Category: Fact Check

Summary

The highly anticipated debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was a combative event in which facts were repeatedly trampled and distorted.

• In a lengthy exchange on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong, too.

• Trump referred to a rumor that began on Facebook alleging that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating local pets. City police have said there have been “no credible reports” of that kind of activity.

• Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by almost $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

• But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American families, but most agree it would be substantial.

• Trump falsely claimed that Harris was sent “to negotiate peace” between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. Days before Russia invaded Ukraine that month, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskky in Germany. She did not meet with Putin, as Trump said.

• Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” When Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4% — lower than it was during several administrations since the 1930s.

• Harris and Trump traded jabs on manufacturing job performance in their respective administrations, with each claiming the other lost jobs, but both sides are cherry-picking from the statistics.

• Trump repeated his unsupported claim that “millions of people” are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” And he said these migrants were “taking jobs” from “African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that, either.

• Trump repeated his false claim that everyone — liberals and conservatives — wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.

• The former president repeatedly said Democrats, including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, were in favor of abortion “in the ninth month” — or even after birth. Abortion that late is exceedingly rare, and abortion after birth does not exist. It’s homicide, and it’s illegal.

• Harris repeated the assertion that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected, but Trump said that he does not intend to sign such a ban. Harris also tried to tie Trump to Project 2025’s proposal for mandatory abortion reporting, but Trump has tried to distance himself from the document.

• The vice president claimed Trump’s economic policies led to “one of the highest” trade deficits in American history. But the annual trade deficits during the Biden administration have exceeded those under Trump.

• Trump again falsely claimed that fraud was responsible for his loss in the 2020 election, and wrongly claimed that none of his lawsuits making that allegation had been decided on the merits.

• Trump said Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania.” When she was running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris did say she was “in favor of banning fracking.” But in an Aug. 29 interview on CNN and at the debate, Harris said, “I will not ban fracking.”

• Harris claimed that Trump’s tax proposal would “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.

• Trump falsely claimed that Harris “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” Harris has not called for taking away all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons.”

• Trump claimed that he had “no inflation” during his presidency, while inflation experienced under Biden has been “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero. And while Inflation has risen significantly under Biden, it is far below record levels.

• Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president, and he backed a lawsuit that would have nullified the law.

• The former president wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” The latest FBI statistics are based on voluntary reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency.

• Trump falsely claimed that the number of jobs created during the Biden administration “turned out to be a fraud.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a downward revision in the jobs tally during its routine annual revision of jobs data.

• Trump wrongly claimed that under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”

• Harris claimed that Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1,” but the former president has said that he was joking when he said he would be a dictator for one day.

• Trump repeated a popular talking point, calling Harris the “border czar.” She was never in charge of border security, rather, she was tasked with addressing root causes of migration from three Central American Countries.

• Trump repeated another familiar claim, wrongly saying that the U.S. had left “$85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment” when it left Afghanistan.

The debate was hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

Analysis

Trump, Harris on Jan. 6 Attack on U.S. Capitol

Co-moderator David Muir kicked off a lengthy back-and-forth between the candidates about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when he asked Trump if there is anything “you regret about what you did on that day.”

In his response, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong.

The former president spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol, where members of Congress were gathering to begin the process of accepting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. In his speech, Trump told his supporters that the Democrats stole the election, making numerous false claims about election fraud in swing states, and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject electoral votes for Biden, so that Trump could remain president.

He also told his supporters to march to the Capitol. They stormed the building, attacked law enforcement officers and interrupted the counting of the electoral votes, which wasn’t completed until the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.

In response to Muir, Trump claimed that he had “nothing to do” with the “Save America” rally “other than they asked me to make a speech.” In fact, Trump heavily promoted the rally on social media, telling his followers in one post that a new report proves it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the election” and urging them to attend the Jan. 6 rally. “Be there,” he wrote, “will be wild!”

Trump baselessly claimed that he “went to Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington, D.C.,” Muriel Bowser, and offered to give them “10,000 National Guard or soldiers” for Capitol security. He also falsely claimed that “Nancy Pelosi rejected me,” blaming the then-House speaker for a lack of adequate security.

“It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington did their jobs,” he said. “I wasn’t responsible for security. Nancy Pelosi was responsible. She didn’t do her job.”

As we have written, the claim that Pelosi is responsible for Capitol security is exaggerated. The speaker appoints one member of the four-member Capitol Police Board, which oversees Capitol security. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, also appointed a member.

As for Trump’s claim that Pelosi turned down his request for 10,000 National Guard troops, the House select committee on the Capitol attack said it found “no evidence” of that. In its report, the committee noted that then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said there was “no direct order from the president” to put 10,000 National Guard troops on the ready.

Trump claimed to have new evidence, citing a tape of Pelosi discussing the attack on the day that it happened. “Her daughter has a tape of her saying she is fully responsible for what happened,” Trump claimed. “They want to get rid of that tape.”

Trump is referring to a video released in June by the House Republicans. In the video, which her daughter took on Jan. 6, 2021, Pelosi can be seen questioning the security plans and taking some responsibility for not making sure that security was adequate.

“We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have,” she said. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” When someone in the car said that security officials thought they had sufficient coverage, Pelosi angrily responded, “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”

In the video, Pelosi did not say that Trump offered to provide the Capitol with 10,000 National Guard troops, and she did not say, as Trump claimed, that “she is fully responsible for what happened.”

When asked to respond, Harris recalled being at the Capitol that day — but got some facts wrong.

“On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured and some died, and understand the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” Harris said.

Harris is correct that 140 law enforcement officers were injured on Jan. 6, 2021, but she was wrong to suggest “some died” that day. As we wrote, none of the officers who provided protection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died that day, although five officers did die in the days and months after the riot — including one that died the next day after suffering two strokes. Four other police officers committed suicide.

Harris also went too far when she said Trump “has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The violent attack on the Capitol was the reason for his second impeachment, which charged him with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” But it wasn’t the reason for the federal indictment. In that case, as we have written, Trump was charged with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Notably absent from the indictment, the New York Times reported, was “any count that directly accused Mr. Trump of being responsible for the violence his supporters committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Harris also went on to misleadingly claim that Trump is again threatening violence. “Donald Trump, the candidate, has said, in this election, there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking,” she said. As we have written, Trump made his “bloodbath” remark at a March 16 rally in Ohio, while warning of China building auto manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cause a hemorrhaging of U.S. auto jobs. A campaign spokesperson told the Washington Post that Trump was referring to “an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers” if he loses the election.

Falsehood About Immigrants Eating Pets

In the midst of commenting on immigration, Trump referenced a debunked rumor that has been circulating widely on social media this week.

Referring to immigrants in a southwestern Ohio city, the former president said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

But, according to the Springfield News-Sun, the rumor began in a local Facebook group. “The original poster did not cite first-hand knowledge of an incident,” the newspaper reported. “Instead they claimed that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and found it hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home being carved up to be eaten.”

City police have said that there’s no evidence to support the claims.

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the Springfield police said in a statement provided to several news outlets this week.

And, in an unusual move, one of the debate moderators, ABC News anchor David Muir, provided some live fact-checking, saying, “ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Indeed, on Sept. 9, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck provided the same statement as the police to ABC News, and said, “Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic.”

Even though there’s no evidence to support the claim, it has been amplified by Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who posted on X on Sept. 9, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

He backtracked the following day, posting on the same platform: “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Tariffs

Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax,” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American consumers, but most agree it would be substantial.

According to Harris, her opponent “has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.” She said, “Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year.”

As we’ve written, Trump has been inconsistent and opaque about what exactly he is proposing, but most often he has talked about a 10% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. On other occasions, he has floated a baseline tariff as high as 20%.

The estimate cited by Harris, $4,000, comes from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based on a 20% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.

Other nonpartisan groups have come in with lower estimates. Based on a 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tax on imported Chinese goods, the Tax Policy Center estimated a more modest $1,350 cost to middle-income households. Using those same parameters, an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical middle-income household about $1,700 in increased expenses each year. The Tax Foundation estimates such tariffs would amount to an annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.

So Harris has taken advantage of Trump’s inconsistent comments about the amount of his proposed universal tariffs to provide a high estimate of its cost to Americans. But Trump’s claim that his tariffs wouldn’t cost Americans at all is misleading.

Americans are “not going to have higher prices,” Trump said. “Who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.”

As we noted above, economists say American consumers, at least in the short term, would see higher prices due to a universal tariff.

As Erica York, senior economist and research director with the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told us earlier this year, “When the U.S. imposes a tariff, the person in the United States who is importing the good pays a tax to the U.S. government when they import the foreign goods. U.S. tariffs are taxes on U.S. consumers of foreign goods that must be paid by the importer of the good.”

Harris Did Not Negotiate Ukraine-Russia Peace

During an exchange about U.S. support for Ukraine, Trump falsely claimed that Harris was tasked with negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia and their respective presidents.

“Nobody likes to talk about it, but just so you understand, they sent her to negotiate peace before this war started,” Trump said of Harris. “Three days later, [Russian President Vladimir Putin] went in and started the war because everything they said was weak and stupid. They said the wrong things. That war should have never started. She was the emissary. They sent her in to negotiate with [Ukrainian President Volodymr] Zelenskyy and Putin.”

That’s not what happened. As we’ve written, in February 2022, Harris traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference to talk with European leaders about world topics, including Russian aggression toward Ukraine. 

In a Feb. 19 speech, she warned that the U.S. and its allies would “impose significant and unprecedented economic costs” if Russia attacked Ukraine. She also had in-person meetings with several heads of state, including Zelenskyy and the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

But Harris did not negotiate peace between Putin and Zelenskyy. Russia reportedly did not send a representative to the security conference that year, and Harris also did not travel to Russia to meet with Putin.

“To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms. Harris,” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Putin, said in July when asked whether Putin had ever talked with Harris.

Prior to the Munich conference, U.S. officials had been warning that Russia planned an invasion of Ukraine. In a Feb. 18, 2022, presser, Biden said, “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days.” Then Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24.

Harris Wrong About Unemployment

While talking about what the Biden-Harris administration inherited from the Trump administration, Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April, as businesses and other services shut down to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But the economy had begun to recover by the time Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, when the unemployment rate had declined to 6.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was not the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, which followed the stock market crash of 1929. The unemployment rate was higher than 6.4% for 65 consecutive months from October 2008 until March 2014, which included periods under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The highest rate during that period was 10% in October 2009, a few months after the “Great Recession,” which began in December 2007, ended in June 2009.

Before then, the unemployment rate had reached as high as 10.8% under President Ronald Reagan in November and December 1982.

Manufacturing Jobs

Harris boasted that the U.S. has “created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, while I have been vice president. … Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.” Trump countered that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month.”

As we wrote recently, both are cherry-picking data points.

The economy added 462,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first two years in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then lost 43,000 in his third year, before the pandemic-fueled recession hit.

The economy then shed nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in the first few months of the pandemic, a little more than half of which returned before Trump left office. So Harris is correct that there was a net loss of manufacturing jobs – 178,000 — over Trump’s full term, but the vast majority of job losses under Trump were due to the global pandemic.

As of August, the U.S. has added 739,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden and Harris — short of the 800,000 mentioned by Harris. (And those numbers may soon change in ways that will markedly change the Biden administration’s record. Preliminary estimates of annual revisions to the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March indicate that the BLS’ monthly estimates may have overshot manufacturing jobs by 115,000.) As for Trump’s claim that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month,” that’s actually an undersell. BLS data show a loss of 24,000 manufacturing jobs between July and August, and a net decline of 39,000 this year.

In other words, the trend under both Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth following an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.

No Evidence for ‘Prisons,’ ‘Mental Institutions’ Claim

Echoing a whopper of a claim he has been making since last year, Trump claimed that “millions of people” crossing the southern border illegally are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Immigration experts told us there’s simply no evidence for that. One expert said Trump’s claim appeared to be “a total fabrication.”

Trump has repeated the claim many times, but he hasn’t provided any credible support for it.

In June, we looked into Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because he has repeatedly linked a drop in crime there with his claim about countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. Once again, during the debate, Trump stated: “Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they’ve taken their criminals off the street and they’ve given them to her to put into our country,” referring to Harris. 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.

Trump also claimed that those coming into the country were “taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” We previously found no evidence for that, either, in employment and union membership data.

Overturning of Roe v. Wade

In discussing abortion, Trump once again repeated his false claim that everyone wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote — and that’s what happened,” he said, also incorrectly crediting six justices on two occasions.

In 2022, after Trump appointed three conservative judges to the court, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in a 5-4 ruling, immediately putting in place restrictions on abortion in nearly half of states. Since then, as Trump went on to note, several states have voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions or reject further restrictions.

Experts have previously told us that Trump’s claim is “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.” Contrary to his claim, most Americans opposed the ending of Roe v. Wade. And even though some scholars have been critical of some of the legal reasoning in the decision, many did not wish to end Roe.

No Abortions ‘After Birth’

In casting his opponent as “radical” on abortion, Trump repeatedly claimed Democrats support abortion “in the ninth month” or later.

“They have abortion in the ninth month,” he said, before alluding to misconstrued comments by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. “He said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.” (Trump initially misidentified him as the former governor of West Virginia.)

“Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump continued, referring to Walz. “He also says, execution after birth. It’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born.”

Trump hit the same point again later, again invoking Northam. “You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth,” he said. “Just look at the governor, former governor of Virginia. The governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside, and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”

As the moderator noted, no state allows people to kill babies after birth. That would be infanticide, and it’s illegal. 

Some states do not have gestational limits on abortion, including Minnesota. Last year, Gov. Walz signed a bill protecting abortion following 2022’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The law eliminated nearly all restrictions on abortion, including gestational limits. 

It also removed a requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and health” of an infant born alive as the result of an abortion. As one obstetrician explained in an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune, this is so that parents of a dying infant can hold their baby and say goodbye, and not be forced to watch while the child receives futile medical intervention (the law still requires the infant be given proper medical care and be “fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law”).

Most abortions are performed early in pregnancy. According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are for 2021, 80.8% of abortions were performed at or before nine weeks of gestation, and 93.5% were performed at or before 13 weeks. Fewer than 1% were performed at 21 weeks or later. The figures are voluntarily reported and apply to legal abortions in 48 reporting areas in the U.S. (D.C, New York City and all states except for California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey). 

In Minnesota, 88% of induced abortions occurred at or before 12 weeks of pregnancy in 2022, according to the latest available data from the Minnesota Department of Health. No abortions occurred in the ninth month.

Trump’s references to Northam are distortions of comments the former governor made in a radio interview in 2019. Trump has previously misrepresented the comments in his State of the Union address that year.

In the interview, Northam, who is a physician, said third-trimester abortion is “done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother’s in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam later clarified that he was not suggesting infanticide, and a spokesperson said Northam was “focused on the tragic and extremely rare case in which a woman with a nonviable pregnancy or severe fetal abnormalities went into labor.”

Trump’s Stance on National Abortion Ban, Pregnancy Monitoring

As she has said before, Harris predicted that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected. But Trump has said this year and stated again during the debate that he would not sign such a ban.

“It’s a lie,” Trump said in response to Harris’ debate claim. “I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban, because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted” — for abortion “to be brought back into the states.” Trump was referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade.

He later again denied plans to sign a national abortion ban, saying, “And as far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of [an] abortion ban, but it doesn’t matter, because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

But it does matter if Congress sends a national abortion ban bill to the next president’s desk. Trump did say during his first presidential campaign and presidency that he would support a federal ban on abortion past 20 weeks in most cases, and he has reportedly more recently privately expressed support for a 16-week abortion ban.

Harris also referenced Project 2025, a conservative document Trump has tried to distance himself from. “Understand, in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” Harris said.

As we’ve written previously, Project 2025 does propose mandatory reporting from states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on miscarriages and abortions. But Trump’s campaign has said that Project 2025 “should not be associated with the campaign.” Trump has recently claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, although parts of it were written by former members of his administration.

When asked in April about whether states with abortion bans “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban,” Trump said such monitoring should be left up to the individual states.

Trade Deficit Higher Under Biden

Moderator David Muir asked Harris about the Biden administration’s decision to keep in place a number of the tariffs levied by Trump on other countries.

Harris responded: “Well, let’s be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit — one of the highest we’ve ever seen in the history of America.”

But as we previously wrote, the trade deficit under the Biden administration has exceeded the deficit during Trump’s term.

As of May, the U.S. goods and services deficit over the previous 12 months was $799.3 billion, according to data published in early July by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade deficit that period was about $145.6 billion higher, or about 22.3% more, than in 2020, when Trump was president. The trade deficit in 2020 was the highest annual deficit under Trump, at $653.7 billion.

Trump Refuses to ‘Acknowledge’ 2020 Loss

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In the popular vote, President Joe Biden received a total of 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. In electoral votes, Biden garnered 306 to Trump’s 232.

But the former president has continued to spread disinformation undermining the integrity of the election, saying that he would have won if there hadn’t been widespread fraud.

Debate moderator Muir asked Trump, “Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?”

“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” Trump responded, going on to wrongly claim that his election-related lawsuits were rejected on a “technicality.”

“They said we didn’t have standing,” Trump claimed.

But a list of lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 election, compiled by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, shows several cases that were decided on the merits — including some brought by the Trump campaign.

And, as we have written, local, state and federal judges have said that Trump’s lawyers provided no evidence of fraud.

For example, Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Robert Baldi in Pennsylvania rejected the Trump campaign’s attempt to toss out absentee ballots in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia. In doing so, Baldi, a Republican, wrote “that there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots.” The Trump campaign appealed, but Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer upheld the lower court ruling and also noted that Trump’s lawyers made “absolutely no allegations of any fraud.”

Trump’s own election security officials at the time also called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

Fracking

Trump repeatedly said that Harris would ban fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. Harris said she would not.

Fracking can impact the environment, including potential contamination of groundwater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“She will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said during the debate in Philadelphia. “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one.”

Moderator Linsey Davis also asked Harris about how her position has changed on fracking. Responding to Davis, Harris said, ”Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020 I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States, and in fact, 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.”

But when she was a candidate in the 2020 race for president, Harris said that she was opposed to fracking. 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 didn’t exactly make her position clear in 2020, as she said in the debate. Instead, in the 2020 vice presidential debate, she said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

More recently, 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.”

The Inflation Reduction Act does not refer specifically to fracking, but it does open up federal land to oil and gas leases, which would involve the use of fracking to extract natural gas on some of that land.

Trump Tax Cuts

Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump’s tax proposal seeks to “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion [added] to America’s deficit.” 

That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.

As we’ve written, the vice president is referring to a 10-year cost estimate of extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017. If Congress does not act, many of the tax cuts, including the individual income tax cuts, will expire after 2025. Trump has proposed keeping them.

But extending the tax cuts would not just benefit large corporations and billionaires, as Harris suggested.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a July 8 blog item that it would cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years to extend the TCJA’s expiring tax cut provisions. If that happens, less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more, Gleckman said.

For example, under the TCJA, the child tax credit doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and the first $1,400 was made refundable, meaning the credit could reduce a family’s tax liability to zero and it would still be able to receive a tax refund, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income cutoff for the child tax credit, or CTC, also increased from $110,000 to $400,000 for married couples filing jointly. Those earning less than $400,000 also benefit from changes made in 2017 to the individual tax rates and brackets — which also will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts.

Overall, the Tax Policy Center’s distributional analysis found that the tax burden of a typical household in the middle income quintile would decrease by 1.1% should Congress extend the TCJA’s provisions, as compared with a 1.7% decrease in the tax burden for a typical household in the top income quintile. 

False Gun Confiscation Claim

Harris, Trump claimed, “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” That’s false. Harris has no such plan.

In 2019, during her first campaign for president, Harris said that she would support a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” — but not all firearms.

“There are certain types of weapons that should not be on the streets of a civil society,” Harris said, referring to assault weapons, which she called “weapons of war,” in a November 2019 NBC News interview, for example. While Harris still supports a ban on purchasing assault weapons, her campaign told us that, as of 2024, she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to give up the assault weapons that they previously purchased.

Inflation

Trump made false claims about inflation during his tenure in office and Biden’s.

During an exchange over Trump’s proposed tariff policy, the former president said that under his administration there was “no inflation, virtually no inflation,” and that the current administration “had the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country.”

Inflation was low during Trump’s presidency, but it wasn’t zero. 

As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the Consumer Price Index rose 7.6% under Trump — an average of 1.9% in each of his four years in office. That continued a long period of low inflation, including during the Obama administration (1.8% annual average) and under George W. Bush (2.4% average).

It isn’t true that under Biden the U.S. has experienced inflation “like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history,” as Trump claimed. 

The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes.

Under Biden, the biggest increase occurred during a 12-month period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment). BLS said it was the biggest increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has cooled since then. More recently, the CPI rose 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July, according to the BLS.

Altogether under Biden’s presidency, the CPI has risen 19.4%.

Affordable Care Act

Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president. His administration also supported a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2021 that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring the suit.

If he “saved” the ACA, it was not for lack of trying to end it.

In the debate, moderator Linsey Davis asked Trump about his recent statement that, if elected, he would keep the ACA, known as Obamacare, “unless we can do something much better.” Davis asked if Trump had a plan to replace the law.

Trump said, “I have concepts of a plan” that “you’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future” and that “I would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive.”

The former president has made similar comments before. During the 2020 campaign, he said, “What we’d like to do is totally kill it, but come up — before we do that — with something that’s great.” He has yet to release a replacement plan for the ACA.

What’s “better” is a matter of opinion, of course. One of the main provisions of the ACA is that it prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their preexisting health conditions, provisions that most notably have affected those seeking to buy their own coverage on the individual market. Trump has expressed support for preexisting conditions protections, but his record shows he has backed ideas that would weaken the law’s provisions.

Trump supported a 2017 GOP bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. He also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.

In late September 2020, Trump signed an executive order that made the general proclamation: “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”

It did not. Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us at the time that the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”

Despite Trump’s comments that he may still replace the ACA, several top Republicans have said the issue is a non-starter in Congress.

Crime

Trump wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” FBI data for 2023 is based on reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency, and the figures show violent crime is trending down.

As we have written, in Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. The 2023 figures are based on data from voluntary reports by 79% of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., representing higher participation than any year during Trump’s presidency.

The final numbers and information about nationwide crime rates, which are adjusted for population, won’t be available until the FBI’s annual crime report is released in October.

The trend in the FBI reports is backed by other credible sources as well.

AH Datalytics’ analysis of data about homicides from more than 200 large U.S. cities showed homicides declined by about 12% in 2023, crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, told us in May. Its data show murders have continued to drop this year overall. The FBI data also track with a large decline in shooting victims in 2023 documented by the Gun Violence Archive.

The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association also show a decline in murders and violent crime. The number of murders went down by 17% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024 in 69 large U.S. cities that provided data.

And finally, the Council on Criminal Justice’s mid-year 2024 crime report representing data from 39 cities found: “Overall, most violent crimes are at or below levels seen in 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020. There were 2% fewer homicides during the first half of 2024 than during the first half of 2019 and 15% fewer robberies. Aggravated assaults and domestic violence incidents also are below levels seen five years ago.”

It’s Not Fraud, It’s Routine Revisions

After falsely claiming the FBI crime data are fraudulent, Trump claimed the “number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.” The jobs data isn’t fraudulent, either.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics last month announced that it would likely revise monthly employment figures based on more comprehensive data — a routine revision it does every year.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever of any manipulation or padding,” David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics, told us when we wrote about Trump’s claims in August. He called the BLS’ recent announcement “completely formulaic,” as it reflected the same pattern of how the BLS has been revising the job figures over many years.

As we’ve written, the BLS publishes monthly employment figures that come from a survey of more than 100,000 employers. Later, it obtains more comprehensive data from state unemployment insurance tax filings that employers submit to determine what taxes they owe to unemployment benefit programs. Once a year, the BLS adjusts its monthly estimates based on those state filings.

This year, the BLS announced on Aug. 21 a preliminary estimate that the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March would likely be adjusted downward by 818,000 jobs. That’s an adjustment of -0.5% to the March level of employment, larger than the average revision over the last 10 years. There have been other large revisions in the past, however.

The annual revision for 2019, under Trump, was a reduction of 514,000 jobs, or -0.3% of the initial March 2019 employment estimate. The 2009 revision was a reduction of 902,000, or -0.7% of the original March 2009 estimate.

BLS’ final estimate for the year ending in March 2024 will be issued in February 2025, when the January employment report is released. That’s when the final revisions have been issued each year dating back to 2004.

The U.S. has added 15.8 million jobs under President Joe Biden. An 818,000 downward revision would drop that number to about 15 million.

More Repeats

The candidates repeated several other claims we have fact-checked before:

Economy. Trump revisited one of his commonly repeated claims, saying at the beginning of the debate that, under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”

But the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” under Trump. 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.

Dictator. The vice president repeated one of her favorite talking points when she claimed Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1.” He said he was joking when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

Harris was referring to a comment that Trump made at a Fox News town hall in December. At the event, Sean Hannity gave Trump the chance to respond to critics who warned that Trump would be a dictator if elected to a second term. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Hannity said. Trump responded, “Except for Day 1.”

Trump went on to say, “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Trump later claimed he was joking with Hannity. In a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

Trump told Bartiromo his “dictator” comment was “said in jest.”

Border czar. Trump falsely claimed Harris is the “border czar.” She’s not.

As we have written, Biden in March 2021 tasked Harris with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative, known as the “Roots Causes Strategy,” seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

Harris was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Afghanistan. If Trump had been president during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind.”

But that’s a gross exaggeration. That figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.

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.

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Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.

It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has sought to tie Trump to the 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides. Harris and Democrats refer to the plan as “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda,” and cite it as evidence (not always accurately) of what Trump will do as president, particularly on hot-button issues such as Social Security, Medicare and abortion.

For his part, Trump has claimed he knows nothing about the plan, and his campaign said that Project 2025 “should not be associated with the campaign.”

Here, we take a look at the plan: what’s in it, who wrote it and what the candidates have said about it.

Who funded and wrote Project 2025?

The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.

The project’s policy agenda was published online as a book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The book has 30 chapters, each credited to one or more of its 35 primary authors and editors — although the final product includes input from “hundreds of contributors,” the project’s organizers said in a press release.

It’s the ninth edition in the “Mandate for Leadership” series, the first of which was published in 1981, during the Reagan administration. According to its authors, earlier editions have had success in influencing government policies.

“The Reagan administration implemented nearly half of the ideas included in the first edition by the end of his first year in office, while the Trump administration embraced nearly 64% of the 2016 edition’s policy solutions after one year,” the Hertiage Foundation said in a press release announcing Project 2025.

Some of the notable authors of this most recent version include Dr. Ben Carson, Christopher Miller and Russ Vought, who are all former Cabinet secretaries under Trump. Carson, who wrote the book’s chapter on housing, was the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Miller, who wrote the chapter on defense, was an acting secretary of the Department of Defense; and Vought, who directed the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter about the executive office of the U.S. president.

Ken Cuccinelli, who was a deputy secretary for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, and Peter Navarro, Trump’s White House adviser on trade, also penned book chapters.

“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.

The book is one of “four pillars” that will be available to the next conservative president. The other pillars are:

• A personnel database, which will allow Project 2025 coalition members to “review and voice their recommendations” for appointments.

• A “Presidential Administration Academy” to teach new hires “how the government functions and how to function in government.”

• A second document — “the Playbook” — which will include “transition plans” to allow the next president to implement plans quickly.

What does Project 2025 propose?

Project 2025 attempts to put “in one place a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed.”

We cannot summarize all of its proposals, but here are some examples:

Abortion: Project 2025 describes the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, as “just the beginning.”

“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” the book states. “In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”

The book calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to protect “the health and well-being of all Americans,” beginning at conception, and to end mandatory health insurance coverage of Ella, an emergency contraceptive that Project 2025 describes as a “potential abortifacient.” It also advocates using an 1873 anti-vice law to block abortion pills from being sent via the mail. (More about that later.)

The book also calls for ending federal funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers and redirect[ing] funding to health centers that provide real health care to women.” As we have written before, Planned Parenthood provides more than abortion services. In its 2022-2023 annual report, Planned Parenthood said it provided 4.6 million tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, 2.25 million contraception services, 464,021 cancer screenings and prevention services (mostly breast exams and Pap tests), and 1.1 million pregnancy tests and prenatal services.

Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)

The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.

As or other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”

One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.

For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

It also calls for the elimination of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, which works with communities “to significantly accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies.” Similarly, it recommends the elimination or “reform” of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, calling for an end to the agency’s “focus on climate change and green subsidies.”

Tax policy: Project 2025 calls for “low tax rates” and minimal “interference with the operation of the free market and free enterprise.”

Specifically, the plan calls for abolishing the seven tax brackets for federal income taxes — 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37% — and creating a “two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions.” It doesn’t say what specific deductions, credits and exclusions should be eliminated.

It also calls for reducing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 18%. The corporate tax rate was 35% before Trump signed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act in 2017, which cut the tax rate to 21%. The capital gains tax — which ranges from 0% to 28%, depending on your income and type of asset — would also be cut for a high of 20% to 15%. The IRS says that most taxpayers currently pay 15%.

“It’s hard to know who gets hurt by this because they never say what the standard deduction is. For low-income people, moderate-income people standard deductions [are] a big deal,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said about Project 2025’s tax proposals in an interview with CBS News. “But, as you say, there are seven rates and three of them — 32%, 35% and 37% are higher than 30%, so it’s pretty clear that high income people who are currently paying a top rate paying higher than 30% would benefit significantly. They are also going to benefit substantially from the lower capital gains rates. Many of them are paying capital gains almost at 25%, and in this proposal, they’d be paying as low as 15%. So, a big deal for high income people. Impossible to know what it means for lower income people.”

Trump has offered his own tax plans, which include making the 2017 tax cuts permanent and further reducing the corporate tax rate.

Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to reinstate “every rule related to immigration that was issued during the Trump Administration,” and calls for new immigration policies and a reorganization of all immigration operations.

The book recommends tightening asylum requirements, reducing the number of refugees, and reinstating Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico program, which required immigrants to wait in Mexico during their immigration proceedings.

It seeks “the overturning of the Flores Settlement Agreement,” a 1997 court-approved agreement that serves as a national policy on how to humanely treat minors who enter the country illegally. Among other things, the agreement prohibits the federal government from detaining minors for more than 20 days.

It also includes proposals to “[e]liminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations,” cut the number of guest worker visas and repeal the diversity visa program that awards visas on a lottery basis to countries with low immigration to the U.S.

As president, Trump unsuccessfully sought to repeal the diversity visa program and move from a family-based to a merit-based system for admitting immigrants. Project 2025 also calls for a merit-based system.

The book also labels these two programs as “unlawful”: the Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which bars the deportation of certain people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.

For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.

The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.

Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.

The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.

What has Trump said about it?

Back when Project 2025 was just getting started, Trump spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s annual leadership conference on April 21, 2022, and appeared to refer to the project, saying, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s what’s coming.”

But Trump has since pivoted sharply against the plan.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on July 5. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

A week later, on July 11, Trump again took to Truth Social to further distance himself from the plan.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote. “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!”

In a July 22 speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump accused Democrats of trying to falsely tie him to the plan. He said that “the other side is going around trying to make me sound extreme, like I’m an extremist. I’m not. I’m a person with great common sense. I’m not an extremist at all. Like, some on the right, severe right came up with this Project 25, and I don’t even know. I mean some of them, I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. … They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left, OK? You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this. … I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s Project 25. ‘He’s involved in Project …’ And then they read some of the things, and they are extreme. I mean, they’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Trump went even further in his rejection of the plan in an interview on “Fox & Friends” on July 25, claiming it was “pure disinformation” from Democrats trying to tie him to it.

“It’s a group of very, very conservative people and they wrote a document that many of the points are fine,” Trump said. “Many of the points are absolutely ridiculous. I have nothing to do with the document. I’ve never seen the document. I’ve seen certain things that are said in it. And it’s a group of very conservative people that probably like me, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t speak for me.

“They wrote something that I disagree with in many cases — and in some cases, you agree. But it’s like a group of radical left people that write something and, you know, people get angry by it. This is a document I know nothing about. It’s called Project 25. I heard about it a week ago. And it has nothing to do with me whatsoever.

“But, of course, our friends that are Democrats — radical left Democrats — they take the document, which is, I guess, pretty big and thorough, and they scour through it. And anything that’s bad in there or that’s a little bit less than mainstream, they take it and they make a big deal out of it. … I haven’t seen the document. I don’t intend to really see the document. And it’s a group of people that got together that wrote some kind of a dream document for them. But it has absolutely nothing to do with me.”

Five days later, on July 30, the day the Heritage Foundation announced that Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 was stepping down, the Trump campaign put out a statement on “Project 2025’s Demise.”

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita stated. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign— it will not end well for you.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said the project had “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people.” Roberts said the project was always slated “to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline.” Although the policy writing portion of the project was finished, he said, “Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local.”

Roberts also stressed that Project 2025 was a “tool … built for any future administration to use.”

What have Democrats said about it?

In several cases, Democrats have gone beyond the facts, calling it “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda” and claiming, based on the conservative proposal, that Trump will implement policies that he says he opposes.

“When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said at a July 23 rally in Milwaukee, for example.

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.”

Furthermore, Trump has said that he has no plans to cut Social Security or Medicare. When he was president, Trump did not propose cutting Social Security’s retirement benefits, and his budgets included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits.

Project 2025 also came up many times during the Democratic National Convention in August.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who spoke on the third night of the DNC, called the plan “Donald Trump’s roadmap to ban abortion in all 50 states.” He also claimed that the plan “puts limits on contraception” and “threatens access to IVF,” or in vitro fertilization.

The book does suggest enforcing the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law, to prevent the mailing of abortion pills, which are used in more than half of U.S. abortions. But Trump, when asked in an August interview about enforcing the law, indicated he would not.

As for contraception, Project 2025 does not generally call for limiting common methods of contraception, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, or IUDs. Instead, the book specifically proposes eliminating mandatory insurance coverage for Ella, an emergency contraceptive that the book’s authors say could induce abortions. But that concern is not backed by science, as emergency contraceptives work by preventing ovulation and pregnancy.

The proposal also says that the government “should end taxpayer funding” of Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion and contraception services, and that the government should maintain religious and moral exemptions for employers who do not wish to cover contraceptives for workers.

In the case of IVF, the book does not propose outlawing the reproductive procedure in which eggs from ovaries are fertilized with sperm to create embryos that are later implanted in the uterus. But language in the plan could be interpreted to support the idea that embryos or fetuses should be granted the same rights as a person who has been born. That could lead to legal challenges around IVF because unused embryos are often discarded.

However, Trump has said he supports both contraceptives and IVF. He also has proposed mandating that the federal government or health insurance companies “pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.”

The Harris campaign also has paid for TV ads that say Project 2025 proposes “eliminating the Department of Education” while “requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies.”

The conservative plan does say that “Congress should shutter” the Education Department “and return control of education to the states.” Trump also supports abolishing that federal department.

In addition, in a section about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the policy agenda calls for the improved reporting of abortion data, including through legislation that requires “states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.”

But Trump has not made such a proposal. In an April interview with the magazine Time, Trump was asked whether he thought states that had banned abortion “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” In response, Trump said, “I think they might do that,” adding that would be left to “the individual states” – just as he says abortion laws should be determined by each state.

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Quick Take

Social media posts have misrepresented a tax proposed in President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget. The 25% tax on unrealized capital gains would apply only to those who have a net worth of more than $100 million, not to all taxpayers as the online posts misleadingly claim.

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Full Story

President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025 calls for collecting taxes on unrealized capital gains for those who have a net worth of more than $100 million. Unrealized capital gains are earnings on investments that haven’t been sold yet.

The proposal would impose a minimum 25% income tax, including on unrealized capital gains, for people in that high-wealth group.

“Billionaires make their money in ways that are often taxed at lower rates than ordinary wage income, or sometimes not taxed at all, thanks to giant loopholes and tax preferences that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest taxpayers,” a fact sheet on Biden’s budget says. “To finally address this glaring inequity, the President’s Budget includes a 25 percent minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01 percent, those with wealth of more than $100 million.”

We’ve written about Biden’s proposal before, which he refers to when claiming that some billionaires pay lower tax rates than schoolteachers or firefighters.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, also supports what Biden and other Democrats have called a “billionaire minimum tax.” That support has prompted social media posts and some politicians to misrepresent what it would do.

Former President Donald Trump, for example, referred to the proposal during a campaign stop in Las Vegas on Aug. 23. “And now she’s even pushing a tax on unrealized capital gains,” he said, going on to suggest that such a tax would result in the closure of the restaurant where he was speaking.

Conspiracy theorist and conservative commentator Mike Cernovich wrote on X, “If you own a house, subtract what you paid for it from the Zillow estimate. Be prepared to pay 25% of that in a check to the IRS. That’s your unrealized capital gains taxed owed under the Kamala Harris proposal.”

That post and a related one have each been viewed more than 11 million times, according to the platform. They’ve also been shared as screenshot memes on Facebook and Instagram.

Other posts have made similar claims, often including the example of home values, or making a broader suggestion that all investments would be subject to the unrealized capital gains tax.

None of those posts includes the key context that the 25% tax on unrealized capital gains would apply only to those who already have more than $100 million in assets.

In its annual analysis of the president’s proposed budget, the Penn Wharton Budget Model described the proposal as “a minimum income tax—where taxable income is redefined to be closer to financial statement income that includes unrealized gains—on households with more than $100 million in net worth.” (The emphasis is PWBM’s.)

The analysis also said that the budget proposal “lacks sufficient details—including basic definitions, how unrealized gains are valued, and the treatment of losses and credits across years—needed to provide meaningful analysis.”

“The tax would apply to unrealized capital gains for households with net wealth above $100 million, so it would not, as currently specified, directly affect middle class taxpayers,” Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation who criticized the plan as “highly unworkable,” told us by email.

“For the narrow group of taxpayers with net wealth above $100 million, they would have to pay an average tax rate on their regular income plus their unrealized capital gains of 25 percent,” she said.

John Buhl, spokesman for the Tax Policy Center, agreed. “The tax increases in the Biden budget related to capital gains that Harris supports would impact a very small percentage of taxpayers,” he told us by email.

According to the most recent wealth report from Henley & Partners, a British consultancy firm that specializes in migration based on wealth and investment, there are about 9,850 people in the U.S. who have assets worth $100 million or more. Henley & Partners specializes in “citizenship by investment,” which allows wealthy individuals to become residents of some countries if they invest enough money in that country.

The White House has said the reason for the proposed change is that wealthy individuals can avoid taxes on unrealized capital gains forever if they don’t sell the assets and when they die, pass the assets on to heirs.

Currently, investment gains are taxed only when assets are sold. But when an asset is passed on to the next generation, the value is adjusted to the fair market value at that time. So, if the new owner of the asset sells it, there would be no tax on the unrealized gains that accrued between the time the original investor bought it and the inheritance.

“In contrast,” according to the Treasury Department, “less-wealthy individuals who must spend down their assets during retirement pay income tax on their realized capital gains.”

The Treasury Department said that the proposal would moderate the concentration of wealth and raise revenue for the federal government, which is facing a growing national debt. According to a 2022 report from the Congressional Budget Office, the share of wealth held by the top 10% of families increased from 63% in 1989 to 72% in 2019, while the share held by the bottom half decreased from 4% to 2% in the same time period.

“[T]he distribution of wealth among Americans has grown increasingly unequal, concentrating economic resources in a steadily shrinking percentage of individuals,” the Treasury Department wrote in its general explanation of Biden’s proposed budget. “Coinciding with this period of growing inequality, the long-term fiscal shortfall of the United States has significantly increased. Reforms to the taxation of capital gains and qualified dividends will reduce economic disparities among Americans and raise needed revenue.”

Biden has included the “billionaire minimum income tax” in his budget proposals since 2022 — and it has yet to become law. So, it could be unlikely to pass under a future administration. What is clear, though, is that the proposed 25% tax on unrealized capital gains would apply only to those who have a net worth of more than $100 million, not to middle-income taxpayers.

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Sources

White House. Press release. “FACT SHEET: The President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2025.” 11 Mar 2024.

Nasdaq. “Unrealized capital gain/loss.” Accessed 4 Sep 2024.

O’Brien, Elizabeth and Matt Peterson. “Biden-Harris’ Plan to Tax Unrealized Capital Gains Is a Longshot. It’s Still Ruffling Silicon Valley’s Feathers.” 23 Aug 2024.

Ramaswamy, Vivek (@VivekGRamaswamy). “Republicans need to hit a lot harder on Kamala’s *policy* record: – Favors a tax on unrealized capital gains (which would trigger a second Great Depression).” X. 12 Aug 2024.

News 3 Las Vegas (@News3LasVegas). “Donald Trump gives remarks in Las Vegas.” YouTube. 23 Aug 2024.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “PRESIDENT BIDEN’S FY2025 BUDGET PROPOSAL: BUDGETARY AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS.” 22 May 2024.

Beyer, Don. Press release. “Congressmen Cohen and Beyer Reintroduce the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act.” 29 Nov 2023.

Cohen, Steve. Press release. “Congressmen Cohen and Beyer Introduce Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act.” 28 Jul 2022.

York, Erica. Senior economist, Tax Foundation. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2024.

Buhl, John. Spokesman, Tax Policy Center. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2024.

Henley & Partners. “The USA Wealth Report 2024.” 19 Mar 2024.

Department of the Treasury. “General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2025 Revenue Proposals.” 11 Mar 2024.

Congressional Budget Office. “Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019.” 27 Sep 2022.

Source

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Former President Donald Trump, who famously called climate change a “hoax” in 2016, hasn’t used the word lately with respect to climate change. But he still clings to some similar arguments, and other claims he makes about climate change haven’t changed much over the years.

Some of his claims reflect a larger shift in rhetoric that other Republicans have embraced. Instead of suggesting that the phenomenon isn’t occurring, isn’t due to humans or the burning of fossil fuels, or that somehow the science isn’t settled (it is), politicians who oppose climate action increasingly use other tactics.

This includes accusing others of exaggerating the risks of climate change, making false claims about clean energy and other climate change solutions, as well as incorrectly claiming that nothing can be done about it.

But for the most part, Trump’s comments are firmly rooted in older tropes that deny or question the existence of climate change — or are far from new. As we recently detailed, this summer Trump has revived claims from 2019, repeatedly providing absurdly low estimates for sea level rise — and at times indicating that maybe even those tiny increases won’t happen at all — to argue that climate change isn’t a concern.

That claim was again on display in a podcast episode that aired on Aug. 26, when he said “the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch” and “the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years.”

“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather,” he added.

Climate, of course, is not the same as weather. Weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, the National Ocean Service explains, whereas climate is average weather over an area for an extended period of time.

The conflation of climate and weather — such as the idea that cold weather or a snowstorm disproves global warming — is a strategy those opposed to climate action have used for years. 

Trump has previously said he doesn’t “think science knows” whether temperatures will increase to similarly cast doubt on climate change. But while scientists can’t know the exact future — largely because they cannot predict how humans will ultimately respond — there is no question that global warming is happening.

Global sea levels, for example, are already rising a bit more than one-eighth of an inch per year, contrary to Trump’s claim, and by 2050 the sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to be 10 to 12 inches higher than in 2000.

Later in the podcast interview, which was with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, Trump repeated other familiar falsehoods about climate change. We contacted the Trump campaign to clarify multiple aspects of the former president’s comments and to ask Trump’s position on climate change, but we did not receive a response. Here, we review several of the claims he made in his interview with Ryan.

Scientists Still Use the Term ‘Global Warming’

When first broaching the topic of climate change in the interview, Trump falsely claimed that people — presumably, scientists or Democrats — had to stop using the term “global warming” and replace it with “climate change” because not every place was getting warmer. 

“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming, they don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because, you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming. It didn’t work,” he told Ryan, referring to the term. “So they finally got it right … they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming.”

Trump has been spinning a version of this changing-of-the-terms story since at least 2019, and has repeated it on at least three other occasions this summer. Other politicians, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have been saying something like it even longer.

But it’s bogus, as we’ve written. Scientists have not stopped saying “global warming.” On the contrary, the term appears in more than 40,000 papers so far this year, according to a Google Scholar search. And there’s nothing problematic about it, either.

Global warming is “the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels,” NASA explains. The term specifically refers to average temperatures across the globe and “does not mean temperatures rise everywhere at every time by [the] same rate,” the agency adds. The fact that a few places have gotten cooler over time does not negate the overwhelming trend in the opposite direction for the rest of the world, nor does it invalidate the term.

Climate change is a related but more general term for long-term changes to the climate. Many scientists prefer saying climate change because it captures the wider range of effects that will occur as the planet warms, such as loss of Arctic ice, sea level rise, and more or more severe extreme weather, including hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

In the early 2000s, a GOP strategist also advised Republican politicians to use the term “climate change” because it sounded “more controllable” and “less frightening” than global warming.

‘Global Cooling’ Myth

Trump further cast doubt on climate change by extending his claim about terminology to say that even earlier, scientists had predicted the planet would get colder.

“You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling,” he said. “In the 1920s, they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up.”

Trump previously referred to “global cooling” to undermine climate change in 2018, and did so again at a rally in Virginia in late June, when he added, “They had a picture, I think it was on Time Magazine, of the Earth. Very cool, 1920s. It was a global cooling thing.” 

The suggestion is clear: If scientists were wrong about the climate before, then they could be wrong about it now. But it’s a myth that there was a scientific consensus about “global cooling” before. And even if some scientists did once think that cooling might be coming, it would not change the current reality — based on a significant body of evidence — that global warming is happening. 

Most often, those who make the argument — which dates back at least two decades — cite news articles from the 1970s, including a 1974 Time story titled “Another Ice Age?,” which warn of an impending cool period. But as we’ve explained before, even at the time, those news stories were not accurately capturing scientific thought on the topic. Climate science as a field was also still in its infancy.

It’s unclear which news story Trump had in mind. He mentioned Time, but in a search, we couldn’t find any such articles from the 1920s. There were a couple reports in the New York Times in the early 1920s about an explorer making a trip to the Arctic to investigate the possibility of a new “ice age.” In 1926, the Times also wrote of a Berlin astronomer who predicted the return of glaciers to Northern Europe well into the future. In either case, climate science as we know it did not exist at the time, and scientists’ understanding of the planet has vastly improved since then. It’s irrelevant what scientists thought a century ago about climate change.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told us Trump “simply mangled the shop-worn, untruthful climate denier talking point” that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 1970s. “[T]hey weren’t,” he said.

It’s also possible Trump is thinking of a fake Time magazine cover. A photoshopped cover purportedly from 1977 showing a penguin on ice with the headline, “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age,” appeared online sometime before 2013. But in fact, the cover’s image was from 2007, and the real headline was “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”

The doctored cover began recirculating as part of a meme in 2019, as we’ve written. There’s even evidence that Trump saw the fake cover and was informed it was a fraud. In 2017, Politico reported that an adviser printed it out and showed it to Trump, who was president at the time. According to Politico, “[s]taff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.”

Misconstruing a Climate Report 

Immediately after Trump’s “global cooling” claim, the former president said “they” predicted “we have 12 years to live,” mischaracterizing a climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“And we’re still waiting for the 12 years,” he told Ryan. “You know, we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand, that with these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at schools, they didn’t even study it. They predict, they said, we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies.”

“Every time it turns a little slightly warm, ‘It’s global warming … the planet is going to hell.’ What about those people that used to say we have 12 years, 12 years, in which case, we’re all gone?” Trump similarly said at his Virginia rally in June. “That ended about five years ago. We keep waiting.”

Trump is likely referring to a 2018 special report from the IPCC that concluded that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, global warming would have to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a feat that would require global carbon dioxide emissions to decline by about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030. 

Since there were just 12 years between the report’s release and 2030, many news headlines at the time incorrectly interpreted the report as saying there were just 12 years left to take action on climate change.

In 2019, when we wrote about similar claims from Democrats, who were underscoring the urgency needed on climate change, we explained that the report didn’t say there was a 12-year deadline to do something, nor does research back that interpretation. Acting sooner to cut heat-trapping emissions is better than tackling the issue later, but there isn’t a single deadline by which action must be taken or it will be “too late.”

“The 1.5 and 2 degree thresholds aren’t magical tipping points,” where “we’re okay before then and it’s a disaster afterwards,” Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA, told us then.

President Joe Biden has similarly inaccurately characterized the 1.5 degree mark as a “point of no return.” Those opposed to climate action have also sometimes used the same language to mock those concerned about climate change and suggest that the fears are overblown.

“No climate scientist I know has EVER claimed that ‘we have 12 years to live,’” Mann told us in an email, calling Trump’s claim “fabricated.”

“What scientists like myself have pointed out is that the impact of climate change will become far worse if we exceed 1.5C,” he added. “And—thanks to decades of inaction because of fossil fuel companies and politicians doing their bidding—we now have to bring emissions down substantially over the next decade if we are to avoid that amount of warming.”

Mann said it was still possible to meet the 1.5 C target, noting that the obstacles “aren’t physical or technological,” but “entirely political at this point.”

Since Trump claimed in Virginia that the 12-year period had “ended about five years ago,” it’s possible he was distorting a tweet from the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. In a now-deleted tweet from 2018, Thunberg wrote, quoting from a news article, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” 

She didn’t claim that all humans would die within five years, but that’s how many people online represented her tweet five years later, in 2023. In any case, the news story she cited had misinterpreted comments by a Harvard atmospheric chemistry professor, who told us last year, when posts about her tweet were circulating, that he had never made such a prediction.

‘Clean’ Coal

In 2016, Trump campaigned on reviving the coal industry and spoke of the fuel often. But despite his administration’s efforts to remove environmental regulations, coal use has further declined, and today Trump speaks of it much less frequently. When he does mention coal, though, he often calls it “clean.”

“And coal is okay, they actually have methods now where coal becomes clean coal,” Trump told Ryan.

He also used the moniker in an Aug. 15 speech at his New Jersey golf club — “clean coal, I call it” — and again on Aug. 19 at a rally in Pennsylvania. “They do have clean coal,” he said.

As we wrote in 2018, when Trump frequently used the term, it’s unclear what he means by “clean coal.” But the only technology that substantially reduces the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning coal is carbon capture and sequestration (or storage), or CCS. The technology is expensive and has yet to be widely deployed for coal.

In 2018, there were only two operational commercial coal carbon capture and sequestration (or storage) power plants in the world — one in the U.S. and another in Canada. Today, there are two more in China, for a total of four, according to a database of facilities compiled by the Global CCS Institute.

The sole American plant, the Petra Nova plant in Houston, began operations in 2017. It shut down in May 2020 because of plunging oil prices during the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened in September 2023.

In the interview, Trump also shifted blame to China for its continued reliance on coal. It’s true that China is building a large number of coal-fired power plants. In 2023, China was responsible for 95% of new coal plant construction in the world. The country, however, is also expanding its renewable energy sector.

China is the top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, followed by the U.S., according to 2022 figures from Our World in Data. Per capita, however, China still lags America, and the U.S. remains the country with the highest cumulative emissions.

Wind Power

Trump, who opposed the construction of a wind farm near one of his golf courses, is well known for his particular aversion to wind power. In the past, he has exaggerated the harms of wind turbines to birds and property values and misleadingly claimed that there are “problems” when the wind doesn’t blow (the electrical grid manages just fine with the variability). His recent comments about wind have not been much different.

“The wind doesn’t work. It’s very expensive, kills the birds, destroys everything around it. It’s very, very, very, very bad,” he told Ryan. “It’s the most expensive energy — wind. And then every nine years you have to replace the turbines. You know, they’re made out of steel and they wear out.”

Offshore wind energy is currently quite expensive, but onshore wind — the type that makes up the vast majority of wind turbines in the U.S. — is on par with or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants. And neither type of wind energy is usually considered the most costly. Of the most common power types, nuclear energy is typically the most expensive.

The latest figures from Lazard and BloombergNEF (sent to us via email) for the levelized cost of electricity — a metric that provides the cost per unit of electricity generated after taking into account construction, maintenance and operation — both show that onshore wind is similar to or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants, even without subsidies. 

The Energy Information Administration’s levelized cost of electricity calculations, which include tax credits for wind, also show that onshore wind is typically cheaper than natural gas.

As we’ve written, the levelized cost of electricity doesn’t tell the full story because it ignores how much providers get paid for the electricity they produce. Since renewables such as wind are variable, they are not as valuable to the grid, so this can make investment in a wind farm less attractive for electricity providers. But levelized cost remains the standard measure used to evaluate the cost of various electricity sources.

As we’ve explained on numerous occasions, wind turbines do kill birds, but it’s not the bloodbath that Trump makes it out to be. Other causes, including cats and collisions with buildings or vehicles, kill far more birds every year.

Trump’s claim about a nine-year interval for replacing turbines is also overblown. Turbines typically last 20 to 30 years, although some parts have to be replaced before then. Turbines are made of steel, but also other metals, such as aluminum, copper and iron, which can be recycled, according to a wind energy end-of-service guide from the Department of Energy. 

The hardest parts of a wind turbine to reuse or recycle are the composite components, such as the blades, which are made out of fiberglass or other lightweight materials. Scientists, however, are working on developing new materials for these components that can more easily be recycled. In August, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reported they had developed a plant-based recyclable material for turbine blades.

For his replacement interval, it’s possible Trump is thinking of turbine blades. The blades, which are not made of steel, typically last about 20 years, or even longer. Some blades, however, are replaced with larger ones after just 10 years or so. Contrary to Trump’s claims, this is not so much because they wear out, but because bigger blades generate more energy and can upgrade a turbine.

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Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris each claim they helped to revive American manufacturing and that the other has hurt it. And they both select cherry-picked data points to underscore their arguments.

The reality is that the manufacturing report cards for the Trump and Biden administrations are mixed. We’ll sort through some of the spin coming from both camps.

Here’s Trump’s version, from a rally last month in Pennsylvania:

Trump, Aug. 19: Together, we will reclaim our nation’s destiny as the No. 1 manufacturing superpower in the world. … We had that going at a level that nobody had seen before. … Some facts that are interesting. The year before I took office, the United States lost over 10,000 manufacturing jobs. Everybody said you’d never bring it back. But under my leadership, we created more than a half a million manufacturing jobs in less than three years. … And under Kamala, we have fallen into manufacturing recession with 13,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the United States since just the start of this year.

And here’s Harris’ version, from a campaign event in North Carolina just days before President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race:

Harris, July 18: Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing. The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. … Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and I have created nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs — so much so, it’s been described as a “manufacturing boom.”

Other Democrats have also weighed in.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on the first night of the Democratic convention, said, “Trump talked big about bringing back manufacturing jobs, but you know who actually did it? President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.”

And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg leveled this claim about Trump’s record during a July 28 interview on Fox News: “Even before the pandemic, America went into a manufacturing recession.”

Both sides were measuring the state of U.S. manufacturing in terms of jobs. There are other measurements, such as productivity, real output and wages relative to nonmanufacturing jobs. But since both sides mentioned jobs, let’s start there, with the data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Manufacturing Jobs Under Trump

Trump came into office in January 2017 on the heels of what Forbes called an “industrial mini-recession in 2015 through much of 2016.” Trump rightly noted that there was a loss of manufacturing jobs in the year before he took office. There was a loss of 7,000 manufacturing jobs in 2016, measuring from December 2015 to December 2016. (Trump rounded up to 10,000 jobs.)

However, Trump didn’t mention that the number of manufacturing jobs had been steadily increasing for nearly six years prior to leveling off in 2016 — rising by more than 900,000 jobs after the Great Recession. The manufacturing jobs lost in the Great Recession have still not been recovered.

In Trump’s first two years, the economy added 462,000 manufacturing jobs. But that growth leveled off in 2019. In fact, for the full year in 2019 — before the pandemic-fueled recession hit — there was a loss of 43,000 manufacturing jobs. That’s what Buttigieg was referring to when he said that “even before the pandemic, America went into a manufacturing recession.”

The effects of the pandemic, of course, resulted in major jobs loss, including nearly 1.4 million in the manufacturing sector between January and April of 2020. About 770,000 of those manufacturing jobs had returned before Trump left office. But the combined job losses in 2019 and 2020 resulted in a net loss of 188,000 manufacturing jobs at the end of Trump’s presidency.

Manufacturing Jobs Under Biden

When Biden took office, manufacturing jobs continued to ride the post-pandemic recovery bump. In Biden’s first two years in office, there was a gain of 754,000 manufacturing jobs. By mid-2022, there were more people employed in manufacturing than before the pandemic, according to the BLS.

As of July, the latest month of available data, the U.S. has added 765,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden. The manufacturing employment level in July is 173,000 more than the pre-pandemic figure in February 2020. (Those numbers may soon change in ways that will markedly change the Biden administration’s record. Preliminary estimates of annual revisions to the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March indicates that the BLS’ monthly estimates may have overshot manufacturing jobs by 115,000. Instead of a gain of 19,000 manufacturing jobs that year, revisions may put that at a 96,000 job loss.)

But as was the case under Trump, the rise in manufacturing jobs stalled in Biden’s third year in office. Between January 2023 and July 2024 — the latest data available — there has been a gain of just 11,000 manufacturing jobs. And from January through July of this year, as Trump said, there has been a loss of 13,000 manufacturing jobs. (And it will likely be more than that after the BLS issues its final revisions in February.)

In other words, the trend 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.

Comparing the raw numbers, Biden has seen an average monthly increase of 18,200 manufacturing jobs per month, compared to 11,600 per month pre-pandemic under Trump. (And again, revisions are likely to lower Biden’s average monthly gain, though it would still be higher than under Trump.)

Other Measures of Manufacturing

There are, of course, other ways to measure the health of the manufacturing sector in the U.S.

“It’s a bit tricky to talk about manufacturing because we’ve seen such different trends in employment versus output,” said George Washington University economic professor Tara Sinclair, pointing to a Pew Research Center report about the long-term trend of manufacturing output rising as jobs have disappeared.

“I usually use industrial production rather than employment to capture output,” Sinclair told us via email.   “It’s true that industrial production started falling after peaking in September of 2018. There were gains from 2016 to 2018, but that was recovery from the much discussed manufacturing recession of 2015-2016.”

Under Biden, industrial production rose until the fall of 2022 and has remained relatively stagnant ever since, according to Federal Reserve data.

The trade deficit for manufactured goods has generally gone up under both presidents, Robert Atkinson, president of Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told us via email. And manufacturing labor productivity growth “has been terrible under both administrations.”

A February 23, 2023, report from Ian Clay of ITIF noted that while the U.S. economy had added 830,000 manufacturing jobs in the first two years of the Biden administration, “Productivity (measured in real output per hour of labor) in the manufacturing sector is lower today than two years ago.”

Atkinson also noted that manufacturing job creation has lagged overall job creation. According to the BLS, under Biden, the growth of manufacturing jobs (6.28%) has been slower than overall job growth (11.06%). The same was true under Trump, even when looking only at his first three pre-COVID-19 years, when manufacturing job growth (3.39%) lagged overall job growth (4.4%).

“Neither administration did particularly well there,” Atkinson said. “Also, the manufacturing wage premium over non-manufacturing jobs has been steadily falling.”

A 2022 Federal Reserve paper that explored the reason for differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors found that “the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker—disappeared in recent years.”

“So overall, neither party should claim any credit regarding manufacturing,” Atkinson said.

Alan Tonelson, a longtime analyst of U.S. manufacturing policy who blogs at RealityChek, told us different measures of the health of manufacturing present different pictures.

“Both administrations have taken important steps in building the policy infrastructure needed for a significant U.S. manufacturing comeback,” Tonelson told us, though through different strategies: Trump via tariffs and deregulation and Biden via government incentives.

Under Biden, there have been significant investments in factory-building. The Inflation Reduction Act included tens of billions for clean energy development, and the CHIPS Act provided $39 billion to fund manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and $11 billion for semiconductor research and development.

Indeed, Bureau of Economic Analysis data show private investment in manufacturing is way up under Biden, rising about 90% since the fourth quarter of 2022. But it may take years for those investments to show up in manufacturing job data.

“There is certainly a lag of some time,” Tonelson said. “It takes time to build factory structures, to get in all kinds of necessary equipment and then to hire workers.”

Ultimately, he said, “we’ll have to see what the actual level of demand for these products is.” For example, he said, the demand for electric vehicles is not as hot as once expected. And whether the semiconductors built in the U.S. will be able to compete with those manufactured in Taiwan remains to be seen.

“There are so many things in flux right now,” Tonelson said, such as the lingering effects of the pandemic, “It’s difficult to assess the health of manufacturing.”

“We will have to wait quite a while longer before we see the full effect,” of things such as Trump’s tariffs, the investments under Biden and the pandemic, Tonelson said.

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Political leanings: Pro-environment/liberal

2022 total spending: $58.6 million by its super PAC alone

The League of Conservation Voters is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that works to “elect pro-environment, pro-democracy candidates up and down the ballot,” according to its website.

The group was founded in 1969 by activist David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club in the 1950s and ’60s and founder of Friends of the Earth. Its current president is Gene Karpinski, former executive director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Several well-known environmental organizations are represented on its board, such as Earthjustice and the Wilderness Society.

The League of Conservation Voters tracks the voting records of members of Congress on environmental issues in its National Environmental Scorecard. The league’s super PAC, the LCV Victory Fund, names a “Dirty Dozen,” a list of politicians whom the group aims to defeat because of their voting records on conservation issues and their political vulnerability. It also names a state-level “Dirty Dozen.”

The League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, a traditional political action committee, and the LCV Education Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that does public outreach and education, are two of the league’s other affiliated organizations.

The super PAC primarily spends money on independent expenditures advocating for or against the election of candidates, while the traditional PAC contributes directly to candidate or party committees. Most of the super PAC’s independent expenditures support Democratic candidates and oppose Republicans.

On March 19, LCV Victory Fund and its affiliated groups announced plans to spend a combined $120 million in 2024 — more than the $115 million they all spent during the 2020 elections and the $100 million on the 2022 midterms.

“LCV Victory Fund priorities for 2024 include winning the White House, defending the pro-climate majority in the Senate, taking back the House away from Big Oil’s MAGA allies and continuing to make climate progress in the states,” a press release said.

As of July 31, the super PAC had raised around $44.7 million this election cycle, according to its most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission. It also has spent over $5 million on independent expenditures, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign finances.

The vast majority of that spending went to supporting Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona.

As a super PAC, the LCV Victory Fund is required to disclose its donors to the FEC. Its largest donor so far is the League of Conservation Voters, the nonprofit, which has donated almost $27.7 million.

As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the League of Conservation Voters does not need to disclose its donors and can make unlimited contributions to super PACs. Spending to influence elections in which the source of the money is undisclosed is known as ”dark money” spending, as the research group OpenSecrets explains.

Other major donors to the LCV Victory Fund this cycle include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, investor Reuben Munger, designer Giovanna Randall, author Thomas Barron and philanthropist Adam Lewis.

As of July 31, the league’s traditional PAC, LCV Action Fund, had raised about $765,000 and had contributed over $588,000 to federal candidates and other political committees for the 2024 cycle. In the 2022 election cycle, the LCV Action Fund raised around $898,000 and gave roughly $763,000 to other committees.

Staff Writer D’Angelo Gore contributed to this article.

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