The first general election debate of the 2024 season has kicked off. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Republican rival, Donald Trump, are squaring off as the candidates attempt to lure currently undecided voters.
Both candidates will talk up their own records in office and their plans for the next term, and both candidates are likely to try to spin their records and their plans in the best possible light.
ABC News is fact-checking both Biden and Trump’s claims in real time.
Trump indictments
TRUMP CLAIM: “That was a case that was started and move they moved a high-ranking official, a DOJ, into the Manhattan DA’s office to start that case … [Biden] basically went after his political opponent because he thought it was going to damage me.”
FACT CHECK: A few things to unpack here – but there is no evidence to support either statement.
First and foremost, there is no evidence that Joe Biden, as president of the United States, directed or choreographed a state prosecution – which was brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg. Biden has no authority to do so and there is no evidence to support Trump’s assertion.
Second, with regard to the “high-ranking” DOJ official who Trump claims was moved into the District Attorney’s office to “start the case”: Trump appears to be referring to Matthew Colangelo, who left the Justice Department in December of 2022 — years after the investigation began. There is no evidence that Biden or the Justice Department coordinated Colangelo’s move. The case was brought by Bragg, an elected Democrat in New York.
And, of course, Trump was found guilty by 12 New Yorkers.
The Economy
TRUMP CLAIM: “I gave you the largest tax cut in history. I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history, that’s why we had all the jobs.”
FACT-CHECK: False. According to Erica York at the Tax Foundation the Trump tax cuts (TCJA) was a large tax cut but not the largest in history. If you look at percent of revenue as share of GDP in the first two years, several tax cuts going back to 1940 were larger. The most recent that was larger was American for Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.
Separately the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the tax cuts under President Ronald Reagan were the largest tax cuts in recent history as a percent of GDP.
At the time the law went into effect the Tax Foundation estimated that it would boost long-term employment by more than 300,000 jobs. But Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi says, “the tax cuts did support job growth, but at the cost of adding approximately $2 trillion to the nation’s debt. He adds, “the regulatory changes had no measurable impact on job growth.”
TRUMP CLAIM: “He also said he inherited 9% inflation — no. He inherited almost no inflation and it stayed.. stayed that way for 14 months and it blew up under his leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were…”
FACT CHECK: This is mostly true. In January 2021, when Biden was inaugurated, year-over-year inflation was about 1.4%. Under Biden, year-over-year inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022. But it is now down to 3.3 percent. Under Trump, inflation rose by 7.76 percent from January 2017 to January 2021, and year-over-year inflation peaked at 2.9 percent in July 2018.
TRUMP CLAIM: “[Biden] created mandates. That was a disaster for our country but other than that we had – we had given back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-covid and nobody thought that was even possible.
FACT CHECK: Unclear. The Dow hit 30,000 for the first time on November 24th, 2020. But that was after the last presidential election-so it’s hard to say whether it was because of Trump’s presidency or because of Biden’s win.
TRUMP CLAIM: We had the greatest economy in history.”
FACT CHECK: That’s not accurate. First of all, the pandemic triggered a massive recession during his presidency. The government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economy. Trump had the ignominy of leaving the White House with fewer jobs than when he entered.
But even if you take out issues caused by the pandemic, economic growth averaged 2.67% during Trump’s first three years. That’s pretty solid. But it’s nowhere near the 4% averaged during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, growth has been stronger so far under Biden than under Trump.
Trump did have the unemployment rate get as low as 3.5% before the pandemic. But again, the labor force participation rate for people 25 to 54 – the core of the U.S. working population – was higher under Clinton. The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than Trump.
Trump also likes to talk about how low inflation was under him. Gasoline fell as low as $1.77 a gallon. But, of course, that price dip happened during pandemic lockdowns when few people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.
Similarly, average 30-year mortgage rates dipped to 2.65% during the pandemic. Those low rates were a byproduct of Federal Reserve efforts to prop up a weak economy, rather than the sign of strength that Trump now suggests it was.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: Trump, complaining about the European Union’s trade practices, claimed that the EU doesn’t accept US products, including American cars. “They don’t want anything that we have,” Trump said Thursday. “But we’re supposed to take their cars, their food, their everything, their agriculture.”
FACT CHECK: It’s not true that the European Union won’t take American products, including American cars, though some US exports do face EU trade barriers and though US automakers have often had a hard time gaining popularity with European consumers.
The US exported about $368 billion in goods to the European Union in 2023 (while importing about $576 billion from the EU that year), federal figures show. According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports – importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euro. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.) The EU’s Eurostat statistical office says that car imports from the US hit a new peak in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, at a value of about 11 billion euro.
Abortion
TRUMP CLAIM: “The problem they have is they’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth.”
FACT CHECK: Trump inaccurately referred to abortions after birth. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.
Abortion rights advocates say terms like this and “late-term abortions” attempt to stigmatize abortions later in pregnancy. Abortions later in pregnancy are exceedingly rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Abortions later in pregnancy also are usually the result of serious complications, such as fetal anomalies, that put the life of the woman or fetus at risk, medical experts say. In most cases, these are also wanted pregnancies, experts say.
TRUM’S CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump repeated his frequent claim that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the power to set abortion policy returned to individual states.
FACT CHECK: Trump’s claim is false. Poll after poll has shown that most Americans – two-thirds or nearly two-thirds of respondents in multiple polls – wish Roe would have been preserved.
For example, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in April 2024 found 65% of adults opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. That’s nearly identical to the result of a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in July 2022, the month after the decision. Similarly, a Marquette Law School poll in February 2024 found 67% of adults opposed the decision that overturned Roe.
A NBC News poll in June 2023 found 61% opposition among registered voters to the decision that overturned Roe. A Gallup poll in May 2023 found 61% of adults called the decision a bad thing.
Many legal scholars had also wanted Roe preserved, as several of them told CNN when Trump made a similar claim and said, “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade” in April.
“Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, said in April.
“Donald Trump’s claim is flatly incorrect,” another legal scholar who did not want Roe overturned, Maya Manian, an American University law professor and faculty director of the university’s Health Law and Policy Program, said in April.
Trump’s claim is “obviously not” true, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on the history of the US abortion debate. Ziegler, who also did not want Roe overturned, said in an April interview: “Most legal scholars probably track most Americans, who didn’t want to overturn Roe. … It wasn’t as if legal scholars were somehow outliers.”
It is true that some legal scholars who support abortion rights wished that Roe had been written differently; the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of them. But Ziegler noted that although “there was a cottage industry of legal scholars kind of rewriting Roe – ‘what Roe should’ve said’ – that isn’t saying Roe should’ve been overturned. Those are very different things.”
You can read more here.
Immigration
TRUMP CLAIM: “We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now.”
FACT CHECK: Largely exaggerated. Trump appears to be referring to the increasing number of migrants on the federal terror “watchlist” who are encountered at the border. The number of people encountered by border authorities on the watchlist jumped from three in Trump’s last full year to nearly 100 in the first full fiscal year under Biden. However, the Terrorist Screening Dataset, maintained by the FBI, includes names of people who have suspected ties to individuals who may be affiliated with a foreign terror organization. It is not a comprehensive list of actual terrorists.
TRUMP CLAIM: We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world, considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world, and he opened it up, and these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.
FACT CHECK: False. The reality is that there is no evidence that points to a major surge in crime caused by recent arrivals. Trump’s claims ignore the fact that overall, crime is down across the country. According to the latest FBI statistics, which are released quarterly, overall both murder and rape rates are down 26% Quarter 1 2024 (through March 2024) compared to the same time frame last year. There is also no evidence to show that any significant number of migrants are coming from mental institutions or prisons.
A mass influx of migrants coming into the U.S. illegally across the southern border has led to a number of false and misleading claims by Trump. For example, he regularly claims other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send to the U.S. There is no evidence to support that.
Trump has also argued the influx of immigrants is causing a crime surge in the U.S., although statistics actually show violent crime is on the way down.
There have been recent high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally. But FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, nor is there any evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the country illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes. For more than a century, critics of immigration have sought to link new arrivals to crime. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission did not find any evidence supporting a connection between immigration and increased crime, and many studies since then have reached similar conclusions.
Texas is the only state that tracks crimes by immigration status. A 2020 study published by the National Academy of Sciences found “considerably lower felony arrest rates” among people in the United States illegally than legal immigrants or native-born.
Some crime is expected given the large population of immigrants. There were an estimated 10.5 million people in the country illegally in 2021, according to the latest estimate by Pew Research Center, a figure that has almost certainly risen with large influxes at the border. In 2022, the Census Bureau estimated the foreign-born population at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years.
BIDEN’S CLAIM: President Joe Biden said the Border Patrol union endorsed him, and then appeared to clarify and said the group “endorsed (his) position.”
FACT CHECK: This is misleading. The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, backed a bipartisan border deal reached by senators that included some of the toughest security measures in recent memory, but didn’t endorse Biden. The deal failed in the Senate.
In a post on X, the union swiftly responded to the president Thursday: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”
Environment
TRUMP CLAIM: “The Paris Accord was going to cost us a trillion dollars and China nothing and Russia nothing, and India nothing. It was a rip off of the United States and I ended it because I didn’t want to waste that money because they treated us horribly.”
FACT CHECK: Not entirely true. On his first day in office, Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, according to a State Department memo. 196 countries signed on to the Paris Accord agreeing to work together to limit the impacts of climate change and global warming. As part of that the more developed, wealthier nations, committed to contributing $100 billion to support developing countries who are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Biden pledged to work with Congress to authorize $11 billion to contribute to the Paris Agreement’s $100 billion funds to support developing countries who need help to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As of 2023 the U.S. was on track to meet that goal with $9.5 billion committed to financing global climate initiatives, according to the State Department.
Foreign Policy
TRUMP CLAIM: “Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything, no money for terror.”
FACT CHECK: Iran has been Hamas’ principal backer for decades, including through the Trump presidency. Although Trump did withdraw from an Obama-era nuclear deal and levy sanctions against Tehran that dealt a sharp blow to its economy, records retrieved from inside Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces and verified by independent news outlets indicate Iran still funneled tens of millions of dollars to Hamas during his administration. Two of Trump’s top advisers for Middle Eastern affairs also claimed that Iran was supplying Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups with $100 million each year in an op-ed published in 2019.
BIDEN CLAIM: “The truth is I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this decade — the best to have any troops dying anywhere in the world that he did.”
FACT CHECK: According to the Washington Post’s analysis of U.S. military records, at least 65 U.S. military personnel died during the Trump presidency in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
With the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the end of direct military operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria there has been a reduction in the number of U.S. military deaths. However, they are still at risk as evidenced by the 12 Marines and a Sailor who were killed during the suicide bomb attack at the airport in Kabul in August, 2021 during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan carried out by the Biden administration. Three U.S. soldiers were killed and 47 were injured during the Jan. 29, 2024 drone attack on a U.S. base in northern Jordan carried out by Iranian-backed militia groups. Those groups had carried out more than 168 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria supposedly in support of Hamas in its war with Israel.
TRUMP CLAIM: “We got…a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good.”
FACT CHECK: Needs context. While it’s true that Trump did not formally declare war against a foreign power while in the White House, he significantly scaled up military action in Syria and Iraq in the fight against ISIS and also authorized the air strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani-putting the country on the brink of a direct conflict with Iran. Pentagon records also show that at least 65 American troops were killed in action during Trump’s term.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: Trump denied that he had used the words “suckers” or “losers” to describe members of the US military who had been killed in action, after Biden pointed to the remarks to criticize his predecessor’s record for veterans.
Biden touted his visit to a World War I cemetery, where he said Trump “refused to go” and told a four-star general it’s because “they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.”
Trump claimed the remark was “made up” by Biden.
FACT CHECK: The Atlantic magazine, citing four unnamed sources with “firsthand knowledge,” reported in 2020 that on the day Trump canceled a visit to a military cemetery in France where US troops who were killed in World War I are buried, he had told members of his senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The magazine also reported that in another conversation on the same trip, Trump had referred to marines who had been killed in the region as “suckers.”
John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security, has said on the record that in 2018 Trump did use the words “suckers” and “losers” to refer to servicemembers who were killed in action. Kelly told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto for Sciutto’s 2024 book that Trump would say: “Why do you people all say that these guys who get wounded or killed are heroes? They’re suckers for going in the first place, and they’re losers.”
There is no public recording of Trump making such remarks, so we can’t definitively call Trump’s denial false. But the account of Trump’s comments does not solely rest on unnamed sources from the article in The Atlantic.
BIDEN CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed that he is the only president this decade “that doesn’t have any … troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” referring to former President Donald Trump.
“Truth is, I’m the only president this century, that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” Biden said.
FACT CHECK: Biden is wrong. US service members have died abroad during his presidency, including 13 troops killed in a suicide bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Thirteen US service members – including 11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman – were killed in the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Three US soldiers were also killed this year at a small US outpost in Jordan in a one-way drone attack launched by Iran-backed militants. And two US Navy SEALs died in January off the coast of Somalia while conducting a night-time seizure of lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen.
Other US service members have also died abroad in training incidents, including five US soldiers who died in a helicopter crash in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission, and eight US airmen who died in a CV-22 Osprey crash in November 2023 off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.
January 6 insurrection
TRUMP CLAIM: “I offered her [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] 10,000 soldiers who are National Guard. And she turned them down and the mayor of – in writing, by the way, the mayor, in writing, turned it down. The mayor of DC. They turned it down. I offered 10,000 because I could see, I had virtually nothing to do. They asked me to go make a speech.”
FACT-CHECK: FALSE
The final report by the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol determined there was “no evidence” to support the claim that Trump gave an order “to have 10,000 troops ready for January 6th.”
The report quoted President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller who directly refuted this claim under oath, saying “there was no direct order from the President” to put 10,000 troops to be on the ready for January 6th.
Instead the report noted that when Trump referenced that number of troops it was not to protect the Capitol but that he had “floated the idea of having 10,000 National Guardsmen deployed to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counter-protesters.”
COVID-19
BIDEN CLAIM: Trump told Americans to “inject bleach” into their arms to treat COVID-19.
FACT CHECK: That’s overstating it. Rather, Trump asked whether it would be possible to inject disinfectant into the lungs.
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute,” he said at an April 2020 press conference. “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, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”
Hunter Biden’s laptop
TRUMP CLAIM: “It’s the same thing — 51 intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It wasn’t that – it came from his son, Hunter. it wasn’t Russia”
FACT CHECK: At the final presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, Joe Biden suggested the contents of his son’s laptop’s hard-drive – which by then had been dubbed the “laptop from hell” in the New York Post and other conservative outlets – were “garbage” and a “Russian plant.”
Biden’s claim that the laptop hard-drive was a “Russian plant” was an apparent reference to a letter signed by 51 retired intelligence officials who wrote that the timing of its emergence “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Several of those signees have since said that Biden mischaracterized the language in their letter.
Furthermore, earlier this month, prosecutors at Hunter Biden’s criminal trial in Delaware introduced the laptop into evidence — and in one of the more theatrical moments of the trial showed jurors the physical MacBook Pro 13 that Hunter Biden purportedly abandoned at a Wilmington computer repair shop in April 2019.
“Ultimately, in examining that laptop, were investigators able to confirm that it was Hunter Biden’s laptop?” prosecutor Derek Hines asked an FBI agent who testified as an expert witness.
George Floyd protests
TRUMP’S CLAIM: Trump said that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
“When they ripped down Portland, when they ripped down many other cities. You go to Minnesota, Minneapolis, what they’ve done there with the fires all over the city – if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.”
FACT CHECK: This is false. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.
The Associated Press and ABC OTV stations contributed to this report
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