By Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, D’Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson, Jessica McDonald, Saranac Hale Spencer, Alan Jaffe, Kate Yandell, Ben Cohen, Logan Chapman, Sarah Usandivaras and Ian Fox
The highly anticipated debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was a combative event in which facts were repeatedly trampled and distorted.
- In a lengthy exchange on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong, too.
- Trump referred to a rumor that began on Facebook alleging that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating local pets. City police have said there have been “no credible reports” of that kind of activity.
- Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by almost $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.
- But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American families, but most agree it would be substantial.
- Trump falsely claimed that Harris was sent “to negotiate peace” between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. Days before Russia invaded Ukraine that month, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskky in Germany. She did not meet with Putin, as Trump said.
- Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” When President Joe Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent — lower than it was during several administrations since the 1930s.
- Harris and Trump traded jabs on manufacturing job performance in their respective administrations, with each claiming the other lost jobs, but both sides are cherry-picking from the statistics.
- Trump repeated his unsupported claim that “millions of people” are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” And he said these migrants were “taking jobs” from “African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that, either.
- Trump repeated his false claim that everyone — liberals and conservatives — wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.
- The former president repeatedly said Democrats, including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, were in favor of abortion “in the ninth month” — or even after birth. Abortion that late is exceedingly rare, and abortion after birth does not exist. It’s homicide, and it’s illegal.
- Harris repeated the assertion that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected, but Trump said that he does not intend to sign such a ban. Harris also tried to tie Trump to Project 2025’s proposal for mandatory abortion reporting, but Trump has tried to distance himself from the document.
- The vice president claimed Trump’s economic policies led to “one of the highest” trade deficits in American history. But the annual trade deficits during the Biden administration have exceeded those under Trump.
- Trump again falsely claimed that fraud was responsible for his loss in the 2020 election, and wrongly claimed that none of his lawsuits making that allegation had been decided on the merits.
- Trump said Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania.” When she was running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris did say she was “in favor of banning fracking.” But in an Aug. 29 interview on CNN and at the debate, Harris said, “I will not ban fracking.”
- Harris claimed that Trump’s tax proposal would “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.
- Trump falsely claimed that Harris “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” Harris has not called for taking away all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons.”
- Trump claimed that he had “no inflation” during his presidency, while inflation experienced under Biden has been “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero. And while Inflation has risen significantly under Biden, it is far below record levels.
- Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president, and he backed a lawsuit that would have nullified the law.
- The former president wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” The latest FBI statistics are based on voluntary reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency.
- Trump falsely claimed that the number of jobs created during the Biden administration “turned out to be a fraud.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a downward revision in the jobs tally during its routine annual revision of jobs data.
- Trump wrongly claimed that under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”
- Harris claimed that Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1,” but the former president has said that he was joking when he said he would be a dictator for one day.
- Trump repeated a popular talking point, calling Harris the “border czar.” She was never in charge of border security, rather, she was tasked with addressing root causes of migration from three Central American Countries.
- Trump repeated another familiar claim, wrongly saying that the U.S. had left “$85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment” when it left Afghanistan.
