Atlanta.– President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump exchanged hints and false and misleading information in their first debate of the 2024 election.
The volume of false and misleading claims Trump has deployed throughout his campaigns and presidency cannot be compared to Biden, who tends to lean more toward exaggerations and embellishments than outright lies. Here is a review of the false and misleading claims of the two candidates.
Economy
TRUMP: “We had the best economy in history.”
THE FACTS: That’s not accurate. First, the pandemic triggered a massive recession during his presidency. The government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economy. Trump had the ignominy of leaving the White House with fewer jobs than when he entered.
But even stripping out the problems caused by the pandemic, economic growth averaged 2.67% during Trump’s first three years. That’s pretty solid. But it’s nowhere near the 4% it averaged during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, growth has been higher so far under Biden than under Trump.
Trump managed to lower the unemployment rate to 3.5% before the pandemic. But once again, the activity rate of people aged 25 to 54 – the core of the American workforce – was higher under Clinton. The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than under Trump.
Trump also likes to talk about how low inflation was under his watch. Gasoline dropped to $1.77 a gallon. But of course, that price drop happened during pandemic lockdowns, when few people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.
Similarly, average 30-year mortgage rates fell to 2.65% during the pandemic. Those low rates were a byproduct of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to prop up a weak economy, rather than the sign of strength Trump now suggests they were.
Abortion
TRUMP: “The problem they have is that they are radicals because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, in the ninth month, and even after birth, after birth”
THE FACTS: Trump inaccurately referred to abortions after birth. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law allowing the killing of a baby after birth.
Abortion rights advocates say terms like this and “late-term abortions” attempt to stigmatize abortions later in pregnancy. Late-term abortions are extremely rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Late abortions are also often the result of serious complications, such as fetal abnormalities, that put the life of the woman or the fetus at risk, medical experts say. In most cases, these are also wanted pregnancies, experts say.
Covid-19
BIDEN: Trump told Americans to “inject bleach” into their arms to treat COVID-19.
THE FACTS: That’s a stretch. Rather, Trump asked whether it would be possible to inject disinfectant into the lungs.
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” he said at a news conference in April 2020. “And is there a way that we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a wipe, because you see it gets into the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so that would be interesting to check that, so you’re going to have to use doctors with that, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’re going to see, but the whole concept of light, the way it kills it in a minute. That’s pretty powerful.”
Migrants
TRUMP, referring to Biden: “He’s the one who killed people with a bad border and flooding hundreds of thousands of people dying and also killing our citizens when they come in.”
THE FACTS: The massive influx of migrants arriving illegally into the United States across the southern border has led to a number of false and misleading claims by Trump. For example, he periodically claims that other countries are emptying their prisons and psychiatric institutions to send them to the United States.
Trump has also claimed that the influx of immigrants is causing an increase in crime in the United States, although statistics show that violent crime is decreasing.
There have been recent high-profile heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally. But FBI statistics do not break down crimes by the offender’s immigration status, and there is no evidence of an increase in crimes committed by immigrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in immigrant-heavy cities like New York. Studies have shown that people living in the country illegally are less likely to be arrested for violent, property, or drug crimes than native-born Americans. For more than a century, immigration critics have attempted to link newcomers to crime. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission found no evidence to support a connection between immigration and rising crime, and many studies since then have reached similar conclusions.
Texas is the only state that tracks crimes by immigration status. A study published in 2020 by the National Academy of Sciences found “significantly lower felony arrest rates” among people in the U.S. illegally than among legal immigrants or the native-born.
Some crime is expected given the large immigrant population. There were an estimated 10.5 million people in the country illegally in 2021, according to the latest estimate from the Pew Research Center, a number that has almost certainly increased with large influxes at the border. In 2022, the Census Bureau estimated the foreign-born population at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases over the past dozen years.
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