Fact Check: 11 Lies Told (Mostly by Trump) During the Presidential Debate

The presidential debate that pitted Republican candidate Donald Trump against Democrat Kamala Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia kept the legion of fact-checkers in the American media busy, who had a hard time keeping up during the 90 minutes of a rough face-to-face. If most analysts agreed that she would win in the race for the fake news Harris ended up losing: Trump lied much more than his opponent, and he did so on some of the issues on which he is most accustomed to lying, with immigration, a ghost that he repeatedly raises, at the forefront.

Trump says undocumented immigrants are ‘eating the dogs’ in Ohio town. It’s false. It was perhaps the most wildly conspiratorial moment of the night. It came when Trump echoed a rumor that had emerged in recent days, according to which undocumented Haitians living in a town in Ohio called Springfield are fed with “the pets of the people who live there.” Several journalistic reports on the ground have denied this. And the authorities of the town, which has voted Republican in recent elections, have declared that “there is no credible evidence or specific complaints of pets hurt, injured or mistreated by members of the immigrant community.”

Trump claims that under Biden, 21 million people have crossed the border. The figure is false, even though the data recorded during the current administration has broken records. The total number of “encounters” at the northern and southern borders between February 2021 and July 2024, both at legal ports of entry and in the spaces between those ports, was approximately 10 million, a far cry from the 21 million cited by the Republican candidate. It should also be noted that the occurrence of an “encounter” does not mean that a person is allowed into the country. Many are immediately expelled.

Harris insists on linking Trump to Project 2025. The Democratic campaign has turned a 900-page document drafted under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank based in Washington, into a weapon to attack its opponent. Project 2025 proposes a series of extreme measures that, according to its critics, serve to give an idea of ​​what a second Trump presidency would be like. Trump, for his part, has distanced himself from its content and its promoters (despite the fact that some of them, some 140 according to CNN, are among his former collaborators). Although the harmony seems evident, there is no conclusive evidence to support that Trump will implement Project 2025 if he returns to the White House.

In Democratic states, “abortions” after birth are permitted, according to Trump. It is one of the most repeated mantras of the hardline wing of the Republican Party and also one of the biggest lies in that repertoire. Those who are against abortion consider the interruption of pregnancy when the gestation has entered its final phase to be an aberration. They tend to hide the fact that only 1% of these interventions take place after the 21st week and also that these decisions are not made on a whim, but because the mother’s life is in danger or because there is a certainty that the pregnancy will not come to term. As for killing newborns, there is no place in the United States that allows something that, on the other hand, would not be an abortion, but infanticide.

Harris assumes Trump will pass a national abortion ban. What the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the precedent of 2022 did Roe v. Wade, And with this, half a century of federal protection of abortion, was to return to the States the ability to legislate on the subject. Harris, who feels especially comfortable on the subject of women’s sexual and reproductive freedom, warned that her rival was willing to go a step further and that she would sign a law that prohibits abortions throughout the country. There is no certainty that the Republican candidate has such plans if he wins the elections, although he has repeatedly chosen not to specifically answer the question of whether he will do so when it has been posed to him.

Trump: “I had nothing to do with January 6th.” Although he has not been convicted of those events (although he has two pending trials for that reason), it is false that he did not contribute to what happened that day. He did so by spreading lies about the supposed theft of the election by the Democrats, calling thousands of his followers to a rally in Washington (to which he promised it would be “savage”), and inviting them to march to the Capitol when it was over. Afterwards, he sat in the White House watching the violent assault on the building, and it took him two hours to come out and ask his followers to desist from the attack.

The Democratic candidate recalls with interest when her opponent promised a “bloodbath.” Trump did say those words, yes, but they need at least some context. He told a rally: “If I’m not elected, it will be a bloodbath for everybody… It won’t matter, because there will be a bloodbath.” The statement certainly sounded like a threat, but listen to it in its entirety and it seems clear that he was referring to the, in his view, disastrous effects that a Democratic victory would have on the economy. The full statement is this: “If you’re listening, President, [chino] Xi [Jinping]you and I are friends… he understands my way of doing things. Those huge monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now… you’re not going to hire Americans and then you’re not going to sell those cars. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every car that crosses the border, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I’m elected.” Immediately afterward, he added: “Now, if I’m not elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for everybody; that’s the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Trump insists on the theory of political persecution against him. It is one of his most cherished arguments: he claims that the four trials against him are part of a plan by the Biden administration to get rid of a political rival. There is no evidence to support this accusation that the prosecutors pursuing him are obeying government orders.

“There are millions of people who come to our country from prisons and mental hospitals,” Trump says. Another classic of the Republican candidate’s rhetoric, which, however, is baseless. There is no evidence that among the immigrants arriving at the southern border of the United States there are many criminals or mentally ill people.

Trump denounces inflation, “probably the worst in the history of our country.” The cost of living is one of the biggest concerns for voters, and it has been an issue since Biden was in the White House, but it is not true that it is the highest in history. There are several examples of inflation records much higher than the 9% that occurred in June 2022. They came just after World War II or during the oil crisis. In addition, the rate as of July 2024 was 2.9% per year, the lowest in three years.

Harris: “There is not a single member of the United States military “I’m on active duty in a combat zone, any war zone around the world, for the first time this century.” This statement is misleading. It’s true that the United States is not engaged in “total” wars on the lines of Iraq or Afghanistan, but it’s also true that American servicemen are involved in Israel’s war against Hamas and the upheaval it has brought to the Middle East region. Not only that, they have also suffered casualties: three soldiers stationed in Jordan were killed in a drone strike in January, and two Navy Seals drowned in early February during an operation against the Houthis in Yemen.