Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
A video showing a Laurel County, Kentucky, voter having difficulty marking a ballot for former President Donald Trump was investigated and found to be an “isolated incident” of “voter error,” a spokesperson for the secretary of state said. Social media posts baselessly claimed it was an example of “election interference.”
Full Story
Throughout his 2024 election bid, former President Donald Trump has baselessly questioned the integrity of U.S. elections. There is no evidence that Trump’s defeat in 2020 was due to fraud or cheating, as we have written. State and federal judges have rejected Trump’s claims, often saying that his legal team provided no evidence of fraud. Election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
But bogus claims of 2024 election interference persisted as voters across the country began to cast their ballots.
In a series of posts on Instagram, users falsely characterize a viral video as evidence of pervasive fraud. The video depicts a voter in Laurel County, Kentucky, repeatedly attempting to select the Republican presidential ticket, Trump and Sen. JD Vance, but the ballot marking device instead indicates a vote for the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.
One post misleadingly reported, “BREAKING: Voter machines in Kentucky are automatically selecting ‘Harris-Walz’ despite voter’s NUMEROUS attempts to select ‘Trump-Vance.’”
“Share this and tag every representative you can think of. This is election interference at its finest and that’s a CRIME,” another post claimed.
A third post baselessly described the video as an example of more extensive interference nationwide: “People in the comments all over the country are saying the same thing happened to them. How many people did not notice and moved on to their next selection?”
Local and state officials mounted a rapid response to the Oct. 31 incident, which the Laurel County voter reported to election officials at her polling location.
Michon Lindstrom, a spokesperson for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, told us in an email that this was an “isolated incident” of “voter error,” not evidence of election interference. Adams is a Republican who won reelection last year.
“The ballot marking device was removed and the Attorney General’s office is looking at the machine out of an abundance of caution,” Lindstrom said.
The Laurel County voter responsible for the video ultimately deposited a ballot containing her desired selections, the State Board of Elections said in a Nov. 1 statement.
More than 1,700 people in Laurel County participated in in-person absentee voting on Oct. 31, and “neither the State Board of Elections nor the Laurel County Clerk were made aware of any other reports of issues with the county’s [ballot marking devices and scanners] on that day,” the board said in its statement.
“According to statements made by the voter to the County Clerk, the voter was able to ultimately use the touchscreen correctly to highlight the field for Donald Trump and every other one of her preferred candidates,” the board also said.
Device Allows for Reviewing Selections
The device featured in the video was an Election Systems & Software (ES&S) ExpressVote ballot marking device, or BMD. The device does not electronically tabulate votes. Instead, voters must make selections for each race on the BMD screen, print their completed ballots, then insert their ballots into an ES&S DS-200 scanner to formally record their selections.
Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown explained in an Oct. 31 Facebook post, “You insert your blank ballot into [the BMD]. … It shows you who you have chosen for each race and notifies you if you didn’t make a selection in a race before it allows the voter to continue to the next page. When you come to the end of the ballot it shows you how you voted in every race and issue. It confirms with each voter that they are satisfied with their selections twice before printing the ballot.”
“Once you receive your ballot back from the ballot marking device you can review your choices again before placing it into the scanner,” Brown continued. “If you made a mistake, you may spoil that ballot and receive another one[.] Kentucky Law allows two spoiled ballots only. Once you are satisfied with your ballot you may place it into the scanner, and it verifies that it has been counted.”
Upon receiving news of the Oct. 31 incident, the BMD was “set face down” in the vote center until a representative of the Kentucky attorney general’s office arrived, Brown reported on Facebook.
“After several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario [in the video], it did occur,” Brown wrote. “This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not.” Investigators used the same BMD from the video when attempting to recreate the scenario.
Brown posted an additional video to Facebook on Nov. 1 with tips to successfully navigate Laurel County BMDs. The State Board of Elections recommends that voters use a finger or stylus to make selections “within the middle of the field allocated for that candidate or response.”
Voters in Kentucky can report ballot issues to the election officials at their polling location and then call the attorney general’s election hotline, 1-800-328-VOTE.
Lindstrom, the secretary of state spokesperson, said Kentucky conducts post-election audits, which involve hand recounts of ballots.
“All Kentucky voters can have confidence that our elections are secure and any potential issues will be addressed quickly,” Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, said on X.
Sources
Farley, Robert, et al. “Donald Trump’s Closing Arguments.” FactCheck.org. 31 Oct 2024.
Kiely, Eugene, et al. “Final Night of the GOP Convention.” FactCheck.org. 19 July 2024.
Kiely, Eugene, et al. “The Facts on Trump’s Post-Election Legal Challenges.” FactCheck.org. 2 Dec 2020.
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. “Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees.” Press release. 12 Nov 2020.
Afreen, Uzma. “Trump, Vance Opted Out of Oregon’s Voter Guide, Contrary to Online Claims of ‘Voter Fraud’.” FactCheck.org. 29 Oct 2024.
Keefe, Eliza. “Dominion Voting Systems Will Operate in Florida, Contrary to Online Claims.” FactCheck.org. 25 Oct 2024.
Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Latest Bogus Claim About Mail-In Vote Fraud in Pennsylvania.” FactCheck.org. 20 Sep 2024.
Collins, Keith, and Josh Williams. “Early Voting Has Started. Here’s What to Watch.” New York Times. 2 Nov 2024.
Laurel County Clerk. “Elections.” Accessed 3 Nov 2024.
Commonwealth of Kentucky State Board of Elections. “State Board of Elections Statement Regarding Laurel County Viral Video.” Press release. Accessed 2 Nov 2024.
NBC News. “Kentucky Secretary of State Election Results 2023: Michael Adams Wins.” 7 Nov 2023.
Kilburn, Brandon. “Commonwealth of Kentucky County Election Planning Report.” 3 Jul 2024.
Commonwealth of Kentucky State Board of Elections. “County Election Plans.” Accessed 2 Nov 2024.
Election Systems & Software. “ExpressVote.” Accessed 2 Nov 2024.
Election Systems & Software. “DS200.” Accessed 2 Nov 2024.
Tony Brown, Laurel County Clerk. “The Attorney General’s office has been to the vote center to check the device.” Facebook. 31 Oct 2024.
Attorney General Russell Coleman (@kyoag). “Kentucky Attorney General’s Department of Criminal Investigations Quickly Responded to Complaint from Laurel County.” X. 31 Oct 2024.
Tony Brown, Laurel County Clerk. “Here is how the ballot Marking Device works.” Facebook. 1 Nov 2024.
Kentucky General Assembly. Title 031. Chapter 004. Regulation 230REG. Accessed 4 Nov 2024.
Attorney General Russell Coleman (@kyoag). “Our elections are secure.” X. 31 Oct 2024.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Vice President Kamala Harris wrongly claimed that former President Donald Trump was talking about “reproductive freedom” when he said that he will “protect” women “whether the women like it or not.” Trump was talking about illegal immigration — but, in doing so, he made his own unsupported claims about criminals from prisons and “insane asylums” being “imported” into the country.
In Reno, Nevada, on Oct. 31, Harris highlighted Trump’s quote, which he had said the day before. Here’s how she described it:
Harris, Reno, Nevada, Oct. 31: And on the issue of freedom, listen, Donald Trump’s not done. Did anybody hear what he had to say just yesterday? And I’ll tell you, it was outrageous.
So, he said on the issue of freedom of choice — reproductive freedom — he said that he will do what he wants. Because, quote, he — this is his perspective, he will do it “whether the women like it or not.” “Whether the women like it or not.”
Trump wasn’t speaking about reproductive rights when he said that — not at all. Instead, he was talking about illegal immigration.
A person walks past a mural honoring women voters ahead of Harris’ campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 14. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.
In his lead-up to the well-publicized quote, Trump claimed that Harris had “eradicated our sovereign border and unleashed an army of migrant gangs,” which, he said, were “waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens like we’ve never suffered before.” The border hasn’t been “eradicated.” Millions have been apprehended trying to cross the border illegally during the Biden administration, and apprehensions have been lower in July, August and September than in the last three months under Trump’s administration, after President Joe Biden implemented emergency policies to restrict asylum eligibility.
There have been some high-profile crimes committed by immigrants who are in the country illegally, but there’s no evidence of a wave of what Trump has called “migrant crime” in the existing data, experts have said. Violent crime overall, and notably murders, also has declined over Biden’s term.
Trump went on to make a version of his frequent, baseless claim that other countries are sending prisoners and people in mental institutions to the U.S. He claimed that Harris “has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, from insane asylums, and mental institutions all over the world, from Venezuela to the Congo, including savage criminals who assault, rape, and murder our women and girls.”
Immigration experts, and criminal justice experts in Venezuela, have told us there’s no evidence for Trump’s talking point, and his campaign hasn’t backed it up.
Trump then said his staff had told him not to say that he would protect women.
Trump, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Oct. 30: And my people told me — about four weeks ago, I would say, “No, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women.” “Sir, please don’t say that.”
“Why?” They said, “We think it’s, we think it’s very inappropriate for you to say.” I said, “Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country.” They said — they said, “Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.” I pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? And I said, “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.”
In his speech, he did not mention abortion rights.
In her remarks, Harris went on to make some outdated and unsupported claims about Trump’s stances on reproductive issues.
She said: “And this is not the first time he has told us he does not believe women should have authority or agency over their own bodies. This is the same person who said that women should be punished for their choices.” In 2016, Trump said that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who violate abortion bans, but he retracted the statement the same day, saying doctors performing abortions should be held responsible, not women. This year, he said it would be up to states to decide if women should be prosecuted for violating state abortion laws.
Harris also cited Project 2025. “And we know that what he has planned includes a national abortion ban, restricting access to birth control, putting IVF treatments at risk, and forcing states to monitor women’s pregnancies. You don’t have to take my word for it. Google Project 2025.”
Some, not all, of that matches what’s in Project 2025, but Trump’s stated positions differ from what Harris said.
Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation, is a playbook for a conservative administration. Some of the authors are former Trump Cabinet officials, but Trump has tried to distance himself from the document.
Of course, we don’t know what Trump will do in the future, but as we’ve written, Trump during this campaign has said he won’t sign a national abortion ban, a change from his position in 2016, when Trump backed a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy. He says he’s against restrictions on birth control, and he supports IVF, or in vitro fertilization. Trump has said it’s up to states to decide if they want to monitor women’s pregnancies.
Project 2025 supports further curtailing abortion access, including preventing abortion pills from being mailed. It calls for limiting insurance coverage of an emergency contraceptive, not restrictions on typical birth control more broadly. It doesn’t comment on IVF, but appears to support fetal “personhood” laws, which say that embryos should have the same rights as people. That could affect IVF, because leftover embryos from the fertility treatment are often discarded. Finally, Project 2025 calls for reporting all miscarriages and abortions but doesn’t call for monitoring all pregnancies, as we’ve explained.
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.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have starkly different track records on climate change.
During his presidency, Trump loosened limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles and other sources, weakened energy efficiency standards, and left the Paris Agreement, a major 2015 international accord to limit global warming.
Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement and set emissions reduction targets. The Biden-Harris administration made progress on meeting those targets, including through regulatory efforts and passing the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provide support for clean energy investment and related infrastructure. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in 2022 to pass the IRA in the Senate.
However, the U.S. is still not on track to meet emissions reduction targets for 2030. To get there, the next presidential administration will need to take further steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And an administration hostile to climate action could erode progress toward meeting those goals.
To shed light on the two candidates’ climate agendas, we sorted through their campaign materials and recent statements on the campaign trail.
The Urgency of Climate Change
Harris, presidential debate on ABC News, Philadelphia, Sept. 10: Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue.
Trump, interview with Elon Musk, X, Aug. 12: The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property. The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming ...
In her limited direct references to climate change during her presidential campaign, Harris has made clear that she considers it an urgent problem. Trump repeatedly has made false statements about climate science and indicated that he does not consider mitigating global warming to be a priority.
The Harris campaign’s communications and Harris’ own statements on climate change have often used the word “crisis.”
During her Aug. 22 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris listed “fundamental freedoms” that are “at stake” in the election, including the “freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”
As she had done previously on the campaign trail, at the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Harris contrasted her view of climate change — which she correctly called “very real” — with Trump’s past statements that it is a “hoax.”
Trump has not used the word “hoax” to describe climate change during his current presidential campaign, but he has repeatedly spread falsehoods about sea level rise, incorrectly cast doubt on the idea that the earth is getting warmer and indicated that he does not consider climate change to be important.
Photo by Kara/stock.adobe.com.
At the June 27 Trump-Biden debate, Trump at first didn’t answer a question about climate change. When pushed, he still deflected, bringing up clean water and air rather than directly addressing climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
“So, I want absolutely immaculate, clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O — we had the best numbers ever. And we did — we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever,” Trump said. He has continued to claim that the U.S. had the “cleanest air” and the “cleanest water” during his presidency.
As we wrote at the time of the debate, greenhouse gas emissions temporarily dipped at the end of the Trump presidency, but this was due to reduced activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration reversed many environmental regulations, including 28 on air pollution and emissions and eight on water pollution.
In his July 18 speech at the Republican National Convention and when he debated Harris in September, Trump did not mention climate change, other than to indirectly refer at the convention to his plans to reverse efforts to mitigate it, which he called the “green new scam,” and state his intention to “drill, baby, drill.”
At rallies and other events, Trump has been more expansive.
He often gives varying and incorrect information about the extent of sea level rise while diminishing its impact. “And nobody knows if that’s true or not, but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years,” he said at an Oct. 16 Univision town hall in Miami, as part of a long answer to a question from a Floridian asking if he still considered climate change a hoax. (In fact, the ocean is rising more than an eighth of an inch per year already.) Trump also referred to the “green new hoax” in his answer, referring to efforts to combat climate change.
As he has often done, Trump juxtaposed his statements about sea level rise with concerns about nuclear war — which he sometimes refers to as “nuclear warming” — in an apparent attempt to diminish the importance of global warming in comparison. “What I’m worried about is nuclear weapons tomorrow,” he said at the Univision event.
Trump has also repeatedly used old tropes to try to cast doubt on climate science, including by incorrectly claiming that people have stopped using the term global warming because the earth is getting cooler in some places. He has also recently falsely claimed at multiple events that the earth is cooling.
“Remember when they used to say global warming? They don’t say that anymore. They say climate change because the planet’s actually getting cooler,” Trump said at a Sept. 18 rally in Uniondale, New York.
As many scientists have stated again and again, there is clear evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions have led to a rise in global average temperature since the pre-industrial period.
The Paris Agreement and International Cooperation
Trump, WPXI interview, Oct. 20: We’re going to [exit the Paris Agreement] again because it’s a rip-off. We pay $1 trillion. Other countries pay nothing. China pays nothing … It’s a ridiculous, one-sided deal.
Harris, CNN interview, Aug. 29: We have set goals for the United States of America and by extension, the globe, around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
As promised during the 2016 campaign, the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement as soon as it could, in November 2020. In February 2021, the U.S. rejoined the accord under Biden.
As part of rejoining the agreement, the Biden-Harris administration committed to a 50% to 52% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. Participating nations must set an emissions reduction pledge every five years; the next set of pledges are scheduled for 2025.
If elected, Trump has vowed in his Agenda 47 to leave the “horrendously unfair” Paris Agreement once again, and he has continued to refer to it as “horribly unfair,” “ridiculous,” “disastrous” or “the most unfair document you’ve ever seen.”
We could not find comments from Harris on the Paris Agreement since her presidential campaign began, but she has expressed support for international cooperation and the setting of climate goals.
“As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership,” the issues section of Harris’ website says, referring to the conference held at the end of last year, which focused on implementing the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement, negotiated via the United Nations, includes commitments from wealthier countries with greater historic contributions to climate change, such as the U.S., to provide financing to developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The agreement also encourages developing countries to contribute.
Trump repeatedly has claimed that the Paris Agreement would cost the U.S. billions — or sometimes $1 trillion — while costing other countries nothing. In fact, in 2022 alone, wealthier nations contributed nearly $116 billion in climate finance to developing countries. The U.S. gave $5.8 billion that year, according to the Biden-Harris administration, in addition to contributing to banks that provide grants and loans for climate-related projects in developing countries. The Biden-Harris administration pledged to reach more than $11 billion in annual climate finance in 2024, although it is unclear whether it will meet this goal.
Trump often complains that China has contributed nothing under the Paris Agreement. China is sometimes classified as developing and has not contributed to climate finance via the U.N. But China has separately provided some climate funding to other nations.
A second Trump withdrawal from the Paris Agreement would have “significant implications for climate finance,” Gautam Jain, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, wrote in an Oct. 15 blog post. It might not only affect U.S. contributions but could also affect contributions from other countries.
“Since the [Paris] agreement is not legally binding and is based on trust and leadership, the stance taken by the largest economy sets the tone for the rest of the world,” he wrote.
Renewable Energy Investment and the Inflation Reduction Act
Harris, CNN interview, Aug. 29: I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far: The Inflation Reduction Act. What we have done to invest — by my calculation … probably a trillion dollars over the next ten years — investing in a clean energy economy.
Trump, speech at the Economic Club of New York, Sept. 5: To further defeat inflation, my plan will terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the green new scam. Greatest scam in history, probably. A $10 trillion scam that we waste. We throw it, like throwing money right out the window. It actually sets us back as opposed to moves us forward. And rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
Key to making progress toward emissions reduction goals is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides significant support for renewable energy projects. An analysis of nine separate models published in Science in 2023 found that on average, with the IRA in place, U.S. emissions would reach 37% below 2005 levels by 2030, compared with just a 28% reduction without it.
A March 2024 Carbon Brief analysis similarly estimated that if the IRA and other Biden-Harris policies were fully implemented, the U.S. would hit a 43% drop in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, whereas a rollback of those policies would result in a 28% decline — a difference of some 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. The estimate does not factor in additional policies either administration might enact.
Harris has indicated continued support for implementing and expanding climate provisions of the IRA.
The short climate section on the Harris campaign website highlights her role in casting the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act and its role in “building a thriving clean energy economy, all while ensuring America’s energy security and independence with record energy production.” The text continues, “As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work.”
In contrast, Trump has expressed hostility toward renewable energy projects — particularly those involving wind energy — and indicated he would stall further implementation of the IRA.
Trump has rebranded the IRA and other climate change-related efforts as the “green new scam” — a play on the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution Democrats put forward in 2019 on how to fight climate change. As a senator, Harris cosponsored the resolution, but it never came up for a vote in the Senate.
At the Republican National Convention, Trump appeared to pledge to redirect money intended for climate efforts. “And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless green new scam ideas,” he said. (The IRA does provide funding for hydroelectric projects and certain transportation infrastructure projects.) Trump has continued to often mention the “green new scam,” promising to “terminate” it.
In a Sept. 5 speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump was more specific, vowing to “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”
Neither Harris nor Trump have fully spelled out what they would do to build on or undermine the clean energy related portions of the IRA, respectively.
The IRA includes more than $142 billion in funding for various loans, grants and other direct spending related to combating climate change, such as for building or repurposing factories to make cleaner vehicles or providing individuals with home energy rebates.
It also will include tax credits for renewable energy projects, electric vehicles and energy efficiency-related efforts, possibly totaling more than $1 trillion over 10 years, depending on how many tax credits are claimed. Tax credits for wind, solar and battery storage projects will make the most significant difference in lowering emissions, analysts say.
Trump could blunt the impact of the IRA, but there would be limits in his ability to halt spending.
Of $105 billion allocated for grants, nearly half had already been spent or committed as of July, according to a report from the Sabin Institute, with more spending or commitments expected before the end of the Biden-Harris administration. There are also limits on how much of the remaining funds could be redirected, the report said. The next administration would be able to reallocate at most 10% of funds for any given program.
Tax credits under the IRA “are generally less vulnerable to direct executive interference than its spending provisions,” according to the Sabin report. Trump would need cooperation from Congress to do away with IRA-related tax credits, explained Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy in a blog post, but he could potentially make them harder to take advantage of.
Trump has repeatedly railed against wind energy, claiming that it is too expensive and that it is harmful to the environment. (In fact, onshore wind has a similar or smaller cost than natural gas. Also, Trump’s claims about the environmental harms of wind farms, which often focus on threats to birds, don’t put them in the context of other environmental threats, such as birds colliding with buildings and climate change itself.)
Agenda 47 states that Trump “will immediately stop all Joe Biden policies that distort energy markets, limit consumer choice, and drive-up costs on consumers, including insane wind subsidies.” Wind energy in 2023 accounted for around 10% of all utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S.
Agenda 47 expresses support for nuclear power, hydropower and “clean coal.” During his presidency, Trump advanced tax credits for carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy when he signed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.
As we’ve said, the IRA provides funding for hydroelectric power projects, as well as tax credits to preserve existing nuclear power plants and encourage the development of advanced nuclear reactors. It is unclear what Trump means by “clean coal,” but the IRA also includes incentives for carbon capture and storage, which can be used to reduce emissions from coal power plants.
Separate from the IRA, Trump said he would end offshore wind projects, while the Biden-Harris administration has approved 10 such projects in federal waters.
When Trump talks about solar projects, his comments are more mixed. At an Oct. 22 campaign event at his golf club in Miami, for instance, Trump said he was “in favor of solar” before continuing, “I saw a solar field the other day that looked like it took up half the desert. I’d never saw anything like it. It’s all steel and glass and wires and looks like hell. And you see rabbits, they get caught in it.”
While utility-scale solar farms can take up hundreds to thousands of acres, their footprint needs to be put in the context of other development, such as golf courses, and the environmental benefits of their low carbon emissions. Solar farm developers are also attempting to make plans that mitigate effects on animals.
Trump has also said he may do away with the IRA’s $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles. (For more on electric vehicles, read the next section below.)
In contrast, Harris has highlighted the achievements of the IRA, including increasing the nation’s battery storage capacity, along with solar manufacturing and wind energy production. In the document A New Way Forward for the Middle Class, Harris says her administration would continue to “invest in a thriving clean energy economy.” She also promises to “build on efforts to directly lower home energy costs for working families,” mentioning tax credits for home energy technologies under the IRA.
In the document, the Harris campaign also appears to allude to the need to reform renewable energy project permitting, referencing plans for “cutting red tape so that clean energy projects are completed quickly and efficiently.” She also proposes support for the cement and steel industries to reduce emissions.
And the campaign promises to “unlock upgrades, efficiencies, and faster construction of a lower-cost and more resilient electrical grid to speed up deployment of cutting-edge technologies that are critical to producing and distributing more energy, providing resilience to climate disasters, and bringing down costs.”
As of 2023, more than one-fifth of U.S. electricity generation came from renewable sources. New renewable energy projects will need to be integrated into the electrical grid, and the next president will have influence over grid-related policies.
Electric Vehicles and Emissions Standards
Trump, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Aug. 30: Kamala Harris wants to outlaw your car and truck and force you to buy electric vehicles whether you like them or not, whether you can afford it or not, and they don’t go far.
Harris, Flint, Michigan, Oct. 4: We will ensure that the next generation of breakthroughs, from advanced batteries to electric vehicles, are not only invented but built right here in America by American union workers. And Michigan, let us be clear. Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.
Even while claiming to “love” electric vehicles, Trump has disparaged and spread misinformation about them throughout his campaign, including after an endorsement from Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. Harris, meanwhile, has not said much about EVs, but has previously spoken positively of them and supported them in various policies.
Trump has said EVs “don’t go far,” “cost too much” and are “all made in China.” He has continued to claim that the Biden-Harris administration spent some $9 billion to build eight EV charging stations — a wild exaggeration, as we’ve written.
The former president has falsely claimed that batteries make electric trucks so heavy that “every bridge has to be rebuilt because the weight is double and triple that of a gasoline or diesel tank truck.” That’s bogus. All semi-trucks have a weight limit of 80,000 pounds and bridges are built to accommodate that weight, as our colleagues at the Washington Post have explained. The extra weight of an electric truck — which is not double conventional trucks — means the vehicles can’t carry as much cargo.
Trump has also incorrectly alleged that giant Chinese auto plants being built in Mexico — many of them for electric vehicles — will eliminate “every single job” in the auto industry in the U.S. As we wrote, there’s only one, small Chinese auto plant in Mexico, announced during Trump’s term. No others are under construction.
On the campaign trail and in his Agenda 47, Trump has frequently said he will end an electric vehicle “mandate.” But as we’ve written before, there isn’t a mandate for electric vehicles. In March, the Biden-Harris administration finalized environmental regulations that reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants from cars and trucks, starting with model year 2027 vehicles. The emissions standards are stringent enough that they are expected to dramatically increase the number of EVs on the road. But carmakers ultimately determine how to comply and there is no requirement that they only make EVs.
Indeed, while the Biden-Harris administration’s goal is to have zero-emissions vehicles make up 50% of new car sales by 2030, the regulations are technology-neutral. Environmental Protection Agency projections indicate new EV sales could be as low as 30% or as high as 56% in 2032 under the new regulations. After a change to the proposed standards, which called for faster pollution reductions, the car industry as a whole has not opposed the new standards.
Harris’ campaign has said she “does not support an electric vehicle mandate” and Harris has told voters that she will “never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.” In her last presidential campaign in 2019, though, she supported phasing out sales of internal combustion cars by 2035.
By 2032, the Biden-Harris emissions standards are projected to cut greenhouse emissions nearly in half for cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and minivans, relative to the previous standards.
Trump plans to reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s emissions regulations and accompanying fuel economy standards. He has also told Reuters he would consider ending a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles included in the IRA.
The credit, which is intended to boost the domestic EV industry and decrease reliance on China, has multiple requirements. There is an income limit for buyers and a price cap on vehicles. Vehicles are not eligible unless they are assembled in North America. The credit amount is also tied to where battery components were manufactured and where battery raw materials, such as lithium and graphite, were mined or processed. To qualify, a percentage of each need to have occurred in the U.S. or elsewhere in North America. (In May, the U.S. Treasury Department relaxed some of the mineral requirements until 2027 in recognition that virtually all graphite is currently sourced from China.)
Trump has said he will instead invite Chinese automakers to build cars in the U.S. “We’re going to give incentives, and if China and other countries want to come here and sell the cars, they’re going to build plants here, and they’re going to hire our workers,” he told Reuters in August.
He has also said he will put tariffs of “200, 250%” on Chinese cars built in Mexico (and called for a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods). “If you put tariffs on those cars, they’re going to make it here,” Trump also told Reuters. “It’s very simple. It’s not complicated.” But as we’ve written, the current trade agreement with Mexico, which Trump negotiated, doesn’t permit tariffs just on Chinese cars.
Taxing EV-related imports from China is not just a Republican idea. Although very few Americans are purchasing Chinese EVs, the Biden-Harris administration finalized a 100% tariff on EVs and a 25% tariff on EV batteries, parts and minerals imported from China in September. Most of these were increases from the Trump-era, when duties had been set at 25% for EVs and 7.5% for batteries and their components. (Also in September, the Biden-Harris administration proposed a ban on Chinese-developed software in cars. If finalized, this would effectively prohibit all Chinese cars regardless of production location.)
Although Harris’ agenda only mentions EVs once — when establishing that Harris will take action when U.S. workers and businesses are threatened by China — it is expected that her administration will continue to support the EV-friendly policies put in place during the Biden-Harris administration.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, for example, which was enacted in 2021, included $7.5 billion for EV charging infrastructure and funding for research and development of EV batteries. In late 2021, when announcing these investments as vice president, Harris called EVs a “solution” to the “pollution from vehicles powered by fossil fuels.”
The IRA, which Harris’ website says she will “build on,” included significant investments in charging infrastructure, domestic manufacturing and, as we mentioned, tax credits for people to purchase new and used EVs.
“I will make sure that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century, which is why, under my plan, we will invest in the industries that built America like steel, iron, and the great American auto industry,” she said at an Oct. 18 event in Michigan with the local autoworker union. “And we will ensure that the next generation of breakthroughs, from advanced batteries to electric vehicles, are not just invented but built right here in America by American union workers.”
Fossil Fuel Projects
Trump, Atlanta, Oct. 15: To crush inflation we will quickly become energy independent and we will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill.
Harris, presidential debate on ABC, Sept. 10: I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.
Trump has made his stance on the extraction of fossil fuels clear by using a Republican slogan first used in 2008: “Drill, baby, drill!” One of his key proposals is to lower energy prices by increasing production of oil and natural gas, or what he calls “liquid gold.”
But as experts have told us, while increasing the supply could put downward pressure on prices in the short term, if demand remains constant, prices are set on a global market, subject to world events. Producers worldwide won’t want to drill more if prices are too low. Also, new oil or gas wells take time to become operational. (For more, see “The Issues: Trump’s Proposal to Lower Prices by Increasing Energy Production.”)
Trump’s plan to increase oil and natural gas production, which is at record levels, includes expediting the approval of federal permits and leases, increasing the amount of public land available for drilling, and accelerating the approval of natural gas pipelines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. He has also mentioned reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline project that was canceled in 2021.
Based on anonymous sources, the Washington Post reported that Trump played up his plans to help the industry, including reversing drilling restrictions in Alaska and offering more oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico, while speaking to a room of oil executives in April. He suggested the group should raise $1 billion forhis campaign, calling it a “deal,” according to the Post’s account.
“Starting on Day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refiners, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape,” he said at a campaign event in Michigan in August.
Trump has also promised to immediately undo a temporary pause on approvals for new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, projects that export to countries that do not have free trade agreements with the U.S. Citing the “climate crisis,” the Biden-Harris administration announced the pause in January. The Department of Energy said the pause was necessary to update economic and environmental impact analyses that help the agency determine if projects are in the public interest. It also noted that the U.S. had recently become the top LNG exporter in the world.
The temporary freeze impacted a dozen LNG projects with pending applications, including a large facility in Louisiana, according to a list compiled by the Center for LNG. The pause was contested by 16 Republican-led states in March and blocked by a federal judge in Louisiana, who determined the DOE’s review had to be “expeditious.” As Politico reported, the ruling did not require DOE to issue any permits, but the agency did authorize one facility in late summer. Experts told Politico in September that they didn’t expect any more authorizations while Biden is in office.
With respect to Trump’s claims during the campaign and in his agenda of “making America energy independent again,” as we’ve written, the U.S. was never 100% energy self-sufficient during his presidency — and isn’t likely to be in the future, according to experts. During Trump’s administration, the country did produce more energy than it consumed and exported more energy than it imported. That’s likely what Trump means by “energy independent.” By that definition, the U.S. has continued to be “energy independent” under Biden. But under both administrations, the U.S. has imported oil and other forms of energy to meet domestic demand.
Although Harris’ agenda clearly differs from Trump’s in that it prioritizes the growth of a clean energy economy, she has at times touted increases in fossil fuel production, even as she has highlighted her role defending “communities that were being poisoned by polluters and Big Oil.”
As California’s attorney general, Harris began an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil lied about the risks of climate change and she helped bring charges against a pipeline company after a 2015 oil spill near Santa Barbara.
Harris has stressed the need for diverse sources of energy and has said she doesn’t support a ban on fracking — a reversal from her position when she was running to be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.
“We can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said in a CNN interview in August.
It’s worth noting that presidents only have authority to restrict drilling on federal land, where a small percentage of oil and natural gas production takes place in the U.S.
During her debate with Trump, Harris highlighted that the IRA “opened new leases for fracking.”
As a condition for auctioning leases for offshore wind development, the IRA requires that the government auction leases for at least 60 million acres for oil and gas. The law also required the government to move forward with certain lease sales Trump had begun but Biden had paused. These provisions were the result of negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was a Democrat but is now an independent.
In late 2023, the Department of the Interior announced its final 2024-2029 plan, saying it had met the 60 million acre minimum to allow wind leases to proceed with a total of three oil and gas sales — all in the Gulf of Mexico. The department’s release noted that this was the fewest leases in history, and that both the areas considered and the number of leases were “significantly narrowed” from the original proposal from the Trump administration, which included “47 lease sales off all coastal areas,” including Alaska.
On LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign suggested the vice president will be guided by the outcome of the DOE’s review, Reuters reported. “The Vice President believes that we need to make decisions informed by the best economic and scientific information -including projected impacts on energy costs, energy security, the environment, and public health,” the spokesperson told the news outlet.
The Harris campaign did not respond to our specific questions about her stance on fossil fuel production.
Power Plant and Energy Efficiency Regulations
Trump, rally in York, Pennsylvania, Aug. 19: I’m announcing today that when I return to the White House, I will end the anti-American energy crusade and terminate Kamala’s so-called power plant rule. It’s a disaster for our country.
As we’ve said, a major difference between the past two presidential administrations has been in the approach to climate-related regulations — with the Trump administration generally rolling back regulations and the Biden-Harris administration reinstating regulations and making new ones.
Trump often discusses his record of cutting regulations and promises further cuts in his speeches. Beyond his promises to cut vehicle emissions regulations, he has said in his Agenda 47 and more recently at a rally in York, Pennsylvania, that he will rescind the Biden-Harris administration’s “power plant rule.” Trump has also repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Harris is “shutting down” power plants, sometimes citing regulations as the cause.
The Biden-Harris administration has made a rule limiting carbon emissions from power plants that has been challenged in court. The Supreme Court on Oct. 16 decided that the rule could go into effect while legal cases work their way through the courts. If fully implemented, the rule will require certain new natural gas power plants, as well as coal power plants intending to operate long-term, to use technology such as carbon capture and sequestration/storage to prevent 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032.
Trump also vowed in Agenda 47 to stop regulations “that prevent Americans from buying” gas stoves, incandescent light bulbs, “quality” dishwashers, “and much more.”
Under Biden-Harris, the Department of Energy released rules encouraging greater gas stove energy efficiency, but these rules would not ban gas stoves. The IRA also provides rebates for electric stove purchases. Another DOE rule phased out incandescent light bulbs, and the agency has also set new energy efficiency rules for dishwashers.
We have not found comments from Harris since the beginning of her campaign on power plant regulations or those for gas stoves, light bulbs or dishwashers.
Most recently on the topic of energy efficiency, Trump has claimed that “they want every building in Manhattan to not have windows anymore because they think it’s environmentally friendly” or that “they want buildings in New York taken down and rebuilt without windows.”
However, energy-efficient homes — which Harris’ plans promote — can and do have windows. Harris’ economic plan notes that the IRA provides homeowners a tax credit of up to $600 each year to install energy-efficient windows.
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.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
A conservative dark money group has fabricated a website and digital ad campaign that purport to share — but oftendistort — policies supported by Vice President Kamala Harris. As the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has not proposed a gun buyback program or Medicare coverage for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, contrary to the conservative group’s ads.
Full Story
A conservative dark money group has created a bogus website, as well as a social media and ad campaign, called Progress 2028 that, on its surface, appears to be led by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign or allies. But Harris has not proposed most of the policies the website lays out, though she did support some of the policies in the past. Her campaign had nothing to do with the creation of Project 2028.
The top of the Progress 2028 website states: “To: Americans Ready for Progress. Re: How we build a sustainable engine of progressive change to carry us to 2028.” It purports that Harris is “leading the way” on a range of policy proposals and would implement them during her administration.
As reported by OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that follows money in politics, Building America’s Future, a conservative nonprofit, registered Progress 2028 on Sept. 23 with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. According to the New York Times, Building America’s Future has raised tens of millions of dollars that have been steered to groups and initiatives that have worked to elect former President Donald Trump for president.
Distortions of Harris’ Statements
The Progress 2028 website and ads could easily be perceived as efforts of a progressive advocacy group that supports — or even speaks on behalf of — Harris’ campaign.
Comic-like ads on Instagram include a photo of Harris with a heading that states: “Kamala’s plan to end gun violence.” The ad also includes a word bubble that says: “Under Kamala Harris’s leadership, a nationwide gun buy-back program will take dangerous weapons off our streets. Fewer guns = fewer tragedies.” At the bottom of the ad, it states: “Let’s get ready for the next phase in Kamala’s bold progressive agenda.”
The ad leaves the false impression that Harris supports a gun buyback program in her 2024 presidential campaign.
Harris did support a mandatory buyback program for so-called assault weapons as an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination during the 2020 campaign, as we’ve written. She has called for a ban on the purchase of certain semiautomatic weapons as the current Democratic nominee for president, but her campaign told us she no longer supports requiring Americans to give up guns already legally purchased.
A similarly misleading ad on Facebook says: “Under Kamala’s leadership, undocumented immigrants will no longer be left behind when it comes to critical Medicare access.” In a word bubble next to a photo of Harris, the ad says: “Healthcare status shouldn’t depend on your immigration status. Kamala Harris will fight to expand Medicare for undocumented immigrants, ensuring a healthier America for all.”
(A different version of the Medicare ad is running on Facebook and Instagram. All of the Progress 2028 ads can be found in the Meta ad library.)
As with the anti-gun ad, Progress 2028 is referring to one of Harris’ positions from the 2020 campaign.
During an NBC News presidential primary debate in 2019, Harris raised her hand when a moderator asked the candidates if their health care plans would provide coverage for immigrants who are in the country illegally. When asked during a 2019 interview whether a proposed Medicare for All bill should cover those immigrants, Harris said she was “opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health.”
But, as we wrote in August, the Harris campaign told us she “will not push Medicare for All as President.” And, as reported by KFF Health News and PolitiFact, Harris has not stated whether she would provide subsidized or free health coverage to those living in the country illegally.
Last year, as governor of Minnesota, Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, signed legislation allowing low-income immigrants in his state who are living in the country illegally to obtain a health plan through a state program. During an Oct. 6 interview on “Fox News Sunday” about that vote, Walz said, “Well, that’s not the vice president’s position.”
Another Progress 2028 post on Facebook on Oct. 28 included an NBC News headline that reads: “Judge blocks Virginia from dropping alleged noncitizens from voter rolls.” Above it, the message says: “Did you see the news? The Biden-Harris DOJ successfully challenged Virginia’s ‘non-citizen’ voter removal program and won!,” misleadingly adding, “This ensures that no undocumented immigrant is unjustly stripped from voter rolls.”
A U.S. District Court judge on Oct. 25 did block a Virginia program that aimed to remove alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls. But the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which sued the state, argued “eligible voters” were “wrongfully purged from the voter rolls” through the program. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 30 that Virginia could continue its removal of about 1,600 people from its voter rolls.
As we have written, a 1996 law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections — although some jurisdictions such as San Francisco do allow noncitizens to vote in certain local elections.
We found no evidence that Harris supports allowing undocumented immigrants to vote in federal elections.
Evidence of noncitizens voting in federal elections is extremely rare. The Bipartisan Policy Center’s review of cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation found just 77 cases between 1999 and 2023 of noncitizens voting.
But Trump has repeatedly made false claims that the 2020 election was rigged due to voter fraud and noncitizens voting, even though his own aides, including his attorney general, told him his claims were baseless. Trump and other Republicans have continued to push the baseless claim that noncitizens will be voting in this year’s election.
The Dark Money Group Behind the Ads
Dark money groups, such as Building America’s Future, are nonprofits created to influence political outcomes but are generally under no legal obligation to reveal the identity of the donors who fund them, as explained by OpenSecrets.
A pair of political action committees, Duty to America PAC and Future Coalition PAC, for instance, have used Building America’s Future funding to try to convince certain demographic groups, such as younger men, Muslim Americans and Black voters, to support Trump instead of Harris, the New York Times reported.
Building America’s Future has hosted speaking events for Republican candidates, including Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick, and it hosted a roundtable on Oct. 29 in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill for Trump.
According to OpenSecrets, the Progress 2028 website appears to be created on Sept. 23 by IMGE LLC, a Washington, D.C., firm run by Republican political operatives. IMGE President Ethan Eilon, a former senior strategist for the Republican National Committee, and senior partner Phil Cox, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association, are also leaders of Building America’s Future, the New York Times reported.
Building America’s Future has received more than $100 million in funding from Republican donors over the past four years, the Times reported, citing people briefed on the group’s work. That includes Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has actively been stumping for Trump at campaign rallies and on social media in recent months. The billionaire has publicly highlighted the work of another conservative group, Fair Election Fund, that has received funding from Building America’s Future, the Times reported.
Building America’s Future also gave $43 million in 2022 to Citizens for Sanity, another conservative group linked to Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior policy adviser, the Wall Street Journal reported, based on 2022 tax filings. Citizens for Sanity ran anti-Democratic ads ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. That money was given to Building America’s Future by Musk, the Wall Street Journal added, citing people familiar with the matter. According to a New York Times analysis of its tax filings, Building America’s Future raised, in total, $11 million in 2021 and $53 million in 2022.
According to OpenSecrets, Musk has also donated more than $118 million to another pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC. Since it was founded in May, America PAC has spent more than $163 million, as of Nov. 1, attacking Democrats and supporting Republicans during the run-up to the Nov. 5 election.
America PAC also recently launched a contest that gives $1 million daily to registered voters in seven swing states who sign a petition supporting free speech and gun rights. The giveaway has been scrutinized by the Justice Department as potentially illegal, and the Philadelphia district attorney filed a lawsuit against the PAC, claiming it’s an unlawful lottery.
We asked Building America’s Future and Progress 2028 for comment about the website and ads, but they did not respond.
The Harris campaign would not comment on specific claims on the Progress 2028 website and digital ads, but a campaign aide told us in a statement: “Trump is so damaged by his Project 2025 agenda that he and his backers have resorted to pushing this desperate and pathetic lie to deceive voters.”
Project 2025 is a conservative policy initiative that Harris and Democrats have referred to as “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.” But it isn’t a Trump campaign document.
The Heritage Foundation, with more than 100 other conservative organizations, created Project 2025, as we’ve written, to provide a roadmap for the next conservative president to fundamentally reshape the federal government. Some of the authors are former Cabinet secretaries under Trump, and others from the Trump administration had a role in the project.
Trump has tried to distance himself from it, saying he disagrees with the document “in many cases.”
Sources
Project 2025. “Advisory Board.” Accessed 25 Oct 2024.
Kiely, Eugene, D’Angelo Gore and Robert Farley. “A Guide to Project 2025.” FactCheck.org. 10 Sep 2024.
Levien, Simon J. “What to Know About JD Vance and Project 2025.” New York Times. 1 Oct 2024.
Meckler, Laura. “GOP candidates embrace Trump’s call to abolish Education Department.” Washington Post. 24 Oct 2024.
Project 2025. “About Project 2025.” Accessed 25 Oct 2024.
Scherer, Michael and Josh Dawsey. “Elon Musk is the October surprise of the 2024 election.” Washington Post. 29 Oct 2024.
Yang, Tia, el al. “Americans don’t like Project 2025.” ABC News. 9 Aug 2024.
Progress 2028. “To: Americans Ready for Progress… Re: How we build a sustainable engine of progressive change to carry us to 2028.” Accessed 25 Oct 2024.
Massoglia, Anna. “Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Elon Musk behind fake pro-Harris campaign scheme.” OpenSecrets. 16 Oct 2024.
Building America’s Future. “Working to Build a Brighter Future for America.” Accessed 25 Oct 2024.
Haberman, Maggie and Theodore Schleifer. “Republican Operatives Function as Hidden Hand Behind Pro-Trump Efforts.” 15 Oct 2024.
Building America’s Future. “America’s Future Tour.” Accessed 28 Oct 2024.
DonaldJTrump.com. “ICYMI: Building America’s Future to Host Special Guest President Trump at Southeast Pennsylvania Roundtable.” 22 Oct 2024.
IMGE. “Full service digital. Done right.” Accessed 28 Oct 2024.
Ehrlich, Charlotte and Maia Cook. “Musk is placing a high bet on the presidential election.” OpenSecrets. 25 Oct 2024.
Mattioli, Dana, Joe Palazzolo and Khadeeja Safdar. “Elon Musk Gave Tens of Millions to Republican Causes Far Earlier Than Previously Known.” Wall Street Journal. 2 Oct 2024.
Renshaw, Jarrett. “Elon Musk’s election promise of $1 million daily giveaway sparks call for probe.” Reuters. 20 Oct 2024.
Crowley, Kinsey. “Elon Musk announces more winners of $1 million giveaway after reported DOJ warning letter.” USA Today. 25 Oct 2024.
Cohen, Marshall. “Philadelphia DA sues Elon Musk and his super PAC over $1M sweepstakes.” CNN. 28 Oct 2024.
Kamala Harris for President. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 25 Oct 2024.
Chapman, Logan. “NRA Posts Misrepresent Harris’ Position on Gun Ownership.” FactCheck.org. 24 Sep 2024.
NBC News. “Health Care For Undocumented Immigrants: Where The Candidates Stand.” 17 Jun 2019.
Armour, Stephanie. “GOP Charge That Harris Backed Taxpayer-Funded Care for All Immigrants Overlooks Details.” KFF Health News. 1 Aug 2024.
Johnson, Chris. “Walz immigration moves sharpen election border security debate.” Roll Call. 8 Aug 2024.
Farley, Robert, et al. “FactChecking Harris’ and Trump’s Fox News Appearances.” FactCheck.org. 21 Oct 2024.
Barnes, Daniel and Rebecca Shabad. “Judge blocks Virginia from dropping alleged noncitizens from voter rolls.” NBC News. 25 Oct 2024.
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Victory: Federal Court Judge Stops Virginia’s Voter Purge After State Was Sued.” 25 Oct 2024.
VanSickle, Abbie. “Supreme Court Allows Virginia to Purge Possibly Ineligible Voters for Now.” New York Times. 30 Oct 2024.
Cardinal Brown, Theresa, Theo Menon and Feyisayo Oyolola. “Four Things to Know about Noncitizen Voting.” Bipartisan Policy Center. 13 Mar 2024.
Heritage Foundation. “Election Fraud Cases.” Accessed 28 Oct 2024.
Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Latest Bogus Claim About Mail-In Vote Fraud in Pennsylvania.” FactCheck.org. 20 Sep 2024.
Charalambous, Peter. “Election fact check: Noncitizens can’t vote, and instances are ‘vanishingly rare’.” ABC News. 28 Oct 2024.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Less than a month after we wrote about a misleading ad that used out-of-context quotes to attack Vice President Kamala Harris on taxes, former President Donald Trump’s campaign has released another anti-Harris ad drawing from the same deceptive political playbook. This time, the campaign used distorted quotes from news outlets to criticize Harris on taxes, illegal immigration and other issues.
For example, the ad shortens a CBS News headline from “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown” to “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.” The ad also cites NBC News while making a claim about Harris providing “welfare for illegals,” even though that clipped quote comes from a 6-year-old opinion piece that never mentioned Harris.
In addition, the ad reuses a truncated line from a New York Times article to falsely suggest that Harris seeks “to significantly raise taxes” on all Americans, when the newspaper said that her plan focuses on increasing taxes for very wealthy individuals and corporations — not people making less than $400,000 a year. That’s the same edited quote we wrote about in early October.
Trump’s campaign began running the new 1-minute ad in several states on Oct. 27, according to political ad tracking service AdImpact. A 30-second version, with only some of the misleading quotes, began airing on Oct. 30, and a version in Spanish started running on Nov. 1.
While the ad’s narrator says that President Joe Biden and Harris “raised taxes on the middle class,” text on screen says that “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes” — a quote that is attributed to the New York Times. But that Aug. 22 article didn’t say that the Biden administration raised taxes on middle-income Americans, nor did it say that Harris wants to raise taxes for all income groups, as the ad’s partial Times quote suggests.
What the Times reported was: “No one making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the plan. Instead, Ms. Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.” (See images below.)
As we’ve written, Harris’ economic policy book says she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans.”
Harris proposes raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%; restoring the top individual income tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, which now applies to income above roughly $609,000 for individuals and $731,000 for married couples; increasing the long-term capital gains rate to 28% from 20% for households with annual taxable income of more than $1 million; and taxing unrealized capital gains at death for gains above $5 million for individuals and $10 million for joint filers. She also has said she would eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, and expand the child tax credit, including a $6,000 credit for newborns.
The Border
The narrator goes on to say that “Kamala was in charge of his open border policies,” while a graphic quotes CBS News as saying, “Harris Vows to Keep Biden’s Border.”
First, Biden doesn’t have an open border policy, and he didn’t put Harris in charge of issues at the U.S. border with Mexico, which is the job of the Department of Homeland Security secretary, as we’ve reported. Harris had a more limited role as the lead on 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.
Second, the full headline of the Sept. 28 CBS News article cited in the ad said: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: ‘The United States is a sovereign nation.’” (See the images below.)
Contrary to the ad’s suggestion that Harris would embrace “open border policies” as president, the CBS News article went on to say that, during her late September visit to part of the border in Arizona, Harris pledged to keep “Biden’s asylum crackdown in place if elected, solidifying Democrats’ embrace of more stringent immigration rules.”
Migrant Benefits
As the narrator suggests that Biden and Harris are “giving welfare to illegals,” text shown on screen, and attributed to NBC News, says “welfare for illegals.” But those three words were taken from a longer sentence in a March 28, 2018, opinion piece published almost three years before Biden and Harris took office in January 2021. The NBC News piece, which did not mention Biden or Harris, was about how “welfare reform” laws passed during Bill Clinton’s administration can prevent recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals from obtaining professional or commercial licenses needed to get certain jobs.
“Regardless of one’s position on welfare for illegal immigrants, a license is clearly different from food stamps and other government safety nets,” the author wrote.
The opinion article noted that a law that Clinton signed in 1996 prevents “unauthorized immigrants from receiving numerous ‘public benefits,’ unless a state enacts a law that explicitly makes unauthorized immigrants eligible.”
On her campaign website, Harris says that she does support “an earned pathway to citizenship” for people illegally in the country, which would eventually make at least some eligible to receive benefits from federal funded programs. But Harris doesn’t provide details on such a plan, and it’s unclear if it would have sufficient support in Congress to become law.
World Conflicts
The narrator also blames Biden and Harris for the state of international affairs, claiming that “their weakness invited wars.” As the narrator speaks, the words “Global War” appear on screen and are attributed to the news website Axios.
But the full headline of that July 31 article said, “U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns.” The story was about a 100-plus page report from Congress’ Commission on the National Defense Strategy that detailed why the U.S. is not prepared for a potential war with Russia and Ukraine. Axios did not fault the Biden administration for ongoing overseas wars, as the ad could lead viewers to believe.
Harris has called for a ceasefire deal, and the release of hostages, to end the war in Gaza. The vice president also has said that, as president, she “will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies” amid Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Harris’ Agenda
Finally, the narrator claims that “Kamala wants to double down on failure,” while text on the screen says, “Kamala’s Policies ‘Would be the same as Biden’s.’” The ad attributes the line about Harris’ policies to an Oct. 14 Hill story, but the newspaper didn’t say Harris would mirror Biden as president.
Instead, the newspaper was paraphrasing something said by political commentator Chris Matthews. The headline of the Hill article reads: “Chris Matthews: ‘Big mistake’ for Harris to say policies would be the same as Biden’s.”
The story was about comments Matthews made after Harris’ Oct. 8 appearance on ABC’s “The View,” in which Harris said “not a thing that comes to mind” when she was asked if she would have done anything differently than Biden in the last four years. “I think when she says her policies are going to be the same as Biden’s, that’s a big mistake,” Matthews said during an Oct. 14 appearance on MSNBC.
However, Harris didn’t say that she would have the exact same policies as Biden if she becomes president. Her comment on “The View” was about the past, not the future.
She does support the continuation of many Biden policies, such as the pledge not to raise taxes for people making under $400,000. But she also has proposed new policies, including a plan to provide eligible first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 in mortgage assistance.
In an Oct. 20 campaign speech from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Harris said: “I have been honored to serve as Joe Biden’s vice president, but I will bring my own experiences and ideas to the Oval Office. My presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different.”
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.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has portrayed former President Donald Trump as a danger to democracy. She also has warned he will enact policies that will hurt blue-collar workers, women, seniors, and the nation’s health care system and economy, while cutting taxes for “billionaires and corporations.”
That was her message at eight campaign events that we reviewed from Oct. 18 through Oct. 22. During that time, Harris appeared at three rallies in Michigan and one in Atlanta, three moderated discussions with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, and a get-out-the-early-vote event with singer Lizzo in Detroit.
We also fact-checked Trump’s remarks over the same time period. (See: “Donald Trump’s Closing Arguments.”)
In contrast to Trump, Harris spoke at her four rallies for an average of only 30 minutes. She spoke about the same amount of time at the moderated events, where she shared the stage with Cheney, and much less at the Detroit event with Lizzo.
We also found another contrast with Trump: There were far fewer falsehoods and fewer claims for us to check.
In Trump’s case, we found he spoke three times longer than Harris at rallies, and we identified about five times as many claims.
Below are the statements by Harris that we found to be false, misleading or lacking context.
Jobs
Manufacturing jobs under Trump: After promising to “retool existing factories, hire locally, and work with unions to create good-paying jobs” during an Oct. 18 speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Harris attacked Trump for being “one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in American history.”
“Donald Trump has a different approach. He makes big promises and he always fails to deliver,” Harris said. “So, remember he said he was the only one — you know how he talks. He [was] the only one who could bring back America’s manufacturing jobs. Then, America lost almost 200,000 manufacturing jobs when he was president. Facts. Including tens of thousands of jobs right here in Michigan. And those losses started before the pandemic, making Donald Trump one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in American history.”
Harris repeated the claim, nearly verbatim, twice that same day at other Michigan rallies in Lansing and Oakland County. But it’s a misleading talking point that ignores the impact of the pandemic-fueled recession in the spring of 2020.
As we’ve written, the economy added 419,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first three years in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But all those jobs and then some were wiped out in Trump’s fourth year, when the pandemic struck. When Trump left office, the U.S. had lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs.
Harris is right that the job losses under Trump “started before the pandemic.” The U.S. shed 43,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s third year in 2019. But, as of September, that’s the exact number of manufacturing jobs that have been lost this year under the Biden-Harris administration.
Manufacturing jobs under Biden-Harris: Harris also left out some important context when she talked about the jobs created during the Biden-Harris administration.
“Over the last three and a half years, we brought manufacturing back to America, creating 730,000 manufacturing jobs,” Harris said in Lansing, Michigan.
Harris is right that, as of September, the BLS monthly payroll survey indicated a gain of 729,000 manufacturing jobs during the Biden-Harris administration. But that figure comes with two caveats.
The vice president’s remarks ignore the economic impact of the pandemic on U.S. jobs, which included the loss of nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in March and April 2020. A little more than half of those jobs had returned by the time Trump left office. It wasn’t until May 2022 that the number of manufacturing jobs returned to its pre-pandemic level of February 2020.
Also, as we’ve written, the 729,000 manufacturing jobs cited by Harris will eventually be reduced. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in August announced a preliminary estimate of its annual revision of jobs data that showed the number of manufacturing jobs created over the 12 months ending in March was 115,000 lower. The final revisions won’t be announced until February.
If the September figure is reduced by the preliminary revised estimate, that would leave a gain of 614,000 under Biden. That would actually be a gain of just 22,000 jobs over the pre-pandemic level in February 2020.
Union strikes/collective bargaining: In a speech in Lansing, Michigan, Harris appealed to union workers by distorting Trump’s remarks about the United Auto Workers strike in September 2023.
Harris, Oct. 18: And when the UAW went on strike to demand the higher wages you deserve, Donald Trump went to a nonunion shop and attacked the UAW. He said striking and collective bargaining don’t make, and I’m going to quote, “a damn bit of difference.”
The vice president is referring to remarks that Trump made at Drake Industries, a nonunion vehicle parts plant in Clinton Township, Michigan, on Sept. 28, 2023. Trump, who skipped a Republican debate to speak in Michigan that day, gave what the Detroit Free Press described as a “rollicking, bellicose speech to workers against automakers’ and the President Joe Biden administration’s efforts to push a transition to electric vehicles.”
Here’s what Trump said, in context:
Trump, Sept. 28, 2023: To the striking workers, I support you in your goal of fair wages and greater stability, and I truly hope you get a fair deal for yourselves and your families. But if your union leaders will not demand that crooked Joe [Biden] repeal his electric vehicle mandate immediately, then it doesn’t matter what hourly word you get, it just doesn’t make a damn bit of difference because in two to three years, you will not have one job in this state. … In other words, your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think. I watch you out there with the pickets, but I don’t think you’re picketing for the right thing.
We should note, as we’ve done before, that Biden did not issue an electric vehicle mandate, so Trump was wrong about that.
Trump was referring at that time to the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules to significantly restrict the amount of emissions from light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, which includes passenger cars, trucks and large pickups and vans. In April 2023, the EPA said the new standards are “projected to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles,” which “could account for 67% of new light-duty vehicle sales and 46% of new medium-duty vehicle sales” in 2032. The rules were finalized in March.
Policy experts told us that carmakers will have flexibility in how they meet the proposed requirements, including by making more efficient internal combustion engines.
Autoworkers’ pay: At the Oakland Expo Center in Waterford, Michigan, Harris said: “Donald Trump encouraged automakers to move their plants out of Michigan so they could pay their workers less.” That’s true, although it requires some context.
Harris, who made similar versions of this claim in Grand Rapids and Lansing, was referring to comments that Trump made in 2015 to the Detroit News. During his first presidential campaign, Trump had been critical of multibillion-dollar investments that Ford had made and planned to make in Mexico.
“We’ve got to keep [factories] here. It’s not that hard to do,” Trump told the Detroit News. “Without action,” he added, “pretty soon all we’re going to have is nursing home jobs.”
The paper said Trump dismissed the argument that labor is cheaper in Mexico, and then suggested that U.S. automakers could save money by moving to other U.S. cities, rather than going to Mexico.
“You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump told the paper. “We can do the rotation in the United States — it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”
The Detroit News wrote that Trump went on to say “that after Michigan ‘loses a couple of plants — all of sudden you’ll make good deals in your own area.’” The paper, however, pointed out that “hourly employees for Detroit’s Big Three are paid the same no matter what state they’re in, under the terms of United Auto Workers contracts.”
Electric vehicle investments: In a speech to United Auto Workers Local 652 in Lansing, Harris said, “Trump’s running mate called your jobs ‘table scraps,’ right?” This requires some context.
Harris is referring to Vance’s answer to a Reuters reporter at a campaign rally on Oct. 8 in Detroit. The reporter asked the Ohio senator if a Trump-Vance administration would honor the $500 million grant that the Biden-Harris administration announced in July to help General Motors convert its Lansing Grand River Assembly plant to manufacture electric vehicles. UAW Local 652 represents workers at the plant.
The Detroit News wrote that the grant, coupled with a $900 million investment by GM, is “expected to create 50 jobs and retain more than 650 jobs at an assembly plant that currently produces Cadillac sedans,” citing the company’s grant application.
Vance told the reporter at the rally: “Neither me nor President Trump has ever said we want to take any money that’s going to Michigan autoworkers out of the state of Michigan.” He then went on to say, “What we said is that Kamala Harris is offering table scraps — $500 million – when you have an EV mandate that’s going to cost 117,000 autoworker jobs. I think Michigan autoworkers deserve more than the table scraps that Kamala Harris’ green new scam” would provide.
As we said earlier, there is no electric vehicle mandate; Vance is referring to EPA rules to significantly curb carbon emissions from vehicles. Also, Vance’s 117,000 figure comes from the Trump-friendly America First Policy Institute, which is run by former top Trump administration officials.
The UAW, which has endorsed Harris and supported the EPA rule, has rejected the notion that the stricter emission standards will result in job losses for its members. In March, when the rule was finalized, the union issued a statement that said: “We reject the fearmongering that says tackling the climate crisis must come at the cost of union jobs. Ambitious and achievable regulations can support both.”
In an Oct. 10 Reuters article, UAW President Shawn Fain responded to Vance’s remarks.
“It’s a lot bigger than just the Lansing Grand River investment,” he said. “It’s factories all over the United States, and it’s supply chain factories all over the United States that are being put in place now. So you’re talking hundreds of thousands of jobs that Donald Trump is just writing off.”
Trump Tax Cut Proposals
At two rallies in Michigan and one in Atlanta, Harris gave the misleading impression that Trump would only cut taxes for “billionaires and corporations.”
Harris at a campaign stop at a UAW hall on Oct. 18 in Lansing, Michigan. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
As we’re written, Trump would cut taxes for most taxpayers.
He proposes extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017 — including the individual income tax cuts, which will expire after 2025. The Tax Policy Center estimates that slightly more than half of the benefits from the individual income tax cuts would go to those making about $450,000 or less.
He also has proposed eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, tips and overtime pay — all with the intent of benefiting middle-income families. Trump has also proposed cutting the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 15% for companies that manufacture their products in the United States.
Bloomberg estimated that Trump’s “grab bag of tax cut proposals” would cost the federal government $10.5 trillion in revenue over 10 years, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Trump’s proposals would “dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances.” (More on Social Security’s finances later.)
Project 2025 Proposals
Harris brings up Project 2025 seemingly every chance she gets, and links Trump to some of its more controversial proposals — even when Trump has taken the opposite position.
In five of the eight campaign events we reviewed for this article, Harris brought up Project 2025, which is being led by the conservative Heritage Foundation. It is not a Trump campaign document, although it was written by some former Trump administration officials and offers proposals to significantly cut the size and scope of government for “the next conservative President.” (For more, read “A Guide to Project 2025,” which details who was involved in writing the document and Trump’s comments about it.)
In a moderated discussion in Brookfield, Wisconsin, on Oct. 21, Harris referred to it as “Donald Trump’s Project 2025,” and at four rallies, including in Atlanta on Oct. 19, she told audiences to Google Project 2025 if they wanted to know what Trump would do as president.
Harris, Atlanta, Oct. 19: Now, Donald Trump, well, he has a different plan. Just Google Project 2025. … And when you read it, you know it is a detailed and dangerous blueprint for what Donald Trump will do if he is elected president. Donald Trump — Donald Trump will give billionaires and corporations massive tax cuts. Like he did it last time, he would do it again. He would cut Social Security and Medicare. He would get rid of the thing we all fought so hard for: that $35-a-month cap on insulin for our seniors.
We’ve already addressed the tax cut remark, so we will address the other claims here.
Social Security and Medicare: Harris said Trump will “cut Social Security and Medicare,” but there is no evidence that he will — except for the indirect impact that his proposed tax cuts could have on Social Security finances and potentially retirement benefits.
As we have written before, Trump has consistently said throughout the campaign that he would not make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits.
When House Republicans last year debated how to reduce government spending, Trump posted a video to social media in which he said, “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”
When he was president, Trump’s budgets included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. He also proposed reductions to the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, but not reductions to Social Security retirement benefits.
There is the threat, however, that Trump’s many tax cut proposals — including a plan to repeal the tax on Social Security retirement benefits — would exhaust Social Security trust fund reserves by 2031, rather than 2034, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Without congressional action to replace the lost tax revenues or replenish the trust fund reserves, the Social Security Administration would have to reduce benefits.
“Upon insolvency, the law calls for limiting Social Security spending to its revenue stream, which we’ve previously estimated would mean a $16,500 cut in annual benefits for a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033,” CRFB said in an analysis of the impact Trump’s plans would have on Social Security released this month.
Project 2025 does lay out “four goals and principles” for Medicare “reform,” but there is nothing in the book that calls for cutting Social Security, which the authors of the project call a “myth.”
When talking about Social Security at another campaign event in Lansing, Harris also said that Trump “recommended we raise the retirement age to 70.” He did, but it was 24 years ago in his book “The America We Deserve.” At the time, Trump was flirting with the idea of running for president as a third-party candidate. He decided against joining the 2000 presidential race, which was won by George W. Bush.
The current age for receiving full Social Security retirement benefits is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. Trump has said he will not raise the retirement age. “I will not cut one penny from Social Security or Medicare. And I will not raise the retirement age [by] one day,” he said at a rally in July.
Insulin cap: The Inflation Reduction Act signed by Biden in August 2022 capped monthly insulin copays at $35 for seniors in Medicare’s prescription drug program. Trump has been critical of the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate change initiatives, telling the Economic Club of New York in September that he would “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”
But he has not said he would “get rid” of the $35 monthly cap, as Harris said, and there are indications that he might keep the cap in place. In fact, Trump has been trying to take credit for the $35 monthly cap. During the June 27 debate with Biden, Trump misleadingly claimed that he was “the one that got the insulin down for the seniors.” A limited project capped costs for some seniors during the Trump administration, but all seniors with Medicare drug coverage benefited during the Biden administration.
So, it isn’t clear that Trump would remove the $35 monthly cap. We asked his campaign, but did not get a response.
In Atlanta and elsewhere, Harris cited Project 2025 as evidence that Trump would get rid of the cap. Project 2025 does call for the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act on page 465. But, again, Project 2025 isn’t a Trump campaign document.
Head Start: In Detroit, Harris talked about her campaign being about a “new generation of leadership” that will work together on projects that invest in the community. “We’re not falling for the other guy trying to get rid of the Department of Education and Head Start because we know what we stand for,” she said.
It is true that Trump has called for eliminating the Department of Education, as he did in Wisconsin last month. But we found no instances of Trump saying he would “get rid” of Head Start, a federally funded initiative within the Department of Health and Human Services that funds local programs that help low-income children prepare for school.
In other speeches, including in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris cited Project 2025 when making her claim about Trump wanting to eliminate Head Start. It is true that Project 2025 on page 482 calls for eliminating Head Start, which it claimed is “fraught with scandal and abuse.” But that doesn’t mean Trump agrees with that proposal.
As president, Trump unsuccessfully proposed cutting Head Start by $29 billion over 10 years in the fiscal year 2019 budget. But Trump has not indicated that he endorses ending Head Start entirely.
Affordable Care Act
Trump, who tried but failed to replace the Affordable Care Act as president, has struggled throughout the campaign to explain what he will do about the law if elected president.
Harris has filled the void with a definitive — but unsupported — claim that Trump will repeal the ACA without replacing it and allow insurers to once again deny coverage or charge more for coverage to those with preexisting medical conditions.
“Donald Trump intends to end the Affordable Care Act with no plan to replace it,” Harris said in Atlanta, calling Trump an “unserious man” whose plans will have “serious consequences.”
“Because, think about it, the man is going to threaten the health insurance of 45 million Americans based on a concept,” she went on to say, “and take us back to when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.”
As a candidate, Trump has been unclear about his plans for the ACA — which currently insures about 45 million people, as Harris said, through policies sold on the ACA marketplaces and obtained because of the expansion of Medicaid. He posted on social media in November 2023 that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the law, saying the cost is “out of control” and claiming to be “seriously looking at alternatives” to the ACA. In late March, Trump said he wanted to make the ACA “better” and cheaper.
But then in August, at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, Trump said he might keep the ACA.
“I’m going to keep the Affordable Care Act unless we can do something much better, we’ll keep it,” he said. “It stinks, it’s not good. If we can do something better, we’re going to do something with it. If we can do better, meaning less expensive and better health care for you, less expensive and better health care for you, then we’ll do it.”
At the Sept. 10 debate, a moderator asked Trump if he had a plan to replace the law. He said, “I have concepts of a plan,” adding that he “would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive.” Although he said at the debate, “you’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future,” Trump has yet to release any details about his plans for the ACA.
Although Trump may not have a plan, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised to overhaul the nation’s health care system if Trump wins. At a closed political event in Pennsylvania on Oct. 28, Johnson said: “The ACA is so deeply ingrained; we need massive reform to make this work. And we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” (Johnson later disputed reports that “massive reform” means he will seek to repeal the ACA.)
As for preexisting conditions, Trump supported a 2017 GOP bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for preexisting conditions. He also proposed less expensive health insurance plans as an alternative to the ACA plans, some of which would not have had to comply with the ACA’s rules against denying coverage or pricing coverage based on health status.
If the ACA were repealed with no replacement, protections for preexisting condition would be significantly curtailed. But even before the ACA, those with employer-based plans couldn’t be denied a policy. They could be denied coverage for a health condition only if they had had a lapse in coverage, as we’ve explained.
Trump as a Danger to Democracy
A staple of Harris’ rallies is her extended take on Trump’s danger to democracy — which has support from some of Trump’s former top aides, including former Chief of Staff John Kelly. Earlier this month, Kelly told the New York Times that the former president said “more than once … that Hitler did some good things,” describing his former boss as meeting “the general definition of a fascist.”
“So, so much is on the line in this election,” Harris said in Atlanta. “And this election is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher for obvious reasons, including because just a few months ago, the United States Supreme Court basically told the former president he is effectively immune no matter what he does in the White House.”
Harris went on to say, “Just imagine now Donald Trump with no guardrails — he who has vowed that he will be a dictator on Day 1.”
There was more, but we will focus on two claims: the court ruling on presidential immunity and Trump’s remarks about being a dictator.
Presidential immunity: Harris went too far when she said that under a Supreme Court ruling Trump “is effectively immune no matter what he does in the White House.”
Harris was referring to a July 1 ruling in response to a motion Trump filed to dismiss a federal indictment that charged him with four criminal counts related to his attempts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. In his motion, Trump argued that a president has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution.
In a 6-3 ruling, the court said a president should enjoy a “presumption of immunity” when carrying out “official acts.” However, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling that “[t]he President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.”
In response to the court’s ruling, special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment that removed mention of “official acts,” including Trump’s communication with Justice Department officials about the election. But Smith did not drop any charges, describing some actions that Trump took while in office as “personal” or unrelated to his duties as president.
Dictator: When she said Trump “has vowed 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, host 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 said he was joking. 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.”
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.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In his third campaign for the nation’s top office, former President Donald Trump’s closing messages have run the gamut, touching on the economy, immigration, the military, crime, taxes and more. In lengthy speeches, he rattles off a stream of claims, citing his time as president and drawing contrasts with Vice President Kamala Harris.
We reviewed Trump’s remarks from Oct. 18 through Oct. 22, which included four rallies — in Detroit; Latrobe, Pennsylvania; and Greensboro and Greenville, North Carolina — a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and roundtable events in Miami and Auburn Hills, Michigan. We identified more than 60 false, misleading and unsupported claims, many that we have fact-checked weeks, months and sometimes even years ago.
We also fact-checked Harris’ remarks over the same time period. (See: “Kamala Harris’ Closing Arguments.”)
In contrast to Harris’ rallies, Trump spoke for an average of about an hour and a half, three times longer than Harris. Still, we flagged about five times as many factual inaccuracies by Trump.
In 2015, Trump’s first year as a politician, we named him the “king of whoppers” in our annual recap of the worst falsehoods of the year, saying that we had “never seen his match” — both in terms of the large number of inaccurate statements he makes and his propensity to double-down on claims that have been shown to be wrong. Nine years later, that’s still the case.
Reading about more than 60 claims in one story is exhausting — we get it. But it is what it is.
We have organized the claims by topic:
Election Integrity Economic Issues Immigration Energy Taxes Defense/Military Crime/Guns Miscellaneous
Election Integrity
Trump has continued to peddle the falsehood that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, and suggested President Joe Biden’s win was the result of cheating.
“You know, we won twice here,” Trump said in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Oct. 22, adding, “and we won twice everywhere, if you want to really know.” Trump did win North Carolina in both 2016 and 2020, but contrary to his many assertions, he didn’t win twice “everywhere.”
In Greenville on Oct. 21, Trump said of Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, “He’s going to stop the cheating. … Are they cheating? They’re trying, but they will not get away with it, right? They didn’t get away with it in this state. They got away with it in plenty of places.”
As we have written, there’s no evidence that Trump’s defeat was due to fraud or cheating. State and federal judges around the country have rejected Trump’s claims, often saying that his legal team provided no evidence of fraud. And Trump’s own election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump’s aides in the White House told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless, too, according to testimony given to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. What Trump characterized as “fraud” was just part of the “normal process,” as former Attorney General William Barr said in one instance.
“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr told the committee.
In two of his speeches, Trump also suggested that immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally are “undercutting the voting power of our own citizens” and that Democrats are “trying to get them to vote.”
But as we have written, noncitizens are not legally permitted to vote in presidential elections, and there is no evidence — contrary to Trump’s repeated claims — that it is happening on any wide scale. As immigration experts have explained to us, the disincentives for it are enormous. Aside from being illegal, it is a deportable offense that makes a person permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S.
Economic Issues
Not the ‘Greatest Economy’
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” Trump wrongly said at the town hall in Lancaster on Oct. 20.
We consider this among Trump’s Greatest Hits, as he has been repeating it, frequently since he left office, and even before. In fact, it was one of the claims we wrote about in our last “Trump on the Stump” story during the 2020 campaign.
As we wrote most recently, the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” during the Trump administration. Economists look to real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth to measure economic health, and that figure exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth more than a dozen times before he took office.
Every president since the 1930s except for Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover has seen a year with at least 3% growth in GDP.
Didn’t ‘Destroy’ the Economy
In several rallies, Trump falsely said that Harris “destroyed our economy.” Aside from inflation, which has moderated greatly since 2022, several economic measures show a strong economy under the Biden-Harris administration.
GDP growth has been strong: 6.1% in 2021, 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% for the third quarter of 2024, the latest estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. As we said, the highest annual GDP growth under Trump was 3%, and the lowest was -2.2% in 2020.
The unemployment rate went down under the Biden-Harris administration and has stayed lower for longer than at any point of the Trump administration. The latest figure was 4.1% in September, 2.3 percentage points below where it was when Biden took office.
Job growth has been strong. More than 15 million jobs have been added, and employment is now about 6 million higher than it was pre-pandemic (and that’s accounting for revisions to the employment figures that the Bureau of Labor Statistics likely will do next year).
On the negative side, inflation went up. During Biden’s presidency, the Consumer Price Index has gone up 19.9%. Inflation has moderated greatly since hitting a 9.1% increase for the 12 months ending in June 2022. The CPI rose only 2.4% in the 12 months ending in September, the most recent figure available.
Wages have gone up, but haven’t quite kept pace with inflation. Average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers have gone up 18% during this administration, but when adjusted for inflation, wages are down 1.8% as of September.
Causes of Inflation
Trump has misleadingly blamed Harris for inflation, claiming it was caused by “what they did with energy,” as he claimed in Lancaster. The primary cause of high inflation, notably in 2022, was the unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflation rose in countries around the world.
Experts told us that the economic fallout from the pandemic created issues with supply and demand, as well as labor, and inflation was further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and subsequent sanctions the U.S. (and other countries) put on Russian oil.
Pandemic stimulus spending under Biden also contributed, but wasn’t the root of the matter. Economists also said some level of stimulus was needed for a robust economic recovery.
Energy prices went up, but that, too, was a pandemic fallout issue. Demand, and supply, fell in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The subsequent supply crunch, when demand returned, caused prices to go up.
Not the ‘Worst’ Inflation
Trump said in Lancaster that the economy is the biggest election issue for voters partly because of inflation, which he falsely said “is the worst we’ve ever had.” He also wrongly said in Greenville that “we had no inflation” when he was president.
The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes. Under Biden, the biggest 12-month increase occurred during the period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment).
As of September, the CPI rose 2.4% in the 12 months ending that month. That’s only 0.1 percentage point higher than the 2.3% increase for the 12 months ending in February 2020, which was before the COVID-19 pandemic helped send the annual rate of inflation to under 2% for several months. Under Trump, the largest annual increase was 2.9% for the 12-month periods ending in June and July 2018.
Tariffs on China
Trump said in Greensboro that he will make U.S. companies that don’t manufacture their products in the country “pay a quite stiff tariff,” and he mentioned imports from China as an example.
“You know how much China paid us during my time?” he asked. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. No other president got them to pay, not 10 cents. … China didn’t pay 10 cents.”
Trump’s claim is false. The amount of customs duties on Chinese imports increased after Trump raised tariffs, but the U.S. already had been collecting billions in customs duties for years. As we’ve reported, in 2016, the year before Trump took office, the U.S. collected $13.3 billion in customs duties on Chinese imports.
Furthermore, that money did not come from China, as Trump falsely claimed. The tariffs are paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, and at least part of those costs are passed on to U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.
Black and Hispanic Jobs
In Detroit on Oct. 18, Trump claimed that “Kamala’s migrant invasion is also devastating our great African American community” because “they’re taking their jobs.” He also said people who immigrated illegally are “taking a lot of Hispanic jobs” as well. But Trump’s campaign has not provided evidence of this, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data do not support his claims, as we’ve written.
Trump at a campaign rally on Oct. 18 in Detroit, Michigan. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
The Black unemployment rate in September was 5.7%, which is lower than the 9.3% rate in January 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, and lower than the 6.1% rate in February 2020, just before the pandemic began. The rate was as low as 4.8% in April 2023.
As for Hispanics or Latinos, the unemployment rate in September was 5.1%, which is lower than the 8.5% rate in January 2021, but higher than the 4.3% rate in February 2020. In September 2022, the rate was 3.9%, which tied the record low first hit under the Trump administration.
Also, the number of Black and Hispanic or Latino people who are unemployed is down from when Biden and Harris took office. There were even fewer Black people unemployed in September than there were in February 2020.
Native- and Foreign-Born Employment
Trump followed his unsupported remarks about migrants taking Black and Hispanic jobs by falsely claiming that “the jobs created by Biden are all being taken by people coming into the country illegally.”
In September, employment of native-born workers was up nearly 7.6 million from January 2021. Meanwhile, employment of foreign-born workers increased by roughly 6.1 million in that period.
BLS says the foreign-born population, meaning those who weren’t citizens at birth, includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.” There is no employment breakdown for only people in the U.S. illegally.
Manufacturing jobs
Trump cherry-picked the data when he claimed in Michigan and North Carolina that “under Kamala Harris, this year alone, the United States has lost nearly 50,000 manufacturing jobs.”
It’s true that manufacturing jobs have declined by 49,000 since January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s also true that 778,000 manufacturing jobs were added in the three years prior to that, going back to the start of Biden’s presidency.
As we wrote, the trend for manufacturing jobs under both Presidents Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth after an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.
Price Increases
At multiple events, Trump misleadingly claimed that the typical family’s costs have increased by tens of thousands of dollars under Harris. For example, in Greenville, he said, “Kamala’s inflation has already cost the typical family over $30,000 in higher prices.”
According to a state inflation tracker produced by the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee, as of September, average household costs in the United States have risen by about $30,000 since January 2021. The estimate is based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data for state-level personal consumption expenditures, including food, shelter, energy and transportation.
But some economists have said that ignores the fact that real incomes have risen as well, minimizing the increase in prices. In an email, Gary Burtless, senior fellow emeritus in economic studies for the Brookings Institution, made the point to us that the BEA’s seasonally adjusted estimate of real disposable personal income, in 2017 dollars, is currently higher than it was at the end of Trump’s presidency. “[T]hese numbers show that Americans’ real (inflation-adjusted) after-tax incomes have been higher in the Biden Administration than they were at the close of the Trump Administration,” he said.
In addition, in July, the Treasury Department updated a report on “The Purchasing Power of American Households” that said, based on new earnings and consumer price data, “We find that in the year ending in the second quarter of 2024, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, plus an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year.”
Car Sales
In Detroit, Trump claimed: “U.S. car sales are down 38% since I left office.” Passenger cars have declined since 2020, although not as much as Trump claimed. Trump also ignores the rise in domestic light-weight trucks, including popular minivans and sport utility vehicles, or SUVs.
Average monthly retail sales of domestic passenger cars went down by 20.6% from 2020, Trump’s last year in office, to the first nine months of 2024, while sales of domestic light-weight trucks went up by 15.5%.
Retail sales of domestic cars generally have been on a downward trajectory for many years. Sales declined by 50.3% during Trump’s term, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (The figures on “domestic” cars include those assembled in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.) Meanwhile, sales of domestic light-weight trucks have been increasing. Those sales went up by 2.1% under Trump.
We can get approximately to Trump’s 38% figure by discounting 2020 entirely, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when sales of both cars and trucks went down. Measuring from 2019 to 2024, sales of domestic cars declined by 42.7%, but they also went down by 31.1% during Trump’s term through 2019.
Light-weight truck sales went up by 14% under Trump up until 2019, and they climbed another 3.4% since then.
Sales of all cars and light trucks in the U.S., domestic or foreign, declined under Trump and have gone up a bit under Biden. Sales totaled 15.5 million in 2023, up from 14.5 million in 2020 — but down from nearly 17 million in 2019. This year’s figures so far indicate a slight increase from 2023.
Mortgage Rates
As he does when he compares other statistics under his administration and Biden’s — see gas prices, below — Trump cherry-picks and exaggerates when it comes to mortgage interest rates.
In Lancaster and Greensboro, Trump wrongly claimed “when I was president, interest was 2.2%. Now it’s 10% and you can’t get any money, so it’s much higher than 10%.”
According to the Federal Reserve’s 30-year fixed rate mortgage average in the U.S., the rate hit a weekly low of 2.65% the first week of Jan. 7, 2021. That’s the lowest weekly rate in the Federal Reserve’s chart going back to 1971. Two weeks later, it was 2.77% in Trump’s last week in office. (The average rate during Trump’s presidency was 3.87%.)
Mortgage rates rose dramatically in 2022 and 2023, reaching a weekly peak of 7.79% in October 2023 (so, well short of 10%). The average rate was down to 6.44% for the week ending Oct. 17.
Immigration
Misleading Immigration Chart
At all of his rallies, Trump displayed a misleadingly labeled chart on illegal border crossings. Trump referred to the chart as “My all-time favorite graph,” because he had turned to gesture to it at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear.
The data in the chart is accurate, but some of the labeling is not.
“See that arrow on the bottom?” Trump said in Lancaster. “That arrow was my final day in office, and we had the lowest illegal immigration that we have had in the recorded history of our country,”
As we wrote in April when Trump began referring to the chart at rallies, the arrow on the chart that purports to point to when “Trump leaves office” actually points to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic.
They rose every month after that. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled and were higher than the month he took office.
In fact, apprehensions during the last three full months of Trump’s presidency were about 24.4% higher than the last three months under Biden, ending in September. The total number of apprehensions was also higher during Trump’s presidency than either of President Barack Obama’s four-year terms.
Apprehensions went up substantially under the Biden administration, but have dropped in recent months after Biden implemented new emergency policies to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally once apprehensions reach a certain level.
Emptying Jails/Mental Institutions
As he has in virtually every public speech over the past couple of years, Trump made the unsupported claim in all of his appearances we reviewed that other countries, such as Venezuela and Congo, are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.
In Greensboro, Trump called the U.S. a “dumping ground for the whole world to put their criminals into.”
Immigration experts told us there’s simply no evidence for that. One expert said Trump’s claim appeared to be “a total fabrication.” Trump hasn’t provided any credible support for it.
In Lancaster, Trump repeatedly singled out Venezuela, where, he said, “they opened up their prisons and they allowed the people to come out.” In his Oct. 18 Auburn Hills roundtable event, Trump added this as evidence: “Their crime is down 72% in Venezuela.”
As we have written, reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.
He said the drop in crime is partly due to worsening economic and living conditions, which have caused nearly 8 million people to leave the country since 2014. The vast majority have settled in nearby South American countries.
False Convicted Murderers Claim
In virtually all of his recent appearances, Trump has offered some variation of the false claim that “under Kamala Harris 13,099 illegal alien convicted murderers are on the loose right now in the United States of America.” That’s the number of noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the vast majority entered before Biden took office. Many are in prison.
Here’s how Trump put it in Miami on Oct. 22: “We have 13,099, exactly. … This is during their three and a half year that they’ve been there. … These are people that were in prison, and they’re murderers. Some are up for the death penalty but some killed far more than one person. … Every one of them has been released into the United States of America.”
ICE’s non-detained docket, as it is known, shows that there were 13,099 noncitizens, who had been convicted of murder, in the U.S. but not in ICE custody, as of July 21, according to a letter sent by the ICE acting director to a Republican congressman on Sept. 25.
But as we wrote last month, the “vast majority” of these noncitizens — not just those who entered the country illegally — came to the United States prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” as the Department of Homeland Security said.
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” DHS said in a statement. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
Springfield, Ohio
In Lancaster, Trump said, “In one town in Ohio, a town of — think of this, a town of 52,000 people, they put 32,000 illegal migrants in this town, right? 32,000 illegal migrants into a 52,000-people town.”
There are several things wrong in Trump’s claim. First, he inflates the number of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. As we have written, Mayor Rob Rue put the city’s total immigrant population at between 12,000 and 15,000, which is also on the city’s FAQ page.
Also, no one “put” the mostly Haitian immigrants in Springfield. On its website, the city says, “No government entity is responsible for the influx of Haitians into Clark County. Once a person with Temporary Protected Status enters the country, they are free to locate wherever they choose.”
The influx of immigrants helped solve a labor shortage, the Wall Street Journal reported, but also strained the city’s services. In early September, Gov. Mike DeWine announced that the state would provide state troopers to help with traffic control and enforcement in Springfield and $2.5 million to help the city expand primary health care for its residents.
Finally, while Trump called them “illegal immigrants,” a city commissioner told us that “most of the Haitians living in Springfield do have Federal documents as well that allow them to be here.”
Aurora, Colorado
Trump claimed in multiple appearances that members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) have taken over communities like Aurora, Colorado. Trump’s claims were sparked by a viral video that showed heavily armed men entering an apartment complex in the city. And as we have reported, there is evidence that numerous Tren de Aragua gang members have been arrested trying to illegally cross the border into the U.S. Nonetheless, Aurora’s mayor and police chief say claims like Trump’s about the gang taking over the city are overblown.
“It’s the savage Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua,” Trump said in Detroit. “They were gang members in Venezuela. We let them into our country. By the way, they’re taking over parts of cities all over the place. But in Aurora, Colorado, and communities in all 50 states, this gang is terrorizing law-abiding citizens, including taking over multiple apartment complexes.”
In Lancaster, Trump said of the gang, “They’re taking over like Aurora and in Colorado.”
A press release issued on Sept. 11 by Aurora’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, and other city officials stated, “As for the perception and reality of public safety in Aurora, please understand that issues experienced at a select few properties do not apply to the city as a whole or large portions of it. TdA has not ‘taken over’ the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. Again, TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months.”
To that point, they wrote, the Aurora Police Department had “linked 10 people to TdA and has arrested eight of those people. Two of the eight individuals who were taken into custody were involved in a July shooting at one of the specific properties in the city that have experienced issues with TdA activity. In line with these arrests, we can also now confirm that criminal activity, including TdA issues, had significantly affected those properties.”
In August, the Aurora Police Department announced that while it considered TdA’s criminal activity in Aurora to be “isolated,” a regional task force was formed to address the gang’s growing criminal activities.
Nonetheless, Coffman and the police chief say the problems in Aurora are being overblown for political purposes.
“It’s a political environment right now going into the election,” Coffman said at a town hall on Oct. 26. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem. There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. … And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”
“Is there a problem now? … I don’t believe there is,” Coffman said.
“We did have a problem, there’s no question about it,” Coffman said. “There was a problem, but there was a law enforcement response to that problem. And I think there are are those who would like to say we have a problem and run that narrative all the way through the election.”
Police Chief Todd Chamberlain echoed that sentiment.
“This city is not overrun by TdA,” Chamberlain said at the town hall meeting. “This city is not controlled by TdA. I’m going to stand up in front of you right now and say that is an incredibly false narrative. It is a narrative that is not validated or backed up by any statistics, any data, any information.”
Closing the Border
Trump claimed that, without a bill from Congress, he was able to unilaterally “close the border.” He claimed that Harris “could walk into the White House, say ‘Wake Biden up, I want him to sign something’ and all he has to do is say, ‘close the border.’ He doesn’t need a bill.”
Actually, Trump tried that very thing as president — to bar migrants caught crossing into the U.S. illegally from pursuing asylum — and the courts blocked him.
In November 2018, as reports circulated about a “caravan” of migrants from Central America making their way through Mexico en route to the U.S. border, Trump issued a proclamation barring the entry of migrants unless they entered at ports of entry. The same day, the administration issued new regulations making those who entered the U.S. illegally between ports of entry ineligible for asylum.
A federal District Court judge in California temporarily halted Trump’s effort, after concluding that barring migrants who enter outside of designated ports of entry from seeking asylum violated federal immigration law, international law and “the expressed intent of Congress.”
Ultimately, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but its motion to stay the District Court ruling blocking enforcement of the policy was denied.
A little over a year later, as the pandemic hit, Trump invoked Title 42, a public health law that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally, even those who sought asylum. That proclamation was also being challenged in court and was heading toward the Supreme Court when the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended, and Biden lifted Title 42 in May 2023.
Immigration law experts told us the bipartisan Senate border bill Trump helped to kill would have granted the authority Trump talked about, in emergency situations.
In June, Biden enacted new measures to restrict asylum eligibility for those apprehended while trying to enter the U.S. illegally across the southern border. The order, as the Department of Homeland Security explained, “generally restricts asylum eligibility” when the number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally reaches a daily average of 2,500 encounters or more for seven straight days. That provision has contributed to a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings ever since.
A number of immigrant rights groups are challenging Biden’s emergency border measures in court.
Inflating Illegal Immigration Numbers
Trump repeatedly inflated the number of immigrants who crossed into the country illegally during the Biden administration.
“Twenty-one million people came in under their rule,” he said in Detroit. He added in Latrobe the following day, “What they’ve done to our country is unbelievable, allowing more than 21 million people into our country.”
As we have written, that’s double the total number of people caught trying to enter the country illegally (7.1 million, which includes repeat attempts), those who came to legal ports of entry without authorization to enter (1.2 million), and the estimated number who evaded capture (2 million). Comprehensive DHS data on the initial processing of these encounters shows that 2.9 million were removed by CBP and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or given other classifications, such as parole.
Opposition to Bipartisan Border Bill
In a bit of revisionist history, Trump mocked Democrats for saying he told senators to vote against the bipartisan border bill that failed in late January. “Ted, did I ever tell you not to sign that bill?” Trump said in Greenville, gesturing to North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd. “No, right? I didn’t tell anybody.” In Greensboro, Trump claimed that “the truth is I had nothing to do with” killing the bill.
Trump made it well known at the time that he opposed the bill, calling it “a great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party” and saying “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat” would vote for the bill.
In a Fox News interview in April, Republican Sen. James Lankford, one of the architects of the bill, said it was “painful” to watch as it “got stirred up in all the presidential politics, and several of my colleagues started looking for ways — after President Trump said, ‘Don’t fix anything during the presidential election. It’s the single biggest issue during the election. Don’t resolve this. We’ll resolve it next year.’ — Quite a few of my colleagues backed up, looked for a reason to shoot against it and then walked away.”
“Former President Trump has indicated to senators that he does not want us to solve the problem at the border,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said in late January. “He wants to lay the blame at the border at Biden.”
Indeed, in a speech in Las Vegas on Jan. 27, Trump seemed happy to take credit for killing the bill.
“I noticed a lot of the senators, a lot of the senators are trying to say respectfully, they’re blaming it on me,” Trump said of the death of the bill. “I said, ‘That’s okay. Please blame it on me, please,’ because they were getting ready to pass a very bad bill.”
Border Bill Misinformation
In Miami, Trump wrongly said of the Senate bipartisan border bill, “They keep bringing up a phony bill, that bill. The bill was horrible, 2 million people are allowed in.”
As we wrote earlier this year, much of the controversy centered on a section of the bill that would have provided emergency authority to the administration to “summarily remove” people who cross into the U.S. illegally between ports of entry, even if they are seeking asylum. Trump and other Republicans claimed the bill would have permitted up to 5,000 illegal entries per day — or 1,825,000 per year, which Trump rounded up to 2 million. That’s not accurate.
We’ll let Lankford, one of the architects of the bill and one of the most conservative members of the Senate, explain.
“This common misnomer of the 5,000 a day — some of my [Republican] colleagues have mentioned this — that’s actually factually not true,” Lankford said in a Fox News interview in April. “The way the bill was set up is the very first person that came across would have been detained, quickly screened and deported. So it was a very rapid turnaround from the very first person that came across the border. But it also did set up an extreme measure that if we had these large caravans and other folks that come in and we get 5,000, it takes away due process when you get to that number and they’re just detained and deported. So the first person detained, screened quickly and deported. If you get to 5,000 they’re just detained and deported. But it doesn’t wait till 5,000 to do something. It did it at the very first moment. That was the great misnomer.”
Migrants and Medicare, Social Security
In Latrobe, while talking about illegal immigration, Trump falsely claimed that “Kamala’s invasion is also bankrupting Medicare and Social Security.”
The fact that the trust funds for the Medicare and Social Security programs are financially unstable is not because of illegal immigration. People in the country illegally are generally not eligible to receive benefits through either entitlement program. However, millions of those individuals contribute to those programs anyway by paying payroll taxes on their earned wages.
Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors reduced immigration, reported in 2023, “Illegal immigration improves the finances of Social Security and Medicare for a simple reason: Although illegal immigrants are generally not eligible to collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, many still pay taxes into the system. These taxes function as free contributions to the trust funds, as long as the illegal immigrants remain ineligible for benefits.”
If people in the country illegally were granted amnesty, allowing them to permanently live in the U.S., and made eligible for benefits, they would become a net drain on the programs, the CIS said, because they would receive more in benefits than the pay in taxes. On her campaign website, Harris says she supports “an earned pathway to citizenship” for people illegally in the country, but she has not detailed how that would work. It’s also not clear that Congress would support such a plan.
Human Trafficking
Trump claimed that human trafficking was 10 times, 12 times, or 15 or 16 times higher than the level it was when he left office. We found no evidence for such figures, and his campaign didn’t provide any evidence.
In Greenville, Trump claimed that his administration had “stopped” human trafficking, saying “we would check in every car, every trunk in every car where they put a lot of them,” but now the number was up “10 times more.” At the Detroit rally, he said the day he left office, “They had human trafficking at a level, the lowest level. Now it’s about 12 times higher.” And at the Miami event, he said that trafficking was up “15 or 16 times” the level of four years ago, again saying, “they put them mostly in trunks of cars.” Trump made those comments when talking about illegal immigration at the southern border.
Amy Farrell, director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, researches human trafficking and the criminal justice system. She told us she had “no idea” where Trump’s figures were coming from. There’s “no good measure of the phenomenon,” she explained.
We can look at prosecutions, arrests and other response measures. However, the data we have on arrests or prosecutions of human trafficking don’t show us what’s happening at the border. Farrell said most federally prosecuted sex trafficking cases, and those identified locally, are domestic cases, not cases involving foreign nationals. Sex trafficking cases have been steadily rising over a decade or so, due to more investigation and prosecution of human trafficking, she said.
Farrell also said Trump’s description of stopping trafficking by finding victims in the trunks of cars at the border “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” as that’s not what typically happens. “We very rarely interdict people who are victims of trafficking at the border,” she said. People can illegally cross the border and later be exploited by nefarious people.
In 2019, when we looked into Trump’s claims tying illegal immigration to human trafficking, experts told us that typically the cases they deal with concerning foreign nationals are people brought through legal ports of entry, such as airports and land border control points.
Applications for T nonimmigrant status, known as the T visa, have increased significantly, but nowhere near the levels Trump cited. The T visa is for noncitizen victims who are in the U.S. or at a legal port of entry and have assisted authorities, when requested, with the investigation or prosecution of trafficking crimes. The visa is granted for up to four years, and approvals are capped at 5,000 per year, a figure that has never been reached.
The numbers are tricky, because it takes more than a year on average for applications for be adjudicated, so approvals for one year represent mostly applications that had been received in prior years. Approvals in fiscal year 2023 — 2,181 — were only 9% higher than in fiscal 2020. Applications, however, tripled from 2,150 in 2020 to 8,598 in 2023.
Martina Vandenberg, founder and president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, referred us to data available in State Department reports on investigations opened by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security. There were 1,282 investigations by DHS in fiscal year 2023, a 35% increase from the number in fiscal 2020. The DOJ investigations were nearly the same in those years: 664 and 663. There was about a 72% increase in new clients served by DOJ-funded programs, but funding for those programs also increased.
Figures from the National Human Trafficking Hotline don’t indicate a 10-fold or more increase in trafficking, or any measurable increase for that matter. The hotline has figures on the “signals” it receives, meaning calls, texts and other tips on trafficking instances, and the number of signals that come from victims or survivors of trafficking. Those numbers were actually lower in 2023 than they were in 2020, though the figures fluctuate and we don’t think much should be read into that.
The increase in immigration flows and apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border overall under the Biden administration could indicate that more people are at risk of trafficking. The most recent State Department report said: “Regional instability combined with U.S. asylum policies and processes resulting in large numbers of migrants and asylum-seekers along the southern border contributes to increased risks of human trafficking by establishing high concentrations of vulnerable populations, including many unaccompanied migrant children.”
Migrant Children ‘Missing’
“Do you know that … 325,000 children are dead or missing under their [watch]. They came across the border or they didn’t,” Trump said at the town hall in Lancaster, distorting a report from DHS. “They’re all dead, missing, or into sex slavery or slavery.” Trump repeated the talking point in Miami, saying, “It’s actually 325,000 children are missing, sex slaves, slaves — or dead.”
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said about that many unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. The report did not say they were “missing.”
The report said that more than 32,000 minors did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, which includes time during the Trump and Biden administrations. In addition, as of May 2024, ICE had not issued a Notice to Appear in court to more than 291,000 minors, the report said. Such notices are sent at the start of removal proceedings.
“By not issuing NTAs to all UCs [unaccompanied children], ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety,” the report said. “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
In a response letter included as an appendix to the report, ICE indicated that it may delay sending notices for various reasons, including if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Noncitizens and ‘Welfare’
In Greensboro, Trump claimed that “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense.” Meanwhile, in Greenville, he promised that he “will ban all welfare and federal benefits for illegals” if elected.
But, under a 1996 federal law, people in the U.S. illegally are already broadly disqualified from collecting federal benefits from government programs, with only limited exceptions.
As the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that researches immigration issues, said in an October explainer: “Noncitizens — a term that covers immigrants of all statuses except for naturalized citizens — are generally ineligible for federally funded programs including the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) if they are not refugees or in a refugee-like status and have not spent five years with a green card (or other such status). Children can access SNAP during their first five years on a green card, and in some states that have elected to supplement federal coverage with their own resources, children and pregnant women can access Medicaid and/or CHIP during their first five years as legal permanent residents.”
Other than the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, which provides nutrition and health services for pregnant and postpartum women and young children, the policy institute said, “unauthorized immigrants are generally ineligible for federally funded supports except for emergency Medicaid, primary and preventive health care at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), free/reduced school lunch, and short-term access to shelters and soup kitchens in emergency situations.”
Trump’s Wall
Trump wrongly said he built 571 miles of wall. It was 458 miles and most of it, 373 miles, was replacement barriers for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated, according to a January 2021 Customs and Border Protection status report. Just 52 miles of it was added in places where there was no wall before.
Trump also falsely said he “built much more than I said I was going to build.”
The border is significantly more robust than when Trump took office, but including barriers that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers, covering about 36% of the total southwest border. That is far less than the 1,000-mile-long wall that Trump promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign.
Trump went on to claim that “we had the safest border in the history of our country.” As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year of Obama’s term.
CBP One App
In Latrobe, Trump misrepresented the CBP One App, which he said the Biden administration created “for the criminal cartels to call up” and ask “where do I dispose of my illegal migrants and they tell you where to drop them off.” That’s not the app’s purpose.
The CBP One app was launched in January 2023 for migrants in Mexico who want to make an appointment to request asylum or parole at a legal port of entry in the U.S. DHS says the process is “safer, humane, and more orderly” than processing between ports of entry, where migrants illegally cross the border and wait to be apprehended by border officials.
To get an appointment, migrants must submit information about themselves, including contact information and a photo. At the appointment, they are screened and could be subject to expedited removal, but the majority are released into the U.S. with a notice to appear in immigration court, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that researches immigration issues, told us when we wrote about immigration in February.
CBP says, through September, more than 852,000 people have made appointments with the app.
Harris on ICE
Trump wrongly claimed “Kamala Harris vowed to abolish ICE. … And she wants to get rid of them. She wants to get rid of ICE.”
While serving as a senator in June 2018, Harris was critical of the way ICE operated during the Trump administration — such as its enforcement of Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents who were detained for entering the U.S. illegally. Harris said the government should “critically reexamine” ICE’s role, adding that might mean “starting from scratch.”
In a subsequent interview in July 2019, Harris was asked if she would get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
“I would not,” Harris said. “We need to restructure and reform it. … We need to deal with it and fix it, but I do not believe in getting rid of it.” Several times, Harris added, “I believe in border security.”
Harris called for reexamining the way ICE was functioning under the Trump administration, and she talked about the possibility of “starting from scratch.” But she never called for abolishing the agency and its functions altogether.
Border Czar
Trump repeated the false claim that Harris was the “border czar” in charge of illegal immigration at the U.S. border with Mexico.
“She doesn’t want to be called border czar. But you know what? I don’t care,” Trump said in Latrobe. Biden “put her in charge of the border,” he said.
As we’ve written, Biden asked Harris in March 2021 to lead federal efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.
Harris’ responsibility did not include security at the southern border, as the “border czar” title implies. That’s the job of DHS, which has been led by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas since February 2021.
Decriminalizing Border Crossings
A video played at several Trump rallies includes a quote from Harris saying, “I am in favor of saying that we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented and cross the border as criminals.”
That comes from a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View.” Harris went on to say, “I would not make it a crime punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue, but not a criminal enforcement issue.”
That was her position in 2019. But Harris has made it clear that is no longer her position.
“I do not believe in decriminalizing border crossings and I’ve not done that as vice president,” Harris said in an interview on Fox News on Oct. 17. ”I will not do that as president.”
Energy
Energy Price Promise
In multiple rallies, Trump has made the dubious pledge that, if elected, he would “cut your energy prices in half within 12 months” of taking office by increasing energy production. “We will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in Detroit. “I will cut your energy prices in half within 12 months. … That’s going to bring everything down.” Experts we interviewed didn’t see a way for Trump to cut energy bills by that much.
As we’ve written, economists and energy experts said increasing the domestic supply of oil and natural gas — if worldwide demand stayed constant — could lower prices, at least somewhat or for a short period of time. But ramping up the supply is a decision oil and gas companies have to make, and they wouldn’t be inclined to produce more for a lower price. And even if they could be incentivized to produce more oil and gas for less in profit, international producers would react to the increased U.S. supply by pulling back on their production.
Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us: “My net-net is that Trump would not be able to deliver on this promise unless the global economy craters, the US cuts itself off from global energy markets, and US producers are convinced to produce at price levels that would not sustain operations.”
Energy Independence
As he often does, Trump in Greenville and at other rallies misleadingly contrasted his administration with Biden and Harris’ saying, “Four years ago, we were energy independent. Can you believe it? … Now we’re buying tar from Venezuela.” But by Trump’s definition, the country remains energy independent under the Biden-Harris administration.
What Trump likely means is that the U.S. either produced more energy than it consumed, or exported more energy than it imported. But as we’ve written, the U.S. never stopped importing sources of energy, including crude oil, from other countries during Trump’s administration.
During Trump’s presidency, after years trending in that direction, the U.S. did hit a tipping point where exports of primary energy exceeded energy imports from foreign sources in 2019 — the first time that had happened since 1952, according to the Energy Information Administration. It happened again in 2020.
But contrary to Trump’s suggestion, the U.S., during Biden’s presidency, continues to export more energy, including petroleum, than it imports, and it produces more energy than it consumes. Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas under Biden.
Gas Price Comparison
“Our energy was incredible,” Trump said in Greenville. “We had it down to $1.87 a gallon, and it went up to five and a half dollars.” He’s cherry-picking on the front end and exaggerating on the back end.
Gasoline prices did dip to $1.87 in May 2020 when Trump was president, but that was during the pandemic when gasoline usage plummeted. Prices were the lowest in Trump’s presidency that month and the month before, according to the EIA. Prices rose to $2.33 per gallon in January 2021, when Trump left office. That’s almost exactly the price of gasoline when Trump took office in January 2017, $2.35.
Under Biden, the price of gas rose to a peak of $4.93 in June 2022, mostly as a result of post-pandemic global supply issues and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has dropped since, and was $3.14 this month. Importantly, as we have written numerous times, U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline.
Crude Oil Reserves
In his Greensboro remarks, Trump said that during his administration drilling would increase because “we have more liquid gold than anybody in the world.” That’s not accurate.
The U.S. already produces more crude oil than any other country. But it does not have more proven crude oil reserves than any other country – a false claim that Trump regularly makes.
The EIA says proved reserves “are the estimated quantities of all liquids defined as crude oil, which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions.”
As of 2023, Venezuela, with approximately 303 billion barrels, had the largest estimated proven crude oil reserves, according to the EIA’s February 2024 country analysis brief on Venezuela, which cited 2023 data from the Oil & Gas Journal. Russia and Saudi Arabia are two of the seven other countries ahead of the U.S, which had fewer than 100 billion barrels and ranked ninth.
Harris on Fracking
“She wants to ban fracking,” Trump said in Detroit, adding in Pennsylvania, “you know she’s going to ban fracking, right? 100%.”
When she was a candidate in the 2020 race for president, Harris said that she was opposed to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. During a September 2019 CNN town hall, Harris was asked by a climate activist if she would commit to a federal ban on fracking because of environmental concerns for local communities. Harris answered, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, so yes.”
Harris has since changed her position. In an Aug. 29 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris said, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
In Miami, Trump repeated his false claim that the Biden administration “spent $9 billion for eight charging stations” for electric vehicles, adding that “if you did the whole country, you would have spent $30 trillion.”
Trump appears to be distorting media articles from earlier this year on the slow progress at that point of building charging stations with $7.5 billion approved by Congress to help construct a network of EV chargers across the country over five years. It’s enough money to help build thousands of charging stations and more than 30,000 individual charging ports, experts said.
The new charging stations are being built with the federal money awarded to states, as well as private funding, and not all of the $7.5 billion has been awarded yet.
In mid-August, when we wrote about this claim, the Federal Highway Administration told us the funding had helped build 15 charging stations that had 61 charging ports, and another 14,900 ports were in progress.
As for Trump’s claim that it would cost $30 trillion to build EV stations across the country, that’s a significant inflation of his already false claims this summer that it would cost $5 trillion or $10 trillion. Pete Gould, a policy expert in transportation and a lobbyist for the EV and charging industry, told E&E News that Trump’s multitrillion figures “sound too ridiculous to be true … because they aren’t true.”
At the Miami event, Trump went on to make the false claim that EV semi-trucks would “weigh two and a half” times the weight of regular gasoline or diesel trucks and, therefore, “you’d have to rebuild every bridge in the United States.” The Washington Post Fact Checker called that claim “nonsense,” writing that there’s a legal weight limit for all semi-trucks, EV or otherwise, of 80,000 pounds, a weight that bridges are constructed to withstand.
More on EVs
In Detroit and Greenville, Trump said, if elected, he “will terminate Kamala’s insane electric vehicle mandate.” But there is no such EV mandate.
In March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its finalized fuel efficiency standards for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles. The new standards are for model years 2027 through 2032 and will remain in place thereafter unless the rules are rescinded or new ones are adopted.
Those Biden administration regulations, which aim to reduce pollution from tailpipe emissions, could greatly increase the number of electric vehicles sold in the U.S. But the regulations do not mean that U.S. residents will only be allowed to buy and drive EVs. Policy experts previously told us that carmakers would have flexibility in how they meet the new federal standards, including by making gas-powered vehicles, or those with internal combustion engines, more efficient.
Sea Level Rise
Trump cast doubt on climate change by telling his Greensboro audience that “nuclear weapons and having stupid people running our country” is “the real global warming, not this nonsense of the ocean’s going to rise over the next 400 years by one-eighth of an inch, and we’re going to be wiped out.”
But the claim that the ocean will rise by less than an inch over four centuries is false. As we’ve reported, the current rate of sea level rise is already a little more than one-eighth of an inch annually. According to the latest data from NASA, the current rate of global sea level rise is 4.2 millimeters, or 0.17 inches, per year.
Taxes
80% Tax Rate Falsehood
Harris “wants to raise your taxes to 70% or 80%,” Trump falsely said in Lancaster.
At rallies, Trump also has been playing a video montage that includes a clip of Megan McCain on ABC’s “The View” saying, “Everything from a 70 to 80% tax rate,” followed by Harris saying, “I think that’s fantastic.”
Harris didn’t endorse that top federal tax rate. And the video is clipped in a very misleading way.
Trump’s claim is also based on that January 2019 interview of Harris on “The View,” and here’s how it actually played out: McCain asked Harris if she believed that “socialist left” policies proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, such as a “70% to 80% tax rate,” could splinter the Democratic Party.
“No.” Harris said. “I think she is challenging the status quo. I think that’s fantastic.”
“I think that she is introducing bold ideas that should be discussed,” Harris said. “And I think it’s good for the party, and frankly I think it’s good for the country. Let’s look at the bold ideas and I’m eager that we have those discussions. And when we are able to defend the status quo, then do it. And if there’s not merit to that, then let’s explore new ideas.”
At the time, Ocasio-Cortez had floated increasing the top income tax rate to 70% or more — but only for U.S. residents making at least $10 million annually. But Harris never said she supported that hypothetical policy.
While running for president in 2019, Harris proposed raising the top income tax rate on the top 1% of earners back to 39.6%. This election, she has similarly proposed increasing the top rate back to 39.6% for individuals earning more than $400,000 or married couples making more than $450,000. Trump reduced the top rate to 37% in 2017, when he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Video Distorts Harris’ Tax Comments
At several rallies, Trump directed the audience’s attention to a video of an ad that we fact-checked in early October. We concluded it was a “classic example of how political ads mislead viewers by using out-of-context quotes.”
The ad includes a truncated quote from the New York Times saying Harris “is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” The rest of that sentence in the Times said: “on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.” The ad also features a clip of Harris saying, “Taxes are going to have to go up.” In the July 2019 event, Harris actually said, “Estate taxes are going to have to go up for the richest Americans.”
A narrator in the video says, “Kamala’s plan will raise families’ taxes by nearly $2,600 a year,” citing the Tax Foundation on May 7. As we wrote, “That’s not what the Tax Foundation said.”
Instead, the Tax Foundation article analyzed the impact on taxpayers if the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire at the end of 2025, as scheduled. “Without congressional action, most taxpayers will see a notable tax increase relative to current policy in 2026,” the Tax Foundation said.
The video assumes — without explicitly saying so — that Harris’ “plan” is to let all of the individual tax cuts in the 2017 act expire. But while Harris hasn’t detailed how she would handle that expiration, she has said she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans,” as her economic policy book says.
Looking at the entirety of Harris’ proposals — and not including an extension of the TCJA cuts, the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Harris’ tax proposals on Oct. 16 found that her plans generally “would redistribute income from high earners to low earners.”
Misleading Jobs Claim
In Detroit, Trump said Harris’ “proposals are estimated to kill almost a million full-time jobs” and that if he is elected, “You’re going to have jobs coming in like never before.”
Trump is referring to an analysis of Harris’ tax plans from the Tax Foundation, which concluded her policies would lead to 786,000 fewer jobs over 10 years. So Trump’s claim of 1 million is a very healthy rounding up.
By contrast, the Tax Foundation concluded that Trump’s tax proposals would increase employment by 597,000 full-time equivalent jobs (though it estimated Trump’s plans would add more than Harris’ to the country’s budget deficits).
But one of the major wild cards in estimating the impact of Harris’ plans is the uncertainty of how she would handle the expiring individual tax cuts contained in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Harris has not specifically addressed her position on the tax cuts set to expire at the end of 2025, saying only that she supports Biden’s pledge that “when it relates to anybody making less than $400,000 a year, your taxes will not go up.” When we asked the Harris campaign in early October about her position, the campaign pointed us to a line in Harris’ economic policy book that says she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans.”
If that means Harris would allow the tax cuts to expire only for those making more than $400,000, that could impact the Tax Foundation’s estimates for jobs lost under her policies, Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation told us via email. But a lot would depend on how she implemented the cutoffs, York said, and the extent of any tax hikes Harris might propose to offset the loss in revenue.
“Harris has not provided enough specifics on how she would address the expirations for us to be able to model it,” York said.
Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget clearly stated that he supported extending the TCJA tax cuts for people earning less than $400,000, and that he would offset the cost by enacting new taxes on “wealthy people and big corporations” so that the tax extensions would not add to the debt.
“Harris would presumably do something along those lines but has not specified whether that means extending all the expiring provisions, including the offsets that could potentially raise taxes on some of those taxpayers, nor specified what tax increases she would use to pay for that partial extension,” York said. “It is possible that the tax increases used to pay for the extension could offset the economic boost from continuing the tax cuts, but since none of it has been spelled out in detail, we simply don’t know.”
What if Harris simply extended the tax cuts to people making less than $400,000 without any commensurate tax hikes to offset the cost?
“Adding $2 trillion of deficit-financed individual income tax cuts would reduce the projected decline in jobs,” York said.
Some economists have reached different conclusions about the impact of Harris’ and Trump’s policy proposals on jobs.
“Job growth is expected to continue under either Harris or Trump due to underlying secular trends, regardless of their policies,” Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told us via email. “However, if the question is whether their plans would create additional jobs, the answer is no.”
An analysis of the candidates’ tax plans by the Penn Wharton Budget Model projected “a reduction in total hours worked of 0.7% under Harris after 10 years and 0.3% under Trump,” Smetters said.
An analysis of the economic consequences of the Trump and Harris proposals by Moody’s Analytics concluded that there would be more jobs under a Harris administration, if there is a divided Congress.
Corporate Tax Rate
In Detroit, Trump claimed, “So we brought the rate down and you saw this from close to 40% to 21%.” As we wrote recently, while Trump often says he cut the corporate tax rate from 39% to 21%, the federal statutory corporate tax rate was actually 35% prior to the implementation of the TCJA, which lowered the rate to 21%. Trump is including the federal tax plus the average of state and local taxes to get to “close to 40%.” But if those are included, then the current rate is roughly 25.8%, not 21%.
Not the ‘Largest Tax Cut’
Sheer repetition has not made Trump’s claim to have delivered the largest tax cut in American history true.
It is one of Trump’s most enduring claims. But the 2017 tax cuts were not the largest, as we’ve explained many times before. There have been pricier tax laws both as a percentage of gross domestic product and in inflation-adjusted dollars.
In Miami, Trump insisted, “We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.” But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in 2017 that Reagan still holds the modern record for the largest tax cut as a percentage of GDP.
Defense/Military
ISIS
Trump boasted, “I’m the one that defeated ISIS. … And I did it in a matter of weeks. It’s supposed to take five years, seven years.” It took a lot longer than “weeks.”
As we wrote in 2018, a U.S.-led coalition had retaken about 50% of the land controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, prior to Trump taking office on Jan. 20, 2017. In Trump’s first year, the coalition had recaptured nearly all of the remaining land.
But it wasn’t until late March 2019 — more than two years into the Trump presidency — that the 79-member U.S.-led coalition took control of all ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.
Missile Defense Shield
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to build a missile defense system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome to protect the U.S. from attack, as he did again in Detroit and Greenville. But experts told us such a system would not be practical in defending the U.S.
The system used by Israel in defense against its neighboring adversaries “detects, assesses and intercepts a variety of shorter-range targets such as rockets, artillery and mortars,” according to Raytheon, the company that works with Israel on its defense system. “Iron Dome’s Tamir missile knocks down incoming threats launched from ranges” of 2.5 to 43.5 miles.
Stephen Biddle, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that “against the normal threats to U.S. security, the Iron Dome is not a useful system.” Biddle said, “Iron Dome is designed to deal with short-range threats,” not long-range ballistic missiles fired from adversaries such as China, Russia or North Korea. “If the North Koreans launched intercontinental ballistic missiles at the U.S., an Iron Dome would not be able to intercept” the missiles reentering the atmosphere aimed at a target in the U.S., Biddle explained.
Military Deaths in Afghanistan
While speaking in Greensboro about the Biden administration’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, which resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers at the hands of suicide bombers, Trump repeated a false claim that the U.S. “didn’t lose one soldier in 18 months” at the end of Trump’s presidency.
In fact, there were 12 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan in the last six months of 2019 and another 11 killed in 2020, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. Eight of the deaths in the second half of 2019 were in combat and four of the deaths in 2020 were in combat.
Military Spending
As he has often over the years, Trump in Detroit claimed, “I rebuilt our military.” But as we have written, the U.S. under Trump didn’t really spend much more on the military than it did under his predecessor, Obama.
The Defense Department budgets passed under Trump totaled $2.9 trillion. That’s larger, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the $2.7 trillion budgeted in the last four years under Obama, but the budgets in Obama’s first four years were nearly $3.3 trillion.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told PolitiFact Trump’s claim amounts to hyperbole, that the net increase in military spending under Trump was about “$400 billion total compared with earlier expectations.”
“Most weapons are the same as before,” O’Hanlon told PolitiFact. “There is more continuity than change in defense policy from Obama to Trump.”
O’Hanlon told us via email that the state of the military during Trump’s four years in office was “a solid step due to the work of two [secretaries of defense] that he fired! But things were pretty good before him and continued to improve after.”
VA Choice
As he has numerous times in the past, Trump falsely claimed that he got VA Choice approved after “they [had] been trying for 58 years.” As we have written, the bipartisan Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act was signed in 2014 by Obama, giving veterans facing long wait times an option to get care outside the VA system.
“We did Choice,” Trump said in Greensboro. “So if … one of our great heroes had to wait for a doctor, they could go out if they had to wait more than one day. They go out and they get a doctor, we pay the bill,” eliminating the sometimes monthslong delays.
As we said, the Veterans Choice Program was created by legislation in 2014. It garnered a 91-3 vote in the Senate and a 420-5 vote in the House, and came after a scandal over wait times at Veterans Affairs facilities.
When Trump took office, he continued the program, signing legislation to provide funding and to eliminate the expiration date. In June 2018, Trump signed the bipartisan VA MISSION Act, which called for consolidating the Veterans Choice program and other private-care options into a new Veterans Community Care Program.
Bagram Air Base
In Lancaster, Trump repeated the false claim that the U.S. would never have abandoned Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan if he had remained president.
“And we were going to keep the big air base at Bagram because it’s one hour away, spent billions and billions of dollars, just about the biggest, most powerful longest runways in the world,” Trump said. “We gave it to China. They gave it to China. China is now operating. We were one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it up. Would have never happened, all of these things.”
As we’ve written before, in 2020 Trump had reached a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from all bases in Afghanistan. The Doha agreement said the U.S. and coalition forces “will complete the withdrawal of their remaining forces from Afghanistan” by May 1, 2021 — which Biden delayed until Aug. 31, 2021. A State Department statement issued on the day the deal was signed in February 2020 said, “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all forces from remaining bases.”
On July 6, 2021, U.S. forces were pulled out of Bagram, as we’ve written.
Days before the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, Trump said, “We should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China.” But we could find no statements by Trump while he was in office about maintaining an American presence at Bagram. The pact he reached with the Taliban called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all the bases in Afghanistan.
Military Equipment Left in Afghanistan
Trump greatly exaggerated the amount of equipment left to the Taliban after the military withdrawal from Afghanistan — a withdrawal that, again, was initiated by his administration but completed by the Biden administration in August 2021.
“We gave them tens of billions of dollars worth of brand new military equipment that I bought, I bought, and they gave it away to the Taliban,” Trump said in Detroit.
Trump often cites a figure of $85 billion, but that is nearly the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. That wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.
In Detroit, Trump said more vaguely, “tens of billions of dollars,” but that’s still a gross exaggeration. CNN reported in April 2022 that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.
Crime/Guns
Falsehood on Gun Ban
In nearly all of his events, Trump made some version of the claim that Harris will take away people’s guns.
“She pledged to confiscate your guns and endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership,” Trump said in Greenville. “She’s going to do it 100%.”
But Harris has never proposed a federal ban on handguns, although, as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2005, she supported a local ballot measure that would have banned residents from possessing handguns.
Also, she previously called for a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” only. Her campaign told us that she said no longer supports requiring the buyback program she proposed during her 2020 presidential campaign.
During a Sept. 17 event with the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris said, “I am a gun owner, and Tim Walz is a gun owner, and we’re not trying to take anybody’s guns away from them. But we do need an assault weapons ban.”
Nonviolent Crimes in California
In Detroit and Greensboro, Trump distorted the facts when he claimed that Harris, as the attorney general of California, “redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon and rape of an unconscious person as a totally nonviolent crime.”
As we’ve written, Harris did no such thing. The California penal code specifies 23 crimes as a “violent felony,” saying they “merit special consideration when imposing a sentence to display society’s condemnation for these extraordinary crimes of violence against the person.” The list includes sexual abuse of a child, rape and “great bodily injury,” as violations of specific laws. Not everything that would be considered violent is on the list, which makes any felonies not specified technically “nonviolent.”
Nationwide Crime
Trump falsely insisted in Lancaster, despite FBI crime data to the contrary, “We had the worst crime that we have ever had in the last year.” In that same speech, as well as in Greensboro, Trump claimed crime is up 45% and that FBI data only showed crime going down because “they didn’t report certain little areas of the country like the worst areas in the country for crime.”
Crime statistics compiled by the FBI and other sources show an increase in violent crime, notably murders, in 2020 — Trump’s last year in office — and a decline since. The FBI recently revised its 2021 and 2022 figures, but that doesn’t change that overall trend. (We detailed the revisions in our recent story “Crime Stats Still Show a Decline Since 2020.” Part of the reason for the size of the revision was the switch to a new reporting system, and low participation rates in the first year of the switch. But contrary to Trump’s claim, the participation rates for the most recent years is much higher.)
The number and rate per 100,000 population for violent crime overall, as well as for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, all went down from 2020 to 2023, according to the FBI-compiled statistics. The violent crime rate dropped by 22.5 points and the murder rate declined by 0.9 points. The number of murders decreased by 14.5%. (For these figures, see the Crime in the United States Annual Reports here and download the CIUS Estimations file for 2023. See Table 1.)
As we have reported, other sources of crime stats show the same trend. The Major Cities Chiefs Association reports, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show a 9.1% decrease in the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities from 2020 to 2023, and a further decline for the first half of 2024. As of early this month, AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, reported a 17.9% decrease in murders in more than 250 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same points in 2023.
As for Trump’s claim that crime last year was the worst that it has ever been — not only is it slightly lower than 2020, it is far, far lower than it was in the 1990s.
Trump has criticized the FBI data as “fake” — it is not — and often instead cites data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks a sample of people if they have been the victim of various crimes. (The FBI statistics are based on crimes reported to state and local law enforcement.)
The NCVS indicates that violent crimes dropped a bit between 2022 and 2023. The number of crimes was about 41% higher between 2020 and 2023 — which is perhaps where Trump derived his figure — but the number of violent crimes in 2023 was nearly identical to the number in 2018. The survey also has its own limitations, and it doesn’t measure murder, as we’ve explained.
‘Defund the Police’
In multiple appearances, Trump falsely claimed that Harris “was an original creator of the defund the police movement,” adding “and anybody who wants to defund the police even for a day or a week is not worthy of being president of the United States.” In other speeches, Trump described Harris as “one of the leaders” of the defund the police movement.
As we have written, there is no agreed upon definition for the term “defund the police.” Some critics of the police, who believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement, really do want to abolish police forces and replace them with other community safety entities. Others advocate shifting some money and functions away from police departments to social service agencies.
In a series of interviews in mid-June 2020, Harris carefully drew out her position on the defund the police movement that arose in the wake of protests and riots in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed after a white police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
In her interviews, Harris talked about “reimagining public safety and how we achieve it.” The answer, she said, is not “more police on the streets” but rather investing more in struggling communities — in things such as education, job creation, affordable housing and health care — as a way to make them safer. She never agreed that that meant slashing or eliminating police budgets.
“We have to stop militarization of police,” Harris said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on June 9, 2020. “But that doesn’t mean we get rid of police. Of course not. We have to be practical about this.”
In that same interview, however, she said she applauded then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposal to reallocate about $150 million from policing to health and youth initiatives. And she again stressed the need to “invest in communities” to make them healthy and safer.
Miscellaneous
FEMA
While talking about Hurricane Helene in Greensboro, Trump falsely claimed that Harris spent federal funding intended for disaster relief “to provide shelter and benefits to illegal aliens.”
“You know, they’re going to probably have to call an emergency meeting, a special session of Congress, because the illegal migrants, many of them killers, many of them drug dealers, many of them released from prison, have taken the money,” Trump said. “Money that they were supposed to spend in North Carolina and Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina. The money was supposed to be spent in those states and they don’t have the money now.”
As we’ve written, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that no funds intended for hurricane recovery have been diverted to programs that respond to illegal immigration. Money for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is appropriated by Congress separately from money that lawmakers also authorize for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which makes payments to state and local entities that provide housing and other services to migrants processed and released by DHS. FEMA helps administer the grants for the Shelter and Services Program, but the funds come from the budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a different agency.
FEMA said it has “enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs,” but may need additional federal funding in the future.
Transgender Surgeries
In Miami, Trump falsely claimed that Harris “was in favor of sex changes for prisoners at their will, paid for by the government.” Harris expressed support in a 2019 candidate questionnaire for “medically necessary” gender-affirming care, including surgical care, for federal prisoners and detainees — not operations at will. Legal rulings have found the government is obligated to provide such medically necessary care.
Trump similarly said in Greenville that Harris “called for free sex changes for illegal aliens in detention. … They’re in detention, they want to have the operation,” suggesting migrants in detention could have the operation if they wanted it.
As we’ve explained, the Constitution obligates the government to provide necessary medical care for prisoners. Two federal transgender prisoners have received gender-affirming surgery, after suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The surgeries occurred during the Biden administration. But as the New York Times recently reported, a 2018 BOP budget memo — issued during Trump’s administration — indicated that the agency considered the government “obligated to pay for a prisoner’s ‘surgery’ if it was deemed medically necessary.”
The memo said: “Medical care may include pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., cross-gender hormone therapy), hair removal and surgery (if individualized assessment indicates surgical intervention is applicable).” The Times said that federal inmates received gender-affirming hormone therapy during the Trump administration.
In Miami, Trump also claimed that Harris had changed her position. “And now, she says, ‘No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.’” But that’s not what she said. In an Oct. 16 Fox News interview, she said she would “follow the law.”
We didn’t find any record of immigrant detainees having received these surgeries. Time spent in ICE custody is typically shorter than two months. Federal inmates have a one-year waiting period before they can seek gender-affirming surgery.
Right to Try
In Lancaster, Trump touted the Right to Try Act that he signed into law in 2018, saying: “And nobody really wanted to do it, but we did it. I forced it on them. We have saved thousands and thousands of lives.” But there is no evidence that the program that allows patients to request access to experimental medical products has led to “thousands and thousands of lives” being saved.
Before Trump made the Right to Try legislation law, the Food and Drug Administration already approved applications from patients seeking access to investigational drugs through the agency’s “expanded access” program, which oversees the use of such medicines for patients who are not able to participate in clinical trials. The new law circumvents the FDA and gives terminally ill patients access to unapproved drugs more quickly than through the FDA’s expanded access program.
While the FDA has reported that 16 medical products were used under Right to Try between 2018 and 2023, the agency has not said how many patients have been treated with those products.
“Moreover, the number of people treated is far less important than the number helped,” wrote Alison Bateman-House, assistant professor of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Holly Fernandez Lynch, associate professor of medical ethics and law at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in an August opinion piece for the health publication STAT. “Unfortunately, Right to Try does not require companies to report on patient benefit, leaving substantial room for exaggerated claims,” they said.
McDonald’s
As he has in virtually every stump speech in recent weeks, Trump claimed, without evidence, that Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s.” Harris has claimed numerous times that she worked at McDonald’s in the Bay Area of California in between her first and second year of college.
Reporters at the Washington Free Beacon in late August raised some questions about Harris’ claim, noting that her employment at McDonald’s was not mentioned in her two memoirs, nor in an October 1987 job application — and attached resume — for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office while she was a law student at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. (The resume lists her work as a law clerk, an operator at Charles Schwab & Co., a student assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and as an intern for a U.S. senator.)
In an internal statement, McDonald’s has since noted, “we and our franchises don’t have records for all our positions dating back to the early ’80s.”
In a Sept. 25 interview on MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris about Trump’s repeated claims about her lying about working at McDonald’s. Harris reiterated that she did work at a McDonald’s and “part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.”
Harris and her campaign have not provided any evidence that she worked at McDonald’s, but importantly, Trump has not provided any evidence that she didn’t.
Harris Is Not a ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist’
Trump, who often refers to Harris as “Comrade Kamala,” frequently and falsely branded Harris “a radical left Marxist,” saying in Detroit that Harris is “a Marxist, communist, fascist, anything you want.”
In an interview on Oct. 23, Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro noted that Trump’s labels resonate with some Latino voters who escaped from socialist countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and so he asked Harris how she defined herself.
“I am a capitalist,” Harris said. “I am a pragmatic capitalist. I believe that we need a new generation of leadership in America that actively works with the private sector to build up the new industries of America, to build up small business owners, to allow us to increase home ownership, to allow people and their families to build intergenerational wealth. … I am a capitalist who believes not everyone starts out on the same base, but that everyone has the drive, the grit, the work ethic to succeed. And we have to create an economy that gives people an opportunity.”
We reached out to Mitchell Orenstein, a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program and professor and chair of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Here is a relatively simple and common-sense definition of Communism,” Orenstein told us via email, “a. Communists support a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist political and economic system. b. Communists believe in the abolition of private property and its replacement by state or communal ownership. c. Communists believe in a government led by a single party (often called ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘people’s’ that rules dictatorially for the benefit of the working class) d. Communists generally take inspiration from the writings of Karl Marx and seek to faithfully implement aspects of the Communist Manifesto, though aspects may differ.”
“Since none of these apply to her, we can say with confidence that Kamala Harris is not a communist,” Orenstein said. “In fact, she describes herself as a capitalist and her policies reflect that.”
Critical Race Theory
In Detroit and Greenville, Trump promised to “get critical race theory … the hell out of our schools.” But as we have written, it’s a college-level theory that educators say is already not being taught in K-12 public schools.
In a September 2021 letter to Biden, the National School Boards Association wrote that the “propaganda” around critical race theory “continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.”
Critical race theory started as an advanced legal theory taught at Harvard University in the 1980s by law professor Derrick Bell. It accepts that institutional racism exists and needs to be better understood in order to address racial inequality
In 2021, the Association of American Educators surveyed more than 1,000 educators, and 96% of those surveyed said they were not required to teach it. In a 2022 report on state efforts to ban critical race theory in public schools, UCLA education researchers wrote that critical race theory isn’t being taught in K-12 schools. They said the term “critical race theory” has been co-opted by conservative activists who seek “to restrict or ‘ban’ curriculum, lessons, professional development, and district equity and diversity efforts addressing … race, racism, diversity, and inclusion.”
2020 Democratic Primary
In Greensboro, Trump argued that Harris “doesn’t deserve to be able to run” for president, and claimed that “she came in last in the primary” for Democratic candidates in 2020. “She was the first to lose” out of “22 people,” Trump said in Greenville.
Harris suspended her 2020 presidential campaign on Dec. 3, 2019, before the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest for Democrats in that election cycle. But she was not the first person out of the Democratic primary. Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Rep. Seth Moulton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, are some of the Democratic candidates who exited the race before Harris.
Crowd Size
Although Trump frequently exaggerates the size of crowds at his rallies, we rarely write about it — an exception was the controversy over the attendance at his inauguration in 2017 — because it seems relatively inconsequential. But at his rally in Detroit, Trump again exaggerated crowd size when he claimed that “101,000 people showed up” to his Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, his first appearance there since an assassination attempt on July 13. He repeated the figure twice more for effect.
Using aerial photos, Newsweek employed crowd-mapping software and expert analysis and concluded the attendance was far fewer than that, with one expert putting the number at about 30,000.
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.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
Singer-songwriter Beyoncé endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president at a campaign rally in Houston on Oct. 25. Social media posts have made the unfounded claim that Beyoncé was paid $10 million for the endorsement. We found no evidence to support the claim, and a Harris campaign official said “it is not true.”
Full Story
Singer-songwriter Beyoncé has a history of supporting Democratic presidential candidates, dating to 2008, when she appeared with her husband, rapper Jay-Z, at a rally for then-Sen. Barack Obama the day before Election Day.
In July, Beyoncé gave Vice President Kamala Harris permission to use her song “Freedom” during her presidential campaign. And Beyoncé was among the rumored special guests expected to appear at the Democratic National Convention in August. (She didn’t.)
It wasn’t until October that Beyoncé officially endorsed Harris. She appeared at an Oct. 25 rally for the vice president in the singer’s hometown of Houston, where she encouraged Texans to vote for Harris. “It’s time for America to sing a new song,” she said.
Social media users have since made the unfounded claim that Beyoncé received $10 million in exchange for her endorsement of Harris.
The claim was shared to X on Oct. 26, where it was viewed more than 1 million times, according to the platform. The post reads, in part, “BREAKING: It is being reported that Beyonce got paid $10 MILLION for her speech last night.” A screenshot of the post was also shared on Threads.
A similar claim was made on X on Oct. 26: “Beyonce was paid $10 million for her 2 minute speech at Kamala’s rally last night. $5 million dollars per minute.”
Beyoncé actually spoke for around four minutes at the Houston rally, and there’s no evidence she was paid for it.
The claim was also shared on Threads in a post that referenced Elon Musk’s America PAC giving away $1 million to registered voters in swing states. The post said, “So Elon can’t pay someone for signing a petition, but Kamala can pay someone 10 million dollars to try and influence voters?”
Musk’s PAC is currently being sued by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for running an illegal lottery. Federal law prohibits paying people for registering to vote.
It is, however, legal for a campaign to pay for endorsements, provided that the expenditures are publicly disclosed. But we found no evidence to suggest that Beyoncé was paid anything for her endorsement, and a Harris campaign official told us in an email the social media claim “is not true.”
The Harris campaign, as of Oct. 17, lists only one endorsement-related expenditure — for $75 — in its Federal Election Commission financial reports. It was made to the League of Conservation Voters, a pro-environment nonprofit, in June, when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection.
Sources
Blair, Olivia. “Beyonce and Jay Z endorse Hillary Clinton at Ohio concert.” Independent. 5 Nov 2016.
Czopek, Madison. “Claims that the Harris campaign paid Lizzo $2.3 million to appear at an event are unsubstantiated.” PolitiFact. 28 Oct 2024.
Decker, Casey. “Yes, it’s legal for federal candidates to pay for endorsements.” Verify This. 10 Oct 2022.
Diggs, Brittany. “Jay Z hosts Obama rally.” Temple News. 4 Nov 2008.
Epstein, Reid J., et al. “Beyoncé Rallies for Harris in Houston With a Message for the Battlegrounds.” New York Times. 26 Oct 2024.
Gardner, Amy. “Jay-Z, Beyonce raise money for Obama.” Washington Post. 18 Sep 2012.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, declined to submit candidate statements for Oregon’s voter information pamphlet, according to the secretary of state and the Oregon Republican Party. But social media posts falsely claim the absence of their statements shows state election officials committed “voter fraud.”
Full Story
Oregon has a long-standing practice, dating to 1903, of providing voters with a pamphlet containing information about the candidates in each election. In the 2024 election, both former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, chose not to submit statements for the Oregon Voters’ Pamphlet, the secretary of state and Oregon Republican officials said.
However, a video posted on Facebook on Oct. 21 questioned the absence of statements from the top two Republican candidates, accusing Oregon election officials of “voter manipulation” and “voter fraud.”
“Where JD Vance should be, it’s blank. … They don’t even put Donald Trump on the thing,” the man says in the video.
The suggestion of impropriety was initially made by the conservative account Libs of TikTok on Oct. 10 on X, where it received more than 1 million views, according to the platform. “Oregon voter pamphlets do not include Donald Trump. He also is not listed on the Oregon State Government website under presidential candidates,” the post read. “What’s going on?”
Laura Kerns, a spokesperson for the Oregon secretary of state, told us in an email that the Trump campaign declined to submit statements for the pamphlet. “We reached out repeatedly to the campaign to ensure they were aware of the deadline to submit a statement to the pamphlet and never received a response,” Kerns said.
The pamphlet includes a message under “List of Candidates & Measures” on page 26, which includes the names of Trump and Vance. There are asterisks beside their names, directing readers to a note at the bottom of the page that says, “Candidate chose not to submit a voters’ pamphlet statement.”
Unlike the printed pamphlet, the online version of Oregon’s pamphlet does not list Trump and Vance as candidates. “Only candidates who submitted statements are listed in the online menus,” the online guide says.
Kerns emphasized that no candidate was removed from any official material.
“Donald Trump will absolutely be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for President,” Kerns said.
The Oregon Republican Party also released a statement on Oct. 10, saying, “The decision not to submit a statement was made by the Trump campaign earlier this year. Rest assured: President Trump WILL be on your ballot, along with other strong, common-sense Republican candidates.” Trump had also declined to submit a statement for the primary election earlier this year.
This marks a shift for Trump from previous elections; he was listed in both the 2016 and 2020 Oregon voters’ guides, available online and in print.
“There are always candidates who decline to submit to the voters’ pamphlet each election, but it’s rare for a candidate for such a high-profile office from a major political party to decline,” Kerns said.
Kerns said Trump and Vance were not the only candidates to decline to submit statements for the 2024 general election pamphlet. The others were: presidential candidates Randall Terry of the Constitution Party and Cornel West of the Progressive Party, as well as vice presidential candidates Nicole Shanahan of We The People, Mike ter Maat of the Libertarian Party and Rudolph Ware of the Pacific Green Party.
Oregon has consistently voted for Democratic presidential candidates in recent years, with no Republican winning the state since 1984. Trump lost the state in both 2016 and 2020, receiving about 40% of the vote in each election.
The spread of misinformation about the voters’ pamphlet led to a surge in calls to the state Elections Division, which prompted the office to temporarily shut down its phone lines on Oct. 17, the secretary of state’s office said.
Sources
Kerns, Laura. Communications director, Oregon Secretary of State. Email to FactCheck.org. 28 Oct 2024.
Oregon Blue Book. “Oregon History.” Accessed 29 Oct 2024.
Oregon Republican Party. “Statement on the Oregon Voters’ Guide.” 10 Oct 2024.
Oregon Secretary of State. “Out-of-state callers, citing false election information, cause Oregon Elections Division to close phone lines today.” 17 Oct 2024.
Oregon Secretary of State. “Voters’ Pamphlet.” 2024.
Oregon Secretary of State. “Voters’ Pamphlet.” 2020.
Oregon Secretary of State. “Voters’ Pamphlet.” 2016.
Oregon Secretary of State. “Online Voters’ Guide | 2024 General Election.” 2024.
Oregon Secretary of State. “The Oregon General Election Voters’ Pamphlet is Now Available.” 3 Sep 2024.
Shumway, Julia. “Biden alone in Oregon voters’ pamphlet after Trump declined to submit statement.” Oregon Capital Chronicle. 21 May 2024.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
An abundance of evidence indicates the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are remarkably safe and work well to protect against severe disease. But last month, the state of Florida issued updated vaccine guidance advising “against the use” of the shots entirely — even for people who are older and at higher risk of severe disease. Experts say the advice is ill-informed and “illogical.”
In late August, in time for the fall season, the Food and Drug Administration authorized and approved updated COVID-19 vaccines that target JN.1-lineage omicron variants of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. The options include the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — the vaccines that the vast majority of Americans have received in the past — and a protein subunit vaccine from Novavax for those 12 years of age and older.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that everyone over the age of 6 months get an updated vaccine, noting that vaccination is most important for higher-risk people, including those who are pregnant, older or have certain medical conditions. (For more, see “Q&A on the 2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccines.”)
Several weeks after the new vaccines became available, however, the Florida Department of Health issued a bulletin that directly contradicted both agencies’ determinations. Citing alleged safety concerns and claiming that the vaccines are both unnecessary and unlikely to work against the circulating variants, the bulletin said that “the State Surgeon General advises against the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”
Without explicitly naming the alternative — Novavax — the Sept. 12 guidance appeared to reluctantly endorse that vaccine for higher-risk people.
“Any provider concerned about the health risks associated with COVID-19 for patients over the age of 65 or with underlying health conditions should prioritize patient access to non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and treatment,” it read.
Experts, however, say there’s no rationale for advising against the mRNA vaccines.
“That’s silly,” University of Arizona immunologist Deepta Bhattacharya said of the guidance in an interview. “It doesn’t seem to be evidence-based at all.”
“The strength of evidence for booster effectiveness may be weaker than that for the original primary series vaccination, but well designed studies have consistently shown booster effectiveness against severe disease, and that boosters generate an updated immune response,” Matt Hitchings, an assistant professor of biostatistics who studies vaccine effectiveness at the University of Florida, told us in an email. He added that he was unaware of any clear evidence that the risks outweigh the benefits.
Indeed, while Florida’s guidance purported to be informing the public about issues the federal government has ignored, the studies it linked to are often cherry-picked, problematic or misinterpreted.
One issue the bulletin raised, for example, is the idea that the mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous because they might insert genetic material into a person’s DNA. To make this claim, the bulletin cited an unpublished and widely criticized report that alleged DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines. But as we’ve written, there’s no credible evidence the vaccines have excessive amounts of residual DNA, which is expected in trace amounts, or that it can integrate into a person’s genome. Moreover, all vaccines made from cells — like the Novavax vaccine — have residual DNA and there is no indication it is harmful.
“It’s so poorly reasoned, it’s hard to watch. It’s like science denialism by scientists,” Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us, noting that Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard. “There’s just no excuse for this kind of behavior.”
A controversial figure who has repeatedly issued vaccine guidance in opposition to public health experts and organizations, Ladapo was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021. We and others have repeatedly fact-checked his claims, which often distort scientific findings or play up dubious ones.
Over time, Ladapo has suggested or advised more and more Floridians not to get an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine — first, just children, then young males, then all people under 65.
In January, Ladapo called for a “halt” in the use of the mRNA vaccines entirely, citing unsubstantiated concerns about DNA contamination. The latest guidance extended that prohibitory recommendation to everyone but specifically addressed the updated vaccines for the 2024-2025 season.
Bulletin Misunderstands Vaccine Evaluation and Updating Processes
Two major thrusts of the Sunshine State’s bulletin were the misleading claims that the updated vaccines were not tested properly and don’t work against the latest variants.
“The most recent booster approval was granted in the absence of booster-specific clinical trial data performed in humans,” the bulletin read, adding that the updated vaccines do “not protect against the currently dominant strain.”
“Although randomized clinical trials are normally used to approve therapeutics, the federal government has not required COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to demonstrate their boosters prevent hospitalizations or death from COVID-19 illness,” the bulletin continued.
It’s true that the updated vaccines were not tested in people (the original COVID-19 vaccines, of course, were tested in very large randomized controlled trials). But as we’ve explained before, this is neither unusual nor a problem. Because the change to the COVID-19 vaccines for this year is so small — and previous versions of the vaccines have been exceptionally well studied, showing their safety and ability to protect against severe disease — regulators specifically do not require clinical testing, just as they don’t require such testing with seasonal influenza vaccines, which also need to be updated each year.
“This is the most tested vaccine in human history,” Offit said. “We have a wealth of data because so many people have been vaccinated.”
It’s also true that the updated vaccines are not an exact match for what is currently circulating — but it’s incorrect to claim that that means they offer little or no protection. Closer matches should offer better protection, including some ability to reduce infection, but even a fairly distant match will still reduce the risk of severe disease, which is the main goal of vaccination.
“They’re never a perfect match because the vaccine strain choices made back in June, and while the vaccine doesn’t change the virus keeps replicating and the virus keeps mutating,” Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, said in a briefing for reporters. But for the most part, he added, this year’s vaccines do appear to be a good match to what’s out there.
The Novavax vaccine targets the JN.1 omicron variant, while both mRNA vaccines target KP.2, a slightly more current JN.1-lineage variant. Neither variant is still circulating much, but the major variants today are highly related to these variants. Unless there is a major shift, the updated vaccines are expected to provide good protection against severe illness.
“Boosters have generally been shown to have significant protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death, and there’s no particular reason to think it would be any different with the latest updated vaccines,” Hitchings said. “Antibodies generated to closely related strains will provide cross-protection, and we have seen that individuals with more vaccinations and/or infections have a ‘broader’ antibody response.”
“There are some parts of the virus that are not changing and those are still sites of vulnerability for the virus,” Bhattacharya also explained. “You’re still making a ton of protective antibodies.”
Misleading Safety Concerns
The bulletin went on to highlight various alleged health concerns of the vaccines, many of which are unproven, unfounded or lack important context.
For example, citing a 2022 paper published in Nature Cardiovascular Research, the bulletin noted the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines “may be associated with an increased risk” of an autonomic nervous system disorder known as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. Patients with this condition get dizzy when standing and often experience fatigue and brain fog, among other symptoms.
The cited paper did identify “a possible association” between POTS and COVID-19 vaccination. But it also noted that the increased odds of POTS following vaccination in the study were “lower than the odds of new POTS diagnosis after SARS-CoV-2 infection” — a key detail the bulletin left out.
“These study results are not intended to discourage use of the COVID-19 vaccine, especially given the relatively higher risk of developing POTS after SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the authors wrote in a research briefing published along with their paper.
POTS is known to be triggered by other infections. A surge of cases has occurred with the pandemic and POTS-like symptoms are common among people with long COVID.
The Florida bulletin also claimed an “increased risk of autoimmune disease after vaccination.” But experts said there isn’t clear evidence of an increased risk.
“Sometimes you can find these small risks in these epidemiological studies, and whether or not that’s real … can be pretty hard” to tell, Bhattacharya said. “What you’re looking for is, has this finding been found over and over again in these large studies? And the answer is no.”
The bulletin linked to a large South Korean study, published in Nature Communications in July, that found compared with a historical control group, mRNA vaccination was associated with a 16% increased risk of lupus after one year. It also found booster vaccination was associated with small increases in risk for alopecia areata, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. The overall conclusion, however, was that mRNA vaccinations “are not associated with an increased risk” of most autoimmune diseases.
The authors called for additional monitoring, but said their results were “not sufficient to discourage booster vaccination” and that the linkage to lupus “remains unclear.”
Hitchings told us the data on autoimmune diseases and vaccination is “very mixed,” but what is clear is that coronavirus infection “is associated with increased risk of new onset autoimmune disease, and that COVID-19 vaccination protects against this.”
Numerous studies, including large ones in the U.S., Germany, Hong Kong, and South Korea and Japan, have identified such associations, with several indicating that vaccination helps reduce the risk.
Finally, the bulletin claimed that mRNA or spike protein from the vaccine sticks around too long and “may carry health risks.” But there is little evidence that this on its own — if or when it occurs — is harmful.
One of the studies cited for this is a 2022 Cell paper, which found in people that vaccine “spike antigen and mRNA persist for weeks” in specialized structures in the lymph nodes. But this is likely good — not bad.
Stanford immunologist and senior author Dr. Scott Boyd explained on X when the paper was first published that finding spike protein “in the lymph nodes of vaccine recipients gives some evidence for why the vaccines are working well. Lymph nodes are the desired destination for vaccine antigens, because that is where antibody producing responses are organized.”
“Finding some vaccine RNA in lymph nodes may help to explain why the viral spike protein is present there for longer times,” he added. “We don’t have any evidence that this is a harmful event.”
The paper the bulletin linked to for carrying a “health risk” related to this concern was about myocarditis. Myocarditis and pericarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle or its surrounding tissue, respectively, are the main serious side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines (including the Novavax vaccine).
The conditions, however, are rare and primarily affect young males after a second dose. Moreover, the CDC and FDA are aware of these risks, continue to monitor for them and have determined the benefits outweigh the risks.
The cited paper, a study published in Circulation in 2023, found free spike protein in the blood of people with vaccine-related myocarditis, but did not detect such protein in the blood of age-matched control subjects who were vaccinated but did not have the condition. It is not yet known what role, if any, lingering spike protein plays in the development of myocarditis, but clearly, it was not present or an issue for everyone who was vaccinated.
A later study found vaccine-related myocarditis to be linked to immune cell inflammation, undercutting earlier hypotheses that the condition might be due to antibodies attacking heart cells.
Notably, the Circulation study stated that the “results do not alter the risk-benefit ratio favoring vaccination against COVID-19 to prevent severe clinical outcomes.”
“The risks of developing vaccine induced myocarditis are far less than the risks of COVID related complications,” Dr. Lael Yonker, the lead author of the Circulation paper and a pediatric pulmonologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, similarly told us in an email.
“As for advice for vaccination,” she said, “I strongly recommend it for my family, friends and patients.”
Studies have consistently shown that myocarditis is much more likely to result from a COVID-19 infection than a vaccine. A possible exception to this, based on a U.K. study, is for males 40 years old and younger. Still, when factoring in the other risks of infection, vaccination wins out for that demographic, too.
Vaccine-related myocarditis is also less serious and is associated with better outcomes than COVID-19-related myocarditis.
Offit noted that the risk of vaccine-related myocarditis appears to have gone down over time, just as the risk of COVID-19 has decreased. He did not think healthy, young people necessarily need annual shots — but didn’t recommend against it.
“I think it’s low risk, low reward for that group,” he said.
Bhattacharya, too, said that he would have been more sympathetic if the Florida guidance had focused on young males.
“But if you’re saying everyone shouldn’t get it,” he said of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, “that’s clearly not based on any science.”
‘Nonsense’ DNA Integration Claim
As we said, the guidance repeated the claim that the mRNA vaccines pose a “unique” risk of DNA integration, citing a problematic report that has not been published.
Offit called the concern “nonsense,” noting the litany of challenges facing foreign DNA in cells that make it exceedingly unlikely that any trace DNA fragments left over after purification would be able to integrate into a person’s genome.
He also called it “illogical,” since anything grown in cells — including the Novavax vaccine and many other vaccines — will also have residual DNA. “It’s just fear mongering,” he added.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration, Australia’s equivalent of the FDA, recently addressed this misinformation, explaining that the reports that claim DNA contamination use improper methods, have issues with samples and “fail to apply the required scientific rigor expected in pharmaceutical testing.” The results, the agency said, are “not robust or reliable.”
The TGA went on to say that it has independently tested 27 batches of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, and found that all were below the regulatory limit for residual DNA. It also noted that there is no evidence of mRNA vaccines or other medicines in use in Australia ever integrating residual DNA into a person’s genome — even something such as insulin, which is injected several times a day for many years.
For more on these claims, see our stories “Faulty Science Underpins Florida Surgeon General’s Call to Halt mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination” and “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Alter DNA, Cause Cancer.”
Misconstrued Effectiveness Concerns
Citing a study from the Cleveland Clinic and one from Qatar, the Florida guidance also misleadingly claimed that studies show that COVID-19 vaccination is counterproductive, increasing the risk of infection or showing “negative effectiveness” after four to six months.
Overwhelming evidence indicates COVID-19 vaccines increase protection against the coronavirus, although that protection wanes. On occasion, due to the observational design of the studies, some effectiveness estimates dip below zero, usually many months after vaccination and for less severe outcomes, such as infection. But this is unlikely to mean that the vaccine is actually increasing a person’s risk.
The Qatar study, for example, estimated the effectiveness of second and third doses of the original Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines against BA.1 and BA.2 omicron variants. The headline results showed “moderate, and short-lived” protection against symptomatic infection and “strong and durable protection against COVID-19 hospitalization and death.”
The Florida guidance was focused on a minor finding from the paper that the authors did not even think was real: negative effectiveness of a second dose against infection, after seven or more months.
“Negative estimated effectiveness likely reflects an effect of bias and not true negative biological effectiveness,” the authors wrote. They went on to say that the result could have come about if people were more social or took fewer precautions after being vaccinated, or if the unvaccinated group had already preferentially developed immunity from infection — a form of bias known as depletion-of-susceptibles. Both would underestimate vaccine effectiveness.
Experts have previously told us that bias is also likely behind a similar result in the Cleveland Clinic paper. As we’ve written, that study did not show that vaccines increase the risk of infection, as many on social media have claimed.
Instead, researchers found an association — not a causal relationship — between hospital workers receiving more vaccine doses and testing positive for a coronavirus infection. This could be due to multiple other factors, since the study was not a randomized controlled trial, and there could be important differences that were unaccounted for between the people who received more doses and those who received fewer.
Similar to the Qatar study, the main finding of the Cleveland Clinic paper was actually that a booster dose was associated with a reduced risk of infection during the period when the variant was a good match to the vaccine.
Inaccurate or misleading claims about negative effectiveness have been a common form of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, with people opposed to vaccination cherry-picking these results and misrepresenting them.
‘Overall Health’ Not a Replacement for Vaccination
The bulletin concluded by encouraging Floridians “to prioritize their overall health” by staying active, eating well and spending time outdoors. It also connected those activities to COVID-19, stating, “Improving habits and overall health help manage and reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, risk factors for serious illness from COVID-19.”
Watching your diet and getting exercise, of course, is good advice, generally. But few people can modify their behaviors fast enough to reduce the risk of a bad coronavirus infection this season. It’s also a very indirect approach to reducing risk when a highly specific tool — a vaccine — is available.
“The only way that your immune system will recognize a specific virus is if you’re either naturally infected or vaccinated,” Offit said. “And vaccination is always the better choice.”
One of the great strengths of the human immune system is the ability to “remember” past exposures to pathogens. That way, when a person encounters the pathogen again, they can more quickly and effectively fight off the invader. This is made possible by the adaptive immune system, which involves the production of immune cells and antibodies that specifically target that particular pathogen.
Being healthy or even having a “strong” immune system is not a replacement for COVID-19 vaccination, as these do not provide specific, adaptive immunity to the coronavirus.
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.
