Fact check: Trump makes more than 20 false claims in RNC acceptance speech

By CNN

Published July 18, 2024 10:54 PM

CNN

By CNN Staff

(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with the most dishonest speech of the four-day Republican National Convention, making more than 20 false claims by CNN’s count.

Many of the false claims were ones Trump has made before, some of them for years. They spanned a wide variety of topics, including the economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy and elections. Some of them were wild lies, others smaller exaggerations. Some were in his prepared text (like the absurd claim that he left the Biden administration a world at peace), while he ad-libbed others (such as his usual lies that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and that the US is experiencing the worst inflation it has ever had).

Below is a fact check of some of Trump’s false or misleading remarks, plus a fact check of claims made by other Thursday convention speakers.

Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The current inflation rate, 3% in June 2024, is nowhere near the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920.

Trump could fairly say that the inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but it has since plummeted.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s misleading claim about North Korean missile launches during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that he “got along with” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and “we stopped the missile launches from North Korea.”

“But, no, I got along with him,” Trump said, “and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now North Korea is acting up again.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “stopped the missile launches” from North Korea is misleading. While missile launches did pause from North Korea for a period of time during his administration, they started up again before he left office.

A May 2019 launch of what was assessed to be a short-range ballistic missile was North Korea’s first since 2017, which was seen as a sign of growing frustration from Kim on the state of talks with the US. North Korea later launched two more missiles in July 2019, a month after Trump’s high-profile meeting with Kim in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. North Korea conducted four missile tests in 2020.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on his claims of defeating ISIS in “couple of months”

Former President Donald Trump claimed in his RNC speech that “we defeated 100% of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was going to take five years. … We did it in a matter of a couple of months.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “a couple of months” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019.

Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has suggested in past remarks, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said he defeated the terror group with no caveats or credit to anyone else. Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Donald Trump’s misleading claim that federal judge ruled case against him was ‘unconstitutional’

Donald Trump said Thursday that the Florida federal judge who was overseeing the classified documents case dismissed the criminal charges against the former president, finding “that the prosecutor and the fake documents case against me were totally unconstitutional.”

Facts first: Trump’s claim is misleading. District Judge Aileen Cannon wrote in her ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who was prosecuting the case, violated the Constitution. But Cannon specifically did not comment on the validity of the charges Trump was facing, or whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper.

In a 93-page ruling Monday, Cannon said Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution. Cannon said that Smith’s position as special counsel “effectively usurps” Congress’ “important legislative authority,” because Congress should have the authority – not the head of the Justice Department – to appoint such an official.

Cannon also said that Smith’s office was being funded improperly.

But Cannon also specifically noted that she was not deciding any “other legal rights or claims” brought by Trump or his co-defendants in the case.

The judge also said that the Justice Department could potentially revive the case by funding the special counsel through different means. Prosecutors from outside the special counsel’s office could also refile the charges.

From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

Trump on the impact of immigration on Medicare and Social Security

During his Republican National Convention speech, former President Donald Trump again said that Democrats are harming Social Security and Medicare by letting migrants into the US.

“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare because all of these people by the millions are coming in – they’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrants who are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits.

The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency.

“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.

Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.”

“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said.

However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.

“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump on trade deal with China

Former President Donald Trump claimed that he struck a trade deal with China, requiring the country to purchase $50 billion worth of American products. “They buy $50 billion worth,” he said at the Republican National Convention Thursday.

Facts First: The claim that China bought $50 billion worth of American product as a result of a trade deal is false.

Trump is referring to what is known as the Phase One deal he struck with Beijing in December 2019.

While the deal required China to buy $50 billion worth of American agricultural products by the end of 2021 – Beijing did not live up to its commitment.

US agricultural exports to China recovered from the trade war but did not reach the levels in the Phase One commitments, according to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Donald Trump exaggerates how much higher gas prices are right now

Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump described gas prices inaccurately during his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention. He said that “gas prices are up 60%.”

Facts First: The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline nationwide is $3.51 as of Thursday, according to AAA. That’s up about 47% from the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated, when the average was $2.39, not 60% higher as Trump claimed.

Although the United States has a strategic gasoline reserve, which can be tapped by the White House to ease upward pressure on prices, as Biden did in May, gas prices are still mostly determined by market forces, such as global petroleum production and consumer demand, not solely by the decisions of a sitting US president.

From CNN’s Bryan Mena

Trump claims government hired 88,000 IRS agents

Former President Donald Trump, while recounting a conversation he had with a waitress worried about the taxes on her tips, claimed that the government recently hired 88,000 IRS agents to audit individuals.

Facts First: This claim is false.

The Inflation Reduction Act – which Congress passed in 2022 without any Republican votes – provided an about $80 billion, 10-year investment to the IRS. The agency plans to hire tens of thousands of IRS employees with that money – but only some will be IRS agents who conduct audits and investigations. Many people will be hired for non-agent roles, such as customer service representatives. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

The 88,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury Department report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees – not solely enforcement agents – over the course of a decade with a nearly $80 billion investment.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Trump on Biden increasing Americans’ taxes by four times

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim that President Joe Biden wants to hike people’s taxes by four times.

“This is the only administration that said, ‘We’re gonna raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,’” Trump said Thursday in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024.

Biden has not proposed quadrupling Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.”

The Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s proposal would, on average, have raised taxes by about $2,300 – but that’s about a 2.3% decline in after-tax income, not the massive reduction Trump is suggesting Biden wants. And critically, Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman noted to CNN in May that 95% of the tax hike would have been covered by the highest-income 5% of households.

The very biggest burden under the Biden plan would have been carried by the very richest households; the Tax Policy Center found that households in the top 0.1% would have seen their after-tax incomes decline by more than 20%. That’s “a lot,” Gleckman noted, but it’s still nowhere near the quadrupling Trump claims Biden is looking for. And again, even this increase would have been only for a tiny subset of the population. Biden has promised not to raise taxes by even a cent for anyone making under $400,000 per year.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s claim on the situation before the ‘Right to Try’ law

Former President Donald Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 in his convention speech Thursday, which gave terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Before the measure was passed, Trump claimed, terminally ill patients in the United States would have to go to foreign countries to seek experimental treatments or go home to die if they couldn’t afford it.

“Sounds simple, but it’s not, and I got them to agree that somebody that needs it will – instead of going to Asia or Europe or some place – or if you have no money, going home and dying,” he said.

Facts First: This is misleading. It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.

‘“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Trump’s claim about Russian warships near Cuba

Former President Donald claimed in his RNC speech on Wednesday evening that “Russian warships and nuclear submarines are operating 60 miles off our coasts in Cuba. … The press refuses to write about it.”

Facts First: Trump’s present-tense claim that Russian warships and nuclear submarines “are” operating close to the United States is misleading. While Russia did have a nuclear-powered submarine visiting Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy vessels, all of the vessels – including the submarine – have since left.

A group of four Russian Navy vessels arrived in Cuba on June 12 as part of what Pentagon and State Department officials stressed is a routine activity and noted that Cuba has hosted Russian ships every year between 2013 and 2020. A Pentagon spokesperson, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said in June that “given Russia’s long history of Cuban port calls, these are considered routine naval visits, especially in the context of increased US support to Ukraine and NATO exercises.”

The vessels left Havana on June 17.

It is also not true that media organizations “don’t want to talk about it.” CNN, along with most other major news outlets, reported on the Russian ships’ positioning.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on military equipment left in Afghanistan

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim, which he has made in speech after speech, that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.

Trump said, “And we also left $85 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim that the ‘world was at peace’ during his administration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday, as many others at the RNC did, that while he was president the world was at peace.

“Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war,” he also claimed later in his speech.

Facts First: Trump’s claim about world peace under his presidency is false. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

US troops were still deployed in combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Somalia continued, as did the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was also ongoing, as were the conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Syria and between Israel and Iran; Islamist insurgents continued their fight in Africa’s Sahel region; there was major violence in Mexico’s long-running drug wars; fighting continued between Ukraine and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine’s Donbas region; and there were lots of other unresolved wars and conflicts around the world.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks armed conflict in countries around the world, said in a June email that it estimates there were active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2020 and again active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2021.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump on Venezuela’s crime rate

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday at the Republican National Convention that “in Venezuela, crime is down 72%” because foreign governments are sending their countries’ criminals to the US.

Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available.

And while it is certain that at least some criminals have joined law-abiding Venezuelans in a mass exodus from the country amid the economic crisis of the last decade, there is no proof Venezuela’s government has deliberately emptied prisons for migration purposes or intentionally sent ex-prisoners to the United States.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s evidence-free claim on immigration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that immigrants are “coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. … Terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before.”

Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that jails around the world are being emptied out so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants, nor for his claim that foreign governments are also emptying out mental health facilities for this purpose. Last year, Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence for his narrower claim at the time that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.

Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told CNN at the time they had not heard of anything that would corroborate Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing.

Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.

In response to CNN’s 2023 inquiry, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung cited one source for Trump’s claim about prisons being emptied for migration purposes – a 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart News about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents that Venezuela had done this. But that vague and unverified claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on US crime statistics

Former President Donald Trump claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that “our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim about a dramatic increase in the crime rate is false. Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall reported violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall reported violent crime.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump blames Biden administration for ‘greatest invasion in history’

During his RNC speech, former President Donald Trump claimed that the Biden administration has done nothing to curb illegal immigration to the US.

“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country—they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East,” Trump said, “they’re coming at levels we’ve never seen before it is an invasion indeed and this administration does nothing to stop them.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the Biden administration is doing “nothing” is incorrect. Illegal crossings at the US border dropped in June and the Biden administration has imposed significant restrictions on asylum along with other measures to curb illegal immigration.

Arrests along the US southern border dropped 29% in June, according to new data released by US Customs and Border Protection, following the Biden administration’s order severely limiting asylum-seeker crossings.“Recent border security measures have made a meaningful impact on our ability to impose consequences for those crossing unlawfully,” CBP Acting Commissioner Troy A. Miller previously said in a statement.

Last month, the Biden administration invoked an authority to shut off access to asylum for migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, a significant attempt to address one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities. It was the administration’s most dramatic move on the US southern border, using the same authority former President Donald Trump tried to use in office.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Trump makes claims about grocery prices rising under Biden

Former President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that groceries are up 57% during the Biden administration.

Facts First: Trump’s claims of grocery prices being up 57% are false and could use some context.

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, hitting a 41-year high, and has slowed since (the Consumer Price Index was at 3% as of June 2024). However, it remains elevated from historical levels. Three-plus years of pervasive and prolonged inflation has weighed considerably on Americans, especially lower-income households trying to afford the necessities (food, shelter and transportation).

Food prices, specifically grocery prices, did outpace overall inflation for much of 2022 and 2023, driven higher by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Still, grocery prices didn’t rise to the extent that Trump claims. Annual food and grocery inflation peaked at 11.4% and 13.5% in August 2022, respectively. Since Biden took office, the CPI “food at home” index is up 21%, which is higher than its 9% typical rise in recent history over a 54-month period, but it’s not 57%.

Through the 12 months that ended in June, overall food and grocery prices were up just 2.2% and 1.1%, respectively.

Certain food categories saw much greater inflation: Notably, egg prices were up 70% annually in January 2023. However, the underlying cause of that sharp increase was a highly contagious, deadly avian flu. Food prices are highly volatile and can be influenced by a variety of factors, especially disease, extreme weather events, global supply and demand, geopolitical events, and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Trump’s misleading claim about energy independence

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the US was “energy independent” during his presidency but that this changed under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: This is misleading. “Energy independent” is a political phrase, not a literal phrase, that can be defined in various ways – and, under Biden, the US has continued to satisfy the same definitions it satisfied under Trump. US production of oil and gas have set records under Biden.

“Energy independent” doesn’t mean the US uses no foreign energy or that it is untethered from global energy markets; this wasn’t the case under Trump and still isn’t under Biden. Experts in energy policy tend to scoff at the term “energy independence,” with three experts telling CNN in 2022 that it is a “horrible term,” “ridiculous term” and “stupid term,” respectively.

But if the term is defined as the US exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported, that has happened in every year under Biden after happening under Trump in 2020 for the first time in decades. (In fact, the US surplus in petroleum trade has grown under Biden as US crude oil production and exports have hit new highs) And if the term is defined as the US producing more energy than it consumes, that has also continued to happen under Biden after happening under Trump in 2019for the first time in decades.

You can read here about the various economic reasons the US has imported foreign energy under both Trump and Biden despite its so-called “energy independence.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on his tax cuts

Former President Donald Trump once again claimed that he signed the largest tax cuts in history during his administration.

“We got credit for the war, and defeating ISIS, and so many things. The great economy, the biggest tax cuts ever, the biggest regulation cuts ever, the creation of Space Force, the rebuilding of our military. We did so much,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

Facts First: This is false. Analyses have found that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

In a report released in June, the federal government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills have been bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration.

The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product – in other words, how much federal revenue the bill cuts as a portion of the economy – over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit, found in 2017 that the framework for the Trump tax cuts would be the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump’s false claim US had ‘no’ inflation during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that inflation did not exist during his presidency – drawing a contrast between his administration and that of President Joe Biden, whose early years in office were plagued by decades-high inflation.

“We had no inflation,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: Trump’s comment is false. Inflation was low, but not nothing.

The Consumer Price Index, a common measure of inflation, rose about 8% during Trump’s four years in office. In January 2021, his final partial month in office, it increased 1.4% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump repeats frequent claim about oil drilling and gas prices

As he has done repeatedly on the campaign trail, Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that under a new Trump administration, the United States would “drill, baby, drill, … by doing that, we will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.”

Facts First: Trump’s frequent campaign claim that the US can lower gas prices by producing more domestic oil is misleading.

Under President Joe Biden, US oil production has reached a new record this year, even surpassing output under Trump’s administration. The Energy Information Administration expects crude oil production to hit successive records this year and next, powered by an oil boom in the Permian Basin. As CNN has reported, the US currently produces more oil than any other country on the planet, at about half a million barrels per day more than the prior annual record set in 2019.

Prices at the pump in the US are highly dependent on the global oil market and the US cannot be truly energy independent when it comes to gas prices, energy experts have told CNN. Oil is a global commodity; the global price of oil determines US gas prices and it’s simply impossible to separate that price from shifting global dynamics like Russia’s war on Ukraine or OPEC’s recent decisions to cut oil production.

“Whether we’re drill baby, drilling has more to do with what the price of crude oil is, how healthy is the economy,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, and a former George W. Bush White House official, told CNN recently. “These things are outside of a president’s direct control.” There’s also the fact that the US consumes a different kind of oil than it produces, McNally told CNN last year. McNally compared the light crude the US produces to champagne, and the heavy crude it imports to coffee. US oil refineries are specifically built to separate out the “heavy and gunky” crude we consume, McNally said.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Pompeo falsely claims Biden ‘won’t even talk about’ American hostages in Gaza

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed on Thursday that President Joe Biden “won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” in Gaza.

“And now of course a second war in Gaza. President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held there by the Iranian regime,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that Biden “won’t even talk about” the American hostages in Gaza is false. Biden has spoken about the Americans held in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ invasion of Israel several times since October.

Recently on May 31, speaking about a proposed deal for Israel and Hamas, Biden said American hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal: “[W]e want them home.”

On October 25, Biden said his administration was working “around the clock together with our partners in the region to secure the release of hostages including American citizens … left behind.”

On November 26, he spoke extensively about the release of an Israeli American little girl who was held hostage and said he was pressing for more Americans to be released, adding, “we will not stop working until every hostage is returned to their loved ones.”

Most recently, at the NATO Summit in DC last week, Biden talked about hostages broadly, saying the US “has been working to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, to bring the hostages home, to create a path for peace and stability in the Middle East.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump biographical video includes false and misleading claims

The Republican National Convention played a biographical video about former President Donald Trump before Trump began his own speech. The video included false and misleading claims.

The Trump tax cuts

The video featured a narrator making a claim that Trump himself frequently utters. The narrator said, “The Trump tax cuts: largest in America’s history.”

This is false. Analyses have found that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars. You can read a detailed fact check here.

Global conflict under Trump

The video’s narrator also delivered a version of another claim Trump has made repeatedly, saying Trump’s “strength and resolve” produced “a stable world at peace.”

This claim about world peace under Trump is false, too. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

Americans’ incomes

While attacking President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, the video featured on-screen text that said, “U.S. incomes fall for third straight year,” attributing those words to a Wall Street Journal article in 2023. An image of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was shown on screen at the same time.

This combination of words and images is misleading. The video didn’t acknowledge that the first of the three straight years in which the Wall Street Journal article reported that inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. (The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline.)

Real median household income fell from $78,250 in 2019 to $76,660 in 2020 (all under Trump), then edged down to $76,330 in 2021 (mostly under Biden) and fell more substantially to $74,580 in 2022 (all under Biden). Figures for 2023 and 2024-to-date are not available.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Eric Trump’s false claims about the economy and US global standing in 2016

Eric Trump told the crowd at the RNC Thursday that the “economy was struggling, jobs were scarce” and the US had poor standing on the global stage when his father was elected president in 2016.

Facts First: Eric Trump’s claims are false. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he inherited a strong economy, including a robust labor market, and a nation that was viewed favorably on the global stage.

In 2016, the US added an average of nearly 194,000 jobs per month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In the two years before, those average gains were even higher: 226,000 in 2015 and nearly 250,000 in 2014.

Job gains remained above historical averages in 2017 through 2019, with 177,000 jobs added on average per month.

Eric Trump’s claims that jobs were scarce in 2016 were not accurate. In fact, the US labor market experienced its longest expansion on record starting in 2010 and continuing until March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic crippled global economies, including that of the US.

In addition to inheriting a labor market in good shape, the economy was growing when Trump took office. Real gross domestic product – the widest measure of economic activity – typically grows between 2% and 3%, and it averaged 2.4% between 2014-2016 and then nearly 2.7% during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

Also, the US was well regarded internationally when Barack Obama left office, and those sentiments plunged at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, according to the spring 2017 Global Attitudes Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Pompeo’s claim about the southern border under Trump

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that the US-Mexico border was “closed” during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Facts First: Pompeo’s claim is false.

While Trump tightened the border during his tenure, illegal crossings into the US from Mexico still numbered in the tens of thousands each month leading up to when he left office. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration limited non-essential travel on the US-Mexico border and prohibited migrants from crossing it in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. President Joe Biden later extended the restrictions.

The former president’s biggest effort to “close” the border was met with resistance by federal courts, and the Supreme Court later gave Biden the green light to end the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy.

From CNN’s Devan Cole

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

For the fourth straight night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a post-election November 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Pompeo’s false claim about spy balloons

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday evening that under former President Donald Trump’s administration, “not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across” the US.

“We’d begun on an honorable exit from Afghanistan, and not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across the United States of America,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.

Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after President Joe Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Linda McMahon’s misleading claim on tariffs

Linda McMahon, who served in the Trump administration as the Small Business Administrator, suggested at the Republican National Convention Thursday that China paid the tariffs that the former president put on roughly $300 billion of Chinese-made goods. “Instead of taxing American companies, Donald Trump put tariffs on China that raised billions of dollars and protected American industries,” she said.

Facts First: This characterization of Trump’s tariffs is misleading.

It’s true that Trump’s tariffs on China raised billions of dollars for the US government, but the duties were paid by US companies – not China.

Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission (USITC), has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.

Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer.

Many economists agree that tariffs act as a tax on American consumers.

“A tariff is just a form of a tax,” Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN earlier this year.

Tariffs can benefit some companies by raising the prices of competing foreign-made goods, but the duties can hurt other companies by raising component parts they need to manufacture.

For example, Trump’s tariffs were imposed, in part, to boost the US manufacturing sector – but that industry lost jobs.

Federal Reserve economists found a net decrease in manufacturing employment due to the tariffs in 2019. That’s mostly because goods became more expensive to US consumers. Plus, retaliatory tariffs put on American-made goods made other US manufacturers less competitive when selling abroad.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

RNC video featuring Reagan’s voice misleadingly twists magazine article

A video played on the final night of the Republican National Convention tried to attack President Joe Biden by featuring quotes from then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous rhetorical questions about the President Jimmy Carter era at a presidential debate against Carter in 1980.

At one point, the video featured Reagan’s voice asking if, compared to four years ago, “Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?” On-screen text answered the question with the words “allies no longer trust the United States,” attributing them to a September 2021 article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Facts First: This quote is misleading. The article in Foreign Affairs didn’t actually declare that allies no longer trust the United States. Rather, the article noted that “critics of President Joe Biden” make the “claim” that allies no longer trust the US after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – but the article then went on to argue that “these concerns about credibility are overblown.”

The convention video also featured Reagan’s voice asking, “Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?” But if you go back precisely four years from the most recent unemployment rate, the answer is: less unemployment. The current unemployment rate is 4.1% for June 2024; four years prior, in June 2020, the unemployment rate was 11.0% amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a reasonable basis for this part of the video, though, if you interpret “four years ago” more broadly to refer to any time in 2020. Before the pandemic, in the first two months of 2020, the unemployment rates were 3.6% and 3.5%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

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