To listen to former President Donald Trump inform it, the U.S. has fallen aside below President Joe Biden: the economic system is failing, international locations are emptying their prisons and psychological establishments throughout the southern border and crime has skyrocketed.
Biden, then again, has claimed he confronted an inflation charge of 9% and $5 gasoline costs when he took workplace, and boasts about his administration’s job creation with out telling the total story.
There’s no evaluating the amount of false and deceptive claims Trump has deployed all through his campaigns and presidency with Biden, who tends to lean extra on exaggerations and elaborations relatively than outright lies. However as the 2 males put together to debate Thursday evening, right here’s a take a look at the info round false and deceptive claims often made by the 2 candidates.
Economic system
Trump and his group like to assert his presidency gave the U.S. its “biggest economic system in historical past.”
That’s not correct.
Initially, the pandemic triggered an enormous recession throughout his presidency. The federal government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economic system. Trump had the ignominy of leaving the White Home with fewer jobs than when he entered.
However Trump’s group likes to argue that solely his pre-pandemic financial file ought to be judged. So, how does that examine?
— Financial development averaged 2.67% throughout Trump’s first three years. That’s fairly stable. But it surely’s nowhere close to the 4% averaged throughout Invoice Clinton’s two phrases from 1993 to 2001, in response to the Bureau of Financial Evaluation. Actually, development has been stronger thus far below Biden than below Trump.
Now, Trump did have the unemployment charge get as little as 3.5% earlier than the pandemic. However once more, the labor pressure participation charge for individuals 25 to 54 — the core of the U.S. working inhabitants — was increased below Clinton. The participation charge has additionally been increased below Biden than Trump.
Trump additionally likes to speak about how low inflation was below him. Gasoline fell as little as $1.77 a gallon. However, in fact, that worth dip occurred throughout pandemic lockdowns when few individuals have been driving. The low costs have been as a consequence of a world well being disaster, not Trump’s insurance policies.
Equally, common 30-year mortgage charges dipped to 2.65% in the course of the pandemic. These low charges have been a byproduct of Federal Reserve efforts to prop up a weak economic system, relatively than the signal of energy that Trump now suggests it was.
— Biden has misrepresented the economic system at occasions, together with falsely claiming that gasoline costs have been $5 when he took workplace. The typical worth was round $2.39 a gallon the week Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, in response to knowledge from the U.S. Power Info Administration.
The president additionally has mentioned in just a few situations that he inherited excessive inflation. In Might interviews, he mentioned the inflation charge was 9% when he took workplace in January 2021. It was 1.4% at that time and elevated steadily in the course of the first 17 months of his presidency, reaching a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. However since then it has fallen and Might knowledge confirmed it at 3.3%.
His customary message has been that costs fell from their 2022 peaks with out the mass layoffs and recession that many economists had predicted.
Biden accurately famous that inflation was a world phenomenon because the world economic system reopened after the pandemic. He can declare that the U.S. economic system is faring higher than its friends. The World Financial institution not too long ago estimated the U.S. economic system would develop 2.6% this yr, method higher than the 0.7% for the 20 international locations on the euro forex or 0.7% for Japan.
But Biden has at occasions boasted about his financial achievements with out offering the total context. He has mentioned his administration created a file 15 million jobs in its first three years. Whereas knowledge helps that, it’s partly as a result of Biden inherited a pandemic economic system. After staggering job losses early within the pandemic, the job restoration started below Trump, and continued below Biden when he took workplace.
Immigration
A mass inflow of migrants coming into the U.S. illegally throughout the southern border has led to a lot of false and deceptive claims by Trump. For instance, he frequently claims different international locations are emptying their prisons and psychological establishments to ship to the U.S. There isn’t a proof to help that.
Trump has additionally argued the inflow of immigrants is inflicting a criminal offense surge within the U.S., though statistics really present violent crime is on the way in which down.
There have been current high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly dedicated by individuals within the nation illegally. However FBI statistics don’t separate out crimes by the immigration standing of the assailant, neither is there any proof of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, both alongside the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the best inflow of migrants, like New York. Research have discovered that individuals residing within the nation illegally are much less probably than native-born Individuals to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.
The variety of foreigners on the terrorist watch checklist has elevated, however federal immigration authorities say they “are very unusual” and a small fraction of the whole variety of migrants who cross the border. From October 2022 to September 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol reported seeing 169 individuals from the checklist, in contrast with 98 the earlier yr. Since October 2023, the Border Patrol has reported 80 encounters.
Crime
Trump falsely claims that crime has skyrocketed since he left workplace in 2021, notably in Democratic-led massive cities that he says are overrun with violence and bloodshed.
Really useful Tales
In actuality, as Biden has precisely identified, violent crime is near its lowest level in 50 years after a spike in 2020. That yr, Trump’s final in workplace, was marred by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.
The FBI’s annual crime report for 2022, the final yr for which yearly knowledge is obtainable, confirmed violent crime throughout the U.S. dropping to about the identical degree as earlier than the pandemic — a charge of 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 individuals in comparison with 380.8 per 100,000 individuals in 2019. Since 1972, solely 2014 had a decrease violent crime charge.
A quarterly FBI crime report launched June 11 confirmed the downward development persevering with, with sharp drops in violent crime in January-March in contrast with the identical interval in 2023. In response to the report, general violent crime was down 15%, with homicide and rape each down 26%, theft down 18% and 13% fewer aggravated assaults.
Consultants famous, nonetheless, that whereas violent crime nearly definitely dropped within the first quarter, the report is preliminary, topic to revision, and is probably going overstating the dimensions of the drops.
Whereas violent crime has trended decrease, property crime has spiked — although that too could also be ebbing. The 2022 report confirmed a 7.1% bounce in property crime, comparable to car thefts, whereas the quarterly report counted a 15% drop in comparison with the primary three months of 2023.
Trump, in the meantime, contends the FBI’s statistics are skewed and don’t inform the true story. In his June 15 speech, Trump falsely claimed the statistics “not embody knowledge from 30% of the nation together with the most important and most violent cities.”
Whereas it’s true that some legislation enforcement companies didn’t present knowledge to the FBI, a change in assortment strategies helped shut the hole. The FBI mentioned the 2022 report relies on knowledge from 83.3% of all companies protecting 93.5% of the inhabitants. In contrast, the 2021 report contained knowledge from 62.7% of companies, representing 64.8% of Individuals. For companies that didn’t present knowledge, the FBI estimates the numbers primarily based on comparably sized cities.
Throughout his felony trial in New York in April and Might, Trump falsely claimed on social media that violent crime was “operating rampant and completely uncontrolled” within the metropolis and mentioned Manhattan District Lawyer Alvin Bragg had let violent crime “flourish at ranges by no means seen earlier than.”
In actuality, crime in New York is nowhere close to the degrees seen within the early Nineteen Nineties, when town averaged greater than 2,000 murders a yr. Final yr, in response to the NYPD, there have been 391 murders. This yr, town is on tempo for lower than 350. Shootings have dropped 41.4% since 2021, although some crimes, like reviews of rape, theft and felony assault have trended increased.
Elections
Trump’s lie that he was the true winner of the 2020 election has permeated the Republican Get together and its agenda over the previous 4 years – and the previous president has proven little interest in reversing that in his present marketing campaign.
Trump has continued utilizing the disproven declare as gasoline to encourage his supporters and sow doubt within the upcoming election outcomes, insisting with out proof that something however a landslide victory in 2024 can be an indication of Democrats rigging the vote.
“The novel left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024,” he mentioned at a current marketing campaign rally in Wisconsin.
Biden beat Trump in 2020 with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and received the favored vote by greater than 7 million ballots. Authorized challenges to the election have been heard and roundly rejected in dozens of state and federal courts, together with by judges whom Trump appointed.
And regardless of Trump’s allegations of foul play, members of his personal administration and election directors in his personal get together have maintained that election safeguards have been efficient and there was no proof of widespread fraud. An exhaustive AP investigation in 2021 discovered fewer than 475 situations of confirmed voter fraud throughout six battleground states — nowhere close to the magnitude required to sway the end result of the race.
Trump and his allies have made the specter of mass numbers of noncitizens voting within the presidential election their newest rallying cry. That’s additionally not primarily based actually.
It’s a felony for non-U.S. residents to vote in presidential elections — one which states have mechanisms to catch. Election administration consultants say the variety of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extraordinarily small, and audits of voter rolls in a number of states affirm that.
The world
International affairs are more likely to loom giant within the debate as each Trump and Biden look to tout their management whereas criticizing the opposite’s dealing with of world affairs. Probably matters embody the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, conflicts with China, Russia and Iran, in addition to the energy of U.S. alliances — difficult topics which have lengthy been the subject of deceptive, debunked and exaggerated claims.
Trump has repeatedly misled about his personal administration’s help for Ukraine within the years forward of Russia’s 2022 invasion. Trump has mentioned that his administration gave Ukraine the $400 million that Congress had permitted forward of schedule — despite the fact that he really held up the funding in an effort to stress Ukraine to announce an investigation of Democrats. That incident led to Trump’s first impeachment by the U.S. Home.
He has additionally falsely accused his predecessors of ignoring Ukraine’s pleas for navy help. “The Obama-Biden administration solely despatched them meals and blankets,” he mentioned two years in the past.
Trump has repeated a debunked story that Ukraine sought to intervene within the 2016 U.S. election by hacking into Democratic Get together servers after which framing Russia for the assault. Authorities have mentioned the proof exhibits that Russia was behind the assault, and that strategies that Ukraine did it are enjoying into the Kremlin’s fingers.
“Fictions,” Trump’s former particular assistant on the Nationwide Safety Council, Fiona Hill, advised members of Congress when requested about Trump’s assertions. “I’d ask that you simply please not promote politically pushed falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian pursuits.”
Biden, for his half, has misleadingly taken credit score for a world group together with the U.S., Australia, Japan and India referred to as the Quad. Final yr, Biden claimed he satisfied the international locations to type the group to keep up stability within the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. However the group was really shaped within the early 2000s, and revived in 2017 below Trump.
