Fact-Checking Trump’s Closing Argument
“Trump’s Closing Argument: Lies, Distortions and Inaccuracies
Beyoncé, whales, voting and immigration: For Mr. Trump, no topic is too insignificant or too important when it comes to making misleading or inaccurate statements.
Former President Donald J. Trump, in the closing days of the 2024 election, continues to be a font of exaggerations, misleading claims and outright lies.
For Mr. Trump, no topic is too important or too insignificant when it comes to making inaccurate or distorted assertions. In the past two weeks, he has shared false claims about voting, immigration, economic policy and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as whales, an astronaut, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and his own uncle, among countless other misleading statements.
Mr. Trump frequently revisits certain claims or inflates old exaggerations into even more egregious falsehoods.
Here’s a fact-check of his recent remarks.
False Claims of Voter Fraud
Mr. Trump has continued to repeat the lie that the 2020 election was stolen (it was not), reprising a number of inaccurate claims about the race that year: insisting that courts threw out all of his election lawsuits without considering the merits (of 64 lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump and his supporters, 20 were dismissed before being heard on the merits, 30 included a hearing on merits and 14 were dismissed by the plaintiffs themselves); asserting that election observers were not given access (his own lawsuits say otherwise); and claiming that former President Jimmy Carter had opposed mail-in voting (he supported it in 2020).
As Election Day nears, Mr. Trump has again cited examples of what he calls fraud.
What Was Said
False. Mr. Trump’s campaign said he was referring to a ruling by a federal judge in Virginia ordering the state to restore about 1,600 voter registrations — not thousands of ballots that have already been cast. The Supreme Court has since temporarily paused that decision, meaning the state can remove those voters from its rolls ahead of this election cycle.
Virginia, citing the need to remove noncitizens who could vote illegally, began purging from its rolls people whose driver’s license forms suggest they are not citizens. It said that 600 people had marked themselves as noncitizens on official forms and that another 1,000 had said they were citizens but were previously listed as noncitizens. The Justice Department and voting rights groups sued Virginia, arguing, among other things, that many may in fact be citizens who had improperly filled out the forms or had since been naturalized. A federal court agreed.
A lawyer representing the state acknowledged the possibility that some may be citizens but said removing the names was necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting. But that is not evidence that thousands of noncitizens have voted illegally, and instances in which that has happened are extremely rare.
False. Again, Mr. Trump was wrongly describing other voter documents as ballots cast.
Officials in Lancaster County, Pa., announced on Oct. 25 that they were investigating two batches of 2,500 voter registration applications for potential fraud. Officials told The New York Times that some contained incorrect Social Security numbers or addresses, and other residents told investigators they had not filled out the forms. But not all the applications were fake and the registrations included both Democratic and Republican voters, they said.
Again, no actual votes were in dispute.
Inaccurate Attacks on Harris
Misleading attacks on Ms. Harris figured prominently in Mr. Trump’s last rallies and appearances in the news media. Those include characterizing her as the Biden administration’s “border czar” (this was not her title), claiming that she supports defunding the police and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (this overstated her positions) and asserting that she supports banning cows and cars (she does not).
His recent remarks also include fresh and false attacks on her economic policies.
What Was Said
False. Most elements of the 2017 tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law are set to expire next year. Mr. Trump was referring to an estimate of the average tax increase in that situation. But Ms. Harris has proposed extending the individual tax cuts for those making under $400,000, while raising taxes on the very wealthy and corporations and giving lower- and middle-class taxpayers additional tax breaks.
The Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank, estimated that the law’s expiration would cost each taxpayer about $2,853 on average. But there is great variability depending on each family and on each taxpayer’s individual circumstances. The think tank estimated that a single person making $30,000 would see a hike of $243 and a family making over $2 million would see an increase of $24,000.
More important, that is not what Ms. Harris has proposed.
Under Ms. Harris’s plan — which includes expanding the child and earned-income tax credits and providing down-payment assistance for some home buyers — all income groups barring the top 5 percent of earners would see after-tax income increase by $1,800 or more, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research group. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank, similarly found that all but the top 1 percent would see after-tax income increase by $1,100 or more.
Mr. Trump’s claim about a 33 percent tax hike on domestic production refers to Ms. Harris’s proposal to increase the top corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. That is indeed a 33 percent increase, but that rate generally only applies to the profits of traditional C corporations, and allows deductions for the cost of goods, wages, advertising, other taxes and interest.
But other types of businesses like sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations are taxed differently. Known as “pass-throughs” because the income of these businesses are passed through their owners’ tax returns and taxed at individual rates, they would not generally be subject to the 28 percent tax increase. Most businesses are, in fact, pass-throughs, and they earn a majority of business income in the United States, contrary to Mr. Trump’s claim that the increase of the corporate tax rate would apply to “all domestic production.” A portion of these businesses would be subject to Ms. Harris’s proposal to the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent — that is not a 33 percent increase.
The Trump campaign cited the Tax Foundation’s assessment that raising the corporate tax to 28 percent would cause a loss of 159,00 jobs and a 0.8 percent decline in gross domestic product. That is not the same thing, though, as a 33 percent tax on all domestic production.
False. Ms. Harris called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in 2019 during the Democratic primary in the 2020 election. She no longer holds that position and has promoted increased oil and gas development, including new leases for fracking, that have taken place under the Biden administration. Mr. Trump also vastly overstated the number of jobs in fracking.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there were about 120,000 jobs in oil and gas extraction across the entire country in September, and 22,200 jobs in “mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction” — not just fracking — in Pennsylvania in 2023. And the Energy Department estimated that there were nearly 49,000 workers in Pennsylvania’s fuels sector in 2023, including more than 16,000 in oil and other petroleum and more than 13,000 in gas.
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, estimated that there were some 93,000 direct jobs in oil and gas in Pennsylvania in 2021 — again, across the entire sector and not just fracking — and a total of 423,000 jobs “supported” by the industry. But experts have taken issue with the figure, noting an industry’s economic activity typically only generates up to twice the number of indirect jobs.
The Trump campaign cited a 2019 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerceestimating that Pennsylvania would lose 609,000 direct and indirect jobs under a nationwide fracking ban — resulting from “higher residential energy costs,” “higher business energy costs” and “upstream production losses.” As The Washington Post noted, Mr. Trump’s own Energy Department said that the study’s finding appeared to be an outlier.
A researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, told The Washington Post that there were about 18,000 direct fracking jobs in the state.
Doubling Down on Old Falsehoods
Mr. Trump’s appearances in the last week included many familiar boasts, superlatives and dire warnings: The 2017 tax cut was the “biggest” (it was not), that the level of illegal immigration under him was the lowest in “recorded history” (it was not) and that he had “rebuilt” the military (he did not). Conversely, by his account, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris presided over “the worst inflation in history”(they did not), the import of “criminal migrants from jails” and “insane aslyums” (there is no evidence for this) and the diversion of funds from disaster relief to migrant shelters (no funds have been diverted).
In some cases, Mr. Trump has updated familiar talking points, railing against crime and reverting to anti-immigrant messaging.
What Was Said
False. During the presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump insisted that violent crime rose under the Biden administration, prompting the ABC anchor David Muir to fact-check him. Recently, Mr. Trump has insisted that he had been proved right by referring to and either misstating or wildly inflating an analysis of official crime data published by Fox News.
The F.B.I. reported that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, and released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to the Fox News report, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.
But even that figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020 from a rate of 386.3 per 100,000 people to 360.9 in 2021, then 377.1 in 2022 and then 363.8 in 2023.
“Violent crime still had a small down in 2023 relative to 2022 and was largely in line with the historically low violent crime rates observed from 2013 through 2019,” wrote Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst.
“None of these revisions change our understanding of the nation’s crime trends,” he added.
What Was Said
This is exaggerated. After repeating a debunked claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the Trump campaign has pivoted to less fantastical, yet nonetheless hyperbolic warnings about their impact on the community.
Mr. Trump overstated the number of Haitian migrants in Springfield. City officials have estimated 12,000 to 20,000, some of whom have lived in the country for many years.
No entity has “dropped” the migrants into the city, which explained in an F.A.Q. that “once a person with temporary protected status enters the country, they are free to locate wherever they choose.” Many were drawn to Springfield to fill jobs.
The Trump campaign pointed to doctors and officials in the city describing struggling to adapt to an influx of migrants. Although the city has said a lack of resources in schools and public health was a current challenge, a public health official in Springfield said its hospitals were not overwhelmed. Similarly, school officials have said that the influx of students who do not speak English “puts a strain” on the system, but those students’ needs for resources was “not taking away from funding that’s used for the English-speaking population.”
A Grab Bag of Errant Claims
Digressions, too, are a staple of Mr. Trump’s messaging and can incorporate his penchant for exaggeration. In the past two weeks, he has repeated inaccurate claims that he was on Oprah Winfrey’s final show (he was not), that devastating wildfires were caused because “they’re not allowed to rake their forests” (this was misleading) and that wind turbines cause whale deaths (they do not).
Mr. Trump also did not stick to the facts on a broad range of topics.
What Was Said
False. Mr. Aldrin, the astronaut who was the second man to walk on the moon, endorsed Mr. Trump last week in a statement that did not say that the endorsement was Mr. Aldrin’s first. A longtime Republican donor, Mr. Aldrin has endorsed a number of Republican candidates in the past, including Martha McSally in Arizona’s Senate race in 2020 (a fact that Mr. Trump himself shared on social media); Dan Crenshaw for a House seat in Texas in 2018; Mark Treadwell, then the lieutenant governor of Alaska, in a Senate race in 2014; and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware’s Senate race in 2008. Mr. Aldrin also spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2016 and appeared at a campaign rally for President George W. Bush in 2004.
What Was Said
“They said, ladies and gentlemen, they said, Beyoncé’s coming to sing. And she came, but she didn’t sing. And then Kamala came on as Beyoncé was leaving without singing even one song, and they booed the hell out of both of them.”
— in a rally on Oct. 30 in Green Bay, Wis.
False. Beyoncé spoke at a rally for Ms. Harris this month in Houston. While she did not perform, as Mr. Trump said, the two women were not booed. The Trump campaign pointed to a Daily Mail report about Beyoncé fans angry that she did not perform, quoting an unnamed fan describing feeling “bamboozled” on social media. The report did not mention booing.
transcript
Video shows Beyoncé walking on stage to loud cheers at a rally in Houston. After speaking, she introduces Vice President Kamala Harris and gives her a hug.
Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big, loud Texas welcome to the next president of the United States: Vice President Kamala Harris.
What Was Said
“I had an uncle that was at M.I.T. for — a professor for 41 years, the longest-serving professor ever.”
— at the Rocky Mount, N.C., rally
False. Dr. John G. Trump, Mr. Trump’s uncle, was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1980 and a professor emeritus until his death in 1985, according to the university’s museum. The university told Newsweek that Professor Trump was not its longest-serving faculty member and that it knew of at least 10 people who had served longer or were currently serving.
What Was Said
This is misleading. Mr. Trump was referring to Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump aide and now a co-host of “The View” who recently signed a letter warning that Mr. Trump, if re-elected, would rule like a dictator. Ms. Farah Griffin worked in the press office as the White House director of strategic communications from April 2020 to her resignation in December 2020. Her title was “assistant to the president,” a designation for top-ranking officials and the same held by senior aides including advisers (like Ivanka Trump), the White House counsel (like Pat A. Cipollone) and chiefs of staff (like John F. Kelly). Ms. Farah Griffin was not an “assistant press secretary,” a term for lower-ranking aides in the press office.
Linda Qiu is a reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade. More about Linda Qiu“
No comments:
Post a Comment