A panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was finalized on April 19 after four days of selection.

In a letter attached to the questionnaire, acting Justice Juan Merchan of the New York Supreme Court told lawyers for both sides that the jurors could not be asked about their party affiliations.

Merchan, April 8: Please note, there are no questions asking prospective jurors whom they voted for or intend to vote for, or whom they have made political contributions to. Nor are jurors asked about their specific political party registration, though the answer to that question may easily be gleaned from the responses to the other questions. Counsel is forewarned not to seek to expand the degree of intrusion beyond what is relevant and has already been approved.

“Contrary to defense counsel’s arguments,” Merchan went on to say, “the purpose of jury selection is not to determine whether a prospective juror likes or does not like one of the parties. Such questions are irrelevant because they do not go to the issue of the prospective juror’s qualifications.”

Former President Donald Trump and his attorney Todd Blanche attend his criminal trial during jury selection at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 18. Photo by Brendan McDermid-Pool via Getty Images.But conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson posted an unsupported claim on social media that the jury was “stacked” with people who voted for President Joe Biden.

In a June 13 Facebook post, Carlson claimed, without evidence, that “Trump was found guilty by a jury stacked with Biden voters…” The post received more than 98,000 likes as of July 10.

In the midst of jury selection, conservative political activist Laura Loomer made a similar claim. She posted on X, “Today, on day 2 of jury selection, six jurors were chosen for Trump’s trial. Several are open Biden supporters. RIGGED TRIAL!” Her post, uploaded on April 16, received more than 15,000 likes.

The claims about the jurors’ political leanings are unsupported, however. As we explained, the judge did not allow jurors to be questioned about political affiliation, so that information was not made public, and they were screened in an attempt to ensure their impartiality.

How Jurors Were SelectedJurors were selected from Manhattan, where the Trump Organization is located, the business fraud occurred and the indictment was filed. Trump argued that it would be impossible for him to get a fair trial in the heavily Democratic borough, but his lawyers failed to convince a federal judge to move the case to federal court – which could have given Trump “a broader, more politically diverse jury pool,” as the Associated Press explained.

During the jury selection process, potential jurors were “grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for any bias that would prevent them from being impartial,” the Associated Press reported.

Furthermore, Trump’s legal team had the ability to challenge jurors who they felt were unfit to provide impartial judgment and reject up to 10 jurors without cause.

“Prospective jurors can be dismissed by the judge for cause if he finds they shouldn’t serve on the panel,” as CNN reported. “Prosecutors and Trump’s defense team will also get 10 peremptory strikes they can use to remove a juror from the pool, no questions asked.”

Trump claimed that 10 strikes were not enough to ensure a fair jury.

During the selection process, Vox reported, “Potential jurors have been asked to read out or explain posts or memes they’ve shared, and at least  one was dismissed for sharing a post that included the words ‘lock him up,’ in reference to Trump.”

Two jurors were dismissed after expressing that they could not provide a fair judgment. The New York Times reported, “One seated juror said she had developed concerns her identity could be revealed. The second was dismissed after prosecutors raised concerns about his credibility.”

What We Know About the JurorsThe decision not to disclose the jurors’ names was made by both prosecutors and Trump’s defense team. In March, Merchan accepted prosecutors’ argument that most information about the jurors should be sealed, and Trump’s lawyers largely agreed.

And, as we said earlier, jurors could not be asked about their party affiliations and voting habits during the jury selection process.

But information about their jobs and thoughts about the trial have been published in news articles, including in the New York Times and the Guardian. Information made public included their sources of news, levels of education, marital statuses and areas of residence. All jurors pledged to remain fair and impartial.

Cynthia Godsoe, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, told us in an email that there is “no validity at all to the claim that [the jurors] were biased. The defense had ample opportunity to question the jurors, research their social media (in fact several were dismissed for things they said there) and exercise the usual amount of challenges (peremptory and for cause) to get rid of jurors they didn’t want.”

“No jury can be totally free of opinions, [especially] in a high-profile case like this, and the question really is, can the juror be fair and impartial,” Godsoe said. “Those left on the jury passed this test for the judge and, more importantly to Trump’s after-the-fact complaints, to HIS own lawyers.”

Lawyers are typically barred from asking jurors about their political party and religion, Godsoe explained, stating thatballots cast in U.S. elections are always anonymous and no voting in the U.S. is public. In this case, Trump’s lawyers “were not allowed to ask which party they voted for, but were allowed to ask about voting generally, i.e. did they vote,” Godsoe said.

In the Times article, some jurors did express feelings of antipathy toward Trump but said that they felt able to remain impartial. Juror 11, for example, a product manager who lives in Upper Manhattan, said, “I don’t like his persona, how he presents himself in public.” She then added, “I don’t like some of my co-workers, but I don’t try to sabotage their work.”

Juror 5, on the other hand, had more positive feelings about Trump. “President Trump speaks his mind,” the New York Times quoted her as saying.

Juror 2, who works in finance and lives in Hell’s Kitchen, said he believed “Trump had done some good for the country,” the New York Times reported.

So, some of the jurors did express positive feelings about Trump. Their political affiliations and voting records — and those of the other jurors — remain unknown.

Merchan had scheduled sentencing for July 11, but delayed it until Sept. 18 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling that grants Trump some immunity from criminal prosecution. The court ruled that presidents have a “presumption of immunity” when carrying out “official acts,” but “no immunity for his unofficial acts.”

Although it’s unclear what impact the Supreme Court ruling might have on Trump’s conviction, the federal judge who last year rejected Trump’s attempt to move the trial to federal court wrote in his decision that Trump’s actions in this case were “not related to a President’s official acts.”

“The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President — a cover-up of an embarrassing event,” U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein wrote in a July 19, 2023, opinion. “Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAmerican Bar Association. “How Courts Work.” 9 Sep 2019.

Bromwich, Jonah E., et al. “Prospective Jurors Are Dismissed in Dozens as Trump’s Trial Begins.” New York Times. 15 Apr 2024.

Bustillo, Ximena. “What to know about week 1 of Trump’s criminal trial, with jury selection complete.” NPR. 20 Apr 2024.

Del Valle, Lauren. “What to expect at jury selection for Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial.” CNN. 15 Apr 2024.

Farley, Robert, et al. “Q&A on Trump’s Criminal Conviction.” FactCheck.org. 31 May 2024.

Fayyad, Abdallah. “Trump’s jury doesn’t have to like him to be fair to him.” Vox. 19 Apr 2024.

Godsoe, Cynthia. Professor of law, Brooklyn Law School. Email to FactCheck.org. 8 Jul 2024.

Halpert, Madeline and Kayla Epstein. “Trump trial: Dozens of jurors rejected as they say they cannot be impartial.” BBC. 16 Apr 2024.

Orden, Erica. “Trump’s sentencing in New York delayed until Sept. 18.” Politico. 2 Jun 2024.

Protess, Ben and Jonah E. Bromwich. “What We Know About Why Two Trump Jurors Were Dismissed.” New York Times. 18 Apr 2024.

Reiss, Adam and Darah Gregorian. “Trump’s historic hush money trial seats 12 jurors, plus an alternate: ‘We have our jury.'” NBC News. 18 Apr 2024.

Robins-Early, Nick. “The jurors: who is on the Trump trial jury?” The Guardian. 18 Apr 2024.

Settles, Gabrielle. “No evidence that hush-money trial jurors were ‘Biden voters’ | Fact check.” USA Today. 28 Jun 2024.

Sisak, Michael, et al. “12 jurors have been picked for Trump’s hush money trial. Selection of alternatives is ongoing.” 18 Apr 2024.

Supreme Court of the State of New York. “Re: People v. Trump, Ind. No. 71543-2023” 8 Apr 2024.

Supreme Court of the United States. “CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT.” 25 Apr 2024.

Wolf, Zachary B. “Why is the Trump trial jury anonymous? The brief and imperfect history of anonymous juries in the US.” CNN. 18 Apr 2024.

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Quick TakeA photo of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely shows him holding the carcass of a goat, lamb or other ruminant animal in Patagonia. Social media posts, citing a Vanity Fair article, make the unsupported claim the photo shows a dog carcass in South Korea. The magazine deleted remarks by a veterinarian who said it was a dog.

Full StoryIn a Vanity Fair article published on July 2, special correspondent Joe Hagan raises questions about the character and credibility of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and highlights his controversial past, including allegations that he sexually assaulted his then-23-year-old babysitter in 1999 and texted images of nude women to his friends.

In response, Kennedy told the Breaking Points podcast on July 2, “The article is a lot of garbage.” Kennedy told the host of the podcast that he is “not a church boy” and has “many skeletons in my closet,” but he declined to comment when asked about the assault allegation. “I’m not going to comment on it,” Kennedy said.

Hagan’s article also published an image of Kennedy posing with an animal carcass. In the original article, Hagan described the photo as Kennedy “posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog” in 2010. Kennedy sent the photo to a friend last year. The friend told Vanity Fair that Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul.”

In the original version of the article, Hagan supported the assertion that Kennedy posed with a canine by stating, “A veterinarian who examined the photograph says the carcass is a canine, pointing to the 13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale ‘floating rib’ found in dogs.”

Kennedy responded to this allegation with a post on X on July 2, stating, “Hey @VanityFair, you know when your veterinary experts call a goat a dog, and your forensic experts say a photo taken in Patagonia was taken in Korea, that you’ve joined the ranks of supermarket tabloids.”

In an interview with Fox News on July 3, Kennedy said that the image is “a real photo,” but told the interviewer, “It’s me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat, which is what we eat down there.” In a 2013 interview in Patagon Journal, Kennedy said that he has visited the Futaleufu River at least five times.

On July 7, Kennedy also posted a video on X responding to the magazine’s claim. In the video, which features his three pet dogs, he refers to the allegation that he posed with a dog carcass as “the height of irresponsible journalism” and calls the article “fake news.”

After Kennedy’s initial response, Vanity Fair revised the article on July 3, replacing the phrase “appears to be a dog” with “what he suggested to the friend was a dog.” Vanity Fair also added Kennedy’s initial response and removed the opinion of the veterinarian who claimed the carcass was a canine.

A representative from Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast, told us in an email on July 5, “The context for reporting this exchange, as we state in the story, was that this apparent attempt at a joke disturbed Kennedy’s friend, and as such, is part of a larger picture of Kennedy’s recent behavior distressing his friends and family.”

The Condé Nast representative told us that “we did not definitively ID the pictured animal as a dog” in the article. “We reported the date from the metadata — 2010 — but not a location, though Kennedy has incorrectly stated otherwise.” Their response also notes, “Kennedy has not disputed what he told his friend,” and that “the friend was disgusted by the picture and felt this episode illustrated poor judgment.”

By the time Vanity Fair made the changes in the article, other news networks had picked up the story. The New York Post, Newsweek and the New York Daily News published articles citing information from the original version of Vanity Fair’s story that said Kennedy posed with what “appears to be” a dog carcass.

Multiple viral posts on social media continue to circulate the unsupported claim that Kennedy posed with a dog carcass despite Vanity Fair’s subsequent retraction. The text above the photo on a July 2 Threads post said, “Here’s a photo of RFK Jr posing with a barbecued dog. How can anyone even think about voting for this guy?”

Photo Likely Displays a Patagonian DishThe preparation style of the carcass and roasting spit displayed in the photo of Kennedy all match closely with images of the popular Patagonian dish “asado al palo” or “cordero al palo,” which roughly translates as “lamb to the post.” The culinary guide Pick Up the Fork explains that while lamb is the favored barbecued meat in Patagonia, goat is more popularly used in Mendoza, Argentina.

We found numerous pictures of carcasses of other ruminants — which refers to hoofed, cud-chewing mammals — prepared on an iron cross in Patagonia that appear extremely similar to the photo published by Vanity Fair.

National Geographic photographer Michael George published a photo of “a lamb that is being smoked” in a 2017 article titled, “11 Breathtaking Photos from Torres del Paine National Park,” which is located in Chile’s Patagonia region. The lamb in the photo is held by an iron cross that appears nearly identical in structure to the one displayed in the photo with Kennedy.

Tourist cruise company Australis published a 2019 blog post with photos describing asado al palo as “Patagonia’s signature dish.” The article explains the dish is prepared by cutting a lamb “vertically down the torso and splayed across an iron cross or rack,” just as it appears in the image with Kennedy.

The travel guide TasteAtlas describes cordero al palo as a “traditional lamb specialty that involves roasting a whole lamb on a spit.” The article displays another image with a close similarity to the carcass held by Kennedy in the photograph published by Vanity Fair.

We found no similar examples of this cooking technique or the iron cross in South Korean cuisine.

Opinions of Other VeterinariansAs we noted, in the original version of the Vanity Fair article, the writer cited a veterinarian who said the photo shows a canine based on the “13 pairs of ribs, which include the tell-tale ‘floating rib’ found in dogs.”

However, both dogs and ruminants possess 13 total pairs of ribs as well as some “floating ribs,” meaning that they do not attach to the sternum.

Dr. Patty Scharko, professor of animal and veterinary sciences at Clemson University and former president of the American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners, disagreed with the findings of the veterinarian originally cited by Vanity Fair. She told us in an email that “without a head and feet (hooves), it is difficult to determine what species [the carcass] is.”

In a post on X, veterinarian Dr. Crystal Heath offered a different opinion than the veterinarian cited in the original Vanity Fair article. Heath claimed that “the triangular scapula and flattened ribs all point to goat.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAmerican Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners. Accessed 9 Jul 2024.

“Anatomy and Physiology of the Goat Animal Biosecurity and Welfare.” Primefact. New South Wales Government Department of Primary Industries. Aug 2017.

Assuncao, Muri. “RFK Jr. Accused of Sexual Assault, Posing with Barbecued Dog in Exposé.” New York Daily News. 2 Jul 2024.

Australis. “Cordero al Palo: The Quintessential Patagonia Food.” 25 Jul 2019.

Breaking Points. “EXCLUSIVE RFK JR: Biden UNFIT to SERVE, Wants Dem Nomination.” YouTube. 2 Jul 2024.

Condé Nast. “Condé Nast – Home.” Condenast.com. 2020.

De Greff, Dana. “Patagonian Asado al Palo: The Best Lamb You’ve Never Tasted.” Miami New Times. 30 Dec 2013.

Fox News. “RFK, Jr.: Biden’s Debate Performance Was ‘Alarming.’” YouTube. 3 Jul 2024.

George, Michael. “11 Breathtaking Photos from Torres Del Paine National Park.” National Geographic. 8 May 2017.

Hagan, Joe. “RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets.” Vanity Fair. 2 Jul 2024.

Heath, Crystal. (@drcrystalheath). “This veterinarian believes that is the body of a goat. You cannot tell if there are floating ribs based on that photo and goats do have floating ribs. Also, the triangular scapula and flattened ribs all point to goat. That said, please support your local, humane, organic dog meat farmer @elwooddogmeat .” X. 2 Jul 2024.

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. (@RobertKennedyJr.) “Hey @VanityFair , you know when your veterinary experts call a goat a dog, and your forensic experts say a photo taken in Patagonia was taken in Korea, that you’ve joined the ranks of supermarket tabloids. Keep telling America that up is down if you want. I’ll keep talking about the fact that working families can’t afford houses or groceries because our last two presidents went on a $14 trillion debt joyride, paid for by hard-working Americans. The DNC media’s garbage pail journalism may distract us from President Biden’s cognitive deficits but it does little to elevate the national debate or reduce the price of groceries.” X. 2 Jul 2024.

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. (@RobertKennedyJr). “Because of some recent irresponsible journalism, I’m in the dog house ” X. 2 Jul 2024.

Land, Olivia, and David Propper. “Photo Appears to Show RFK Jr. With Barbequed Carcass of Dog.” New York Post. 2 Jul 2024.

Langman, Jimmy. “Interview: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” Patagon Journal. Accessed 8 Jul 2024.

Martin, Allen and Jennifer Mistrot. “Bay Area Veterinarian’s Spay/Neuter Clinic Helps Thousands Of Shelter Animals.” CBS News Bay Area. 22 Apr 2019.

Micheau, Antoine. “IMAIOS Veterinary Anatomy of Domestic Mammals: Textbook and Colour Atlas, Sixth Edition.” IMAIOS. Accessed 8 Jul 2024.

National Geographic Expeditions. “Michael George.” Accessed 8 Jul 2024.

Norman, Abby, and Jenny Sweigard. “What Is a Floating Rib?” Verywell Health. 12 Jul 2023.

Our Honor. “Our Honor Board.” Accessed 8 Jul 2024.

Patty Scharko. Professor of animal and veterinary sciences, Clemson University. Email to FactCheck.org. 9 Jul 2024.

Pick Up the Fork. “A Guide to the Argentine Asado.” 11 Oct 2016.

Plummer, Kate. “RFK Jr. Ate a Dog, Photo Appears to Suggest.” Newsweek. 2 Jul 2024.

TasteAtlas. “Cordero al Palo | Traditional Lamb Dish from Patagonia.” Accessed 8 Jul 2024.

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In his first televised interview since his admittedly “bad” presidential debate, President Joe Biden made a few exaggerated and misleading statements.

Here’s what Biden said in his 22-minute, primetime interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on July 5:

• Biden exaggerated when he claimed that the U.S. share of global semiconductor — or chip — production capacity has declined to “virtually nothing.”
• Biden, again, wrongly claimed that former President Donald Trump told the public to inject bleach as a treatment for COVID-19.
• Biden denied that he had fallen further behind Trump in post-debate polling, saying “nothing’s changed substantially since the debate in the New York Times poll.” The Times post-debate poll showed Trump ahead by 6 percentage points — an increase of 3 points.
• Biden repeated his misleading talking point that Trump “lost more jobs than he created.” That ignores the swift and devastating economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

SemiconductorsBiden claimed that the U.S. share of global semiconductor — or chip — production capacity has declined to “virtually nothing.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration.

“We used to have 40% of computer chips,” the president said. “We invented the chip, the little chip, the computer chip. It’s in everything from cellphones to weapons. And so, we used to have 40%, and we’re down to virtually nothing.”

The federal government “played a central role in the development of semiconductors” and the U.S. used to account for about 40% of semiconductor fabrication capacity in 1990, according to a Congressional Research Service report published in 2020. The capacity share in North America — primarily the U.S. — had declined to 11% in 2019, which ranked fifth in the world behind South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China, the report said.

CRS described the chips as small electronic devices that are “fundamental to nearly all modern industrial and national security activities” and “essential building blocks of other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, 5G communications, and quantum computing.”

Concerns about the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry led to Biden signing into law in August 2022 the CHIPS and Science Act, which, among other things, included $39 billion for a fund designed to boost chip manufacturing capacity in the country.

In a report released in May, the Semiconductor Industry Association, along with the Boston Consulting Group, projected that investments “facilitated by incentives under the CHIPS Act” would lead the U.S. share of global fab capacity to grow from “10% today to 14% by 2032.” Without new investments, U.S. fab capacity would have gone down to 8% by 2032, the joint report said.

BleachBiden, again, wrongly claimed that Trump told the public to inject bleach as a treatment for COVID-19.

“This is a guy who told us to put bleach in our arms to deal with COVID, with a million — over a million people died,” Biden said, referring to U.S. deaths from the disease.

As we’ve written, Biden is twisting the words of Trump, who never told public to “put bleach” in their bodies. During an April 2020 press briefing at the White House, Trump suggested that scientists at the Department of Homeland Security test the use of “very powerful light” and “disinfectant” in the body to kill the virus that causes COVID-19. He did not tell Americans to try it themselves.

New York Times PollStephanopoulos said Biden fell “further behind” Trump in national polling after the June 27 debate, including the latest New York Times/Siena College poll that showed Trump up by 6 percentage points. The president pushed back, saying the New York Times/Siena College poll showed him “behind 10 points” prior to the debate and “nothing’s changed substantially since the debate in the New York Times poll.”

But, as Stephanopoulos said, the latest Times/Siena poll shows Trump has widened his lead. The former president now leads Biden “49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from just a week earlier, before the debate,” the Times wrote. That’s the largest lead Trump “has recorded in a Times/Siena poll since 2015,” the Times article said.

Even with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included, the Times/Siena poll shows Trump up by 5 points — 42% to 37% — with Kennedy receiving 8% among likely voters.

The poll’s margin of error was “plus or minus 2.9 percentage points for the likely electorate.”

In other polling, the Suffolk University/USA Today National Voter Poll found Trump “edged ahead” of Biden 41% to 38% in a poll of registered voters, while Kennedy polled 8%. The two major party candidates were tied at 37% in May.

Trump’s 3 point lead is within the Suffolk/USA Today poll’s margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

As Stephanopoulos noted, Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million in 2020, but it took narrow victories in a few swing states for Biden to win the Electoral College and the presidency.

Biden’s Talking Point on JobsAs he did during the debate, and on many other occasions, Biden compared Trump to Herbert Hoover, the Depression-era president. Biden said Trump — like Hoover — “lost more jobs than he created.”

But, as we’ve written, Biden is ignoring the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. added nearly 6.7 million jobs in Trump’s first 37 months in office. But a string of 37 months of consecutive job growth ended in March 2020, when the economy lost 1.4 million jobs and bottomed out the next month when it lost nearly 20.5 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The job market started to recover in May 2020. But by the end of Trump’s four years, the U.S. had about 2.7 million fewer total jobs.

Under Biden, employment is up 6.2 million from the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020 — but the total increase since Biden took office in January 2021 is about 15.6 million, BLS data show.

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SciCheck DigestCOVID-19 vaccination is generally very safe, and except for extremely rare cases, there is no evidence that it contributes to death. Social media posts about a now-published, but faulty review of autopsy reports, however, are repeating an unfounded claim from last summer that “74% of sudden deaths are shown to be due to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

   How safe are the COVID-19 vaccines?        How safe are the COVID-19 vaccines?   More than half a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

A small number of severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, which are expected with any vaccine, have occurred with the authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately, these reactions are rare, typically occur within minutes of inoculation and can be treated. Approximately 5 per million people vaccinated have experienced anaphylaxis after a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC.

To make sure serious allergic reactions can be identified and treated, all people receiving a vaccine should be observed for 15 minutes after getting a shot, and anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis or had any kind of immediate allergic reaction to any vaccine or injection in the past should be monitored for a half hour. People who have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous dose or one of the vaccine ingredients should not be immunized. Also, those who shouldn’t receive one type of COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored for 30 minutes after receiving a different type of vaccine.

There is evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines may rarely cause inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or of the surrounding lining (pericarditis), particularly in male adolescents and young adults.

Based on data collected through August 2021, the reporting rates of either condition in the U.S. are highest in males 16 to 17 years old after the second dose (105.9 cases per million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine), followed by 12- to 15-year-old males (70.7 cases per million). The rate for 18- to 24-year-old males was 52.4 cases and 56.3 cases per million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively.

Health officials have emphasized that vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis cases are rare and the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks. Early evidence suggests these myocarditis cases are less severe than typical ones. The CDC has also noted that most patients who were treated “responded well to medicine and rest and felt better quickly.”

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to an increased risk of rare blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets, especially in women ages 30 to 49. Early symptoms of the condition, which is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, can appear as late as three weeks after vaccination and include severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision, leg swelling, and easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin outside of the injection site.

According to the CDC, TTS has occurred in around 4 people per million doses administered. As of early April, the syndrome has been confirmed in 60 cases, including nine deaths, after more than 18.6 million doses of the J&J vaccine. Although TTS remains rare, because of the availability of mRNA vaccines, which are not associated with this serious side effect, the FDA on May 5 limited authorized use of the J&J vaccine to adults who either couldn’t get one of the other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines because of medical or access reasons, or only wanted a J&J vaccine for protection against the disease. Several months earlier, on Dec. 16, 2021, the CDC had recommended the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots over J&J’s.

The J&J vaccine has also been linked to an increased risk of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks nerve cells. Most people who develop GBS fully recover, although some have permanent nerve damage and the condition can be fatal.

Safety surveillance data suggest that compared with the mRNA vaccines, which have not been linked to GBS, the J&J vaccine is associated with 15.5 additional GBS cases per million doses of vaccine in the three weeks following vaccination. Most reported cases following J&J vaccination have occurred in men 50 years old and older.

Link to this

Full StoryLast July, an unpublished paper authored by several physicians known for spreading COVID-19 misinformation briefly appeared on a preprint server hosted by the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet.

The paper claimed to have reviewed autopsy reports and found — in the opinion of three of its authors — that 73.9% of the selected deaths were “directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.” Those conclusions, however, were often contrary to the original scientists’ determinations. Moreover, abundant evidence contradicts the suggestion that the COVID-19 vaccines are frequently killing people.

The preprint repository quickly removed the manuscript because, it said, “the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology,” and indicated that the preprint had violated its screening criteria.

Social media soon flooded with posts highlighting the purported findings and alleging censorship, with many falsely stating that the paper had been published in the Lancet.

Multiple scientists and fact checkers detailed numerous problems with the preprint and the resulting social media posts. As Dr. Jonathan Laxton, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba who frequently debunks misinformation online, wrote at the time on Twitter, “this is not a conspiracy, the paper was literally biased hot garbage and the Lancet was right to remove it.”

Despite these efforts, the same claims are back this summer after the paper was published in the journal Forensic Science International on June 21. Capitalizing on the paper’s now-published status, numerous posts are once again spreading the review’s supposed findings and realleging censorship.

“Largest autopsy series in the world. Censored by what was the most reputable peer reviewed journal,” reads one popular Instagram post. “74% of the 325 Suddenly Died Autopsies point the cause to the dart,” it added, using coded language to refer to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Another post, from Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician in Ohio known for her opposition to vaccines and her false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people, also repeated the falsehood that the paper had been previously published in the Lancet.

“Bottom line results: 74% of sudden deaths are shown to be due to the COVID-19 vaccine,” the post went on to say. “This paper is a game changer. Sadly, it was censored for ONE YEAR. Just think of all the lives that could have been saved.”

As we’ve explained before, publication in a peer reviewed journal does not necessarily mean a paper is accurate or trustworthy, although the process can improve manuscripts and weed out bad science. In this case, the published paper is highly similar to the previously criticized manuscript. Experts say its conclusions are unreliable and misleading.

“The vast majority of these cases do not show a causal, but coincidental, effect,” wrote Marc Veldhoen, an immunologist at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes in Portugal, in a thread on X, addressing the paper’s central claim. “This certainly does not apply to the general population!”

When asked about the published paper, Dr. Cristina Cattaneo, co-editor-in-chief of Forensic Science International, told us the journal was “currently looking into the matter.”

Problematic ‘Review’For their “review,” the authors searched the medical literature for published autopsy studies related to any kind of COVID-19 vaccination. After excluding duplicates and studies without deaths, autopsies, or vaccination status information, the authors were left with 44 studies comprising 325 autopsies. Three of the authors then reviewed the described cases and decided for themselves if the deaths were vaccine-related; if at least two agreed, the death was counted as being attributable to COVID-19 vaccination.

In the end, the authors thought 240, or nearly 74%, of the reviewed autopsies were vaccine-related (rounded to one decimal, 240 out of 325 is actually 73.8%, not 73.9% as reported in the paper). Among these deaths, 46.3% occurred after a Sinovac vaccine, 30.1% after a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, 14.6% after an AstraZeneca vaccine, 7.5% after a Moderna vaccine and 1.3% after a Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

As others have pointed out before, there’s reason to suspect that the authors may have been biased in their determinations. All three adjudicators, including Dr. Peter McCullough, are well known for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Dr. William Makis, a Canadian radiologist, has previously claimed, without evidence, that 80 Canadian doctors died from COVID-19 vaccines. The only pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, incorrectly claimed in 2020 that COVID-19 was a “hoax” and “just a bad flu.”

Photo by dusanpetkovic1 / stock.adobe.comHodkinson and McCullough, along with five other authors, are also affiliated with and have a financial interest in The Wellness Company, a supplement and telehealth company that sells unproven treatments, including for purported protection against vaccines.

Perhaps most tellingly, the scientists who conducted many of the autopsy studies came to opposite conclusions than the review authors. Of the 240 cases, for example, 105 come from a single paper in Colombia, whose authors found “[n]o relation between the cause of death and vaccination.”

Similarly, the review authors counted 24 of 28 autopsies from a study from Singapore as vaccine-related, even though the original authors identified “no definite causative relationship” to mRNA vaccines.

The authors of a German study also attributed 13 of 18 autopsy deaths to preexisting diseases, but the review authors decided 16 cases were vaccine-related.

In a LinkedIn post debunking the preprint, Dr. Mathijs Binkhorst, a Dutch pediatrician, went back to each cited paper, and found that of the 325 autopsies and one heart necropsy the review authors said were vaccine-related, only 31, or 9.5%, were likely related and 28, or 8.6%, were possibly related. The rest — 267, or 81.9% — were unlikely, uncertainly, or not related to vaccination.

In other words, even among a set of studies that is more likely to identify some vaccine involvement, less than a fifth of deaths were possibly or likely vaccine-related.

Even if the authors aren’t biased, this type of study is not able to provide information on how frequently COVID-19 vaccination leads to death, and whether the risks outweigh the benefits.

“They only looked at ‘published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination,’” Veldhoen said of the published study on X. “If you look only at autopsies of those related (in time) with drugX: X-involvement is then a high proportion of all cases.”

Indeed, as Binkhorst noted, the autopsy reports come from 14 countries that collectively administered some 2.2 billion vaccine doses. If the COVID-19 vaccines truly were as dangerous as the review authors contend, this would be evident in other data sources — but it’s not.

Vaccine safety surveillance systems and other studies from across the globe have found that serious side effects can occur, but they are rare.

The Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, for example, can in very rare cases cause a dangerous and sometimes fatal blood clotting condition combined with low blood platelets.

Rarely, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech have caused inflammation of the heart muscle or surrounding tissue, known as myocarditis or pericarditis. In almost all cases, however, those conditions are not deadly.

There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death and has led to excess deaths or a large number of deaths. Instead, a wealth of data supports the notion that COVID-19 vaccines protect against severe disease and death from COVID-19. The flawed autopsy “review” doesn’t change this.

SourcesRoley, Gwen. “Misinformation swirls around unpublished paper on Covid-19 vaccine risks.” AFP. 14 Jul 2023.

Hulscher, Nicolas et al. “A Systematic REVIEW of Autopsy findings in deaths after covid-19 vaccination.” Forensic Science International. Available online 21 Jun 2024.

Binkhorst, Mathijs. “McCullough’s misinformation.” LinkedIn post. Archived 4 Sep 2023.

Laxton, Jonathan (@dr_jon_l). “McCullough et al attempted upload a preprint to the Lancet server, and it was removed because it was hot garbage. However, I feel going through this paper for you guys will help you spot dodgy science …” X. 6 Jul 2023.

Payne, Ed. “Fact Check: A ‘Lancet Study’ Does NOT Show COVID Vaccine Caused 74% Of Deaths In Sample — Lancet Rejected Paper And Its Methods.” Lead Stories. 7 Jul 2023.

Carballo-Carbajal, Iria. “Flawed preprint based on autopsies inadequate to demonstrate that COVID-19 vaccines caused 74% of those deaths.” Health Feedback. 31 Jul 2023.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “Review Article By Misinformation Spreaders Misleads About mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines .” FactCheck.org. 16 Feb 2024.

Veldhoen, Marc (@Marc_Veld). “Does ‘We found that 73.9% of deaths were directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.’ Hold? No. The vast majority of these cases do not show a causal, but coincidental, effect. This certainly does not apply to the general population!” X. 22 Jun 2024.

Cattaneo, Cristina. Co-Editor-in-Chief, Forensic Science International. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Jun 2024.

“No evidence that 80 Canadian doctors died from COVID vaccinations.” Reuters Fact Check. 22 Dec 2022.

Lajka, Arijeta. “Pathologist falsely claims COVID-19 is a hoax, no worse than the flu.” AP. 2 Dec 2020.

Yandell, Kate. “Posts Push Unproven ‘Spike Protein Detoxification’ Regimen.” FactCheck.org. 21 Sep 2023.

Chaves, Juan José et al. “A postmortem study of patients vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 in Colombia.” Revista Española de Patología. 31 Oct 2022.

Yeo, Audrey et al. “Post COVID-19 vaccine deaths – Singapore’s early experience.” Forensic Science International. 19 Jan 2022.

Schneider, Julia et al. “Postmortem investigation of fatalities following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines.” International Journal of Legal Medicine. 30 Sep 2021.

Yandell, Kate. “Study Largely Confirms Known, Rare COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects.” FactCheck.org. 27 Feb 2024.

“Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination.” CDC. Accessed 5 Jul 2024.

“COVID-19 vaccines: key facts.” European Medicines Agency. Accessed 5 Jul 2024.

Robertson, Lori. “A Guide to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” FactCheck.org. 27 Feb 2021.

Lai, Francisco Tsz Tsun et al. “Prognosis of Myocarditis Developing After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination Compared With Viral Myocarditis.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 5 Dec 2022.

Yandell, Kate. “No Evidence Excess Deaths Linked to Vaccines, Contrary to Claims Online.” FactCheck.org. 17 Apr 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “Flawed Analysis of New Zealand Data Doesn’t Show COVID-19 Vaccines Killed Millions.” FactCheck.org. 15 Dec 2023.

The post Flawed Autopsy ‘Review’ Revives Unsupported Claims of COVID-19 Vaccine Harm, Censorship appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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President Joe Biden’s debate performance on June 27 left many in his own party uneasy about his ability to serve another four years.

“I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, one of several Democratic Party leaders who have publicly expressed their concern, said on July 2.

The following day, the New York Times reported that Biden privately “told key allies that he knows the coming days are crucial and understands that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.” The White House called the Times report “absolutely false.”

In her daily press briefing on July 3, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked directly if Biden is considering stepping down.

“Absolutely not,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that Biden “understands it was not his best night” and “understands that it is fair for people to ask that question.”

At this point, there’s no telling if Biden will voluntarily leave the race, or if some in the party will attempt to deny him the nomination. The fact that either option is even being discussed is shocking at such a late stage in the nominating process. Biden has amassed more than 99% of the pledged delegates who will meet in Chicago in about seven weeks to nominate the party’s standard-bearer.

Here, we answer some of the questions about the Democratic National Convention process. What happens if he voluntarily steps aside? What if he doesn’t? Can Biden be replaced, and if he can, how would that work?

Are pledged delegates bound to support Biden at the convention?Pledged delegates are those who were elected in state primaries and caucuses to represent their candidate at the national convention. The Democratic National Committee rules for pledged delegates at the 2024 convention state: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

The word “shall” may suggest that pledged delegates are bound to their candidates. But they are not, and that’s because of the phrase “in all good conscience” that follows the word “shall,” William Mayer, a political science professor at Northeastern University who has written numerous books on presidential politics, told us in a phone interview.

“You are kind of encouraged to vote for the candidates for whom you were elected – but ‘in all good conscience’ you could vote for someone else,” he said.

“The thing to remember is that the convention is what decides the nominee, not the primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” explained in a July 1 podcast on the Brookings Institution website.

“The primaries elect delegates to the convention, but the legal authority for choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party, or for that matter, the Republican Party, is not the primaries, it is the delegates voting in convention. When that happens, you have a formal nominee,” Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, said.

The last time pledged delegates were bound to the candidates was at the 1980 convention, when then-President Jimmy Carter held off a challenge from the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, Mayer said.

“There was a provision in the 1980 rules that said if you are elected as a Carter delegate, and you decided as the convention got closer that you didn’t want to vote for Carter, then Carter could actually replace you with someone that would [vote for him].” Mayer said. “It became a little bit of a controversy at the 1980 convention.”

In a 2005 interview for the University of Virginia’s presidential oral history project, Kennedy recalled how the “faithful delegate rule” had “caused resentment” among some Carter delegates.

“Some of the delegates selected and pledged to Carter early appeared to have been willing to support my candidacy later in the process, but there had been a change in the rules put in by Carter that said that once a delegate was selected as pledged, they had to stay that way,” Kennedy recalled. “They call it the ‘faithful delegate rule,’ which means that if they pledged, they couldn’t change their mind. That caused resentment with the delegates, just generally was not popular.”

In a compromise after the 1980 election, the Democrats changed the rules for the 1984 convention to give delegates more flexibility, as the New York Times wrote at the time.

There are 3,937 pledged delegates, including 3,894 pledged to Biden, according to the Associated Press delegate tracker. The nominee will need the votes of 1,968 delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot, the AP said.

What about the superdelegates? In addition to pledged delegates, the Democratic Party also has up to 744 so-called superdelegates — officially known as “automatic delegates.” Superdelegates include, for example, members of the Democratic National Committee and all Democratic Senate and House members, among others, as the DNC delegate selection rules explain.

They are not pledged to any candidates, but cannot vote in the first round if the nomination is contested.

The DNC rules state: “On the first ballot of the presidential roll call, only pledged delegates will be permitted to vote unless a presidential candidate has been certified by the DNC Secretary to have obtained a number of pledged delegates equal to a majority of all pledged and automatic delegates to the Convention, at which point automatic delegates will also be permitted to vote on the first ballot.”

Will delegates replace Biden?For an open convention to become a reality, William A. Galston and Kamarck, both senior fellows in governance studies at Brookings, wrote in commentary after the debate, “Biden would have to either withdraw of his own accord or a strong opponent would have to challenge him and build a credible campaign among the approximately 4,000 delegates already elected prior to the August convention. Both scenarios are, at this point, long shots.”

But it is far less likely if Biden refused to step aside. Although it is technically possible for delegates to choose someone else, “The only way that would happen is if he [Biden] voluntarily took himself out of the of the race,” Kamarck said in a podcast on July 1. “He has the delegates, etc.”

In the event that Biden were no longer an option, delegates elected for Biden would become uncommitted, Kamarck explained back in January. “Candidates who step into the breach hoping to take the place of the fallen candidate will find out who these delegates are and woo them in as many ways as they can.”

How would the process for selecting a new nominee play out? If Biden did end his candidacy, Kamarck said the process would begin with other candidates putting “their names in the pot to become the nominee of the party.”

“They would campaign in a short period of time for the allegiances of approximately 4,000 [delegates],” she explained in the podcast. “How they would do that varies. I mean, there’d be a lot of phone calls. There would be a lot of delegation meetings. People would speak before delegations. I’m sure there’d be some debates, etc. But it would be a very truncated campaign geared towards those … approximately 4,000 people.”

One detailed proposal for how to select a new nominee surfaced this week from a longtime DNC member.

James Zogby, who has served in DNC leadership roles for three decades, outlined his plan in a memo he sent to DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and circulated among DNC members.

The plan, according to the New York Times, would require Biden to step aside and “instruct the party not to simply designate Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee, but instead meet after the Fourth of July to ‘lay out a one-month campaign schedule to select the party’s nominee.’”

Zogby, who currently is chairman of the DNC Ethnic Council, elaborated on his plan in an interview with CNN.

“DNC members would be authorized” to endorse candidates who would then be certified by the party secretary as official candidates, he told CNN. A “limited field” of candidates – “four or five” – would then spend a month campaigning, beginning with televised town halls, he said.

The process would end at the party’s national convention, which will be held in Chicago from Aug. 19 through Aug. 22, where the delegates would select the nominee from among the candidates.

Instead of Biden “leaving later in the process toward the convention, and handing it off to Kamala Harris,” Zogby said Harris would be given “an opportunity to show her stuff in an engaged democratic process.” It would not be “simply a coronation, which I think would not be helpful to her or helpful to the party or to the country,” he said.

But, he added, Biden needs to start the process by stepping aside.

“The call ultimately has to come from Joe Biden. He has to decide whether he’s going to leave,” he said. “But here’s the point: If the holdup is that he’s afraid of handing it off to Kamala Harris and she may not be able to win, this solves that problem. If there’s a fear that if he withdraws, there’ll be chaos. This solves that problem.”

Biden may endorse his vice president for the nomination, but he wouldn’t have “any formal power over the delegates to say they have to vote for X candidate,” said Mayer, the Northeastern University professor. “Since we haven’t faced anything like this, it’s hard to know how much his recommendation would matter.”

Can Biden be replaced after the convention and, if so, how?Yes, if Biden were to decide to drop out of the race after receiving the formal nomination at the Democratic convention, he could still be replaced on the Democratic ticket in November.

In that case, the 426 DNC members — who are elected in their states and include the state party chair and vice chair, as well as other prominent people in their state and party — would meet in a special session to choose a replacement nominee, Kamarck explained in a Jan. 3 post.

And, no, she wrote, “the nomination does not automatically extend to the vice-presidential candidate on the ballot.”

“The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Kamarck wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

SummaryExcluded fromthe CNN presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on June 27, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. livestreamed a parallel debate on social media, answering the same questions put to the major party candidates.

In our fact check of the CNN debate, we described a “relentless barrage of false and misleading statements” from the two candidates, and in Kennedy’s addition — what he called the “real debate” — he added a few of his own distortions and falsehoods.

• Kennedy made a few unsupported and inaccurate claims about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives for the invasion.
• He falsely claimed that Trump “spent more money in office than every president in the United States history combined.” Federal outlays during Trump’s presidency didn’t come close the $79 trillion the government spent before he took office.
• Kennedy incorrectly claimed Trump and Biden “shut down every business in our country” during the COVID-19 pandemic, falsely adding that the businesses were forced to close for “no scientific reason.”
• He also blamed Trump and Biden’s pandemic policies for transferring wealth to billionaires, but misleadingly used global statistics.
• Kennedy misleadingly claimed that “Russians are in Cuba firing missiles” as a warning to the U.S. about its resolve to win the war with Ukraine. Russian warships on the way to an annual trip to Cuba conducted simulated missile drills in the Atlantic but did not fire live missiles from Cuba.
• Kennedy proposed taxing marijuana to fund free “rehabilitation farms” to treat “depression … alcoholism, drug addiction to illegal drugs, but also addiction to SSRI’s, to Benzos, Adderall.” Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI, are not considered to be addictive.

Kennedy’s rival “debate” was livestreamed June 27 on X, formerly known as Twitter.

AnalysisKennedy on Russia’s Invasion of UkraineKennedy made a few unsupported and inaccurate claims about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives for the invasion.

Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Kennedy’s remarks were “full of inaccuracies.”

Kennedy, son of the late U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, misleading claimed that “the only thing Putin wanted was to keep NATO out of the Ukraine,” falsely adding that Putin “didn’t even want to take Ukraine.”

He also blamed Biden for extending the war when Putin was ready to accept a deal to end it, and he incorrectly said that Putin “first invaded” Ukraine “with only 40,000 troops.”

Putin illegally annexed Crimea, then part of Ukraine, in March 2014, and has been trying for years to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. But he has signaled that his goals go beyond that.

In an article last month for the Council on Foreign Relations, Russian expert and council fellow Thomas E. Graham writes that Putin’s “goals fall into three baskets: weakening or disrupting Ukraine’s ties with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), stymieing Ukrainian nationalism, and expanding territorial gains.”

Peter Dickinson, editor of the UkraineAlert blog at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, wrote that Putin’s goal is to create a “new Russian Empire.”

“Putin has launched the largest European conflict since WWII for the simple reason that he wants to conquer Ukraine,” Dickinson writes. “Inspired by the czars of old, Putin aims to crush his neighbor and incorporate it into a new Russian Empire.”

In his article, Dickinson cites Putin’s remarks on the 350th anniversary of Russian Czar Peter the Great on June 9, 2022, when Putin spoke about wanting to “return” Russian territory, as Reuters wrote.

Reuters, June 9, 2022: “Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned (what was Russia’s),” Putin said after a visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar.

In televised comments on day 106 of his war in Ukraine, he compared Peter’s campaign with the task facing Russia today.

“Apparently, it also fell to us to return (what is Russia’s) and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”

In response, a senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed what he called any attempt to legalise the theft of land.

Kennedy, who claimed that Putin “has been asking to settle this war from the beginning,” blamed Biden for extending the war “to weaken Russia.”

“Putin was withdrawing his troops, leaving Donbas and Luhansk,” Kennedy said, referring to eastern Ukraine. “And what happened? President Joe Biden sent [then-UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson over to Kyiv and forced Zelenskyy to tear up that agreement because they had another agenda, which is to weaken Russia.”

But Pifer, the Brookings Institution senior fellow, called Kennedy’s claim “nonsense.”

“In March 2022, the Russians, having failed to take Kyiv, withdrew their forces from northern Ukraine and announced that they would shift the focus of their attack to Donbas (which is Luhansk and Donetsk combined),” Pifer said. “At that point, the Ukrainians were liberating towns such as Bucha and saw the many atrocities (summary executions, torture chambers, children deported to Russia) and their attitude hardened on negotiations.”

As for its troop size at the start of the Ukraine war, Russia built its forces on the Ukraine border throughout 2021, as we wrote in a timeline of events leading up to the war. In early December 2021 — more than two months before the war started — U.S. intelligence estimated that Russia had about 70,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, according to the Washington Post.

On Feb. 22, 2022, Russia first entered Ukraine’s Donbas region in what Russian officials described as a peace-keeping mission. The next day, the Pentagon said Russia had between 160,000 and 190,000 troops on the Ukraine border.

The full scale invasion occurred on Feb. 24, 2020, and within four days the Pentagon estimated that almost 75% of Putin’s army entered Ukraine — which, at the low end, would be 120,000 of the 160,000 troops that were amassed on the Ukraine border in preparation for war. That’s three times larger than Kennedy’s claim of only 40,000 Russian soldiers.

Pifer said it was even higher than that.

“No serious analyst has suggested the Russian invasion force numbered only 40,000 troops,” Pifer said. “The generally accepted number is closer to 200,000.”

Trump’s SpendingKennedy made a false claim about Trump while criticizing the amount of federal spending during his administration.

“President Trump came into office promising to balance the budget,” Kennedy said. “Instead, he spent more money in office than every president in the United States history combined. George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years of history.”

Kennedy’s spending comparison is wrong.

From fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2020, which includes all but three months of Trump’s four-year term, federal outlays totaled about $19 trillion, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget. There was an additional $6.8 trillion spent in fiscal 2021, when Trump was president for roughly three and a half months and signed some spending bills.

But that doesn’t come close to the combined total of about $79 trillion spent during the administrations of all other presidents before Trump took office.

If Kennedy meant to refer to debt, considering that he later mentioned the debt going up by more than $6 trillion under President Joe Biden, his claim would still be inaccurate.

Under Trump, the total national debt increased by about $7.8 trillion and there was a $7.2 trillion increase in the debt held by the public, which excludes money the government owes to itself. As we’ve written, Trump alone is not responsible for all that debt, since the debt added during a president’s term includes the fiscal impact of actions that predate their administration. Congress also plays a role.

However, when Trump was inaugurated in January 2021, the publicly held debt already was roughly $14.4 trillion and the total national debt was over $19.9 trillion. So, the amount added to the debt during his administration was still less than the cumulative debt of all the presidents who preceded him.

COVID-19Kennedy confused and exaggerated several aspects of the COVID-19 response and the resulting economic effects.

“These two presidents shut down every business in our country, 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation,” he said. “There was no scientific reason to do this.”

As we’ve explained before, when Kennedy blamed Biden for business shutdowns, the pandemic closures occurred on Trump’s watch, since that was when the pandemic began. But Trump didn’t have the authority to shut down businesses. The federal government issued guidelines; many state and local jurisdictions then implemented temporary non-essential business closures.

Not “every” business closed, of course. Essential businesses were allowed to stay open. Kennedy’s figure of 3.3 million likely comes from an August 2020 study from a University of California, Santa Cruz economist, and reflects the number of working small businesses lost between February and April of 2020. By June 2020, there was a “partial rebound,” according to the study, with a net decline of 1.2 million small businesses since February.

It’s worth noting that the government did provide some financial assistance to businesses affected by the pandemic.

Kennedy also misleadingly claimed that there was no scientific rationale for the business closures — a claim he repeated when discussing restrictions on church gatherings. At the time, scientists knew a new respiratory virus — without a vaccine or treatments available — was easily spreading between people. One of the few tools available was to limit people’s exposure to others, which included closing non-essential businesses and recommending against large gatherings, including religious services. Multiple studies have since found protective effects of such mitigation measures, although others have not.

Kennedy repeated two of his favorite claims about the pandemic enriching the wealthy. Speaking of both Trump and Biden, he said, “They shifted $4.3 trillion upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires … They created a billionaire a day, in 500 days.”

As we’ve explained before, the 500 new billionaires figure likely comes from a Forbes article, which reported 493 newcomers to the outlet’s billionaire list for 2021. But the tally is global, with only 98 in the U.S. Similarly, while it’s unclear where Kennedy sourced his roughly $4 trillion figure, he may be citing a 2022 Oxfam analysis, which is also global and not specific to the U.S. or its policies.

Russians Not ‘in Cuba Firing Missiles’Kennedy misleadingly claimed that “Russians are in Cuba firing missiles because they’ve warned us: ‘We aren’t going to … lose the war in Ukraine.’” Russian warships on the way to an annual trip to Cuba conducted simulated missile drills in the Atlantic and did not fire live missiles from Cuba, which lies just several hundred miles from the Florida coast.

Kennedy’s claim mirrors a popular social media meme that we debunked on June 14. The social media posts shared clips of a years-old video of missiles launched from a Russian ship and a submarine surfacing, to falsely claim the Russian ships recently fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” to show off their firepower to the U.S.

A spokesperson for the Department of Defense, which was closely tracking the activities of the ships, told us via email that claims that a Russian ship fired missiles near the Florida coast while en route to Cuba, is “not true.”

U.S. officials told the New York Times that the Russian warships posed no threat and were not carrying nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense has been monitoring the movement of the ships through the Atlantic Ocean, a spokesperson told the Times. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the warships practiced locating targets and used precision missiles to simulate destroying those targets at distances of more than 350 miles, according to the Times.

According to Al Jazeera, “The drills, by the submarine Kazan and the warship Admiral Gorshkov, involved firing high-precision missiles at mock enemy targets from a distance of more than 600km (370 miles), it said in a statement on Tuesday. The Admiral Gorshkov also conducted training in recent days to repel an air attack, the ministry said.”

Al Jazeera cited an anonymous U.S. official that the Russian exercises were “about Russia showing that it’s still capable of some level of global power projection.”

SSRI Antidepressants When talking about the opioid crisis, Kennedy said both Biden and Trump “missed the point.” The problem is not the border, he said, but “something much larger than that — it’s a generation that is alienated, that is dispossessed, that is depressed, that is suicidal, that is disconnected from community, and that is why they’re turning to drugs.”

His proposed solution is to tax marijuana and with those funds — “8.5 billion dollars in revenue,” he said, citing this report — build “rehabilitation farms” where people can be treated for free from depression, drug and alcohol addiction, “but also addiction to SSRI’s, to Benzos, Adderall,” he said, referring to benzodiazepines, a medication that slow down the nervous system.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are a very common type of antidepressant. People who stop taking them abruptly might experience symptoms similar to those of withdrawal, such as nausea, dizziness and lethargy, which are described as “discontinuation syndrome.” But SSRIs are not considered to be addictive.

SSRI antidepressants are considered safe and side effects are usually temporary or mild. There are concerns that children and adolescents taking SSRI antidepressants may have an increased risk for suicidal behavior, but studies are not conclusive and some have found that the decrease of antidepressant use have in turn increased suicidal attempts. In general, the benefits of treatment outweigh the risks of not treating depression, including suicide.

Kennedy has repeatedly blamed these antidepressants for the rise in school shootings.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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Garamone, Jim. “Defense Official Says Russian Forces Ready to Launch Attack on Ukraine.” DOD News. 23 Feb 2022.

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“Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).” Mayo Clinic. 17 Sep 2019.

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“Side effects – Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).” NHS. 8 Dec 2021

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As we’ve written, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump got more than a few things wrong at the first presidential debate.

Here we provide a fact-checking video of some debate highlights, which include Trump’s remarks on Roe v. Wade and the cost of insulin, and Biden’s remarks on Social Security and taxes paid by billionaires. We also sort out a dispute between the two when they blamed each other for record deficit spending.

For the full story, read “FactChecking the Biden-Trump Debate.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

The post Video: FactChecking Highlights from the Biden-Trump Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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SummaryThe much-anticipated first debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump featured a relentless barrage of false and misleading statements from the two candidates on immigration, the economy, abortion, taxes and more.

• Both candidates erred on Social Security, with Biden incorrectly saying that Trump “wants to get rid” of the program, and Trump falsely alleging that Biden will “wipe out” Social Security due to the influx of people at the border.
• Trump misleadingly claimed that he was “the one that got the insulin down for the seniors,” not Biden. Costs were lowered for some under a limited project by the Trump administration. Biden signed a law capping costs for all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.
• Trump warned that Biden “wants to raise your taxes by four times,” but Biden has not proposed anything like that. Trump was also mostly wrong when he said Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.” Biden said he would extend them for anyone making under $400,000 a year.
• Biden repeated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8%. That White House calculation factors in earnings on unsold stock as income.
• Trump repeated his false claim that “everybody,” including all legal scholars, wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.
• Trump falsely claimed that “the only jobs” Biden “created are for illegal immigrants and bounced back jobs that bounced back from the COVID.” Total nonfarm employment is higher than it was before the pandemic, as is the employment level of native-born workers.
• Biden claimed that Trump oversaw the “largest deficit of any president,” while Trump countered that “we now have the largest deficit” under Biden. The largest budget deficit was under Trump in fiscal year 2020, but that was largely because of emergency spending due to COVID-19.
• Biden misleadingly said that “Black unemployment is the lowest level it has been in a long, long time.” The rate reached a record low in April 2023, and it was low under Trump, too, until the pandemic.
• Biden said Trump called U.S. veterans killed in World War I “suckers and losers,” which Trump called a “made up quote.” The Atlantic reported that, based on anonymous sources. A former Trump chief of staff later seemed to confirm Trump said it.
• Trump claimed that Biden “caused the inflation,” but economists say rising inflation was mostly due to disruptions to the economy caused by the pandemic.
• Trump grossly inflated the number of immigrants who have entered the country during the Biden administration — putting the number at 18 million to 20 million — and he said, without evidence, that many of them are from prisons and mental institutions.
• Trump claimed that “we had the safest border in history” in the “final months” of his presidency. But apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally in the last three full months of his presidency were about 50% higher than in the three months before he took office.
• Biden criticized Trump for presiding over a loss of jobs when he was president, but that loss occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Trump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow abortions “after birth.” If it happened, it would be homicide, and that’s illegal.
• Trump made the unsupported claim that the U.S. border with Mexico is “the most dangerous place in the world,” and suggested that it has opened the country to a violent crime wave. The data show a reduction in violent crime in the U.S.
• Trump overstated how much food prices have risen due to inflation. Prices are up by about 20%, not double or quadruple.
• Trump boasted his administration “had the best environmental numbers ever.” Trump reversed nearly 100 environmental rules limiting pollution. Although greenhouse gas emissions did decline from 2019 to 2020, the EPA said that was due to the impacts of the pandemic on travel and the economy.
• Biden said he joined the Paris Agreement because “if we reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius, and then … there’s no way back.” Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would reduce the damages and losses of global warming, but scientists agree that climate action is still possible after passing the threshold.
• Trump said immigrants crossing the border illegally were living in “luxury hotels.” New York City has provided hotel and motel rooms to migrant families, but there is no evidence that they are being placed in “luxury” hotels.
• Trump falsely claimed that there was “no terrorism, at all” in the U.S. during his administration. There were several terrorist acts carried out by foreign-born individuals when he was president.
• While talking about international trade, Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. currently has “the largest deficit with China.” In 2023, the trade deficit in goods and services with China was the lowest it has been since 2009.
• Trump wrongly claimed that prior to the pandemic, he had created “the greatest economy in the history of our country.” That’s far from true using economists’ preferred measure — growth in gross domestic product.
• As he has many times before, Trump wrongly claimed, “I gave you the largest tax cut in history.” That’s not true either as a percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.
• Trump contrasted his administration with Biden’s by misleadingly noting that when he left office, the U.S. was “energy independent.” The U.S. continues to export more energy than it imports.

The debate was hosted by CNN in Atlanta on June 27.

AnalysisSocial SecurityBiden claimed that Trump “wants to get rid” of Social Security, even though the former president has consistently said he will not cut the program and has advised Republicans against doing so.

Biden and Trump on stage at the first presidential debate of the 2024 election hosted by CNN in Atlanta. Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images.Earlier this year, Biden and his campaign based the claim on Trump saying in a March 11 CNBC interview that “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.” As we’ve said, in context, instead of reducing benefits, Trump was talking about cutting waste and fraud in those programs — although there’s not enough of that to make the program solvent over the long term.

“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump later said in a March 13 Breitbart interview. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”

During the GOP presidential primary, Trump also criticized some of his Republican opponents for proposing to raise the retirement age for Social Security, which budget experts have said would reduce scheduled benefits for those affected.

Some critics of Trump have argued that he cannot be expected to keep his promise because of his past budget proposals. But, as we’ve written, Trump did not propose cuts to Social Security retirement benefits.

Meanwhile, Trump claimed during the debate that Biden “is going to single handedly destroy Social Security” because of illegal immigration. “These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security,” Trump said of Biden.

As we and others have explained before, immigrants who are not authorized to be in the U.S. aren’t eligible for Social Security. In fact, because many such individuals pay into Social Security via payroll taxes but cannot receive benefits, illegal immigrants bolster rather than drain the finances of the program.

InsulinIn referring to what seniors pay for insulin, Trump misleadingly claimed, “I heard him say before ‘insulin.’ I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors. I took care of the seniors.” Insulin costs went down for some beneficiaries under a limited project under Trump; Biden signed a more expansive law affecting all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.

Under Trump, out-of-pocket costs were lowered to $35 for some Medicare Part D beneficiaries under a two-year pilot project in which some insurers could voluntarily reduce the cost for some insulin products. KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization, explained earlier this month that under this model, in effect from 2021 to 2023, “participating Medicare Part D prescription drug plans covered at least one of each dosage form and type of insulin product at no more than $35 per month,” and “less than half of all Part D plans chose to participate in each year.”

But in 2022, Biden signed a law that required all Medicare prescription drug plans to cap all insulin products at $35. The law also capped the out-of-pocket price for insulin that’s covered under Medicare Part B, which covers drugs administered in a health care provider’s office. The caps went into effect last year.

STAT, a news site that covers health care issues, reported that the idea for a $35 cap for seniors initially came from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, which proposed it in 2019.

Trump on Biden Tax Plan“He’s the only one I know he wants to raise your taxes by four times,” Trump said of Biden. “He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times. He wants the Trump tax cuts to expire. So everybody … [is] going to pay four to five times – nobody ever heard of this before.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is also mostly wrong that Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.”

As he has said since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.

In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to expire at the end of 2025. And that’s what Biden says he would do — but only for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000. (In order to pass the TCJA with a simple Senate majority, Republicans wrote the law to have most of the individual income tax changes expire after 2025.)

The Biden budget plan “would raise marginal income tax rates faced by higher earners and corporations while expanding tax credits for lower-income households,” according to a Tax Foundation analysis of the tax provisions in Biden’s budget. “The budget would redistribute income from high earners to low earners. The bottom 60 percent of earners would see increases in after-tax income in 2025, while the top 40 percent of earners would see decreases.”

Biden on Taxes Paid by BillionairesIn arguing that wealthy households should pay a minimum tax, Biden repeated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8%.

“We have a thousand … billionaires in America, and what’s happening?” Biden said. “They’re in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2% in taxes.”

That’s not the average rate in the current tax system; it’s a figure calculated by the White House and factors in earnings on unsold stock as income. When only considering income, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in lower income groups, as we’ve written before.

The top 0.1% of earners pay an average rate of 25.1% in federal income and payroll taxes, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center in October 2022 for the 2023 tax year.

The point that Biden tried to make is that earnings on assets, such as stock, currently are not taxed until that asset is sold, which is when the earnings become subject to capital gains taxes. Until stocks and assets are sold, the earnings are referred to as “unrealized” gains. Unrealized gains, the White House has argued, could go untaxed forever if wealthy people hold on to them and transfer them on to heirs when they die.

Roe v. WadeAs he has before, Trump wildly exaggerated the popularity of ending Roe v. Wade — even going so far as to claim that it was “something that everybody wanted.”

“51 years ago, you had Roe v. Wade and everybody wanted to get it back to the states,” he said, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, which was overturned in 2022.

Trump: Everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back — religious leaders. And what I did is I put three great Supreme Court justices on the court and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade, and moving it back to the states. This is something that everybody wanted. Now 10 years ago or so they started talking about how many weeks and how many this and getting into other things. But every legal scholar throughout the world — the most respected — wanted it brought back to the states. I did that.

In fact, a majority of Americans have disagreed with ending Roe v. Wade, including plenty of legal scholars, as we’ve explained before. While some scholars criticized aspects of the legal reasoning in Roe, it did not necessarily mean they wanted the ruling overturned. Legal experts told us that Trump’s claim was “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.”

Trump Wrong on JobsAfter Biden talked about job creation during his administration, Trump falsely claimed that “the only jobs [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounced back jobs that bounced back from the COVID.”

In fact, as of May, total nonfarm employment in the U.S. had gone up about 6.2 million from the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The increase is about 15.6 million if you count from when Biden took office in January 2021 until now — but that would include some jobs that were temporarily lost during the pandemic and then came back during the economic recovery.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that only “illegal immigrants” have seen employment gains.

Since Biden became president in January 2021, employment of U.S.-born workers has increased more than employment of foreign-born workers, a category that includes anyone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen at birth, as we’ve written before. BLS says the foreign-born population includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.” There is no employment breakdown for just people in the U.S. illegally.

In looking at employment since the pre-pandemic peak, the employment level of foreign-born workers was up by about 3.2 million, from roughly 27.7 million in February 2020 to nearly 30.9 million in May. Employment for the U.S.-born population increased by about 125,000 — from nearly 130.3 million in February 2020 to 130.4 million, as of May.

Conflicting Budget Deficit ClaimsBiden and Trump accused each other of presiding over the largest budget deficit in the U.S.

After talking about Trump’s plans for additional tax cuts, Biden said Trump already had the “largest deficit of any president in American history.” When he got a chance to respond, Trump said, “We now have the largest deficit in the history of our country under this guy,” referring to Biden.

Biden is correct: The largest budget deficit on record was about $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 under Trump. However, that was primarily because of trillions of dollars in emergency funding that both congressional Republicans and Democrats approved to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, the largest budget deficit under Trump was about $1 trillion in fiscal 2019.

Meanwhile, the most recent budget deficit under Biden was about $1.7 trillion in fiscal 2023. As of June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit for fiscal 2024, which ends on Sept. 30, would be about $2 trillion.

Black UnemploymentBiden boasted that on his watch, “Black unemployment is the lowest level it has been in a long, long time.”

It’s true that the unemployment rate for Black or African American people reached a record low of 4.8% in April 2023, but it is currently 6.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has data going back to 1972.

Also, the unemployment rate was low under Trump, too, until the pandemic.

Under Trump, the unemployment rate for Black Americans went down to 5.3% in August 2019 – the lowest on record at that time. It shot up to 16.9% in April 2020, when the economic effects of the pandemic took hold. When Trump left office in January 2021, amid the pandemic, the rate was 9.3%.

The rate has been 6% or less in only 29 months since 1972, and it happened only under two presidents: 21 times under Biden and eight times under Trump.

‘Suckers and Losers’Biden said Trump called U.S. veterans killed in World War I “suckers and losers,” which Trump called a “made up quote … that was in a third-rate magazine.”

It was first reported by a magazine — the Atlantic — but Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, later seemed to confirm it.

Biden was referring to a trip Trump made to France in November 2018, where he reportedly declined to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near the location of the Battle of Belleau Wood. “He was standing with his four-star general and he told him, ‘I don’t want to go in there because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.’”

The Atlantic wrote about this alleged incident in 2020, citing unnamed sources. The magazine wrote that Trump made his remark about “losers” when he declined to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, and his remark about “suckers” during that same trip.

The Atlantic, Sept. 3, 2020: In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

In October 2023, Kelly – who was on that trip and visited the Aisne-Marne Cemetery — gave a statement to CNN that seemed to confirm those remarks. CNN published Kelly’s statement.

CNN, Oct. 3, 2023: “What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Trump said, “We had 19 people who said I didn’t say it.” One of those who said that he didn’t hear Trump make those remarks is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who was also on the trip and said he was there when the decision was made not to visit the cemetery.

“I didn’t hear that,” Bolton told the New York Times in 2020 after the magazine story first appeared. “I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion.”

Biden Misleads on JobsBiden ignored the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic when he criticized Trump for employment going down over Trump’s time in office.

“He’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover that lost more jobs than he had when he began,” Biden said.

Job growth during Trump’s term was positive until the economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to business closures and layoffs. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, employment had partly rebounded, but was still 9.4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

InflationTrump repeatedly claimed that Biden “caused the inflation” and that “I gave him a country with no essentially no inflation. It was perfect. It was so good.”

It’s true that inflation was relatively modest when Trump was president. The Consumer Price Index rose 7.6% under Trump’s four years — continuing a long period of low inflation. And inflation has been high over the entirety of Biden’s time in office. The Consumer Price Index for all items rose 19.3% between January 2021 and May.

For a time, it was the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June 2022 saw a 9% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI rose 3.3% in the 12 months ending in May, the most recent figure available.

Although Trump claims that Biden is entirely responsible for massive inflation, economists we have spoken to say Biden’s policies are only partly to blame. The economists placed the lion’s share of the blame for inflation on disruptions to the economy caused by the pandemic, including supply shortages, labor issues and increased consumer spending on goods. Inflation was then worsened by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which drove up oil and gas prices, experts told us.

Indeed, inflation has been a worldwide problem post-pandemic.

However, many economists say Biden’s policies — particularly aggressive stimulus spending early in his presidency to offset some of the economic damage caused by the pandemic — played a modest role.

Jason Furman, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now a Harvard University professor, told us in June 2022 that he estimated about 1 to 4 percentage points worth of the inflation was due to Biden’s stimulus spending in the American Rescue Plan — a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure that included $1,400 checks to most Americans; expanded unemployment benefits; and money for schools, small businesses and states. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s — whose work is often cited by the White House — said the impact of the stimulus measure now “has largely faded.”

Economists note that the American Rescue Plan came after two other pandemic stimulus laws enacted under Trump that were worth a total of $3.1 trillion. That spending, too, could have contributed to inflation.

Immigrants Entering U.S. Under BidenTrump grossly inflated the number of immigrants who have entered the country during the Biden administration — putting the number at 18 million to 20 million. The number, by our calculation, is about a third of that. Trump also claimed, without evidence, that many of those immigrants are from prisons and mental institutions.

“It could be 18, it could be 19, and even 20 million people,” Trump said of the immigrants who have entered the U.S. during the Biden administration. Later in the debate, Trump asked Biden why there had been no accountability “for allowing 18 million people many from prisons, many from mental institutions” into the country.

That’s a greatly exaggerated number. We took a deep dive into the immigration numbers in February, and again in mid-June, and we came up with an estimate of at most a third of Trump’s number.

Here’s the breakdown:

Department of Homeland Security data show nearly 8 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border between February 2021, the month after Biden took office, and May, the last month of available statistics. That’s a figure that includes both the 6.9 million apprehensions of migrants caught between legal ports of entry – the number typically used for illegal immigration – and nearly 1.1 million encounters of migrants who arrived at ports of entry without authorization to enter the U.S.

DHS also has comprehensive data, through February, of the initial processing of these encounters. That information shows 2.9 million were removed by Customs and Border Protection and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole. (Encounters do not represent the total number of people, because some people attempt multiple crossings. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to the most recent figures from CBP.)

As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024. The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total about 5 million.

There were also 407,500 transfers of unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services and 883,000 transfers to ICE. The ICE transfers include those who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE. We don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near 18 to 20 million.

And we should note that these figures do not reflect whether a migrant may ultimately be allowed to stay or will be deported, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.

Also, as we have written repeatedly, Trump has provided no credible support for his incendiary claim that countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S. Experts tell us they have seen no evidence to substantiate it.

Earlier this month, we looked into Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because Trump has repeatedly cited a drop in crime there to support his claim about countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that — including an enormous out-migration of citizens and a consolidation of gang activity — 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.

Border Under TrumpTrump claimed that “we had the safest border in history” in the “final months” of his presidency, according to Border Patrol. But according to data provided by Customs and Border Protection, apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally into the U.S. in the last three full months of Trump’s presidency were about 50% higher than in the three months before he took office.

In fact, as we wrote in our piece, “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 before he was sworn in.

But these statistics tell only part of the story. The number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly during Trump’s presidency, from a monthly low of 11,127 in April 2017 to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.

Back in April, we wrote about a misleading chart that Trump showed to the crowd during a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office,” Trump said. “That was the lowest number in history.” But Trump was wrong on both points.

The arrow was pointing to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic.

“The pandemic was responsible for a near-complete halt to all forms of global mobility in 2020, due to a combination of border restrictions imposed by countries around the world,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us.

After apprehensions reached a pandemic low in April 2020, they rose every month after that. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled from that pandemic low and were higher than the month he took office.

AbortionTrump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow abortions “after birth.” As we have written, that’s simply false. If it happened, it would be homicide, and that’s illegal.

“No such procedure exists,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says on its website.

The former president has wrongly said that abortions after birth were permitted under Roe v. Wade — the Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion until it was reversed in 2022. It was not.

Under Roe, states could outlaw abortion after fetal viability, but with exceptions for risks to the life or health of the mother. Many Republicans have objected to the health stipulation, saying it would allow abortion for any reason. Democrats say exceptions are needed to protect the mother from medical risks. We should note, late-term abortions are rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1% of abortions in the U.S. in 2020 were performed after 21 weeks gestational time.

In June 2022, after Trump had appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, the court overturned Roe in a 5-4 ruling. Biden supports restoring Roe as “the law of the land,” as he said in his State of the Union address in March.

Trump Calls Border ‘The Most Dangerous Place’In his focus on the U.S. border with Mexico, Trump made the unsupported claim that it is “the most dangerous place in the world.”

It’s true that unauthorized border crossings can be dangerous — 895 people died while doing so in fiscal year 2022, which is the most recent year for which the Customs and Border Protection has data. Most of those deaths were heat related.

And the International Organization for Migration called calendar year 2022 “the deadliest year on record” for migration in the Americas, with a total of 1,457 fatalities throughout South America, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. The organization began tracking deaths and disappearances related to migration in 2014.

“Most of these fatalities are related to the lack of options for safe and regular mobility, which increases the likelihood that people see no other choice but to opt for irregular migration routes that put their lives at risk,” the organization said in its 2022 report.

Trump suggested that the border crossings imperil Americans when he went on to say, “these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.”

But, as we’ve written before, FBI data show a downward trend in violent crime in the U.S., and there’s no evidence to support the claim that there’s been a crime wave driven by immigrants.

Crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the New Orleans firm AH Datalytics, told us in May that there’s no evidence in the data to indicate a migrant crime wave.

Similarly, Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the New York Times in February there was no evidence of a migrant crime wave in New York City after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants there in April 2022.

“I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something significant, meaningful and a departure from the norm,” Butts said at the time. “So far, what we have are individual incidents of crime.”

Also, it’s worth noting that the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index — which measures the safety of 163 countries based on 23 indicators, including violent crime, deaths from internal conflict and terrorism — said the “least peaceful country” is Afghanistan, followed by Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Food CostsIn discussing inflation, the former president embellished the degree to which food prices have increased.

“It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore,” Trump said. “You look at the cost of food, where it’s doubled, tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for food has gone up 17.5% — not 100% to 300% — since January 2021. The Consumer Price Index specifically for groceries, or “food at home,” has risen 20.8%.

Climate ChangeDuring a short exchange about climate change, Trump boasted that during his tenure “we had the best environmental numbers ever.” It is not clear what he was referring to exactly, but he said if elected president he wanted to have “absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air — and we had it.” He might have been referring to a talking point that Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, had recommended Trump mention during the debate: “CO2 emissions went down” during his administration, as the Hill reported.

Greenhouse gas emissions, which are responsible for global warming, did decline from 2019 to 2020. But that was “largely due to the impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on travel and economic activity,” according to the EPA. Emissions increased by 5.7% from 2020 to 2022, once the economy started getting reactivated again, the agency said.

According to an analysis by the New York Times, Trump’s administration reversed nearly 100 environmental rules, including 28 regulations on air pollution and emissions, and eight rules that limited water pollution. Reportedly, Trump recently asked oil executives and lobbyists to donate to his campaign, promising he would roll back other environmental rules that hurt fossil fuel interests.

“He’s not done a damn thing for the environment,” Biden said in response, pointing out that Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. “I immediately joined it because if we reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius … there’s no way back,” Biden said.

As we’ve reported, although reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming comes with a number of very serious impacts, it is not a point of no return. Scientists agree that every increment of global warming increases these negative impacts, but 1.5 degrees is not a magic number after which everything is doomed, they say.

Immigrants Living in HotelsDuring the debate, Trump mentioned twice that while immigrants crossing the border illegally were “living in luxury hotels,” in New York City and other cities “our veterans are living in the street.”

While it is true that New York City has provided hotel rooms to migrant families as a temporary shelter solution, there is no evidence that immigrants are being placed in “luxury” hotels.

In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams signed a $275 million contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to house 5,000 migrants. The deal was intended to help struggling hotels impacted by the pandemic and did not expect to include luxury hotels. “There are no gold-plated rooms that are being given away contrary to any reports that you may have seen,” the association president told NY1 at the time. In January, the city signed another $77 million contract to shelter migrant families in hotels.

In April, social media posts falsely claimed immigrants had stormed New York City Hall to demand luxury hotel accommodations. But as the Associated Press reported, the immigrants were there for a hearing about racial inequities in shelter and immigrant services.

In 2023, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness increased 7.4% from 2022, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But homelessness among veterans has been declining in recent years, with a 4% overall reduction within the last three years alone.

Terrorist Attacks Under TrumpWhile talking about Iran and terrorism, Trump falsely claimed that “you had no terror, at all, during my administration.” As we’ve written, there were several acts of terrorism carried out by foreign-born individuals when Trump was in office.

For example, in October 2017, Sayfullo Saipov used a truck to run down people in New York City. He killed eight people, including Americans and tourists, in an attack carried out on behalf of the Islamic State.

Then in December 2017, Akayed Ullah detonated a homemade pipe bomb he was wearing inside a New York City subway station. Ullah told authorities he did it in response to U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and other places.

Then in December 2019, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot 11 people at Florida’s Naval Air Station Pensacola, killing three U.S. sailors. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, called it an act of terrorism in January 2020. “The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Barr said in a statement.

China Trade DeficitWhen discussing U.S. trade relations with China, Trump said “we have the largest deficit with China.” That’s false, as we’ve written.

In 2023, the U.S. had a trade deficit with China in goods and services of roughly $252 billion, according to revised figures the Bureau of Economic Analysis released in early June. The deficit in goods trading was about $279 billion which was partially offset by a roughly $27 billion surplus in the trading of services — which can include travel, transportation, finance and intellectual property.

The trade gap with China last year was the lowest it had been since 2009, when it was $220 billion.

In fact, according to BEA data going back to 1999, the highest total U.S.-China trade deficit in goods and services was about $378 billion in 2018 — when Trump was president. Under Biden, the highest trade deficit with China was $366 billion in 2022.

Not ‘Greatest Economy’ Under TrumpTrump falsely said that prior to the pandemic, the U.S. had “the greatest economy in the history of our country. … Everything was locked in good.”

Trump’s boast about creating the “greatest economy in history” is ubiquitous in his campaign speeches. And it’s not true, at least not by the objective measure typically used to gauge the health of the economy.

As we have written, economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth of its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. Under Trump, growth was modest. Real GDP in Trump’s four years grew annually by 2.5% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2.5% in 2019 — before the economy went into a tailspin during the pandemic in 2020, when real GDP declined by 2.2%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

So, in the best year under Trump, U.S. real GDP grew annually by 3%. By contrast, the nation’s economy grew at a faster annual rate 48 times and under every president before and after Trump dating to 1930, except Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover. The economy grew at more than 3% six of Ronald Reagan’s eight years, including 7.2% in 1984, and it grew 5% or more 10 times under Franklin D. Roosevelt, including 18.9% in 1942. Under Biden, the GDP grew by 5.8% in 2021 — a post COVID-19 bounce-back — by 1.9% in 2022 and 2.5% in 2023.

Trump’s Was Not Largest Tax Cut in HistoryAs he has many times before, Trump wrongly claimed, “I gave you the largest tax cut in history.” But saying this over and over, as Trump has for years, doesn’t make it any more true.

As we have been writing even before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted into law, while the law provided tax relief to nearly all Americans, it was not the largest tax cut in U.S. history either as a percentage of gross domestic product (the measure preferred by economists) or in inflation-adjusted dollars.

According to a Tax Policy Center analysis, the law reduced the individual income taxes owed by Americans by about $1,260 on average in 2018. It also reduced the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, beginning in January 2018.

The law signed by Trump was initially projected to cost $1.49 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. It could end up costing substantially more if individual tax provisions are extended past 2025. Over the first four years, the average annual cost was estimated to be $185 billion. That was about 0.9% of gross domestic product in 2018.

That’s nowhere close to President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was 2.89% of GDP over a four-year average. That’s according to a 2013 Treasury Department analysis on the revenue effects of major tax legislation. Five more tax measures since 1940 had an impact larger than 1% of GDP, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget includes a 1921 measure as also being larger than the 2017 plan. That’s eighth place for Trump’s “biggest tax cut in our history.”

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Trump-era tax cut is also less than the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which comes in at No. 1 with a $320.6 billion cost over a four-year average. And it’s less than tax reductions in 2010 ($210 billion) and 1981 ($208 billion).

Energy IndependenceTrump boasted, as he often does, that “on Jan. 6 [2021], we were energy independent,” implying that’s no longer the case under Biden. But by Trump’s definition, the country remains energy independent.

To be clear, under Trump, the U.S. never stopped importing sources of energy, including crude oil, from other countries. What he likely means is that the country either produced more energy than it consumed, or exported more energy than it imported. 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 and 2020 — the first times that had happened since 1952, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But contrary to Trump’s suggestion, that has continued in the Biden presidency. The U.S., during Biden’s presidency, has exported more energy, including petroleum, than it imported, and it has produced more energy than it consumed. Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas under Biden.

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In recent weeks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Sen. Tim Scott offered seemingly contradictory claims when discussing the impact of inflation on the typical American’s wages and income.

During prepared testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on April 30, Yellen claimed that “real wages and household median wealth have increased since before the pandemic.” Similarly, in a June 13 interview with CNBC, she said that “all Americans, both those who are well off and those who are near the bottom of the income distribution, are better off now. Their wages have risen more than prices.”

Conversely, during a June 16 interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Scott claimed that for the “working class coalition … under Joe Biden … their wages, frankly, have gone down. Costs have gone up. And they have less spending power.”

Both Scott and Yellen can cite economic data that support their claims. The difference between the two claims is that Scott analyzed changes in inflation-adjusted wages and incomes since President Joe Biden entered office in 2021, whereas Yellen began her analysis in 2019, arguing that the pandemic distorted evaluations that began when Biden entered office.

Measuring from the start of Biden’s term in office, both wages and incomes have not kept up with inflation. However, measuring from before the pandemic to the present, inflation-adjusted wages and incomes have slightly increased.

To analyze these claims, we asked multiple economists to evaluate whether it was more useful to measure changes in real wages and incomes under Biden by beginning in 2019 or 2021. The question elicited disagreement from the economists we interviewed.

Scott’s Timeline: 2021 to the PresentSince Biden entered office, three key macroeconomic metrics gauging the purchasing power of Americans through their wages and disposable income have each increased at a slower pace than inflation, supporting Scott’s claim.

First, our analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that real average hourly earnings for all private sector employees have decreased by 2.24% between January 2021 to May 2024. [Technical point: For our analysis, we adjusted nominal average hourly earnings for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for all items, with 2018 as the base year. CPI-U covers 87% of U.S. consumers.]

Second, quarterly data from the BLS identifies that real median weekly earnings for full-time workers (using 1982-1984 CPI-adjusted dollars) have decreased by 2.14% from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2024.

Third, the Bureau of Economic Analysis identifies that real per-capita disposable personal income (using chained 2017 dollars) has decreased by 9.04% between the first quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2024.

Real personal disposable per-capita income offers a different picture of purchasing power by including income sources other than earnings, such as “Social Security and other government benefits, dividends and interest, [and] business ownership.” As a result, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative-leaning American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told us in a phone interview that income offers “a broader measure of purchasing power” than wages. According to the BEA, disposable income denotes the income “residents have left to spend or save after paying taxes.”

While Scott is correct that average hourly earnings have grown at a slower pace than inflation over the last three years, nominal wages have still increased for the typical American. The BLS estimates that nominal average hourly earnings (measured in current dollars without adjusting for inflation) have increased by 16.64% between January 2021 and May 2024.

Nevertheless, in each of the three macroeconomic metrics we’re using to evaluate purchasing power, Scott is correct that the typical American’s income and wages have failed to keep pace with inflation since Biden entered the presidency.

Yellen’s Timeline: 2019 to 2023When asked to support Yellen’s claim, the Treasury Department cited two reports published by the CBO and the Treasury Department, which both identify increases in the average American’s purchasing power by analyzing changes in adjusted market income and weekly earnings, respectively. Unlike Scott, these studies identified increases in real wages between late 2019 and late 2023.

Biden made a similar claim to Yellen’s in an interview with Time Magazine on May 28, arguing that “wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices.”

By all the three measures we’ve evaluated, Biden and Yellen are correct.

Real average hourly earnings (calculated by adjusting nominal average hourly earnings for inflation using the CPI-U) increased by 1.20% between February 2020 and May 2024, while disposable per-capita real personal income increased by 6.06% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. Finally, real median weekly wages increased by 0.83% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. These findings support Biden’s claim that the average consumer possesses more purchasing power today than before the pandemic.

Recent short-term changes in consumer purchasing power also support Biden’s argument. Between May 2023 and May 2024, average hourly earnings growth has outpaced price increases, growing at an inflation-adjusted rate of 0.81%. Additionally, between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, real disposable personal income per capita has increased by 1.11%. Finally, real median weekly wages increased by 0.55% between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.

It’s worth noting that Yellen also addressed this issue during an interview on the same June 16 episode of “This Week” in which Scott argued that real wages decreased under Biden. During this show, Yellen attempted to repeat her earlier claim, but cited an incorrect timeframe — referring instead to the last three years.

“Well, it is true that, over the last roughly three years, there’s been a significant increase in the price level,” she said. “I would point out, of course, that wages have also gone up during this time, and government studies show that, for all — for households at all points in the income distribution wages have gone up somewhat more than prices.”

As we described earlier, from January 2021 to the present, the inflation-adjusted measures of average hourly earnings, median weekly earnings, and per-capita disposable personal income all decreased. Holtz-Eakin called Yellen’s claim from June 16 “demonstrably false.”

However, Yellen’s previous statement from April, and the evidence supporting her claim provided to us by the Treasury Department, all compare wage and income data from before the pandemic to the present and correctly identify an upward trend.

Impact of the Pandemic on Real Wage and IncomeThe different timeframes used by Scott and Yellen highlight the impact of the pandemic in altering measurements of the typical American’s purchasing power. In March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, all three of our reported metrics quickly spiked upward and subsequently declined in the following months.

When Yellen and Biden compare pre-pandemic real wage rates with present rates, they use a timeframe that predates the March 2020 spike. However, Scott’s timeframe begins at the start of 2021, after the peak of the spike.

Because of the distortionary effects of the pandemic, measurements of real wage and income growth starting from 2019 are significantly different from measurements beginning in 2021, as illustrated in the chart below.

Explaining the Disruptive Role of the PandemicMultiple economists’ explanations of these fluctuations in real wages and incomes during the pandemic focused on the exit and reentry of low-wage employees from the workforce. Biden’s CEA wrote in April 2021 that a “sharp, one-month increase in reported average wages” occurred early in the pandemic “because millions of relatively low-paid workers lost their jobs, while relatively high-paid workers remained employed.”

Holtz-Eakin corroborates that a “huge chunk” of the more than 20 million workers who lost their jobs early in the pandemic worked in “the leisure and hospitality and other sectors that have an abundance of low-skill, inexperienced workers.”

In a report by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, economists Chloe East, Wendy Edelberg, and Noadia Steinmetz-Silber write that “from February 2020 to April 2020, the unemployment rate increased by 15.4 percentage points for those with less than a high school education, compared to 6.5 percentage points for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.”

Dean Baker, senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a labor-focused think tank, told us in an email that these changes in the labor market at the beginning of the pandemic were “comparable to telling the five shortest people to leave a room. The average height of the people remaining is greater, even though no one has gotten any taller.” As a result, he argues that “the rise in real wages at the start of the pandemic was an illusion.”

Subsequently, the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank partly funded by labor unions, argues that the U.S.’s recovery from the pandemic in the following months reversed this trend, driving real average wage growth down as many of these low-wage workers rejoined the labor force.

In a February 2022 report on the real wage gains over the two years of the pandemic, the Dallas Federal Reserve explained the impacts of these “composition effects,” which it defined as the “average wages of individuals who leave the workforce, compared with those who enter it over the period.”

The report identified an abnormally large positive composition effect driving up average hourly wages at the beginning of the pandemic. Subsequently, it also identified a large negative composition effect driving down average wages in the second quarter of 2021, which the report said resulted from the rapid reentry of low-wage workers into the labor force. (See the chart below from the report.)

Baker offered another explanation for the fluctuations in per-capita disposable personal income. In a February article for CEPR, he asserted that real per-capita income spiked in 2020 “primarily due to the pandemic checks” included in the CARES Act passed under then-President Donald Trump and the “$1,400 a person” stimulus from “Biden’s recovery package.” Holtz-Eakin refers to this roughly $5 trillion in total stimulus spending during the pandemic as an “enormous transfer to households.”

However, Baker said that “these programs mostly went away after 2021, which explains most of the drop in 2022.” He pointed out that 2021 “was also a year of sharp inflation, which outpaced wage growth for most workers. That further lowered real income.”

Therefore, selecting a timeframe that begins when Biden entered office, as Scott did in his interview with ABC News, includes this sharp drop in real per-capita disposable income in the middle of 2021.

When Should the Analysis Begin?We’ve established that while real wages have increased since 2019, they have not grown since the beginning of the Biden administration. But how to evaluate purchasing power and real wages under Biden stirs a debate among some economists.

In an email message, a Treasury spokesperson argued that “the 2021 Bureau Labor of Statistics data on earnings was skewed and should not be used as a comparison point” because “the people out of the labor force at that time were disproportionally low-income such that the people that were working then skewed higher income. This made it look artificially like wages spiked in 2020 and remained elevated in 2021.” Instead, the spokesperson argued that “the comparison point that is more reliable for wage measurement is in 2019, just before the pandemic, when there was near full employment as there is today.”

When asked whether she felt it was more useful to begin an analysis of real wage growth under Biden in 2019 or 2021, Chloe East, a University of Colorado Denver Economics Professor and nonresident fellow with the Hamilton Project at Brookings, told us in a phone interview that the decision was something she and her peers at Brookings “struggled with.” Ultimately, they decided to begin their analysis in 2019 because it offered “more stable” data. “There were still changes in 2021,” she argues, making wage data from that year more “volatile” than 2019.

However, Holtz-Eakin disagrees with this approach. He argues that by the time Biden entered office, the president “inherited an economy that was growing rapidly and had recovered from the recession,” and that many of these low-skill workers had already reentered the labor force. He points to the unemployment rate, which had decreased from a pandemic high of 14.8% in April 2020 to 6.4% by the time Biden took office in January 2021. For context, the unemployment rate has stayed within the 3.4%-4% range between December 2021 and the present, and was 3.5% in February 2020. Therefore, Holtz-Eakin said he believed it is reasonable to begin his analysis of changes in real wages under Biden in January 2021, and not before the pandemic.

It’s worth noting that our evaluations of macroeconomic metrics under Biden published in the Biden’s Numbers quarterly reports generally evaluate data beginning with the start of his administration in January 2021.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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Q: Are wind farms harmful to the environment?

A: Like all energy sources, wind farms have some negative environmental impacts. But getting energy from wind farms results in dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from fossil fuels.

FULL QUESTIONI received this post on Facebook today. I know it contains a lot of claims [challenging the eco-friendliness of wind turbines] and I don’t know where to start in terms of validating them (for myself). Can you help out?

FULL ANSWERA genre of lengthy posts on social media claims to poke holes in measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. The posts throw out numerous statistics without citations, making it difficult to quickly sort fact from fiction.

A reader recently contacted us asking for help evaluating one such post, which cast doubt on the eco-friendliness of wind energy. The post has been circulating on Facebook since March 2021, racking up more than 135,000 shares. Other versions of the post have also been spreading on social media.

Some statistics and statements in the post are arguably accurate, while others are misleading or flat-out wrong. But perhaps more important is what the post left out. It referenced the petroleum products used while building, operating, maintaining and decommissioning wind turbines without ever stating that over its entire life cycle, a wind turbine produces among the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of the main electricity sources in the U.S.

The post also misleadingly said that the land for wind farms “would have to be clear-cut land” and referenced the need to cut down “all those trees.” But in the U.S., wind farms are largely located on land that is already not forested, and this is likely to remain the case as wind energy expands.

The post discussed the landfill space needed for decommissioned wind turbine blades without providing the context that, even as wind power increases, they will make up a small percentage of all waste, and without mentioning efforts to recycle them. And it referenced bird deaths from wind farms without putting them in the context of far greater threats to birds, such as collisions with glass buildings and vehicles.

We consulted experts on wind energy to get to the bottom of the claims made in the post, and to provide context on the challenges associated with this source of renewable energy.

Wind Turbines Generate Low Emissions Over Their LifetimesThe major advantage of wind turbines is that, taking into account their entire lifespan, they generate very low emissions compared with fossil fuels.

Researchers often calculate greenhouse gas emissions associated with methods of electricity generation using a technique called life cycle assessment. In the case of wind energy, this includes emissions generated in the course of “extraction and processing of materials, fabrication of components, transportation, installation, operations and maintenance … decommissioning, and disposal or recycling,” Aubryn Cooperman, an engineering analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told us via email.

“Each of these processes may have emissions associated with the equipment used, such as trucks, cranes, ships, etc.,” she said. “Petroleum-based fuels are used for most types of transportation and portable equipment, and the related emissions are accounted for in the wind energy lifecycle assessment.”

In the case of fossil fuels, a life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions also includes emissions caused by burning the fuel, such as coal or natural gas.

A report from NREL reviewed studies of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions for various sources of electricity. The median published estimates of emissions associated with wind were more than 37 times lower than those from natural gas and 77 times lower than those from coal.

Over their lifetimes, wind farms also are associated with very little generation of air pollutants such as particulate matter and ground-level ozone.

Despite this, the Facebook post misleadingly implied that because petroleum products can be used in various ways in building, operating, maintaining and removing wind turbines, this means that they do not qualify as clean energy.

First, the post presented various statistics on the lubricant oil in wind turbines, used in varying amounts depending on the turbine. To be clear, this oil is used to lubricate the moving parts in wind turbines and is distinct from fuels such as gasoline that are combusted and produce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from ‘clean’ energy,” the post said. “Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the fricken oil fairies?”

The post went on to describe the use of petroleum products by “the large equipment needed to build these wind farms,” as well as service, maintain and remove them.

As we’ve said, emissions from petroleum product-powered equipment associated with wind farms are included in life cycle emissions calculations, and these indicate that wind farms are far cleaner sources of energy than fossil fuels.

“It’s also worth noting that as the transportation sector decarbonizes, that will reduce emissions in the wind energy lifecycle as well,” Cooperman said.

As for the lubricant oil used in wind turbines, this oil does need to be changed from time to time, which can be challenging given the locations and height of the turbines. However, it does not necessarily need to be changed annually, contrary to what the post said.

“Oil change interval on wind turbines has been extended over the years and nowadays, it is typical to do every 5 or 7 years,” Shawn Sheng, a senior research engineer at NREL, told us in an email. “Some research is being done by extending this even further to ten years or longer, such as fill-for-life (~20 years) oil.”

Emissions associated with changing this oil are included in life cycle emissions calculations, Cooperman said.

Many machines require lubricant oil, and the wind industry makes up only a fraction of the market for these products. Furthermore, lubricants only make up 1% of petroleum products produced in U.S. refineries.

Post Distorts Wind Farm Land Use ImpactsNext, the Facebook post listed various statistics about wind farm land use, mixing somewhat plausible figures with estimates based on bad math and misleading statements about impacts on forests.

“And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway?” the post said. “Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres…” This estimate is roughly plausible if considering the direct footprint of a relatively new, average-sized land-based wind turbine, but it doesn’t acknowledge the wide variation in turbine size.

Grace Wu, who studies land use and climate change mitigation at UC Santa Barbara, told us via email that the science and engineering community would not calculate the space requirements of a wind farm per turbine, but rather per unit of energy the wind farm can produce.

“The larger the wind turbine the more spacing it required, so to generalize across wind turbines itself (treating the unit as the wind turbine) is inaccurate,” she said. Wind turbines can have one megawatt of capacity to over 10 megawatts of capacity, Wu explained. Offshore wind turbines can be greater than 20 megawatts.

A May 2024 U.S. Department of Agriculture report on utility-scale solar and wind installations in rural areas said that the typical direct footprint of a wind farm is approximately 0.74 acres per megawatt of capacity. The direct footprint of a wind farm includes “the relatively small area on which service roads, turbine pads, and other infrastructure are constructed,” the report said.

Wind turbine capacity has been increasing. The average land-based wind turbine installed in 2022 can generate 3.2 megawatts of electricity, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Based on this, the average land-based turbine installed in 2022 would have a direct footprint of more than two acres.

Wind farms also have an indirect footprint, the USDA report explained, since wind turbines need sufficient spacing between them to best take advantage of wind flow. However, the land between wind turbines often can still be used for other purposes — typically for growing crops or as rangeland.

Photo by mj0007 via iStock / Getty Images PlusThe post’s math and logic went more seriously awry as it discussed the broader impacts of wind farm land use. “In order to power a city the size of NYC you’d need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US,” the post said.

Here, the post did its own internal math incorrectly. The post previously had claimed it would take 3,800 turbines to power a city the size of New York, and 3,800 multiplied by the post’s estimated footprint of 1.5 acres per turbine is 5,700 acres, not 57,000 acres.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Energy Information Administration told us via email that it “would be impossible” to accurately calculate the number of turbines needed to power a city without knowing various other factors, including the height of the turbines, wind speed and generation capacity.

The USDA report found that in 2020, there were 88,000 acres in rural areas of the U.S. in the direct footprint of wind farms. As of 2023, 10% of U.S. electricity came from wind farms, according to the EIA. For context, the U.S. has 897 million acres of farmland.

The post’s suggestion that the entire U.S. would be solely powered by wind farms is unrealistic. According to EIA projections for 2050, even in a high-uptake scenario a minority of electricity in the U.S. would be generated by wind, with solar power showing a greater increase. “There is no scenario we have modeled in which there would be only one source of electricity generation in the United States,” the EIA spokesperson told us.

The post also did not put the land use requirements of wind farms in the context of land use requirements of other methods of generating electricity. A 2022 study published in PLOS One indicated that, when looking just at the direct footprint, natural gas and coal use more land per unit of energy generated than wind.

However, “the answer differs significantly depending on whether or not one considers spacing between turbines,” Wu said. Wind is more space-intensive than most other energy sources when taking into account the full area of wind farms.

The Facebook post misleadingly said that the land used by wind farms would all need to be clear cut. “Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna piss off a lot of green-loving tree-huggers,” the post said.

Building wind farms does sometimes require trees to be cut down. But Wu explained that in the U.S., wind farms are largely located on existing agricultural land in the Midwest. “There are of course some cases of wind farms in forest land, but the vast majority of wind capacity has and will be sited in the ‘wind belt’ (midwest),” she said.

According to the USDA report, between 2012 and 2020 just around 3% of newly built wind farms were located on forest land.

Wind Turbine Blades Represent Small Proportion of All WasteThe Facebook post also painted a misleading picture of what happens to wind turbine blades at the end of their life.

“They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so guess what..? It’s off to special landfills they go,” the post said. “And guess what else..? They’re already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness.”

Claire Barlow, a sustainability and materials engineer at the University of Cambridge, explained to us in an email that there are real challenges associated with the end of life of wind turbine blades. She said that the “normal lifetime” of a wind turbine is 20 to 25 years, and that the blades currently being decommissioned generally come from a time when wind energy was “starting to take off in a big way” — particularly in Europe and China. This means that “the number of end-of-life blades coming through will increase hugely in the next decade, and steadily after that.”

Putting them in landfills is the cheapest way to dispose of wind turbine blades, Barlow said. It is least expensive to simply bury the blades near the wind farms they came from, if there is space. “‘Special’ landfills yes, but not in the sense of meaning dangerous or difficult,” she said.

A Wind Energy End-of-Service Guide from the DOE explained that as of 2018, wind turbine blades sent to landfills represented 0.017% of “combined municipal solid waste and construction and demolition waste” in the U.S. The report said that by 2050 wind turbine blade waste would represent less than 0.15% of total waste, in a calculation using 2018 total waste levels.

Barlow went on to explain that in more densely populated areas, such as Northern Europe, there is less space to dispose of wind turbines via landfills and it is even banned in some areas. This means there’s an incentive to find alternate options.

“There is a great deal of work going on in finding economically (and environmentally) attractive solutions for end-of-life blade material, some of which are already commercially successful enterprises, and others that are busy scaling up from prototypes to full-scale,” she said.

The majority of wind turbine parts are readily recyclable, according to the DOE guide. “Blades are difficult to recycle because they are made from mixed materials which can’t easily be separated,” Barlow said.

The most basic recycling method, she said, “involves cutting up blades into small pieces (a few cm, or smaller for some applications) and using this material as filler in material used for road or playground surfaces, where it contributes useful strength.” There are companies using this approach, although “this recycled material isn’t high-value,” she said.

The DOE guide said that this and other recycling approaches are “increasingly being used in the United States,” although the majority of blades are still sent to landfills and the number of blades that are recycled “is difficult to determine.”

People are currently attempting to develop better processes for separating “potentially valuable fibres” out of the blades so they can be reused, Barlow said. There are challenges, but “real significant advances are being made,” she said.

The blades also “can safely be disposed of in modern well-controlled” waste-to-energy power plants, she said, although these are more common in Northern Europe than the U.S. There is also at least one operation in the U.S., she said, and others outside the country that are using wind turbine blades as fuel during the cement-making process.

Wind Turbine Impacts on Birds Need ContextFinally, the Facebook post brought up bird deaths caused by wind turbines. This, again, is a real problem, but the claims in the post are missing context, including that there are far greater causes of bird deaths.

“Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles,” the post said. “Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren’t so lucky. I’m sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that. I’m so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.”

Estimates vary for the total bird deaths from wind turbines. A 2020 report based on the American Wind Wildlife Information Center database, which compiles data from multiple studies, concluded that the median estimate for mortality was 1.3 bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year.

Given that the total wind power capacity of the U.S. is more than 150,000 megawatts, this would represent around 200,000 bird deaths per year. Other work, done using data from 2012, estimated up to more than 500,000 bird deaths per year — and bird deaths would be expected to have risen as significantly more wind turbines have been built.

The Facebook post does not put wind turbine-related deaths in the context of other threats to birds. According to median estimates compiled in 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bird deaths from wind turbine collisions are dwarfed by bird deaths from collisions with building glass, estimated to kill nearly 600 million birds annually, collisions with vehicles, estimated to kill more than 200 million birds a year, and encounters with cats, estimated to kill 2.4 billion birds a year.

The post’s claim that most bird deaths are among large birds is incorrect. According to the AWWIC report, median estimates were for 1.3 small bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year, compared with 0.24 deaths for large birds and 0.06 deaths for raptors.

However, it is true that researchers have particular concerns about raptor deaths from wind turbine collisions, due to their relatively small populations and reproductive life histories. Raptor deaths from wind turbines may have an outsized impact on their population size.

A final piece of context: Birds face major threats to their diversity and abundance from climate change. By providing an alternative form of energy with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, wind turbines may help mitigate climate change-related threats to birds.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Carol Bebb McLaren. “This was shared to me by a friend in the USA. It was written by a Man named Frank Fera. …” Facebook. 4 Jun 2024.

Love Europe, hate the EU. “Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we’re not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude… 12,000 gallons of it. …” Facebook. 6 Jun 2024.

UK Keep Britain United. “Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we’re not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude… 12,000 gallons of it. …” Facebook. 6 Jun 2024.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In speeches in Nevada and Arizona, former President Donald Trump continued to spread misinformation that undermines public confidence in state and federal elections:

• Trump claimed that Kari Lake lost the Arizona governor’s race in 2022 because Maricopa County “machines just happened to be broken” — falsely adding, “only the Republican machines.” Some printers produced ballots that were too light for on-site tabulators, but the ballots could be counted later. Lake’s court challenges failed, and an independent review found no evidence of wrongdoing.
• Trump also claimed, without evidence, that Abraham Hamadeh lost the 2022 attorney general’s race in Arizona because “his election was rigged.” A recount confirmed Hamadeh lost the election, and court challenges failed, too, due to a lack of evidence.

In Nevada, Trump — who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly conspiring to remain in office despite losing the 2020 presidential election — whitewashed the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to count the electoral votes that would declare Joe Biden the winner.

“All they were doing is protesting a rigged election. And then the police say, ‘Go in, go in’” to the Capitol, he said of his supporters. “What a setup that was.”

As we have written before, nearly 140 law enforcement officers were injured trying to keep the protesters out of the U.S. Capitol that day, according to official reports. There’s also no evidence the 2020 election was “rigged” or that Trump supporters were the victims of an FBI “setup.”

Trump, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, made his remarks at a town hall event in Phoenix on June 6 and at a rally in Las Vegas on June 9. The former president lost Arizona and Nevada to Biden in 2020. Biden won by only 10,457 votes in Arizona, which remains a key swing state in 2024.

Kari Lake’s DefeatAs presidential candidates usually do when visiting a state, Trump introduced some of Arizona’s Republican candidates when he spoke in Phoenix — including Hamadeh, a House candidate for the 8th Congressional District, and Lake, who is now running for the U.S. Senate.

In his introductions, Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. doesn’t have “honest elections,” and went on to baselessly claim that Hamadeh and Lake were victims of election fraud in 2022.

Trump, June 6: A congressional candidate who’s doing a really terrific job — his election was rigged the last time, I will tell you that. They don’t like — they say, “Oh, please. Don’t say that.” These elections, let me tell, if we could have honest elections in this country, I would have stopped campaigning two weeks ago. We would’ve had it made. But we don’t have that. … Congressional candidate, Abe Hamadeh.

And a friend of mine, and a really incredible woman, who’s worked very hard, and she had another one of those elections, the machines just happened to be broken. Only the Republican machines, however. That was a strange situation. She had lines going back 2 miles. And I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to come back about 12 o’clock in the evening. The machines happen to be broken.

Let’s look at Lake’s election first, and Trump’s false claim that she lost because “Republican machines” failed on Election Day.

Lake lost the 2022 governor’s race to then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes. She blamed her defeat on election fraud, making multiple claims in a lawsuit filed Dec. 9, 2022 — including one that Trump referenced when he spoke of “broken machines.”

Trump is referring to a problem with Maricopa County’s ballot-on-demand printers at some polling locations on Election Day. As we wrote a day after the Nov. 8, 2022, election, Maricopa County said the printers produced ballots for a period of time that were too light for the on-site ballot tabulators to read. Until the problem was resolved, election officials advised voters to leave their completed ballot in a secure box to be tabulated later.

Former President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Sunset Park in Las Vegas on June 9. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images. Lake sued, claiming that her voters were disenfranchised. But she lost her lawsuit and subsequent appeals.

“Plaintiff’s own expert acknowledged that a ballot that was unable to be read at the vote center could be deposited by a voter, duplicated by a bipartisan board onto a readable ballot, and—in the final analysis—counted,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson wrote in his Dec. 24, 2022, decision.

Nearly eight weeks later, a state appeals court upheld Thompson’s ruling, dismissing Lake’s complaint about disenfranchised voters as “sheer speculation.”

“Lake’s claim thus boils down to a suggestion that election-day issues led to long lines at vote centers, which frustrated and discouraged voters, which allegedly resulted in a substantial number of predominately Lake voters not voting. But Lake’s only purported evidence that these issues had any potential effect on election results was, quite simply, sheer speculation,” the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One, wrote in a Feb. 16, 2023 ruling.

Lake appealed, but the state Supreme Court declined to hear her case.

“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues, most of which were the subject of evidentiary proceedings in the trial court, and Petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law,” the high court said.

There is also no evidence that the printer failure was part of a plot to elect a Democrat.

“The premise that Vote Centers with issues were ‘Republican Machines’ isn’t possible,” Jennifer Liewer, a spokesperson for the county elections department, told us in an email. “Maricopa County uses a vote anywhere model so a voter can check in to any Vote Center, have their ballot printed, and then tabulated on election day. There are not ‘republican’ or ‘democrat’ Vote Centers.”

In our analysis of the precincts with the problematic printers, we found more than 70,000 votes were cast for the Democratic and Republican candidates in each of the gubernatorial and attorney general races, and the votes were roughly equally divided between the two major party candidates.

But what caused the problem?

The county attorney’s office hired a retired judge to determine what happened and how the county can prevent it from happening again.

In a report, released April 10, 2023, former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor blamed “equipment failure” for the problems on Election Day. Some of the on-site printers couldn’t “reliably” print the general election ballots, which were longer and heavier than those used in the primary election, the report said. The printer problems occurred at 37 of the county’s 223 vote centers, Liewer told us.

“[T]he primary cause of the election day failures was equipment failure,” McGregor’s report said. “Despite the assurances of the manufacturer, many of the Oki B432 printers were not capable of reliably printing 20-inch ballots on 100-pound paper under election-day conditions. Any failure in process or human error relates to a failure to anticipate and prepare for the printer failures experienced. But nothing we learned in our interviews or document reviews gave any clear indication that the problems should have been anticipated.”

McGregor’s report provided some idea of the scope of the problem: “Two-thirds of the general election vote centers reported no issues with misprinted ballots; approximately 94 percent of election day ballots were not faulty.”

Lastly, there was no recount in the governor’s race, because the race wasn’t close enough to trigger a mandatory recount. But there were hand audits performed in 12 of the state’s 15 counties, including Maricopa, which audited the governor’s race, as well as two other races and a ballot question.

State law requires county election officers to count “a sample of ballots to test the accuracy of the vote tabulation equipment if there is participation from the county political parties,” as explained on the secretary of state website. All 12 counties that participated passed the audit — including Maricopa. The audit involved about 5,000 ballots in Maricopa County and resulted in no net change for Lake or Hobbs.

Abraham Hamadeh’s DefeatTrump also claimed that Hamadeh’s election — which was a lot closer than Lake’s election — was “rigged.” But again, the losing Republican candidate failed to produce the evidence needed to convince the courts.

Hamadeh lost the 2022 attorney general’s race to Democrat Kris Mayes by only 280 votes out of 2.5 million ballots — and that was after a statewide recount that cut Mayes’ lead nearly in half, according to the official results.

Like Lake, Hamadeh claimed, among other things, that “thousands of voters were disenfranchised” in Maricopa County, and he sought to overturn the election results. Hamadeh filed a complaint in Mohave County Superior Court on Dec. 9, 2022. But, notably, the complaint did not allege fraud or wrongdoing.

“The Plaintiffs are not, by this lawsuit, alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022, general election,” the complaint read, according to AZCentral, a news website that includes the state’s largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic.

At a Dec. 23, 2022, hearing, Hamadeh’s attorney, Timothy La Sota, repeated to the court that the complaint was not alleging fraud. “We said in our complaint we are ‘not alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,'” La Sota said. “So, we did not allege intentional misconduct.”

That same day, Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee F. Jantzen rejected Hamadeh’s lawsuit. “The bottom line is you just haven’t proven your case,” Jantzen told La Sota.

Hamadeh filed a motion for a new trial, but Jantzen denied the motion. In his July 17, 2023, ruling, Jantzen said that Hamadeh failed to satisfy the requirements for a new trial, because there were no irregularities or errors of law in the first trial, and there was no “newly discovered material evidence that could not have been discovered” at the first trial.

Days later, Hamadeh appealed Jantzen’s decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which rejected Hamadeh’s motion in a 2-1 ruling in April.

“A virtual firestorm of challenges followed the 2022 general election. Those flames have subsided. The winners were announced and took their oaths of office more than 15 months ago,” Chief Judge David B. Gass wrote for the majority. “This case, one of the last embers still glowing, does not burn hot enough to warrant relief.”

Protesters at U.S. Capitol and the ‘Rigged’ ElectionIn Nevada, Trump once again minimized the actions of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, saying his supporters were only there to protest a “rigged election” and falsely alleging that police told protesters to “go in” to the Capitol.

We have debunked this bit of revisionist history on more than one occasion from others who sought to distort the mission and actions of the officers that day.

In reality, the police were trying to prevent the crowd that attended Trump’s “Save America” rally at the White House Ellipse from disrupting the electoral vote count that was scheduled for that same day at the Capitol.

Pro-Trump supporters clash with law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images. In the course of defending the Capitol and protecting the vice president and lawmakers and their staffs, the U.S. Capitol Police said 73 of its officers were injured, and the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia reported 65 injuries, according to a bipartisan report by two Senate committees.

“Throughout the seven hours of the riot on the Capitol grounds, law enforcement officers faced verbal and ‘absolutely brutal,’ violent physical abuse,” the report said. “One officer described an interaction with a group of protestors during the evacuation of the Senate: ‘[W]e stopped several men in full tactical gear and they stated ‘You better get out of our way boy or we’ll go through you to get [the Senators].'”

The report said the officers were “physically assaulted with a range of objects thrown from the crowds, pinned against surfaces, and beaten with flag poles and other weapons carried or found by rioters, including frozen water bottles.” The rioters also used pepper spray and other chemical irritants against officers.

Trump has called the rioters “patriots,” “hostages” and “warriors,” hinting that he would pardon them if he becomes president again. He said in Nevada that they were victims of “a setup” — which is a reference to a debunked theory that the FBI infiltrated and egged on the pro-Trump supporters, so they could be arrested.

As we have written, FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump, addressed that discredited theory at a congressional hearing in November 2022. “To the extent that there’s a suggestion, for example, that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6 — that’s categorically false,” Wray told Congress.

The notion that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” is equally without merit.

William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”

After the election, top White House aides and other Justice Department officials also told Trump there was no evidence of widespread fraud, but that hasn’t prevented Trump from repeating false fraud claims then and now.

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Quick TakeIsrael will send a delegation of about 85 athletes to the Olympic Games in Paris in July. Protesters opposed to the war in Gaza have called for limited participation by the Israelis, and a post on Threads falsely claimed Israel is “out” of the Games. The International Olympic Committee has said Israeli athletes will be allowed to compete.

Full StoryIsrael plans to send about 85 athletes to compete in the Olympic Games in Paris next month, its second-largest delegation ever, according to the Times of Israel. But the war in Gaza presents security concerns for Israeli athletes and for the host country.

The fighting in Gaza began after the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 hostages on Oct. 7, sparking an ongoing assault by Israeli forces that has led to the deaths of more than 37,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.

The Gaza death toll has sparked protests around the world, including an April 30 rally in Paris where pro-Palestinian demonstrators called for limited participation by Israel in the Olympics. The protesters compared Israel’s situation to the International Olympic Committee’s restrictions on Russian athletes’ participation in the Games since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Protesters stage a demonstration against Israel’s participation in the 2024 Paris Olympics in front of the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, on June 12. Photo by Muhammet Ikbal Arslan/Anadolu via Getty Images.A post on Threads on June 17 took the call for action against Israel a step further, claiming, “ISRAEL OUT OF THE PARIS OLYMPIC GAMES.” Comments on the post said that was “great news.”

But it’s not true that Israel is “out” of the Olympics. IOC President Thomas Bach said on March 6 that Israeli teams and individual athletes will be allowed to compete in the Paris Games, the Associated Press reported. “There is no question about this,” Bach said.

Since the attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Bach said that “there were always special measures” taken regarding the security of Israeli athletes, and “the same will be true” in Paris, which will include competitions outside stadiums and on the city’s streets, as well as venues in other French cities.

Eleven members of the Israeli delegation were killed in September 1972 during an assault in the Munich Olympic Village by the Palestinian militant group Black September and a failed rescue attempt by the German police. Among other things, the militants sought the release of 200 Palestinians being held at the time in Israeli prisons.

French officials have held rehearsals addressing security concerns for the July 26 opening ceremonies on the Seine River, the Washington Post reported. Security plans include deployment of 45,000 police officers, 18,000 soldiers and 22,000 private contractors, officials said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAgence France-Presse. “Health Ministry In Hamas-run Gaza Says War Death Toll At 37,372.” Barron’s. 18 Jun 2024.

Britannica. “Munich massacre. Munich, Germany [1972].” Accessed 20 Jun 2024.

Dunbar, Graham. “IOC confirms Russian athletes can compete at Paris Olympics with approved neutral status.” Associated Press. 8 Dec 2023.

Dunbar, Graham. “Israel’s Olympic status not in question says IOC president Bach amid frustration with Russia.” Associated Press. 6 Mar 2024.

New York Times. “Israel-Hamas War: Israel Lowers Oct. 7 Death Toll Estimate to 1,200.” Updated 30 Nov 2023.

Noack, Rick. “Paris tests Olympic readiness with Opening Ceremonies rehearsal on Seine.” Washington Post. 17 Jun 2024.

Spiro, Amy. “On complex world stage in Paris, Israel’s Olympians hope to stay focused on sport.” The Times of Israel. 5 Jun 2024.

Turnbull, Alex. “Pro-Palestinian protesters call on Olympic officials to limit Israel’s participation in Paris Games.” Associated Press. 30 Apr 2024.

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SciCheck DigestA federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District for its now-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine requirement. The court said the case should be allowed to develop beyond the preliminary arguments. But anti-vaccination activists have twisted the opinion to falsely claim the court had “declared that the mRNA covid jab is NOT a vaccine.”

Full StoryThe Los Angeles Unified School District was among the employers that mandated COVID-19 vaccination in 2021, and then faced lawsuits over its requirement.

The first suit, filed on March 17, 2021, was brought by employees who didn’t want to get vaccinated. It was dismissed four months later because the school district had amended its policy to allow workers to instead submit to regular testing. (The district later reinstituted the vaccine requirement without the testing option, and then did away with the mandate altogether in September.)

A second suit was brought in November 2021 on behalf of the district employees by an Idaho-based nonprofit that started in 2020 and has pursued several lawsuits directed at public health measures meant to curb the spread of COVID-19, including mask and vaccine mandates.

The nonprofit organization, called the Health Freedom Defense Fund, argued that COVID-19 vaccines are not actually vaccines, but are instead “medical treatments,” and cannot be mandated. The group argued that the COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent transmission of the disease, but rather just reduce its severity in those who are infected – making “the injection … a treatment, not a vaccine.”

As we’ve explained before, since the virus changes as it spreads, the vaccines have become less effective in providing protection against symptomatic illness, but it is effective in preventing severe disease and death from COVID-19.

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in February found that, for adults, the most recent formulation of the vaccines provided 54% increased protection against symptomatic infection. Experts say that those vaccines should also be effective in preventing severe disease and death from the most common variants circulating since 2023.

Although the legal fight against the LA school district has been going on for about three years, it’s still in a relatively early legal stage, since both cases have been dismissed by trial courts. The Health Freedom Defense Fund suit was dismissed for several reasons in 2022, most importantly because the court found that the vaccine’s ability to reduce the severity of disease and death from COVID-19 met the district’s interest in protecting the health of students and employees.

However, on June 7, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed that dismissal and sent the case back to the trial court to flesh out the arguments on both sides.

But conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccination influencers on social media have misrepresented the opinion from the appeals court to falsely claim that it had “declared that the mRNA covid jab is NOT a vaccine.”

The court did no such thing.

Rather, the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the lower court was wrong to dismiss the case and that the school district’s “pattern of withdrawing and then reinstating its vaccination policies was enough to keep this case alive.”

As we said, the case is still in the early stages and neither side has presented much beyond their initial arguments. The appeals court wrote, “At this stage, we must accept Plaintiffs’ allegations that the vaccine does not prevent the spread of COVID-19 as true.” Letting the case continue will allow for each side to present evidence to support their arguments about the effectiveness of the vaccines.

“We note the preliminary nature of our holding,” the court said. “We do not prejudge whether, on a more developed factual record, Plaintiffs’ allegations will prove true.”

So, the court found that the case should continue. It has not “declared” whether or not the COVID-19 vaccines are actually vaccines.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

SourcesThorbecke, Catherine. “Majority of companies plan to have COVID-19 vaccine mandate, survey finds.” ABC News. 1 Sep 2021.

Dusto, Amy. “Vaccine Mandates: A Public Health Tool for Employers.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 22 Feb 2022.

California Educators for Medical Freedom v. Los Angeles Unified School District. No. 21-cv-02388. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Complaint. 17 Mar 2021.

Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Megan K. Reilly. No. 2:21-cv-08688. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Complaint. 3 Nov 2021.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Widespread Claims Misrepresent Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2022.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “COVID-19 Vaccines Reduce Hospitalization and Death Rates, Contrary to Social Media Claims.” FactCheck.org. 14 Apr 2022.

Link-Gelles, Ruth. “Early Estimates of Updated 2023–2024 (Monovalent XBB.1.5) COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection Attributable to Co-Circulating Omicron Variants Among Immunocompetent Adults — Increasing Community Access to Testing Program, United States, September 2023–January 2024.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 1 Feb 2024.

Rosen, Aliza. “What to Know About COVID FLiRT Variants.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 13 May 2024.

Katella, Kathy. “The Updated COVID Vaccines Are Here: 9 Things to Know.” Yale Medicine. 19 Apr 2024.

California Educators for Medical Freedom v. Los Angeles Unified School District. No. 21-cv-02388. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Order grants defendants’ motion to dismiss. 27 Jul 2021.

Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Megan K. Reilly. No. 2:21-cv-08688. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Order granting defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings. 2 Sep 2022.

Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Alberto Carvalho. U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. No.22-55908. Opinion. 7 Jun 2024.

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Former President Donald Trump has made illegal immigration and its impact on the U.S. a focus of his campaign – but several of his talking points are wrong or misleading. Here’s what we found among his immigration claims at recent events in the electoral swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

• Trump falsely said that a proclamation by President Joe Biden to limit asylum eligibility “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers.”
• He distorted how a mobile app for asylum appointments operated, saying it allows “free entry to be released into the United States at the push of a button.” Applicants are screened, and appointments are limited.
• Trump offered wildly exaggerated border crossing statistics. For instance, he said that in April, “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year.” Apprehensions, which are a proxy for illegal crossings, were down by 30%. If Trump meant April 2020 instead of “last year,” that’s misleading. Apprehensions plunged that month due to the pandemic.
• He distorted reporting by the New York Times to misleadingly claim that “88,000” unaccompanied minors who came to the U.S. illegally and were processed by the Biden administration “are missing” and “many of those children are dead.”
• Trump claimed that “more drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history.” Federal data for drug seizures by weight are trending down under Biden. As a proxy for drug smuggling, that data suggest that fewer drugs, not more, are coming into the country. Fentanyl seizures, however, have increased significantly under both Trump and Biden.
• Trump claimed that “300,000 people are dying a year” in the U.S. from drugs, and said the figure is “probably more than that.” A federal agency reported that there were 107,941 drug overdose deaths in 2022, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher previously told us that any undercount “should be relatively small.”
• He falsely claimed that “virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens.” Since Biden became president in January 2021, employment of U.S.-born workers has increased more than employment of foreign-born workers, which includes those in the U.S. legally.
• Trump claimed that real, meaning inflation-adjusted, income and wages for the Black population are down 6% under Biden. But the most recent government data show real income is up for Black households, while real wages for full-time Black workers are down by less than what Trump said.
• The former president claimed that illegal immigration under Biden had created “flat-out economic warfare” on Black and Hispanic Americans by “taking the jobs” of those workers, and he said unions were “being absolutely slaughtered.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that.

Trump first spoke at a June 6 town hall in Phoenix hosted by groups affiliated with Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization. Three days later, he spoke at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on June 9.

We’re focusing only on Trump’s immigration-related assertions in those speeches. In addition to the claims below, Trump repeated his unsubstantiated talking point that “the entire world is emptying their prisons and jails, insane asylums, and mental institutions” and sending those people to the U.S. He has provided no evidence for that explosive claim, as we’ve written several times.

Biden’s Immigration ProclamationIn his Phoenix remarks, Trump wrongly said that a recent Biden proclamation to limit asylum eligibility “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers,” and he further inaccurately claimed that those crossing the southern border illegally are “coming in totally unchecked, unvetted.”

Biden’s June 4 immigration proclamation limits asylum eligibility for those caught trying to cross the southern border illegally when the number of people apprehended reaches a daily average of 2,500 encounters or more for seven straight days. The new rules went into effect immediately, because apprehensions were already higher than that threshold.

As we’ve explained, the proclamation allows the Department of Homeland Security to deny asylum eligibility and remove migrants who are apprehended when the limits are in effect. There are exemptions, according to DHS — including unaccompanied children, victims of “a severe form of trafficking,” noncitizens with visas or other lawful means of entering the country, and noncitizens who enter at a legal port of entry using a DHS-approved process, such as the CBP One app (more on that later). There is also a broader exemption for people who “express a fear of return to their country or country of removal, a fear of persecution or torture, or an intention to apply for asylum” if they “establish a reasonable probability of persecution or torture in the country of removal.”

The restrictions will be lifted 14 days after the daily average of apprehensions drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days. But the daily monthly average hasn’t been that low since July 2020.

None of this calls for a minimum 2 million border crossers. Even if the 2,500 threshold is reached every day for a year, that totals under 1 million, and those apprehended are processed and screened, not simply allowed to come into the country no questions asked.

Trump’s claim is similar to his false claims about the bipartisan Senate immigration deal earlier this year, which would have restricted asylum eligibility when apprehensions reached 5,000 per day for a week. As Republican Sen. James Lankford, one of the architects of that failed legislation, said of the measure in February, “It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous. The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. … If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”

The idea that migrants are “coming in totally unchecked, unvetted” — either before or after Biden’s proclamation — is also wrong. Immigration experts explained to us that those who are apprehended trying to cross illegally are interviewed, have criminal record checks and provide biometric data. Depending on their circumstances and asylum claims, migrants could be released with a notice to appear in immigration court, processed for expedited removal or asked if they want to be returned to Mexico.

At both his Phoenix and Las Vegas events, Trump repeated a false claim he has often made — that the U.S. “had the most secure border we’ve ever had” when he left office. “When I ran in 2016, I ran largely on the border. Border was really bad. I fixed it,” he said in Phoenix. Apprehensions on the southern border, figures used as a proxy for illegal immigration, went up under Trump by 14.7% in his last year compared with 2016.

CBP One Mobile AppThe Biden administration has tried to steer those seeking asylum to an application method at legal ports of entry that requires people to sign up for a limited number of appointments through the CBP One mobile app. They are then screened at those appointments. Trump claimed that the app allows “free entry to be released into the United States at the push of a button. Pretty hard, you go like this, ‘Ding, I’m here.’ Congratulations. Welcome to America.”

That’s not how it works.

Trump also falsely said that Biden’s recent immigration proclamation “dramatically expands” the CBP One app, but it doesn’t. Appointments have been capped at 1,450 per day since last June. The Customs and Border Protection press office confirmed to us that there has been no change in the number of daily appointments available.

The CBP One app was launched in January 2023 to accept appointments for migrants who are in Mexico and want to request asylum or parole. DHS calls this “safer, humane, and more orderly” than processing between ports of entry, where migrants cross the border illegally and wait to be apprehended.

Migrants must submit information about themselves in order to get the appointment, 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.

As of the end of April 2024, more than 591,000 people have made appointments with the app, CBP says.

Border StatsTrump offered some wildly exaggerated statistics on illegal border crossings in his Phoenix remarks.

He claimed that 18 million people had been allowed into the U.S. under Biden. “I think that’s the real number as of now, 18 million people.” There’s no evidence for such a figure. We asked the Trump campaign about this claim, and others cited in this article, but we didn’t receive a response.

According to data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, there were 6.5 million apprehensions by Border Patrol of migrants trying to cross the southern border illegally from February 2021, the month after Biden took office, to February of this year. (The figure doesn’t correspond to that same number of people because of repeat crossing attempts by the same people. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to the most recent figures from CBP.)

Trump speaking at the “Chase the Vote” town hall at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 6. Photo by Gage Skidmore.Over that 2021-2024 time period, there were also 923,000 “inadmissibles” who arrived at legal ports of entry but didn’t have legal permission to enter the U.S. Of those 7.4 million total encounters at the border, 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 in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.

As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024.

The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total 5 million, a far cry from 18 million. There were also 407,500 transfers to HHS, which is responsible for children who cross the border on their own, unaccompanied by adult family members or legal guardians, and 883,000 transfers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE transfers include those who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE. So, we don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near 18 million.

Also, these figures reflect what initially happens when migrants have come to the border. In many cases, the final decision on whether a migrant will be allowed to stay or will be deported comes later, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.

Trump also falsely claimed that in April, “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year, 1,000% compared to last year. And by the way, last year, it was 1,000% compared to the year before.” In April, apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally were 30% lower than they were in April 2023. And the April 2023 figure was down 9.6% compared with the year before.

Update, June 18: If Trump meant the April of his last year in office, he would get closer to his 1,000% figure, but his claim would be misleading. Apprehensions by Border Patrol, which are used as a proxy for illegal immigration, plunged in April 2020 to 16,182, because of the pandemic and restrictions worldwide. Comparing April 2024 to the pandemic low in April 2020 produces a 696% increase in apprehensions, and a 951% increase when looking at all border encounters, including those deemed inadmissible at legal ports of entry.

However, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us for a story we did two months ago when Trump cherry-picked the April 2020 figure: “Any complete reading of what took place at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2020 would have to note the emergence of a global pandemic that dramatically chilled mobility of all forms in its early phase.”

There’s no doubt border apprehensions have gone up significantly under Biden, but not 1,000%. In our quarterly “Biden’s Numbers” articles, we compare yearly figures to even out seasonal changes in these statistics. By that measure, apprehensions for the past 12 months ending in April are 286% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Migrant MinorsIn February 2023, the New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services was not able to get in contact with more than 85,000 children whom department officials had placed with relatives or other sponsors in the U.S. after the minors illegally came to the country unaccompanied in 2021 and 2022.

In Phoenix, Trump distorted those facts and claimed without any evidence that all of the children “are missing” and that “many” of them are now deceased.

“Because of Biden’s policies, millions and millions of children have been separated from their families and pushed into the hands of the coyotes and the cartels,” Trump said. “And, you know, 88,000, I don’t know if you — if it were me, it would be the biggest story — 88,000 children are missing. … 88,000 children are missing under this administration, and they have no idea. And unfortunately, many of those children are dead.”

That’s not what the Times reported. Its article said: “While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS agency that manages the program for unaccompanied children, says its “custodial relationship with the child terminates” once he or she is placed with a sponsor. However, before closing a case file, ORR says that 30 days after releasing the child, the office should make a “Safety and Well Being Follow Up Call” and document the results, including noting if the child or sponsor could not be reached “after reasonable efforts have been exhausted.”

But if a call goes unanswered or is not returned, that doesn’t necessarily mean the child is missing. The Times said it interviewed more than 100 minors who had been released from ORR custody. Many were working dangerous jobs “in violation of child labor laws.”

As for deaths, the Times said it “found a dozen cases of young migrant workers killed since 2017.” There was little information provided on when they died or who was president when they came to the U.S. Based on the details the Times provided for four deaths that were highlighted in its story, we were able to determine that two of the children died in work-related accidents during the Trump administration. And at least one of those two reportedly came to the U.S. during the Obama administration. The two other deaths highlighted in the Times story occurred, or likely occurred, during the Biden administration.

The Washington Post Fact Checker wrote about this claim, noting that HHS also couldn’t reach children under the Trump administration.

Drug SmugglingTrump claimed that there has been a large increase in drugs coming into the U.S. because drug smugglers do not fear the Biden administration.

“More drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history, times five or times six,” he said in Phoenix. “We’ve never had massive amounts of drugs pouring into our country. We fought it like hell.”

And in Las Vegas, he claimed that under Biden “now the drugs are pouring into our country.”

Comprehensive data on the total quantity of illicit drugs smuggled into the U.S. do not exist. But CBP does track the amount of drugs seized by border officials, most of which comes through legal ports of entry. Some use the seizure data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. When more drugs are seized, that is seen as an indication that more drugs are coming into the country.

Trump may have been referring only to fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that is lethal in small doses. He mentioned that drug in his remarks in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials has increased by about 462% under Biden, going from almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal year 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal 2023. There were about 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in FY 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before Trump took office, so there was a 586% increase in seizures of that drug when he was president.

Overall, federal data show that the total amount of drugs seized nationwide has declined each fiscal year under Biden.

As we’ve written, there were nearly 1.1 million pounds of drugs seized by the Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations in fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full fiscal cycle as president. That was an increase from the 901,000 pounds of drugs seized in fiscal 2019.

Under Biden, there were about 913,000 pounds of drugs seized in fiscal 2021, which is the highest total during his administration. The amount of drugs seized then declined to almost 656,000 pounds in fiscal 2022 and about 549,000 pounds in fiscal 2023.

As of April, more than 320,000 pounds of drugs had been seized through the first seven months of fiscal 2024. That’s more drugs seized than in the same period the prior year, but it’s still well below the totals interdicted during the end of Trump’s presidency.

Drug OverdosesTrump again inflated the number of people dying each year in the U.S. from drug overdoses, claiming that such deaths are significantly underreported.

In Phoenix, he said: “300,000 people are dying a year. Those are the real numbers. They like to say 100[,000]. They like to say 90[,000]. It’s been that number for a long time. It’s 300,000 people, and it’s probably more than that, and we’re going to have to take very strong action because we can’t let that happen.”

Officially, there were 107,941 deaths from drug overdoses in 2022, up from 106,699 in 2021, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total did not top 90,000 deaths until 2020, during Trump’s administration.

When we fact-checked a similar Trump claim in March 2023, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told us that he had “not yet seen convincing evidence that the number of overall drug deaths is drastically underreported.” Ruhm wrote in a 2018 paper that incomplete death certificates previously led to drug deaths from opioids being “understated,” but in our interview with him he said that “undercount has fallen over time” because the reporting on death records improved.

Merianne Spencer, then a CDC researcher, also told us last year that there was no evidence hundreds of thousands of drug-related deaths were not being counted.

“While we believe that there could be an undercount due to some overdose deaths still pending investigation at the close of the mortality files at the end of each year, any undercount should be relatively small,” she said in an email.

Native- and Foreign-Born EmploymentIn Las Vegas, Trump falsely claimed that all of the jobs added in the U.S. during the Biden administration have been filled by people residing in the U.S. illegally.

“Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that?” Trump said in his remarks. “100% of the new jobs have gone to illegal aliens, can you believe it?”

But he’s wrong. According to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total employment for the native-born population has increased by almost 7.4 million under Biden. The employment level for people born in America was at 123,065,000 in January 2021, when Biden took office, and it was up to 130,445,000, as of May 2024.

Meanwhile, employment of foreign-born workers increased by about 5.6 million – from an estimated 25,318,000 in January 2021 to 30,896,000 in May 2024. 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 just people in the U.S. illegally.

Trump may have been referring to a February analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors low immigration, which found that, when comparing the fourth quarter of 2019 with the fourth quarter of 2023, the U.S.-born employment level declined by 183,000 and the immigrant employment level increased by 2.9 million.

But Biden did not become president until more than a year after the fourth quarter of 2019; he took office when the U.S. economy was still recovering from millions of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. So, the CIS analysis does not illustrate the change in employment under Biden. It also does not include employment data for only people without legal status.

Black Income and WagesAfter falsely claiming that “illegal aliens” have taken all of the new jobs, Trump said, “Meanwhile, real wages of African Americans and the workers from all over the world that came here legally, they’re down 6% under Crooked Joe.”

Three days before that in Phoenix, Trump claimed that “real income for African Americans is down more than 6%” under Biden.

But as of 2022, the real median income for Black-only households was $52,860, according to the latest inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. That was up about 2% from $51,880 in 2020 and $51,750 in 2019. (Figures for 2023 should be out in September.)

On the other hand, more recent data from the BLS show that real wages for Black Americans are down – but by less than Trump claimed.

For Black full-time workers, real median usual weekly earnings, when adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, were $293 in the first quarter of 2024. That was down 3.6% from $304 during the fourth quarter of 2020.

However, some economists argue that wage statistics were inflated in 2020 because low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. With millions of low-wage workers out of the workforce, average and median wages appeared to increase because workers with higher earnings kept or gained jobs.

Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, which was before the pandemic started in early 2020, the real weekly earnings of Black full-time workers are currently down just 0.3%.

Black and Hispanic UnemploymentUnemployment rates under Biden — overall and by race — are low, as we recently reported. The rates for Black and Hispanic Americans reached or tied record lows.

Yet Trump claimed, without evidence, that migrant border crossings under Biden had created “flat-out economic warfare” on Black and Hispanic Americans by “taking the jobs” of those workers.

He also claimed, as he said in Phoenix, “Unions are being absolutely slaughtered because people are coming in, and they’re taking those union jobs.” The data on union membership rates don’t show a slaughtering in recent years.

In Las Vegas, Trump claimed that “with his border nightmare, Joe Biden is also waging an all-out war on the workers of America, especially African-Americans and Hispanic Americans.” In Phoenix, he added, “These people are taking the jobs of African Americans. They’re taking the jobs of Hispanic Americans, and it’s — they’re tremendously affected.”

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t support that.

The Black unemployment rate was 9.3% when Biden took office, and it’s now 6.1% as of May. Over that time, it hit a record low of 4.8% in April 2023. The current 6.1% rate is the same as the pre-pandemic rate in February 2020.

The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 8.5% when Biden took office and has dropped to 5% as of May. In September 2022, it tied a record rate of 3.9%, which was first hit under the Trump administration. The rate now is 0.7 percentage points above the pre-pandemic rate of 4.3%.

There are also more job openings in the U.S. than job seekers: 8.1 million job openings in April and 6.5 million unemployed job seekers the same month.

The number of unemployed Black Americans has gone down under Biden, from 1.9 million people when he took office to 1.3 million in May. The level of Hispanic or Latino unemployment dropped from 2.5 million to 1.6 million over the same time period.

As for Trump’s claim that people who have crossed the border illegally are taking union jobs, the available statistics don’t back that up, either. Our fact-checking colleagues at Politifact interviewed economists and labor experts on this issue, who said migrants who come to the U.S. aren’t likely to take union jobs and instead work in lower level jobs such as being a day laborer.

A 2022 Cato Institute working paper posited that immigration overall from 1980 to 2020 led to a 5.7 percentage point reduction in union density in the U.S. because immigrants “have lower preferences for unionization and increase diversity in the working population that, in turn, decreases solidarity among workers.” That paper doesn’t show immigrants are taking union jobs, but rather having an effect on unionization. (And one of the authors of the report noted on the Cato website that there were other issues to consider, such as whether “unions reduce immigration rather than immigration reducing unions.”)

Regardless, the yearly rates of union membership among wage and salary workers under Biden don’t show evidence that unions are being “slaughtered,” as Trump claimed.

In 2023, 10% of wage and salary workers were union members, down from 10.8% in 2020, the year before Biden took office. But the rate has been declining for several decades; it was 20.1% in 1983, according to BLS figures.

The rate declined under Trump, too, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The union membership rate was 10.7% in 2016, before Trump took office, and it dropped to 10.3% in 2019. The following year, when a union job could have offered more security than others during the pandemic, as researchers found, the rate went up to 10.8%.

The question of how immigration overall, not only illegal immigration, affects the U.S. economy and jobs has long been debated and studied. We wrote about the issue in 2010 and found: “Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.”

A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released in 2016 largely reiterated those conclusions. It said there was “little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers,” according to a press release on the report, and that the impact on wages over a 10-year or longer period was “very small.” However, the National Academies said there was “some evidence that recent immigrants reduce the employment rate of prior immigrants” and that if there is a negative impact on wages, it’s “most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school—who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills.”

Those conclusions, too, are for all of the foreign-born in the U.S., not solely those who entered the U.S. illegally.

Those in the country illegally don’t have legal authorization to work — but many do anyway. A 2022 Congressional Research Service report said most of those in the country illegally participate in the labor force, and their jobs are “highly concentrated in certain industries, including agriculture, construction, leisure/hospitality, services, and manufacturing.” (Those who have applied for asylum have to wait six months to receive a work authorization.)

Update, June 18: We updated this story to include more information, including in the bullet at the top, regarding Trump’s inaccurate statement about apprehensions at the southern border in April.

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Quick TakeRussian warships conducted simulated military exercises on their way to Cuba in June. But social media posts share clips from a 2018 Russian video of missile tests in the White Sea to claim the warships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” before arriving in Havana. A Department of Defense spokesperson said the claim is “not true.”

Full StoryA four-ship Russian convoy, including a military frigate and a nuclear-powered submarine, the Kazan, arrived in Cuba on June 12 for a five-day visit, CNN reported. Russian state media said that on the way to Cuba, the warships conducted military exercises “using computer simulation for naval targets, designating ship groupings of a simulated enemy,” CNN also reported.

But posts on social media shared clips of a years-old video to falsely claim the Russian ships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” on their way to Cuba.

A June 12 Instagram post by an account called packingpatriot.2 bears a caption that claims, “Russia is showing off its naval firepower right off the coast of Florida today thanks to Joe Biden and his useful idiots.”

The narrator on the post claims the Biden administration is “pushing us to the brink of World War III with their support of Ukraine.” He then shows a video of four missiles apparently launching from a ship through roiling smoke and into the sky. Those images are followed by a submarine on the surface of the water, then submerging, as Russian-speaking crew members are seen operating inside the ship. The text overlaid on the video says, “Russians showing off their firepower right off the coast of Florida.”

The post had received more than 6,800 likes as of June 14.

A similar Instagram post also shared on June 12 has text that claims, “Breaking[:] Russia conducting marine exercises with nuclear submarines just 66 miles off the coast of Florida…” That post also shows the video of the missiles blasting off and the Russian crew inside the submarine.

But a Google search of images from the Instagram posts shows that a longer version of the video was shared six years ago on YouTube with the title, “Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Successfully Test-Fires 4 Bulava intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.”

An image from that video also appeared in an article on the Indian news site The Week on May 24, 2018. That article reported, “As a warning to the western nations, and in particular the US, Russia test-fired four Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles from the nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky on May 22. Fired from the submarine in a submerged position from the White Sea, the missiles successfully hit targets on the Kura range in the Kamchatka Peninsula.”

An Associated Press story that appeared in the Navy Times on Oct. 14, 2019, also shows the image used on the Indian news site, and the caption reads: “In this photo made from the footage taken from Russian Defense Ministry official web site on Thursday, May 24, 2018, the Russian nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky test-fires the Bulava missiles from the White Sea.”

So the video in the Instagram posts does not show Russian missiles being fired “off the coast of Florida” in June 2024. Rather, the video — provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense — shows missiles being fired by a different submarine in the White Sea toward Kamchatka in eastern Russia in 2018.

We asked the U.S. Department of Defense for a response to the social media claim that a Russian ship fired missiles near the Florida coast while en route to Cuba, and a spokesperson emailed a one-line reply: “That is not true.”

The Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov did fire a 21-gun salute as it arrived in Havana harbor, CNN reported.

U.S. officials told the New York Times that the Russian warships posed no threat and were not carrying nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense has been monitoring the movement of the ships through the Atlantic Ocean, a spokesperson told the Times. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the warships practiced locating targets and used precision missiles to simulate destroying those targets at distances of more than 350 miles, according to the Times.

CNN reported that U.S. officials said Russian ships traveled to Cuba every year between 2013 and 2020.

The Russian-Cuban alliance goes back further. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane captured images of nuclear missile sites being built by the then-Soviet Union in Cuba. Then-President John F. Kennedy placed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet supplies from arriving and demanded that the missiles be removed. The Americans and Soviets reached a deal in which the missiles were dismantled and the U.S. promised not to invade the island, ending the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. “Russia slates drills for nuclear forces.” 14 Oct 2019.

CNN. “Russian frigate receives 21 gun salute as it enters Havana harbor.” 12 Jun 2024.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Cuban Missile Crisis.” Accessed 13 Jun 2024.

Oppmann, Patrick, et al. “Russian ships arrive in Cuba as Cold War allies strengthen their ties.” CNN. 12 Jun 2024.

Sampson, Eve. “Russian Warships Enter Havana Harbor as Part of Planned Exercises.” New York Times. 12 Jun 2024.

The Week. “Russia’s nuclear submarine test fires four Bulava missiles.” 24 May 2018.

U.S. Department of Defense. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 13 Jun 2024.

YouTube. “Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Successfully Test-Fires 4 Bulava intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.” 2018.

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Anyone who has heard a speech by former President Donald Trump in the last few years has certainly heard his unsubstantiated claim that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.

Trump has offered scant support for this claim, but in virtually all of his recent speeches, he has been citing a reported drop in crime in Venezuela as evidence that the economically and politically beleaguered country is sending its criminals to the U.S.

Experts in and out of Venezuela told us there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claim. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela — though not nearly as dramatically as Trump claims — but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to prove a negative, and those who follow Venezuelan politics say such a tactic is not beyond Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and is seeking another six-year term. The FBI acknowledges some Venezuelan criminals have migrated to the U.S., but there’s no indication they were purposefully released from prison to come to this country.

When Trump makes such an explosive and sweeping claim — and makes it a hallmark of his case to return to office — the onus is on him to provide evidence. He hasn’t. (His press office did not respond to our inquires about it.) And the argument that Venezuelan crime is down is not the proof Trump suggests it is.

Trump’s ClaimIn recent speeches, Trump has sometimes said that crime is down “a staggering 67%” in Venezuela, while at other times he has put the drop in crime at “72% in a year.”

But in each case, as he did in a video posted to social media on June 4, he cited the statistics to support his claim, “They’re taking their drug dealers and their people in jail, lots of people in jail, they’re taking their murderers, their killers, they’re taking them all and they’re sending them into the United States.”

“Venezuela was crime ridden,” Trump said in remarks on May 31 after his conviction in the hush money case. “Caracas, their cities, crime ridden two years ago, three years ago. They just reported a 72% drop in crime in the last year because all of their criminals, most of them, and the rest are coming in now, the ones that didn’t come in. In Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States, and that’s true with many other countries.”

In this report, we’ll focus on Venezuela because that’s the country most often cited by Trump.

Carlos Nieto of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organizationA Window to Freedom is, of course, well aware of Trump’s relentless insistence that Venezuelan officials have been systematically emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.

Nieto, whose group has been monitoring the prison situation in Venezuela for more than 25 years, told us he has observed no evidence that supports Trump’s claim. He added that there definitely is no official state policy to that effect.

Some criminals have emigrated from Venezuela, he told us in Spanish, and some have made their way to the U.S. But, he said, “there is nothing that can be affirmed that establishes that there is an agreement, or that the Venezuelan government is helping criminals leave Venezuela to go to the United States.”

But neither can he rule out that it could be happening “under the hood.”

“I do not doubt that it could be happening, nor do I doubt that it can be done,” Nieto said. “I mean, these people, I’m talking about Maduro and his clique, are capable of that and many more things.”

But that’s pure speculation. And again, Nieto and other experts say they have seen no evidence of it.

Venezuelan Crime StatsReliable crime statistics in Venezuela are notoriously difficult to obtain. The government hasn’t provided dependable crime reports in many years, Mike LaSusa, deputy director of content at InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas, told us via email.

Although Venezuelan security officials in May reported a 25% drop in crime this year compared with the same period in 2023, “the absence of official reports makes it impossible to verify the data,” LaSusa said in a May 28 report.

In the absence of reliable government reporting, media and nongovernmental organizations have become the most trusted sources for documenting and tracking crime, LaSusa said.

One such NGO, the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, in December reported a 25% decrease in violent deaths between 2022 and 2023. (Violent deaths include homicides, deaths by police intervention and suspected violent deaths under investigation.) That drop was widely reported in U.S. media. If Trump is citing the murder tally as a proxy for overall crime, he is vastly overstating the one-year drop.

But the number of violent deaths has been declining for years in Venezuela, according to the group’s tallies, and is nearly 70% lower than it was in 2018, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the founder and director of the OVV (the acronym for Venezuelan Observatory of Violence in Spanish). That corresponds with Trump’s figure, but, of course, that is a much longer time frame that predates the Biden administration.

LaSusa said the OVV’s murder rate estimates track with InSight’s observation about “a reduction in the intensity of criminal violence in certain areas of the country.” But, he said, InSight has not seen a reduction in crime of 67% in a year, as Trump claimed.

“Additionally, the reductions that we have observed seem to respond largely to changes in criminal dynamics, rather than the effectiveness of the government’s security policies,” LaSusa said. “Basically, criminal groups seem to be seeking new opportunities outside of Venezuela due to the lack of opportunities in the country.”

What’s Driving the Crime Drop?In its Annual Report on Violence 2023, OVV documented 6,973 violent deaths in 2023, about 14% of which resulted from police enforcement. That’s down from 9,447 and 9,367 in 2021 and 2022, respectively. That’s a decline of 26% in the reported number of violent deaths between 2021 and 2023.

While the violent death rate may have dropped, a national survey conducted by OVV in mid-2023 found that about 78% of residents believed crime had stayed the same or gotten worse.

Briceño-León shared with us via email in Spanish some of the causes OVV identified for the drop in murders — none of which includes a government program to ship convicts 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,” Briceño-León said.

Rather, he said, the drop in crime is due to worsening economic and living conditions in the country, which has led to a massive out-migration of nearly 8 million people since 2014.

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

There has also been a consolidation of gang activity, which has led to a reduction in crime. In its report, OVV wrote that the drop in crime “can be attributed to the reduction of disorganized criminal activities and the growing concentration and monopolization of violence by powerful criminal organizations. These criminal organizations are now focusing on specific niches of criminal opportunities, which has led to a decreased overall level of violence in the country.”

“The decrease in ‘disorganized’ violence, which causes high lethality, has been reduced by the notable emigration of young people and the loss of opportunities for crime,” the report stated. “In recent years, there has been a reduction in the lethality of violence in certain parts of the country. This trend has been attributed to agreements made between criminal gangs regarding the distribution of tasks during business operations, as well as the demarcation of areas of operation, which has allowed for their expansion and consolidation. However, in municipalities where there are no such agreements or where criminal control has not been fully established, violent events continue to occur.”

The consolidation of organized crime has led to “a kind of mafia peace” in areas they control, Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us in Spanish.

The “humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela has also had implications for criminals as well. Venezuela, she said, “stopped being attractive for crime, because it no longer made sense to kidnap. … It made no sense to steal, because everyone was poor. In Venezuela … no one had money, people were starving and then for crime, for criminals, it was no longer profitable to have criminal activities.”

Rísquez said another reason for the decrease in crime is that Venezuelan authorities, sometime between 2015 and 2021, began “a large number of alleged extrajudicial executions” of people accused of belonging to criminal groups.

The OVV report notes that some criminals have also left Venezuela “seeking to continue their criminal life in other places where they find greater opportunities for profit,” Briceño-León said. But, he said, the vast majority of emigrants from Venezuela are “honest workers fleeing the country’s poverty, looking for a job and a better future.”

The vast majority of those fleeing Venezuela have settled in nearby South American countries. But more and more are making their way to the U.S. Prior to President Joe Biden taking office, relatively few Venezuelan emigrants were intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol. For most of the 2010s, less than 100 Venezuelans a year were caught trying to cross the southwest border illegally. The number grew to more than 2,000 in fiscal year 2019. But beginning in 2021 the numbers began to swell, and topped 187,000 and 200,000 in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, respectively.

A Venezuelan asylum seeker carries his daughter before they cross the Rio Grande into Brownsville, Texas, in December 2022. The U.S. has seen a surge of migrants from Venezuela since 2021. Photo by Veronica G. Cardenas/ AFP via Getty Images.As of January, the U.S. had the third-largest number of Venezuelan emigrants in the world (545,000) — though Colombia remained by far the largest destination (2.9 million), followed by Peru (1.5 million). Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and Spain each had roughly the same number as the U.S.

Criminal groups with origins in Venezuela have quickly spread to neighboring South American countries where most Venezuelans have settled. According to a U.S. State Department trafficking report for Colombia released in 2023, “El Tren de Aragua – Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang – and the National Liberation Army (ELN) operate sex trafficking networks in the border town of Villa del Rosario in the Norte de Santander department. These groups exploit Venezuelan migrants and internally displaced Colombians in sex trafficking and take advantage of economic vulnerabilities and subject them to debt bondage.”

And some criminals from Venezuela have come to the U.S.

Nieto, of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organization A Window to Freedom, attributed the decrease in crimes to the mass emigration from the country in recent years, a number, he said, that “undoubtedly does not exclude criminals.”

There is some evidence Tren de Aragua gang members have also made their way to the U.S. The U.S. Border Patrol told CNN en Español that 38 potential members of Tren de Aragua were arrested at the border between October 2022 and October 2023.

On April 5, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens posted on social media to “[w]atch out for this gang. It is the most powerful in Venezuela, known for murder, drug trafficking, sex crimes, extortion, & other violent acts.”

And suspected members of the Venezuelan gang have been linked to a number of crimes in the U.S., including the murder of a former Venezuelan police officer in Miami in November, and a spate of cell phone robberies in New York City.

In March, Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. María Elvira Salazar led a group of 23 federal legislators petitioning Biden to formally designate Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization, which would allow the U.S. to freeze assets its members have in the U.S. In a Senate subcommittee hearing on April 11, Chris Landberg, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, told Rubio that “we’re closely tracking Tren De Aragua and have similar concerns to you,” though he declined to discuss internal deliberations about its designation.

Rísquez, author of “The Aragua Train: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America,” said that while some criminals are inevitably among those who have emigrated from Venezuela to the U.S., “There is no element, no evidence, nothing that indicates that in Venezuela prisoners are being released to leave or to be sent to the United States to commit crimes. There is no plan from the Venezuelan government that points toward that.”

Prison ReleasesComplicating the issue is that Venezuela has, in fact, been actively trying to reduce its prison population.

Venezuela has been seeking to address severe overcrowding in its preventive detention centers, which were only designed to hold inmates for 48 hours but have become the de facto prisons of the country, Nieto said.

In March, the Presidential Commission for Judicial Revolution announced the release of 100 inmates from such a facility as part of a directive issued by Maduro to evaluate the preventive detention facilities and address overcrowding.

Preventive detention centers were designed to be temporary holding cells for people awaiting a court date. But that’s not what they became, Nieto said.

“The Ministry for the Penitentiary Service many years ago gave the order not to allow the entry of new people [to the traditional prisons] if they did not authorize it,” Nieto said. “This ministry prohibited the entry of new inmates into Venezuelan prisons, which is where they should be. This caused the preventive care centers to collapse and the preventive care centers to become, as they are today, the new prisons of Venezuela.”

Nieto estimates there are as many as 70,000 people held in these preventive care centers, far greater than they were designed to house.

In response, the government created two commissions to review the cases of prisoners and to determine if they should be “granted freedom,” Nieto said. “In fact, there are many who have been released.”

While some in the U.S. have claimed the Venezuelan government is releasing its most violent criminals, the Venezuelan government doesn’t disclose the charges against those released, so there’s no way of knowing, he said.

“Look, people are released, first, in many cases because they have been detained there for several years and a trial has not even been initiated against them,” Nieto said. “Also because in many cases they are minor crimes that do not merit such heavy penalties. So, well, that frees people. There are cases [of those] that have even already served the sentence established at that time.”

In addition, the Venezuelan government under Maduro has attempted recently to militarily regain control of traditional prisons, whose operation had previously been ceded to criminal groups. The leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, and hundreds of others escaped from the prison where the gang originated shortly before the prison was raided by government authorities in September, CNN en Español reported. He remains at large, and InSight reported that it is believed he is being protected by criminal associates in a mining town in Venezuela near the border with Guyana.

According to the World Prison Brief website maintained by Helen Fair of the Institute for Crime and Justice Police Research, Venezuela’s prison population (not including pre-trial detainees) declined from 37,543 in 2020 to 32,200 in 2022 (and had been declining for the four years before that as well).

The government’s efforts to retake control of the prisons “has involved relocating some prisoners from one prison to another, and there are some prisoners who are unaccounted for,” LaSusa, of InSight, said. “However, the Venezuelan government has no known policy of selecting particular inmates to send them outside the country.”

SpeculationAgain, Trump has provided no evidence to back up his claim that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons and sending inmates to the U.S.

Some supporters of Trump’s immigration policy say that, while perhaps speculative, there is good reason to believe Trump may be right.

Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates lower immigration, wrote a column noting that Cuba did something like that in the 1980s, and he argued that since there are ideological and political ties between Cuba and Venezuela, “the idea may not be as specious as some have claimed.”

In 1980, Cuban leader Fidel Castro allowed the mass migration of some 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

“Most were true refugees, many had families here, and the great majority has settled into American communities without mishap,” the Washington Post wrote in 1983. “But the Cuban dictator played a cruel joke. He opened his jails and mental hospitals and put their inmates on the boats too.”

According to the Post, about 22,000 of the new arrivals “freely admitted that they were convicts.” Some were political prisoners, but others were convicts who had committed serious felonies, including violent crimes.

Arthur pointed to a drop in Venezuelan crime, the close alignment between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, and anecdotal evidence of Venezuelans committing crimes in the U.S.

“None of this is evidence of anything,” Arthur told us, but “all of this does raise some questions.”

But the bar is higher than that for such a definitive and repeated claim by Trump, and numerous officials say they have seen no evidence to support Trump’s claim. (Not to mention the fact that Trump claims the emptying of prisons and mental institutions is happening “with many other countries.”)

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

“They are neither emptying the prisons nor the mental shelters to send people to the United States, nor is the reduction in crime associated with [Trump’s claim],” Rísquez, the Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us. “Those statements by former President Trump, it seems to me that they have no basis, that they are political, that they have to do with, well, some intention to criminalize migration or the processes that are occurring in the United States with migrants.”

In an interview with CBS News in March, Owens, the U.S. Border Patrol chief, was asked if it was accurate — as Trump has said — that “we have millions and millions of people coming from jails and prisons.”

“I don’t know,” Owens said. “I don’t know if other countries are releasing people from jails and those folks that got released are making their way up, or not, I don’t know what the numbers would be. It’s the unknown that scares us. I can tell you that there are at least 140,000 that we know about that have gotten away [since October], that we have detected but have not been able to apprehend. And I know there’s a good likelihood that there’s plenty more that we have not detected that also got away. Is it possible that at least a portion of them come from violent criminal backgrounds or served time in prison in other countries? Absolutely.”

But among the large number of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing illegally into the U.S. and then seeking asylum status, “I think they absolutely are by and large good people,” Owens said.

Nonetheless, he said, there is “a very small amount” among those apprehended that have criminal backgrounds, including “convicted sexual predators” and “convicted gang members.” Owens said it is only logical that there is a “higher incidence” of criminals among the so-called gotaways, because they are afraid to turn themselves in for CBP scrutiny.

“Most of the folks who we’re encountering that are turning themselves in, they’re coming across because they’re either fleeing terrible conditions or they’re economic migrants looking for a better way of life,” Owens said. “It doesn’t make them bad people. It’s just that they’re not being respectful of the laws that we’ve established as a country and they’re actually putting people in this country in harm’s way because they’re pulling the border security apparatus off of task.”

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Quick TakeThe Kansas City Chiefs offer a “Pride Collection” of merchandise for the team’s LGBTQ+ fans. But social media posts are making the unsupported claim that the team “Refuses to Participate in Pride Month” this year. The claim apparently originated in a satirical article, and we could find no announcement from the team regarding this year’s Pride Month.

Full StoryPride Month commemorates the Stonewall Uprising for gay rights in Manhattan on June 28, 1969, and celebrates the contributions of LGBTQ+ people with parades and other events throughout June.

But this year’s observance of Pride Month has been met in the U.S. with increasing anti-gay hostility, following passage last year of what ABC News said were a record number of state laws negatively affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The anti-gay sentiment has also been reflected in misinformation on social media, as we’ve written before.

The text on a June 8 Facebook post falsely claimed, “NFL Team Kansas City Chiefs Refuses To Participate In Pride Month, ‘It’s Extremely Woke.'” The post received more than 34,000 likes. A post with the same photos of a Pride parade juxtaposed with uniformed Chiefs players was shared on Threads, also claiming the team refused to participate in Pride Month, and carried the caption, “KANSAS CITY CHIEFS STANDING FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND TRUTH WITH THE WORD OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST NAME.”

The kicker for the Super Bowl champion team, Harrison Butker, criticized the celebration of Pride Month — among other controversial remarks he made about women and cultural values — during his commencement address at a private Kansas college on May 11, as we wrote. In that speech, Butker referred in passing to Pride Month as “the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.”

But we could find no statement issued by the Chiefs team about the celebration of Pride Month on the Chiefs’ website, X account or other social media. In fact, the Chiefs’ website includes what it calls a “Pride Collection” of merchandise for fans. Many of the items incorporate the team logo with the symbolic Pride rainbow, including hats, flags, signs and T-shirts that say, “LOVE WINS.”

A headline identical to the wording on the social media posts appeared June 6 on the website SpaceXMania. The article included a “SATIRE” label above the headline. The website includes a “Disclaimer” that states, in part, “All the information on this website – SpaceXMania.com – is published in good faith and for general information purposes only. SpaceXMania does not make any warranties about the completeness, reliability, and accuracy of this information.”

The social media posts do not include a “satire” label, however.

The June 8 Facebook post includes a link to an online article published on a website called News Today as evidence of its claim about the team’s stance on Pride Month. The headline on the article reads, “Breaking: The Kansas City Chiefs, an NFL franchise, declines involvement in Pride Month festivities, citing them as overly ‘woke.'” The article is a nearly word-for-word reprint of the satirical story that appeared on the SpaceXMania site.

We reached out to the Chiefs for a response to the claim, but we didn’t receive a response.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAlfonseca, Kiara. “Record number of anti-LGBTQ legislation filed in 2023.” ABC News. 28 Dec 2023.

FactCheck.org. Issues: LGBTQ.

Jaffe, Alan. “Pearl Jam Singer’s Criticism of Harrison Butker Didn’t Affect Concert Schedule.” FactCheck.org. 23 May 2024.

Jones, Brea. “Posts Misrepresent Virtual Rainbow on Arc de Triomphe for Pride Month.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jun 2023.

Kansas City Chiefs. Pride Collection. shop.chiefs.com. Accessed 11 Jun 2024.

Lavietes, Matt. “LGBTQ Pride Month kicks off with bias-fueled pushback.” NBC News. 5 Jun 2024.

Library of Congress. About Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Pride Month. Accessed 11 Jun 2024.

Macaluso, Nora. “Viral Video Makes False Claim About Pride Month Flag Display.” FactCheck.org. 14 Jun 2023.

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On June 4, President Joe Biden announced new measures to restrict asylum eligibility for those apprehended while trying to enter the U.S. illegally across the southern border.

As we’ve reported, apprehensions of those crossing illegally have gone up significantly during his presidency. Behind the increase is a spike in migrants seeking asylum. While asylum application figures aren’t broken down by how immigrants enter the country, the overall statistics show nearly 89,000 asylum applications in the U.S. in fiscal 2021; in fiscal 2023, the figure was nearly 479,000.

Less than 15% of those seeking asylum were ultimately granted it in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, according to Justice Department statistics. But all of the applications have created a growing backlog of cases, which can take several years to get to court.

Biden issued a proclamation to implement steps to decrease such crossings and ease the load of processing asylum applications. While proclamations are often ceremonial declarations, this one contained specific changes to immigration procedures that are destined to be challenged in court.

Here, we answer several questions about Biden’s action.

• What’s in Biden’s border proclamation?
• What reason did Biden give for acting?
• How many people are crossing the border illegally now?
• What impact will the order have on illegal crossings?
• How will migrants be ‘promptly removed’?
• What impact will it have on those seeking asylum?
• Under what legal authority did Biden act?
• Will it be challenged in court?
• How does this compare with the bipartisan plan that Biden supported?
• What’s the reaction of Republicans? Democrats?

What’s in Biden’s border proclamation?Biden’s order seeks to reduce the flow of people trying to cross the border illegally by suspending the entry of certain migrants and steering them toward a legal means of entry.

The order, as the Department of Homeland Security explains in a June 4 fact sheet, “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. For context, apprehensions averaged nearly 4,300 a day in April, according to the most recent U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

Some — but not all — of those who are apprehended during this period of high border encounters will be denied asylum eligibility and “promptly removed,” the DHS fact sheet says.

The DHS spells out those who are exempt from the policy: Lawful permanent residents, unaccompanied children, victims of “a severe form of trafficking,” “noncitizens with a valid visa or other lawful permission to enter the United States,” and noncitizens who enter the U.S. at a legal port of entry using a DHS-approved process, such as CBP One — an app that in January 2023 began accepting appointments for a limited number of migrants who are in Mexico and want to request asylum or parole.

There is also a broader exemption for people who “express a fear of return to their country or country of removal, a fear of persecution or torture, or an intention to apply for asylum” if they “establish a reasonable probability of persecution or torture in the country of removal.”

Currently, Border Patrol agents ask those apprehended at the border if they have a fear of returning to their home countries and want to apply for asylum, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, told us in a phone interview. But CBP will not ask such questions and those apprehended must affirmatively state that they wish to apply for asylum before they are referred to an asylum officer, she said. It’s known as the “shout test,” she added.

Those who are removed when this new policy is in effect will be barred from entering the U.S. for five years and may be subject to criminal prosecution.

The restrictions will be lifted 14 calendar days after the daily average of people apprehended crossing the border illegally drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days. The daily monthly average hasn’t been that low since July 2020.

What reason did Biden give for acting?In his proclamation, Biden cited a need to “address the historic levels of migration and more efficiently process migrants arriving at the southern border given current resource levels.” He called out Congress for not passing immigration legislation, including a bipartisan Senate deal that was unveiled in February but failed to advance.

“Our broken immigration system is directly contributing to the historic migration we are seeing throughout the Western Hemisphere, exacerbated by poor economic conditions, natural disasters, and general insecurity, and this fact, combined with inadequate resources to keep pace, has once again severely strained our capacity at the border,” Biden’s proclamation said. “The result is a vicious cycle in which our United States Border Patrol facilities constantly risk overcrowding, our detention system has regularly been at capacity, and our asylum system remains backlogged and cannot deliver timely decisions, all of which spurs more people to make the dangerous journey north to the United States.”

The immigration court backlog was nearly 3.6 million cases as of April, according to figures compiled by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University.

Biden criticized Congress, saying there had been a “decades-long failure … to address the problem through systemic reform and adequate funding” and specifically cited “Congress’s failure to pass the bipartisan legislative proposal.” As a result, he said, “I must exercise my executive authorities to meet the moment.”

How many people are crossing the border illegally now?As of April, there had been 531,208 encounters of people who illegally crossed the southern border in 2024, according to the most recent figures published by CBP. That is an average of 132,802 encounters a month, or about 4,390 encounters a day.

Last month, CBS News reported that during the first three weeks of May, apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents were down to 3,700 a day, based on internal government data. Complete figures for the month should be publicly available later in June.

The number of encounters recorded by the Border Patrol through the first four months of this year already was lower than in the same periods under Biden in 2022 and 2023, when there were 721,732 and 607,627 apprehensions of illegal border crossers, respectively. Those totals do not necessarily equal the number of people who illegally entered because some people may have been encountered more than once due to repeat attempts to enter the country.

What impact will the order have on illegal crossings?It’s unclear how effective the order will be. Putzel-Kavanaugh, of the Migration Policy Institute, is skeptical that the policy — which DHS called temporary — will be lifted any time soon.

“Right now, apprehensions are around 4,000 per day – so to get to 1,500 would mean apprehensions need to be cut by more than half,” she said. “l can’t imagine that would happen any time soon.”

In a June 5 analysis of the new policy, the American Immigration Council said it’s “highly unlikely that the current emergency will be lifted in the near future,” citing statistics that show “monthly average border crossings have exceeded 1,500 in every month” but one in five of the last six fiscal years.

Putzel-Kavanaugh does, however, expect that initially there will be some reduction in illegal border crossings.

“Migrants who are either deciding to travel [to the U.S.] or are currently in Mexico between the [legal] ports [of entry] … are likely to pause and wait and see what the impacts will be on the ground,” she said.

She also said they may try to choose a legal way to enter — which is what the administration wants.

“The idea is to encourage people to use the lawful pathways,” she said. “We could see an increase in CBP One. The effect of that could be that people wait longer for appointments.”

As we have written before, DHS describes CBP One as a “safer, humane, and more orderly” way of processing migrants. Those with CBP One appointments are screened and could be subject to expedited removal. But it currently takes weeks or months to get an appointment, and increasing the number of appointments will add to the delays, Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

Appointments are capped at 1,450 per day — which is 529,250 a year. For calendar year 2023, 413,300 people scheduled such appointments, CBP says.

“Those who seek to come to the United States legally, for example, by making an appointment and coming to a port of entry, asylum will still be available to them,” Biden said when announcing his proclamation in a press conference on June 4. “But if an individual chooses not to use our legal pathways, if they choose to come without permission and against the law, they’ll be restricted from receiving asylum and staying in the United States.”

How will migrants be ‘promptly removed’?At a June 4 background briefing for reporters, a senior administration official said that at times of high border crossings “individuals who do not manifest a fear will be immediately removable, and we anticipate that we will be removing those individuals in a matter of days, if not hours.”

But experts are skeptical that the administration has the resources to carry out the job.

“The new regulation presumes that the government will have the capacity to subject everyone to expedited removal,” the American Immigration Council’s analysis said. “This would require the government to not only have enough asylum officers to screen everyone who requests an interview through a ‘shout test’ and conduct fear interviews that (because they require more from the respondent) may take longer than existing interviews do, but also have the detention beds to hold them during this process and then enough deportation flights to return them to their home countries.”

Also, it isn’t easy to remove migrants who have traveled from countries other than Mexico and those in Central America, Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “Trying to organize removals for people all over the world is an incredibly time-consuming task,” she said, adding that some countries aren’t willing to accept the migrants and other countries don’t have the resources to do it well or quickly.

On May 16, the DHS and the Department of Justice announced what they called a Recent Arrivals Docket, or RA Docket, process. The system, which is now in place in five major cities, seeks “to accelerate asylum proceedings” for single adults “so that individuals who do not qualify for relief can be removed more quickly and those who do qualify can achieve protection sooner,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said.

The goal is to make asylum decisions in 180 days, instead of years, the joint announcement said.

Putzel-Kavanaugh said it is too soon to know how well the RA Docket process will work, but she believes the administration’s move toward such expedited removal processes will make it difficult for migrants to receive due process. “It raises questions about people being able to access an attorney, get documents together to prove their case – all of the due process questions.”

What impact will it have on those seeking asylum?The process for migrants to show that they are eligible for asylum during the initial screening process will be more difficult during periods of high border encounters. It is the second time in two years that the administration has tightened the rules, the American Immigration Council said in its analysis.

American Immigration Council, June 5: Before 2023, the standard for passing a screening interview for asylum was demonstrating “credible fear” of persecution—defined as a “significant possibility” (at least a 10 percent chance) that their asylum claim would prevail. Under the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule enacted in May 2023, most people who cross between ports of entry and are screened by an asylum officer are subjected to a higher standard known as “reasonable possibility.”

Under the new regulation, whenever the emergency suspension of entry is in effect, this standard is replaced with a completely new standard called “reasonable probability”—which the regulation defines as “substantially higher” than reasonable possibility, and “somewhat lower” than a “more likely than not” standard.

Those who are deemed ineligible for asylum can still remain in the U.S. under international protections — specifically under the Convention Against Torture and withholding of removal, which is a form of relief for migrants who fear persecution, as explained by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

However, the Biden administration has also tightened those standards, the senior official said in the June 4 press briefing.

“I think individuals who do manifest a fear and are ineligible for asylum as a result of the rules measures will be screened for our international obligations under withholding of removal and the Convention Against Torture at a ‘reasonable probability’ standard, which will be a substantially higher standard than the ‘significant possibility’ standard that is being used today, while still somewhat below the ultimate merits standard of ‘more likely than not,'” the senior official said.

“I think the bottom line is that the standard will be significantly higher,” the official added. “And so, we do anticipate that fewer individuals will be screened in as a result.”

Those who will be unaffected by the new rules include children who illegally enter the U.S. without a parent, adult family member or guardian. But relatively few border crossers are unaccompanied children. In fiscal year 2023, they made up only 5.3% of border encounters, according to CBP.

Human trafficking victims, who are also exempt from the new rules and eligible for a so-called T visa, make up an even smaller number.

“In FY 2023, USCIS received its highest number of T visa applications (8,598) in a single year and approved the highest number of T visa applications in a single year (2,181),” USCIS said in an April report to Congress. In addition, 1,495 eligible family members of trafficking victims were also granted T visas.

Under what legal authority did Biden act?Biden primarily relies on section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Section 212(f) of the INA reads: “[W]henever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

An “alien” under U.S. code is anyone who isn’t a citizen or national of the U.S.

Biden’s proclamation says that “absent the measures set forth in this proclamation, the entry into the United States of persons described” in the proclamation “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The proclamation also cites section 215(a) of the INA, which concerns travel restrictions, and part of the U.S. code that gives the president authority to delegate functions to agency heads. Section 215(a) of the INA says, in part, that it’s unlawful, unless the president orders otherwise, “for any alien to depart from or enter or attempt to depart from or enter the United States except under such reasonable rules, regulations, and orders, and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe.”

Will it be challenged in court?Yes. The American Civil Liberties Union has already said it will challenge Biden’s executive action in court. “It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a press release.

The ACLU and other groups filed suit over an asylum ban instituted by former President Donald Trump’s administration, and the courts blocked Trump’s regulations from taking effect. The ACLU says that ban “took the same approach” as Biden’s action — invoking section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. A senior Biden administration official, however, told reporters that there are “humanitarian exceptions” and “important exceptions for individuals entering through lawful pathways” in Biden’s proclamation.

As we’ve explained before, Trump issued a proclamation in November 2018 barring the entry of migrants unless they entered at ports of entry. At the same time, the administration issued regulations making those who entered the U.S. illegally between ports of entry ineligible for asylum.

A federal District Court judge in California halted Trump’s effort; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court both denied the Trump administration’s motions to stop the District Court’s ruling. The appeals court ultimately affirmed the lower court’s order in February 2020.

“The President does not have the authority to close the border under 212(f),” Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us via email when we wrote about this issue in February.

Other provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act “make very clear that all persons arriving at the border or entering the United States, without regard to status, must be processed for asylum if they indicate a fear of return to their home countries,” Gilman said. “These provisions cannot simply be trumped by 212(f). Under current law, they must be given effect and asylum seekers must be able to present their claims.”

When the bipartisan group of senators released the text of an immigration overhaul bill in February, Trump and other Republicans claimed then that Biden had “the right” to shut down the border, without legislation from Congress. But the claim was dubious, given Trump’s attempt and legal failure to do so.

Now, Biden is trying to implement a version of a border shutdown, with “exceptions” that the administration expects will allow the order to hold up in court.

It’s unclear if that will happen. In a report on Biden’s actions, the American Immigration Council said that whether the 212(f) presidential authority “may be used to address purely domestic policy concerns remains an unsettled area of law.”

“For more than 40 years, U.S. law has been clear: all people physically present or arriving in the United States may seek asylum. No president can erase that law from the books with the stroke of a pen,” Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council, said in a June 5 press release that noted the “legal uncertainty” around this issue.

How does this compare with the bipartisan plan that Biden supported?Biden’s action is similar to the border authority provisions of the bipartisan Senate plan that failed in Congress — but differs on the specifics.

The plan, which was unveiled in early February as part of a foreign aid bill, stated that the Department of Homeland Security secretary would automatically activate temporary border emergency authority to prohibit entry of migrants between ports of entry, except for unaccompanied children, if there is an average of 5,000 or more migrant encounters a day over seven consecutive days — or if there are 8,500 or more such encounters on any single day, as we have reported before.

The Homeland Security secretary also would have “discretionary activation” authority if there is an average of 4,000 or more encounters over seven consecutive days. The bill included an exception for migrants who said they had a fear of persecution if returned to their countries, if they demonstrated a “reasonable possibility” of such during an interview with an asylum officer.

As we’ve explained, Biden’s proclamation sets a lower threshold for activating its restrictions on asylum eligibility — a daily average of 2,500 encounters or more for seven straight days.

A major difference between Biden’s proclamation and the Senate bill is that the legislation appropriated money. The bill included funding for more border barriers, expanded detention facilities, and more personnel, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, asylum officers, and immigration judges.

But getting legislation through Congress is much tougher than issuing a proclamation. The Senate plan faced significant opposition from former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders. On Feb. 7, the bill failed after all but four Republicans and a few Democrats opposed it, and it failed again in May, when Democrats tried to advance it on a procedural vote.

What’s the reaction of Republicans? Democrats?Several Republicans, including Trump, have said Biden’s proclamation doesn’t do enough.

On social media, Trump posted a meme, which appears to have been left over from his criticism of the Senate immigration plan, wrongly claiming that Biden’s action “allows at least 5,000 illegal entries per day.” It doesn’t, and neither did the Senate legislation.

As one of the architects of the bill, Republican Sen. James Lankford, said of the measure in February, “It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous. The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. … If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”

Biden’s proclamation set a threshold of 2,500 average encounters. So Trump’s meme is both wrong and outdated.

In a video, also posted on social media, Trump said Biden’s order was “weak,” and claimed: “All he had to do is say, ‘Close the border.’ That’s the power of the presidency.” But, again, Trump tried to shut down the border and was blocked by the courts. (For more on that, see the section above on whether Biden’s proclamation will be challenged in court.)

Trump also wrongly said that “up to 20 million people” had been allowed in under Biden. There’s no evidence for such a figure. We found that from February 2021 through October 2023, 2.5 million people encountered at the southern border had been released into the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole. That’s according to DHS statistics. There were also an estimated 1.6 million so-called “gotaways,” meaning people who crossed the border by evading the authorities.

Democrats were divided over the president’s plan.

Rep. Pete Aguilar, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told reporters that Biden should “secure our border while opening up more legal pathways” and expressed concern that the proclamation “is just the enforcement only side of the strategy.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was even more critical of the order, saying in a statement that it was “extremely disappointing” and a “dangerous step in the wrong direction.”

“While there are some differences from Trump’s actions, the reality is that this utilizes the same failed enforcement-only approach, penalizes asylum seekers, and furthers a false narrative that these actions will ‘fix’ the border,” she said.

Biden’s proposal received a warmer reception from House members in the New Democrat Coalition, who issued a joint statement saying they were “encouraged” by the order, which they called a “commonsense action to restore order at the southern border.”

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in remarks on the Senate floor, said that “legislation would have been the more effective way to go,” but added that Biden was “left with little choice but to act on his own” because of Republican inaction.

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Quick TakeManhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on May 30. Now Bragg has become the target of viral social media posts that claim, without evidence, that he has a net worth of $42 million or more and baselessly imply that Bragg is corrupt.

Full StoryFormer President Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election by concealing payments he made to an adult-film star. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who guided the prosecution of the case against Trump, announced the verdict reached by a New York State Supreme Court jury on May 30.

The district attorney’s office will provide a memo to Justice Juan Merchan with recommendations for Trump’s sentencing, which is scheduled for July 11.

Bragg’s role in the historic case, in which Trump became the first current or former U.S. president to be convicted of a criminal offense, has made him a target of unsupported claims on social media about his financial holdings.

A widely shared meme posted May 30 on Facebook, showing a photo of Bragg, claims, “Net Worth: $42 Million[.] His Net Worth Has Grown 300% The Past 5 Years[.] He Owns 12 Properties, 8 Cars, and 3 Luxury Yachts[.] How Did DA Bragg Become So Wealthy?” Comments on the post call Bragg “crooked” and “corrupt.”

A May 31 Facebook post inflates Bragg’s purported net worth even more, saying, “How on earth did Alvin Bragg amass wealth of nearly $45 MILLION NET on an annual salary of app. $220,000 +- as DA?”

The May 30 post cites @RickyDoggin, a social media account titled “A Man of Memes,” who describes himself as a “Patriot – Fighting Back Against Liberal Insanity One Meme At A Time… Views expressed here are MY Opinions and nothing more.”

The posts are not marked as opinion, however, and cite no other sources for the claims about Bragg’s net worth.

New York City’s Annual Disclosure Law requires elected officials to file yearly reports listing their financial interests. Bragg’s most recent New York City Conflicts of Interest Board financial disclosure report for 2022 showed his financial holdings were nowhere near the claims in the posts.

The report showed Bragg received $100,000 to $249,999.99 for his annual income as district attorney; $5,000 to $54,999.99 in retirement plan distributions from the City University of New York; and $5,000 to $54,999.99 in dividends and distributions from a TIAA retirement account. The report also listed a Charles Schwab managed account valued at $5,000 to $54,999.99; an individual retirement account valued at $60,000 to $99,999.99; an IRA valued at $100,000 to $249,999.99; an IRA valued at $250,000 to $499,999.99; another IRA valued at $250,000 to $499,999.99; a retirement plan valued at $60,000 to $99,999.99; and “$500,000 or more” in a trust or estate, which Bragg wrote was “money that was in a bank account for the estate of my late mother.”

The report also showed two real estate holdings — a property in New York City that Bragg wrote was owned by his late mother and was sold in 2022 for “$500,000 or more” and a property in Petersburg, Virginia, that was owned by his grandmother and was valued at $100,000 to $249,999.99. New York City records show that Bragg’s mother’s house was sold in April 2022 for $2,250,000.

The conservative website the Dispatch debunked the recent posts about Bragg’s personal finances on June 3, and reported that similar claims appeared on social media in July 2022 and April 2023, shortly after Trump was indicted in New York.

We could find no reports or evidence that Bragg owns “12 Properties, 8 Cars, and 3 Luxury Yachts,” as the meme claimed. And his total financial holdings, based on his disclosure forms and the sale of his mother’s property, add up to about $4.6 million — not $42 million.

We reached out to the Manhattan district attorney’s office for comment on the social media posts, but we didn’t receive a response.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBellafante, Ginia. “Alvin Bragg’s Next Decision on Trump Presents a Political Quandary.” New York Times. 7 Jun 2024.

Breuninger, Kevin. “Trump has been convicted. Here’s what happens next.” CNBC. Updated 31 May 2024.

Demas, Alex. “No Evidence Supports Claims That Alvin Bragg Is Worth $42 Million.” The Dispatch. 3 Jun 2024.

District Attorney of New York County. “Alvin Bragg: A lifetime of hard work, courage and demanding justice.” Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

District Attorney of New York County. “D.A. Bragg Announces 34-Count Felony Trial Conviction of Donald J. Trump.” 30 May 2024.

Farley, Robert, D’Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Trump’s Criminal Conviction.” FactCheck.org. 31 May 2024.

New York City Conflict of Interests Board. The Annual Disclosure Law. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

New York City Conflict of Interests Board. Report for Alvin Bragg. Public Report for 2022. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

New York City Department of Finance. Office of the City Register. Document ID 2022040700872001. Deed for the Estate of Sadie Chavis Bragg. Accessed 7 Jun 2024.

Sisak, Michael R., et al. “Guilty: Trump becomes first former US president convicted of felony crimes.” Associated Press. Updated 31 May 2024.

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SciCheck DigestAntarctica is losing ice mass to the ocean, contributing to global sea level rise. But a popular video misrepresented work focused on Antarctic ice shelves — which float in the sea at the edges of the continent — to incorrectly suggest that “it is unclear if Antarctica is losing any ice on balance.”

Full StoryThe Antarctic ice sheet is a vast mass of ice, accumulated over millennia via snowfall, that sits atop bedrock, covering nearly all of Antarctica. As the ice spreads outward and meets the ocean, some of it begins to float. These floating ice platforms, which surround about three-quarters of Antarctica, are called ice shelves.

Antarctic land ice loss into the ocean is an increasingly important contributor to global sea level rise. In contrast, ice shelf loss doesn’t directly cause sea level rise, as the ice is already floating in the ocean and displacing water. However, ice shelf changes can contribute to land ice loss, as ice shelves in some areas buttress land ice and slow its descent into the ocean.

A popular video from the Heartland Institute — which has a long history of casting doubt on climate science — minimized the significance of Antarctic ice loss and then questioned whether it’s happening at all. “The truth is, it is unclear if Antarctica is losing any ice on balance or if it’s currently experiencing a net gain,” the video’s narrator inaccurately said, citing two scientific papers.

“The statement is false,” Chad Greene, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told us in an email. “Antarctica has been losing sea ice, grounded ice, and floating ice shelf mass over the past few decades. Satellite analysis from NASA groups show trends of ice loss, and the same trends have been reported by independent research groups from around the world.”

We reached out to the Heartland Institute with questions about the video but have not gotten a reply. The video was originally posted on Facebook and YouTube but is no longer available on Facebook.

The first paper mentioned in the video to back up the claim is a 2015 study by NASA researchers. They found that from 1992 to 2001 and 2003 to 2008, Antarctica gained ice mass.

But other studies disagree with the finding that Antarctica was gaining ice, and a NASA press release about the study now contains a message saying, “The findings reported here conflict with over a decade of other measurements, including previous NASA studies.”

“[M]ore recent work shows clearly that on balance Antarctica is losing mass,” Jonathan Kingslake, who studies ice sheet evolution at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told us in an email.

According to measurements from NASA satellites, since 2002 Antarctica has been losing an average of 140 billion metric tons of ice mass per year.

An ice shelf at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo by Daniel / stock.adobe.comThe Heartland Institute video went on to incorrectly state that a 2023 paper looking at data from 2009 to 2019 confirmed the 2015 NASA findings. However, that paper looked at Antarctic ice shelf area — the floating ice at the edges of the continent, as we explained — and not ice sheet mass overall. Saying that the 2023 paper confirmed the earlier NASA findings “is totally misleading,” Kingslake said.

Additionally, data from a longer time frame does show loss of Antarctic ice shelf area, Greene said.

The Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the latest report from this United Nations body — found that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets have been “losing mass since at least 1990, with the highest loss rate during 2010–2019” — a statement made with “high confidence.” And the ice sheet mass loss is expected to continue.

Antarctic Ice Loss Is ConsequentialEarlier in the Heartland Institute video, the narrator did acknowledge Antarctic ice loss but minimized its importance.

“The media claims that Antarctica is losing ice six or more times faster than it was a few decades ago,” the video said. “But Antarctica was barely losing ice back then and it still is barely losing ice compared to its overall ice mass. Some satellite measurements estimate that the total ice loss each year from Antarctica is 3/10,000 of 1% of the continent’s ice mass. That’s not much.”

Media outlets have reported, based on various studies, that the Antarctic ice sheet as of the 2010s was melting six times faster than in the 1980s, or that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets combined were losing ice six times faster in the 2010s than in the 1990s.

It’s correct that Antarctica “is barely losing ice compared to its overall ice mass,” as the video said, given that Antarctica’s total ice mass is very large, Helen Amanda Fricker, a professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told us in a written response to our questions. But “I would turn this around and say that even a small % of a large number is not inconsequential,” she said. The Antarctic ice sheet contains enough ice — if it all melted — to raise sea level by 57 meters, or 187 feet, she said.

Oceanographer Laurence Padman, president and senior scientist at Earth and Space Research, a nonprofit research institute, told us that he couldn’t argue with the fraction of ice lost given in the video, based on rough calculations and given variation and uncertainties in annual ice loss. But “the important number is the sea level rise, not the fraction of the Antarctic ice sheet that is lost,” he said in a written response to our questions.

As of 2018, the global average sea level had risen by 7 to 15 centimeters (almost 3 to 6 inches) since 1971, according to the latest IPCC report, and was projected to rise by 10 to 25 centimeters (about 4 to 10 inches) more by 2050, even if greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. Melting of the Antarctic ice sheet caused 7% of sea level rise between 1971 and 2018, but its contribution to sea level rise has increased and will continue to increase.

Since 2016, the Antarctic ice sheet has been responsible for 14% of sea level rise, according to the IPCC report. In a low-emissions scenario, the Antarctic ice sheet could contribute to more than 20% of sea level rise by 2100, according to a graphic in the report’s FAQ section.

Lizz Ultee, a glaciologist at Middlebury College, explained that sea level rise is driven by two main processes: ocean water expansion as it gets warmer and melting of ice into the ocean.

Mountain glaciers melt more quickly due to warming temperatures than ice sheets because mountain glaciers are smaller, Ultee explained.But the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are playing an increasing role in sea level rise.

Currently, Greenland, which has a smaller ice sheet than Antarctica, is losing ice mass at a faster rate, but in the long term, Antarctica “has the most potential to contribute to very large sea level changes,” Ultee said.

Antarctic ice sheet loss will probably lead to up toabout 0.3 meters, or nearly 1 foot, of sea level rise by 2100, she said, and total sea level rise could be about half a meter to a meter (1.6 to 3.3 feet) by that time. Even if humans were to stop contributing to climate change by 2100, she said, Antarctica would continue to lose ice mass and contribute to sea level rise for centuries.

About a meter of sea level rise in 2100 would flood the homes of about 4 million people in the U.S., Ultee said, an estimate that doesn’t include people who would be at risk from higher storm surges or more frequent tidal flooding, or who would be cut off from essential services.

The Eastern Gulf of Mexico — from the Mississippi Delta to Florida — has already experienced some of the fastest rates of local sea level rise in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Important Role of Ice ShelvesAs we’ve said, the Heartland Institute video also misrepresented data on ice shelves, incorrectly claiming a 2023 paper confirmed that the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining mass.

The 2023 paper, published in the Cryosphere, used satellite data to analyze the area of Antarctic ice shelves between 2009 and 2019, finding that 16 ice shelves grew in area and 18 got smaller. This translated to a net gain of 5,305 square kilometers in total ice shelf area, representing an increase of 0.4%.

But “this paper is about Antarctic ice shelves, which are only the floating portions of the ice in Antarctica,” Ultee said. Ice shelves are made up of ice that has flowed from the continent outward to the ocean and is floating. (Sea ice, which forms seasonally from the ocean and also floats, is distinct from ice shelves.)

Antarctic ice shelves, in white, are seen at the edge of the continent, which is largely covered in the ice sheet (grey). Credit: Agnieszka Gautier, National Snow and Ice Data CenterThe work “does not support the assertion that the Antarctic ice sheet is not losing mass,” Ultee said.

Padman also said that the Cryosphere paper looked at one specific time period that doesn’t represent the full history of Antarctic ice shelf loss. Prior work, published in Nature in 2022, showed that Antarctic ice shelves lost 35,000 square kilometers of area between 1997 and 2004. The Cryosphere paper showed the ice shelves regaining “only about 15% of the earlier loss,” he said.

Greene, the NASA scientist, co-authored the Nature paper. In that study, “we used a longer, 24 year baseline and found overwhelming loss of ice shelf area since 1997,” he said. “We then looked at the calving history of the biggest ice shelves and found that they are all on track for major calving events in the next 10 or 15 years … meaning Antarctica as a whole is losing ice shelf mass overall.” (Ice shelf calving occurs when chunks of ice break off into the ocean.)

Additionally, ice shelf loss in specific areas is significant and indirectly influences sea level rise, experts told us.

“Ice shelves don’t directly contribute to sea level rise when they melt but rather, they act like buttresses to glaciers, keeping the ice from simply sliding into the ocean,” Greene said.

Padman added that “some areas of ice shelves affect ‘buttressing’ of grounded ice, while other areas don’t.” The ice shelves shown to be losing ice in the Cryosphere paper — many in West Antarctica — tend to be more important for buttressing the ice sheet than the ice shelves that are gaining ice.

“Even if East Antarctic ice shelves are gaining area and the West Antarctic is losing area, we still really care about the West Antarctic ice shelf area,” Ultee said.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

Sources“Ice Sheets.” National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed 5 June 2024.

Padman, Laurie et al. “Confused about ice shelf decay and sea ice increase?” Scripps Glaciology Group website. Accessed 5 June 2024.

“Is an East Antarctic Melt Likely?” National Snow and Ice Data Center. Updated 17 Feb 2022.

Andreasen, Julia R. et al. “Change in Antarctic Ice Shelf Area from 2009 to 2019.” The Cryosphere. 16 May 2023.

Fox-Kemper, B. et al. “2021: Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change.” Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1211–1362.

Otosaka, Inès N. et al. “Mass Balance of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets from 1992 to 2020.” Earth System Science Data. 20 Apr 2023.

“Regional fact sheet – Polar Regions.” Sixth Assessment Report: Working Group I – The Physical Science Basis. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

Hanna, Edward et al. “Short- and Long-Term Variability of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets.” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 8 Feb 2024.

“The Heartland Institute.” DeSmog Climate Disinformation Database. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

The Heartland Institute (@HeartlandInstitute). “The media claims that Antarctica is losing ice 6 or more times faster than it was a few decades ago.” YouTube. 21 May 2024.

Heartland Institute. “The media claims that Antarctica is losing ice 6 or more time faster than it was a few decades ago. But in reality, it’s barely losing ice back then or now! …” Facebook.

Greene, Chad. Email to FactCheck.org. 4 Jun 2024.

Zwally, H. Jay et al. “Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Exceed Losses.” Journal of Glaciology. 2015.

Petersen, Kate S. “Fact Check: NASA Antarctic Ice Sheet Data Consistent with Global Warming.” USA Today. 24 Mar 2023.

“Study: Mass gains of Antarctic ice sheet greater than losses.” NASA website. 5 Nov 2015.

Kingslake, Jonathan. Email to FactCheck.org. 29 May 2024.

“Ice Sheets.” NASA website. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

Rice, Doyle. “Antarctic Ice Melting 6 Times Faster than It Did in ’80s.” USA Today. Updated 15 Jan 2024.

Carrington, Damian. “Polar Ice Caps Melting Six Times Faster than in 1990s.” The Guardian. 11 Mar 2020.

“Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s.” NASA website. 16 Mar 2020.

Fricker, Helen Amanda. Correspondence with FactCheck.org. 28 May 2024.

Padman, Laurence. Correspondence with FactCheck.org. 29 May 2024 and 31 May 2024.

Ultee, Lizz. Phone call and emails with Factcheck.org. 31 May 2024, 5 Jun 2024 and 6 Jun 2024.

“Sea Level.” NASA website. Accessed 6 Jun 2024.

Hauer, Mathew E. et al. “Millions Projected to Be at Risk from Sea-Level Rise in the Continental United States.” Nature Climate Change. 14 Mar 2016.

Greene, Chad A. et al. “Antarctic Calving Loss Rivals Ice-Shelf Thinning.” Nature. 10 Aug 2022.

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The total U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services in 2023 was about $252 billion, the lowest it has been in 14 years. Former President Donald Trump was way off when he falsely claimed that the U.S.-China trade gap is about four times as high.

“Right now, we have the largest deficit we’ve ever had with China, like over a trillion dollars,” Trump said in an interview for Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show,” which was posted online June 3. “Think of how bad that is. Too much. You can’t sustain that.”

Trump made the claim when talking about his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “He respected me,” Trump said, claiming that “they don’t respect” President Joe Biden “at all.”

While Trump portrays bilateral trade deficits as a negative, many economists do not believe that they necessarily are. For example, Robert Z. Lawrence and Yeling Tan, the lead authors of a strategic brief for the Global Future Council on International Trade and Investment, said the ideas that “trade deficits are bad” and “[b]ilateral trade between countries should be balanced” are misconceptions.

Regardless, Trump was wrong about the size of the imbalance in exports and imports between the U.S. and China — and he wasn’t even close, as the chart below shows.

The U.S. had a trade deficit with China in goods and services of roughly $252 billion in 2023, according to revised figures the Bureau of Economic Analysis released June 6. The deficit in goods trading was about $279 billion for the year, but that was partially offset by a roughly $27 billion surplus in the trading of services — which can include travel, transportation, finance and intellectual property.

In fact, last year’s total trade gap with China was lower than it was in each year of Trump’s presidency. It also was the lowest since the $220 billion deficit in 2009.

BEA data going back to 1999 show that the highest total U.S.-China trade deficit in goods and services was about $378 billion in 2018 — when Trump was in office. In 2022, the deficit was $366 billion, the highest figure among Biden’s three years in office.

The former president has been exaggerating the U.S. trade deficit with China, and other countries, for years, dating to the 2016 campaign and in justifying his trade policies when in office. He used to regularly claim that the deficit with China was $500 billion, which also was incorrect. His latest assertion that the deficit is “over a trillion dollars” is even further off the mark.

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Quick TakeA photo taken in January shows a large tunnel under Gaza’s northern border with Israel, reportedly used in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. But recent social media posts falsely claim that the photo shows a tunnel connecting Egypt with the southern Gaza city of Rafah — where Palestinians displaced by the Israel-Hamas war have been sheltering.

Full StoryMore than a million people fleeing the Israel-Hamas war had been sheltering in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah when, on May 26, the Israeli military struck a refugee encampment, killing at least 45 — most of whom were women and children — according to the Gaza health ministry.

That strike, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “tragic mishap,” and worsening conditions in Rafah have kept the area in the news. Now, it is the target of misinformation.

Israel closed the border with Egypt on May 7, shutting off a major route for humanitarian aid and depriving people there of food and medicine. On May 24, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Israel to end military operations in Rafah and open the border, which Israel has not done.

A photo taken on Jan. 7 shows the inside of a tunnel that Hamas reportedly used on Oct. 7 to attack Israel through the Erez border crossing in Northern Gaza. Photo by Noam Galai via Getty Images.Now, posts are circulating on social media that claim to show a picture of “One of 50 Tunnels the size of motorways Israel has discovered connecting Rafah to Egypt.”

Social media users are responding to the posts with messages that indicate the tunnel justifies Israel’s actions in Rafah. For example, one user wrote, “No wonder they resisted Israel’s invasion of Rafa! They all new what was under cover there! Go for it Israel, consume anything along your path to victory!”

But the picture actually shows a tunnel that was photographed in January on the opposite end of the Gaza Strip at the Erez border crossing into Israel.

The caption accompanying the original photo, as shown on the Getty Images website, says: “A view inside a tunnel that Hamas reportedly used on October 7th to attack Israel through the Erez border crossing on January 07, 2024 in Northern Gaza. As the IDF have pressed into Gaza as part of their campaign to defeat Hamas, they have highlighted the militant group’s extensive tunnel network as emblematic of the way the group embeds itself and its military activity in civilian areas.”

The Israeli military said it has found multiple tunnels on the southern end of Gaza, which borders Egypt. That corridor “served as the oxygen line of Hamas through which Hamas carried out weapons smuggling into Gaza on a regular basis,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military chief spokesperson, said in May.

But the photo circulating in these social media posts does not show one of those tunnels.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesUnited Nations. “Conditions in Gaza are ‘unspeakable’ as one million people flee Rafah: UNRWA.” 3 Jun 2024.

Mackintosh, Thomas and David Gritten. “Dozens reported killed in Israeli strike on Rafah.” BBC. 27 May 2024.

Goldenberg, Tia, Melanie Lidman and Samy Magdy. “Netanyahu says deadly Israeli strike in Rafah was the result of a ‘tragic mishap.’” Associated Press. 28 May 2024.

United Nations. “World court orders Israel to halt military operations in Rafah.” 27 May 2024.

International Court of Justice. Order. APPLICATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP. 24 May 2024.

Galai, Noam. “Israeli Forces Highlight Alleged Hamas Infrastructure In Northern Gaza.” Getty Images. 7 Jan 2024.

PBS. “Israel seizes control of strategic Gaza land border, claims area is awash in smuggling tunnels.” 30 May 2024.

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President Joe Biden punctuated a campaign speech in Philadelphia with the phrase “a promise made and a promise kept,” when chronicling several actions his administration has taken. But in a few cases, he hasn’t kept the promise or he misleadingly described his accomplishments.

• Biden said the wealth gap between white and Black Americans is “the lowest it’s been in 20 years,” and he took credit. A 2023 paper from Federal Reserve Board staffers does show that the wealth ratio between white and Black families in 2022 was the smallest in 20 years, but the gap in raw dollars was the widest it had been since 1989.
• Biden exaggerated in saying he was “keeping my promises that no one should be in jail merely for using or possessing marijuana.” He has issued pardons, but only retroactively and for people convicted under federal or D.C. laws. It’s unclear if anyone has been released from jail.
• The president said he has kept his promise to “remove every lead pipe in America.” But that’s a “goal,” as the administration has said, that he has started to address. It’s not a “promise kept,” as Biden described it.
• Biden rightly said he capped the cost of insulin and out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors on Medicare. But he inaccurately added that the provisions will save Medicare $160 billion. Instead, they will increase costs.

As we typically see in campaign speeches, the president repeated claims we’ve written about before — on billionaires’ tax rates, former President Donald Trump’s comments on “bleach” and COVID-19, and Biden’s unsupported claim that Trump “is determined to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Biden spoke in Philadelphia on May 29. Pennsylvania, a swing state, was won by Biden in 2020 and by Trump in 2016.

The White-Black Wealth GapBiden said he reduced the gap in wealth between white and Black Americans.

“The racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years because of our efforts,” Biden said, repeating a claim that he has made before. “A promise made and a promise kept.”

Biden was accurately referring to the ratio of median Black wealth compared with median white wealth, based on data in a research paper published in October 2023 by Federal Reserve Board staffers. The report shows that in 2022, Black families had $15.75 in wealth for every $100 in wealth for white families — the smallest gap since 2001, when the ratio was roughly the same. (The paper defines wealth as assets minus liabilities.)

However, by an alternative measure, in absolute or raw dollars, Black families had a median wealth of $44,890, and for white families the median was $285,010. The difference of $240,120 was the largest gap in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1989, which is as far back as the report’s data go. The wealth gap in absolute dollars widened in 2022 despite Black wealth growing at a faster rate than white wealth, the report said.

So, one measure supports Biden’s claim and the other does not.

In an email, Moritz Kuhn, a professor of economics at the University of Mannheim in Germany, told us that “in general, there is no right or wrong measure of inequality or the racial wealth gap.” Although, economists tend to prefer using the relative, or ratio, measurement when making comparisons over time, he said.

As for why Black wealth increased in 2022, the authors of the report said that the biggest factor was growth in net housing wealth, or “the market value of a family’s home minus any outstanding loans secured by the home.” Business equity was the second largest factor, followed by a rise in “other wealth” and stocks. The paper noted that more Black families owned homes, stocks and businesses in 2022 than in some prior years.

Pardons for Federal Marijuana OffensesBiden has issued two proclamations pardoning people convicted of federal simple marijuana possession and use charges, as well as charges in Washington, D.C. But he exaggerated the impact of his actions when claiming that he was “keeping my promises that no one should be in jail” for such offenses. The pardons apply only to federal and D.C. offenses committed on or before Dec. 22, 2023 — not offenses after that date — and it’s unclear if anyone has or will be released from prison.

“I’m keeping my promises that no one should be in jail merely for using or possessing marijuana,” Biden said. “I pardoned thousands of people incarcerated for the mere possession of marijuana — thousands. A promise made and a promise kept. And for — their records should be expunged as well, I might add.”

Biden’s Oct. 6, 2022, proclamation grants “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to people who were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time they committed or were convicted of simple possession of marijuana in violation of either the federal Controlled Substances Act or D.C. Code 48–904.01(d)(1). The Justice Department explains that the pardon pertains to offenses committed on or before the date of the proclamation.

On Dec. 22, 2023, Biden issued a second proclamation to cover offenses committed up to that date, and expanded the eligible offenses beyond simple possession to include attempted possession and use.

The DOJ says that these pardons lift “barriers to housing, employment, and educational opportunities for thousands of people with those prior offenses.” But, as we explained in 2022, when Biden similarly exaggerated the scope of his first proclamation, the pardons don’t do anything for people convicted on state or local charges, and it’s unclear if anyone would be released from jail as a result of the pardons.

In October 2022, a senior administration official told reporters that “there are no individuals currently in federal prison solely for simple possession of marijuana.”

Simple possession of marijuana is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a minimum fine of $1,000 for a first-time offender. The penalties increase for repeat offenders. A January 2023 report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission said that 70% of federal marijuana possession offenders were sentenced to prison from fiscal year 2017 to 2021, with an average prison time of five months.

The report also said that nearly 60% of all offenders weren’t U.S. citizens. Biden’s pardons apply to citizens and legal permanent residents only.

In the December proclamation, Biden said he encouraged “Governors to do the same with regard to state offenses and applaud those who have since taken action.”

As of May 2, 24 states and Washington, D.C., as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands have legalized recreational use of small amounts of marijuana, and more allow for medicinal use, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Biden also exaggerated in saying that he “pardoned thousands of people” jailed for marijuana possession. Thousands of people are eligible for these federal pardons — in October 2022, the administration said more than 6,500 people with prior federal convictions and thousands with D.C. convictions could benefit — but they have to submit an application to get one. So far, 208 certificates of pardon have been issued, according to the DOJ webpage, last updated on June 3.

In his remarks in Philadelphia, Biden said that offenders’ “records should be expunged,” meaning the offense would be removed from the person’s permanent record. That’s something he promised for prior convictions on the campaign trail in 2020. But the pardons issued under his proclamations don’t expunge a conviction. In fact, the Justice Department says a president can’t grant expungement. Instead, it is up to the court, and it “is rarely granted.”

Lead Pipe RemovalThe president said he has kept his promise to “remove every lead pipe in America.” But that’s a “goal,” as the administration has said — not what Biden described in Philadelphia as a “promise kept.”

Biden, May 29: Look, I said I’d remove every lead pipe in America so every child can drink clean water without fear of brain damage. We’re doing it. A promise made and a promise kept.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the Biden administration refers to as the bipartisan infrastructure law, is one of Biden’s signature accomplishments. It includes $15 billion in direct funding for lead pipe replacement. So far, the $9 billion in funding announced to date is “expected to replace up to 1.7 million lead pipes nationwide,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a May 2 press release.

However, the EPA estimates that there are 9 million lead service lines in the United States, according to the agency’s Updated 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey & Assessment issued last month. As we’ve written before, the EPA estimated the average cost for full lead service line replacement at $4,700 per line. Using that estimate, it would cost more than $42 billion to replace 9 million lead pipes.

State, local and tribal governments can use other federal grant, loan and loan guarantee programs to replace lead service lines, such as community block grants and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which was created under the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, the EPA says on its website. But whether the Biden administration will “remove every lead pipe in America” is not yet a promise kept.

Medicare SavingsDuring the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to reduce prescription drug costs, including proposing to cap out-of-pocket drug expenses for Medicare beneficiaries, allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and require Medicare to “target excessively priced prescription drugs that face little or no competition.”

In his Philadelphia speech, Biden said that he kept his promise to reduce prescription drug costs for seniors on Medicare.

“Seniors with diabetes are now paying $35 [a month] for insulin instead of $400,” Biden said. “We capped total out-of-pocket costs for drugs for seniors beginning next year at $2,000 a year total, including cancer drugs that cost $10-, $12-, $14,000 a year. You pay no more than $2,000 a year. A promise made and a promise kept.”

But he went too far when he repeated his claim that reducing insulin costs and out-of-pocket expenses will save Medicare $160 billion.

“And, by the way,” Biden added, “it not only saves people money, it saves the taxpayers — guess what? — $160 billion cut in the def- — because Medicare doesn’t have to pay those exorbitant prices.”

It’s actually the opposite. Those two provisions, which are part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, will increase Medicare spending.

As we have written before, the insulin cap will cost $5.1 billion over 10 years, while the limit on out-of-pocket expenses for seniors with Medicare Part D prescription coverage will increase spending by $30 billion over the 2022-2031 period, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Overall, the Medicare provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act are expected to reduce the deficit by $237 billion over 10 years, according to CBO. That includes prescription drug negotiation provisions that would save Medicare $98.5 billion over 10 years. There’s also a projected $63.2 billion in savings by requiring rebates from drug companies if their prices increase faster than inflation. Those two provisions total about $160 billion — which is the figure used by Biden.

But most of the savings haven’t happened yet.

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Quick TakeSocial media posts seeking to discredit the judge who presided over former President Donald Trump’s criminal case in New York have been circulating online. Contrary to a popular meme, the judge’s wife works for a Republican district attorney, not the Democratic state attorney general, and his daughter was not personally paid by a high-profile Democrat.

Full StoryA jury found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star in an attempt to influence the 2016 election. The judge overseeing the New York criminal case, Justice Juan Merchan, has been the target of several false or misleading claims, many of them from Trump himself.

Another claim is circulating online, this time saying that Merchan’s family is “corrupt.”

The New York court building where Justice Juan Merchan presided over former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial is in Manhattan. Photo by Rainer Mirau/stock.adobe.comThe meme, which has been shared on various social media platforms, references Rep. Adam Schiff — a Democrat from California who has been a frequent target of partisan misinformation since he led the first Trump impeachment proceedings — and New York Attorney General Letitia James — another Democrat who has also been targeted with misinformation after she brought a civil fraud case against Trump and his organization that resulted in a judgment of more than $450 million. The meme claims that Merchan’s “daughter was paid $4M by Adam Schiff” and “his wife works with Letitia James.”

Schiff’s 2020 campaign paid the political marketing firm run by Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, and Lara Merchan, the judge’s wife, used to work for the state attorney general’s office but no longer does.

The claim connecting Loren Merchan to Schiff has been made by conservative online outlets before. For example, conservative commentator Julie Kelly laid it out in an April 1 post on her substack.

There, she accurately says that Schiff’s campaign paid $4 million in the 2020 election cycle to Authentic Campaigns, the political marketing agency where Loren Merchan works. Merchan is listed as the president on the company website, and Justice Merchan wrote in an August 2023 ruling that his daughter is the president and chief operating officer at Authentic.

But the meme goes even further, suggesting that Schiff paid Loren Merchan directly, which is inaccurate, and claiming it is evidence of a “corrupt” family.

According to records from the Federal Election Commission, it’s true that Schiff’s House campaign committee spent about $4 million on digital advertising and consulting with Authentic in 2019 and 2020. His Senate campaign so far has spent more than $12 million with Authentic during the 2024 election cycle, FEC records show.

On May 31, 2023, Trump’s legal team had raised the issue of Loren Merchan’s political work in an effort to get the judge to recuse himself. About six weeks earlier, Justice Merchan sought an opinion on the issue from the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which found no reason for recusal.

“[T]he matter currently before the judge does not involve either the judge’s relative or the relative’s business, whether directly or indirectly,” the committee wrote in its May 4, 2023, opinion. “They are not parties or likely witnesses in the matter, and none of the parties or counsel before the judge are clients of the business. We see nothing in the inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests.”

And, as we’ve written before, one of Trump’s own lawyers has said that he saw no bias on Merchan’s part. In an interview on CNN in April 2023, Joe Tacopina — who withdrew in January from representing Trump in the New York criminal case — said Merchan “has a very good reputation.”

“I have no reason to believe this judge is biased,” Tacopina said, before Trump’s legal team unsuccessfully sought Merchan’s recusal.

So, the potential conflict of interest posed by Loren Merchan’s job has already been discredited by the judicial ethics committee, and a former Trump lawyer on the case has said there’s no reason to think the judge is biased.

Regarding the meme’s claim about Merchan’s wife’s current job — that’s inaccurate.

Lara Merchan works in the Nassau County district attorney’s office. Currently, that office is led by District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly, who is a Republican.

According to Lara Merchan’s LinkedIn profile, she did work in the New York state attorney general’s office from November 2000 to March 2022. That means she would have worked for about three years under James, who took office in January 2019, and has been working for Donnelly for more than two years.

Merchan’s LinkedIn page says that she had worked as a “special assistant attorney general,” and, according to the attorney general’s website, the office has more than 1,700 staff members and more than 700 assistant attorneys general.

But, as we said, she left that job in 2022 and has been working for the Nassau County district attorney since then.

So, both claims made in the meme stretch the facts to make the unsupported claim that Merchan’s family is “corrupt.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesFarley, Robert and D’Angelo Gore. “What’s in Trump’s Indictment?” FactCheck.org. Updated 30 May 2024.

Robertson, Lori, et al. “Trump’s Repeated Claims on His New York Hush Money Trial.” FactCheck.org. 30 May 2024.

Kiely, Eugene. “Judge Hasn’t Ruled on Trump’s Graduation Request.” FactCheck.org. Updated 17 May 2024.

Jaffe, Alan. “Trump Plans to Attend Son’s Graduation and GOP Fundraiser, Contrary to Online Claim.” FactCheck.org. Updated 17 May 2024.

Kiely, Eugene, Lori Robertson and Robert Farley. “Examining Trump’s Claims on His Arrest and Arraignment.” Updated 10 Apr 2023.

Jalonick, Mary Clare. “Schiff sets tone of impeachment case, says ‘right matters.’” Associated Press. 23 Jan 2020.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Social Media Posts Inflate Net Worth of N.Y. Attorney General.” FactCheck.org. 29 Mar 2024.

Authentic. “Our Team.” Authentic.org. Accessed 3 Jun 2024.

State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Ind. No. 71543-23. Decision on Defendant’s Motion for Recusal. 11 Aug 2023.

Federal Election Commission. Schiff for Congress disbursements to Authentic. 9 Jan 2019 to 31 Dec 2020

Federal Election Commission. Schiff for Senate disbursements to Authentic. 5 Jan 2023 to 18 Mar 2024.

State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Ind. No. 71543-23. Memorandum of Law in Support of Donald J. Trump’s Motion for the Court’s Recusal and for an Explanation. 31 May 2023.

New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics. Opinion 23-54. 4 May 2023.

Nassau County District Attorney’s Office. Honorable Anne T. Donnelly, District Attorney. Accessed 31 May 2024.

Bonfiglio, Briana. “Republican Anne Donnelly Declares Victory in Nassau DA Race.” Long Island Press. 2 Nov 2021.

Merchan, Lara. LinkedIn. Accessed 31 May 2024.

Office of the New York State Attorney General. About the Office. Accessed 3 Jun 2024.

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Donald Trump became the first U.S. president, current or former, to be convicted of a criminal offense when a 12-person jury in New York on May 30 found him guilty on 34 felony counts of business fraud as part of an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election by making payments to suppress a sordid tale of sex with a porn star.

The unprecedented conviction raises questions about what’s next for the 77-year-old man who is in line to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024.

In remarks at Trump Tower a day after his conviction, Trump called the United States “a corrupt country” and declared that he would be “appealing this scam.”

(Trump also repeated many of the false, misleading and unsupported claims he has made about the judge, the judge’s rulings, the district attorney and other issues related to the trial. For more about Trump’s talking points, see our May 30 article, “Trump’s Repeated Claims on His New York Hush Money Trial.” He also repeated false and unsubstantiated claims on other issues, such as taxes and migrants.)

Here, we answer some of the questions raised by the former president’s conviction:

What are the next steps in the case?
What punishment could Trump face? Will he go to prison?
Can Trump vote in the 2024 election?
Can a felon run for president, hold office?
Can Trump pardon himself on this conviction, if he wins?

What are the next steps in the case?Sentencing and an appeal are up next in this case.

Sentencing by Justice Juan Merchan is scheduled for July 11. Before that date, a probation officer or someone in that department will interview Trump, and potentially others involved in the case or connected to Trump, and prepare a pre-sentence report for the judge. The report includes the personal history and criminal record of the defendant, and it recommends what sentence the defendant should receive, according to the New York State Unified Court System.

“The pre-sentence interview is a chance for the defendant to try to make a good impression and explain why he or she deserves a lighter punishment,” the state court system explains.

Trump’s lawyers have to wait until after the sentencing to appeal the conviction. First, Trump’s lawyers will file motions before the judge “in a couple weeks” saying why they found the trial to be “unfair,” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche told CNN hours after the guilty verdict.

Demonstrators hold up signs near Trump Tower as former President Donald Trump holds a press conference on May 31 in New York City after his conviction. Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images.Cheryl Bader, a clinical associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, said these motions are typical when a defendant is convicted. The defense attorneys will ask the judge to overturn the jury’s conviction. “It’s rarely, rarely granted, and I don’t think there’s a chance that will happen in this case,” she told us in a phone interview.

Blanche told CNN that if the motions aren’t successful, “then as soon as we can appeal, we will. And the process in New York is there’s a sentencing, and then — and then we appeal from there.”

Bader, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, walked us through the appeals process. “The case is considered completed at sentencing,” she said. “At that point, his lawyers file a notice of appeal … letting the court know that he intends to appeal.”

At that point, they will also request a “stay” on the sentence, meaning a pause on imposing the sentence while the case is being appealed.

This appeal goes to the Appellate Division, First Judicial Department in Manhattan. The appeals court doesn’t retry the case. “They’re not going to substitute their judgment on the facts for the jury’s judgment,” Bader explained. Instead, “they’re looking for where there was error that would have led to an improper prosecution or an unfair trial.”

The appeals process would take several months to a year, she said. After the notice of appeal is given, the record of the case is gathered, including trial transcripts, the indictment, pretrial motions, evidentiary rulings, jury selection and instructions, and more. Trump could also appeal the sentencing. The lawyers need to write their arguments for all of the issues they’re objecting to, and that takes time, Bader said.

And then the appeals court needs to consider the case and write a decision on it.

If Trump ultimately isn’t successful at the appellate level, he can appeal to the highest court in New York state, which is called the Court of Appeals. But the court decides whether or not it takes the case.

After such an appeal to the highest state court, the case would be over — unless Trump tries to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But there has to be a U.S. constitutional issue for that. “I don’t see one,” Bader said, but perhaps Trump’s lawyers would try to make an argument.

What punishment could Trump face? Will he go to prison?Whether Trump is sentenced to any time in prison is up to the judge.

Each of the 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a class E felony, carries a maximum sentence of up to four years in prison. The judge could decide to impose the sentences consecutively or simultaneously. However, under New York law, 20 years is the maximum prison time that Trump could get — not 187 years, as Trump falsely claimed in his May 31 remarks.

Norman Eisen, a CNN legal analyst and a senior fellow in governance studies for the Brookings Institution, said that “in the most serious” cases of business records falsification in New York that he studied, “a sentence of imprisonment was routinely imposed.” Trump’s case “is the most serious one in NY history,” he wrote on X, predicting that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin “Bragg will likely ask for incarceration & Merchan will consider it.”

While possible, Bader, with Fordham’s School of Law, told us she doesn’t think incarceration will happen.

For a first-time convicted felon, with a low-level, nonviolent felony and a person of advanced age, “under any circumstance like that, there’d be a relatively low chance of incarceration,” she said.

“On the other hand, I could see the prosecutor arguing that here’s a man who has shown disrespect for the court system and the rule of law and has violated the court’s orders on numerous occasions. He is not remorseful. And that in order to promote general deterrence, he needs to be punished,” she said in describing a possible argument from the prosecutor.

Bader said any incarceration sentence “would be only a token amount of time to make the point that Trump is not above the law.” Other sentencing possibilities include probation or a “conditional discharge” with conditions other than incarceration or probation.

The “simplest” option might be for the judge to fine Trump, she said.

Can Trump vote in the 2024 election?Yes, Trump can vote as long as he is not in jail on Election Day, which this year is on Nov. 5.

Trump owns homes in New York and Florida, but in 2019 he changed his primary residence to Florida. However, Florida law does not apply in Trump’s case because he was convicted in New York. Instead, New York law applies.

“If you were convicted outside Florida, your voting rights are governed by the state where you were convicted,” as the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida explains on its website.

In 2021, New York state enacted a law that “restores the right to vote for a person convicted of a felony upon release from incarceration, regardless of if they are on parole or have a term of post-release supervision,” the New York State Board of Elections says. “If a convicted felon is not incarcerated, they are eligible to register to vote.”

Can a felon run for president, hold office?Yes. According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, there are three qualifications to serve as president: He or she must be at least 35 years old upon taking office, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States.”

“These qualifications are understood to be exclusive,” Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University law professor, told us last year when we were writing about Trump’s federal indictment related to allegations of mishandling sensitive classified documents after he left office. “Anyone can be president so long as they meet the constitutional qualifications and do not trigger any constitutional disqualifications.”

“Someone can run for president while under indictment or even having been convicted and serving prison time,” said Chafetz, who pointed to the example of Eugene V. Debs, the late labor leader, who, in 1920, ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket and got almost 1 million votes.

There is an exception to that rule. The Constitution says in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment that no U.S. officeholder, including the president, can serve if they are convicted of “engag[ing] in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. — something Trump has not been charged with either in this case or the three others he faces.

Six Colorado voters successfully sued in state court to prevent Trump from appearing on that state’s ballot, citing the constitutional amendment barring insurrectionists from holding federal office. But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state ruling, “[b]ecause the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates.”

Can Trump pardon himself on this conviction, if he wins?The short answer is no.

Trump was convicted in New York for offenses in violation of state law. Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that a president has the “[p]ower to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States.” According to Constitution Annotated, a government-sanctioned record of the interpretations of the Constitution, that means the power extends to “federal crimes but not state or civil wrongs.”

In a case decided in 1925, Ex parte Grossman, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that interpretation, writing that the Constitution’s language specifying presidential pardon power for offenses “against the United States” was “presumably to make clear that the pardon of the President was to operate upon offenses against the United States as distinguished from offenses against the States.”

The New York governor has the power to pardon Trump for his conviction of crimes under state law. That’s currently Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat. After the verdict, Republican Rep. Nick LaLota called on Hochul “to immediately announce her intention to pardon President Trump and pre-emptively commute any sentence. To not do so is to allow America to become a banana republic.” Hochul released a statement on May 30 saying, “Today’s verdict reaffirms that no one is above the law.”

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Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty by a jury in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an effort to conceal election law violations after buying the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels, shortly before the 2016 election. Daniels said she had a sexual encounter with Trump, who denies it. In recent days in his remarks outside the courthouse, in speeches and on social media, Trump repeatedly has made false and misleading statements about the case and trial.

• Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that President Joe Biden is behind the prosecution of this case. This is a New York state case, and Biden has no control over it.
• The former president has claimed that the judge in this case — Justice Juan Merchan — is “corrupt” or “conflicted,” but one of Trump’s own lawyers last year said he had “no issue … whatsoever” with Merchan.
• Trump wrongly has claimed a limited gag order — barring remarks about certain trial participants — prevented him from answering “simple questions” or criticizing the Biden administration.
• He falsely claimed that Merchan “wouldn’t let” Trump’s defense team call campaign finance expert Bradley Smith as a witness. The judge did not say Smith couldn’t testify, although he limited what Smith could potentially discuss if he testified.
• Trump wrongly said the judge wouldn’t allow an “advice of counsel” defense. Before the trial, Trump’s attorneys chose not to seek such a defense, and Merchan held them to that decision.
• He has also claimed that all legal scholars said this case “shouldn’t be brought,” and that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg himself “didn’t want to bring the case.” Bragg said he didn’t want to pursue a broader financial crimes case until it was “ready,” and there were some law experts who said the hush money case against Trump was “strong.”

The jury began its deliberations on May 29 and reached the verdict the following day. The indictment was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. (See our Q&A on the indictment for more information.)

After the guilty verdict was revealed, Trump told reporters, “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial.” Sentencing is scheduled for July 11.

Not a Biden CaseWithout evidence, Trump has repeatedly claimed that President Joe Biden is responsible for the prosecution of this case. Biden has no control over state-level prosecutors.

Trump appears in the Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30, the second day of jury deliberations. The verdict came later in the day. Photo by Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty Images.“Make no mistake about it, I’m here because of crooked Joe Biden,” Trump claimed on May 28 in remarks to the press before closing arguments in the case. “This is purely his weaponization.” The following day, Trump said, “It was all done by Joe Biden. This judge contributed to Joe Biden.” He repeated the claim again after the guilty verdict, saying, “This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent.”

The 34-count indictment for this case was brought by Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney.

Despite his unsupported claims that Biden is behind the case, Trump has also claimed that “the federal government” looked at this case and “turned it down.” (The Federal Election Commission voted 2-2 on whether Trump violated campaign finance laws, so it couldn’t pursue any charges.)

Separately, the federal government has indicted Trump for other matters — his handling of classified documents after he left office and his attempts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. But those cases, which Biden has denied any involvement in, have nothing to do with the New York hush-money case.

Trump’s suggestion that the judge in this case, Justice Juan Merchan, is linked to Biden rests on a $15 contribution Merchan made to Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.

As we’ve reported before, Federal Election Commission records show three small donations from Merchan to ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform, in July 2020. In addition to the $15 to Biden’s campaign, the other two donations, of $10 each, were earmarked for the voter mobilization group Progressive Turnout Project and the group’s digital ad campaign called Stop Republicans.

Reuters reported on May 17 that the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct dismissed an ethics complaint about the donations, with a caution to Merchan. Last May, an advisory ethics committee said Merchan wouldn’t need to recuse himself from the case, writing that “these modest political contributions made more than two years ago cannot reasonably create an impression of bias or favoritism in the case before the judge.”

Attacks on JudgeBesides pointing to that small political contribution, Trump has made other attacks on Merchan’s credibility, claiming repeatedly, including after the verdict, that he is “corrupt” or “conflicted.” But before the trial, one of Trump’s lawyers at the time said he has “no issue … whatsoever” with Merchan overseeing the case.

In an April 2, 2023, interview with CNN, then Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina — who in January withdrew from representing the former president — said Merchan “has a very good reputation.”

Asked if he thought Merchan was biased, Tacopina said, “I have no reason to believe this judge is biased.”

According to his court bio, Merchan has been an acting justice on the New York Supreme Court since 2009. He was appointed to the Family Court for Bronx County in 2006 by then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In the past, Trump has objected to Merchan having been the judge who sentenced the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, to five months in jail in a tax fraud case. At the January 2023 sentencing, Merchan said had there not been a plea deal, he would have imposed a harsher sentence than the five months, which ultimately was reduced to 100 days with good behavior. Weisselberg was released in April 2023, but sentenced to five months again, by a different judge, this April after committing perjury in the New York civil fraud trial against Trump.

Last year, Trump also said that Merchan’s daughter “worked for Kamala Harris” and “now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign.”As we’ve said before, the career of Merchan’s daughter is irrelevant; she’s not the judge in this case. She works for a digital campaign consulting firm that does work for progressive clients, including the two campaigns mentioned by Trump.

Limited Gag OrderOne of Trump’s more common — and often inaccurate — claims involves a gag order that Merchan imposed on March 26 and expanded on April 1.

“Every time I speak to you, you ask me simple questions. I’m not allowed to give you the answer because I’m gagged by the judge,” Trump said in remarks outside the courtroom on May 29, as jury deliberations began.

The former president has made similar remarks before and during the trial. At the Libertarian National Convention on May 25, Trump wrongly accused the “Biden regime” of “imposing a strict gag order in order to keep me from talking about their crimes and their unconstitutional acts.”

The gag order issued by Merchan — not “the Biden regime” — did not prevent Trump from speaking “every time” he was asked a question, and it did not prevent him from criticizing the Biden administration.

Manhattan District Attorney Bragg requested a gag order in February, citing the former president’s “long history of making public and inflammatory remarks about the participants in various judicial proceedings against him, including jurors, witnesses, lawyers and court staff.” Merchan agreed to a limited gag order that sought to prevent Trump from making intimidating or harassing remarks about certain trial participants.

Specifically, the March 26 order covered witnesses, jurors, court staffers, the prosecuting attorney and the district attorney’s staff (though not the district attorney himself), as well as family members of the district attorney’s prosecutors and staff members. “The uncontested record reflecting the Defendant’s prior extrajudicial statements establishes a sufficient risk to the administration of justice consistent with the standard set forth in Landmark, and there exists no less restrictive means to prevent such risk,” Merchan wrote, referring to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling.

The judge expanded his order on April 1 to include his family and member’s of the district attorney’s family after Trump attacked the judge’s daughter on social media.

“The average observer, must now, after hearing defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well,” Merchan wrote. “Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.”

The gag order, in its original and the amended form, allowed Trump to criticize Merchan and Bragg. And, of course, Trump was free to continue to make remarks about Biden and others not involved in the trial.

“The Defendant has a constitutional right to speak to the American voters freely, and to defend himself publicly,” the amended order stated. “This Decision and Order is equally narrowly tailored and in no way prevents Defendant from responding to alleged political attacks but does address Defendant’s recent speech.”

To date, Trump has been fined $10,000 for violating the gag order on 10 occasions. Among the violations were comments about witnesses and the jury, including a social media post that quoted a Fox News host as saying “undercover Liberal Activists” were “lying to the Judge” to get on the jury.

Smith Could Have TestifiedIn his May 29 remarks, Trump falsely said that his attorneys planned to have Bradley Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, testify for the defense, but were denied by Merchan.

“This judge didn’t even let us use the No. 1 election attorney,” Trump said. “We had the leading election expert in the country, Brad Smith, ready to testify. Wouldn’t let him do it.”

But it’s not true that Merchan would not let Smith take the stand. Trump’s team decided not to use Smith as a witness after Merchan narrowed what he could talk about.

In a pretrial decision, Merchan ruled that Smith could “not testify as a lay (fact) witness; offer opinion testimony regarding the interpretation and application of federal campaign finance laws and how they relate to the facts in the instant matter, nor may Smith testify or offer an opinion as to whether the alleged conduct in this case does or does not constitute a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

Instead, Merchan said that Smith would be permitted to provide “general background” about the FEC, including what it does and what laws it may enforce, and he would be able to define certain terms, such as campaign contribution, “that relate directly to this case.”

However, in court on May 20, Merchan also said that “it will be impossible” for Smith to address three specific terms that the defense wanted Smith to talk about “without invoking, discussing and interpreting the application of federal law.” The judge also pointed out that if Smith were called to testify, the prosecution would be allowed to call its own witness to testify on the same subject matter, resulting in a “battle of the experts” that may confuse the jury.

Ultimately, Smith was not asked to testify in court. In a social media post on May 20, Smith complained that Merchan had “so restricted” his testimony, but acknowledged that the “defense has decided not to call” him.

‘Advice of Counsel’ DefenseOn the evening after closing arguments, Trump complained on Truth Social that Merchan would not allow him to employ an “advice of counsel” defense during the trial. Actually, Trump’s defense attorneys made a strategic decision before the trial to not seek such a defense. Merchan held them to that.

“An advice of counsel defense says that the defendant lacked the specific intent necessary to commit the charged crime (in this case, intent to defraud) because he was advised by his attorney that his behavior was lawful,” Randall D. Eliason, who teaches white collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School, explained to us via email. “If that’s true, that negates the required criminal intent.”

“THE GREATEST CASE I’VE EVER SEEN FOR RELIANCE ON COUNSEL, AND JUDGE MERCHAN WILL NOT, FOR WHATEVER REASON, LET ME USE THAT AS A DEFENSE IN THIS RIGGED TRIAL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on May 28. “ANOTHER TERM, ADVICE OF COUNSEL DEFENSE!”

“To present such a defense, the defense usually has to announce it in advance and, most important, has to agree to waive attorney-client privilege so the attorney can testify about the legal advice given,” said Eliason, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where he served as chief of the public corruption/government fraud section. “That waiver would apply to all attorney-client communications, so the defense often is reluctant to do that.

“That’s what happened in this case – Trump was not willing to waive attorney-client privilege as required, so the judge told him he could not present the defense,” Eliason said. “So he was not flatly prohibited from offering an advice of counsel defense, he was prevented from doing so when he would not take the legal steps necessary (including waiver) to properly raise the defense. That’s standard.”

In a March 12 court filing, Trump’s attorneys said they would not be employing a “formal advice-of-counsel defense.”

However, Trump’s lawyers did attempt to put forth a related argument, that Trump “lacked the requisite intent to commit the conduct charged in the Indictment because of his awareness that various lawyers were involved in the underlying conduct giving rise to the charges.” They noted that this argument was not “a formal advice-of-counsel defense,” which, his lawyers said, “would require him to prove at trial that he (1) made a complete disclosure to counsel [concerning the matter at issue], (2) sought advice as to the legality of his conduct, (3) received advice that his conduct was legal, and (4) relied on that advice in good faith.”

Therefore, they argued, “there is no privilege waiver requiring production of communications protected by the attorney-client privilege.”

On March 18, however, Merchan ruled against the use of a so-called “presence” of counsel defense.

“To allow said defense in this matter would effectively permit Defendant to invoke the very defense he has declared he will not rely upon, without the concomitant obligations that come with it,” Merchan wrote. “The result would undoubtedly be to confuse and mislead the jury. This Court can not endorse such a tactic.”

Nevertheless, during the trial, one of Trump’s attorneys said, according to a CNN account, that he wanted “to be able to argue that because Michael Cohen testified that ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker told him the agreement was ‘bulletproof’ and Cohen communicated that to Trump, that they should be able to argue it goes to Trump’s state of mind and intent to defraud.”

Merchan said his previous decision had not changed and “honestly I find it disingenuous to make it at this point.”

“This is an argument that you’ve been advancing for many, many, many months,” Merchan added. “This is something you’ve been trying to get through to the jury for many, many, many months. It’s denied; it’s not going to happen. Please don’t raise it again.”

The Case Against TrumpTrump has argued that he should have never been put on trial because “every single legal scholar and expert said this is no case” and “shouldn’t be brought,” as he said on May 29. Even “Bragg didn’t want to bring the case.” On May 30, Trump claimed that “Bragg turned it down, then rejuvenated it when I was running for office.”

It’s not true that there were no legal minds who thought there was a case against Trump.

Norman Eisen, a CNN legal analyst who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform during the Obama administration, and John Dean, a CNN contributor and former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, wrote an April 2023 opinion piece titled “Alvin Bragg was right to prosecute Donald Trump.”

The men noted that many had said that the hush money case appeared “too political,” “too thorny legally” and “should have been brought by federal authorities – or not at all.” And though Eisen and Dean said that there were “important critiques of the case” that “are worthy of consideration,” the men concluded that “ultimately, they are all wrong.”

“Bragg’s case is a strong one and should not be resisted merely because it involves a controversial political figure,” they wrote.

Eisen made similar points in another April 2023 op-ed co-authored with Karen Friedman Agnifilo, also a CNN legal analyst and a former Manhattan chief assistant district attorney. The headline: “We Finally Know the Case Against Trump, and It Is Strong.”

They said some legal observers feared that the case would be weak, which turned out not to be so.

“With the release of the indictment and accompanying statement of facts, we can now say that there’s nothing novel or weak about this case,” Eisen and Adnifilo wrote. “The charge of creating false financial records is constantly brought by Mr. Bragg and other New York D.A.s. In particular, the creation of phony documentation to cover up campaign finance violations has been repeatedly prosecuted in New York. That is exactly what Mr. Trump stands accused of.”

In the end, they said that Trump was “being treated as any other New Yorker would be with similar evidence against him.”

As for Bragg, Trump may be referencing comments that were made about his reluctance to bring a broader case about Trump’s alleged financial crimes — not specifically the hush money case.

As we have written, Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, wrote in a book released in early 2023 that Cy Vance, Bragg’s DA predecessor, “agreed and authorized” the prosecution of Trump for allegedly obtaining bank loans by overvaluing his assets. But Pomerantz wrote that once Bragg took office, “the new regime decided that Donald Trump should not be prosecuted, and the investigation faltered.”

When Pomerantz resigned in protest in March 2022, he said that Bragg’s decision was “misguided and completely contrary to the public interest.”

However, Bragg later said that he had not ruled out bringing a case in the future.

“I bring hard cases when they are ready,” Bragg said, during a February 2023 press conference, in which he was asked about what Pomerantz had written in his book. “Mark Pomerantz’s case simply was not ready. So I said to my team, let’s keep working,” Bragg said.

Bragg announced the indictment for the hush money case against Trump on April 4, 2023.

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Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego has consistently said that he opposes allowing anyone other than United States citizens to vote in Arizona and in federal elections. But in a campaign ad attacking him, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake misleadingly claims that the congressman “supports … allowing illegals to vote.”

Other than citing a bill name and number in small font, the ad does not make clear that Lake’sclaim is based on Gallego’s February 2023 vote against a joint resolution that would have stopped Washington, D.C., from enacting a law that gives eligible noncitizens — regardless of their immigration status — the right to vote in that city’s local elections for positions such as mayor and councilmember.

However, the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act, which later became D.C. law, does not allow the city’s noncitizen residents to vote in federal elections, which is prohibited under federal law.

“Washington, D.C. is not Arizona, and I do not believe Congress should be in the business of telling the residents of Washington, D.C. how to hold their democratic elections,” Gallego said in a statement at the time of his vote in 2023.

The attack ad could lead viewers to wrongly believe that Gallego supported letting people without legal status vote in federal, state and local elections in Arizona.

What’s more, on May 23, over a week after the ad began airing, the congressman switched positions on the D.C. law and voted for a different bill pushed by Republicans that would repeal the city’s voting ordinance.

“I believe that only citizens have the Constitutional right to vote, which is why I voted for this legislation,” Gallego said in a statement about his recent vote.

Lake and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are reportedly spending $675,000 to run the immigration-focused ad on broadcast, cable and digital media in Arizona. It is the initial phase of a $10 million ad buy, her campaign said in a press release.

Lake is the front-runner in the state’s GOP Senate primary and is expected to face Gallego in the general election for the seat being vacated by Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. The race could determine control of the U.S. Senate in 2025. Sinema, along with two other independent senators, caucuses with the Democrats, helping the party maintain a two-seat majority.

The ad starts with a group of Arizonans discussing illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border and then blaming President Joe Biden. Later, Lake joins them and talks about the “big differences” between her and Gallego, who she says supports “sanctuary cities” and “allowing illegals to vote,” and is “opposed to the border wall.”

Gallego did co-sponsor the Safeguarding Sanctuary Cities Act of 2017, which would have barred reducing or withholding federal funding to state or local governments that restrict law enforcement from complying with immigration detainer requests.

He also objected to building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, saying in a March 2018 social media post that the structure proposed by then-President Donald Trump was “stupid” and “useless.” In a 2017 op-ed, Gallego also said that he opposed Trump’s wall because it was about “dividing Americans – playing upon the racial fears and anxiety” and “will do nothing about the real issue of visa overstays.”

More recently, Gallego has supported bipartisan immigration legislation with $650 million included for border wall construction or reinforcement.

But Lake’s claim that Gallego wants people without legal status to vote is misleading.

A citation in a version of the ad captured by AdImpact on May 14 references the congressman’s vote against H.J.Res. 24, which passed the House with bipartisan support in February 2023. (The version of the ad the Lake campaign uploaded to YouTube wrongly cites the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.)

The joint resolution was introduced by House Republicans after the D.C. Council approved the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act in October 2022. The bill amended the city’s election code to allow all qualifying D.C. residents – including those without a legal immigration status – to vote for mayor, city council, attorney general and other locally elected positions in D.C., as well as ballot initiatives and referendums.

But before bills passed by the D.C. Council can officially become law, they are required to be submitted for review by Congress. That’s because the U.S. Constitution gives Congress legislative authority over the District, which is the federal capital and not a state.

After the bill was submitted to the House for review in January 2023, the resolution disapproving the D.C. bill was introduced, and it passed with 260 votes in favor, including 42 from Democrats. Gallego was one of the 162 Democrats who voted against the resolution and in favor of allowing the city’s voting rights law take effect.

At the time, the congressman said he would not support allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections or elections in his home state, but he argued that the nation’s capital city — not Congress — should control its own elections.

“I believe voting is a fundamental right reserved for the citizens of the United States, and I will oppose any effort to erode that right in Arizona and on the federal level,” Gallego said in a Feb. 9, 2023, statement. “But Washington, D.C. is not Arizona, and I do not believe Congress should be in the business of telling the residents of Washington, D.C. how to hold their democratic elections. Today’s vote, if anything, is yet another example of why we need D.C. statehood, so those living in Washington no longer find themselves at the mercy of a vindictive Republican House majority.”

Because the Democratic-controlled Senate did not vote on the resolution in the required 30-day review period, the D.C. legislation automatically became law in early 2023. D.C. is now one of only a few cities or municipalities in the country that permit noncitizen residents to participate in local elections.

However, on May 23, the House voted on another GOP-led bill, H.R. 192, that would repeal the D.C. law. This time, 262 members voted in favor of the legislation, including 52 Democrats. Gallego, in a reversal, was one of the representatives who supported the bill, which is unlikely to receive a vote in the Senate.

In a statement, the Arizona lawmaker said, “I believe that only citizens have the Constitutional right to vote, which is why I voted for this legislation.” He also claimed that the new bill made “important improvements on the previous attempt” to block the D.C. law — even though the legislation would have had the same effect as the joint resolution if signed into law.

We asked Gallego’s congressional office and his Senate campaign for clarification, but neither has responded.

After his vote on May 23, Lake released a statement accusing Gallego of having “flip-flopped” because “he is running for Senate and finds it politically convenient.”

Gallego may no longer believe that D.C. should decide if noncitizens can vote in the city’s local elections, but he has been consistent about noncitizens not being allowed to vote in state and federal elections — contrary to what the ad suggests.

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Quick TakeA Michigan town clerk pleaded no contest in 2023 to a charge of misconduct in office. Social media posts misleadingly highlight her case to push the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” The clerk’s case was related to her local primary race, not the presidential election.

Full StoryKathy Funk, who was up for reelection as a town clerk in Michigan, in 2020, took a plea deal in a case accusing her of hampering the recount in her primary.

Funk was the clerk in the Township of Flint — which is next to, but separate from, the City of Flint, which garnered national attention in 2015 for its lead water crisis. She had won the Democratic primary for that August 2020 race by 79 votes.

Prosecutors accused her of breaking the seal on a canister of election ballots so that they couldn’t be recounted.

In January 2023, Funk pleaded no contest to one count of misconduct in office, which means that she accepted the punishment but didn’t admit guilt. The punishment, in this case, was two years of probation and six months of house arrest. Prosecutors dropped a charge of ballot tampering.

Funk’s primary election in August 2020 was not related to the general election in November or the Michigan presidential primary, which was held on March 10, 2020.

But the Epoch Times, a conservative publication with a history of spreading misinformation, has posted a video on social media suggesting that this case — which received news coverage when it was resolved a year ago — is new. The video also vaguely refers to Funk’s crime “during the 2020 election cycle,” leaving some viewers to wrongly conclude her actions affected the 2020 presidential election.

A shorter, promotional video for the full five-minute video doesn’t identify Funk — who had left her job as clerk in 2021 to become the elections supervisor for Genesee County. She was placed on administrative leave from her county job when criminal charges were filed against her, and she was terminated in late 2022.

The promotional video uses vague language, saying only, “A woman who was both a county election official as well as a former township clerk, she was convicted of tampering with ballots during the 2020 election cycle.”

It goes on to say, “Specifically during a recount process, this woman, using her official access, spoiled a batch of ballots in order to make them ineligible to be recounted.”

Posts on social media sharing links to the video falsely suggested that Funk’s behavior impacted the 2020 presidential election, a claim that contributes to the ongoing false narrative that the election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, who is a primary proponent of this falsehood.

One post on Facebook, for example, said, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT Election Official busted for rigging the 2020 election!!” The page that shared the post is run by a Minnesota-based marketing company called Making Web, which runs conservative digital properties — including a website called Trending Politics that has published false claims we’ve written about before and a website that sells pro-Trump merchandise, such as a flag with the slogan, “make votes count again.”

Another Facebook post said, “RIGGED FROM THE START Election Official busted for rigging the 2020 election!!”

Both of those posts linked to the Epoch Times’ video hosted on the outlet’s website, which requires users to sign in to watch.

The title of the video says only, “Former Election Official Convicted for Ballot Tampering.” The full video gives more details, including Funk’s name and the fact that her case involved only her own primary election. But the comments on the Epoch Times’ video and the social media posts indicate that the details were lost on users, many of whom expressed anger at the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

President Joe Biden won that election with 306 electoral votes, compared with 232 for Trump, according to the Federal Election Commission. Biden also won the popular vote, 51% to 47%.

But the false narrative that the election was stolen has persisted, and claims like the ones made in social media posts about Funk contribute to its longevity.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesState of Michigan v. Kathy Funk. Docket. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Genesee County, Michigan. Primary Election, Tuesday, August 4, 2020. Official results. 18 Aug 2020.

Michigan Department of Attorney General. Press release. “AG Nessel Charges Former Flint Township Clerk with Ballot Tampering.” 11 Mar 2022.

Michigan Department of Attorney General. Press release. “Former Flint Twp. Clerk Funk Sentenced for Misconduct in Office.” 25 Apr 2023.

Norris, Pippa. Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Harvard University. “Electoral Integrity in the 2020 U.S. Elections.” The Electoral Integrity Project. 1 Dec 2020.

Federal Election Commission. “Federal Elections 2020.” Oct. 2022.

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Quick TakeFBI agents who searched for classified documents held by former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 followed standard protocol. But Trump supporters and social media posts now falsely claim the search was an “attempted assassination” of Trump. The claim is based on a misquote of FBI policy in a legal motion — and Trump wasn’t in Florida during the search.

Full StoryThe standard policy of the U.S. Department of Justice on the use of deadly force is spelled out in the department’s Justice Manual.

The section on deadly force begins by stating, “Law enforcement officers and correctional officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

That basic policy is reiterated on the FBI website in its section on frequently asked questions.

But lawyers for former President Donald Trump misquoted the policy in a motion, which was unsealed on May 21, in Trump’s classified documents case, the Associated Press reported. The motion said the operations order for the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” — omitting the word “only.”

The release of the unsealed motion, with the misquoted order, was then shared by Julie Kelly, a writer with RealClear Investigations, according to Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler. Kelly posted on X, “Oh my god. Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary. … Gestapo.”

But the operations order was just repeating standard Department of Justice policy, and there was no plan to “confront Trump,” who was in New York City during the search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the FBI said in a statement to the Associated Press. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

In his fact-checking article for the Post, Kessler noted that Steven D’Antuono, a former FBI assistant director in charge of the Washington field office when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, told the House Judiciary Committee in a June 7, 2023, interview that the FBI coordinated the search with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues.” D’Antuono said he was “adamant” that there would be no show of force — let alone use of force — at the former president’s resort.

“It wasn’t even a show of force, right, because we were all in agreement. We didn’t do a show of force, right. I was adamant about that, and that was something that we agreed on, right, the FBI agreed on, right. No raid jackets, no blazed FBI,” D’Antuono, who has since retired, said. “We made sure we interacted with the Secret Service to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues. We’re not banging down any doors. We weren’t bringing any like FBI vehicles, everything that was reported about helicopters and a hundred people descending on, like a Die Hard movie, was completely untrue, right. That is not how we played it.”

The release of the motion, with its mention of “deadly force,” sparked a firestorm from the former president and his allies.

A May 21 post on Trump’s Truth Social account claimed, “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.” A fundraising appeal on the Trump National Committee web page said, “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of Trump, posted on X on May 21, “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”

The claim spread on other social media accounts associated with Trump adviser Steve Bannon, including a May 22 Instagram post by the account @bannonswarroom, which said, “The FBI Raid At Mar-A-Lago Was An Attempted Assassination On President Trump.”

But, as we said, the DOJ order contained standard language for a search like the one conducted at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and the FBI coordinated its operation with the Secret Service.

Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, were indicted in 2023 on charges of mishandling sensitive classified documents and obstructing federal officials who tried to retrieve them, as we’ve written. The case is being heard in Florida by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who has not yet set a date for the trial.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesDawsey, Josh, et al. “Trump’s secrets: How a records dispute led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago.” Washington Post. 13 Aug 2022.

Farley, Robert, D’Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Trump’s Federal Indictment.” FactCheck.org. Updated 31 Jul 2023.

Feuer, Alan. “Judge’s Decisions in Documents Case Play Into Trump’s Delay Strategy.” New York Times. 8 May 2024.

FBI. “What is the FBI’s policy on the use of deadly force by its special agents?” fbi.gov. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Goldin, Melissa. “FACT FOCUS: Trump distorts use of ‘deadly force’ language in FBI document for Mar-a-Lago search.” Associated Press. 23 May 2024.

Kessler, Glenn. “How Trump used his own court filing to claim an ‘assassination’ attempt.” Washington Post. 23 May 2024.

RealClear Investigations. Author Archive: Julie Kelly. Accessed 23 May 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Manual.

U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Manual. 1-16.200 – Deadly Force. Accessed 23 May 2024.

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In a May 19 interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Sen. Marco Rubio made misleading and unsubstantiated claims about election fraud in states lost by then-President Donald Trump in 2020:

• Rubio said “liberal groups” in Georgia “were paying people $10 per vote.” A conservative group made this claim in November 2021, but failed to provide evidence to state investigators.
• The Florida senator claimed there were “over 500 illegal drop box locations” in Wisconsin. He apparently is referring to a state Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that said state law doesn’t allow for ballot drop boxes, but there was no evidence of fraud.
• Rubio said “200,000 ballots” in Arizona had “signatures [that] didn’t match.” This allegation has been made about Maricopa County, but a state investigation found no improper procedures, no criminality and no fraud in the county’s signature-verification process.

Rubio, who is reportedly under consideration as Trump’s possible vice presidential running mate, brought up discredited claims of election fraud in the 2020 election during a lengthy exchange with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker. After Rubio said he might not accept the results of the 2024 election, Welker played a clip of the senator on Jan. 6, 2021, saying, “Democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results.”

“So by your own definition, are Donald Trump’s claims undermining Americans’ confidence in democracy?” Welker said, referring to Trump’s repeated false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election.

In response, Rubio said, in part: “I think what undermines people’s confidence in the election is when you have places like Wisconsin with over 500 illegal drop box locations, when you have places like Georgia where liberal groups were paying people $10 per vote.”

Let’s first take a look at the Georgia claim.

Georgia We asked Rubio’s office where the senator got the information about the $10 payments, but we received no response. However, True the Vote, a conservative organization, filed a complaint with Georgia election officials in late November 2021 claiming to have proof of a massive “ballot trafficking scheme.” The complaint identified the group’s unnamed source as “John Doe,” who claimed participants in this operation were paid “typically at a rate of $10 per ballot.”

Catherine Engelbrecht, a founder of True the Vote, spoke about the alleged scheme in the controversial film “2000 Mules,” which was produced by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza. As we wrote in our article “Evidence Gaps in ‘2000 Mules,'” Engelbrecht said in the film that “mules” were paid “generally $10 a ballot” for each ballot that was collected from one of the unidentified nonprofit organizations and deposited in designated drop box locations. Engelbrecht said in the film that the information about the payments came from unnamed “people who shared information with us.”

In January 2022, the Georgia State Election Board launched an investigation into True the Vote’s claim, and issued a subpoena that asked True the Vote to produce, among other things, “witness interviews” and “contact information,” including for the John Doe. After True the Vote failed to provide the information, citing confidentiality agreements with its sources, the state board sued and obtained a court order to compel the group to comply.

In May 2023, True the Vote attempted to withdraw its complaint, which the election board chairman refused to accept. In December, the group responded to the court order by saying, “TTV does not have in its possession, custody, or control such identity and contact information.” True the Vote also acknowledged that it did not have confidentiality agreements that it previously cited as a reason for not complying with the subpoena.

The state board’s investigation, which is “all but officially ‘closed,'” has produced no evidence of ballot harvesting in Georgia, Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told us in an email.

“It has uncovered zero evidence of the allegations made by True the Vote but did expose True The Vote as a mendacious and deceptive enterprise that it is untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairy-tale allegations,” Hassinger said. “Like all the lies about Georgia’s 2020 election, True The Vote’s fabricated claims of ballot harvesting have been repeatedly debunked, and anyone who repeats them … is either a willful dunce or a co-conspirator.”

WisconsinAs for Rubio’s claim that Wisconsin had “over 500 illegal drop box locations,” the senator appears to be referring to a 2022 state Supreme Court ruling that said state law does not authorize the use of ballot drop boxes.

Under state law, “absentee ballots ‘shall be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots.’ The prepositional phrase ‘to the municipal clerk’ is key and must be given effect,” the court said in a 4-3 ruling. “An inanimate object, such as a ballot drop box, cannot be the municipal clerk.”

The ruling said Wisconsin used 528 ballot drop boxes in the 2020 general election — matching Rubio’s description of “over 500 illegal drop box locations” in the state.

But the existence of drop boxes in the 2020 election isn’t evidence of fraud.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brian Hagedorn — a conservative who ruled against Trump in other 2020 election-related rulings — said the case wasn’t about fraud, but rather how to apply the law.

“The principal issue in this case involves the lawfulness of ballot drop boxes. This case is not about the risk of fraudulent votes being cast or inspiring confidence in elections,” Hagedorn wrote. “This case is about applying the law as written; that’s it.”

Hagedorn also urged the Legislature to address the issue of drop boxes.

“[T]he election law statutes we are asked to consider are by no means a model of clarity. Many of the controlling provisions were originally enacted over 100 years ago and have been layered over with numerous amendments since,” he wrote. “Significant questions remain despite our decision in this case, especially as absentee voting has become increasingly common. Although our adjudication of this case will provide some assistance, the public is better served by clear statutes than by clear judicial opinions interpreting unclear statutes.”

ArizonaIn the interview, Rubio cited Arizona as another example of why Americans are losing confidence in U.S. elections.

“They look at what happened in Arizona, 200,000 ballots that the signatures didn’t match,” he said. “People lose confidence.”

There is no evidence to support the senator’s claim that 200,000 signatures didn’t match in Arizona — let alone that those votes were fraudulent or that they were cast for Biden.

Again, the senator’s office did not respond to our questions about this and other statements he made on “Meet the Press.” However, state Republicans, including then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich, raised concerns about the signature-verification process in Maricopa County, which Biden narrowly won with 50% of the vote.

On April 6, 2022, Brnovich released an interim report on the 2020 election that questioned the county’s signature-verifying process, saying the process was “insufficient to guard against abuse.” As evidence, the report noted that the county received nearly 2 million early voting ballots in 2020, but relatively few ballots were rejected because of missing (1,455 ballots) or mismatched (587 ballots) signatures.

“We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona,” the AG’s report, addressed to Senate President Karen Fann, said.

However, Brnovich’s own investigators found no improper procedures after reviewing the county’s signature-verification process, according to internal documents that weren’t released until after he left office.

Days before the report was released, the chief special agent in the AG’s Special Investigators Section sent an April 1, 2022, email to top officials in the AG’s office with the subject line “Additional Considerations for Draft Interim Report.” A marked-up copy of the draft report that was attached to the email said the Special Investigations Section, or SIS, found no evidence of fraud, noting that the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, or MCRO, followed its signature-verification process.

“(Investigators examined the policy and procedures followed by the MCRO relative to signature verification. SIS staff concluded the MCRO followed its policy/procedures as they relate to signature verification; we did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election),” the marked-up version of the draft report said.

That observation by investigators was not included in the interim report that was released to the public by Brnovich. It wasn’t made public until February 2023 by his successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat.

In a March 2022 interim report summary, which was also released by Mayes, the attorney general’s SIS staff explained the county’s signature-verification process: All mail-in and drop-box ballots in Maricopa County are scanned and then those images are “run through the Signature Verification Application,” where signatures on the ballots are compared with “historical reference signatures.” Ballots without signatures or those that cannot be electronically verified are then reviewed by county election staffers in a process called “curing.”

“No improper Election Procedures were discovered during the Signature Verification review,” the March 2022 summary said about the county’s process.

So, where did Rubio get his figure of 200,000 ballots with signatures that didn’t match? It likely came from a February 2022 “pilot study” funded by the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate. That study estimated “that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures in Maricopa were counted without being reviewed” for accuracy during the curing process — according to a report in Just the News.

The pilot study, which was done by a firm calling itself the Election Systems Integrity Institute, was based on 499 images of early voting mail ballot, or EVB, envelopes. The study compared signatures on the envelopes with signatures on public deeds.

But the pilot study didn’t claim that there were 200,000 fraudulent ballots. It said, “Based on this Study, over 204,430 early EVBs should have been cured vs. the 25,000 that the County actually cured; and, using the County’s 2.3% post-curing rate, 5,277 EVBs should have been disallowed.”

Even the 5,277 figure is an extrapolation based on this firm’s review of 499 signatures – a review that didn’t follow the same process as the county. And, as we said, state investigators reviewed the county’s signature-verification process in 2020 and found no improper procedures, no criminality and no fraud.

We’ve debunked many claims about fraud in the 2020 election, and once again, Rubio’s supposed examples don’t show evidence of any widespread illegality. In fact, his claims don’t show evidence of voter fraud at all.

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Quick TakeCollege commencement remarks by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker on the roles of women drew widespread criticism, including from Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder. Social media posts falsely claimed Arrowhead Stadium, where the Chiefs play, then canceled concerts by the band. A team spokesperson said Pearl Jam was “never scheduled to perform” at the venue.

Full StoryHarrison Butker, the kicker for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, made a series of controversial remarks while delivering the commencement address at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, on May 11.

In his over 20-minute address at the Catholic private college, Butker took swipes at President Joe Biden’s position on abortion, the celebration of PRIDE Month, and “degenerate cultural values in media.”

Butker also offered his views on the roles of women.

Butker, May 11: For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.

Butker received a standing ovation at the end of his address, the Associated Press reported. But his remarks were also widely criticized — including by the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, a sponsor of Benedictine College, who said they “do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested,” The Athletic reported.

Pearl Jam Singer Kicks BackButker’s views on women’s roles came under fire from Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, during a May 18 concert in Las Vegas, Variety reported. Vedder praised the show’s opening act, Deep Sea Diver, which includes two women. “The singer, Jessica, and the keyboard player, Patti, they must not have believed that ‘diabolical lie’ that women should take pride in taking a back seat to their man,” Vedder said, referring to Butker’s remarks.

“There should be pride in homemaking if you’re a man or a woman … it’s one of the hardest jobs and you should definitely take pride in it, but you’re going to benefit by giving up your dreams?” Vedder said, later adding, “There’s nothing more masculine than a strong man supporting a strong woman.”

Social media posts then fabricated a claim about repercussions to Vedder’s comments.

“After Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder went on an anti-Harrison Butker rant, the front office at Arrowhead Stadium canceled three of the band’s upcoming shows. ‘We stand with Harrison and his admirable moral values. Vedder and his band can find somewhere else to play.[‘] The move will cost the band around $14 million,” read a May 20 Facebook post, referring to the stadium used by the Kansas City Chiefs. The post received more than 150,000 likes.

But the post was concocted by America’s Last Line of Defense, a “satire/parody” website that frequently spreads bogus stories and misinformation, as we’ve previously written. The May 20 Facebook post did not include a label identifying the content as satire.

A Kansas City Chiefs team spokesperson told us in a phone interview on May 23, “I can confirm that Pearl Jam was never scheduled to perform [at Arrowhead Stadium] this year. They were not on our concert slate.”

We reached out to Pearl Jam for comment on the claim, but we didn’t receive a response.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. “Chiefs kicker Butker congratulates women graduates and says most are more excited about motherhood.” Updated 16 May 2024.

Caplan, Anna Lazarus. “NFL Says They Do Not Agree with Harrison Butker’s ‘Views’ in Graduation Speech, Are Committed to ‘Inclusion.'” People. 16 May 2024.

FactCheck.org. “Tag: America’s Last Line of Defense.”

Kansas City Chiefs. Arrowhead Events Schedule. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Kansas City Chiefs. Team spokesperson, phone interview with FactCheck.org. 23 May 2024.

National Catholic Register. “Full Text: Harrison Butker of Kansas City Chiefs Graduation Speech.” 16 May 2024.

Pearl Jam 2024 Tour. pearljam.com. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Sharf, Zack. “Eddie Vedder Calls Harrison Butker a ‘F–ing P–y’ Mid-Concert Over Sexist Speech: ‘There’s Nothing More Masculine Than a Strong Man Supporting a Strong Woman.'” Variety. 20 May 2024.

Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica. “Statement in Response to the 2024 Benedictine College Commencement Address.” Accessed 22 May 2024.

The Athletic. “Benedictine Sisters denounce Harrison Butker’s speech as his jersey sales rise.” New York Times. 18 May 2024.

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SciCheck DigestA rare risk of dangerous blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was identified and reported in early 2021. This month, the company announced it was pulling the vaccine off the market globally, citing a decline in demand. Social media posts misleadingly linked the decision to the company having “admitted” the rare side effect “for the first time” in court documents and used it to impugn all vaccines.

Full StoryThe association between the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and a rare and dangerous blood clotting condition combined with low blood platelets has been known for more than three years. The condition is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, in general, and vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, or VITT, when it implies an association to vaccines.

The European Medicines Agency, which regulates vaccines in the European Union, first warned of the possible link between the vaccine and “very rare cases of blood clots associated with thrombocytopenia, i.e. low levels of blood platelets” on March 18, 2021. In a statement issued that same day, the pharmaceutical company acknowledged the finding and said it “recognises and will implement” EMA’s recommendations, including updating the product information to warn about the reported cases.

A few weeks later, in April 2021, the EMA concluded the unusual blood clots “should be listed as very rare side effects” of the vaccine. TTS is included in the “possible side effects” section in the package leaflet for users for Vaxzevria (page 30), one of the brand names of the vaccine along with Covishield. TTS has also been listed in Covishield’s product insert under the “special warnings” section, as a side effect in the fact sheet for recipients since at least August 2021, and as a possible adverse reaction in an FAQ page from its manufacturer that was updated on July 5, 2021.

In September 2021, the National Health Service in England reported that the “rare condition” affected approximately 1 in 50,000 AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine recipients under 50 years old and 1 in 100,000 recipients older than 50. Between May 2021 and May 2022, there were 443 cases of TTS reported following vaccination in the U.K.; 81 of them were fatal.(In July 2021, the vaccine was also linked to rare cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder that leads to muscle weakness and, at times, paralysis. The World Health Organization said that most people recover fully.)

The vaccinewas never used in the U.S. outside clinical trials — AstraZeneca decided not to file the application for approval. Butthe vaccine was widely used in the rest of the world, especially during 2021.

In March, the European Commission withdrew AstraZeneca’s authorization to market its COVID-19 vaccine in the European Union, at the company’s request, and on May 7, the company announced it was pulling the vaccine from the market globally. Social media posts misleadingly framed the company’s recent decision as a consequence of “admitting” the rare TTS condition “for the first time” in court documents, as part of a lawsuit in the U.K. The claim was also shared in Spanish.

AstraZeneca had said the decision was based on a decline in demand. Other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers had developed new versions to target variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. “As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines,” the company said in a statement sent to us.

“AstraZeneca finally WITHDRAW Covid vaccine worldwide, months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted for the first time in court documents that it can cause ‘a rare and dangerous’ side effect. Never forget how they cancelled anyone who questioned its safety,” reads a viral post shared across social media platforms.

The U.K. news website the Telegraph had reported on April 28 that AstraZeneca had “admitted” its COVID-19 vaccine could cause TTS “in an apparent about-turn that could pave the way for a multi-million pound legal payout” in a class action lawsuit in which the company is being sued for “death and serious injury in dozens of cases.” The article said the company hadn’t said that in a court document before. But the story went on to say that a link between the vaccine and the rare blood clotting condition was identified in March 2021, as we said.

On May 7, the Telegraph reported that AstraZeneca was “being withdrawn worldwide, months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted for the first time in court documents that it can cause a rare and dangerous side effect.” The next day, the Independent, a British online newspaper, published a story with the headline “AstraZeneca withdraws Covid vaccine worldwide after admitting it can cause rare blood clots.”

Christina Pagel, professor of operational research at University College London, said the headlines were “needlessly scary” on her blog on May 8, and days later in an op-ed with Sheena Cruickshank, immunologist at the University of Manchester, in the New Statesman, a U.K. publication.

“Fundamentally, the situation is this: there isn’t a new ‘smoking gun’; the AZ vaccine was one of the first and cheapest vaccines; it saved millions of lives globally; and there are better vaccines out there now, adapted to new variants,” they wrote.

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine Safety and Impact Even though the rare risk associated with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was reported early on and was well-known, some social media users took the Telegraph’s news reports as vindication.

“Now they admit it,” wrote conservative commentator Dan Bongino in a Facebook post, linking to a Rumble video titled “AstraZeneca Makes SHOCKING Admission About COVID Vax – We Were Right All Along.”

Others used the apparent news to cast shade on all other COVID-19 vaccines. “It’s not just the Astra Zeneca,” one Facebook post said.

A commenter to a post on Instagram wrote, “Whens the class action lawsuit against the US Government?,” although the vaccine was not authorized for use in the U.S. Another one wrote, “When will Pfizer finally step up and do the same?,” although the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has not been linked to TTS.

Just like other COVID-19 vaccines authorized or approved for use, the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, co-developed by Oxford University, was found to be safe and effective for people over 18 years old in clinical trials and in further studies. The efficacy of the vaccine in preventing symptomatic disease in clinical trials was 74%, which was lower than its mRNA counterparts, namely the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Vials of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Photo by Leon Neal via Getty Images.After the potentially deadly blood clot side effect was identified in 2021, many countries restricted the AstraZeneca vaccine use for only older populations. The reported TTS cases were more prevalent among those younger than 50.

Because AstraZeneca’s vaccine was cheaper and easier to distribute than other COVID-19 vaccines, it was among the first vaccines sent to poorer countries by COVAX, a global initiative that allowed for equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Since its rollout, more than 3 billion doses were distributed in over 180 countries, according to a 2022 statement from the vaccine developers, with approximately two-thirds of the doses going to poorer countries. A 2022 analysis by Airfinity, a disease-forecasting company, showed that the vaccine saved 6.3 million lives from December 2020 to December 2021. The company used data from a study by scientists with the Imperial College London on the global impact of COVID-19 vaccination during that year.

Vaccines in the U.S.As we said, the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was not used in the U.S. outside clinical trials.

The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, though, uses the same platform as the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both use a modified, harmless adenovirus, a type of virus that typically causes the common cold, to trigger an immune response. The J&J vaccine was granted an emergency use authorization in February 2021, but soon after, in April of that year, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported cases of TTS following the administration of the vaccine and recommended a “pause” in its use. The FDA also reported rare cases of GBS in July 2021.

The FDA limited the authorization of the J&J vaccine to certain people in May 2022, and the vaccine was ultimately discontinued in 2023. As of April 7, 2022, the CDC and FDA had confirmed 60 cases of TTS, including nine deaths, among more than 18.6 million J&J vaccines administered. In September 2023, the CDC said TTS after J&J COVID-19 vaccination “has occurred in approximately 4 cases per one million doses administered.”

The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorized and approved in the U.S., the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, are both mRNA vaccines. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were widely used in the U.S., and neither has been linked to TTS. For context, as of April 26, 2023, approximately 367 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, 232 million doses of the Moderna vaccine and 19 million doses of the J&J vaccine had been administered in the country.

Both mRNA vaccines have been shown to be safe, with rare serious side effects reported, and effective at preventing severe COVID-19 disease and death. One estimate published in December 2022 suggests that COVID-19 vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and 3 million deaths in the U.S.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Gun rights candidates often falsely exaggerate their opponent’s position, claiming they want to confiscate weapons from law-abiding citizens. Mark R. Joslyn, professor of political science at the University of Kansas, says this is one of the reasons why gun owners generally vote more reliably than non-gun owners.

In a speech at a National Rifle Association convention on May 18, former President Donald Trump employed that very tactic, deceptively stoking fears that if President Joe Biden is reelected, the government will be “coming for your guns.” Biden has advocated a ban on so-called assault weapons, but he has not proposed confiscating ones currently owned. Trump followed it up by claiming that gun owners don’t vote as often as non-gun owners. That’s wrong.

In his 2020 book, “The Gun Gap: The influence of gun ownership on political behavior and attitudes,” Joslyn analyzed two public databases that have tracked American attitudes for decades to conclude that gun owners are more likely to vote compared with non-owners, that the gap is widening, and that the more guns one owns the more likely one is to vote.

That runs directly counter to Trump’s narrative at the NRA convention.

Trump, May 18: But one thing I’ll say, and I say it as friends, we’ve got to get gun owners to vote because you know what? I don’t know what it is — perhaps it’s a form of rebellion because you’re rebellious people, aren’t you? — but gun owners don’t vote. What is that all about? I’ve heard that. I heard it a few weeks ago. If the gun owners voted, we would swamp them at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. So I think you’re a rebellious bunch, but let’s be rebellious and vote this time. Okay?

Later in the speech, Trump reiterated the point: “And remember what I told you is so true. The gun owners don’t vote. It’s so crazy. They should be … I would think that they would vote more than any other group of people. And it’s just the opposite. They don’t vote. And they have to get out and vote.”

We reached out to the Trump campaign for backup for his claim but did not get a response.

Trump’s claim is “false,” Joslyn told us via email. “Gun owners, compared to non-gun owners, tend to vote more, not less. In addition, political participation (including voting) increases with the number of guns owned.”

Joslyn’s conclusion is based on an analysis of two databases: the General Social Survey, a comprehensive examination of American attitudes and beliefs, conducted since its creation in 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and the American National Election Studies, a collaboration of Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Duke and the University of Texas at Austin that has tracked public attitudes about elections for decades.

Photo by Bytmonas/Getty Images.The GSS survey showed that gun owners consistently reported voting in national elections at a higher rate than non-gun owners in elections from the mid-1970s through 2016.

“Since 1996, the gap between gun owners’ and nonowners’ reported vote is about 11 percent,” Joslyn wrote in his book, which covers federal elections up to 2016. “Turnout among gun owners has increased since 1972 and peaked in 2004 and 2008 at 79 percent. In contrast, turnout declined among nonowners from a high in 1972 of 70 percent to a low of 64 percent in 1996 and 2016.”

Joslyn attempted to tease out the effect of other variables that might explain the disparity in voting behavior, other than gun ownership.

“For example, older people vote more than younger people, and gun ownership and age are positively associated,” Joslyn wrote. “Similarly, higher-income groups are more likely to vote, and income also predicts gun ownership. Race plays a role as well: Whites are more likely to own guns and participate in politics than Blacks. Education is yet another strong predictor of turnout, as is church attendance.”

Parsing those variables, Joslyn found that gun ownership had a “statistically significant effect,” albeit a modest one.

“In summary, results show that gun ownership is a significant predictor” of whether someone votes, Joslyn wrote. “It survives a multivariate test that includes strong correlates of political participation.”

Joslyn also considered that reported voting is usually higher than actual voting — in other words, people sometimes say on surveys they have voted when they really didn’t — though “there is no reason to believe that gun owners are more likely than nonowners to misreport turnout,” he said. Joslyn compared the reported levels of voting to the validated votes of gun owners and non-owners for the 2012 and 2016 presidential contests and the 2014 congressional races, as tracked by the ANES. (In ANES’ voter validation studies, “field interviewers go to local election offices and look at the office’s record of participation for each respondent.”)

While the validated vote was lower than the reported vote, Joslyn wrote, ANES similarly found that “gun owners’ validated turnout levels are higher [than for non-gun owners] and group differences remain significant. Again, this finding demonstrates the political influence of gun ownership on political behavior. A gun, of course, symbolizes many things, but in this case, it indicates Election Day participation and a willingness to affect electoral outcomes.”

Joslyn did not analyze the validated voting figures from ANES for the 2020 election, but he did analyze for us the 2020 self-reported vote, which again showed gun owners were more likely to vote — 80% of gun owners self-reported that they had voted in 2020, as opposed to 73% of non-gun owners.

“Controlling for other relevant predictors including gender, age, education, income, church attendance, and race,” gun ownership was a predictor of voter participation in 2020 — meaning “gun owners compared to non-gun owners are more likely to report voting in 2020,” Joslyn told us.

“[T]he empirical evidence … represent a strong case for gun owners as an important political group in American politics,” Joslyn wrote in “The Gun Gap.” “Gun owners represent a large group. They exhibit a distinctive vote choice and reliably show up on Election Day. As a group, they also actively engage gun organizations and politicians on gun policy. There is variation within the group. The stronger a member’s attachment to guns, the more likely he or she is to vote, and to vote for a Republican.”

Joslyn cited a number of possible reasons why gun owners vote at higher levels. According to his book:

• “Their personal and group interests are often implicated in debates about gun access and use. This naturally draws their attention. A personal stake in politics is clear.
• “Gun rights organizations are quick to exploit threats to owners’ interests and use them as powerful incentives to engage. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and other advocates are experienced in election politics and successful in mobilizing gun interests.
• “Local and state gun rights organizations are plentiful and well positioned to support turnout efforts and effectively reach gun enthusiasts and other supportive citizens.”

“The NRA recognizes gun owners’ voting calculus and repeatedly stirs the pot,” Joslyn wrote. “It arouses suspicion, raises doubts, and prompts gun owners to consider an adverse reality where guns could be confiscated and the Second Amendment challenged.”

Trump did just that in his speech at the NRA convention.

Trump, May 18: If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain. Crooked Joe has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. He’s always wanted to do that.

That’s a distortion of Biden’s position, as we have written several times over the years.

Biden’s Position on Gun ControlBiden has long sought to ban the manufacture and sale of so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for ammunition. But he has not proposed confiscating such weapons. Rather, he has advocated a mandatory federal registry and a voluntary buyback program for all legally purchased assault weapons.

On the campaign trail, Biden often likes to tout that he signed “the first major gun legislation in over 30 years.” He’s referring to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a compromise bill that became law in June 2022 and provided $750 million for states to implement “crisis intervention court proceedings and related programs or initiatives, including but not limited to mental health courts; drug courts; veterans courts; and extreme risk protection order programs.” That last bit refers to so-called red flag laws to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. The law also extended the prohibition of guns for people convicted of domestic abuse to include dating partners, and it expanded background checks on gun purchasers between the ages of 18 and 21.

In September, Biden also created the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and his administration has sought to — among other things — crack down on rogue gun dealers and reduce the number of guns sold without background checks. But, Biden said recently, “I think we have to do more.”

Biden said he supports national red flag laws, required safe storage of weapons and required background checks for all gun purchases.

But nothing in Biden’s record suggests Biden is “coming for your guns” and would seek to “rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.” Biden, who often notes that he himself owns guns, repeatedly has said he does not favor banning all guns, as he made clear in a colorful exchange with an autoworker during the presidential campaign in March 2020:

Man, March 20, 2020: You are actively trying to end our Second Amendment right and take away our guns.

Biden: You’re full of shit. I did not—no, no, shush. Shush. I support the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment — just like right now if you yelled fire, that’s not free speech. And from the very beginning, I have a shotgun, I have a 20-gauge, a 12-gauge. My sons hunt, guess what? You’re not allowed to own any weapon, I’m not taking your gun away at all. You need 100 rounds?

Man: You and [former Rep.] Beto [O’Rourke] say you’re going to take our guns —

Biden: I did not say that. That’s not true. I did not say that.

Rather, Biden explained his position in Las Vegas in December, saying, “We need to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; pass national red flag laws … require safe storage; enact universal background checks and other commonsense measures to save lives. Because, you know, the Second Amendment didn’t say you can own any gun, you can own any weapon.”

In other words, Biden says he would seek to limit the manufacture and sale of certain guns, and he would prohibit the sale of guns to people deemed to have dangerous mental health issues. But he has never proposed confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens.

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A new Biden administration rule will make recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals eligible to obtain health insurance plans established by the Affordable Care Act. But former President Donald Trump has mischaracterized the regulation, claiming that it is “giving Obamacare and all free government health care to illegal aliens.”

DACA is a program created by the Obama administration to defer deporting certain individuals who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children years ago. They are often called “Dreamers,” a reference to legislation that never became law.

The new rule, announced May 3, defines DACA recipients as “lawfully present” in the United States for the purpose of enrolling in a qualified health plan through the ACA health insurance exchanges, or an insurance plan through a state-run basic health program. The exchanges and basic health programs are for people who have to get their own insurance. For those who choose to buy a health plan on the exchanges, they also may qualify for federal financial assistance that would lower the cost of that private insurance.

However, the rule does not grant DACA recipients – or anyone living in the U.S. illegally – access to “all free government health care,” as Trump said.

Immigrants who are not lawfully present in the U.S. are ineligible for the health plans created under the ACA. Furthermore, immigrants in the country illegally are still generally not eligible for non-emergency federal health care programs.

DACA and the ACATrump made the health care claim during a May 11 campaign speech in Wildwood, New Jersey. He said he would “rescue our health care system from Joe Biden’s migrant invasion.”

That was after Trump’s presidential campaign issued a statement on May 3, the day the new rule was announced, saying that Biden was now forcing Americans to pay for “the healthcare of illegal immigrants.”

It’s true that DACA recipients had been prohibited from signing up for qualified or basic health plans – because the 2010 health care law requires enrollees to be citizens, U.S. nationals or lawfully present in the country. (Healthcare.gov, the site through which people can sign up for ACA exchange plans, lists the legal immigration statuses that are eligible to obtain coverage, such as lawful permanent resident, asylee and refugee.)

Starting on Nov. 1, individuals with DACA status will become eligible to apply for those health plans, when the new rule – finalized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services – goes into effect. Those who enroll in a qualified health plan through the ACA marketplace could also be eligible for income-based premium tax credits that would lower their monthly premiums, as well as cost-sharing reductions that lessen out-of-pocket costs for health services.

To qualify for DACA, which was created by executive action in 2012, individuals must meet several criteria. Among other things, they need to have been born on or after June 16, 1981; arrived in the U.S. before they turned 16 years old; and continuously lived in the U.S. since June 15, 2007. They also needed to be a student, high school graduate, General Education Development recipient, or an honorably discharged military or Coast Guard veteran.

Photo by photobyphotoboy / stock.adobe.com.As of Dec. 31, there were about 530,000 active DACA recipients in the country, who can renew their status every two years. But the program, which is still being challenged in court, is not processing new initial applications, as ordered by a 2023 court decision.

Trump tried ending DACA, but was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.

CMS estimates that its new policy could result in 100,000 DACA recipients enrolling in health coverage in fiscal year 2025 – 99,000 through an ACA marketplace plan and 1,000 through a state basic health program. Enrollment, or re-enrollment, in basic health plans is estimated to remain at that same level through FY 2028, while marketplace enrollment is expected to drop to 85,000 a year starting in FY 2026.

Those totals are a fraction of the nearly 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission, as of Jan. 1, 2022, according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics.

Currently, only New York and Minnesota have basic health programs, which offer insurance to low-income individuals and families who do not qualify for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. There is no monthly premium for those who qualify for New York’s “essential plan.”

Oregon’s basic health care program is scheduled to launch in July. For qualifying members, the state says there will be no premiums, co-payments, coinsurance or deductibles.

Due to the expected increase in ACA marketplace enrollment, CMS estimates that the federal government will spend an extra $240 million on premium tax credits in FY 2025. After that, the cost is projected to increase to about $300 million a year through FY 2028.

In addition, because the federal government provides money to help states implement their basic health plan programs, increased enrollment in such plans is estimated to cost about $5 million a year from FY 2025 to FY 2028, CMS says. The federal government pays states 95% of what enrollees in basic health plans would have received if they had enrolled in marketplace plans and received tax credits and cost-sharing reductions.

Federal Health Care ProgramsContrary to what Trump claimed, the new rule does not give “all free government health care to illegal aliens.”

Even for DACA recipients, the regulation says that it does not — at this time — make them and other immigrants newly classified as lawfully present eligible for Medicaid and CHIP, low-cost health care programs that can be free for beneficiaries in some cases. (CMS said it is still reviewing public comments it received about a proposal to classify DACA participants as lawfully present and eligible for Medicaid and CHIP.)

The larger population of people illegally residing in the country has long been generally excluded from participating in most health programs provided by the federal government. Emergency medical care is the main exception, as we have written before.

“Facilities such as emergency departments and health centers have obligations to provide care regardless of insurance status, though they may charge for the services they provide,” the Congressional Research Service said in a report updated in December 2022.

In addition, the report said: “Federal programs also support providers that deliver family planning services and those that seek to reduce the transmission of communicable diseases. These programs generally provide services regardless of ability to pay or immigration status. Moreover, federal law provides that public health services related to communicable disease transmission be available to individuals regardless of immigration status.”

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Quick TakeRepublican Sen. Katie Britt has introduced a bill that would create a government website to help connect pregnant people with resources, excluding abortion services. Some Democrats and partisan websites have misleadingly claimed the proposed law would create a federal database of pregnant people. The bill doesn’t require users to provide any personal information.

Full StoryAs Republicans face an uphill battle on their restrictive abortion policies for the 2024 election, GOP Sen. Katie Britt — who opposes abortion — has introduced a bill that she says seeks to support pregnant women.

But critics have spun the draft legislation into a claim that the senator from Alabama is proposing a government-run database that could track pregnant people.

The bill — called the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act, or MOMS Act — has three sections:

• The first would create a website called Pregnancy.gov that would list “relevant resources” to pregnant people and parents of young children, including health services (not including abortion), nutrition assistance, and recovery and mental health services.
• The second would offer grants to organizations that provide prenatal and post-natal services — such as housing assistance, adoption services, and child care assistance — and to organizations that would use telehealth to improve prenatal and post-natal health care to people in remote or underserved areas.
• The third would require states to impose child-support payments through pregnancy.

Within days of the bill’s introduction, partisan media outlets, including the MeidasTouch Network and HuffPost, panned the proposal, misleadingly claiming that it would create a federal database of pregnant people.

Some Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, also opposed the bill. In a statement issued on May 13, they characterized the bill as a means to “push anti-abortion propaganda” through “a new government-run website to collect data on pregnant women and direct them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and other ‘resources’ to pressure women into carrying pregnancies to term, no matter their circumstances.”

And posts have proliferated on social media, repeating the claim that Britt had proposed creating a “national database of pregnant women.”

But the bill includes no such proposal.

The claim appears to be based on the first section of the bill, which would create a new government-run website. But nowhere in the text of the proposed law does it say that people who use the site would be required to enter their personal information. Rather, it says that users would be able to opt in to give their contact information and receive follow-up emails or phone calls with “additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.”

The bill doesn’t specify where or for how long the contact information provided by users would be kept, so we asked Britt’s spokesman Sean Ross for further details. He pointed out that the website would function under existing federal privacy guidelines.

“Nothing in this bill alters existing federal data privacy laws or regulations related to government agencies, including the Privacy Act of 1974, the E-Government Act, and existing HHS regulations,” Ross said in an email, referring to the Department of Health and Human Services.

He also highlighted existing rules for websites maintained by the HHS, which Britt’s proposed website would follow.

“Submitting personally identifiable information (PII) such as name, address, telephone number, email address, etc. is voluntary and is not required to access information on our website,” the HHS privacy policy says. “We retain the information only for as long as necessary to respond to your question or request, in most cases no longer than three months. We maintain and destroy information submitted electronically as required by the Federal Records Act and the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) records schedules. It may be subject to disclosure in certain cases (for example, if required by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, court order, or Congressional access request, or if authorized by a Privacy Act SORN).”

The bill doesn’t mention anything about creating a database with users’ personal information.

It does say that within six months of the site’s launch, the secretary of Health and Human Services would be required to report to Congress on website traffic and feedback. The bill specifies that “the report … shall not include any personal identifying information regarding individuals who have used the website.”

So, the bill proposes listing pregnancy-related services, except for those involving abortion, on a website where users could choose to share their contact information in order to get more customized results. It does not describe the creation of a nationwide database detailing the whereabouts of pregnant people.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesKight, Stef. “Senate GOP pushes bill to provide support to pregnant women, moms.” Axios. 9 May 2024.

Hassan, Maggie. Press release. “Senators Hassan, Collins, Britt, Smith Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Expand Access to Maternal Health Care.” 3 Apr 2024.

Kamarck, Elaine. “Abortion and the 2024 election: There is no easy way out for Republicans.” Brookings Institution. 17 Apr 2024.

U.S. Senate. “S. 4296, A Bill To amend the Public Health Service Act to provide more opportunities for mothers to succeed, and for other purposes.” (as introduced 9 May 2024).

Murray, Patty. Press release. “Senate Democratic Women Respond to New Senate Republican Legislation to Collect Data on Pregnant Women Through New Government Website, Push Anti-Abortion Propaganda.” 13 May 2024.

Ross, Sean. Spokesman, Sen. Katie Britt. Email to FactCheck.org. 17 May 2024.

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Quick TakeAdult film star Stormy Daniels recently testified at the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, who is charged with falsifying records during his 2016 campaign to conceal an affair with Daniels. Social media posts falsely claim to show evidence of the affair by sharing a fake, digitally altered photo of Donald and Melania Trump with Daniels.

Full StoryThe first criminal trial of a former U.S. president is winding down in a Manhattan courtroom, where Donald Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to keep extramarital affairs from becoming public during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial, which began April 15, has included the testimony of adult film star Stormy Daniels, who described her sexual encounter with Trump and $130,000 in payments she received from attorney Michael Cohen on behalf of Trump as part of an agreement not to disclose their relationship. The former president has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied having an affair with Daniels.

Social media users have weighed in with their own purported evidence of Trump’s relationship with Daniels. A May 16 Instagram post, which has received more than 5,000 likes, purports to show an image of Donald and Melania Trump with Daniels, all of them in formal wear, and text that reads: “A Bible salesman, his pregnant wife, and the woman he never ever ever ever met, but paid her $130,000 for something they never ever ever ever did…..”

A Facebook post shares the same image and text, with the caption: “Boooooooom (I got the receipts).”

But the “receipts” aren’t real. The picture shared in the posts was digitally altered using two photos to create a fake composite image. The original photo of the Trumps showed them with Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka in a Daily Mail article, photographed at a 2005 event. The photo of Daniels was lifted from coverage of a 2009 awards show.

The Snopes fact-checking website debunked posts that shared the same manipulated image in 2018.

Testimony in Trump’s criminal trial may wrap up and the jury could begin deliberations the week of May 20.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAssociated Press. “Trump hush money trial: A timeline of key events in the case.” 13 May 2024.

Bustillo, Ximena. “Trump’s New York criminal trial could head to jury deliberation as soon as next week.” NPR. 16 May 2024.

Evon, Dan. “Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Stormy Daniels?” Snopes. 21 Mar 2018.

Michallon, Clemence. “Donald Trump called his pregnant wife Melania ‘a monster’ and ‘a blimp’ just two months after ‘grab them by the p***y’ comments.” Daily Mail. 9 Oct 2016.

Reiss, Adam, et al. “Stormy Daniels spars with Trump’s lawyer during hush money trial testimony.” NBC News. 9 May 2024.

Sisak, Michael R., et al. “Trump charged with 34 felony counts in hush money scheme.” Associated Press. 4 Apr 2023.

Supreme Court of the State of New York. “The People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump.” 4 Apr 2023.

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President Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed that past presidents, including his predecessor, have “ignored” or “failed to uphold” laws requiring that federal government money be used to purchase only U.S. materials or products. Biden has expanded and emphasized such requirements, but we found no indication other presidents didn’t abide by the laws on the books during their tenures.

Presidents of both parties have embraced the “Buy America” political messaging. Biden can lay claim to implementing broader requirements on how federal money is spent, such as those in a major infrastructure law that included $550 billion in new spending. But he goes too far in suggesting prior administrations broke the rules.

“And, by the way, ‘Buy America’ has been the law of the land since the ‘30s, but it’s been ignored by most administrations,” Biden said on May 8 in Racine, Wisconsin. “Past administrations, including my predecessor, have failed to buy American.

“Not anymore,” he continued. “Here’s how it works. When the pre- — when the Congress sends something to the president to build something — whether it’s a road, a highway, a deck of an aircraft carrier; whatever it is — that president is — back from a law that was passed in the ‘30s — is supposed to hire American workers to build it and use American products.”

In Pittsburgh, in a speech at the United Steelworkers Headquarters, Biden said “very few presidents ever paid attention to” the provision in the 1930s law. “If a president is sent money from the Congress to do something for the public, he must use American products and must use American workers unless you couldn’t find them. Well, guess what? A lot of them didn’t find them, except me.”

The president continued, “We buy America. And past administrations, including my predecessor, failed to uphold that Buy America provision. Not anymore.”

He made similar comments in his State of the Union address in early March, and on April 24, when picking up the endorsement of North America’s Building Trades Unions. At the union event, Biden said former President “Donald Trump failed to uphold” Buy America.

Biden is right in describing the law dating back to 1933. That act, and several subsequent laws that are often conflated with it, have required federal government money to be spent on domestic, not foreign, products — with some exceptions and waivers allowed under certain conditions, such as cost and supply issues, or prevailing trade agreements. But experts told us past presidents, including Trump, didn’t ignore these laws.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us Biden’s claim about past presidents was “a pretty egregious misstatement.”

Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics and trade at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us Biden’s claim “stretches the truth.”

“The Trump administration was quite active in trying to limit the application of Buy America waivers,” Lincicome said, “and thus make the rules more restrictive.”

When we asked the White House about Biden’s remarks, a spokesperson pointed to the president’s efforts to expand Buy America requirements, including a proposed rule to eliminate a broad, decades-old waiver for manufactured products used in highways. One expert told us getting rid of that waiver gives Biden’s claim legitimacy, while another disagreed.

Even if we give Biden credit for going beyond what his predecessors have done, his broad-brush comments leave the impression that presidents before him “ignored,” as he puts it, the buy-domestic provisions entirely.

“If previous administrations had somehow violated the Buy America provision in the 1930 law, as amended, you may be sure that some domestic firm would have sued,” Hufbauer told us. “I know of no such suits.”

We should note that economists generally are critical of these types of protectionist laws, because, they say, the restrictions increase costs, delay projects, and can lead to getting inferior or not as advanced products. And the more the U.S. pushes such laws, the more other countries implement their own buy-national rules. Both Lincicome and Hufbauer have written about such concerns.

“Economists don’t like these things,” Lincicome told us, saying it was “one of those rare areas” where the “vast majority of economists agree.”

In a 2020 article, Hufbauer and his Peterson Institute co-author Euijin Jung estimated the markup on domestic procurement due to restrictions on buying potentially cheaper imports. They then calculated that “the annual taxpayer cost for each US job arguably ‘saved’ by Made in America probably exceeds $250,000. We put ‘saved’ in quotation marks because buy national requirements essentially shuffle jobs from other sectors of the economy to the procurement sector.” They called such a policy of excluding imports “an economic loser.”

But “it’s good politics and that’s what keeps it going,” Hufbauer told us.

We’ll explain more about what these laws do and the actions of the Biden administration and past presidents.

Buy America/American HistoryIn general, there are two types of these laws: those concerning materials the federal government buys itself, and those applicable to federal money granted to states and local governments for some infrastructure projects.

Biden cites the 1933 Buy American Act, the first of these types of statutes. The law concerns federal government procurement, requiring agencies “to apply a price preference for ‘domestic end products’ and use ‘domestic construction materials’ for covered contracts performed in the United States,” as the Congressional Research Service explained in a report updated in 2022.

There are several other laws that further the domestic-content requirements for federal purchasing, such as the Berry Amendment, which puts restrictions on Defense Department spending. “There are also a number of other domestic content restrictions that apply in specific contexts and, in many cases, are intended to address perceived gaps in the BAA,” CRS said.

Connecticut Department of Transportation crews reconstruct a southbound Interstate 95 bridge on Nov. 5, 2023, in Westport. The work is part of a project funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.Confusingly, there are also Buy America — no “n” — laws and regulations that apply to federal money given to state and local governments for some infrastructure projects. The restrictions mainly concern “highways, public transportation, aviation, and intercity passenger rail, including Amtrak,” CRS explained in another report on this family of laws. The transportation industry restrictions were first part of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1978.

“Unless a nationwide or project-specific waiver is granted, Buy America generally requires the use of U.S.-made iron and steel and the domestic production and assembly of certain other manufactured goods,” CRS said. “One of the main manufacturing industries this affects is rolling stock, which includes intercity passenger rail trains, public transportation rail cars and buses, and associated equipment.”

Though Biden only mentions the 1933 law, he’s talking about both Buy America and Buy American provisions.

There are exceptions under these laws for purchasing foreign goods, including when the domestic products are too expensive, in short supply in the U.S., or when adhering to the requirements would be against the “public interest,” as Cato’s Lincicome explained in a February 2023 commentary piece. Under a 1979 law, presidents can also grant waivers if the restrictions would discriminate against countries that are in trade agreements with the U.S.

Changes Under Trump, BidenSome of the details of the Buy America/American requirements have changed over time. The 1933 government procurement law called for the use of only “unmanufactured” materials that had been “mined or produced” in the U.S. and only “manufactured” items that had been made in this country “substantially all from articles, materials, or supplies mined, produced, or manufactured in the United States.” As Lincicome wrote, “substantially all” used to mean 50% of the value of the items were from U.S. materials. The Trump administration increased the threshold to 55% in a rule, finalized late in his administration, that reflected a 2019 executive order. That rule also said for items manufactured from iron and steel, the cost of foreign iron and steel must be under 5% of the total product cost.

So, contrary to Biden’s claims, Trump tightened the requirements related to the 1930s law.

Biden, however, upped the general domestic content threshold again, to 60%. Under the October 2022 final rule, the threshold is set to increase further to 65% this year and 75% in 2029, though the final rule says the cut-off can go back to 55% through the end of 2029 if “no domestic products can meet the new thresholds or the cost to acquire them would be unreasonable,” the Office of Management and Budget’s Made in America Office, which Biden also created, explains.

The new Made in America Office has a website that includes all Buy America/American waiver requests and whether they have been reviewed yet. In addition to providing some transparency about the waivers, the site says it aims “to maximize opportunities for U.S. producers to supply goods and services to the federal government.”

There are more than 1,100 waivers listed, the vast majority of them requested due to “nonavailability” of the product in the U.S. But that doesn’t help us fact-check how this compares with past administrations or whether presidents have skirted these laws. Experts told us there’s no database or repository that could measure how much one administration “bought American” compared with another.

A Government Accountability Office report on fiscal year 2017 found that while waivers and exceptions were used, the federal government didn’t buy a lot of foreign products. Using federal procurement data for that year, the GAO determined that “foreign end products accounted for less than 5 percent—about $7.8 billion—of federal obligations for products potentially subject to the Buy American Act,” noting that the amount could be higher due to errors in the data.

As Lincicome put it, the GAO “said, yeah these waivers happen but they’re not the exception that’s eating the rule.”

Trump used “Buy American, Hire American” as a campaign slogan in 2016, and a few months into his presidency, he signed an executive order with that name, saying “every agency shall scrupulously monitor, enforce, and comply with Buy American Laws, to the extent they apply, and minimize the use of waivers, consistent with applicable law.” In 2018, he signed a bipartisan water infrastructure law that extended for five years requirements that only U.S. iron and steel be used in projects funded by a state revolving fund.

The restrictions on funding for transit projects also tightened just before Trump took office, Alon Levy, a research fellow with the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management’s transportation and land-use program, told us. Levy said, “The decision was not made by political appointees but by career civil servants who were anticipating a more protectionist direction in federal policy,” under the incoming Trump administration.

“This is not about upholding provisions, though,” they said. “Buy America has an escape clause, allowing federally-funded projects to import if there’s no American substitute, or if the American substitute is too expensive, at least 25% more expensive than the import. However, to exercise the escape clause, agencies need to apply for a waiver — it’s not automatic.

“Traditionally, federal waivers were granted as per the law, but during the Obama-Trump transition, FTA stopped processing the waiver requests,” Levy said, referring to the Federal Transit Administration. “This policy has been maintained under Biden.”

Levy, who is also a critic of the Buy America policies, said “federal agencies have already acted as if the law is more restrictive than it actually is,” dating back to that Obama-Trump transition. And restrictions have gotten tighter during Biden’s administration “because the supply chain crisis created a backlog” of waiver requests. (In a 2021 article, Levy said Buy America was “harmful” and should be repealed, detailing the impact on U.S. mass transit and what they said were “[t]oo few jobs” created at too high a cost.)

Under Biden, the Build America Buy America Act, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure law, expanded how Buy America pertains to federal infrastructure grants. The law says all infrastructure projects that are federally funded must use iron, steel, manufactured products and other construction materials that are made in the U.S., with waivers available for public interest, supply and cost issues. (See this explainer by the Bipartisan Policy Center for more.)

Typically, the Buy America laws covered transportation and water infrastructure, but the Build America Buy America provision goes beyond that to include any infrastructure construction. And in addition to covering “the usual iron/steel products,” Lincicome wrote, the act pertains to “nonferrous metals (e.g., copper), plastic‐ and polymer‐based products, glass, composite building materials, lumber, and drywall.”

Hufbauer noted that previous presidents “didn’t have huge projects like this” — except for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act under former President Barack Obama. That 2009 stimulus act also included requirements that “all of the iron, steel, and manufactured goods” in public projects be domestic, with the usual exceptions. Hufbauer also said that previous presidents “weren’t tight on requiring states to follow Buy America rules when they spent the money.”

Biden “did change the way things are done,” he said, but Biden’s claim that others were “breaking the law … is a misstatement.”

Also under Biden, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes funding for renewable energy projects, offers a bonus for projects that meet domestic content restrictions.

Lincicome told us “it’s fair to say” that the Biden administration has tried to reduce the exceptions to Buy America rules. “But Trump did the same type of stuff,” and it’s hard to determine the impact of Biden’s efforts thus far. “You can kind of tell how effective [it has been] by how much people are complaining,” he said, “and people are complaining,” referring to industry players and state transportation departments and others that have to deal with these rules.

When we asked the White House press office about the president’s comments about past administrations, White House spokesperson Robyn M. Patterson sent us a statement saying: “Since his first week in office, President Biden has worked tirelessly to build a future Made in America – including by signing Executive Order 14005, Ensuring the Future is Made in All of America by All of America’s Workers, and establishing the Made in America Office at the Office of Management and budget and launched a whole-of-government initiative to strengthen the use of taxpayers’ dollars to support American manufacturing.”

Patterson also referred to a proposed rule by the Biden administration to do away with a longtime waiver for federally funded highway projects that said manufactured products that don’t contain steel and iron are exempt from Buy America provisions. Examples of such manufactured products include traffic signals and controllers, and vehicle detection equipment. Patterson said “the previous administration continued a sweeping, Reagan-era Buy America waiver for manufacturing products in federal-aid highway projects and failed to carry out longstanding grants guidance which encouraged the purchase of domestic products.”

The proposed rule’s comment period ended on May 13.

The waiver has been in place since 1983, when the Federal Highway Administration cited “public interest” reasons for the exception, saying the products affected by the waiver made up only a small percentage of highway projects. “Due to the Manufactured Products General Waiver, manufactured products permanently incorporated into FHWA-funded projects do not need to be produced domestically, apart from predominantly iron or steel manufactured products and predominantly iron or steel components of manufactured products,” the proposed rule says.

A former House transportation committee staff member told us there has been an effort on Capitol Hill over the years to get rid of that waiver, but no one has done it. If this is what Biden means in talking about past administrations not upholding the law, the former staffer said, it’s a legitimate claim.

But Hufbauer said the proposed rule still doesn’t back up Biden. “Previous administrations were perfectly entitled to invoke the [FHWA] waiver,” he told us. “Nothing wrong with that. They did that to save taxpayer money and speed up projects.”

Biden can claim that his administration has taken several steps to increase the use of domestic products in federal and federally funded projects, but that doesn’t mean that past administrations have “ignored” or “failed to uphold” Buy America/American laws.

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In an interview with Time, former President Donald 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.

In several campaign speeches, however, President Joe Biden has twisted Trump’s words, 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.”

Trump’s three appointments to the U.S. 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.

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 so-called 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.

Nonetheless, Trump did not say states should prosecute women who have abortions, as Biden has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail. In fact, in a March 2016 campaign statement, Trump said that he does not support criminal prosecution of women who get abortions. Now, Trump says the issue should be left up to the states.

What Trump SaidAs 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, Trump retracted the statement the same day, saying that the physician performing the procedure in violation of a 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.

Since then, Roe v. Wade was overturned. This election cycle, Trump faced questions about whether he would support a national abortion ban, and if so, at what point in a pregnancy and with what exceptions.

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 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.”

In the Time interview, Trump was asked about several potential state policies — such as punishing women who violate abortion bans or monitoring pregnancies to police whether a prohibited abortion occurs — and whether he would support them. (In his response, Trump also repeats his false claim that “every legal scholar … wanted that issue back at the states.” Legal scholars told us that was “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.”)

Time, April 12: Are you comfortable if states decide to punish women who access abortions after the procedure is banned?

Trump: Are you talking about number of weeks?

Time: Yeah. Let’s say there’s a 15-week ban—

Trump: Again, that’s going to be—I don’t have to be comfortable or uncomfortable. The states are going to make that decision. The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.

Time: Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?

Trump: I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states. Look, Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states. And that was a legal, as well as possibly in the hearts of some, in the minds of some, a moral decision. But it was largely a legal decision. Every legal scholar, Democrat, Republican, and other wanted that issue back at the states. You know, Roe v. Wade was always considered very bad law. Very bad. It was a very bad issue from a legal standpoint. People were amazed it lasted as long as it did. And what I was able to do is through the choice of some very good people who frankly were very courageous, the justices it turned out to be you know, the Republican—

Time: States will decide if they’re comfortable or not—

Trump: Yeah the states—

Time: Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban. But are you comfortable with it?

Trump: The states are going to say. It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions. And by the way, Texas is going to be different than Ohio. And Ohio is going to be different than Michigan. I see what’s happening.

Trump later claimed in a May 5 post on Truth Social that his words were being misconstrued in the press.

“I never said that ‘some states may choose to monitor women’s pregnancies to possibly prosecute for violating any abortion bans.’ This was made up by Democrats and the Fake News Media,” Trump claimed in the social media post.

But that is precisely what Trump said, as the transcript from the Time interview shows.

And Trump has since reiterated that point in an interview with WGAL News 8 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on May 7. WGAL anchor Barbara Barr told Trump, “There are ads running that say that you would support certain states with bans monitoring a woman’s pregnancy.”

Trump responded, “Well that would be up to the states, again. They will make a decision as to how they do it. So far, a lot of states are coming in without that, without any of that. And that would all be up to the states. Everything having to do with that question is now in the hands of the states, which is where every legal scholar – and that’s on both sides, Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative – every legal scholar wanted it to be in the hands of the states.”

Again, Trump’s claim about “every legal scholar” wanting the issue to return to the states is false.

Nonetheless, on two occasions, when asked about states monitoring pregnancies, Trump has responded that those decisions would be left up to the states. But Trump never said that’s what he thinks states should do.

Biden Twists Trump’s WordsThe Biden administration quickly seized on Trump’s remarks in the Time interview, with varying degrees of accuracy.

“Just this week, in an interview, he said states have the right to monitor pregnant women to enforce these bans and states have the right to punish pregnant women for seeking out abortion care,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in Jacksonville on May 1, accurately reflecting Trump’s interview.

But the same day at a campaign event in Washington, D.C., Biden took it one step further.

“And then Trump did a long interview in Time magazine. I — it’s coming out. You got to read it. It’s a mandatory reading. And … he said in that magazine — he said states should monitor women’s p- — now, get this: States should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.”

Biden repeated the claim at a campaign reception in Seattle on May 12.

“Trump did a long interview in Time Magazine,” Biden said. “You ought to read it. He said, quote, ‘states should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate the bans.’ Monitor women’s pregnancies? What have we become here?”

We should note that Biden’s carefully worded line claims Trump said states should prosecute “those who violate abortion bans,” not necessarily women who get abortions in violation of state bans. Biden made that connection, however, in remarks at a campaign event on May 12 in Medina, Washington, when he claimed that in the Time interview, Trump “said, ‘The states should monitor women’s pregnancies’ … ‘monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who seek help.’ Monitor women’s pregnancies? Prosecute them?”

Other Democrats echoed Biden’s claim. For example, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer claimed Trump “said again that women should be punished for having abortions. And he’s okay with states monitoring pregnant women to stop them from having abortions.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul cited Trump’s Time interview as evidence that he “endorses punishing women who get an abortion.”

But again, those were not Trump’s words, and the Democrats’ claims twist his message.

Trump said his opinion about prosecuting women who violate state abortion bans was “irrelevant” because those decisions should be left to the states. Likewise, Trump said states “might” decide to monitor women’s pregnancies and “you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” That’s different from Trump advocating that states enact such laws.

Then again, Trump isn’t advocating women should not be prosecuted – which was his position in the first campaign. In 2016, he put out a formal position statement saying that he does not think women should be criminally prosecuted for violating abortion bans. Now, he has declined to state his opinion on the issue, saying only that states will decide.

State LawsWhether states decide to monitor pregnancies to determine whether abortion bans are being violated and whether states will prosecute women who get an abortion are separate — though related — issues.

Most states require hospitals, facilities and physicians to provide information about abortions, with some requiring details such as a patient’s reason for seeking the abortion and whether the fetus was deemed viable. But we could not find any state laws that require monitoring of pregnancies for the purpose of policing abortion bans.

On May 9, Republican Sens. Katie Britt, Marco Rubio and Kevin Cramer introduced a billthat would — among other things — create a national pregnancy website to act as “a federal clearinghouse of resources available to expecting and postpartum moms.” A provision of the bill that talks about pregnant women voluntarily providing contact information to the website has some Senate Democrats concerned that it would “provide data to a potential Trump administration and potentially allow a government bureaucrat to follow up with them about the status of their pregnancy.” But the bill doesn’t call for a mandatory federal monitoring of pregnancies.

As for whether states might prosecute women who get an abortion in violation of state prohibitions, no state laws currently call for that explicitly. But in recent years, Republican lawmakers in several states have proposed that. And some state abortion laws are silent on the issue of prosecuting women who get prohibited abortions, raising concerns that aggressive prosecutors in those states might attempt to punish women who get an abortion that violates state law.

Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School and the Duke Initiative for
Science and Society, and Stephanie Pell, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare, recently published an analysis in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy looking into whether women could be prosecuted for self-managing their abortions through medication.

That is especially relevant, Dellinger said, given that more than 60% of abortions are performed with medication and as self-managed abortions have become increasingly more common, “especially in ban states where the provision of care has been criminalized.”

“Our analysis indicated that, in spite of the popular narrative that women will not be prosecuted for violating abortion laws, many of the existing laws do not explicitly prohibit such prosecutions,” Dellinger told us via email. “Florida’s 6-week ban, for example, broadly prohibits and criminalizes abortion and does not include any provision that would exempt women from prosecution. In these circumstances, we are concerned that a prosecutor could exercise discretion to bring charges against a pregnant person who self-manages abortion with medication.”

A law in Nevada, for example, criminalizes some self-managed abortions, she said. According to the Nevada law, it is a felony if a woman, not acting under the advice of a physician, “takes or uses, or submits to the use of, any drug, medicine or substance, or any instrument or other means, with the intent to terminate her pregnancy after the 24th week of pregnancy.”

In addition, Dellinger said, “Ban states that have personhood laws also raise issues about the interplay between abortion laws and homicide codes.”

It remains to be seen how those laws will play out, and whether women who obtain abortions might be charged criminally and convicted. It also remains to be seen whether states may pass laws to monitor pregnancies in order to enforce abortion bans. But Trump never said states “should” enact such laws — only that they might, and that such decisions ought to be made at the state level.

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A recent video promoting independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises to “start with some irrefutable facts.” The over 30-minute video, narrated by actor Woody Harrelson, begins with some biographical truths about the candidate, but veers into promoting various debunked or unsupported narratives about vaccines.

The pro-Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024 paid for the video, titled “Who is Bobby Kennedy?” Posts of the video have been viewed more than 100 million times on X, where Kennedy promoted it as “The Bobby Kennedy video Meta doesn’t want you to see.” Elon Musk, who owns X, shared Kennedy’s post.

Meta, which owns social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook, has said that a link to the video was “mistakenly blocked” temporarily after being incorrectly flagged as spam. The super PAC behind the video and Kennedy have both sued Meta, claiming election interference.

Kennedy has a history of spreading false or misleading information on vaccination, autism and COVID-19, among other topics. Below, we discuss a few of the claims made in the video that we previously addressed in a three-part series about Kennedy last year.

Debunked Claims on Vaccines and MercuryAccording to the video, a pivotal moment in Kennedy’s career came when he met parents who believed that mercury in vaccines had harmed their children. The video doesn’t explicitly state how the parents believed the vaccines had injured their children, but Kennedy has said in the past mothers of autistic children brought the issue to his attention. A wide range of evidence indicates that there’s no link between thimerosal — a mercury-containing preservative — and autism or other conditions.

However, one parent provided Kennedy with scientific studies that convinced him, in his words, that “I got to drop everything and do something about this.” This led Kennedy to publish a 2005 article for Salon and Rolling Stone, which advanced the unsupported idea that thimerosal had caused an increase in autism and other disorders. Salon eventually retracted the story.

The Kennedy video doesn’t mention that extensive research has failed to show any relationship between thimerosal in childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders. In fact, the rate of autism continued to rise after thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, indicating that it did not explain the increase in diagnoses of the condition. This increase was likely caused in large part by growing awareness of autism, changes to how it is defined and the growing availability of services for children who get the diagnosis.

For more, read “What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism.”

Missing Facts on Vaccine Safety Testing and Manufacturer LiabilityKennedy goes on to state in the video: “Thanks to pressure from millions of people, they’ve taken mercury out of most vaccines, but pharmaceutical companies are still immune from prosecution and litigation, and vaccines aren’t subject to the same rigorous safety testing as other medicines, and that’s not right.”

Kennedy’s statement about the liability of vaccine makers needs context, and his claim about vaccine safety testing is misleading.

As we have written previously, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 in many cases prevents people from suing vaccine makers for alleged vaccine harms. Instead, people must seek help from a government program.

If a compensation claim is rejected or it takes too long to get a response, people can still sue, and vaccine makers can still be held liable in certain situations, such as where negligence, fraud or manufacturing flaws led to vaccine injuries. Kennedy has himself been involved in an ongoing lawsuit against Merck on behalf of clients allegedly harmed by the human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil.

The law was passed because lawsuits against vaccine makers — even those that turned out to be unjustified — were dampening companies’ enthusiasm for making vaccines. The law also led to the creation of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a national surveillance system used by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to identify potential vaccine safety concerns. VAERS accepts unverified reports of any health issue that occurs after vaccination.

VAERS is just one part of a larger system that promotes vaccine safety in the U.S. Vaccines undergo testing for safety and efficacy before entering the market. As they are rolled out to the larger population, they undergo safety monitoring using systems such as VAERS and Vaccine Safety Datalink, which uses data from health care organizations across the country to monitor for possible connections between health events and vaccination.

It is unclear what exactly Kennedy means when he says that “vaccines aren’t subject to the same rigorous safety testing as other medicines.” We reached out to the Kennedy campaign for more information but have not received a reply.

Kennedy has previously falsely claimed that placebo-controlled trials are required for medications but not for vaccines. As we have said, vaccines are typically tested in controlled trials, but it is not feasible for all vaccines to be tested in placebo-controlled trials. For instance, if an effective vaccine is already available against a disease and researchers are testing a new version, it would be unethical to randomly assign some people to receive a placebo instead of an already available vaccine. For similar reasons, not all drugs are tested in placebo-controlled trials.

For more, read “FactChecking Robert F. Kenndy Jr.“

Revising the COVID-19 NarrativeA theme of the video is the idea that Kennedy has been unfairly criticized and attacked because he holds companies accountable. The video extends that argument to imply without evidence that attempts to hold Kennedy accountable for his statements on COVID-19 were in fact motivated by pharmaceutical companies.

“I feared that a rushed COVID vaccine wouldn’t be as safe or as effective as we were promised,” Kennedy says. “And I also felt that lockdowns were going to do more harm than good, especially to small businesses and to children. Well, when I made those arguments publicly I was silenced.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a 2021 rally against vaccine mandates in New York City. Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.This is a highly pared down account of Kennedy’s statements on COVID-19. Among many other unfounded claims, Kennedy has said that the COVID-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” and that “there is an argument” that COVID-19 is ethnically targeted. He has promoted disproven COVID-19 treatments and inflated the costs, while discounting the benefits, of COVID-19 restrictions.

The narrator, Harrelson, then outlines a conspiracy: “So powerful corporations and partners in the media have a playbook they use on you when you beat them too much and in areas you can cost them real money. They implemented every page in the playbook on Bobby when he decided to question the absolute moral purity of the gods of Big Pharma.” The video, meanwhile, shows logos of a collection of pharmaceutical companies, with Pfizer’s at the center.

Various media outlets over the years have published articles pointing out Kennedy’s misleading and false claims. The video visually highlights some of these articles, including ours, as part of a “playbook” in which they “attack you broadly and they question your facts.”

To be clear, the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out rapidly — amid a deadly pandemic — because experts judged that the benefits outweighed the risks. Ample research has since affirmed that the vaccines protect against severe disease and that serious side effects are rare.

For more, read “RFK Jr.’s COVID-19 Deceptions.”

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Michigan officials have said that only people who the federal government has determined are in the U.S. legally are eligible for a state program that temporarily pays rent for refugees and other qualifying immigrants.

But a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump is running a TV and online ad that distorts the facts about the state’s rental subsidy program – which is funded with federal money – to claim that President Joe Biden “is paying rent for illegals.”

There is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants in the country are benefiting from the program. As of April, all of the more than 1,200 beneficiaries in Michigan receiving help with their rent had a legal immigration status, according to data from the state agency that runs the program. Over 80% of the beneficiaries were refugees or Afghan nationals who came to the U.S. through a humanitarian parole program the Biden administration established in 2021.

What the Ad SaysThe pro-Trump MAGA Inc. began airing the TV ad in Georgia on April 24, and it was still running as of May 15, according to AdImpact, a political ad tracking service. The group also has paid to run the ad on digital platforms in Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.

In the ad, an actress playing a Biden campaign worker speaks with a man playing a 2020 Biden voter frustrated with higher prices for food, gasoline and rent. When the campaign worker interjects that “Biden’s helping pay rent for newcomers to America from around the world,” the disgruntled voter responds by asking: “You mean illegal immigrants?”

“I’m struggling to pay my bills, but Biden is paying rent for illegals? They get handouts and I’m paying for it,” the man says.

As the caller speaks, text on screen in the ad says “$500 a month to illegal immigrants.” A citation in the ad attributes that quote to an April 4 Daily Mail article that wrongly says a Michigan program – not a federal one, as the ad suggests – “gives $500 a month to illegal immigrants for housing.”

Trump himself falsely claimed in an April 11 social media video, “In Michigan, radical, left Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is handing out $500 a month in cash to anyone who accepts illegal aliens into your homes.”

Michigan’s Rental Subsidy ProgramThe Michigan Newcomer Rental Subsidy Program began in October as a collaboration between the Office of Global Michigan – which is part of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity – and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.

The program provides some refugees and other immigrants legally in the U.S. with rental assistance for up to 12 months. According to the program’s website, those who qualify include refugees, people granted asylum, individuals with special immigration visas, victims of human trafficking, certain citizens of Cuba and Haiti, nationals of Afghanistan, and humanitarian parolees from Ukraine.

In addition, applicants must be a Michigan resident and meet income and employment requirements. If approved, the rent payments, which are made directly to qualifying landlords, are between $300 and $500 a month depending on the household size.

As for the connection to Biden, the program is being funded with federal money.

OGM officials told us the $9 million budget for the program includes $5 million via a grant from the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as $4 million for housing support from the American Rescue Plan Act that Biden signed into law in March 2021. In April 2023, the board of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority approved using the pandemic-related funds for the rental subsidy program, which is expected to last up to two years.

At the time, the MSHDA said the program “will give refugees, asylees and other new populations from areas such as Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti and African countries the opportunity to apply for up to 12 months of rental subsidy assistance, helping ensure families successfully integrate to communities, become self-sufficient, and thrive.”

The BeneficiariesClaims that “illegal immigrants” are receiving payments have largely been based on language on a Michigan state website about the program that says an eligible immigration status includes “individuals with a pending asylum application.”

As mentioned in the Daily Mail article cited in the ad, some Republican lawmakers have argued that would allow people who illegally entered the U.S. and applied for asylum as a way to avoid being deported to have their rent paid while they wait to appear in immigration court. Applying for asylum after being apprehended for illegal entry and placed into removal proceedings is known as defensive asylum.

However, people “with a pending defensive asylum hearing are not eligible” for the rent payments, OGM told us in an email.

It’s also possible for immigrants to apply for affirmative asylum, which is reserved for people who are already in the U.S. and not in removal proceedings. Generally, they must apply within one year of arriving in the country, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says the immigration status of the applicant does not matter.

When we asked about the possibility of a person with a pending affirmative asylum application receiving rental assistance, among other questions, OGM said in an email: “Only residents who are in the country legally as determined by the federal government are eligible for the program.”

Asylum applicants who illegally entered the U.S. or overstayed a visa do not officially have a legal status — although they are permitted to be in the country while their application is pending, Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us in an email.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone in Michigan temporarily having their rent paid by the state is living in the country illegally. Data provided to FactCheck.org by OGM showed that, as of April, all of the program’s beneficiaries had a legal immigration status.

OGM said that 245 of 485 applications had been approved, covering 1,242 individuals. Of that total, 537 individuals were refugees, and 504 were nationals of Afghanistan who came to the U.S. through a 2021 resettlement program called Operation Allies Welcome.

There were also 69 people with special immigrant visas, 61 U.S. citizens, 35 humanitarian parolees from Ukraine, 24 people granted asylum, seven Haitian nationals and five lawful permanent residents. State officials told us that the U.S. citizens were the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

We reached out to MAGA Inc. about its ad, but have not yet received a response.

A spokesperson for the super PAC also argued to PolitiFact that Biden is paying rent for “illegal immigrants” because the Michigan rental subsidy program accepts humanitarian parolees, who the Department of Homeland Security has said “are, by definition, inadmissible” to the U.S. under federal immigration law.

However, as the USCIS, which is part of DHS, explains, while humanitarian parolees — such as those from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — may otherwise be ineligible for admission to the U.S., federal authorities have authorized them to reside in the U.S. for a fixed period of time and for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

So, they are not in the country illegally, and subsidies paid to the landlords of parolees do not support the ad’s claim that “Biden is paying rent for illegals.”

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Political leanings: Anti-Donald Trump

2022 total spending: $12.9 million

Republican Voters Against Trump, a project of the Republican Accountability PAC, was originally established in 2020 as a standalone super PAC to oppose the reelection of then-President Donald Trump. The project currently focuses on sharing online testimonials from “former Trump voters [who] don’t believe he should ever hold office again.”

Longtime conservative strategist Sarah Longwell founded RVAT with Bill Kristol, who worked in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, and Tim Miller, the former communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Longwell also leads the Republican Accountability PAC, which started as a super PAC in 2022.

Super PACs, officially known as independent expenditure-only committees, can accept unlimited contributions that can be spent advocating the election or defeat of federal candidates. The independent expenditures cannot be coordinated with candidates, campaigns or political parties, and the donors to the super PACs must be disclosed in filings to the Federal Election Commission.

As a super PAC in 2020, Republican Voters Against Trump spent almost $9 million of the nearly $10.1 million it raised on independent expenditures. Over $6.7 million of its donations came from Defending Democracy Together, a nonprofit organization that Longwell founded to fight Republican abuses of power. John Pritzker, whose family owns Hyatt Hotels, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg each contributed $500,000.

In the lead up to the 2020 election, RVAT’s ads targeted voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four of the six states — Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — flipped from supporting Trump in 2016 to supporting Democratic candidate Joe Biden in 2020.

After it was terminated in 2021 as a super PAC, RVAT came back in 2022 as a project of Defending Democracy Together. Now, RVAT is part of the Republican Accountability PAC’s efforts to defeat Trump.

Through March 31, the Republican Accountability PAC had raised more than $14.6 million and spent over $3.1 million this election cycle, FEC records show. As of May 7, the group has spent almost $1.6 million on independent expenditures opposing the former president, according to more recent data from OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics.

The super PAC is planning to spend $50 million on its campaign against Trump before Election Day, according to the New York Times.

Major donors to the group include Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn who funded E. Jean Carroll’s civil sexual assault lawsuit against Trump, who has given $6 million, and Seth Klarman, CEO of the Baupost Group hedge fund, who donated $3 million. Defending Democracy Together has also contributed $2 million, so far.

For the 2022 midterms, the Republican Accountability PAC raised roughly $13.5 million and spent over $12.9 million. About $4.4 million of its spending was on independent expenditures trying to defeat several Republicans running for Congress, including J.D. Vance, Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz. The Times reported that the PAC targeted candidates “who embraced” Trump’s 2020 election “conspiracy theories.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S. annual rate of inflation was 1.4% — far from the 9% inflation Biden falsely said in a May 8 interview that he inherited. Inflation rose quickly in Biden’s first year, but it didn’t hit 9% until 17 months into his presidency.

Biden made that claim — and several others we’ve fact-checked before — in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett. While responding to Burnett’s question about voter concerns about the economy, Biden touted the economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“But no president’s had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%,” Biden said.

He’s wrong about inflation, which, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, rose 1.4% year over year in January 2021, the month that Biden became president.

After that, inflation increased almost every month until reaching 9.1% in June 2022 – its highest level in about 40 years. From there, the annual rate of inflation trended down for a year, reaching 3% in June 2023. But it has since remained above 3%, and was at 3.5% for the 12 months ending in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A White House official told us that in the CNN interview Biden was conveying that factors contributing to the spike in inflation – such as global supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic – were already in place before Biden was sworn into office. High inflation was worse in some other countries, the official said.

Economists did tell us in June 2022 that price increases were inevitable as the economy opened back up after a shutdown period intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. They said increased consumer demand and spending combined with the limited production of various goods helped push prices up fast.

In the U.S., that spending surge was partly due to trillions of dollars in federal funding that were pumped into the economy during the pandemic, including three rounds of government stimulus checks distributed to qualifying households. Two of those stimulus payments were part of bills signed into law in 2020 by Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump, while the other payment to most Americans was in the American Rescue Plan Act that Biden signed in March 2021.

Some analysts said that while the federal stimulus may have contributed to inflation, not providing that spending also could have negatively affected the economy.

Nevertheless, Biden did not tell Burnett that factors out of his control helped produce high inflation early in his term. Instead, he said he walked into the White House with inflation already at 9% – which was not the case.

Repeats on Jobs, COVID-19 and Tax RatesBiden also repeated some claims we have already fact-checked:

Jobs. He misleadingly contrasted the job creation under his presidency with the job losses that occurred over former President Donald Trump’s term, losses that occurred once the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs and I have never failed,” Biden claimed. “I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president, 15 million in three-and-three-quarters years.”

Trump did succeed in creating jobs. As we’ve written, employment was up during his term, until the economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as pandemic containment measures led to business closures and layoffs. When Trump left office in January 2021, employment was still 9.4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Under Biden, the economy has gained 15.4 million jobs.

‘Inject bleach.’ Biden again twisted Trump’s words, claiming his predecessor “would tell people, inject bleach,” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump suggested that scientists test the use of “very powerful light” and “disinfectant” in the body to kill the virus. But he didn’t tell people to do this themselves, nor did he say: “inject bleach.”

During an April 2020 press briefing, a Department of Homeland Security official discussed research on the ways the coronavirus reacted on nonporous surfaces when exposed to heat, humidity, sunlight and disinfectant. In his remarks, Trump said: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that.”

For the record, experts say it’s dangerous to inject disinfectants into the body.

Billionaire “tax rate”: Biden repeated his misleading talking point that billionaires pay an 8.3% federal tax rate on average. The figure comes from a White House calculation that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income. When counting just taxable income, the wealthiest Americans — the top 0.1% of earners who have more than $4.4 million in expanded cash income — paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 24% in 2023, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Biden has proposed that those with wealth over $100 million pay a 25% minimum tax, as calculated on both standard income and unsold investment income combined. We wrote a detailed explanation of Biden’s claim last year.

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According to the Department of Education, about 28% of U.S. students are Hispanic. According to Census Bureau data, about 15% of U.S. students speak Spanish at home. And about 21% of students come from homes where at least one person speaks Spanish.

Three different statistics. Three different numbers.

But in remarks to Latino audiences whose votes he hopes to win, President Joe Biden routinely conflates these statistics, sometimes in the course of the same speech or interview.

For example, in remarks at a Cinco de Mayo reception at the White House on May 6, Biden called Latinos “the future of our nation.”

“You know, everybody says … why have I always been so fundamentally focused on Latinos,” Biden said. “Simple proposition: You make up 28% of the students in America. Think — think about it. Twenty-eight percent of all the students in high school and grade school in America are Latino.”

Right so far. The Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics says that by the fall of 2021, about 28% of students enrolled in public schools in prekindergarten through 12th gradewere Hispanic/Latino.

But later in the speech, Biden said, “You know, when you have 28% of all the students in our schools up to high school — 28% speaking Spanish, how in God’s name can we not pay attention?”

That’s not accurate. It assumes all Hispanic students speak Spanish, and they do not.

We wouldn’t normally write about an elected official botching a statistic that he had repeatedly gotten right on other occasions. But in this case, it’s a statistic Biden has mangled numerous times, and for years.

For example, on a Spanish-language radio show recorded May 6, Biden was asked why it was important for him to have events like the Cinco de Mayo reception.

Photo by Louis-Photo / stock.adobe.com.“The Hispanic community’s part of the future of America,” Biden said. “Twenty-eight out of every 100 students in school speak Spanish — 28! The idea that we’d ignore that? That’s our future.” (The Republican National Committee called Biden out on that one, commenting on X, “He completely made that statistic up.” But Biden didn’t invent the figure; he confused it with a different statistic, as this story makes clear.)

On other occasions, Biden has cited similar figures as the percentage of students who come from Spanish-speaking homes, as he did in an April 9 interview on Univision and in remarks at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gala on Sept. 21, 2022.

Analyzing data from the Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, concluded that about 21% of U.S. students live in a home where at least one person speaks Spanish.

In fairness, Biden has gotten the statistic right numerous times as well, such as during remarks at the Americas Economic Leadership Summit on Nov. 3, when he said, “About a quarter of the children in our public schools today are Hispanic.” But quite often, Biden conflates the percentage of Hispanic students in the U.S. with the percentage of U.S. students who speak Spanish.

The mix-up prompted PolitiFact to weigh in with two fact-checks when Biden repeatedly got it wrong on the campaign trail in September 2020, and again in June.

At least once, the White House press office has corrected the president in the official transcript. When Biden, in remarks at a Hispanic Heritage Month reception on Sept. 30, 2022, said, “Twenty-six percent of every single child who’s in school today speaks Spanish,” the press office later clarified that he meant “is Latino.”

There is a difference between being Latino and speaking Spanish. According to the Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, about 45% of Hispanics born in the U.S. speak only English. Another 45% speak another language but also speak English “very well.” As one would expect, a far smaller percentage of foreign-born Hispanic people — who make up about a third of the Hispanic population in the country — speak only English (6.5%) or speak another language but also speak English “very well” (31%).

According to Passel of the Pew Research Center, the American Community Survey shows about 26% of K-12 students are Hispanic (a little higher for public than private school). That’s close to the 28% cited by Biden, and, as we said, the Department of Education reports the figure as 28%.

As for the percentage of U.S. students who speak Spanish, the American Community Survey questions don’t make it easy to answer that precisely.

Analyzing available data from the survey — not whether someone speaks Spanish, but whether it is “spoken at home” — for those aged 5 and over, Passel said about 15% of K-12 students speak Spanish at home, representing about 55% of the Hispanic students. We looked at the survey data another way — people aged 5 to 17 (so school age but not necessarily students) — and found, similarly, nearly 15% of that population speaks Spanish.

Analyzing 2022 American Community Survey data — the latest available — Passel estimated the share of K-12 students who come from a home where somebody speaks Spanish is 21%.

Again, Biden mixes up these statistics, often inflating the percentage of students who speak Spanish.

We reached out to the White House press office for comment or backup for the president’s claims, but we did not get a response.

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Quick TakeA recent deal involving a prisoner swap and the extension of a Trump-era waiver have freed $16 billion in previously frozen Iranian funds. Social media posts distort the sources of the money to falsely claim “Joe Biden gave 16 billion to Iran.” The Iranian money has been unfrozen with restrictions that it be used for humanitarian purposes.

Full StoryTwo separate agreements in the fall allowed Iran to access up to $16 billion of its previously frozen assets, including a reported $10 billion as the result of an extension of a Trump-era waiver that allows Iran to access funds for humanitarian purposes.

Posts on social media have misrepresented those agreements, claiming, “Joe Biden gave 16 billion to Iran.” One early version of the claim, which spread widely on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, showed a picture of President Joe Biden with this text: “Anyone remember when this guy handed $16,000,000,000 to Iran last year?” It came from an account that describes itself as “Conservative populist.” When the post went viral, the account added a marketing link to a survivalist goods company.

“This use of the word ‘gave’ is certainly intended to mislead,” Heather Williams, a senior policy researcher at RAND who specializes in Middle East regional issues, told us in an email. “[P]eople often try to portray this issue in a way that gives the impression that America is giving funds to Iran.”

The agreements don’t provide any U.S. money to Iran, as the posts suggest. Rather, they allow Iran to access its own assets that had been frozen in foreign banks due to earlier sanctions. The money can only be used for humanitarian purposes.

It’s also not clear how much of the $16 billion – which is held in accounts in Qatar and Oman – has been spent. As of December, U.S. officials said no Iranian money held in Qatar had been spent, but there were two transactions from the funds in Oman. The amounts of the transactions have not been disclosed.

Williams said she isn’t as familiar with the details of the money held in Oman. But as for Qatar, “There is no clear evidence Iran has used any of this money,” she said — although there are still questions about how Qatar plans to enforce the restrictions on the money, and Iran has claimed to have access to the money.

Here’s the deal with each of the two agreements.

$6 Billion in Foreign BanksIn September, the U.S. and Iran exchanged prisoners in a deal that also included the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian assets.

Five Americans were released from Iranian jails and returned to the U.S., and five Iranians who had either been charged or convicted in the U.S. received clemency. The other part of the deal freed up $6 billion in previously frozen Iranian assets.

As we’ve explained before, none of it was U.S. money. It was Iranian money that had been held in South Korean banks.

The money was from South Korea’s purchases of Iranian energy products. It was held in the bank accounts after then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, in May 2018. Months later, the administration reinstated sanctions on Iran that were lifted after Iran agreed to the nuclear deal, which was negotiated by the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Those sanctions included a partial ban on oil exports, and the next year, the Trump administration made it a total ban. The sanctions were also aimed at stopping “transactions by foreign financial institutions with the Central Bank of Iran.”

In October 2019, the Trump administration made the money in those accounts available to Iran for limited humanitarian purposes, although the banks didn’t use that accommodation much due to the increased reporting it required.

As the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained, “participants and observers complained that the ‘enhanced due diligence’ requirements were too much of a burden.”

So, even though there were mechanisms to disperse Iranian assets, “the South Koreans weren’t interested,” Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute, told us last year. “From the beginning, South Korean banks were reluctant to use it because they feared the U.S. could change its mind and come back and fine them.”

The prisoner swap deal in September moved that money from South Korea to Qatar, although it is available only for humanitarian purposes. John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said in October that Iran hadn’t accessed any of the money.

Abram Paley, the State Department deputy special envoy for Iran, said the same thing in December during a House Financial Services Committee hearing.

“Not a penny of this money has been spent and these funds will not go anywhere anytime soon,” Paley said, although he didn’t explain what mechanism was keeping the funds static.

After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo reportedly told House Democrats in a closed-door meeting in October that the U.S. and Qatar had reached an agreement to prevent Iran from accessing the $6 billion that had been unfrozen as part of the prisoner swap, according to ABC News.

The Biden administration was under pressure to act because of Iran’s support for Hamas. “The Iranian government has backed Hamas for decades, going back nearly to the group’s inception in the 1980s,” according to a Congressional Research Service report on the history of U.S. policy toward Iran.

The CRS report, which was last updated on April 22, cited the same news reports and noted that the apparent agreement was “for an unspecified period of time.”

We reached out to the State Department for more information but didn’t get a response.

At the same December House hearing, Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, also confirmed that no money had left those accounts. “There have been no transfers out of this, from the $6 billion sum held in Qatari financial institutions,” she said.

$10 Billion in Energy Sales to IraqIn 2018, after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal and reinstated sanctions, his administration issued a waiver that allowed Iraq to continue purchasing electricity from Iran, with restrictions that Iran only use the proceeds for humanitarian purposes.

That waiver has been consistently renewed, typically in 120-day increments.

On Nov. 14, Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed another waiver, “the twenty-first such waiver across multiple administrations,” Paley, the State Department’s deputy special envoy, said at the hearing. That waiver expired in March and was, again, renewed.

News stories noted the estimated reserve of money that had built up from the sale of energy from Iran to Iraq was about $10 billion.

The decision to extend the waiver was criticized by some conservative politicians, who highlighted the $10 billion figure, including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. And that number has now found its way to social media posts.

It’s unclear exactly how much has accrued from the sale of Iranian energy to Iraq, though. It’s also unclear how much has been accessed by Iran, which, as we said, can use the money only to fund humanitarian purchases.

The $10 billion figure — which has been referenced by many U.S. officials over the last several months — appears to have come up over the summer, in an Iranian media report.

When the previous waiver was renewed in July, the State Department allowed for money to be held in bank accounts outside of Iraq to prevent Iran from pressuring Iraq to give it access to the funds. That money is now largely held in Oman. As of December, there had been two transactions from those accounts, according to Rosenberg, who declined to give details about them during the House hearing.

Also in July, the Persian-language broadcaster Iran International reported that the chairman of the Iran-Iraq chamber of commerce had estimated the amount of money in the Iraqi accounts for Iran was $10 billion, which is the earliest reference we could find to that amount.

A month earlier, in June, the U.S. had reportedly approved a payment of $2.7 billion from restricted funds held for Iran in Iraq.

Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to our requests for more details.

When the waiver was reissued in November, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller explained that the money “is held in accounts that are restricted where they can only be used to pay for food, medicine, humanitarian purposes, and other non-sanctionable activities.”

Referring to Iraq, Miller said, “We’ve had a number of policies we’ve worked with to try to ensure their energy independence, but in the meantime, they continue to buy Iranian electricity. And so we have in the past, as has the Trump administration, issued waivers to allow these funds to move to restricted accounts, or as I said, that can be used for humanitarian and other non-sanctionable purposes.”

And, more recently, Kirby, the NSC spokesman, answered a reporter’s question in April about the unfreezing of Iranian assets, saying, “none of those funds — funds set up in an account, by the way, by the previous administration — goes directly to the Supreme Leader of the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. It can only be used for humanitarian purposes. And we’re watching that account very, very closely to make sure that that’s what happens.”

So, saying only that “Joe Biden gave 16 billion to Iran” leaves the false impression that the administration has provided new, unrestricted money to Iran. That money already belonged to Iran, and its use is restricted. It’s also unclear how much of it Iran has actually accessed.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesChappell, Bill. “5 Americans freed from prison in Iran land on U.S. soil.” NPR. 19 Sep 2023.

Press release. “Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on the Return of American Detainees from Iran.” Whitehouse.gov. 17 Sep 2023.

Farley, Robert and Lori Robertson. “Republican Claims on Hamas Attack and Iran Funds Distort the Facts.” FactCheck.org. Updated 12 Oct 2023.

Robinson, Kali. “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?” Council on Foreign Relations. Updated 27 Oct 2023.

Press release. “Statement from the President on the Reimposition of United States Sanctions with Respect to Iran.” Whitehouse.gov. 6 Aug 2018.

Rome, Henry. “The Iran Hostage Deal: Clarifying the $6 Billion Transfer.” Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 18 Sep 2023.

“Iran prisoner swap for $6 billion in spotlight after Hamas attacks Israel.” Reuters. 9 Oct 2023.

Bruce, Mary, et al. “US, Qatar agree to prevent Iran from tapping previously frozen $6 billion fund.” ABC News. 12 Oct 2023.

Thomas, Clayton. “Iran Sanctions.” Congressional Research Service. 2 Feb 2022.

Lewis, Simon and Humeyra Pamuk. “US renews waiver letting Iraq pay Iran for electricity.” Reuters. 14 Nov 2023.

Tillis, Thom. Press release. “Tillis, Colleagues Demand Answers from Biden on Latest Iran Sanctions Waiver.” 4 Dec 2023.

Scott, Tim. Press release. “SENATOR SCOTT LEADS COLLEAGUES IN DEMANDING ANSWERS FROM BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ON LATEST IRAN SANCTIONS WAIVER.” 30 Nov 2023.

U.S. Department of State. “Department Press Briefing – November 14, 2023.” 14 Nov 2023.

White House. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby.” 15 Apr 2024.

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Quick TakeWhile his criminal fraud trial is not in session on May 17, former President Donald Trump plans to attend the high school graduation of his son Barron in Florida as well as a campaign event in Minnesota. A post on Threads misleadingly claims he will “miss his son’s graduation for fundraiser.” The graduation is in the morning and the fundraising dinner in the evening.

Full StoryAs former President Donald Trump’s criminal fraud trial opened in Manhattan on April 15, Trump asked that he be allowed to attend the high school graduation of his son Barron on May 17. As we’ve written, New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan did not immediately rule on the request, leading Trump and conservative commentators to falsely claim the judge would not allow Trump to go to the graduation.

In fact, the judge announced on April 30 — two weeks into the trial — that Trump could attend Barron’s graduation in Palm Beach, Florida. Merchan said the court would not be in session on May 17.

Former President Donald Trump with his son Barron and wife, Melania. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour.In addition to his son’s graduation, Trump has other plans for that day.

The Republican Party of Minnesota announced on May 6 that the former president will speak at the party’s fundraising Lincoln Reagan dinner in St. Paul on the evening of May 17. President Joe Biden won Minnesota in 2020, but the Trump campaign believes it can flip the state in the November election.

In light of the Minnesota Republicans’ announcement, a May 7 post on Threads said that Trump’s attendance at the campaign event means he will not be going to Barron’s graduation, citing a Los Angeles Magazine article. “Trump Will Reportedly Miss His Son’s Graduation for Fundraiser: Judge Merchan canceled court proceedings on May 17 so Donald Trump could attend his son Barron’s graduation, but Trump is attending a GOP fundraiser that day,” the headline on the story and the text of the post said.

We asked Trump’s team for a response to the Threads post, and we received a one-line email from campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung saying the author of the social media post, a Democratic strategist, “is a fake news bitch.”

The liberal New Republic also ran a headline on May 7 claiming, “Trump Appears to Be Ditching Barron’s Graduation for a Fundraiser. Of course Donald Trump is bailing on his own son’s graduation.”

But the article later says, “Trump could use his private jet to attend both Barron’s graduation and the Minnesota dinner, assuming his son’s graduation isn’t later in the day.”

Similarly, the Los Angeles Magazine said “it’s unclear” whether Trump can attend Barron’s graduation.

It appears the former president can make it to both events. Barron’s graduation ceremony at the private Oxbridge Academy will begin at 10 a.m., People magazine reported. We reached out to the academy for confirmation of the time of the graduation but didn’t hear back.

The Republican Party fundraising dinner in St. Paul is scheduled for 6 p.m.

The new graduate will participate in his father’s likely ascension to Republican presidential nominee. The 18-year-old Barron was chosen as one of Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention, which will be held in July in Milwaukee.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAllen, Jonathan, et al. “At a private donor retreat, Trump team says Minnesota and Virginia are in play.” NBC News. 4 May 2024.

Alvord, Kyler. “Donald Trump Is Headlining a GOP Event in Minnesota on the Same Day as Barron’s Florida Graduation: Reports.” People. 7 May 2024.

Cheung, Steven. Spokesperson, Donald Trump for President Campaign. Email to FactCheck.org. 8 May 2024.

Fins, Antonio. “Trump schedules doubleheader for court day off — son’s graduation and Minnesota GOP dinner.” Palm Beach Post. 7 May 2024.

Forum News Service. “Donald Trump to visit St. Paul for Republican fundraising dinner.” Twin Cities Pioneer Press. Updated 7 May 2024.

Gold, Michael. “Barron Trump Is Picked to Be Delegate at the Republican Convention.” New York Times. 9 May 2024.

Haag, Matthew. “Judge Says Trump Can Attend Son’s High School Graduation in Florida.” New York Times. 30 Apr 2024.

Kiely, Eugene. “Judge Hasn’t Ruled on Trump’s Graduation Request.” FactCheck.org. Updated 7 May 2024.

Lewerenz, Jennifer. “Former President Donald Trump Set to Headline Minnesota GOP’s 2024 Lincoln Reagan Dinner on May 17th.” KNSI. 6 May 2024.

Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State. “2020 General Election Results. Votes for U.S. President and Vice President.” Accessed 8 May 20204.

Rashid, Hafiz. “Trump Appears to Be Ditching Barron’s Graduation for a Fundraiser.” The New Republic. 7 May 2024.

Republican Party of Minnesota. @mngop. “Chairman Hann, the MN GOP, & @tmemmer are excited to announce that President @realDonaldTrump will be headlining our 2024 Lincoln Regan dinner! We hope to see you there!” X. 6 May 2024.

Sammarco, Ally. “Trump Will Reportedly Miss His Son’s Graduation for Fundraiser.” Los Angeles Magazine. 8 May 2024.

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Republican Sen. Tim Scott has claimed that African Americans, Hispanics and Asians all had their lowest unemployment rate under former President Donald Trump. But the lowest unemployment rate on record for African Americans was under President Joe Biden, and the lowest unemployment rate for Hispanics was the same under both presidents.

Women also had their lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s under Biden, despite what Scott suggested on May 5, when he was interviewed by host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Scott speaking at the Judge Joseph Story Dinner in Cambridge, Iowa, in August 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore.“We were just better off under President Trump,” began Scott, who is considered to be a potential vice presidential running mate for Trump. “Inflation, Kristen, was at 2%, and we had the lowest unemployment rates for African Americans, for Hispanics, for Asians, a 70-year low for women.”

The South Carolina senator has made similar claims about record low unemployment rates under Trump.

Later in the NBC interview, Scott said to Welker: “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump, and I’m excited to get back to low inflation, low unemployment.”

Scott is right about the annualized rate of inflation, which was 2.3% in February 2020, just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The inflation growth rate was down to 1.4% in January 2021, when Biden took office amid the economic recovery.

Due to a number of factors, inflation spiked to 9.1% in June 2022 but has been trending down ever since. Inflation was 3.5% for the 12 months ending in March, the most recent figure available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But it’s misleading to claim that the U.S. has to “get back to … low unemployment.”

The unemployment rate is already relatively low under Biden, having been at or below 4% for 29 consecutive months, the longest stretch since the late 1960s. Trump’s longest streak was 24 months.

In addition, Trump inherited an unemployment rate of 4.7% in January 2017, which then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said was already near full employment. When Biden was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 6.4%.

Also, as we said, Scott’s claims about historically low unemployment rates for certain demographics under Trump are outdated. Here are the facts:

African American UnemploymentUnder Trump, the unemployment rate for African Americans went down to 5.3% in August 2019 – at that time, the lowest rate on record, according to BLS data going back to 1972. When Trump left office in January 2021, amid the pandemic, the rate was 9.3%.

But under Biden, the unemployment rate for African Americans reached a new low of 5.1% in March 2023, and then dipped even lower to 4.8% the following month. Most recently, the rate for Black Americans was 5.6% in April – not 6.4%, as Scott said in the interview, referring to the rate one month earlier in March.

In fact, the rate in April was lower than the pre-pandemic rate of 6.1% in February 2020.

Hispanic UnemploymentThe unemployment rate for Hispanics also went down to a new low of 3.9% under Trump, according to BLS data going back to 1973. At the end of Trump’s four-year term in January 2021, the rate was up to 4.3%.

But after Biden took office, the Hispanic unemployment rate again declined to 3.9% in September 2022, tying the previous record during the Trump administration. As of April, the rate was 4.8% — half a percentage point higher than the rate of 4.3% in February 2020, just before the pandemic.

Asian UnemploymentScott’s claim about Asian unemployment is still accurate.

During Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate for Asians declined to 2% in June 2019, the lowest rate on record – although BLS data for the Asian population only go back to 2003. By the time of the presidential transition in January 2021, the rate was 6.6%.

So far, the lowest Asian unemployment rate under Biden was 2.3% in July 2023. Since then, the rate has gone up to 2.8%, as of April, which is still a bit higher than it was prior to the pandemic in February 2020 at 2.5%.

Women’s UnemploymentThe lowest recorded unemployment rate for women was 2.7% in May 1953, according to BLS figures.

Under Trump, the rate got as low as 3.4% in September and October 2019 – the lowest it had been since 66 years earlier, when the rate also was 3.4% in September 1953. By January 2021, the rate was up to 6.1%.

But Biden’s lowest women’s unemployment rate was slightly better – 3.3%, in January 2023. In April, the rate had increased to 3.8%, which was a bit higher than the 3.5% rate in February 2020.

Bottom line: The BLS data show that unemployment – overall, and for certain groups of people – was low under Trump, until COVID-19 disrupted the economy in 2020. Comparing the pre-pandemic rates in February 2020 with the most recent data in April, unemployment is nearly as low, or lower in one case, under Biden – contrary to what Scott has suggested.

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While talking about illegal immigration at a town hall in 2020, Joe Biden, then a Democratic presidential candidate, said that if he were elected, “nobody is going to be deported in my first 100 days.”

But a TV ad from a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump features a clip of Biden only saying “nobody is going to be deported,” falsely suggesting that Biden promised his administration would never deport anyone who was in the U.S. illegally.

The 30-second ad from MAGA Inc. began airing in Pennsylvania on May 1, according to AdImpact, a political ad tracking service.

The super PAC’s ad starts with Tony Dokoupil, a host of “CBS Mornings,” saying that Biden encouraged asylum seekers to come to the U.S. — which Biden did, as a candidate. But the ad ends with Biden saying there would be no deportations if he were president – which he did not say.

The super PAC has produced at least one other ad — which ran on digital platforms in late March — featuring the same deceptively truncated Biden quote about deportations.

Here’s a fuller transcript of Biden’s remarks during that February 2020 CNN town hall while answering an audience member’s question about raids carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Biden, Feb. 20, 2020: We have a right to protect the border. But the idea — and by the way, nobody — and some of you are going to get mad at me with this – but nobody is going to be deported in my first 100 days until we get through the point that we find out the only rationale for deportation will be whether or not — whether or not you’ve committed a felony while in the country.

A month later, Biden clarified his awkwardly worded statement about the “only rationale for deportation” being “whether or not you’ve committed a felony while in the country.” During a March 2020 debate for Democratic presidential candidates, Biden said: “Number two, the first hundred days of my administration, no one, no one will be deported at all. From that point on, the only deportations that will take place are commissions of felonies in the United States of America.”

In both cases, Biden said the proposed moratorium on all deportations was only for his first 100 days as president — not his entire presidency, as the edited clip in the ads would lead viewers to believe.

What’s more, when Biden took office in January 2021, the policy that his Department of Homeland Security planned to implement for the first 100 days said that DHS would still deport some people regardless.

A memorandum issued on Jan. 20, 2021, by then acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske said the 100-day pause on deportations of individuals with final removal orders would not apply to anyone who “has engaged in or is suspected of terrorism or espionage, or otherwise poses a danger” to U.S. national security. The pause also excluded anyone who was not already in the U.S. on Nov. 1, 2020, those who voluntarily waived their rights to remain in the country, and anyone who the acting director of ICE determined had to be removed under federal law.

In addition, the document said that “nothing in this memorandum prohibits the apprehension or detention of individuals unlawfully in the United States who are not identified as priorities herein.”

The policy was short-lived, anyway. It ended up being challenged in court almost immediately and was first blocked for 14 days by a federal judge in Texas on Jan. 26, 2021. The same judge indefinitely blocked the policy on Feb. 24.

Ultimately, the Biden administration would go on to deport hundreds of thousands of people — and more than just those with felony convictions in the U.S.

In fiscal year 2021, which included more than three months when Trump was still president, DHS recorded 85,783 “removals,” which the department defines as “the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable noncitizen out of the United States based on an order of removal.” That figure increased to 108,733 in fiscal 2022, Biden’s first full fiscal cycle, according to the most recent “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics” published by DHS.

There were at least 142,580 additional removals in fiscal 2023, according to ICE’s annual report published in December.

And those figures do not include all of the “returns” of inadmissible or deportable people who agreed to voluntarily leave the U.S. before officially being ordered to do so. Also not included are people who were quickly expelled from the country under Title 42, a federal public health order that was invoked, starting in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In all, there were more than 2.8 million removals, returns and expulsions in just fiscal years 2021 and 2022, according to the most recent annual data published by DHS.

But the MAGA Inc. ad ignores those facts, in addition to turning Biden’s stated proposal for a 100-day pause on deportations into an indefinite policy.

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On March 25, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that avian influenza had been detected in American dairy cattle. On April 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported that the agency had detected genetic material from the bird flu virus — a form of H5N1 — in the commercial milk supply.

Pasteurization has been effective at inactivating the H5N1 bird flu virus, and the viral material found in the milk has not proven to be infectious. According to the FDA, “these results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe.”

However, widespread appearance of the viral genetic material in grocery store milk indicates that the virus is likely more prevalent in cows than cow testing data indicate. The virus has been detected in dairy milking cattle in 36 herds in nine states, according to the USDA, and has been spreading among cows, both within herds and between herds as cows are transported.

Since the beginning of the cow outbreak, only one person in the U.S., a dairy worker in Texas, has tested positive for H5N1 bird flu. The virus, found in wild birds around the world, has not shown the ability to spread among humans in a sustained way.

The World Health Organization currently evaluates the overall public health risk from H5N1 bird flu as low, adding that the risk is low to moderate for people exposed to “infected birds or animals or contaminated environments.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also currently rates the risk to public health as low.

Still, the situation with cows has renewed concerns among infectious disease experts that H5N1 bird flu — long regarded as a threat to humans — has the potential to cause a pandemic.

“This is a virus that we are concerned that could cause human infection or could lead to an epidemic-type outbreak,” Dr. Jonathan Runstadler, chair of the department of infectious disease and global health at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, told us. “The fact that it’s getting into an agricultural animal and seems to be spreading, and that has potential implications for contamination of the food supply — all of those are reasons to be concerned about influenza and the possibility of spillover of influenza into humans.”

But “right now really it’s more of an animal health issue,” Dr. Andrew Bowman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told us. “Certainly, keeping an eye towards public health, but with only one reported case in humans, and there’s been a growing number of animal detections and we haven’t seen the uptick in human detections, I think that’s probably a good sign for public health.”

Below, we’ve assembled answers to some basic questions about H5N1 bird flu.

How Did H5N1 Bird Flu Spread to Cows?The H5N1 bird flu virus likely passed to dairy cows from wild birds — perhaps via contaminated food or water — and subsequently began to spread between cows. USDA analyses, described in a May 1 preprint, indicate there was just one introduction of the virus to the cows.

The virus spreading in cows belongs to a group of H5N1 bird flu viruses that has been causing substantial disease and death in wild birds and domestic poultry since 2020.

This group of H5N1 viruses was first found in the U.S. in wild birds sampled in late 2021, and it caused the first outbreak in domestic poultry the following month. The virus spread to North America via wild birds migrating from Europe. Since then, nearly 91 million poultry in the U.S. have been affected, due to repeated introductions from wild birds. There was one human case linked to poultry in 2022, and the person recovered.

The virus also has spread from birds to mammals various times, Bowman said, but has not become established in these animals. In the U.S., these have included at least 20 species, such as seals and a dolphin, as well as foxes, raccoons and other wild animals that would be expected to eat dead birds.

The difference now is that it “seems to be maintained amongst the cattle, which is a first from what we’ve seen in mammalian spillovers,” Bowman said. “The rest of them seem to have been dead-end hosts.”

When cows get sick with H5N1 bird flu, their milk production and appetite may decline; the milk may become thicker; and the cows may become lethargic and feverish, among other possible symptoms. Unlike birds, for which the virus can be widely lethal, the cows appear to recover from their illness. There is also evidence that some cows can carry the virus without having any symptoms.

H5N1 bird flu has been detected in cats that were fed raw milk from infected cows. And cows appear to have spread the virus to poultry, wild birds and a raccoon.

How Is the Virus Transmitted Between Cows?The movement of cattle from herd to herd has been linked to the spread of the virus. However, it is unclear exactly how H5N1 bird flu is spreading between dairy cows, Bowman and Runstadler both said.

The learning curve has been complicated by the fact that cow influenza isn’t exactly a research specialty. “Why cows?” Bowman said. “Because if you’d asked probably any flu expert seven weeks ago, bovine was not a primary host of influenza.”

Photo by piyaphunjun / stock.adobe.comThe virus has been primarily found in milk and mammary tissue, according to the USDA, and milk is likely implicated in its spread. The virus has not been found in significant amounts in respiratory samples. In a presentation at an event hosted by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials on April 25, Dr. Rosemary Sifford of the USDA said that no significant viral shedding had been found from the gastrointestinal tracts of cattle, based on limited samples.

Bowman called the high levels of virus in the cows’ udders unprecedented. “As we think about influenza, for the most part we think about it as an upper respiratory pathogen in most mammalian species,” he said. However, he added that H5N1 bird flu has been more of a systemic disease than other flu types.

One theory on transmission is that contaminated milking or other dairy equipment is spreading the virus from cow to cow. Or perhaps the virus is getting aerosolized in milk and spreading between adjacent cows, or getting into the animals’ feed, Runstadler said. “There’s a lot of different possibilities in a farm situation for transmission to occur through different routes,” he said.

How Widespread Is the Virus in Cows?It is also uncertain when the virus spread to cows and how widespread it is, Bowman and Runstadler said.

There have been reports of symptoms in dairy cows dating to late January. USDA scientists estimate that the virus spread in cows for about four months before being detected in March.

Bowman said that the lack of a precedent for significant influenza in cattle may have contributed to the illness flying under the radar at first. “As a veterinarian, if I had a cow with illness, I would have never requested an influenza test,” he said.

Sifford said during her April 25 presentation that USDA has flu surveillance systems set up in domestic pigs and poultry, as well as feral swine. But similar systems don’t exist in cows.

“This virus seems to have spilled over into dairy cattle from birds, and one of the potential reasons why we didn’t notice it until now or haven’t noticed it is that there isn’t enough public funding that’s put into surveillance for potential zoonotic disease like this,” Runstadler said, referring to the potential for animals to spread a virus to humans.

As of May 2, the USDA has reported cases in 36 herds in nine states. But when the FDA sampled commercial milk being sold in stores, it found that 1 in 5 samples contained genetic material from H5N1. Some researchers, including Bowman, have also found genetic material from the virus in milk they bought in retail settings across various states.

Farmers are supposed to discard milk from sick cows, but the findings of viral genetic material in the milk supply indicate that this isn’t happening in all cases, perhaps because some cows are asymptomatic.

It’s hard to tell based on commercial milk testing data exactly how many cows or even farms are affected, Bowman said. However, “it gives us the indication that it’s more widespread in the cattle herd than the reported cases so far,” he said.

As of April 29, the USDA ordered that state veterinarians and laboratories report any positive test for influenza A — which would include H5N1 cases — in livestock, and that farmers get some dairy cows tested if they are going to be transported across state lines. This should likely increase testing in dairy cattle, which is otherwise left up to the discretion of the farmers.

Is It Safe to Drink Milk?The vast majority of milk products sold in the U.S. and all milk sold via interstate commerce is pasteurized. The available evidence shows that this family of heat treatments inactivates any H5N1 that is present.

“At this point every indication is that milk is safe to drink,” Bowman said. “We’re just picking up viral genetic material. We’re not picking up viable virus.”

The FDA strongly recommends against consuming raw milk, which isn’t pasteurized, under ordinary circumstances and has affirmed this recommendation. Researchers told STAT that this would be a particularly bad time to drink raw milk, citing the high levels of virus found in udders of infected cows, and the high levels of inactivated viral material found in commercial pasteurized milk. The FDA bans interstate raw milk sales and reports that “20 states explicitly prohibit intrastate raw milk sales in some form and 30 allow it.”

The FDA is looking at the effects of pasteurization on H5N1 using various methods and in various dairy products, Dr. Donald Prater of the FDA said during the April 25 presentation. FDA testing has since shown, for instance, that viral fragments in cottage cheese and sour cream are inactive. Prater also said that the FDA is evaluating H5N1 risk in aged cheese made with raw milk, which can be sold in interstate commerce.

Is the Virus Spreading in Beef Cattle?So far, there’s no evidence the virus has affected beef cattle, according to the USDA. In her April 25 presentation, USDA’s Sifford said the virus likely originally spilled over from wild birds into dairy cattle due to “the management of dairy cattle being in much more confined spaces.” The access to feed and water in a confined space may have attracted wild birds.

Therefore, when looking to see whether the virus might spread into beef cattle, it would make sense to look at a more confined setting where the birds could access food and water, such a feedlot, she said.

The USDA reported no evidence of H5N1 in 30 samples of ground beef bought in retail settings in areas where H5N1 has been reported in dairy cows. The agency has said it will also do experiments to see how different cooking temperatures might affect the virus in ground beef.

While most beef comes from dedicated beef cattle, a small portion comes from dairy cattle. The USDA has said it will test muscle from some dairy cows that are being slaughtered.

What Is the Risk of H5N1 Bird Flu Spreading to Humans?As we have written, WHO and the CDC say the current risk to public health is low. The virus would need to undergo various changes to easily infect and replicate in humans, and to spread between them. But the circulation of H5N1 bird flu in dairy cows raises a few concerns.

One is that the cows put a new population of workers and animals in contact with H5N1 bird flu. Flu viruses trade sequences with each other, in a process called reassortment, and they also mutate over time. Contact with humans and livestock, such as pigs, may give the virus more chances to mix with other flu viruses or develop mutations that would allow it to better spread between humans.

“It’s one thing to have a virus circulating out in wild birds that might be a risk,” Runstadler said. “It’s another thing to have it in a domestic agricultural animal population if it might be a risk.”

“Not only is this in a new host species, but then this is a different set of farm workers,” Bowman said, explaining that pig and poultry farmers are well versed in flu protection measures but that occupational health recommendations for dairy workers have not historically included such measures.

Given that it’s uncertain exactly how the cows are transmitting H5N1, it’s unclear what precautions dairy workers need to take, Bowman said. But the CDC has recommended new procedures for people working in the cattle industry, particularly those exposed to infected cows.

Another concern is that H5N1 bird flu may become better adapted to mammals as it circulates in cows, which could in turn help the virus gain a foothold in people or other mammals. Researchers are monitoring H5N1 from cows to better understand if it has developedmutations “that would suggest that it’s better adapted to causing disease in a mammalian host,” Runstadler said.

Vivien Dugan, director of the influenza division at the CDC, told STAT that “we’ve not seen anything that would be concerning to us for mammalian adaptation, at this point.”

So far, there aren’t any signs that the virus is spreading widely among humans. The CDC has flu surveillance systems that detect influenza A, the general family of flu that H5N1 bird flu is a part of. The rate of influenza A in health care settings is decreasing as flu season ends. CDC also does surveillance for unusual subtypes of flu, and routine testing for flu should also detect if an unusual type of flu is circulating.

However, it is difficult to know how many other cases there are beyond just the single one detected in the Texas dairy worker, Bowman said. “I think we generally accept the idea that there are more cases than reported cases, always,” he said.

There are anecdotes of sick dairy workers who did not get testing. There are multiple known barriers that could keep workers from getting testing, such as low wages and poor benefits, undocumented status, or speaking a language other than English as a first language.

How Dangerous Is H5N1 for Humans?Bowman emphasized that H5N1 comprises a broad group of viruses that has changed over time. Looking at people who have gotten H5N1 bird flu since 2003, mainly via animal exposures, the virus has a case fatality rate of more than 50%, representing 463 deaths out of 888 known cases. But this doesn’t necessarily apply to the current situation.

“The H5N1 viruses that were historically responsible for that 50% case fatality rate — this is a different version,” Bowman said.

Thus far, the one American known to be infected by cows only suffered from pinkeye and recovered. The other American who got H5N1 bird flu since it began spreading among wild birds in the U.S. in late 2021 also had mild disease and recovered.

Case fatality rates simply show what percentage of people known to be infected died. They don’t show the percentage of the total number of infected people who die. People who are asymptomatic or only mildly ill may not get testing.

Finally, it’s unknown what other changes H5N1 might undergo if it did develop the ability to spread well in humans. It could become more lethal, or it could become less lethal.

If H5N1 did begin spreading between humans, some treatments and vaccines would likelybe available. The CDC has confirmed that the version of H5N1 bird flu that infected the Texas dairy worker should be susceptible to available antiviral flu medications and recommends treating people who are exposed or infected with oseltamivir, otherwise known as Tamiflu.

The U.S. has a stockpile of vaccines previously developed to protect against H5 influenza viruses. The CDC says these are expected to provide some protection against the version of the virus currently spreading in cattle, should they become necessary. However, there would likely be challenges in scaling up vaccine production to vaccinate people around the world.

People also may have some immunity to part of the virus from the H1N1 swine flu pandemic virus, as well as some vaccines, but the degree to which this would be helpful is unclear.

What Can I Do to Reduce Risks?As we’ve said, the CDC recommends specific precautions for people working with livestock, including people with backyard birds, such as chickens. These include wearing appropriate gear when dealing with potentially infected animals or materials.

The CDC also recommends a few general precautions. These include keeping one’s distance from wild birds and avoiding contact with substances like bird poop that could be contaminated. People should also avoid contact with sick or dead animals, whether domestic or wild, and look into policies for reporting dead birds in their area. Researchers suggest keeping pets away from animals that could be infected, including in urban areas.

The CDC also recommends following normal food safety practices, such as properly cooking poultry, eggs and beef, and avoiding raw milk and raw milk products.

Finally, the agency says that it’s important to get annual seasonal flu shots. If a person is infected with an ordinary human flu virus and becomes infected with H5N1 at the same time, the viruses could mix together and undergo reassortment, potentially leading to a virus better positioned to replicate in people.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Quick TakeAt a campaign rally in Michigan, former President Donald Trump promised to build an Iron Dome missile defense system for the U.S. that would serve as “a shield around our country.” A post on Threads falsely claimed Trump said the system would be used to “‘defend us’ from Canada.”

Full StoryOn a day off from his criminal trial in New York City, former President Donald Trump traveled to the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan on May 1 for campaign rallies in support of his effort to regain the White House.

A post shared on Threads on May 1 shows a clip from Trump’s rally that day in Freeland, Michigan, and the Thread user claims, “Donald Trump wants to build an ‘iron dome’ at the border of our country to ‘defend us’ from Canada. Yes, Canada.”

In the 22-second video in the Threads post, Trump says, “In my next term, we will build a great Iron Dome very much like Israel has, but even better. I’m saying, why don’t we have that? We should have that too. We have a lot of hostile people out there. We have a lot of bad actors out there. We’re going to build the greatest dome of them all.”

But Trump does not mention Canada in the short video on Threads. And a YouTube video of his entire remarks in Michigan shows he didn’t cite any need to “‘defend us’ from Canada.” Nor did he identify who he meant by “hostile people” or “bad actors.”

As he did in Michigan, Trump has advocated for an Iron Dome system for the U.S. in other recent speeches as well. But never as a defense against Canada.

Defense Against Short-Range AttackTrump’s references are to a missile defense system first used by Israel in 2011 to shoot down short-range rockets fired from Gaza. The Iron Dome, along with the Arrow 3 system — an Israeli air defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles — successfully downed nearly all the 300 drones and missiles launched at Israel by Iran on April 14.

The U.S. Army acquired two Iron Dome batteries from Israel in 2020, but they “have subsequently been returned to Israel as part of US security assistance efforts to our Israeli partners,” a Pentagon spokesperson told us in a May 2 email.

The Pentagon spokesperson referred us to U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon for information on the capabilities of the Iron Dome system.

Raytheon works with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, an Israeli company, on the Iron Dome, which Raytheon describes as “the world’s most-used system, intercepting more than 1,500 incoming targets with a success rate exceeding 90 percent since being fielded in 2011.”

The system “detects, assesses and intercepts a variety of shorter-range targets such as rockets, artillery and mortars,” Raytheon’s website explains. “Iron Dome’s Tamir missile knocks down incoming threats launched from ranges of 4-70 km,” or 2.4 to 43.5 miles.

“Ten Iron Dome batteries protect the citizens and infrastructure of Israel, with each battery comprising three to four stationary launchers, 20 Tamir missiles and a battlefield radar. Each of the batteries can defend up to nearly 60 square miles, and are strategically placed around cities to intercept threats headed toward populated areas,” the Raytheon site also says.

But “against the normal threats to U.S. security, the Iron Dome is not a useful system,” Stephen Biddle, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us in a phone interview. “Iron Dome is designed to deal with short-range threats, especially unguided rockets,” not long-range ballistic missiles that could be fired from adversaries like China or Russia.

The Congressional Research Service explains that “a ballistic missile leaves the atmosphere and follows an unpowered trajectory or flight path before reentering the atmosphere toward a predetermined target. Ballistic missiles have an effective range from a few hundred kilometers (km) to more than 10,000 km,” or 6,200 miles.

“If the North Koreans launched intercontinental ballistic missiles at the U.S., an Iron Dome would not be able to intercept reentry vehicles,” explained Biddle, who is also a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. Reentry vehicles are the parts of intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying warheads back into earth’s atmosphere before striking a target.

‘A More Sophisticated Version’At the May 1 rally in Michigan, Trump touted the security and economic benefits of an Iron Dome system.

After the remarks quoted in the Threads clip about building “the greatest [Iron] Dome of them all,” the YouTube video of Trump’s full remarks show that he then said: “We’re going to have it all made right here in America. Some of it’s going to be made right here in Michigan. State-of-the-art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America and will create jobs, jobs, jobs, and we’re going to have the greatest Dome of them all. … We’re going to have a more sophisticated version. We have the technology. We have the genius. We’re going to have a more, we’re going to build a great Iron Dome. We’re going to have a shield around our country and it’s made here, and it’s going to be a great day.”

Defense experts are skeptical that a missile defense system can “shield” the entire U.S., as Trump suggests. But Trump did not say such a system was needed to “defend us” from our neighbor to the north.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesBiddle, Stephen. Adjunct senior fellow for defense policy, Council on Foreign Relations. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 2 May 2024.

Congressional Research Service. “Defense Primer: Ballistic Missile Defense.” Updated 30 Jan 2024.

Fowler, Stephen. “Away from his New York trial, Donald Trump’s campaign rallies are business as usual.” NPR. 1 May 2024.

Rafael Advance Defence Systems Ltd. “Our Story.” Accessed 2 May 2024.

Raytheon/RTX. “Iron Dome System and SkyHunter Missile.” Rtx.com. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Reiss, Adam, et al. “Key witnesses in Trump’s criminal trial describe how the hush money deals came together.” NBC News. 30 Apr 2024.

Seitz-Wald, Alex. “Trump has long promised a ‘beautiful’ wall. Now he’s pledging ‘the greatest dome ever.'” NBC News. 23 Jan 2024.

U.S. Department of Defense. Email from Pentagon spokesperson to FactCheck.org. 2 May 2024.

Vinograd, Cassandra and Matthew Mpoke Bigg. “What Weapons Did Israel Use to Block Iran’s Attack?” New York Times. 14 Apr 2024.

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Former President Donald Trump said FBI data that show homicides and other violent crimes trending down are “fake numbers.” They’re not.

The FBI data for 2023 are preliminary, but crime statistics experts say the reporting behind the overall downward trend is solid, and that trend is validated when compared to data samples from local and state law enforcement reports.

The FBI statistics contradict Trump’s campaign narrative, repeated at a May 1 rally in Wisconsin, about rampant and rising violent crime in the U.S. And polls that show most Americans believe crime is on the increase. But that doesn’t mean the data are wrong or “fudged,” as Trump put it.

The FBI statistics are, however, incomplete, given that they measure only crimes reported to law enforcement — some crimes, such as rape, are historically greatly underreported — and not every law enforcement agency reports its statistics. That has been the case for decades.

Trump’s dismissal of the validity of the FBI’s crime statistics reminds us of when Trump was running for president in 2016 and falsely labeled the unemployment rates published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “phony numbers.”

At that time, Trump claimed the unemployment rate was really 42%. (The official unemployment rate then was 4.9%.) Less than two months after Trump took office, however, he was happy to cite BLS’ official unemployment rate. Sean Spicer, Trump’s top spokesman at the time, joked in a press briefing about Trump’s new embrace of the jobs data, “Yeah, I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly — ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”

According to the FBI’s preliminary 2023 crime report, violent crimes dropped 5.7% between 2022 and 2023, and the number of murders declined 13.2%. That’s based on data from 79% of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., representing higher participation than any year during Trump’s presidency. Murders and violent crime went up in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and murders continued to rise in 2021, albeit to a lesser extent, as violent crime ticked down a bit. Both have been declining since, according to FBI and other crime data.

Asked about the downward trend in violent crime figures in a Time interview conducted on April 12, Trump said he didn’t believe it, and he claimed, “The FBI gave fake numbers.”

Time National Politics Reporter Eric Cortellessa, April 12: Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There was a 6% drop in—

Trump: I don’t believe it.

Cortellessa: You don’t believe that?

Trump: Yeah, they’re fake numbers.

Cortellessa: You think so?

Trump: Well it came out last night. The FBI gave fake numbers.

Cortellessa: I didn’t see that, but the FBI said that there was a 13% drop [in homicides] in 2023.

Trump: I don’t believe it. No, it’s a lie. It’s fake news.

Cortellessa: Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?

Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There’s no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?

Cortellessa: So these local police departments are wrong?

Trump: I don’t believe it’s from the local police. What I saw was the FBI was giving false numbers.

We reached out to Trump’s press office for clarification about what Trump was referring to when he said, “it came out last night” that “[t]he FBI gave fake numbers.” We also asked for any other evidence to support Trump’s claim the FBI “fudged the numbers.” We got no response.

The FBI figures are based on voluntary reports by agencies nationwide. The final numbers and information about nationwide crime rates, which are adjusted for population, won’t be available until the FBI’s annual crime report is released in October.

“This data is preliminary and unaudited so agencies have time to submit data for additional months or fix apparent data errors (of which there are a handful), but it’s data coming from agencies themselves,” crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the New Orleans firm AH Datalytics, told us via email. “I like to think of those figures as accurate but not precise.”

In other words, he said, the drop in murders may end up being 10% or 11% lower in 2023 instead of 13.2%. And the drop in violent crime may be smaller than the 5.7% in the preliminary report. But, he said, the preliminary data “highlights the trend of rapidly declining murder and less rapidly declining violent crime.”

The downward homicide trend is backed up by AH Datalytics’ analysis of data about homicides from more than 200 large U.S. cities, which showed homicides declined by about 12% in 2023, Asher said. The FBI data also track with a large decline in shooting victims in 2023 documented by the Gun Violence Archives.

“Murder almost certainly declined at one of the fastest rates ever recorded in 2023,” Asher wrote in his 2023 analysis.

As for the downward trend in violent crime, that “is seemingly backed up by publicly available data from 14 states that published their data already showing a decline in violent crime in most states,” Asher said.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s crime report for 2023, published in January, found that homicides in 32 cities that provided such data were 10% lower—representing 515 fewer homicides—in 2023 than in 2022. The CCJ analysis also found there were 3% fewer reported aggravated assaults and 7% fewer gun assaults in 11 reporting cities, and 5% fewer carjackings in 10 reporting cities. The report found robberies and domestic violence incidents each rose 2% in 2023.

“Overall, crime rates are largely returning to pre-COVID levels as the nation distances itself from the height of the pandemic, but there are notable exceptions.” the CCJ report states. “While decreases in homicide in the study cities (and many other cities) are promising, the progress is uneven and other sources of crime information, including household surveys of violent victimization, indicate higher rates and more pronounced shifts than reports to law enforcement agencies.”

The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association also show a decline in murders and violent crime. The number of murders went down by 10.4% from 2022 to 2023 in 69 large U.S. cities that provided data, according to its report. Since 2020, murders in those cities have dropped by 8.6%. The latest report from MCCA shows violent crime continued to trend down in the first quarter of 2024, though homicides and other violent crimes remain above their pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

“Given the multitude of data sources pointing to the same widespread decline I’d say the FBI quarterly data is trustworthy in terms of the overarching trend while there still being a fair amount of uncertainty as to how large the declines in murder and violent crime may have been,” Asher said.

Richard Berk, emeritus professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. “Violent crime generally appears to have been declining post COVID,” Berk told us via email.

“It’s clearly going down in the way it’s described” by the FBI, Berk said. And if you doubt that, he said, “If you use local data (e.g., from the Philly PD) you can bypass claims of FBI malfeasance. And if you do that, you get pretty much the same story.”

Nonetheless, he said, the process of tracking crime in the U.S. is “a very imperfect system.” For one, some violent crimes — such as rape and domestic violence — are far more underreported to police than others.

Crime Victimization SurveyThe FBI’s Uniform Crime Report documents crimes reported to law enforcement. The government’s other national crime measure is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which estimates levels of various crimes based on a survey of about 240,000 people each year, asking whether they have been victims of various crimes. The two measures can vary, and have in recent years.

At a May 1 rally in Wisconsin, Trump said, “We have a country that’s in hell. Look at what’s going on. Look at the crime.” But FBI statistics contradict Trump’s campaign narrative that crime is on the rise. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images. While the FBI Uniform Crime Reports were showing a decrease in violent crime between 2021 and 2022, the NCVS for 2022 — the latest year available — showed the serious violent crime victimization rate — which includes rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault — rose from 5.6 the year before to 9.8 violent crimes per 1,000 population age 12 and older.

In an October report, criminologists at the Council on Criminal Justice wrote that the divergence between the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the NCVS “makes it uncertain whether violent crime actually went up or down in 2022.”

Nonetheless, that still doesn’t support Trump’s claim.

“These findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the 2022 rate of nonfatal violent victimization increased compared to 2021, but was similar to the rate in 2018 and remained much lower than the highs of the early 1990s,” Kevin M. Scott, principal deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said in a press release about the report for 2022.

Asher said there are numerous reasons the NCVS does not nullify the trends reported in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

The NCVS “is terrific for outlining the contours of what does and doesn’t get reported but isn’t particularly great at measuring year-to-year trends,” Asher told us. In a post on April 8, Asher outlined some of the reasons for the discrepancy between the reports in 2022.

“The most obvious reason to avoid year-to-year direct comparisons is that UCR counts murder while NCVS does not,” Asher wrote. “Murder victims cannot be surveyed, so the reason for the crime’s absence makes sense in NCVS, but it’s also the crime that comes with the highest societal cost and I’m guessing it’s usually the crime that people are thinking about when they think about the nation’s violent crime rate. Murder is also the one crime that probably has decently accurate — albeit imperfect — counts each year.”

Murders have indisputably gone down in each of the last two years, after a spike in 2020 and a smaller uptick in 2021, though they are still a bit higher than 2019.

Asher also cites a lag time built into surveys that ask about crimes over the last six months, the fact that the surveys only include people 12 and older, and that surveys — by definition — have margins of error.

Asher also notes that the NCVS’ most recent survey is for 2022, while the preliminary FBI data is for 2023.

“In many ways, 2022’s violent crime trend isn’t particularly important relative to the direction implied in 2023’s preliminary reported crime trend sitting here in the spring of 2024,” Asher wrote.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on April 24, John Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, argued that the NCVS has revealed that violent crime is not down, just reporting of violent crime to police departments. He attributes that to large cities arresting fewer people, and thereby giving victims less incentive to report a crime.

“Law enforcement has collapsed in the U.S., particularly in big cities,” Lott wrote, and “many Americans [are] no longer confident that the legal system will protect them.”

Indeed, Ernesto Lopez, a research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice, said the NCVS indicated that “non-reporting of aggravated assaults increased by about 29% from 2021 to 2022,” which he said, “could create an undercount of aggravated assaults.” Nonetheless, he said, “I generally would not classify the FBI data as inaccurate.”

Lott, whose controversial research on crime and guns is often cited by conservatives, also attributes the discrepancy between the 2022 FBI and NCVS data to low participation among local police departments that feed data to inform the FBI report. But participation rates in 2023 grew substantially.

A Change in Reporting DataAs we have written, starting in 2021, the FBI transitioned to a new system for local law enforcement agencies to submit data, requiring agencies to use what’s called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. That first year, only 60% of agencies reported crime data — police departments in the two largest U.S. cities, New York City and Los Angeles, were among the notable non-reporters — and so the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics provided national estimates to fill in the gaps. Due to the low reporting level, some crime data experts cautioned not to make sweeping conclusions about crime trends.

Anna Harvey, a politics, data science and law professor at New York University, was among those who warned at the time that politicians were “kind of throwing around allegations and claims about crime that may or may not be accurate.”

In an email interview, Harvey told us participation rates have since improved dramatically.

The year the FBI transitioned to the NIBRS system for collecting crime data — 2021 — she said, only 60% of agencies reported. That increased to 71% in 2022, “which was better but still worse than pre-NIBRS rates,” Harvey said.

But the preliminary 2023 FBI report — the one that found a 13.2% drop in murders and a 5.7% decline in violent crimes in 2023 compared with 2022 — is based on 79.4% of agencies reporting.

“That’s pretty good!” Harvey said. “It’s higher than any reporting rate during the Trump presidency, and close to the highest observed reporting rate between 2000 and 2022 (81%).”

‘Migrant Crime’Trump argued that the FBI crime statistics must have been “fudged” because they did not account for a wave of “migrant crime.”

“There is no way that crime went down over the last year,” Trump said in the Time interview. “There’s no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?”

Crime data experts say Trump confuses how FBI crime data are collected and reported.

“The FBI UCR statistics do not track incidents such as illegal entries, failure to appear in hearings, etc.,” Lopez, of the Council on Criminal Justice, told us. “However, if a migrant commits an offense, such as a robbery, and that robbery is reported to the police, and that police department reports their crime incidents to the FBI, that incident will be reflected in official statistics.”

To be sure, there have been a number of high-profile crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally this year, including the murder of nursing student Laken Riley in February and an assault on New York City police officers in January.

But Asher, of AH Datalytics, says there is no evidence in the data to indicate a migrant crime wave. Asher said that assuming a wave of crimes being committed by immigrants was too small to register in overall national trends of reported violent crime, he decided to analyze crime data to see if it was at least showing up along the U.S. border with Mexico. And so he looked at Texas crime data.

“Comparing violent crime rates in Texas border counties over time to violent crime in the US and statewide in Texas shows no evidence of increasing violent crime along the US border with Mexico,” Asher wrote. “The 14 counties along the Texas-Mexico border have seen a relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole.”

“There are — and likely always will be — extraordinarily tragic individual incidents of crime to point to as anecdotal evidence of whatever wider trend one wants to assert,” Asher wrote. “But individual tragedies do not inherently constitute a crime wave, and the lack of an overarching surge in incidents shouldn’t detract from the tragedy of individual examples.

“Ultimately, the US crime data system is poorly set up to definitively answer the question of whether there is an immigrant-driven crime wave,” he said. “That said, the overall trend of declining violent crime nationally, and seeing no localized crime surges in the places I’d expect to see one if there was such a ‘wave’ strongly suggests that no such thing exists.”

A February New York Times analysis found that while 170,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since April 2022 — when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began bussing migrants there to call attention to rising illegal immigration into his state — “the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased.”

Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the New York Times there was no evidence of a migrant crime wave.

“I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something significant, meaningful and a departure from the norm,” Butts said. “So far, what we have are individual incidents of crime.”

An ‘Imperfect’ SystemThe FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports are an “imperfect” way to measure crime in the U.S., Berk said. There isn’t uniform compliance among reporting agencies, and the report only captures crimes reported to law enforcement.

“Overall crime is a composite of many different kinds of crimes, some are quite common and some are quite rare,” Berk said. “Overall measures can be dominated by the most common crimes. Crimes such as homicide, which is what has great political clout, are relatively rare. The concept of overall crime is basically nonsense.”

“The best back of envelope way to proceed is to focus on particular crimes one by one and one jurisdiction at a time,” Berk said. “But there are subtitles here too. For example, homicides can fall even if the number of shootings increases insofar as medical care substantially improves, such as with the ‘scoop and run’ policy of the Philly PD. Trauma centers really help as well.

“Nevertheless, violent crime generally appears to have been declining post COVID,” Berk said.

In other words, there are numerous caveats that go along with crime statistics like the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The data have certain limitations. But crime data experts say they are useful and informative, and there is no reason to believe they are “fake” or “fudged,” as Trump claimed.

In order to check the FBI data, Berk said, simply look at the crime reports from various cities and you will see they generally match up with the data reported by the FBI for that city, he said.

“It’s hard to argue there’s a conspiracy [by the FBI to fudge the data] if the local police departments are giving them the statistics,” Berk said. “You could say [for example] the Philadelphia police department is in cahoots with the Biden administration’s FBI, but that’s simply a silly conspiracy theory.”

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SciCheck DigestIt has not been shown that COVID-19 vaccines cause or accelerate cancer. Yet opponents of the vaccines say a new review article “has found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could aid cancer development.” The review conclusions are mainly based on the misinterpretation of a study on mRNA cancer vaccines in mice.

   How is mRNA in vaccines delivered to cells?        How is mRNA in vaccines delivered to cells?   Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work by instructing a small number of a person’s cells to make specific proteins. In the case of the approved mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, the cells make spike protein — one component of the virus that causes COVID-19.

For mRNA vaccines to work, it’s not enough to just put mRNA molecules into a vial and then inject them into a person’s muscle. One innovation that made the current mRNA vaccines possible was the use of lipids to encircle the mRNA molecules.

These fatty structures — called lipid nanoparticles — protect the mRNA from being broken down prematurely. They also help the mRNA cross the cell membrane and get into cells. The approved mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 each use a blend of four types of lipids.

Once the lipid nanoparticles make it past the cell membrane, they release the mRNA into the cell’s interior. Called the cytoplasm, this region encompasses the inside of the cell excluding the nucleus, in which the cell’s DNA resides. The mRNA is processed and used to create the spike protein. The body then mounts an immune response to the spike protein, preparing the immune system to respond to the virus that causes COVID-19 in the future.

Link to this

Full StoryClinical trials, involving thousands of people, and multiple studies have shown that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are safe. Hundreds of millions of doses have been administered under close monitoring systems that have found serious side effects are rare. Studies have also shown that the vaccines work very well in preventing severe COVID-19 disease and death, saving millions of lives across the globe.

There is no evidence to support a link between COVID-19 vaccines and cancer, as we’ve reported. Both the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society have stated there’s no information that suggests COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, make it more aggressive or lead to recurrence of cancer.

Yet, vaccine opponents falsely claim a review article published in April proves the contrary.

“BREAKING: A review in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could aid cancer development,” reads an April 16 Facebook post by America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has repeatedly spread misinformation about the pandemic and whose founder was sentenced to 60 days in prison for entering the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.

A separate Facebook post used a Gateway Pundit headline to falsely claim, “Confirmed: Researchers Reveal COVID mRNA Vaccines Contain Component that Suppresses Immune Response and Stimulates Cancer Growth.” Similarly, a post on X said the new “study … confirms what some medical experts have been suspecting for 18 months: The COVID mRNA shots containing N1-methyl-pseudouridine SUPPRESS the immune system and STIMULATE cancer growth!”

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work by instructing a small number of a person’s cells to make specific proteins, which then prompt the body to mount an immune response. N1-methylpseudouridine is a modification naturally found in some RNA molecules that’s attached to mRNA in vaccines to allow it to deliver its message to the cell without being destroyed by an innate immune response, as we will explain.

Experts told us the review paper, which is based on other published articles and does not contain original research, misleads by misinterpreting several studies and the role of N1-methylpseudouridine in vaccines. The authors also refer to an unreliable review article, written by authors known for spreading misinformation, that falsely claimed the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines impair the immune system and increase the risk of cancer, as we have explained before.

One of the most important misrepresentations, and one that the authors heavily rely on, is based on the findings of a study on mRNA cancer vaccines in mice.The study looked at the efficacy of mRNA cancer vaccines with different degrees of N1-methylpseudouridinemodification in a mouse melanoma model. According to the review, the study found that “adding 100% of N1-methyl-pseudouridine (m1Ψ) to the mRNA vaccine in a melanoma model stimulated cancer growth and metastasis, while non-modified mRNA vaccines induced opposite results, thus suggesting that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could aid cancer development.”

But that’s not what the study found.

“[O]ur results did not show, suggest or indicate that modified mRNA promotes tumor growth/metastasis,” Tanapat Palaga, professor of microbiology at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and the corresponding author of that study, told us in an email.

What the study actually showed is that both unmodified mRNA and modified mRNA induced immune responses against the tumor antigens, but only the unmodified mRNA reduced cancer growth and metastasis, while the modified mRNA didn’t. The study was published in 2022 and co-authored by Drew Weissman, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize with Katalin Karikó for discovering this mRNA modification that eventually led to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. James A. Hoxie, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Penn Institute of RNA Innovation (directed by Weissman), told us those findings are relevant for scientists who are studying ways in which mRNA cancer vaccines can elicit immune responses needed to prevent or delay cancer progression. (See “Social Media Posts Misinterpret Biden on mRNA Cancer Vaccines” for more information about mRNA cancer vaccines.)

“But that is a far cry from saying that the vaccine that was used to prevent COVID-19 disease causes cancer,” he said. Implying that by regulating the innate immune system, which is something scientists working in immunotherapies are trying to understand, “you’re leaving yourself open for cancer risk — that is ludicrous.”

“I believe that the authors of this review article intentionally or [unintentionally] misinterpret our results and tried to twist the conclusion to support their agenda,” Palaga told us.

There are no studies supporting a link between N1-methylpseudouridine and cancer in animals or mice, experts told us.

There is also no evidence mRNA COVID-19 vaccines impair, much less suppress, the immune system, as we’ve reported. In fact, the vaccines enhance immunity by teaching the immune system how to identify and fight the coronavirus.

N1-methylpseudouridine and Its Role in mRNA VaccinesTo understand the role of N1-methylpseudouridine we have to look back at the history of mRNA vaccines.

Normally, when a cell encounters a foreign RNA, a molecule present in most living organisms and viruses, it activates a strong innate immune response against the molecule.

Daniel Jędzura / stock.adobe.comThis was a problem for scientists trying to use mRNA as a therapeutic, since the goal was for the cell to receive the instructions carried by the mRNA and produce certain proteins. Until the mid-2000s, Karikó, Weissman and others observed that if they attached certain chemical modifications found in some kinds of natural RNA molecules, such as pseudouridine, into one of the four bases of mRNA, they could blunt that innate immune response and, at the same time, increase the mRNA’s capacity to translate its code for the cell to make the desired proteins.

Later, scientists found N1-methylpseudouridine, another modification naturally found in some kinds of RNA molecules, worked better than pseudouridine.

The modification is not “suppressing” the immune system, Hoxie told us — it just allows for certain parts of the immune system not to activate temporarily “in order to get the desired effect.”

Jordan L. Meier, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute who has studied the role of N1-methylpseudouridine in COVID-19 vaccines, told us the authors of the review paper misrepresent what N1-methylpseudouridine, which is abbreviated as m1Ψ, does.

The review “incorrectly” confuses “m1Y’s ability to hide from the immune system with an ability to weaken or disable it,” he told us in an email.

To explain it, Meier compared the mRNA modification to a spy using a disguise in order to pass security guards.

“The authors are essentially suggesting that the disguise somehow makes the guards less able to do their jobs going forward,” he wrote. “In reality, once the disguised person is through, the guards remain just as vigilant and capable as before.”

The review, he added, doesn’t provide evidence that N1-methylpseudouridine “leaves the immune system any worse off for future threats.”

Misrepresented Studies in the Review PaperSimilarly, the review misleads by cherry-picking or misrepresenting figures and tables of this and other papers.

For example, in the study by Palaga, Weissman and others using a mouse melanoma model (in which malignant cells from a tumor are given to a mouse), scientists found that relative to mice that received no vaccine (and instead received a saline solution) no increase in tumor growth or decrease in survival occurred when animals were vaccinated with a modified mRNA vaccine. However, when animals received a vaccine containing unmodified mRNA, the study showed a decrease in tumor growth and an increase in survival compared with the control group that received the saline solution. In other words, the study found that the unmodified mRNA generated immune responses that decreased tumor growth and improved survival, while, similar to the control group, the modified mRNA had no effect on the tumor.

Table 1 of the review, however, incorrectly says the study found that the modified mRNA vaccine “increases tumor growth” and “decreases survival.”

“This is simply not true and is a gross misrepresentation of the data that paper actually shows. The modified RNA had no effect on the tumor, and results using that vaccine were the same as using a saline solution,” Hoxie told us.

The tumor growth in mice receiving the modified mRNA was “increased relative to the unmodified vaccine, but it was identical to when there was no intervention,” Hoxie told us. “Animals that received the modified mRNA vaccine died at the same rate and with the same amount of tumor as did animals that received the saline solution. The fact tumor progression in this model was reduced with the unmodified mRNA vaccine is the key point of this paper and indicated that in this model immune responses to unmodified mRNA may have anti-tumor activity, an important finding for the cancer immunotherapy field.”

The review also refers to a study that has been extensively misinterpreted to falsely claim that the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine causes what vaccine opponents called “turbo cancer.” The study describes one mouse that died from a lymphoma after 14 mice were given a high dose of the vaccine. The review paper reproduces images from the study that show dissected mice and compares the organs of the mouse that died with one with a normal anatomy.

As we explained, and as the authors of that paper noted in an addendum, there is no such thing as “turbo cancer,” and, more importantly, the case report does not demonstrate a causal relationship between the lymphoma and the vaccine.

Meier told us the review also wrongly refers to a study published in 2016 to support its thesis that modified mRNA vaccines turn off an immune sensor known as RIG-I.

“In reality, this study only showed m1Y mRNAs are unable to activate RIG-I and did not test inhibition. In other words, what was shown was that m1Y is a strong camouflage, not that it is an immune suppressor,” he wrote.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

Sources“Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines.” CDC website. Updated 3 Nov 2023.

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Trang, Brittany. “Covid vaccines averted 3 million deaths in U.S., according to new study.” Stat. 13 Dec 2022.

“COVID-19 vaccinations have saved more than 1.4 million lives in the WHO European Region, a new study finds.” WHO. Press release. 16 Jan 2024.

Van Beusekom, Mary. “Global COVID vaccination saved 2.4 million lives in first 8 months, study estimates.” CIDRAP, University of Minnesota. 31 Oct 2023.

Watson, Oliver J., et al. “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study.” Infectious Diseases. 23 Jun 2022.

Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Cause ‘Turbo Cancer’.” FactCheck.org. 31 Aug 2023.

Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Alter DNA, Cause Cancer.” FactCheck.org. 26 Oct 2023.

“COVID-19 Vaccines and People with Cancer.” National Cancer Institute website. Accessed 2 May 2024.

“COVID-19 Vaccines in People with Cancer.” American Cancer Society website. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Bergengruen, Vera. “‘What Price Was My Father’s Life Worth?’ Right-Wing Doctors Are Still Peddling Dubious COVID Drugs.” Time. 15 May 2023.

Van Beusekom, Mary. “Report spotlights 52 US doctors who posted potentially harmful COVID misinformation online.” CIDRAP. 16 Aug 2023.

Dyer, Owen. “Founder of America’s Frontline Doctors is sentenced to prison for role in Capitol riot.” BMJ. 22 Jun 2022.

“Understanding COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines.” National Human Genome Research Institute website. Accessed 22 Mar 2024.

McDonald, Jessica. “COVID-19 Vaccination Increases Immunity, Contrary to Immune Suppression Claims.” FactCheck.org. 30 Jul 2022.

Sittplangkoon, Chutamath. “mRNA vaccine with unmodified uridine induces robust type I interferon-dependent anti-tumor immunity in a melanoma model.” Frontiers in Immunology. 14 Oct 2022.

Palaga, Tanapat. Professor of microbiology at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 19 April 2024.

“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023.” The Nobel Prize. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Hoxie, James A. Emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Penn Institute of RNA Innovation. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 25 Apr 2024.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “Social Media Posts Misinterpret Biden on mRNA Cancer Vaccines.” FactCheck.org. 22 Mar 2024.

Karikó, Katalin, et al. “Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors: the impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA.” Immunity. 23 Aug 2005.

Anderson, Bart R., et al. “Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA enhances translation by diminishing PKR activation.” Nucleic Acids Research. 1 Sep 2010.

Karikó, Katalin, et al. “Incorporation of Pseudouridine Into mRNA Yields Superior Nonimmunogenic Vector With Increased Translational Capacity and Biological Stability.” Molecular Therapy. Nov 2008.

Andries, Oliwia, et al. “N1-methylpseudouridine-incorporated mRNA outperforms pseudouridine-incorporated mRNA by providing enhanced protein expression and reduced immunogenicity in mammalian cell lines and mice.” Journal of Controlled Release. 10 Nov 2015.

Meier, Jordan L. Senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Apr 2024.

Nance, Kellie D, and Jordan L. Meier. “Modifications in an Emergency: The Role of N1-Methylpseudouridine in COVID-19 Vaccines.” ACS Cent. Sci. 26 May 2021.

Eens, Sander, et al. “B-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma following intravenous BNT162b2 mRNA booster in a BALB/c mouse: A case report.” Frontiers in Oncology. 1 May 2023.

Fiegen Durbin, Ann, et al. “RNAs Containing Modified Nucleotides Fail To Trigger RIG-I Conformational Changes for Innate Immune Signaling.” mBio. 20 Sep 2016.

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In his interview with SiriusXM radio’s Howard Stern, President Joe Biden revived a dubious anecdote about having been arrested as a teenager while standing in solidarity on the porch of a Black family amid a desegregation protest.

As it has in the past, the story came up as Biden recalled mulling Barack Obama’s offer to join the 2008 Democratic ticket as vice president and discussing it with his mother, who encouraged Biden to accept, as Obama had a chance to be the nation’s first Black president.

In the April 26 interview, Biden said that his mother had told him, “‘Joey, let me — remember’ — true story, she said — ‘Remember when they were desegregating Lynnfield, the neighborhood, there was 70 homes built, suburbia — and I told you — and there was a Black family moving in and there was — people were down there protesting. I told you not to go down there and you went down, remember that? And you got arrested standing on the porch with a Black family? And they brought you back, the police?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Mom, I remember that.’”

There is no evidence Biden was ever arrested, though news stories at the time do corroborate that there were incidents near Biden’s home in Delaware when he was a teenager in which white neighbors protested a Black family moving in. Biden has told the anecdote numerous times. And in some retellings, he only claims that the police drove him home, not that he was arrested.

In early 2022, after Biden boasted that he had been arrested as part of the Civil Rights Movement, fact-checkers at the Washington Post and PolitiFact looked into Biden’s multiple accounts of the story. They could not corroborate that he was ever arrested, and they dug up news articles that suggested he was not.

We couldn’t find that Biden has relayed the anecdote publicly since then, until the Stern interview.

But it is possible Biden cryptically referred to it in this exchange at a Democratic National Committee event in New York City on Sept. 20, 2022. Biden appeared to be referring to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, when he said — according to a White House transcript:

Biden, Sept. 20, 2022: And, Mr. Mayor, thank you. I — we have a similar background, except I didn’t get arrested. (Laughter.) I got stopped a couple of times, but I — (laughter) — talked my way out of it. Only time I almost got arrested was I was trying to go see Nelson Mandela in South — in —

Adams: South Africa.

Biden: — in South Africa and — and when I was at a Civil Rights march. That was the only two times. But I didn’t get arrested. They I didn’t think I was worth it.

As we have written, Biden claimed multiple times in 2020 that he had been “arrested” in Soweto while trying to see Mandela on Robben Island, where the future leader of South Africa had been imprisoned from 1964 to 1982. Biden later acknowledged that he had only been “stopped” and briefly “detained.” It was unclear to us whether, at the New York City event, Biden was referring to the Delaware incident when he said he was “stopped” but “talked my way out of it.”

We reached out to the White House press office to ask about the Delaware anecdote and whether Biden had embellished the details. We did not get a response. (Biden’s mother, Catherine “Jean” Biden, died in 2010.)

The anecdote about his civil rights history comes as the president is trying to shore up his support among Black voters.

The Varying Versions of Biden’s AnecdoteAs we said, in the Stern interview on April 26, Biden said his mother recalled how some white residents were protesting because a Black family moved into the Lynnfield neighborhood. And despite her telling him not to go there, he “got arrested standing on the porch with a Black family … And they brought you back, the police.” He has told this story numerous times over the years, although sometimes with slightly different details.

The version Biden gave in the Stern interview is similar to the one Biden told during a speech in Nashville in November 2017, though in that version the protests were in nearby Graylyn Crest or Carrcroft, Delaware, not Lynnfield, as the Washington Post documented. In that telling and two others, in October 2018 and February 2020, Biden again said his mother recalled him being arrested.

But in relaying the anecdote on Dec. 13, 2018, at the University of Utah, Biden said his mother told him, “Remember I told you not to go down, and the police brought you back because you were standing on the front porch with the Black couple?'” So in that version, he was not arrested, but simply brought home by the police.

That’s similar to the version Biden relayed in a Zoom interview with Oprah Winfrey on Oct. 28, 2020: “She said, ‘Joey, remember when you were a kid and they were desegregating that neighborhood called Lynnfield, down the road from us. And there were people protesting and I told you not to go down there and you went down and the police brought you back because you were standing on the step with the Black family. You were standing with them. And the police brought you home because they thought you’d get in trouble.'”

When Biden was a teenager in 1955, his family moved to Mayfield, Delaware. That’s about a mile from both Lynnfield and Carrcroft. And there were some incidents similar to what Biden described at the time he was living there.

Newspaper Historical RecordThe Washington Post unearthed two newspaper clippings describing protests over desegregation of a white neighborhood not far from the Bidens’ home.

The first is a Feb. 25, 1959, story in the Wilmington Journal that reported about 300 people gathered to protest outside a home that a Black couple had purchased in Collins Park, about 10 miles from the Bidens’ home. According to the Wilmington Journal account, three people were arrested for breach of the peace and four teenagers for possession of fireworks. Biden would have been 16 at the time, but there’s no mention of him or anyone else being arrested while siding with the family.

A week later, on March 2, 1959, the Associated Press reported another disturbance outside the Collins Park home.

“Crowds demonstrated in two different places Saturday night against the presence of a Negro family in a previously all-white housing development near here,” the AP reported. “The larger group gathered at the home of George and Lucile Rayfield, a Negro couple, who early last week moved into Collins Park four miles south of Wilmington. Some of the demonstrators scuffled with state troopers. One policeman was reported to have been hit by a stone. Four persons were arrested. Estimates of the crowd ranged from 150 to 300.”

The four arrested were “Harold Figgett, his wife and 17-year-old son, and the father’s brother, Henry. The father was charged with assault and battery on a state trooper, disorderly conduct and, along with his wife, with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The boy was charged with juvenile delinquency, and his uncle with breach of the peace and public intoxication.” So Biden wasn’t arrested there.

But there was another related incident that night closer to Biden’s home — about a mile away — at the home of the real estate agent who had sold the Rayfields the Collins Park home.

“The other gathering was at the home of Francis A. Levering Jr., in suburban Carrcroft, which is north of the city and several miles from Collins Park,” the AP reported. “Levering is the real estate dealer who sold the Collins Park home to the Rayfields for a reported $13,500. Here demonstrators set up a crude cross, three or four feet tall, and tried to set it aflame. Repeated efforts fizzled, however, and state police seized it. No arrests were made at this site.”

If that’s where Biden showed up, there’s no indication he was arrested there, either. There’s also no record to prove one way or the other whether police brought the 16-year-old Biden home because they were afraid he’d “get in trouble.”

In his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden also tells the anecdote of his mother encouraging him to accept Obama’s offer to run as his vice president. “My ninety-year-old mother, who had watched my lifelong fight for civil rights and racial equality, put it this way at a larger family meeting the next day: ‘So let me get this straight, honey. The first African-American in history who has a chance to be president says he needs your help to win — and you said no’” (Page 60). But there is no mention of her specifically recounting his involvement supporting neighborhood desegregation as a teenager. Nor is there any mention of the incident in the chapter discussing his time in Mayfield, Delaware, in his 2007 book, “Promises to Keep.”

If we get more information, or if the White House press office gets back to us, we will update this story. But unless new evidence emerges, it does not appear Biden was arrested in relation to nearby desegregation protests. Nor is there any indication of why he would have been arrested, as all of the arrests documented in news accounts were of people protesting a Black family moving into a white neighborhood.

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Quick TakeProtesters against the war in Gaza raised three Palestinian flags on the Harvard University campus on April 27. Social media posts misleadingly claimed the university “replaced the American flag with the Palestinian flag.” The Palestinian flags were removed by Harvard staff shortly after they were raised by the protesters.

Full StoryThe rising toll of the war in the Gaza Strip, which began after the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, has sparked student protests on university campuses across the United States. About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the initial attack, about 250 people were taken hostage, and more than 250 Israeli soldiers have died in the ensuing war. In Gaza, more than 33,700 Palestinians have died as a result of retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces as of April 15, according to United Nations data, based on Gaza Ministry of Health reporting,compiled by Statista.

Students protesting the ongoing war in Gaza have held mostly peaceful but tense demonstrations and sit-ins and have set up encampments on campuses. College officials have sometimes responded with suspensions and expulsions, and police have arrested hundreds of students for trespassing or failure to disperse.

But the official response by Harvard University — where then-President Claudine Gay resigned in January amid conservative criticism of her handling of the protests and accusations of plagiarism — has been misrepresented on social media.

A person walks past an encampment in Harvard Yard on April 28 as Harvard University students protest the war in Gaza. Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.An April 28 post on Facebook misleadingly claims, “Harvard has REPLACED the American flag with the Palestinian flag. Once Harvard and now Hamas University.” A 36-second video in the post shows several people raising a Palestinian flag over a statue of 17th-century college benefactor John Harvard on the campus.

Conservative commentator Graham Allen shared a similar message in an April 28 post on X, adding, “They are teaching students to HATE America. Pull their funding.” Allen’s post received more than 5 million views, according to the platform.

The university, however, did not hoist the Palestinian flag, as the posts claim.

Three Palestinian flags were raised by protesters on April 27 over the John Harvard statue, the Harvard Crimson reported. The first flag was raised at 6 p.m., the second at 6:18 p.m. and the third at 6:23 p.m.

University staff were called to remove the flags shortly after 6:30 p.m., the Boston Globe reported.

A spokesperson for the university emailed a statement to us saying, “The flags raised by protesters over University Hall were removed by Harvard facilities staff. The protesters’ actions are a violation of University policy and the individuals involved will be subject to disciplinary action.”

The statement, released on April 27, did not say what disciplinary action was being considered.

The Harvard statement also said, “The American flag was not flying on University Hall at the time the other flags were raised. University procedures are that the American flag is raised on University Hall each Monday through Friday at 7am and lowered at 4pm for proper storage.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

SourcesAndone, Dakin. “How universities are cracking down on a swell of tension months into student protests over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.” CNN. 29 Apr 2024.

Berger, Ava. “Palestinian flags raised in Harvard Yard over the weekend spark outrage.” Boston Globe. 29 Apr 2024.

Federman, Josef and Issam Adwan. “Hamas surprise attack out of Gaza stuns Israel and leaves hundreds dead in fighting, retaliation.” Associated Press. 7 Oct 2023.

Harvard University. Email from spokesperson. 30 Apr 2024.

Harvard University. “Statement Apr. 27.” 27 Apr 2024.

Hung, Madeleine A. and Joyce E. Kim. “Encampment Protesters Briefly Raise 3 Palestinian Flags Over Harvard Yard.” The Harvard Crimson. 27 Apr 2024.

Jeffery, Jack and Josef Federman. “Hamas releases video showing well-known Israeli-American hostage.” Associated Press. 24 Apr 2024.

Schuessler, Jennifer, et al. “Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations.” New York Times. Updated 3 Jan 2024.

Statista. “Number of Palestinian and Israeli fatalities and injuries caused by war between Hamas and Israel since October 7, 2023.” Accessed 30 Apr 2024.

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Quick TakeImmigrants who are lawfully living or authorized to work in the U.S. are eligible for a Social Security number and, in some cases, Social Security benefits. But viral posts make the false claim that “illegal immigrants” can receive Social Security numbers and retirement benefits, and they confuse two programs managed by the Social Security Administration.

Full StoryThe flow of immigrants across the southern border hit a record high at the end of 2023, the Pew Research Center reported, and immigration has become a dominant issue in this election season. But, as we’ve written, politicians and social media posts have spread misinformation exaggerating immigration numbers and distorting the political impact of immigrants in the U.S.

Another persistent yet false claim about immigrants in the country illegally and Social Security benefits is also circulating again. Immigrants who are not authorized to be in the United States are not eligible for such benefits, as we’ve previously written.

An April 12 Facebook post, however, claims, “Illegal immigrants get BOTH social security numbers AND Social Security BENEFITS!! This massive story has been BURIED by the mainstream media!! This information can now be found right on the government’s website. If social security — that we as taxpayers have paid into our entire lives — is ‘broke’… then why are we expanding benefits to those are not citizens and not here legally???”

A nearly identical claim was posted on Instagram and received more than 2,500 likes.

The posts show two sections on the Social Security Administration’s website purportedly to back up their claims. But the posts misrepresent the government’s programs and who’s entitled to receive benefits.

In one section shown in the posts, titled “Social Security Numbers for Noncitizens,” the Social Security Administration says (emphasis ours), “Generally, only noncitizens authorized to work in the United States by the Department of Homeland Security” can get a Social Security number, which is “used to report a person’s wages to the government and to determine that person’s eligibility for Social Security benefits.”

Nilsa Henriquez, a spokesperson for the Social Security Administration, confirmed to us in an email, “In order for a person to be assigned a Social Security number (SSN), they must meet our evidence requirements and be a United States citizen; or an individual lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence; or an individual lawfully admitted to the United States on a temporary basis who has Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorization to work.”

Social Security numbers can also be assigned to “an individual with a valid nonwork reason… For example, they need an SSN because of a federal or state law requiring an SSN to get a benefit or service,” Henriquez said.

Many of the immigrants arriving at the U.S. southern border in recent years have sought asylum, claiming they fear returning to their home countries because of persecution and other dangers.

“While asylum seekers who have come across the border do not have any kind of durable legal status in the United States, they are legally allowed to stay in the country while their asylum application is pending,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us in an April 26 email. “It is legal to request asylum, no matter how one entered the United States.”

“Of all of the foreign-born people who enter the United States each year, most are coming with some kind of legal status – a green card for permanent residence, refugee status, or a temporary visa like a student visa, H-2A farmworker visa, or H-1B high-skilled work visa. Under the Biden administration, many people – but a smaller number than those entering with visas — are also entering the United States with humanitarian parole, which grants the temporary right to live and work in the United States,” Gelatt said.

“Asylum seekers whose application has been pending for more than six months who apply for and are granted work authorization can get SSNs,” Gelatt also said. “People who cross the border illegally who have not applied for asylum usually cannot get work authorization or an SSN.”

So, immigrants can receive a Social Security number, provided they are “authorized to work” in the U.S. and are “lawfully admitted” to the U.S. when they apply.

SSI Not the Same as Retirement BenefitsThe social media posts also show a section of the SSA website titled, “Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for Noncitizens.”

That section explains that noncitizens may be eligible for SSI payments if they are “lawfully admitted for permanent residence, granted conditional entry, paroled into the United States, admitted as a refugee, granted asylum, an alien whose removal is being withheld,” or if they fall into another classification of immigrants from specific countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Iraq or Afghanistan.

In addition, a noncitizen must be “lawfully residing” in the U.S. or fall into another specific category to receive SSI payments.

By citing the information about SSI, the social media posts confuse that program with Social Security retirement benefits. Both programs are managed by the Social Security Administration, but they are not the same.

SSI is a “needs-based program for people with limited income and resources” who are elderly or disabled, the Social Security Administration explains. The program is funded through general tax revenues, and the amount a person receives is based on federal and state laws which “take into account where you live, who lives with you and what income you receive.”

The social media posts refer to Social Security as a program “that we as taxpayers have paid into our entire lives” and “is broke.” The Social Security retirement program is the one workers pay into throughout their lives. It is an entitlement program funded through taxes paid by workers and employers and collected into trust funds. A recipient’s payments are based on work history and earnings.

Many critics warn the program is going broke, but that’s not accurate. Unless the program is changed or new revenues are raised, the reserves of the Social Security trust fund related to the retirement portion of the program are projected to become depleted in 2033. At that time the program would only have enough income to pay 77% of scheduled retirement benefits, according to the latest report from the trustees overseeing the program.

The Social Security Administration says on its website (emphasis ours), “Lawfully present noncitizens of the United States who meet all eligibility requirements can qualify for Social Security benefits.”

Henriquez, the SSA spokesperson, told us, “In terms of benefits, in addition to several specific eligibility requirements, each Social Security program also has a United States lawful presence payment provision which applies to retirement, survivors, or disability benefits and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).”

Gelatt, of the Migration Policy Institute, said, “Just because someone can get an SSN does not mean they are immediately eligible for Social Security benefits. … Someone in the US is not eligible for Social Security disability or old-age benefits until they have accrued enough work history in the United States – that’s usually at least about 10 years of work, and they have to be ‘lawfully present’ … to be eligible to receive the benefits even once they have that work history.”

Contrary to the claims in the social media posts, someone who is not authorized to be in the U.S. is not eligible for benefits of the Social Security retirement program that is financed by a payroll tax on employers and employees.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

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SummaryAs President Joe Biden runs for reelection, here’s how the U.S. has fared during his time in office:

• The economy added 15.2 million jobs. The number is now nearly 6 million higher than before the pandemic.
• The unemployment rate dropped back and has stayed lower, longer than at any time during the previous administration.
• The U.S. economy has expanded each year under Biden and is expected to continue to grow this year, although the first quarter estimate for this year was below expectations.
• Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up nearly 19% overall. Gasoline is up 54%.
• Average weekly earnings haven’t kept pace with prices. After adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings dropped 2.5%.
• The number of people receiving food stamps has decreased by more than 1 million.
• The S&P 500 has increased 32.9%.
• Apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally are up 297% for the 12 months ending in March.
• Crude oil production is up 14.2%; imports are up 10.8%.
• Violent crime has gone down. The latest figures from large cities show an 8.6% drop in murders.
• The publicly held debt has increased by roughly 27%.
• The trade deficit for goods and services is about 18.8% higher.
• For fiscal year 2024, the administration is on pace to admit the most refugees in nearly three decades.

AnalysisIn the fall presidential election, Biden will likely face his predecessor, Donald Trump. As we did for Trump, we’ve compiled on a quarterly basis the latest statistics that provide a measure of how things have changed under Biden’s time in office.

This is our ninth quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we first published in January 2022. We plan to publish two more updates before Election Day, in July and October.

Jobs and UnemploymentThe number of people with jobs rebounded strongly during Biden’s time, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by almost 6 million.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 15,217,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and March, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March figure is 5,824,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

Some areas are still lagging, however. In March, there were only 23,000 more local government education workers, including teachers, than there were at the pre-pandemic peak, and reports of teacher shortages persist. Employment in the leisure industry still hasn’t recovered; there were 151,000 fewer hotel and restaurant workers and others in the accommodation and food services industries in March than before the pandemic.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has been lower for longer under Biden than under his predecessor.

It hit the lowest point in over half a century in January 2023 and again in April 2023, when it was 3.4%, the lowest since June 1969.

This March also marked the 28th consecutive month that the rate was at or below 4%. The longest such stretch under Donald Trump was 24 months, just before the pandemic sent the unemployment rate soaring.

The rate was 3.8% last month, down 2.6 percentage points since Biden took office.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March 2022, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs was nearly 8.8 million as of the last business day of February, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of nearly 1.6 million openings — almost 22% — compared with January 2021, when Biden took office.

In February, there was an average of nearly 1.4 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, it was the other way around — fewer openings than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in March is set to be released May 1.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has risen slowly during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.7% in March.

That still leaves the rate about half a percentage point short of the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate has been trending generally down for nearly a quarter of a century. It peaked at 67.3% during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will continue to slide down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — but that hasn’t yet been achieved.

As of March, the U.S. added 768,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.3% increase in the space of 38 months, according to the BLS.

But compared with the highest level during Trump’s time in office — which was January 2019 — manufacturing jobs are up only 128,000, or 1%.

Wages and InflationCPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden. During his first 38 months in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 18.9%.

For a time it was the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June 2022 saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI rose 3.5% in the 12 months ending in March, the most recent figure available.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline shot up even faster.

During the week ending April 22, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump was $3.67. That’s $1.29 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 54%.

The price swung wildly during Biden’s first year and a half, hitting just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13, 2022. That’s the highest on record. The rise was propelled by worldwide supply and demand issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 16.6% during Biden’s first 38 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. In March “real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, were still 2.5% below where they were when Biden took office.

That’s despite months of recent improvement. Real earnings in March were 2.1% higher than in June 2022, the low point under Biden.

Economic GrowthDespite concerns about high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising interest rates to slow inflation, the U.S. economy has expanded each year under Biden and is expected to continue to grow this year — although the first quarter estimate for this year was below expectations.

The real gross domestic product (which is adjusted for inflation) increased 5.8% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022 and 2.5% last year. In the first quarter of this year, the economy grew at an annual rate of 1.6%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in an April 25 release announcing its “advance estimate.” (The advance estimate is the BEA’s first estimate, which could be adjusted May 30 when the second estimate is released.)

The 1.6% first quarter estimate was far below expectations. A day earlier, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 2.7%. The BEA said the first-quarter figure reflected a slowdown in spending.

“Compared to the fourth quarter, the deceleration in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected decelerations in consumer spending, exports, and state and local government spending and a downturn in federal government spending,” the BEA said in its release.

Prior to the release of the first-quarter estimate, economists had become increasingly more positive about the U.S. economy in 2024.

In mid-April, Bloomberg News surveyed 71 economists and found that they “now see gross domestic product expanding by 2.4% on average in 2024, up from 2.2% in last month’s survey.”

Similarly, the International Monetary Fund this month upgraded its forecast for U.S. growth this year to 2.7%, up from 2.1% in January. And Vanguard said in its April economic outlook that it expects “real (inflation-adjusted) U.S. economic growth of about 2% in 2024, higher than our initial estimate of about 0.5%.”

CrimeViolent crime has gone down over Biden’s time in office.

Preliminary figures from the FBI show a 5.7% drop in violent crimes and a 13.2% decline in the number of murders from 2022 to 2023, based on data from 79% of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. (download the quarterly tables to see these figures). All other categories of crime also declined, including property crime overall, with the exception of motor vehicle thefts, which increased by 10.7%.

The FBI figures are based on voluntary reports by agencies nationwide. We won’t have the final numbers or information about the nationwide crime rates, which are adjusted for population, until the FBI’s annual crime report is released later this year.

The 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate of 0.5 points from 2020, the year before Biden took office, to 2022. The violent crime rate dropped by 15.4 points, to 369.8 per 100,000 population in 2022.

The property crime rate also decreased during that time period, by 9.5 points. As with the more recent preliminary data, there was an increase in motor vehicle thefts, by 35.2 points. (For these figures, see Table 1 in the CIUS Estimations download for the crime in the U.S. reports.)

The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association also show a decline in murders and violent crime. The number of murders has gone down by 10.4% from 2022 to 2023 in 69 large U.S. cities. Since 2020, murders in those cities have dropped by 8.6%.

(Note: New York City isn’t included in those percentages, because its 2023 statistics are not in the latest Major Cities Chiefs Association report. However, the number of murders citywide declined by 16.5% from 2020 to 2023, according to data posted by the New York Police Department. The decrease from 2022 to 2023 was 10.7%.)

Despite the decline, the number of murders still isn’t back down to the level in 2019, before a sizable increase occurred. From 2019 to 2020, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, there was a 33.4% increase in the number of murders in large cities. In Biden’s first year in office, there was a much smaller uptick of 6.2%. Since 2021, the numbers have been going down.

So far in 2024, murders in more than 200 U.S. cities have declined by 20% overall, compared with the same point last year, according to figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group.

TradeThe U.S. goods and services deficit was $775.9 billion over the last 12 months through February, according to figures published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis earlier this month. The trade deficit in that period was about $123 billion higher, or about 18.8% more, than in 2020.

The international trade gap in the most recent 12-month period is about $3.9 billion less than the calendar year 2023 deficit of $779.8 billion. Last year’s trade deficit was the first annual decrease under Biden — dropping more than 18% from the record gap of nearly $951.2 billion in 2022.

The BEA said the deficit went down in 2023 because of an increase in exports of services, such as travel and transport, and a decrease in the import of goods, such as industrial supplies and materials.

Food StampsThe number of people receiving food stamps has decreased during Biden’s time by more than 1 million.

As of January, the most recent figures available, there were 41.1 million beneficiaries receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to preliminary statistics from the Department of Agriculture published April 12.

That puts SNAP enrollment about 1.1 million below where it was when Biden took office.

In percentage terms, the decline is just over 2.5%.

At the current level, 12.2% of the U.S. population was receiving food aid in January, or just under 1 out of every 8 people.

Health InsuranceThe number and percentage of people lacking health insurance has dropped under Biden, and millions more have enrolled in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans.

Since our last report, we have just one more quarter of data on the uninsured from the National Health Interview Survey In the third quarter of 2023, 7.7% of the population was uninsured. That’s a half of a percentage point increase from the second quarter but the same rate as the first quarter.

So far, the quarterly data for 2023 indicate there was a decrease in the uninsured again that year. In 2020, 9.7% of the population or 31.6 million people were uninsured, according to the NHIS. In 2022, 8.4% or 27.6 million people were uninsured. That’s a decrease of 1.3 percentage points or 4 million people under Biden.

The NHIS, a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, measures the uninsured at the time people were interviewed.

The Census Bureau’s annual reports, which measure those who lacked insurance for the entire year, show the uninsured decreased by 0.7 percentage points or 2.4 million people from 2020 to 2022. We won’t have the 2023 annual report for several more months.

As we have been noting, it’s possible the uninsured figures will start to rise, since some Medicaid provisions that were enacted during the coronavirus pandemic started to be phased out at the end of March 2023.

Under Biden, the premium subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace plans have increased — first, through the American Rescue Plan for two years and then through the Inflation Reduction Act. The expanded subsidies are set to expire at the end of 2025. The more generous subsidies allow those earning up to 150% of the federal poverty level to get an insurance plan for $0. (People are eligible for subsidies at 100% of the poverty level, or 138% in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion.) The ACA’s subsidy cap at 400% of the poverty level also has been lifted — those earning more can get subsidies but have to contribute up to 8.5% of their income toward their premiums, as the health policy research organization KFF has explained.

Since 2020, enrollment in the ACA’s marketplace plans has gone up by 10 million people. In the 2024 open enrollment period, 21.4 million people signed up for an insurance plan or were automatically reenrolled.

Stock MarketsAs we noted in our last report, the stock markets finished last year strong and started this year strong.

The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, set new highs in late January, closing on Jan. 24 at a high of 4,868.55. On March 28, the final trading day of the first quarter, the S&P reached a new high at 5,254.35, and recorded its best quarter since 2019.

April has been a cruel month for some investors, but overall all three markets have seen double-digit gains under Biden.

At the close on April 25, the S&P 500 was 5,048.42 — down from its peak in March, but still 32.9% higher than what it was when Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which includes 30 large corporations, has seen smaller gains than the S&P 500. It has increased 23.1%under Biden — not much different from our last report.

Like the Dow, the technology-heavy NASDAQ composite index, which is made up of more than 3,000 companies, has experienced little change since our last report. Overall, it was up 18.3% under Biden, closing at 15,611.76 on April 25.

Consumer SentimentIn our January report, consumer confidence in the economy showed some signs of life. But, since then, it has leveled off.

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its final Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 79 — the highest since July 2021. The preliminary survey results for April were little changed at 77.9.

“Since January, sentiment has remained remarkably steady within a very narrow 2.5 index point range, well under the 5 points necessary for a statistically significant difference in readings,” Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in a press release on the April preliminary results. “Consumers perceived little change in the state of the economy since the start of the new year.”

Hsu cited a “slight uptick in inflation” and the looming 2024 election as reasons why consumers have tempered their views of the U.S. economy.

Still, the preliminary April figure is 27.9 points higher than the low under Biden, which occurred in June 2022. It is now nearly back to where it was when Biden took office in January 2021, when the index was 79, the historical survey data show.

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey also reported little change in March, and warning signs that consumers were becoming “more pessimistic about the future.”

Debt and DeficitsDebt — Since our last quarterly update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has increased to about $27.5 trillion, as of April 23. That is more than $5.8 trillion, or roughly 27%, higher than the public debt was when Biden took office.

Deficits — The budget deficit for fiscal year 2024 is a little less than it was at the same point in fiscal 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Through the first six months of this fiscal cycle (October to March), the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or “$37 billion less than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year,” the CBO said in its Monthly Budget Review published this month. The nonpartisan agency said the difference is partially due to higher revenue this fiscal year, but also a shift in when some scheduled payments were made during the previous fiscal year.

For now, the nonpartisan agency projects that the total budget gap for fiscal 2024 will be $1.5 trillion — down from the nearly $1.7 trillion deficit in fiscal 2023.

Corporate ProfitsAfter two record-setting years under Biden, after-tax corporate profits dipped slightly in 2023.

For the year, after-tax corporate profits set records in 2021 and 2022, according to BEA estimates. (See line 45.)

The BEA estimated that profits in 2023 were $2.97 trillion — slightly lower than $2.98 trillion in 2022. Still, it was 36% higher than in 2020, the year before Biden took office.

The preliminary estimate of after-tax corporate profits for the first quarter of 2024 will be released May 30.

RefugeesBiden may fall short again of his ambitious campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees a year into the U.S. But his administration is on course to admit the most refugees in nearly three decades.

On Sept. 29, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2024 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal years 2023 and 2022.

The administration admitted only 25,465 refugees in FY2022 and 60,014 in FY2023. In the first six months of FY2024, the U.S. has admitted 48,673 refugees, according to State Department data.

At the current pace, the Biden administration appears unlikely to reach 125,000 refugees, but it is likely to register the highest number of refugees since 1995, when the Clinton administration admitted nearly 100,000 refugees, according to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

“Legal immigration is returning to and in some cases surpassing pre-pandemic levels, including refugee admissions on pace to reach the highs of the 1990s,” the Migration Policy Institute said in a January article on Biden’s immigration policies after three years.

In a November report to Congress, the State Department credited the Biden administration’s “intensive efforts to restore, strengthen, and modernize the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program” as the reason for making “significant progress” toward Biden’s goal for refugee admissions.

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 144,160 refugees in Biden’s first full 38 months in office, or nearly 3,800 refugees per month, the department’s data show. That’s 106% higher than the 1,845 monthly average under Trump, who drastically reduced the admission of refugees. The Trump administration admitted only 86,731 refugees in four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

Illegal ImmigrationThe number of apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally rose to a historic monthly high of nearly 250,000 in December, before dropping dramatically to an average of about 134,100 per month in the first three months of 2024. Overall, apprehensions have been significantly higher under Biden than his predecessors, according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year before Biden took office. And for the past 12 months ending in March, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,019,232, according to Customs and Border Protection. That’s 297% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Driving much of the increase has been an explosion in the number of migrants seeking asylum.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which collects and analyzes immigration data, the immigration court backlog rose to nearly 3.3 million cases by the end of 2023, more than three times higher than just four years prior. The result, immigration experts said, is that millions of migrants have been released into the U.S. pending court cases that may take years before they come before a judge.

In early February, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled the text of a proposed foreign aid and immigration overhaul bill. The $118 billion bill, called the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, sought significant changes in border policy. It included money to build more border barriers, to greatly expand detention facilities, and to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges to reduce the yearslong backlog in cases to determine asylum eligibility. It sought to expedite the asylum process, essentially ending — in most cases — the so-called “catch and release” policy whereby migrants are released into the U.S. pending asylum hearings. And it would have increased the standard of evidence needed to win asylum status.

Biden threw his support behind the bill, but after Trump publicly opposed it — in part based on a distortion of what the bill would do — the bill failed in the Senate on Feb. 7. It was opposed by all but four Republicans and a few Democrats.

On Feb. 13, the Republican-led House voted to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, claiming that he had “willfully and systemically refused to comply with Federal immigration law.” The vote was 216-211, with every Democrat and one Republican opposing it. On April 17, the Senate voted along party lines to end the impeachment against Mayorkas.

Judiciary AppointmentsSupreme Court — Biden has appointed one Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. She was confirmed on April 7, 2022. Trump had won confirmation for two Supreme Court justices at the same point of his tenure.

Court of Appeals — Biden has won confirmation for 41 U.S. Court of Appeals judges. At the same point during Trump’s term, 51 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 150 District Court judges, while Trump had won confirmation for 139 at the same point.

Four U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges have also been confirmed under Biden, while five had been confirmed at the same point of Trump’s presidency. Each man had won the confirmation for two U.S. Court of International Trade judges at this stage of their terms.

As of April 25, there were 42federal court vacancies, with 12 nominees pending.

Gun SalesThe trend of Americans buying fewer guns appeared to continue in the first three months of 2024, according to background check figures reported by a gun industry trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

The NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. We rely on these figures because the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales.

During the first quarter of 2024, the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks was about 3.98 million — lower than the 4.17 million in the first quarter of 2023, and the lowest first quarter total since 3.41 million during the same period in 2019.

The three-month total so far this year is also about 29.2% lower than the nearly 5.63 million during Trump’s last quarter in 2020, which was a record year for background checks for firearm sales.

The NSSF stipulates that its adjusted NICS data is “not a direct correlation to firearms sales” — but does “provide an additional picture of current market conditions.”

Crude Oil Production and ImportsLast month, the Energy Information Administration reported that average crude oil production in the U.S. increased to roughly 12.92 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in January). That was about 14.2% above the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020. And it’s higher than the pre-pandemic average in 2019.

EIA has said that oil production, despite declining drilling activity, has reached all-time highs during the Biden administration because new oil wells are more efficient.

“The number of new wells brought on line by drilling activity has historically been the key determinant of whether crude oil production increases or decreases,” the EIA said in a March analysis. “However, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies have increased well productivity, enabling U.S. producers to extract more crude oil from new wells drilled while maintaining production from legacy wells.”

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for April, the EIA projected that crude oil production will continue to break records. The agency expects production to reach 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024 and 13.7 million barrels a day in 2025.

Growth in crude oil production led the U.S. to export a record 4.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, the EIA said. But the U.S. is still importing more oil than it sends abroad.

In Biden’s last 12 months, the U.S. imported about 6.51 million barrels per day on average. That’s up almost 10.8% from average daily imports in 2020.

Carbon EmissionsAfter two consecutive years of increases, U.S. energy-related emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products fell in 2023 to about 4.81 billion metric tons. That total is about 4.9% more than 2020, but still about 6.6% less than in 2019, before the pandemic.

The EIA said emissions declined last year partially because of a reduction in electricity generated from coal-fired power plants, which was due to the increased use of solar power and other renewable energy sources. The agency said it expects CO2 emissions to remain “mostly unchanged” in 2024 before declining by 1% in 2025.

Home Prices & HomeownershipHome prices — After declining for seven consecutive months, home prices increased in February and again in March.

The preliminary median sales price of existing single-family homes in the U.S. was $397,200 in March — up from $388,000 in February, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“Frankly, it’s a great time to list, with ongoing multiple offers on mid-priced properties and, overall, home prices continuing to rise,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in an April 18 issue of Realtor Magazine.

The preliminary March figure is 29% higher than the $308,000 median home price in January 2021, when Biden took office. But it’s below the peak under Biden of $420,900 in June 2022.

Home prices began to fall last year in part due to rising mortgage rates. In its ongoing attempt to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate in July for the 11th time since March 2022.

With inflation showing signs of cooling, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell indicated in December that the Fed may start cutting its rate. But recent inflation data have put the brakes on talk of rate cuts.

“The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence and instead indicate that it’s likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence,” Powell said at a forum on April 16.

In our January report, we noted that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage average nationwide, as of Jan. 18, dropped to 6.6% — the lowest since May 2023, according to Freddie Mac. But 30-year mortgage rates, as of April 18, topped 7% for the first time this year, Freddie Mac reported in a recent press release.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have barely budged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.7% in the fourth quarter of 2023 — not much different than the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.)

The rate under Trump peaked in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Former President Donald Trump said he wants young voters to know that “Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok.” But a TikTok ban enjoys broad bipartisan support in Congress. Trump himself tried to ban TikTok as president through an executive order, but it was blocked by the courts.

A House bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest or face a U.S. ban overwhelmingly passed the House 360-58 on April 20, with the support of 186 Republicans and 174 Democrats.

The bill was introduced by Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who said in an April 20 speech on the House floor that the bill “protects Americans, especially our children, from the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled TikTok.”

“This app is a spy balloon in Americans’ phones,” McCaul said. “It is a modern-day Trojan horse of the CCP
used to surveil and exploit Americans’ personal information.”

TikTok is a popular video-sharing mobile app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd. Many legislators fear the Chinese government could access TikTok users’ data via Chinese national security laws that state, “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.”

The logo of TikTok is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on April 20. Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images.The bill, which was paired with new sanctions on Iran, China and Russia, prohibits “foreign adversary controlled applications” and would give ByteDance a year to divest or else TikTok would be banned in the U.S.

Biden vowed on March 8 if Congress passed the TikTok bill, “I’ll sign it.”

Update, April 24: The Senate passed the bill as part of a larger foreign aid package at 9:10 p.m. on April 23 with a bipartisan vote of 79-18. The vote was supported by Democrats 46-2 and by Republicans 31-15. Biden signed the bill on April 24.

In December 2022, Biden signed a spending bill that included a provision prohibiting the use of TikTok by most federal government employees on devices owned by the government.

But much of the momentum behind the recent TikTok legislation has come from Republicans. On March 13, the House passed a Republican-introduced TikTok bill that was similar to the one passed on April 20. It received even greater Republican support, 197-15, than the recent bill. Democrats also supported that bill 155-50. But the bill stalled in the Senate commerce committee after its chair, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, expressed some concerns about it. The latest version of the legislation would extend the deadline for TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest from six months to a year, and Cantwell said she supports that iteration.

While both TikTok bills received overwhelming Democratic support in the House, neither could have advanced without Republican support, as the GOP narrowly controls the House. And Biden could not sign any bill that does not reach his desk, a point Trump omits in his post on Truth Social.

“Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump wrote on April 22. “He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party. It’s called ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Young people, and lots of others, must remember this on November 5th, ELECTION DAY, when they vote!”

A recent poll from the CNBC All-America Economic Survey found that a plurality of Americans supported a ban or sale of TikTok, including 60% of Republicans and 40% of Democrats. But nearly half of people age 18 to 34 opposed a ban.

Trump himself once supported a ban of TikTok. As we have written, when Trump was president he tried to ban the popular app, but he was blocked by the courts.

Trump’s Order Banning TikTokIn May 2019, Trump issued an executive order that declared a national emergency “to protect America from foreign adversaries who are actively and increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology infrastructure and services in the United States,” as described in a White House statement.

No company was named in Trump’s order, but that order was referenced in another executive order issued by Trump in August 2020 that specifically targeted TikTok. “Under authority delegated by the 2020 Order, the Secretary of Commerce issued a list of prohibited transactions, which included maintaining TikTok on a mobile app store or providing internet hosting services to it,” the Congressional Research Service said in a Sept. 28 report.

According to the August 2020 order, “TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

“TikTok also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive, such as content concerning protests in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities,” Trump’s order stated. “This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. These risks are real.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said on Sept. 10, 2020. “It’ll either be closed up or they’ll sell it. So we’ll either close up TikTok in this country for security reasons, or it’ll be sold.”

In separate lawsuits, TikTok and TikTok users challenged the Trump administration’s restrictions on TikTok’s U.S. operations. “The courts ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and issued preliminary injunctions temporarily barring the United States from enforcing the restrictions,” the CRS report said. “Both courts described the government actions as effectively banning TikTok from operating in the United States.”

On June 9, 2021, Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order and replaced it with one that the New York Times said “calls for a broader review of a number of foreign-controlled applications that could pose a security risk to Americans and their data.”

Trump has since reversed his position on the app. According to ABC News, the conversion came shortly after Trump met in early March with hedge fund manager Jeff Yass, “a GOP megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular social media platform.”

In a Truth Social post on March 14, Trump argued that “TIKTOK IS LESS OF A DANGER TO THE USA THAN META (FACEBOOK!), WHICH IS A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”

Trump railed against what he said was Facebook’s interference in the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $350 million in nonpartisan grants to help election officials meet the challenges of administering the 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic, but some Republicans criticized it as an effort to boost Democratic voting. In his March 14 post, Trump claimed, “FACEBOOK IS A GREAT THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, AND IT WILL ONLY GET BIGGER AND STRONGER IF TIKTOK IS TAKEN OUT.”

In an interview with CNBC on March 11, Trump expressed ambivalence on the topic of banning TikTok.

“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users. There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

Trump said he did view TikTok as a security threat, “and we have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights. … But you know, we also have that problem with other, you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too. … But when I look at it, I’m not looking to make Facebook double the size. And if you, if you ban TikTok, Facebook and others, but mostly Facebook, will be a big beneficiary. And I think Facebook has been very dishonest. I think Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially when it comes to elections.”

Trump also said he never discussed TikTok when he met with Yass and that the meeting had no impact on him changing his position on TikTok.

TikTok released a statement saying it was “unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24bn to the US economy, annually.”

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While the risks associated with COVID-19 generally have decreased over time due to prior exposure to the vaccines and the virus, some people remain at elevated risk, such as the elderly and immunocompromised. The updated COVID-19 vaccines and, in some cases, a new monoclonal antibody can provide increased protection for this group.

“At this point, many people have had multiple vaccines and we are seeing a lot less severe and life-threatening illness, especially in people who have had recent vaccination,”Dr. Camille Kotton, clinical director of Transplant and Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, told us.“Nonetheless, we are still seeing significant severe disease, hospitalization, even life-threatening disease, especially in people over the age of 65 or who are immunocompromised.”

We spoke with Kotton, who is also a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, about the current state of affairs for people at elevated risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and the tools they can use to protect themselves.

For some people who are immunocompromised, a newly authorized monoclonal antibody, Pemgarda, or pemivibart, may provide an additional layer of protection, Kotton said. These antibodies may substitute for a person’s own antibodies and help block the coronavirus from entering a person’s cells.

Even so, Kotton emphasized the importance of getting this year’s updated COVID-19 vaccines. “The majority of immunocompromised patients have not had a first dose of the 2023/2024 vaccine,” she said. They, along with people age 65 and up, are eligible for multiple doses of the updated vaccines this year.

Who Remains at Increased Risk from COVID-19?Last month, the CDC updated guidelines for people with COVID-19, removing the previous standard five days of isolation and replacing it with symptoms-based guidance. The move was part of a transition away from the emergency response phase of the pandemic to recovery and maintenance phases, the agency explained.

Rates of COVID-19-associated hospitalization have declined across adult age groups since early pandemic waves. There is also evidence that outcomes have improved for those who are immunocompromised. However, these groups remain at elevated risk from COVID-19, Kotton said.

As of the latest census, just around 17% of the U.S. population was age 65 or over. But between October 2023 and January 2024, around two-thirds of COVID-19 hospitalizations were among those 65 and older, according to data from the CDC. Older Americans make up an increasing proportion of those hospitalized for COVID-19, as outcomes have improved more markedly for younger people.

People who are immunocompromised also are hospitalized for COVID-19 and die from the disease at a relatively high rate. Between October 2022 and November 2023, 16% of all adult COVID-19 hospitalizations were among people with immunocompromising conditions, and 28% of in-hospital deaths occurred in this group.

People can be immunocompromised for a variety of reasons, and to varying degrees. Sometimes, a health condition itself alters a person’s immune system’s ability to respond to infection. These conditions can include certain blood cancers, advanced or untreated HIV, or primary immunodeficiency, a group of rare genetic diseases in which some portion of a person’s immune system is altered and doesn’t work properly.

At other times, the treatment for a disease weakens someone’s immune system. For instance, people are considered immunocompromised if they are receiving immunosuppressive treatments associated with transplant or various treatments for conditions such as autoimmune disease or cancer.

Recent estimates indicate around 7% of U.S. adults report having immunosuppression, up from around 3% in 2013.

The growing availability of advanced therapies for various diseases has likely contributed to the increasing percentage of immunocompromised Americans, Kotton said. Previously, for “many of those people, we did not have such successful treatments,” she said. “Unfortunately, now one of the side effects of all of those treatments can be a higher risk of infection.”

How Can People Protect Themselves from COVID-19?The Food and Drug Administration approved, and the CDC recommended, updated COVID-19 vaccines in September. (For more information, see “Q&A on the Updated COVID-19 Vaccines.”) Since then, the updated vaccines have been shown in multiple studies to reduce the risks of hospitalization and other negative outcomes — including among the elderly and immunocompromised.

As is recommended for everyone 6 months and up, people who are elderly or immunocompromised should get an updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine if they haven’t yet, Kotton said. People who are immunocompromised or elderly are also eligible for additional vaccine doses. Protection from the vaccines wanes as time passes, particularly among these groups, she said.

People age 65 and up should get a second dose of the updated vaccines at least four months after their previous dose, according to the CDC. People who are moderately or severely immunocompromised “may get additional updated COVID-19 vaccine doses” if it has been at least two months since their last COVID-19 vaccine, the agency says.

Percentage of American adults by age group who received updated COVID-19 vaccines between September 2023 and early February 2024. Source: National Immunization Survey-Adult COVID Module, Feb. 28 ACIP meeting slides.Despite these recommendations, just over 20% of American adults had gotten the updated vaccines as of February. Uptake was a bit better among adults 65 and older, with more than 40% having gotten the shots.

In a recent study of electronic health records through February, just 18% of immunocompromised people had gotten an updated shot. The same study showed that the vaccines reduced the risk of hospitalization in this group by 38% between seven and 59 days after getting the shot and 34% in the 60 days following that, compared with immunocompromised people who hadn’t received an updated vaccine.

“I actually believe that we should focus many of our efforts on really encouraging uptake of the 2023/2024 COVID-19 vaccine, and that everybody has a first dose and at least two or more months later get a second dose so that they remain well vaccinated,” Kotton said, referring to the population of people who are immunocompromised.

What Is Pemgarda and Who Might Benefit?On March 22, a new potential tool for mitigating COVID-19 risk was authorized by the FDA. Pemgarda, the monoclonal antibody, received an emergency use authorization for people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised and who are unlikely to have a sufficient immune response to COVID-19 vaccination. It became available for purchase by wholesalers on April 4.

It is the first preventive antibody treatment to be authorized since a prior monoclonal antibody combination, called Evusheld, was taken off the market in January 2023, based on data indicating that it was unlikely to help protect against the latest viral variants that were circulating.

Pemgarda is given to people who do not have COVID-19 or a known exposure. It consists of an antibody shown to recognize a section of the spike protein, which is part of the virus that causes COVID-19. The product was authorized based on calculations indicating that receiving it should lead to sufficient antibodies in a person’s blood to protect against JN.1, the current dominant variant in the U.S.

Pemgarda may benefit a subset of immunocompromised people, Kotton said, but it is not a substitute for vaccination. People who are vaccinated “tend to develop multiple forms of immunity that seem more protective than just administration of a monoclonal antibody alone,” she said.

Seventyfour / stock.adobe.comVaccination should lead to both the production of antibodies and a cellular immune response, she explained. A drug like Pemgarda may help people who are not producing sufficient antibodies on their own in response to vaccination.

It is not cut and dried how well someone who is immunocompromised will respond to vaccination, however. “When we give immunocompromised people vaccines, some respond by developing an antibody, others develop a cellular immune response, and it’s not always predictable that if they develop one that they will develop the other,” Kotton said. “And so it’s been challenging to know who is actually well protected.”

It is clear that the people who are at risk of severe COVID-19 include those with recent bone marrow transplant, people with certain cancers such as multiple myeloma, or those taking certain drugs given for various cancers and autoimmune diseases. “We do think that those populations could potentially benefit” from Pemgarda, Kotton said.

These patients are not only at risk of severe disease, Kotton said, but of chronic infections. Distinct from long COVID, these long-term infections occur when a person is unable to clear an active infection.

“Otherwise, it seems that it’s not clear that there will be widespread benefit to all immunocompromised populations, in the era of widespread, numerous vaccination doses,” Kotton said.

What Are the Obstacles to Getting Pemgarda?Kotton emphasized the importance of practical considerations, such as cost and logistics, when considering COVID-19 prevention measures.

Evusheld, the previously available preventive treatment, was provided for free by the U.S. government, she said. The same is not true for Pemgarda. Its maker, Invivyd, announced a wholesale acquisition cost of nearly $6,000 per dose. This is the list price a manufacturer charges wholesalers, although it may not represent the price they actually pay after discounts. Costs to patients will vary depending on insurance coverage.

Preventive monoclonal antibodies are available without cost-sharing for people covered by Medicare, who make up a portion of those eligible for Pemgarda, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. However, the amount individuals with private insurance pay will depend on their insurance plans and whether the monoclonal antibody is covered.

While Evusheld was given as two injections, Pemgarda is an infused drug, Kotton added, increasing the logistical challenges for both patients and health care providers. Patients must sit for an hour-long infusion, followed by a two-hour observation period, for a drug that may be given every three months. “Already Evusheld was a very challenging rollout,” Kotton said. “We did not have staff or capacity.”

In contrast, the private sector cost of the COVID-19 vaccines for those 12 and older is between $115 and $130 per dose. And people in the U.S., including those without insurance, should be able to get COVID-19 vaccines for free.

As Pemgarda is rolled out, Kotton said, it will be important to push for equity in who receives it. “I think it’s important to think hard about how we would make the monoclonal antibody available to all severely immunocompromised people who would really benefit and not just people that might be able to pay for it,” she said.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Political leanings: Democratic

2022 total spending: $181.6 million

The House Majority PAC was founded in April 2011 by Alixandria Lapp, a former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee official. In 2023, Lapp stepped down as the political action committee’s president and was succeeded by political strategist Mike Smith, who was most recently a senior adviser to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Abby Curran Horrell, a former chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Ann McLean Kuster, is the PAC’s executive director.

The House Majority PAC was one of several PACs formed by Democrats in response to the heavy spending by conservative organizations in the 2010 midterm elections, when Republicans gained control of the House. As a Carey committee, or hybrid PAC, the House Majority PAC can act as both a traditional PAC, giving money directly to candidates’ committees, and a super PAC, making independent expenditures not coordinated with candidates. It can also accept donations of any size for its independent expenditures from individuals, labor unions and corporations, but must disclose those dona and expenditures tions in reports to the Federal Election Commission.

On April 7, the House Majority PAC announced that it was reserving an initial round of $186 million in television and digital placements in 58 markets across the country. In a press release, the group said over $146 million has been reserved for TV ads and about $40 million for digital ones.

“Through these historic television and digital reservations, House Majority PAC has made it clear that we are ready to do whatever it takes to flip the House and elect Hakeem Jeffries the next Speaker of the House,” Smith said in a statement.

As of Feb. 29, the group had raised about $61.1 million for the 2024 cycle, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending. Of that amount, $8 million was donated by House Majority Forward, an affiliated nonprofit organization. Other large donors include hedge fund manager James Simons, businessman and philanthropist Fred Eychaner, Netflix Executive Chairman Reed Hastings, and Suffolk Construction Company Chairman and CEO John Fish.

This cycle, House Majority PAC already spent about $7 million on a variety of independent expenditures to help Democrat Tom Suozzi win the special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District seat against Republican Mazi Pilip.

During the 2022 midterms, the PAC spent over $181.6 million, including about $145 million on independent expenditures supporting Democratic candidates and opposing Republicans. In 2020, about $139 million of its more than $160 million in spending was on pro-Democrat or anti-Republican ads and other communications.

Staff Writer D’Angelo Gore contributed to this article.

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Traducido por El Tiempo Latino.

While former President Donald Trump spent much of his week in court, President Joe Biden visited the swing state of Pennsylvania for three days and gave speeches in Scranton, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. We flagged some false and misleading claims, including several common talking points:

• Biden twisted Trump’s words about the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “Remember when he told us, literally, inject bleach?” Trump suggested having scientists test the use of “very powerful light” and “disinfectant” in the body to kill the disease. He didn’t tell people to “inject bleach.”
• Biden got ahead of himself in touting Medicare savings, due to drug price negotiations, that won’t happen for several years.
• The president falsely said there were “more people in retirement than working” in China.
• Biden wrongly said he was “the second-youngest man ever elected to the Senate.” He was the second-youngest from Delaware, but the sixth-youngest overall.

The president also repeated misleading claims we’ve fact-checked before — on taxes, jobs, deficit reduction, the Affordable Care Act, and Trump’s comments on Social Security and Medicare.

In 2020, Biden, who was born in Scranton, won the presidency after winning the state of Pennsylvania. He started off his trip to the state on April 16 in Scranton, and then visited Pittsburgh and Philadelphia the following two days.

Trump spent the week in a New York court room as a jury was selected for the criminal fraud case alleging that Trump falsified business records to cover up state and federal election law violations after paying to keep allegations of extramarital affairs a secret during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Twisting Trump’s WordsIn one of his Scranton speeches, Biden criticized how Trump managed the COVID-19 pandemic, but he also misrepresented pandemic-related statements that Trump made.

“When the pandemic hit, Trump failed the most basic duty any president owes the American people: a duty to care and a duty to respond,” Biden said. “Remember when he told us, ‘Don’t worry; this will all be over by Easter’? Remember when he told us, literally, inject bleach?”

First, Trump did not “literally” tell the public to “inject bleach” as a treatment for COVID-19.

He did suggest having scientists test the use of “very powerful light” and “disinfectant” in the body to kill the disease. That was during an April 2020 press briefing in which William Bryan, then the head of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed DHS research on the ways the coronavirus reacted on nonporous surfaces when exposed to heat, humidity, sunlight and disinfectant.

Trump, while looking back at Bryan at times, said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that.”

But Trump never said people should try this themselves.

He also did not say that the pandemic would end by Easter on April 12, 2020.

In a Fox News virtual town hall from the White House on March 25, Trump said he hoped that by then the country could reopen businesses and other services that had been temporarily shut down. This was after he issued guidance on March 16 that recommended ways the public could help slow the spread of the coronavirus for a period of 15 days.

“I would love to have it open by Easter,” Trump said. “It’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this, too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”

Trump said that after reopening the public could continue other mitigation practices, such as social distancing, but he argued it was important for the U.S. to get back to work as soon as possible. Later that same day, Trump told Fox News: “And I’m not sure that’s going to be the day, but I would love to aim it right at Easter Sunday.”

Then on March 29, as reported cases of COVID-19 continued to increase, Trump issued updated guidance advising Americans to follow his previous recommendations for 30 more days, through April 30.

Finally, on April 16, Trump issued additional guidance on how states could begin reopening on May 1. But he said the decision to do so ultimately would be up to each governor.

Medicare SavingsThe 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included several provisions related to Medicare that would lower some beneficiaries’ prescription costs and reduce the deficit over 10 years, as we’ve explained. But Biden claimed a provision on insulin would lower the deficit — in fact, it would increase spending — and said savings that have yet to occur had already happened.

Biden at Zummo’s Cafe with Scranton, Pennsylvania, Mayor Paige Cognetti on April 17. Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images.“With the same law, I gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drugs, which is why those of you who have diabetes and need insulin, instead of paying 400 bucks a month, you’re now paying $35 a month for insulin,” Biden said at his April 16 campaign stop in Scranton. He went on to talk about the law giving Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices and putting a cap on Medicare Part D out-of-pocket costs of $2,000 a year.

He then talked about savings to the federal government. “Not only does it reduce the federal deficit — help with the prescription holder, it reduces the federal debt. You know how much the first tranche of this has done? It’s reduced the federal debt by $160 billion. Why? Because Social Security — Medicare does not have to pay out 400 a month. They’re paying out $35 a month.”

Overall, the Medicare provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce the deficit by $237 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimates (which are broken down by the budget watchdog Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and KFF, an independent health policy research organization). But much of the savings hasn’t happened yet.

For the prescription drug negotiation provisions, the CBO estimated a deficit reduction of $98.5 billion over 10 years, and there’s another $63.2 billion reduction for requiring rebates from drug companies if their prices increase faster than inflation. That’s a little more than $160 billion, the figure Biden used. But those savings haven’t materialized yet.

CBO estimated very little of the savings from rebates would have occurred last year, when the rebates began, and in 2024. There aren’t any savings from the drug negotiation until 2026, when the negotiated price for the first batch of drugs will be available, and most of the deficit reduction is in the later years of the 2022-2031 period.

As KFF explains in an FAQ, 10 drugs on Part D — the Medicare prescription drug program — were selected for negotiation in this first round. Another 15 drugs can be negotiation for 2027 and again in 2028 (when Part B, which covers drugs administered by a health care provider, will be part of the program), and for 2029 forward, 20 drugs each year can be subject to negotiation.

The insulin provision, which took effect in 2023 and caps what beneficiaries in Part B and D have to spend on insulin to $35 per month, doesn’t save the government money — instead, it costs $5.1 billion over 10 years.

Biden also mentioned the law capping seniors’ out-of-pocket costs for Part D at $2,000 a year. That provision is being phased in this year and next, and it, too, increases federal spending — by $30 billion over the 2022-2031 period.

Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of KFF’s Program on Medicare Policy, confirmed to us in an email that the insulin provision “is separate from the drug price negotiation provision.”

“One possible interpretation of President Biden’s statement is that the savings to the federal government associated with drug price negotiation will help to pay for other provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that will cost money, including the $35 insulin copay cap and other improvements to the Medicare Part D benefit, like the $2,000 out of pocket spending cap that takes effect next year,” she said. “In the early years of IRA implementation, before negotiated drug prices have taken effect, some provisions might cost more than the savings that’s been achieved to date, but over the 10-year budget window, based on CBO’s estimates, savings to the federal government will outweigh spending.”

China’s Aging PopulationIn discussing China’s economy, Biden said that it has “real problems,” citing China’s aging population. “They’ve got a population that is more people in retirement than working,” he said in Pittsburgh.

It is true that China has an aging population, but it doesn’t have more retirees than workers.

On Jan. 17, Reuters wrote a story on the impact of China’s aging population on the country’s pension system. “Ten working-age Chinese supported 1 retiree in 2002, with the ratio falling to 5 in 2021,” Reuters wrote. “The ratio is forecast to drop to 4 in 2030 and 2 in 2050, said Larry Hu, chief economist at Macquarie.”

That same day, the National Bureau of Statistics of China released data showing that the working-age population (ages 16 to 59) accounted for 61.3% of mainland China’s population last year, and those 60 years and older accounted for 21.1% of the population.

China has among the lowest retirement age in the world. “Normal pension age is 60 years for men, 50 years for blue collar women and 55 years for white collar women,” according to a 2021 report on China’s pension system by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It should be noted, too, that the U.S. also has a problem with an aging workforce.

A table from the Social Security trustees’ 2023 report shows that there were 2.8 covered workers for each beneficiary in 2022, down from 4 workers per retired beneficiary in 1965.

Sixth-Youngest U.S. SenatorIn Pittsburgh, where he spoke at the United Steelworkers Headquarters, Biden recalled receiving the support of a steelworkers’ union leader “as a 29-year-old kid running in a tough year for United States Senate, making me the second-youngest man ever elected to the Senate.”

Biden was the second-youngest Delawarean ever elected to the Senate, but not “the second-youngest man ever elected to the Senate.”

Five others were younger than Biden when they were elected — including three in the 1800s who were sworn into office even though they were not the constitutionally required age of 30 years old, according to the U.S. Senate Historical Office.

On Nov. 16, 1818, Tennessee’s John Henry Eaton became the youngest senator in history — “a record that is never likely to be broken” — when he took the oath of office at just 28 years, 4 months and 29 days old, the historical office says. Two others were also younger than 30 when they took office: Virginia’s Armistead Mason, who was 28 years, 5 months and 18 days when he took office in 1816, and Kentucky’s Henry Clay, who was 29 years old when he became a senator in 1806.

The fourth-youngest senator in U.S. history was West Virginia’s Rush Drew Holt, who was elected when he was 29 years old in 1934, but pledged to wait until his 30th birthday to be sworn in. Holt wasn’t sworn into office until June 21, 1935 — two days after his birthday and five months after the session started, according to his official congressional biography.

The fifth youngest was William Wells, also of Delaware, who took the oath of office in 1799 at 30 years old and 10 days.

“In January 1973, the distinction of becoming the sixth youngest — and the youngest since Holt, at the age of 30 years, 1 month, and 14 days — went to Delaware’s Joseph R. Biden, Jr.,” the historical office said.

Biden did set a record when he was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021. On that day, he became the oldest president to take the oath of office at 78 years and 61 days. Prior to Biden taking office, Trump had been the oldest. Trump was 70 years and 220 days on Jan. 20, 2017, when he assumed office.

RepeatsBillionaire “tax rate”: Biden once again misleadingly claimed that the “average federal tax rate for a billionaire” is 8.3%. “For real: 8.3%,” he said in Scranton. But, as we’ve explained before, that “tax rate” is actually a White House calculation that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income. When counting just taxable income, the wealthiest Americans — the top 0.1% of earners who have more than $4.4 million in expanded cash income — paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 24% in 2023, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Social Security/Medicare: Biden misleadingly suggested that Trump will pay for “billionaire tax cuts” by cutting popular retirement programs. “Trump recently said Social Security and Medicare, quote … ‘There’s a lot you can do in terms of cutting,’ end of quote,” Biden said. As we’ve written, the Trump campaign said the former president was talking about cutting waste and fraud in those programs. Besides, as a president and candidate, Trump has consistently stated his opposition to cutting both programs.

Jobs. The president contrasted the job growth during his tenure with a loss of jobs under Trump, leaving out the fact that the loss under his predecessor occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “There are only two presidents on record in all of American history that left office with fewer jobs than when they entered office: Herbert Hoover and, yes, Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump,” Biden said in Scranton. Job growth under Trump was positive until April 2020, when millions of jobs were lost during pandemic-related closures and layoffs. Employment had only partly rebounded by the time Trump left the White House.

In his Pittsburgh stop, Biden highlighted the 15 million jobs created during his presidency — “a record,” he said. As of March, the job growth was 15.2 million jobs under Biden, a record number, at least since 1939, for any president in his first three or four years in office, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that go back to January 1939. But Presidents Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson saw greater percentage increases over the same number of months in office.

Deficit reduction: Biden took more undeserved credit for the budget deficit declining from about $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 to about $1.7 trillion in fiscal 2023. “I’ve been able to cut the federal deficit at the same exact time by over $1 trillion,” he said at a Scranton campaign event. But as we’ve written, the primary reason the deficit dropped so much is because of emergency COVID-19 funding that expired — not Biden’s policies.

Affordable Care Act: Once more, Biden inflated the number of Americans who could be denied health coverage if the ACA health care law is repealed. “Trump says his MAGA friends want to, quote … ‘terminate’ the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said. “That would mean over 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions who now have health care because of the Affordable Care Act would lose their coverage.” There are an estimated 100 million Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid who have preexisting conditions. But as we’ve explained, if the ACA were repealed, only those buying their own plans on the individual market — about 20 million people in 2022– would immediately be at risk of losing health insurance.

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Quick TakeDuring the April 8 eclipse, people in the path of totality were able to see solar phenomena, including the sun’s corona. But social media posts have shared altered or composite images of these phenomena, claiming one image was “captured by NASA.” It was actually an artist’s rendering of a composite photo of the 2017 eclipse.

Full StoryA total solar eclipse — in which the moon blocked Earth’s view of the sun — occurred April 8 in a narrow path across Mexico, the United States and Canada. Crowds gathered in cities along the path, including Dallas, Cleveland and Montreal, to witness totality, the brief period in which the sun’s light is completely obscured by the moon.

In addition to the sky darkening, those in the path of totality were able to see a part of the sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, which is otherwise impossible to see because of the sun’s bright light.

An actual photo provided by NASA shows the total solar eclipse seen in Dallas on April 8. Photo by NASA/Keegan Barber.Gary Bernstein, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, explained the appearance of the corona in an email to us. “The sun is always in the process of ejecting a tenuous stream of gas into space. This gas emits a very faint light compared to the sun’s main body, so while it’s always present in the sky, we can’t see it on a normal day because it’s lost in the glare of the disk of the sun,” he said.

“During a total eclipse, the moon blocks the disk, and the sky becomes dark enough to see the corona. This only occurs during the totality phase,” Bernstein said.

Another phenomenon known as Baily’s Beads — beads of light that appear around the edge of the moon during an eclipse — occurs just as totality begins and ends. “They occur because the moon has mountains and valleys, and the last rays of the sun can pass through the valleys while the mountains block light. This breaks up the very thin final arc of light into pieces,” Bernstein explained.

NASA uploaded a photo album of pictures taken during the recent eclipse, many of which show Baily’s Beads and the sun’s corona.

But some social media posts have shared the painting of a composite image or an altered image of these phenomena, and misleadingly claimed they were photos of the recent eclipse.

A Digital Painting of a 2017 Composite PhotoOne image, featuring a dramatic corona, was shared on Facebook on April 9 with the caption, “Most Detailed Image of the Solar Eclipse.” The post received 88,000 likes, but has since been removed.

Several other posts also shared the image on social media, falsely claiming it was a photo taken during the eclipse and “captured by NASA.” Through a reverse image search, we found this image is actuallya digital painting from 2020 by artist Cathrin Machin.

As she wrote in an Instagram caption on July 20, 2020, Machin based her painting on a picture created by astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer in Wyoming during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Voltmer uploaded his original photo to Flickr in September 2017, and he wrote that the photo was a composite of 35 images taken during the eclipse.

Bernstein explained that many astrophotographers use composite images — that is, an image produced by combining two or more photos — “since we are taking pictures of things the human eye can’t see.” He added: “They’re not what your eye would see but they are ‘real’ in the sense of being an image of what’s truly in the sky.”

Alexei Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, told us, “Cameras are good at capturing the solar corona, but only with composites made from images having many different exposures. A given exposure doesn’t have a large ‘dynamic range’ the way the human eye does. The human eye can see faint and bright things well simultaneously, but a photo cannot.”

Image ‘Appears to be Altered’ Another image, which shows both Baily’s Beads and the corona, was posted to Facebook on April 10 with a caption misleadingly claiming it was from the recent eclipse. The caption, originally in Spanish, claims that the photo is “one of the best shots of the solar eclipse.”

But a spokesperson for scientists at the National Solar Observatory told us that “this image appears to be altered.”

“The S-shape of the coronal streamers on the left and right of the corona is the most obvious problem,” the NSO spokesperson told us in an email. “The coronal magnetic field does not bend in such sinuous curves. They are angled and curved at times, but a 90-degree bend in the field lines is unrealistic.”