Fact-checking night 1 of the Republican National Convention
CNN
By CNN Staff
(CNN) — The Republican National Convention kicked off Monday night in Milwaukee.
Here are some of the most noteworthy falsehoods from night one of the RNC.
Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video
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. 20788998 58:01 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.” 20788998 57:44 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
Sen. Blackburn claims Biden administration hired 85,000 new IRS agents
Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee claimed in her speech Monday that the Biden administration has hired 85,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents to “harass hardworking Americans.”
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 85,000 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
Sen. Katie Britt on Americans working two jobs
Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama suggested in her speech on Monday that during President Joe Biden’s term, Americans are having to take on two jobs to deal with the cost of living.
“With President Trump, the tough choice was which job offer to accept, now it’s which second job to take just to pay the bills,” she said.
Facts First: The number of workers who hold multiple jobs as a percentage of total employment has never gone above the highest level under Trump, according to Labor Department data.
While it’s true that the annual inflation rate reached its highest level in more than four decades under Biden (in June 2022, though it has since declined), Americans aren’t necessarily taking on two jobs more than usual to deal with it. In fact, the number of Americans holding multiple jobs as a share of all employed workers was below levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic throughout 2021 and 2022. It has increased over the past several months, reaching 5.2% in June. The share of workers with multiple jobs hasn’t gone above 5.3% since the Great Recession.
From CNN’s Bryan Mena
North Carolina gubernatorial candidate’s economic claims
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, now running for governor, made a series of economic claims in his speech. One about the Biden era was misleading, while another about the Trump era touted pre-pandemic statistics without acknowledging that when Trump left office the economy was in much worse shape.
Robinson said that under Biden’s administration, “grocery prices have skyrocketed, and gas has nearly doubled.”
Facts First: It is true that grocery prices have jumped by over 20% since Biden was sworn in, but gas prices aren’t double what they were when he took office.
The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to AAA. When Biden was inaugurated, the national average was $2.39.
Robinson also claimed that while Trump was president, unemployment was “at a historic low.” That was certainly true prior to the pandemic. For instance, in February 2020, the nation’s unemployment rate was at 3.5%, the lowest since the late 1960s.
By comparison, the average monthly unemployment rate over the past decade was 4.8%.
But when Trump left office, it was at 6.4%, far from historic lows.
From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s misleading claim about Biden-era job growth
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia claimed of Democrats: “They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years.”
Facts First: This is misleading at best. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that the number of American-born workers with jobs has grown significantly during President Joe Biden’s administration. About 130.9 million American-born workers were employed in June, an increase of nearly 4.7 million since June 2021, shortly after Biden took office. (This data is not seasonally adjusted, so we have to look at the same month in each year for an accurate comparison. In January 2021, the month Biden was sworn in, about 123 million American-born workers were employed.)
There is always churn in the labor market, so it’s certainly possible that hundreds of thousands of individual American-born workers lost their jobs during this period – but contrary to Greene’s insinuation, there have been far greater gains than losses under Biden for American-born workers as a group.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Tami Luhby
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Transgender Day of Visibility
Greene said while attacking Democrats in her convention speech that “the establishment in Washington” held Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter this year.
“They promised normalcy and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday,” the Georgia Republican said.
Facts first: This claim needs context. Transgender Day of Visibility has been held annually on March 31 since it was started in 2009 as a day of awareness to celebrate the successes of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the first day of spring and can change year to year. The holiday happened to fall on March 31 in 2024.
Responding to Republicans criticizing President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in an April 1 briefing said she was “surprised by the misinformation” surrounding Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility falling on the same day.
“Every year, for the past several years, on March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked. And as we know — for folks who understand the calendar and how it works, Easter falls on different Sundays every year. And this year, it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day. And so, that is the simple fact,” she said.
From CNN’s Jack Forrest
RNC video falsely claims Trump signed largest tax cuts ever
A video played at the Republican National Convention featured a narrator making the claim that Trump “gave us the largest tax cuts in history.”
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
Republican chair falsely claims Middle East was ‘at peace’ four years ago
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in his speech on Monday: “Four years ago, Europe and the Middle East were at peace.”
Facts First: Whatley’s claim is false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords that Trump’s administration helped to negotiate, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East four years ago in mid-2020 and when Trump left office in early 2021.
The list notably included the civil war in Yemen; the civil war in Syria; and the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Millercalled “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.” Also, the US, its allies and civilians continued to be attacked in an unstable Iraq.
“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last fall, when Trump himself made a similar claim about having achieved peace in the Middle East.
Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called that claim “false” when Trump made it. She said in a November email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
RNC video attacks Biden with two-year-old gas price figure
The Republican National Convention featured a video attacking Biden over the price of gas. But the video misleadingly deployed out-of-date figures as if they were current.
A narrator claimed: “When President Trump left office, gas cost only $2.20. Under Biden and Harris, gas skyrocketed to the highest price in history, over five bucks a gallon.” Later in the video, a young man said, “Within my first year of driving, I’m having to deal with an average of $5.03 across the nation,” and a woman said, “It’s impossible to pay $5.03. We need to care about our people better than that.”
Facts First: These claims about Biden-era gas prices are two years out of date. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to the AAA. The national average did, under Biden, hit a record high of more than $5 per gallon – about $5.02, according to AAA data – but that happened in June 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a global spike in oil prices. The RNC videos offered no indication that the national average has since fallen substantially.
Also, the national average on the day Trump left office in January 2021 was about $2.39 per gallon, not $2.20, though it was lower than $2.20 in some states.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
RNC video doesn’t mention Trump was president during one of the years Americans’ incomes dropped
A video played during the Republican National Convention, which attacked Biden’s handling of the economy, featured a narrator saying, “The Wall Street Journal has reported today that Americans’ incomes have gone down three straight years.”
Facts First: This needs context. The RNC video left out an inconvenient fact from the Wall Street Journal report that was published in 2023: one of the three straight years in which inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline, but the ad failed to explain that not all of the three years were under Biden.
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
RNC video cites outdated inflation figure
Attacking Biden’s handling of the economy, the Republican National Convention featured a video in which a narrator said, “America has reached the highest inflation in 40 years.”
Facts First: This claim is two years out of date. The year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was indeed the highest since late 1981, between 40 and 41 years prior. But inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3.0% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
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