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Summary
President-elect Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in January. But in all the years since he was last president, not once has he been absent from our annual roundup of the worst whoppers. He’s very present on our 2024 list as well.
Several of Trump’s biggest falsehoods over the last 12 months were about immigration, including his bizarre claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of people in an Ohio community. In addition, he incorrectly blamed “migrant crime,” as he coined it, for the not-at-all “Worst Crime Wave in History!”
He also took historical revisionism to new levels when he claimed that “all legal scholars” had long wanted the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling overturned, and he continued to greatly minimize the impact of climate change by repeating his old — and absurd — prediction that oceans will rise just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.”
But Trump wasn’t alone in misinforming the public. His political foes did so as well.
Our jaws dropped when President Joe Biden claimed that the annual rate of inflation, which spiked during his administration, already “was 9%” when he took office. And the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz kept calling the conservative Project 2025 playbook Trump’s “agenda,” and Walz falsely claimed that it calls for a federal registry to monitor “all pregnancies.”
Read on to see the full list of claims, which are in no particular order.
Analysis
‘They’re eating the dogs.’ While we don’t rank our Whoppers of the Year, Trump’s claim during his lone debate with Harris about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — “They’re eating the dogs. … They’re eating the cats. … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there” — deserves a place high on our list. As we wrote in our debate coverage that night, Springfield’s city manager and police chief both said there were “no credible reports” of pets being harmed. In media interviews, Mayor Rob Rue dismissed the claim, saying that “your pets are safe” in Springfield.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, who first thrust the claim into the national dialogue, later acknowledged that it’s “possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
The claim about eating the pets of local townspeople was just one of numerous falsehoods Trump and Vance spread about Haitian migrants who have settled in Springfield. Vance twisted data to make the unfounded claim that immigrants are responsible for an 81% increase in the city’s murders. And both he and Trump grossly inflated the immigrant population in Springfield and wrongly claimed the Haitian immigrants in the city were there illegally.
Biden’s inflation distortion. With American voters’ frustration over inflation near the top of the list of their concerns, Biden tried to flip the script, falsely claiming that he had inherited 9% inflation. “It was 9% when I came to office, 9%,” Biden said in a CNN interview on May 8 and repeated in an interview with Yahoo Finance on May 14.
As we wrote, the U.S. annual rate of inflation was 1.4% when Biden took office in January 2021. After that, inflation increased almost every month until reaching 9.1% in June 2022 – its highest level in about 40 years. From there, the annual rate of inflation has been trending down, and was at 2.7% in November. Nonetheless, over the entirety of his presidency, though November, the Consumer Price Index has risen 20.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Although Trump repeatedly blamed Biden and Harris for the high inflation, experts told us the primary driver was the unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered inflation around the globe. While pandemic stimulus spending under Biden also contributed to inflation, experts explained that the root cause was economic fallout from the pandemic, which created issues with supply and demand, as well as labor, and inflation was further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and subsequent sanctions the U.S. (and other countries) put on Russian oil.
Trump’s bogus claim of legal consensus on abortion. Fulfilling a 2016 campaign promise, Trump in his first term appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices, enough to win a 5-4 ruling in 2022 in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The ruling in the case, which concerned a Mississippi law, effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion.
Justifying his role in overturning that landmark case, Trump posted a video in April in which he falsely claimed, “All legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” that Roe v. Wade “be ended.” It became a regular line in Trump’s stump speeches. But as we wrote, legal scholars told us that was “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.” In fact, many legal scholars wrote amicus briefs in that case supporting Roe and opposing the state law.
False FEMA claims. In the aftermath of devastation from Hurricane Helene, Trump falsely and repeatedly claimed that the Biden administration “stole” money for hurricane recovery and spent it on housing for people in the U.S. illegally. FEMA quickly debunked Trump’s claim, releasing a statement that explained, “FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”
Trump’s claim hinged on federal funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which makes payments to state and local entities that provide housing and other services to migrants processed and released by DHS. FEMA helps administer the grants for the Shelter and Services Program, but the funds come from the budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a different agency.
The claim about money “stolen” from FEMA for immigrant services was just one of several misleading or unsupported claims Trump made while criticizing the Biden administration’s hurricane relief efforts.
Trump on Harris’ race. A week after Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Trump turned his attention to the Democrats’ quickly emerging replacement, Harris, with an eyebrow-raising comment at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists on July 31.
Trump claimed that Harris “was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? … I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
As we wrote, there is ample evidence that Harris had for decades identified as both Indian American and Black, reflecting her biracial parentage. Among other things, she attended Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which bills itself as “America’s premier Greek-letter organization for African American women.”
The Harris campaign’s Project 2025 abortion distortions. A common refrain from both Harris and her running mate, Walz, this year was that Trump planned to ban abortion nationwide and force states to not only track abortions, but miscarriages, too. The claims were based on some of what’s in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for “the next conservative President.”
But as we’ve explained on numerous occasions, Trump has distanced himself from the project, explicitly saying he would not do any of those things. He said monitoring pregnancies would be up to “the individual states.”
Setting that aside, the two Democrats were still sometimes wrong about what Project 2025 said. At one point, Walz took it so far as to claim that Project 2025 called for the tracking of “all pregnancies” and would require people “to register with a new federal agency” upon getting pregnant. The playbook says no such thing. It does advise that miscarriages and abortions be reported, but does not stipulate the monitoring of all pregnancies.
Trump’s false suggestion that vaccines might cause autism. Two decades after a National Academies report reviewed the evidence and rejected the idea that certain vaccines or vaccine ingredients cause autism, the president-elect has brought the issue back to the fore. From a leaked phone call with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal anti-vaccine advocate, in July, to Trump’s announcement in mid-November to select Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump and his allies have breathed new life into old claims that scientists have considered settled for years.
In a “Meet the Press” interview earlier this month, Trump repeatedly pointed to the rising autism rate and suggested vaccines might be a cause. “Go back 25 years. Autism was almost nonexistent,” he said, incorrectly. Later, referring to whether vaccines cause autism, he said, “I think somebody has to find out.” Trump did much the same in his “Person of the Year” interview with Time, which was published on Dec. 12. He claimed his administration would go “all out” and “do very serious testing” to determine if vaccines cause autism.
But as we’ve written, scientists have already gone “all out” — and failed to find any links. There’s also a lack of biological plausibility, since autism begins to develop before a child receives any vaccines. As easy as they are to quote, autism statistics themselves are also a bit of a red herring. While the autism rate in the U.S. has dramatically increased over time, this does not necessarily mean that more children actually have the condition. Instead, scientists think that most of what is going on is that autism is better diagnosed, including less severe cases that before would not have been identified as autism.
Trump’s extreme lowball estimate of sea level rise. In another example of how far Trump can stray from established science, one of the president-elect’s campaign lines this year was the false claim that the oceans will rise just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” Event to event, Trump changed the numbers slightly, but that amount is much too low. According to NASA, the sea level is already rising a little more than one-eighth of an inch each year. So much for four centuries.
Given just how far off they are, it’s never been clear if Trump is serious when he gives these sorts of figures. But quip or not, the effect has been to downplay climate change.
Misleading chart on illegal immigration. It’s the chart that Trump says saved his life, because he turned to gesture to it at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear. It’s also highly misleading. At virtually all of his rallies, Trump would point to the chart on apprehensions of immigrants at the southern border as evidence that he had solved illegal immigration by the end of his presidency.
“See that arrow on the bottom?” Trump said at a rally in Lancaster. “That arrow is my final day in office, and we had the lowest illegal immigration that we have had, I guess probably in history, certainly in recorded history.” Except that’s not where the arrow points. Despite how the chart is labeled, the arrow actually points to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. They rose every month after that. In Trump’s last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled and were higher than the month he took office.
Not the ‘worst crime wave in history.’ Among his live social media responses to Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Trump falsely claimed, “Migrant Violence is leading to the Worst Crime Wave in History!” Similar claims would become a defining theme of his campaign. But it’s not true. The U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has dropped in recent years to less than half those rates, according to estimates from the FBI. Crime statistics from several sources show a spike in violent crime, particularly murders, in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and a decline since then.
It’s also not true that FBI data that show homicides and other violent crimes trending down since Trump left office are “fake numbers,” as Trump has alleged. Crime statistics experts say data do not back up Trump’s claims about a wave of “migrant crime.” And the Biden administration did not release into the U.S. more than 13,000 “murderers” who entered the country illegally, as Vance and Trump falsely claimed.
For more, read our full stories on these claims:
FactChecking the Harris-Trump Debate, Sept. 11
FactChecking Biden on Inflation, Other Claims, May 10
Trump’s False Claim About Roe, April 9
Trump’s False Claim of Stolen Disaster Relief Funds, Oct. 8
Trump’s False Claims of ‘No Help’ or Helicopters Sent for Helene Victims, Oct 11
FactChecking Harris’ and Trump’s Fox News Appearances, Oct 18
Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black, Aug. 1
Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration, April 4
FactChecking Trump’s ‘Fact Check’ of the State of the Union, March 11
FactChecking Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ Interview, Dec. 9
Trump’s Bogus Attack on FBI Crime Statistics, May 3
Third Night of the Democratic Convention, Aug. 22
A Guide to Project 2025, Sept. 10
Walz’s False Project 2025 Pregnancy Monitoring Claims, Oct. 1
Final Night of the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 23
Trump Embraces RFK Jr.’s Views on Vaccines, Fluoride, Nov. 4
Sen. Mullin’s Misleading Vaccine Testing Claim, Dec. 6
Trump Revives — and Further Decreases — His Absurdly Low Estimate of Sea Level Rise, Aug. 23
Trump Clings to Inaccurate Climate Change Talking Points, Sept. 9
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