A World Economic Forum panel discussion about a so-called “Disease X” has revived social media conspiracy theories that a new pandemic is being planned.
“Another potential vaccine and disease is apparently coming. Called Disease X,” read a caption on a Jan. 11 Instagram post.
It shared an image from a World Economic Forum post that described a Jan. 17 session about preparing healthcare systems for an unknown Disease X at the organization’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
A Jan. 17 Instagram post about the event had an image with words that said, “If we just call it X no one will notice.” The post’s caption said, “Remember… they always tell us what’s coming,” with a winking emoji. The post was removed before this story published.
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
We found other recent posts making similar claims about Disease X, a term adopted by the World Health Organization several years ago as a placeholder for an unknown disease that could emerge. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones baselessly said in a video that Disease X is a laboratory-created virus.
We debunked a similar claim in August that said Disease X was “the next plandemic,” a reference to a 2020 documentary of false conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic. And another false claim this week tied a potential measles exposure at two Washington, D.C.-area airports to Disease X.
The claims both mislead about what Disease X means and baselessly imply that world leaders are meeting in Davos to concoct a new pandemic.
The World Economic Forum panel discussion included Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the inspector general of the World Health Organization, and other global health care leaders from both public and private organizations.
Tedros sought to clarify what Disease X is because, he said, it was “attracting a lot of attention” on social media.
Preparing for Disease X discussion at the World Economic Forum, Jan. 17, 2024
Disease X is not an actual disease, but a hypothetical one. It’s a term the WHO said “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”
Disease X is not a new term either, said Tedros. The WHO since 2015 has annually listed pathogens to prioritize for research and development, and first added Disease X to it in 2018.
Tedros cited the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how preparation for an unknown disease could have helped. Many people died because of overwhelmed hospitals and lack of oxygen supplies, he said.
“So how can you have a (health) system that can expand when the need comes?” he said. “You don’t need to know the disease.”
Social media posts claimed that a World Economic Forum panel discussion about Disease X is evidence that global leaders are planning a new pandemic. But the posts are wrong about Disease X, a term coined to refer to a hypothetical pathogen that could start a global pandemic.
Scientists have been studying ways to better prepare and respond to the sudden rise of a deadly pathogen, but it doesn’t mean one is being planned. We rate the claims False.
In a victory speech after decisively winning the Iowa GOP caucus on Jan. 15, former President Donald Trump twisted some facts on terrorism, mail-in voting and his record in Iowa caucuses.
When talking about terrorism and a travel ban he ordered, Trump falsely claimed that during his presidency “we had no terror” in the U.S. There were several acts of terrorism that were perpetrated by foreign-born individuals while Trump was president.
Trump wrongly claimed that a commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter in 2005 concluded, “once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.” The commission warned about the increased risk of fraud, but suggested measures to lessen that risk. Carter is an advocate for mail-in voting.
He also incorrectly claimed that this was “the third time” he’d won the Iowa caucus. This was only Trump’s second win, and the first when he faced a serious challenge.
Acts of Terrorism
In between talking about Iran’s history of funding terrorism and his 2017 executive order blocking certain foreign nationals from traveling to the U.S., Trump claimed that there had been no acts of terrorism in the U.S. while he was president.
“And for four years, we had no terror,” Trump said. “We had the terror ban. … They called it the Trump travel ban, but it was really the Trump terror ban.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks on the night of the Iowa caucuses. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
At a Jan. 10 town hall hosted by Fox News, he similarly claimed, “We had no terrorist attacks at all during my four years.”
That’s not accurate. Trump’s revised travel ban from September 2017 — which prevented certain nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela from traveling to the U.S. — didn’t prevent several acts of terrorism carried out by foreign-born individuals during his presidency.
Here are some we found using a list compiled for a 2023 report on terrorism and immigration by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh. Notably, the first two attacks cited below were carried out by people who traveled to the U.S. while Trump was president — and from countries not included in his travel ban. The others were committed by people who were already living in the U.S.
December 2019: Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot 11 people at Florida’s Naval Air Station Pensacola in December 2019, killing three U.S. sailors.
In January 2020, after a criminal investigation into the shooting, then-Attorney General William Barr announced that it had been an act of terrorism. “The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Barr said in a statement.
Alshamrani, who had been participating in a training program at the air station, had come to the U.S. on a diplomatic visa that he applied for and obtained in the summer of 2017, which allowed him to travel to and from Saudi Arabia while taking classes in the U.S. A New York Times investigation revealed how vetting systems in both countries failed to detect Alshamrani’s ties to al Qaeda, which began in 2015, according to the newspaper.
June 2017: Amor M. Ftouhi, from Canada, traveled to Michigan intending to kill police. The Department of Justice said that Ftouhi, after not being able to purchase a gun in the state, bought a knife that he used to stab a Flint Bishop Airport police officer in the neck twice. The DOJ said that after his arrest, Ftouhi, who was born in Tunisia, described himself as a “soldier of Allah,” and told law enforcement that his plan was “to kill the victim, steal his gun, and kill other police officers in the airport.”
October 2017: Sayfullo Saipov used a rented flatbed truck to run down more than 20 people on the Hudson River bike path in New York City. Eight people, including Americans and tourists, were killed, and many more were injured.
Saipov, born in Uzbekistan, reportedly came to the U.S. in 2010 on a diversity visa and later became a legal permanent resident. He told the FBI that the attack, planned months in advance, was carried out on behalf of the Islamic State, which officials said later praised him as one of its soldiers.
December 2017: Although no one was injured, Akayed Ullah detonated a homemade pipe bomb he was wearing inside a busy subway station near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. After being taken into custody, he told authorities that he did it in response to U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and other places.
At the time of the attack, Ullah was a legal permanent resident from Bangladesh who was living in Brooklyn. He came to the U.S. in 2011 on a family immigrant visa, as reported by the New York Times. The Justice Department said Ullah became radicalized, starting in 2014, by watching pro-Islamic State materials online, including videos on how to make a bomb.
June 2020: Dzenan Camovic, a Bosnian national born in Germany, ambushed officers patrolling an intersection in Brooklyn, the New York City borough where authorities said he had been living illegally. He stabbed one officer, attempted to stab another, stole a gun from one of the officers and used it to shoot at other officers, hitting one of them in the hand.
Federal prosecutors said that during the attack, Camovic repeatedly shouted the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar,” meaning God is great, and that he was found to have previously “possessed a significant volume of radical jihadist propaganda.” Camovic had been living in the U.S. for more than 15 years at the time of the attack, Camovic’s attorney said in a 2022 court filing.
On Jimmy Carter and Mail-In Voting
In his ongoing campaign against mail-in voting, Trump misleadingly suggested he has an ally in former President Jimmy Carter.
“We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” Trump said in his speech. “Actually, Jimmy Carter’s commission said that a long time ago.”
Trump is referring to a report issued in 2005 by the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was co-chaired by Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican. The report states that while vote by mail was increasingly popular, it was “likely to increase the risks of fraud.”
The report highlighted several potential vulnerabilities associated with mail-in voting: “Blank ballots mailed to the wrong address or to large residential buildings might get intercepted. Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
The report called for several specific reforms to ensure the validity of mail-in ballots, such as signature verification, and “prohibiting ‘third-party’ organizations, candidates, and political party activists from handling absentee ballots.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 28 states and Washington, D.C., offer the option of “no-excuse” mail-in voting, and eight states conduct elections entirely by mail.
All states that allow mail-in voting require a signature, and most states perform signature verification. Nine states also require the signature of a witness, and three states require that mail-in ballots be notarized. Thirty three states allow someone other than the voter to return an mail-in ballot, but most states limit that option to family members or caregivers or sometimes designated agents who can only submit a certain number of ballots on someone else’s behalf.
The CFER report encouraged further research “on the pros and cons of vote by mail.” But it did not call for doing away with it.
In fact, Carter has been a proponent of mail-in voting. During the pandemic, Carter in May 2020 urged federal and state governments to expand access to vote-by-mail options.
In a press release, the Carter Center said that the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform “noted among its many findings and recommendations that because it takes place outside the regulated environment of local polling locations, voting by mail creates increased logistical challenges and the potential for vote fraud, especially if safeguards are lacking or when candidates or political party activists are allowed to handle mail-in or absentee ballots.”
“However, the Carter-Baker Commission found that where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place – for example in Oregon, where the entire state has voted by mail since 1998 – there was little evidence of voter fraud,” the Carter Center noted. “The commission’s main recommendations on vote-by-mail and absentee voting were to increase research on vote-by-mail (and early voting) and to eliminate the practice of allowing candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots. Fortunately, since 2005, many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”
Later that year, as Trump and his allies repeatedly launched misleading attacks on mail-in voting, Carter issued another statement in September saying, “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.” (We note that Trump, too, has voted by mail.)
In March 2021, Carter said he was “disheartened, saddened and angry” after Republican lawmakers in Georgia passed legislation to limit mail-in voting.
Carter said he was also disappointed that some advocates for the changes to limit mail-in voting “repeatedly and selectively” referenced the commission’s 2005 report.
“While our report noted a few good and bad examples of vote-by-mail practices, its main recommendation was that further study of voting by mail was needed,” Carter said. “In the 16 years since the report’s release, vote-by-mail practices have progressed significantly as new technologies have been developed. In light of these advances, I believe that voting by mail can be conducted in a manner that ensures election integrity.”
For his part, Baker told PolitiFact in September 2021 that he “continue[s] to believe such balloting remains a significant source of potential fraud, absent safeguards some states have put in place to help guarantee that a person’s vote is secure.”
Nonetheless, Trump is mischaracterizing the commission’s conclusion as “once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.” That’s not what the report said.
Trump’s Iowa Caucus Wins
Trump also claimed to have won the Iowa caucus for Republicans twice before, which is inaccurate.
“This is the third time we’ve won, but this is the biggest one,” he said.
Trump may want to forget it, but Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won the Iowa Republican Party’s caucus in 2016, the first time that Trump ran for the Republican nomination for president. Out of the 13 candidates, Cruz came in first with 51,666 votes (27.6%) and Trump took second with 45,429 votes (24.3%).
Trump later baselessly accused Cruz of stealing the election.
Trump did win the Iowa caucus in 2020, when he was up for reelection and his main challengers in the Republican field were former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois. Trump won with over 97% of the vote.
So, his 2024 victory over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikky Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was only Trump’s second win in the Iowa caucuses.
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Former President Donald Trump continues to attack Nikki Haley’s position on Social Security as he tries to siphon support from her in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s Jan. 23 presidential primary.
“Americans were promised a secure retirement. Nikki Haley’s plan ends that,” a narrator says in a new Trump campaign ad airing in the Granite State. “Haley’s plan cuts Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans.”
The 30-second spot features older people and a clip of Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, responding to a question about how she would address entitlement programs. “We say the rules have changed,” Haley says in the ad. “We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy. What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that.”
A still from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ad “Threat from Within.” (Screenshot from YouTube)
We know from a previous fact-check that this excerpt of Haley’s quote is missing context; Haley specified that the rules should change for younger Americans, not current or imminent beneficiaries.
But would her plan, as this new Trump ad claims, cut Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans — or roughly 272 million people?
No. The Trump ad is an extreme exaggeration of how many Americans would be affected by Haley’s plans for Social Security. It would not affect retirees or people nearing retirement.
Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to PolitiFact about its statistic’s source. The ad cites a CNN article that doesn’t support the claim.
The 82% appears to reference a rough estimate of the total Americans eligible for Social Security benefits. (Some people are not included because they receive Social Security disability insurance or are ineligible for Social Security, such as infrequent workers, for example.)
Haley has never advocated cutting all Social Security benefits for everyone currently in that 82%. Trump’s ad gives the false impression that Haley’s plan would end or cut into older Americans’ Social Security retirement. Haley’s more limited plan wouldn’t apply to current beneficiaries or anyone nearing retirement.
Haley has repeatedly said she would support increasing the age for Americans in their 20s, which she explained in the same interview that Trump’s ad misleadingly clipped. “The way we deal with it, is we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in,” Haley said in the Aug. 24 Bloomberg News interview. “But we go to people like my kids in their 20s, when they’re coming into the system, and we say the rules have changed.”
How the retirement age affects Social Security benefits
The retirement age for collecting full Social Security benefits is 67 for Americans born in 1960 and later and age 65 for people born before.
Americans who choose to collect their benefits early (which they can do at 62) receive smaller monthly payments. This offsets the additional checks they’ll receive over their lifetimes. For example, people who collect Social Security benefits at age 64 instead of 67 receive 80% of their full monthly benefit. People who retire at 62 receive 70% of their full monthly benefit.
Raising the full retirement age means people who retire before the new cutoff would receive smaller benefits, and people who opt to wait for full benefits will have to retire later.
“As the system’s retirement age increases, everyone’s benefits fall a bit, depending on the age you start collecting,” said Richard Johnson, director of the Urban Institute’s program on retirement policy.
It’s not clear what year or age Haley’s proposal would kick in. But based on population estimates from the 2022 U.S. Census, if people ages 25 and older were excluded from a retirement age increase, which is in line with Haley’s pitch, her plan would likely reduce benefits for 26% of Americans alive today — decades from now.
Haley’s proposal ties the increased age requirement to gains in average U.S. life expectancy, which ticked up in 2022 after two years of decreases. (Not everyone is expected to live longer, though — research shows that life expectancy is shorter for people with lower socioeconomic status, — so, raising the retirement age based on that metric would reduce the years they’d receive Social Security benefits.)
The kicker in Trump’s attack
Trump is hitting Haley for a similar position that he once held. In his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” Trump warned that the Social Security trust fund would run out in decades (which was accurate then and now). He suggested raising the retirement age to 70.
“A firm limit at age seventy makes sense for people now under forty,” Trump wrote. “We’re living longer. We’re working longer. New medicines are extending healthy human life. Besides, how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon? The way the workweek is going, it will probably be down to about twenty-five hours by then anyway. This is a sacrifice I think we all can make.”
Trump no longer supports raising the retirement age and has vowed he wouldn’t make any cuts to the program. But he hasn’t offered a plan that would keep the Social Security trust fund solvent.
Johnson said that “doing nothing at all” would mean “all beneficiaries, including those with disability benefits, would suffer.”
Gary Burtless, Brookings Institution economist and senior fellow, said Haley’s plan wouldn’t reduce costs until today’s 20-somethings reach their early 60s, so it would have no impact on Social Security’s funding shortfall in the next 10 years, when the reserve fund is expected to be depleted.
Our ruling
A Trump campaign ad claimed Haley’s plan “cuts Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans.”
The number is wrong. Haley’s plan wouldn’t affect current beneficiaries or Americans anywhere close to retiring, let alone 82% of the U.S. population.
While most proposals that call for increasing the retirement age represent a benefit cut for Social Security beneficiaries, Haley’s plan would apply to Americans in their 20s and younger. If people ages 25 and older were excluded from her proposed retirement age increase, that would represent benefit cuts for around 26% of Americans alive today — 40 years from now.
We rate Trump’s claim False.
PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley contributed to this report.
Related: Who’s right on life expectancy, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley? Both
Related: Donald Trump omits context on Nikki Haley’s comments about US retirement age being too low,
Related: Trump suggested raising Social Security retirement age in 2000, but hasn’t backed it since
HAMPTON, N.H. — Hello from New Hampshire! PolitiFact is in the Granite State this week covering the run-up to the state’s presidential primary Jan. 23. We’re collaborating with our partner WMUR-TV to fact-check candidates and talk with voters about their concerns in 2024.
I’m Ellen Hine, PolitiFact’s audience engagement producer, and I’m here in Manchester, New Hampshire, with Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson. We’ve been traversing icy roads and frosty weather to fact-check candidates at their campaign events. If you want to follow our work on the ground in New Hampshire, make sure to sign up for our PolitiFact Daily newsletter and follow us on social media.
We were in Henniker, New Hampshire, on Tuesday night to check Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ CNN town hall. (Read more about our adventures here.) And we’ll be back in Henniker tonight to fact-check former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s town hall with the network.
If you want to see more on-the-ground fact-checking like this during the 2024 election, please consider supporting PolitiFact with a donation. Readers like you make our independent, nonpartisan fact-checking work possible.
Wednesday started with breakfast from a local coffee shop in Manchester and then a stop at WMUR. Lou filmed a segment on President Joe Biden comparing former President Donald Trump with Herbert Hoover, who was president during the Great Depression’s onset in 1929. Biden’s jab that Trump and Hoover were the only presidents to lose jobs didn’t mention the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted unemployment to spike in Trump’s fourth year in office. Biden took office as the pandemic was receding and benefited from the steady flow of Americans back into jobs.
Then, we drove an hour east to Hampton on New Hampshire’s seacoast, where DeSantis was holding a town hall at a local restaurant called Wally’s. I deeply enjoyed the sign.
DeSantis spent the hour-and-a-half-long event touting his record on COVID-19 and education policies and lobbing attacks on Haley and Trump. He repeated a few claims we’ve checked before, such as:
“I’m the only one running that (has) delivered on 100% of his promises.” We tracked 15 of DeSantis’ campaign promises from when he first ran for governor of Florida. His pledge to reduce TV and cellphone tax and his promise to reduce the corporate income tax were both rated Promise Broken.
“In fact, there was a school in Miami Dade County, there was this book of poems from, I guess, a lady that did a poem at Biden’s inauguration, and the school decided to move it from (the) elementary library to middle school library. And that was it. And the media said that somehow, they were banning these poems. And it’s like, this has nothing to do with the state.” We’ve previously rated the claim that Miami-Dade County banned “The Hill We Climb,” a poem Amanda Gorman wrote and later read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, from elementary schools as Mostly False. A single school decided to move the poem to its library’s middle-school section after a parent’s complaint. Some younger students can still access the poem if they can show they read at a fifth grade level while access for others is restricted.
DeSantis also repeated a talking point that piqued our interest on Tuesday. During his CNN town hall, DeSantis voiced support for imposing term limits for members of Congress, enacting a line-item veto for presidents and enabling state authorities to enforce immigration laws. But the U.S. Supreme Court has said the law prohibits all three of these proposed policies.
So, you can imagine how our fact-checker ears perked up when, a few hours later at a town hall in Rochester, Haley said she also supported term limits for members of Congress.
Haley’s event was much shorter than DeSantis. (According to NBC News, Haley hasn’t taken voters’ questions onstage since a controversial comment about the cause of the Civil War last month.) She still packed a number of claims about foreign policy, fentanyl and immigration into her speech, including:
“We have had 8 million illegal immigrants come to the border.” We rated a similar claim Mostly False. Immigration officials have encountered migrants 8.1 million times during Joe Biden’s presidency, but the data represents events not people.
China now has “the largest naval fleet in the world. They have 370 ships. They’ll have 400 ships in two years. We won’t even have 350 ships in two decades.” That’s Half True. Haley’s numbers are accurate, but experts say that simply counting ships omits context about a country’s true military capabilities. Ship counts ignore overall ship size, warfighting capabilities and overall geographic reach, all of which are metrics showing the United States maintains an edge over China.
“We’ve had more people, more Americans, die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam wars combined.” We’ve rated that claim True. About 65,300 service members died in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. About 127,000 Americans died from drug overdoses involving a synthetic opioid other than methadone in 2020 and 2021, federal data shows. These deaths were primarily because of fentanyl.
We’re looking forward to covering Haley’s CNN town hall tonight, and a talk between Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips and Andrew Yang about the future of artificial intelligence. Tag us on social media @politifact or email me at [email protected] with any fact-check suggestions or questions you have.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, poses for selfies with town hall attendees Jan, 17, 2024, in Rochester, New Hampshire. (Louis Jacobson/PolitiFact)
Fact-checks of the week
Wait, what? When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a Concord, New Hampshire, town hall that U.S. tax dollars “have gone to promote transgenderism in Bangladesh,” we had to look into it. Since 2018, the U.S. has invested in aid programs in Bangladesh that support gender-diverse people. But PolitiFact found no evidence that this money was used to persuade people to adopt a new gender identity or undergo gender transition, as some hearing DeSantis’ statement might be led to believe. The money supports a community describing itself as “hijra” or “third-gender” — not necessarily “transgender” — that has existed for centuries and that the Bangladeshi government had worked to recognize. We rate this claim Half True.
At the border. Republican primary presidential candidate Nikki Haley has pledged to deport people who have entered the U.S. illegally under President Joe Biden’s administration. On Jan. 5, she said, “The 8 million that have come in illegally … and they only sent back 142,000, should scare everybody.” There have been 8.1 million encounters with migrants nationwide under Biden, but that number does not represent unique individuals, and not all who were stopped were allowed to stay in the U.S. The 142,000 refers only to Immigration and Customs Enforcement removals in fiscal year 2023. But migrants can be sent out of the U.S. in other ways. There have been 3.6 million removals, returns and expulsions under Biden’s administration. We rate this claim Mostly False.
Closing the gap. Ahead of South Carolina’s February primary, President Joe Biden appealed to the state’s Black voters by touting his administration’s efforts to bolster racial equity in the economy. “The racial wealth gap is the smallest it’s been in 20 years, under my watch,” he said Jan. 8 in Charleston. By one measure, the white-Black wealth ratio, that checks out. In 2022, that ratio modestly narrowed to the smallest it’s been in 20 years. By a different measure, the dollar amount difference in wealth, the white-Black gap widened to more than $240,000. That’s the largest disparity since 1989, the earliest year recorded in the Federal Reserve data. For a partially accurate claim in need of context, we rate this statement Half True.
Knowing the facts has never been more important. Please consider donating to PolitiFact today.
Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, appears Jan. 17, 2024, at a campaign event in Portsmouth, N.H. (AP)
Donald Trump’s Iowa caucus win, and early call controversy
If you tuned in late to television coverage of the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses, even a half-hour late, the suspense was already over. The major networks had declared Donald Trump the winner.
Trump, the former president and 2024 Republican presidential front-runner, was expected to win. (He garnered 51% of the vote, or 56,260 votes). Trump told his supporters, “This is the third time we’ve won, but this is the biggest win.”
Trump is wrong. He’s won it twice, and 2020 was not competitive. In 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, won the Iowa caucuses with about 27.6% of the vote. Trump finished second with 24.3%. In 2020, Trump captured 97% of the vote to defeat former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a nominal challenger.
The media’s call for Trump on Monday night rankled some people, notably James Uthmeier, campaign manager for the second-place finisher, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, because it came with voting far from over. Uthmeier told NBC News reporter Dasha Burns, “I just need people to understand this is a grave concern. This challenges the very foundation of our democracy to have winners announced before voting.”
NBC News’ Chuck Todd defended NBC’s call, telling NBC News NOW anchor Tom Llamas, “When it is a double-digit victory like this, 20 to 30 points in any of this, whether we’re doing primaries, caucuses or general elections, you’re going to get an early call and projection because of the data we have.” Todd later added, “If this were a close race, we wouldn’t have called it.”
The Associated Press also called the race early. Elections and democracy reporter Robert Yoon wrote that the decision hinged on an analysis of initial returns and results of AP VoteCast, a survey of voters who planned to caucus. Yoon said that in traditional primaries, the AP doesn’t declare winners before the last polls are scheduled to close. But Iowa, Yoon wrote, has neither “polls” nor fixed times when all voting ends; there’s an 8 p.m. ET deadline for caucus voters to arrive and deliberate.
Read more from Poynter.
Migrants wait Oct. 19, 2023, to be processed by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP)
Ask PolitiFact: Answering your question about border crisis responsibility
“What branch of government is ‘really’ responsible for the crisis at the border?” a reader asked PolitiFact in a recent email. Is it the president or Congress? “I realize it’s very complicated,” the reader also wrote.
Unpacking who is to blame for the high numbers of immigrants at the border is complicated, but we spoke with immigration experts to get their insights.
Here’s what they said.
Who is to blame for the immigration crisis? The federal government directs immigration and the U.S. political system is arranged so each branch checks and balances the others. “Each of the three branches of government has a role to play in immigration law and policy, and each has failed,” Cornell University immigration law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr said. “The result: a quagmire, where nothing gets resolved and matters get worse every day.”
Congress has failed to update immigration laws for decades. The legislative branch passes and changes immigration laws. So, it’s up to the House of Representatives and the Senate to decide how people come to the U.S., and what penalties people face if they enter the country illegally. Congress also has a final say on how much funding is appropriated to the agencies that apply those immigration laws.
Presidents enact policies, but these can change with each administration. Although Congress creates immigration laws, the executive branch must apply them. This includes the president and departments and agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department and Justice departments.
Courts can stop or start immigration policies, which can cause confusion and instability. The courts are responsible for ensuring that laws are constitutional and that the policies presidents make align with laws Congress has passed. As presidents increasingly rely on executive actions because of Congress’ inaction, the courts have become more active in ruling on immigration policies.
Read Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe’s full report.
Quick links
Pants on Fire
Do you smell smoke?
Here’s your Pants on Fire fact-check of the week: A video of an orb exploding is not from Miami mall Jan. 1. Police said teenagers exploding fireworks, not aliens, caused the fracas.
See what else we’ve rated Pants on Fire this week.
Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson and Copy Chief Matthew Crowley contributed to this week’s newsletter.
Social media users are claiming President Joe Biden has announced thousands of dollars in government subsidies. But this is no new stimulus; it’s a scam.
A Jan. 12 Facebook post showed clips of Biden speaking and people celebrating. In the video, Biden appeared to say, “Those who haven’t received the $6,400 stimulus yet are in luck! We extended the enrollment period, allowing most Americans to qualify for immediate approval for this money.”
The video claimed the money “comes within minutes” and can be spent on “whatever you want,” including groceries, gasoline, lottery tickets and beer.
(Screengrab from Facebook)
But that’s not Biden promoting a government subsidy. The audio has been edited to sound like the president.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
A reverse-image search confirmed that the video of Biden was from a Jan. 5 campaign event in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Biden didn’t mention a government subsidy.
Misleading posts promising free and fast money are common on social media platforms. PolitiFact has debunked similar claims in the past.
This Facebook post’s audio said to receive the $6,400 government subsidy, people can click the link below the video, answer a few questions and make a “30-second phone call.” People earning less than $50,000 a year who are not on Medicaid are eligible, it claims.
However, the link leads to a webpage with the URL “myobamacarerates.us” that’s not affiliated with the U.S. government. The site says, “Congress announces $6,400 subsidy available to all Americans.”
The site also includes a disclaimer that it is not endorsed by the U.S. government or Medicare.
We searched and found neither news articles nor federal announcements about a $6,400 subsidy for Americans.
The U.S. government warns that offers of free money or government grants are often scams. Government-funded financial assistance programs are offered only through official government websites.
The Federal Trade Commission’s website offers tips for avoiding and reporting these scams.
We rate the claim that a video shows Biden promoting a $6,400 government subsidy False.
Si debes impuestos atrasados, ten cuidado con publicaciones engañosas que prometen ayudarte a pagarlos.
“El nuevo Programa de Alivio de Impuestos está ayudando a miles de hispanos a que por fin puedan liquidar sus impuestos de una vez por todas”, dice un video en Facebook del 5 de octubre que aún está siendo compartido.
La publicación añade en su subtítulo: “Miles de hispanos ayudados” e incita a las personas a aplicar “antes de que expire”.
La publicación fue marcada como parte del esfuerzo de Meta para combatir las noticias falsas y la desinformación en su plataforma. (Lea más sobre nuestra colaboración con Meta, propietaria de Facebook e Instagram).
PolitiFact hizo una investigación en internet y en medios de comunicación legítimos y no encontró reportes de ningún programa nuevo de alivio de impuestos. También notamos que la publicación fue hecha por una compañía privada, no por una agencia gubernamental.
Al llamar al número de teléfono en la publicación y preguntar cuál era el programa de alivio de impuestos, la persona no respondió. Al preguntar los requisitos para calificar para el programa, la persona que respondió, sin hacernos ninguna pregunta sobre nuestra situación tributaria, dijo que “todos califican”.
Octavio O. Saenz, un portavoz del IRS, le dijo a PolitiFact que no hay ningún programa de alivio de impuestos nuevo y que cuando hay un programa de ese tipo es reportado en las noticias.
Él dijo que hay agentes que le cobran a las personas para crear una cuenta en línea con el IRS y crear un plan de pago. Pero esto puede hacerse en la página del IRS gratuitamente.
El IRS tiene un programa que baja o elimina los impuestos – pero este es aprobado en casos muy severos y es difícil calificar. Sin embargo, entidades fraudulentas pueden hacen creer que cualquiera califica.
Saenz añadió que si se puede recibir ayuda para pagar los impuestos, pero debe hacerse directamente con el IRS.
“En el momento que alguien le diga que todos califican es mentira, en el momento que le diga usted califica sin haberle preguntado minuciosamente cuál es su situación tributaria, está mintiendo o exagerando”, dijo Saenz.
Saenz dijo que hay que tener cuidado con entidades que piden información personal — como tu nombre o dirección — pero no quieren dar detalles sobre su supuesto programa.
La Comisión Federal de Comercio (FTC, por sus siglas en inglés), dice en su página web que las compañías de alivio tributario que dicen poder reducir o eliminar deudas de impuestos y detener la cobranza de impuestos atrasados por un pago adelantado pueden dejarlo más endeudado.
Hay compañías que buscan estafar cobrando un monto adelantado para cancelar deudas, pero algunas veces ni siquiera envían los documentos al IRS. Esto puede dejar a personas con la deuda inicial y sin el monto que pagó a la compañía privada.
El FTC recomienda a los consumidores a tratar de establecer un plan de pago con el IRS para impuestos federales y con la oficina del contralor del estado para impuestos estatales.
Nuestro veredicto
Un video en Facebook dice “El nuevo Programa de Alivio de Impuestos está ayudando a miles de hispanos a que por fin puedan liquidar sus impuestos de una vez por todas”.
PolitiFact no encontró reportes de dicho programa.
Un portavoz del IRS dijo que no hay un nuevo programa de alivio de impuestos. También dijo que las personas pueden aplicar para un plan de pago u otros programas con el IRS gratuitamente sin tener que pagarle a una entidad privada.
El FTC advirtió sobre las compañías de alivio tributario que dicen reducir y eliminar la deuda tributaria por un pago adelantado. Estas puede que no cancelen las deudas, ni los inscriban en un programa del IRS.
Calificamos la declaración en el video como Falsa.
Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.
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Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.
It’s one of the spookiest zombie claims out there about voter fraud: Dead people are voting.
Former President Donald Trump has said this multiple times, including after losing the 2020 election.
In January 2021, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that “close to 5,000” dead people voted in the state. But officials found only a handful of cases.
Social media users also have falsely claimed that hundreds of thousands of ballots were sent to dead people — and pets — in Virginia and Nevada.
As evidence, these posts often share the same photo of a mail truck in a cemetery, some claim Democrats have something to do with it.
It’s possible toview these social media posts — many with laughing emojis — as a joke, which is why we aren’t fact-checking these claims on our Truth-O-Meter. However, these posts spread the falsehood that U.S. elections are marred by widespread fraud.
(Screengrab from X)
“It is sadly another tactic to sow distrust in the election process by bad faith actors,” said Thessalia Merivaki, an American politics associate professor at Mississippi State University. But the process to verify voters’ identities is “robust” across states, and people can be charged with voter fraud if they try to get a ballot on behalf of a dead person, she said.
Donald Kirk Hartle, a Nevada Republican, told a TV station in 2020 that he was “surprised” that someone cast a ballot in his late wife’s name. His claim eventually collapsed, as investigators concluded that Hartle had cast the fraudulent ballot.
In summer 2022, we found instances of people prosecuted for casting mail ballots in the name of a dead person in recent years. But these cases were sporadic and did not change an election’s outcome. Some media outlets reported that some of the people voting in this way voted for Trump.
Mail truck photo comes from a blog post about relationship closure
We traced the photo of the U.S. Postal Service truck parked in a cemetery to a July 2019 blog post titled “Delivering mail to a cemetery.” Gina DeNicola, author of the blog “Heart Written Words,” confirmed to PolitiFact that she took the photo at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives. When she saw the truck drive into the cemetery to deliver mail to the funeral home’s office, she snapped a photo and began brainstorming her next blog post. Her blog entries are largely about her life experiences.
In the July 2019 post, DeNicola wrote that the mail truck and a conversation with a friend inspired her to write a letter to the “men from my past” to get closure about old relationships. DeNicola shared the blog post on her social media accounts, as usual.
But social media users misconstrued the photo.
DeNicola, a registered Democrat, said she was “completely unaware and very surprised” that social media users took her photo out of context and said she regrets that it’s being misused to spread false claims about dead people voting.
A Mount Olivet Funeral Home and Cemetery spokesperson said the photo was likely taken at the cemetery, but it was difficult to say for certain because the cemetery spans more than 200 acres.
Why dead people’s names on voter rolls do not equal fraud
Typically when voters die, it’s rare that their relatives contact the local elections office to ask that the person be removed from the voter rolls. But elections offices routinely receive death records from state and federal sources and then remove dead voters from voter rolls.
Errors happen, too, but that doesn’t mean they’re linked to nefarious activity.
For example, in Michigan a few years ago, a voter born in 1823 was listed in the voter rolls, but that was because of a typographical error. Also, having a dead person’s name on state voter rolls does not automatically equal fraud. It’s a crime only if someone fills out a ballot in a dead voter’s name and sends it in.
Each month, Tennessee’s Davidson County, which includes Nashville, removes voters identified through health department-supplied death certificates, said Jeff Roberts, the county’s elections administrator.
Many states are part of the national Electronic Registration Information Center, which sends reports to member states showing when voters have moved or died. Many Republican-led states stopped participating in 2023, after misinformation spread about the center’s funding.
State laws vary on whether ballots from voters who die before Election Day should be counted, the National Conference of State Legislatures found.
In the November 2016 election, Michigan rejected more than 1,780 such absentee ballots.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.
RELATED: Successful program finds voters who moved or died. Why are states leaving it before 2024 elections?
RELATED: Debunking the zombie claim that ‘dead people always vote Democrat’
Is a possible measles exposure at two Washington, D.C.,-area airports the precursor to another pandemic?
That’s the claim in a Jan 16 TikTok post that links a possible measles outbreak at Ronald Reagan Washington National and Dulles International airports to Disease X, the term for a hypothetical new disease that will cause a future pandemic.
Text in the TikTok post reads: “BREAKING: Reports are coming in that passengers in the state of Virginia might have been exposed to highly contagious Measles. Disease X. Election 2024.” The post also includes a Fox News segment reporting that a case of measles has surfaced in a traveler passing through the two Virginia airports.
TikTok identified this video as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.) An Instagram post with similar language was also separately flagged.
News outlets have reported a potential measles exposure for travelers after a person with a confirmed case traveled through Dulles and Reagan airports in early January.
The news reports cite a press release from DC Health, which says the “threat of transmission is low.”
Virginia’s public health agency issued a similar release and said it is investigating the possible exposure.
No reports from public health officials link the possible measles exposure to a potential new pandemic, or a possible Disease X. Disease X does not yet exist and is a placeholder name used by the World Health Organization to determine how to prioritize research and prevent another global pandemic. It has been the subject of conspiracy theories.
“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease,” according to the WHO.
We rate the claim that a possible measles exposure at Dulles and Reagan airports is linked to Disease X False.
Singer Lil Nas X got social media users talking after he posted what looked like an acceptance letter to Liberty University’s Christian leadership and biblical studies program.
Lil Nas X is known for his Gen Z comedy and for poking fun at religion while using Christian imagery and themes in his music. In a video for his 2021 song “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” he gave Satan a lap dance.
And the acceptance letter was more of the same.
The singer posted his purported acceptance letter to Liberty University days before the release of his latest song, “J Christ.” In the music video for that song, Lil Nas X compared himself with Jesus, using imagery of himself on a crucifix.
In an Instagram post that received more than 520,000 likes, he wrote, “I know some of yall hate me right now but i want yall to know I’m literally about to go to college for biblical studies in the fall. Not everything is a troll!”
Some people were in on the joke, but others seemed confused. One user commented, “This has to be fake right? Cause ain’t no way…”. Another user commented, “Now that lil nas has money he can afford to go to school”.
On TikTok some users wondered if the singer would attend Liberty University based on his post.
A spokesperson from Liberty University told The Washington Post that the school did not issue the acceptance letter and it has no record of Lil Nas X applying. We contacted Liberty University for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
The purported acceptance letter was signed by Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty University but died in 2007.
We rate the claim that Lil Nas X was accepted to Liberty University False.
HENNIKER, N.H. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set himself a high bar in a Jan. 16 town hall while campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. He mentioned three policies he’d like to implement that current Supreme Court jurisprudence frowns upon.
In the town hall aired on CNN at New England College, DeSantis endorsed these policies:
DeSantis said he’s “in favor of term limits for members of Congress, because their No. 1 priority is to stay in office for 30 to 40 years. That’s not the right incentive.”
He said he thinks the president “should have a line-item veto. That means you can have a budget bill on your desk, and you can veto individual pork-barrel items or any item you want, without having to veto the entire spending bill.”
And he said that if someone crosses the U.S. border without prior authorization, “Why shouldn’t the state authorities or the local sheriff be able to just deport them back across the border?”
The answer, in all three cases, is that the Supreme Court has said the law prohibits it.
On congressional term limits, the justices ruled in 1995 that states cannot set qualifications for members of Congress beyond what the Constitution specifies. These provisos include being at least 25 years old and a citizen for seven years for the House and being at least 30 and a citizen for nine years for the Senate. In both chambers, members must also live in the state they are elected from.
On the line-item veto — a power afforded to governors in the vast majority of states — the U.S. Supreme Court nixed the idea in a 1998 decision. The justices ruled 6-3 that a presidential partial veto violated the part of the Constitution that says both congressional chambers and the president must approve identical versions of bills.
DeSantis also mentioned these proposed policies the following day, at an event in a bar-restaurant in Hampton, New Hampshire. Nikki Haley, one of DeSantis’ rival presidential candidates, also advocated for congressional term limits Jan. 17 at campaign rally in Rochester, New Hampshire.
On congressional term limits and the line-item veto, “We have Supreme Court decisions directly on point,” said Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor.
The third position DeSantis backed, enabling state authority to enforce immigration laws, is murkier, Somin said, but the most recent major decision would seem to rule out state-ordered deportation, too.
A 5-3 majority handed down the decision Somin cited, Arizona v. United States, in 2012. The justices concluded that federal immigration laws trumped an Arizona immigration enforcement law, S.B. 1070.
DeSantis’ office did not answer an inquiry for this article.
Just because these three policies would seem to be unconstitutional now doesn’t mean that they would be impermissible forever. A subsequent Supreme Court could create new precedent by overturning these decisions.
However, that process could take years to work its way through the courts, and would face long odds because of existing jurisprudence.
This is not the first time DeSantis has offered a policy position that appears to conflict with existing precedents.
In his campaign platform, DeSantis said he would “take action to end the idea that the children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.”
Experts have told PolitiFact that this approach contravenes the longstanding legal consensus over birthright citizenship, which has typically been defined as having U.S. citizen status by virtue of being born on U.S. soil.
That means that DeSantis would have to pursue a legal case that challenges this historical birthright citizenship definition or begin the arduous process of amending the Constitution. A constitutional amendment would require passage by both congressional chambers and ratification by three-quarters of the states.
