Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part Two

Posted on December 16, 2024 by bpriddy

We painted a rather pessimistic view in our last entry of our retread President’s plans for the largest deportation effort in our history. We looked at a Mother Jones article from a few months back that tried to gauge what the difficulties would be if he carries through with his plan.

The article displayed concerns about grave economic consequences of deporting 11-million people. Most of the adults in the group would be forced to leave their jobs behind, producing a crisis in the chicken plucking, roofing, and agricultural industries.

Here’s how to deal with this:

During his campaign, the incoming President asserted that these brown people from the south and the (probably) predominantly white people form the north—all of those thieves, killers, rapists, robbers, insane people, and major drug carriers, you know—were taking jobs away from Americans. Late in the campaign, speaking to a special group, he emphasized that these jobs were “Black jobs.”

You might remember from his June debate: “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Hispanics taking Hispanic jobs? We’ll let him try to make that logical some other time, which might be one of the few times he has done that. But what about “Black jobs?”

If I were an African-American, I might take great offense at his assumption that there are certain jobs set aside for Black people. I thought our civilized America had pretty well gotten beyond that, but maybe he was too busy bankrupting his latest business venture to notice.

Incidentally, did he ever check the citizenship status of the cleaning staff at his hotels, clubs, and other properties? And what color were those jobs?

Well, not to get toooooo snarky—

The Hispanic people that he seems to have a hate/love relationship with do the farming, roofing, hotel cleaning, and healthcare jobs that include, as one source put it in our last entry, “emptying bedpans.” But if we export the Hispanics despite them having “Hispanic jobs,” then Black people seem to be the correct substitute, especially since those folks took black jobs to begin with.

But before we jettison all of these brown rapists, drug smugglers, etc., we can make them build the wall on our southern border that Mexico was supposed to pay us for building. We’re still waiting to hear that the check has cleared.

NBC had a story this summer reporting that Black workers often are overrepresented in government and health care work. There are eight Fortune 500 companies already headed by black executives, and Black people cause a problem for this scheme elsewhere. Under the first Trump administration, black unemployment dropped to 5.3%–in September 2019. Under Joe Biden, it dropped to 4.8% in April 2023.

But that’s good news because the Army and the National Guard won’t have to round up a real big bunch of people to fill vacancies in Black people’s Black jobs. That’s good news because he won’t have enough federal military or state national guard units to round up all of the Black people who will be told to fill in for the rounded-up Hispanics. Federal law tends to oppose that sort of thing anyway—-although the Trump Supreme Court might refine that provision.

Oh, wait! We DO have enough troops to do all of this. We just bring home soldiers helping protect our NATO allies and our sailors whose ships are protecting Israel from Iranian rocket attacks, and sailors from the ships protecting Taiwan, and troops keeping peace or holding enemies at bay in other places. He doesn’t seem to think many of them belong out there anyway, so that’s not an employment gap he needs to worry about filling.

But then, who will replace all the Black people who are going to replace the Brown people thrown out of the country?

The solution is too easy.

Round up all the homeless people and make them fill in for all the Black folks who will regain all the jobs the brown people took away from the black people who will get their jobs back when we get rid of the Hispanic people who risked everything to come to this country to get jobs, many of whom sent some of their earnings back to other people in their home countries .

Now, all of those people who sent money home from America will be no longer sending money back home that helps their national economies. Instead, they will become a burden to those counties that we consider our allies.

Getting back to the homeless—

There are studies that show many of the homeless have mental problems but they can’t be treated because Ronald Reagan killed President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act that continued funding federal community mental health centers. In a matter of weeks after he took office, Reagan changed things to give states block grants which haven’t made up for the loss of the Carter program. So we have a lot of mentally-ill homeless people among us and it’s easier to complain about them than do something about their problems.

But if we can take these folks, even those with mental health issues, round them up, get them off the streets and then distribute them out for mental health care duties now handled by Hispanic and Black people, everything’s fine.

Elon Musk wants to slash government spending by billions of dollars so don’t look for any mental health help for the homeless folks that will be rounded up to complete this restructuring of our economy. The buck has to stop somewhere.

But who is going to help those who have taken the remaining job openings that have trickled down after the Hispanic deportations?

Simple.

Our retread President tells all those countries for which he wants to inflict tariffs that if the armies in those other countries round up enough of their people and make them emigrate to the United States, we won’t have a problem. Unfortunately, our immigration people might be so busy getting people out of the country that they won’t have time to check the legality of those coming in.

But there it is. All the bases are covered. America will be great again.

No charge. No awards expected.

A lingering issue remains, though. Will the Army and the National Guard be committed equally to rounding up Canadians, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Swedes—among others—who probably are in this country illegally, too?

And then once we’ve got all of immigrants out of the country, who’s going to protect the rest of us from the Wampanoags, whose lands were taken by the Pilgrims who came here seeking religious liberty for themselves but not for Baptists and other unacceptable people who they considered the equivalents of our rapists, drug smugglers, criminals and crazy people, when the Wampanoags and other nations demand the interlopers get out of places such as Mar-a-Lago?

Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part One

Posted on December 11, 2024 by bpriddy

Our retread President has promised that deportation of 11-millon undocumented aliens will be started on his first day in office. A number of economists or economy-watchers say the consequences could be severe. But that is immaterial to the incoming Commander/Demander in Chief of our country. Others have raised serious humanitarian questions about the policy. But nobody has ever accused our incoming President of having any humanitarian interests except for his own, which are closely tied to his personal wealth.

Today we are going to start describing a plan that will mitigate any economic or diplomatic damage resulting from this deportation efforts. We expect no recognition from the incoming administration for these helpful ideas. However, if an invitation were extended to attend the State of the Union speech during which it would be announced that our necks soon will be decorated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, we would not object. Much. We are offering this advice at no cost, something that will please Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who seems to have a plan to reduce government spending no matter what the cost.

Some might find this plan slightly off-the-wall. Or entirely so. But somebody has to provide some insight into how to deal with this issue and your faithful scribe will jump into the breach.

Mother Jones magazine, which some people dismiss as a liberal rag, took a hard look at Trump’s proposal a few months ago. The incoming president has blamed foreign drug cartels and gangs have “invaded” the United States and have established a foothold at an apartment complex in Colorado, a claim contested and/or debunked by the town mayor and residents of the apartment complex in much the same way that leaders of a town in Ohio deny there’s any cat-eating going on there. Regardless, the “invasion” deserves a forceful response from this country.

The incoming President also has asserted that brown people from Venezuela and other countries that have emptied their prisons and lunatic asylums are killers, rapists, fentanyl importers, and probably don’t wear clean underwear every day.

Mother Jones describes a lot of problems with 47’s plan (actually he’s the 45^th person to be President. He’s the second one to have two different administrations):

The magazine says it’s going to take 95,994 chartered flights to get the 11-million people out of the country and going to wherever they will be unloaded. Projected costs, spread through 20 years because you can’t do this in two weeks would be $300-Billion.

Who would profit? Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group were paid $1.5 billion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to run immigration detention centers in 2022. They’ll improve our economy by building new facilities and hiring a lot of people to guard the women and children—and men—at new lockups. A GEO Group subsidiary, BI Incorporated, got a five-year deal to produce ankle monitors and phone tracking apps worth $2.2 billion to ICE and will do quite well making 11-million more of these shackles. CSI Aviation has a $128.3 million contract for daily transport flights that they’ll have to increase, again pumping more money back into economy.

And this business expansion will offset the loss of jobs elsewhere in our economy.

There probably will be inconsiderate and ungrateful lawyers who will sue the government if the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is used to justify the deportations.

This might be the time to invest in a critical industry: hardware and home improvement companies. All of those detention camps will require a lot of posts and poles and wire and plywood buildings for the large facilities for undesirable Canadians, Mexicans, etc. A spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association likens such camps to Soviet Gulags.

If there aren’t enough people in our regular military services who are guarding Taiwan, and South Korea and other pressure points in the globe and a decision is made not to lessen those protections, then nationalizing the National Guard is a possibility, he says. Fine and dandy but the Posse Comitatus Law forbids the National Guard from doing civilian law enforcement jobs.

Let’s face it, establishing military guard posts at every road in and out of all of our states is going to take a lot of people making sure no undocumented aliens can seek safety in a different state from their illegal homes here.

The article suggested we brace ourselves for big increases in food costs, decreases in important segments of the workforce, cuts in housing development, and cuts in some health programs.

The magazine quotes an agriculture and economics professor at the University of California-Davis who estimates food prices for hand-picked products will go up 21% because the deportations will eliminate half of the hands doing the picking. The survey also estimates 25% of the people who process our chicken, turkeys, pork, and fish are undocumented aliens. And it says we can look for a doubling of the price of milk if the people doing the milking are shipped out.

Illegal migrants are not eligible to collect Social Security. But they pay about $13-Billion a year into it. Undocumented immigrant households paid $35.1 Billion in state and federal taxes in 2022. That’s a pretty big economic hole. We’re waiting to see the plan for dealing with that.

It’s estimated about 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, two-thirds of them in providers or in supporting positions. Rebecca Shi, who heads the American Business Immigration Coalition says, “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms and empty our bedpans.”

This roundup also could affect the roofs over our heads. A study indicates one third of the crews that are whizzes at installing new roofs on our homes and businesses are potential deportees. The construction industry already is short an estimated half-million workers.

But don’t worry. The incoming President knows who will replace all of these workers. If he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him in our next installment.

It might seem bizarre and crazy. It isn’t. It’s just the new normal.

Then They Came For Me…..

Posted on November 1, 2024 by bpriddy

Our almost final pre-election meditation today focuses on a former president, a comedian/social commentator/political satirist, a German leader, a Christian movement that might sound familiar, and a Lutheran minister.

We are focusing on Donald Trump’s promotion of “the enemy within” and the failure of people today to recognize the dangers of that philosophy in the past as a warning for us now.

There are several versions of a famous quotation although scholars have found no indication that he was the one who distilled his words into the poetic version in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The one we will use here comes from the British Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and is slightly longer.

The Lutheran minister is Martin Niemoëller, an anti-Communist supporter of Adolph Hitler during his rise to power. But he became a leader of German religious leaders opposing Hitler when Hitler announced he supported the German Christians movement that sought to remove the “Jewish element” from Christianity, including portraying Jesus as Aryan, rejecting the Old Testament and trying to rewrite the New Testament. Niemoëller was a leader in the opposition to Hitler and the German Christians.

He was arrested in 1937 and imprisoned at Dachau and Sachsenhausen until American troops liberated the camps in 1945. The next year, he began a series of speeches apologizing for those who remained silent about Hitler’s crackdowns. Among his comments we find, “The people who were put in camps then were Communists. Who cared about them?…They got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables [who] just cost the state money; they are a burden to themselves and others….”

His apologies came to mind as I watched a recent edition of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Stewart is a liberal comedian and social commentator who has a large following, especially among young people, and is an intellectual critic of American politics and the contradictions within the practice of them. In this case, we refer to his comments after Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event.

We have omitted the audience applause and Stewart’s pauses and facial expressions that are part of his schtick. He inserted several video excerpts of events as part of his program:

Trump at his Madison Square Garden rally; On day one I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.

Stewart: Day one? Have a snack. Meet the staff. Day one is typically—we just read the syllabus. There’s no—there’s generally no homework. OK, day one, mass deportation. How is that going to happen?

Trump: I will invoke the Alien enemies act of 1798.

Stewart: …From the man himself, that is his priority. From day one, I’m going to round up all the so-called illegal immigrants. It’s a tough policy but I guess it’s gotta be done. And it’s not like anyone else, i.e. legal immigrants or who are American citizens going to be caught up in that dragnet. I’m sure that Trump has a very detailed and precise plan. How many people are we talking about?

Niemoëller: First they came for the Communists but I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Trump (montage of previous statements at rallies and in interviews); Millions of illegal immigrants. They think it’s two million; it’s probably five times that amount. You hear 15, 16 million, sometimes you hear 17. We have 21 million, at least 21 million; I think it’s much more than 21.

Stewart: So we are going to be rounding up and deporting between two and 21, or more, million people. But listen, they’re all bad. And they’ve all committed terrible crimes. And we have cataloged—without due process—the terrible things they have done, yes?

Trump (from debate with Kamala Harris): In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

Stewart: So, between 2 and 21 million people—and while they weren’t actually doing that, still, chase them with guns. Because at the very least they are here illegally. Yes, they are illegal.

John Berman, CNN, during broadcast: Donald Trump threatening to deport thousands of migrants in the country legally…

Stewart: So that one’s tricky. But I’m confident that on day one, Trump does his mass deportation of anywhere from two to 100 million people, it won’t be you. It’ll be them because of how precise Trump is, especially when it comes to people of color.

Niemoëller: They came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.

Trump: I know Willie Brown very well. In fact I went down in a helicopter with him.

(Part of News Nation’s The Hill Sunday excerpt, with Chris Stirewalt): The African-American politician in question was not Willie Brown but rather this man, Nate Holden.

Reporter: Holden says, quote, “Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco. I’m a tall black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike.”

Stewart: I guess there’s some confusion there. But he’s not deporting California politicians day one. And that story makes him racist. It’s not the point. He really can’t tell white people apart either.

Trump (video from grand jury deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case): Roberta Kaplan asks, “You say Marla’s in this photo?” Trump: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.” Kaplan: “Which woman are you pointing to?” Trump: (points) “Here.” Kaplan: “That’s Tara. The person you just pointed to is E. Jean Carroll.” Trump: “Oh, I see. Who is that? (points to another woman in the picture). Kaplan: “And the person, the woman on your right is your then wife, Ivana?” Trump: “I don’t know. This was the picture.”

Stewart: You know what I just realized? Donald Trump doesn’t have affairs—just thinks everyone is his wife. So clearly an attempt to deport between thirty and 500 million people is gonna be complicated. So it’s gonna be important to know how carefully the former president would execute this plan.

(Portion of interview on Full Measure, the weekly television news show hosted by Sharryl Attkisson):

Niemoëller: Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Attkisson: “A lot of the millions of people have had children here who are American citizens. So, yes to mass deportation of women and children—” Trump: So we’re going to look at it very closely. They way that you phrase it is exactly right. You put one wrong person on a bus or on an airplane and your radical-left lunatics will try and make it sound like the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

Stewart; Because it’s the worst thing that ever happened to THEM, the American citizens, the American citizens you mistakenly deport. Yet Trump is like (imitating Trump), “That makes me look like the bad guy.” And why is my wife interviewing me? (a takeoff on his inability to identify people in the photo, shown earlier and a reference to Attkisson) You are my wife, right? Marla? Ivana? Ivanka? I don’t know. This sounds awful. But as everyone knows, you can never listen to what Trump’s saying and hear it.

(Montage of Republicans responding: Unidentified member of Congress: “I think you’re taking everything a little bit too literally.” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sunnunu: “Look, Trump speaks in hyperbole. This is nothing new.” KellyeAnn Conway, at the time of the interview the incoming White House counselor: “He’s telling you what was in his heart. You always want to go with what comes out of his mouth rather than what’s in his heart.”

Stewart: You’re right Why hold former presidents to what they say they’re going to do from their mouth holes?… Look. You know what? Sure, maybe Trump’s just talk. But on day one when the deportation of between two and eleventy billion people begins, what will be the guiding principle? Perhaps we should ask the dead-eyed architect of these plans, Stephen Miller.

Miller (at Madison Square Garden rally): America is for Americans and Americans only.

Niemoëller: Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Stewart: Oh, that makes sense. We’re only deporting people who’ve come here illegally, or people who have come here legally but sneaky legally. Or people who have children who actually are citizens, or some people who look like they may have come here illegally, or people who have protested the war in Gaza, or a special prosecutor that Trump doesn’t like, like Jack Smith, which, by the way, name a more American name than Jack (bleeped) Smith. Where are you going to report him to, Faneuil Hall in Boston? Or maybe we just going to be deporting the people that always bring wretchedness and want.

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s how we describe the Irish in 1832 (with image of portrait of New York Mayor Phillip Hone who said, “They will always bring wretchedness and want.”)

Or maybe we’re just going to deport people whose race inherently has a certain kind of criminality. Oh, I’m sorry, That was the Italians in 1911.

The point is, every one of these groups was at a place and a time on the wrong side of not being American enough. And right now you think you’re safe. Because the group Trump’s people are talking about—It’s not you, as if…Donald Trump can tell the (bleep) difference or even cares that day one implementation of the 1798 law that was last used to intern Japanese and German citizens in World War II, will be a fine-toothed comb.

It just makes me very sad, it—the whole thing—it

(Interrupted by the show’s former senior correspondent, Jessica Williams) Jon, Jon, Jon…Don’t be sad. Jon, everything’s going to be okay—for you, a white guy, a rich old white guy.

Stewart: You think my rich old white guy privilege will save me?

V: Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Williams; Maybe…It doesn’t matter. Because for non old white people, for people of color, and women, and queer people it’s gonna be a completely different story, all right?

Let me give you some advice. I know you’re exhausted. Hell, I’m exhausted. Everybody’s exhausted. Anger and disappointment in our political discourse is exhausting. But it’s easy to throw up our hands and be like fine…I’m tired. Go ahead and take people’s rights…

—–

In one of his 1946 speeches, Niemoëller wondered what would have happened if thousands of clergy in Germany would have spoken out against Hitler and his German Christians and the disaster and the tragedy they brought to the world.

Niemoëller: … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.

Williams: Focus, okay? I just want to be clear, all right? Do not let them exhaust you. Don’t let the constant draining bull— wear you out. Do not turn away. Look it right down that barrel and say, not today, apathy… And no matter what happens, we have to throw our arms around the people who need us the most, and hang…on. All right?

If you want to watch the entire routine, it’s at (15) Jon Stewart on Trump’s Xenophobic MSG Rally & Mass Deportation Plan | The Daily Show – YouTube.

(Photo Credits: Amazon, The Daily Show, Holocaust Museum)

Fact-Checking the VP Debate

Posted on October 4, 2024 by bpriddy

We turn again to Daniel Dale and his staff of fact-checkers at CNN to straighten out the information that gushed at us during Tuesday’s debate among the candidates for Vice-President. We use the CNN analysis because it does not just offer true-false responses but because it places remarks in contest.

As has been the case with previous presidential debates (Trump vs. Biden and Trump Vs. Harris), the predominant questions about truth and shades of truth are from the Republican side. While President Trump, after the debate with VP Harris complained he had been fact-checked far more frequently than Harris had been, the observation is merited that his arguments merited checking more than hers.

In political debates, candidates limited by time sometimes speak in headlines that do not allow more complete explanations. That is when the checkers step in with context that helps consumers make their own evaluations of the accuracy or the (sometimes intentional) inaccuracy of remarks.

As we have reviewed these findings, we find Dale and his staff found fifteen statements from Vance that were questionable but only two from Walz.

One Walz statement was branded as “false;” the other statement “needs context.”

In Vance’s case, five needed context, four were misleading, five were false and one overstated a statistic.

Here’s how the CNN staff appraised the debate points:

Vance mischaracterizes Harris’ role on border policy

Sen. JD Vance claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed the “border czar” during the Biden administration. “The only thing that she did when she became the vice president, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border,” Vance said.

Facts First: Vance’s claim about Harris’ border role is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.

Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong. Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries.

A White House “fact sheet” in July 2021 said: “On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy. Since March, Vice President Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries. (Biden also mentioned Mexico that day.) Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.”

Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Walz on jobs from Biden’s climate law

Touting the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a major climate law for which Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, her running mate, Tim Walz, spoke of how the law created “200,000 jobs in the country,” including building electric vehicles and solar panels.

Facts First: This claim needs context. While it’s clear that a significant number of new clean energy jobs were created as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the “200,000” figure includes jobs that companies have promised to create but aren’t finalized. And other counts of new clean energy jobs have come up with smaller figures.

There are several data sets that track climate law investments, all of which differ slightly. Walz’s number of jobs created by President Joe Biden’s climate law is slightly smaller than a June tally by communications group Climate Power that found a total of 312,900 jobs publicly announced by companies following the IRA passage through May 2024.

E2, another clean energy group that tracks Inflation Reduction Act-related investments and jobs, has counted over 109,000 new clean energy jobs created or announced from August 2022 to May 2024 – significantly lower than the Climate Power number. A recent report from the US Department of Energy found 142,000 new clean energy jobs were created in 2023.

Not all of these jobs have already been created. Climate Power’s topline number also didn’t distinguish between construction jobs building new factories and the long-term jobs at those factories – jobs building batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, among other things. Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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Different entities use different methodologies when analyzing data, so it is difficult to determine an exact figure. Regardless, there’s no question there’s a huge amount of clean energy investment, and a significant number of new jobs building EVs and renewables like wind and solar are being created by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The 2024 Energy Department report showed clean energy jobs made up more than half of the total for new energy sector jobs and grew at a rate twice as large as the overall US economy.

The report also acknowledged how the sudden growth in the clean energy sector from the Inflation Reduction Act has made it difficult to track all the jobs that are being created.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Vance on migrants in Springfield, Ohio

Sen. JD Vance said that schools and hospitals in Springfield, Ohio, are “overwhelmed” because of “illegal immigrants.”

“Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed … because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance said.

Facts First: Vance’s statement, referencing the Ohio town subject to a firestorm of misinformation about Haitian migrants this summer, is misleading.

We don’t know the immigration status of each and every immigrant in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of Haitians have official permission to live and work legally in the US. The Springfield city website says, “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Springfield in September that the Haitian immigrants “are there legally” and that, as a Trump-Vance supporter, he is “saddened” by the candidates’ disparagement of “the legal migrants living in Springfield.”

Many Haitians came into the country under a Biden-Harris administration parole program that gives permission to enter the US to vetted participants with US sponsors. And many have “temporary protected status,” which shields Haitians in the US from deportation and allows them to live and work here for a limited period of time. Some received that protection after the Biden-Harris administration expanded the number of Haitians eligible in June. Others have been living in the US with temporary protected status since before the Biden-Harris administration.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Danya Gainor

Vance’s claims about Biden-Harris immigration executive orders

Sen. JD Vance said that the United States has a “historic immigration crisis” because Vice President Kamala Harris “wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies” with “94 executive orders” that did things like “suspending deportations” and “decriminalizing illegal aliens.”

Facts First: While the Biden-Harris administration has signed dozens of executive orders about immigration, Vance’s comments about the administration decriminalizing illegal immigration through executive order aren’t true. Harris did, however, say she supported decriminalizing illegal immigration – a position she’s since reversed.

When she was a candidate for president and a sitting US senator, Harris filled out an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in which she expressed support for sweeping reductions to Immigration and Custom Enforcement operations, including drastic cuts in ICE funding and an open-ended pledge to “end” immigration detention.

Harris has since acknowledged that some of her stances have evolved over time but that she holds core beliefs that remain unshakable: “My values have not changed,” she said in an August interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.

From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

Walz falsely claims Project 2025 calls for a pregnancy registry

Gov. Tim Walz claimed that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation think tank’s detailed right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration, says people will have to register their pregnancies.

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said.

Facts First: Walz’s claim is false. Project 2025 does not propose to make people register with any federal agency when they get pregnant. And there is no indication that a Trump-Vance administration is trying to create a new government entity to monitor pregnancies.

Project 2025 is firmly anti-abortion; it proposes, among other things, to criminalize the mailing of abortion medication and devices. But it does not propose to require people to register their pregnancies.

The Project 2025 policy document, released in 2023, proposes that the federal government take steps to make sure it is receiving detailed after-the-fact, anonymous data from every state on abortions and miscarriages. The vast majority of states already submit anonymous abortion data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a voluntary basis – the CDC has collected “abortion surveillance” data for decades – and all states already submit some anonymous miscarriage data under federal law.

Minnesota, the state run by Walz, is one of the states that voluntarily submits abortion data to the CDC. And Minnesota posts anonymous abortion and miscarriage data on the state health department’s website every year.

The Project 2025 policy document says the existing federal Department of Health and Human Services should “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

The document also says the department “should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” And it says, “In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”

In the context of the CDC, the word “monitoring” is used to mean statistical tracking. For example, the existing CDC webpage that displays anonymous state-by-state abortion data says, “Since 1987, CDC has monitored abortion-related deaths” through its Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System. Neither “monitored” nor “surveillance” means the CDC is spying on individuals during their pregnancies.

Trump dodged the question when asked in a Time magazine interview earlier this year whether states should monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure compliance with an abortion ban, saying, “I think they might do that” but that “you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” Walz is free to criticize Trump for this answer, but nowhere in the interview did Trump make an actual proposal to create a new pregnancy-monitoring government body.

Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino wrote on social media last month that Project 2025 “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling *anonymous* abortion statistics for all states” – and noted that Minnesota already compiles such data.

Vance denied that a Trump-Vance administration would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency when asked by CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.

“Certainly, we won’t,” Vance said.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Katie Lobosco

Vance falsely says he never supported a national abortion ban

Sen. JD Vance said at Tuesday’s debate that he never supported a national abortion ban. “I never supported a national ban. I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard. For example, we have a partial-birth abortion ban … in place in this country at the federal level. I don’t think anybody is trying to get rid of that, or at least, I hope not, though I know the Democrats have taken a very radical pro-abortion stance,” Vance said.

Facts First: This is false. Vance previously said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” in 2022 while running for his Senate seat in Ohio. He did say that he supported a “minimum national standard” to ban abortion in 2023. During the current campaign, however, Vance has deferred to former President Donald Trump’s stated view that each state should set its own abortion policy.

In 2022, while running for his Senate seat in Ohio, Vance said, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and that he was “sympathetic” to the view that a national ban was necessary to stop women from traveling across states to obtain an abortion. He also said on his website during that Senate campaign that he was “100 percent pro-life” and that he favored “eliminating abortion”; these words remained on his website until Trump selected him as his running mate in July. And Vance said in an interview during the 2022 campaign that he wanted abortion to be “primarily a state issue,” but also said, “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”

In November 2023, Vance told CNN’s Manu Raju and Ted Barrett in the Capitol: “It seems to suggest there needs to be some more interest in this building among Republicans in setting some sort of minimum national standard, whether that it’s 15 weeks or 20 weeks or the different ranges that are thrown out there.” He said, “We keep giving in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter. Because if it doesn’t … then the pro-life movement is basically not gonna exist, I think, for the next couple of years.”

Vance, emphasizing his support for certain exceptions to abortion bans, said on CNN in December 2023, “We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t. And I say that as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for life of the mother, for rape, and so forth.”

During his vice presidential campaign this year, Vance has aligned himself with Trump’s professed desire for a state-by-state approach to abortion policy rather than federal legislation. Vance said on Fox News in July, “Alabama’s going to make a different decision from California. That is a reasonable thing. And that’s how I think we build some bridges and have some respect for one another.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck

Vance falsely claims Biden administration unfroze $100 billion in Iranian assets

Sen. JD Vance claimed the Biden-Harris administration had unfrozen more than $100 billion in Iranian assets, which he said were then used to buy weapons.

“Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration. What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially, launching against the United States as well,” Vance said, referring to Iran’s Tuesday attack on Israel.

Facts first: Vance’s statement is false. There is no evidence that the Biden-Harris administration unfroze more than $100 billion in Iranian assets. As part of a prisoner exchange last year, $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets were moved from restricted accounts in South Korea to restricted accounts in Qatar to be used for humanitarian purchases. The process for Iran to be able to spend those funds was expected to take months, if not years.

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House lawmakers that the US and Qatar had reached a “quiet understanding” not to allow Iran to access any of the $6 billion in Iranian funds for the time being, according to a source familiar.

Under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, sanctions waivers would allow Iran to access frozen assets abroad. Estimates varied, but some said those assets could be worth more than $100 billion. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was California attorney general at the time, had no involvement with the nuclear deal, from which the US withdrew under former President Donald Trump.

From CNN’s Jennifer Hansler

Vance on Harris’ energy policies and China

Speaking about combatting climate change and bringing down planet-warming emissions, Sen. JD Vance suggested the fix was to “produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”

Vance accused Vice President Kamala Harris of making climate change worse by supporting clean energy, saying her policies “actually led to more energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas.”

Facts First: A few parts of Vance’s claim are misleading and need context. First, while Vance is correct that China is currently the biggest global supplier of clean energy technologies and components, the Biden administration is trying to stop that by bringing more clean energy manufacturing to the US and moving the global supply chain away from China.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which contained the largest climate investment in US history, was designed to bring more manufacturing of electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, large batteries and other components to the United States. The law’s EV tax credits were crafted with the intention of moving the EV supply chain away from China, which has long dominated the industry. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who authored much of the IRA, changed its federal EV tax credits to move the supply chain for the critical minerals needed for things like EV batteries, solar panels and smaller rechargeable batteries away from China.

China will likely continue to dominate the global clean energy supply chain in the coming years. But the US is catching up; companies have announced over $346 billion worth of investments building new clean energy projects and factories in the US since the law was passed. According to the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and MIT, in the last two years, companies have invested $89 billion in clean energy manufacturing alone – a 305% increase from the prior two years.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Vance on a Minnesota ‘born alive’ law

Sen. JD Vance claimed during Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate that Gov. Tim Walz signed a law that says doctors aren’t required to provide lifesaving care to babies that survive a botched abortion.

“The statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion,” Vance said, adding that the law is “fundamentally barbaric.”

Facts First: This needs context. The law Walz signed in 2023 says that an infant born alive must be “fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law,” and must be provided “all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice.” While previous Minnesota law said that medical personnel needed to take steps to “preserve the life and health” of that infant using all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, the new law says that medical personnel must take steps to “care” for the infant using all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice.

The key difference between the “preserve the life and health” language and the “care” language, experts say, is that the new law gives families the option to choose comfort care if their infant does not have a legitimate chance of survival.

Dave Renner, director of advocacy for the Minnesota Medical Association, which supported Walz’s change to the law, said in a September email: “The difference is the old law only focused on preserving the life and health of the infant, even if there was no chance of the infant living. The result was that infants who have no chance of survival were taken away from the parent at birth for extraordinary efforts to ‘preserve the life’ even though they would not succeed. It did not allow the grieving parent to hold their infant.”

Dr. Erin Stevens, legislative chair of the Minnesota section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a September email that under the new law, “any infant that is born alive in any circumstances who has a legitimate chance of survival will be provided sound medical care to encourage survival. No one is sitting by depriving healthy infants of nutrition and care.”

Stevens said that people who decide to terminate pregnancies at a very advanced gestational age generally do so because of a “particularly dangerous or life-threatening” new diagnosis and are offered either a surgical abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation (D&E) or a delivery after a C-section or the induction of labor.

“In the latter scenario of a delivery,” she said, “often that is pursued knowing the baby could be alive for a very short time after the birth but that that life would not be sustainable. Generally, these are the cases on mandated statistical reports of terminations that indicate live births after abortion. It’s not a ‘botched abortion,’ which many people envision as a D&E gone wrong resulting in a mangled, living baby. Many times, the reason a patient chooses the option of delivery is to have the opportunity to hold their baby and experience that precious time with them.”

She continued: “When there are mandates to resuscitate in such circumstances no matter how futile the attempts, the parents lose out on that opportunity and will never get that time back. It’s not only a waste of costly medical resources, but it’s cruel. Comfort care is provided as clinically appropriate.”

Former President Donald Trump has previously claimed that the new law allows the execution of Minnesota babies after birth. That is still murder in the state.

“This change does not allow ‘the execution of babies’ and to suggest so does not understand the change,” Renner said.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Jack Forrest

Vance claims DHS ‘effectively lost’ 320,000 children

Sen. JD Vance claimed the Department of Homeland Security has “effectively lost” 320,000 children.

“You ask about family separation. Right now, in this country, we have 320,000 children that the department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said, referring to separating migrant families.

“Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at home with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules. The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris’ wide-open southern border,” the Republican vice presidential candidate said.

Facts First: This claim needs context. An August 2024 report from the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General said Immigrations and Customs Enforcement reported more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 (which includes two years and four months under the Trump administration). The report added that the number could be larger, given that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children were not given notices to appear in court. The report said that without the ability to monitor those children, ICE has “no assurances” those children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” The report does not say for certain that those children are being used in drug trafficking or are victims of sex trafficking.

The report, released August 17, said that of 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children (UCs) transferred or released from Homeland Security or Health and Human Services custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, more than 32,000 “failed to appear for their immigration court hearings.”

The report also said that ICE failed to issue a “Notice to Appear” for 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children in that timeline and that those children “therefore do not yet have an immigration court date.”

By not issuing the notices, the report says, “ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety. Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN last month: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the OIG are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”

Some right-leaning outlets, such as the New York Post and the Washington Times, took the report from the Office of Inspector General and combined those numbers, reaching the 320,000 figure of migrant children who are unaccounted for.

From CNN’s Jack Forrest

Vance’s claim about Trump’s comments to protesters on January 6

Sen. JD Vance claimed that then-President Donald Trump said protesters should protest peacefully on January 6, 2021, when the Capitol was attacked and overrun by Trump supporters.

“He said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully,” Vance said.

Facts First: This claim leaves out some key context. During his speech, Trump did tell protestors to “peacefully” make their voices heard and, in the same speech, told protesters they should “fight like hell” and used other combative language.

During his speech that day, Trump told those attending: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Trump, however, also made numerous other remarks in the speech in which he struck a far more combative tone.

Trump, for example, urged Republicans to stop fighting like a boxer “with his hands tied behind his back,” saying, “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder.” Trump told marchers, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.” After urging congressional Republicans and Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College results, Trump said, “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”

Trump alleged there would be dire consequences if his supporters did not take immediate action – saying that, if Joe Biden took office, “You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.” And he said, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump also spent much of the speech laying out a false case that the election was marred by massive fraud. And he falsely claimed, “We won this election, and we won it by a landslide.”

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Vance on the number of undocumented immigrants in the country under Biden administration

Sen. JD Vance claimed during the debate that there are “20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country.”

Facts First: That number is significantly higher than most estimates.

While the exact number of undocumented immigrants in the country difficult to track, multiple estimates show it is probably smaller than the number Vance floated during the debate. For instance, a 2024 report from Pew Research Center estimated that the undocumented immigrant population in the US grew to 11 million in 2022. The report used data from the US Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey.

In 2024, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimated there were about 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the US in 2021.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports curbing immigration and criticized the Biden administration’s border policies, estimated there were approximately 12 million in May 2023.

From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Vance on CBP One app

Sen. JD Vance claimed Tuesday that migrants who apply for legal status through a Customs and Border Protection app can have it granted “at the wave of a … wand.”

“There’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand,” he said.

Facts First: This claim is false. CBP One allows users to schedule appointments to claim asylum with border authorities, but that does not mean that their request will be granted. The app is not a means to make an asylum application. It allows applicants to enter their information through the app rather than going directly to a port of entry.

The app was launched in October 2020, during the Trump administration, so people could access Customs and Border Protection services on their mobile devices. It was expanded during the Biden administration and is now “the only way that migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry can preschedule appointments for processing and maintain guaranteed asylum eligibility,” according to the American Immigration Council.

From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Vance on inflation under Trump

Sen. JD Vance claimed at Tuesday’s debate that former President Donald Trump’s economic policies delivered 1.5% inflation for Americans.

“Because Donald Trump’s economic policies delivered the highest take-home pay in a generation in this country, 1.5% inflation, and to boot, peace and security all over the world,” Vance said.

Facts First: Vance’s claim needs context. The annual inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, was indeed 1.5% in May 2019; however, the average inflation rate was north of 2.1% from January 2017 through February 2020, prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its quick and deep economic recession in the US, inflation slowed drastically as Americans sheltered at home and reduced spending on in-person services.

Including the pandemic-distorted pricing environment, the CPI averaged 1.9% from 2017 through 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

For comparison purposes, during the Biden-Harris administration, the CPI averaged an annual rate of 5.2%

Inflation’s rapid ascent – which began in early 2021 and peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 before moderating to 2.5% in August 2024 – was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic, such as snarled supply chains, and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Vance’s misleading claim that Trump ‘saved’ Obamacare

Sen. JD Vance said in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate that former President Donald Trump could have “destroyed” the Affordable Care Act during his first term, but instead he “saved” it.

“He saved the very program from a Democratic administration that was collapsing and would have collapsed absent his leadership,” Vance said.

Facts First: Vance’s claim is misleading. During Trump’s administration, he and his officials took many steps to weaken the Affordable Care Act after failing to repeal it, though they did continue to operate the Obamacare exchanges. Also, during his term, the Department of Health and Human Services approved several state waiver requests that resulted in lower premiums for Affordable Care Act plans.

As president, Trump initially tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act but failed because congressional Republicans could not amass enough votes to kill the law in 2017.

Then, Trump put in place many measures aimed at undermining the law, which led to a decline in enrollment. He cut the open enrollment period in half, to only six weeks. He also slashed funding for advertising and for navigators, who are critical to helping people sign up. At the same time, he increased the visibility of insurance agents who can also sell non-Obamacare plans.

Trump signed an executive order in October 2017 making it easier for Americans to access alternative policies that have lower premiums than Affordable Care Act plans – but in exchange for fewer protections and benefits. And he ended subsidy payments to health insurers to reduce eligible enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs.

Plus, his administration refused to defend several central provisions of the Affordable Care Act in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, arguing that key parts of Obamacare should be invalidated. The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the challenge and left the law in place.

Enrollment declined until the final year of his term, which was in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the Trump administration did approve several states’ waiver applications to implement reinsurance programs in their Affordable Care Act exchanges. This generally lowered Obamacare premiums by providing funding for insurers that enrolled many high-cost patients.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Vance on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Sen. JD Vance argued that former President Donald Trump’s economic policies have helped American workers, specifically citing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

“If you look at what was so different about Donald Trump’s tax cuts, even from previous Republican tax cut plans, is that a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to middle class and working-class Americans,” Vance said.

Facts first: Vance’s comments need context. While the 2017 law reduced taxes for most people, the rich benefited far more than others, according to a 2018 analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act contained an array of individual income tax reductions – including lowering many individual income tax rates, notably the top rate, from 39.6% to 37% for the highest earners.

More than 60% of the benefits were expected to go to those whose incomes are in the top 20%, and they were projected to get the largest bump in after-tax income, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Only a little more than a quarter of those in the lowest-income households would see their taxes reduced, and they were projected to have a very small bump in after-tax income.

Most middle-income taxpayers were expected to see a tax cut, but their boost in after-tax income was projected to be smaller than those at the top of the income ladder.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Vance says illegal guns are flowing into the US from Mexico

Sen. JD Vance on Tuesday claimed that part of the United States’ issue with gun violence stems from Mexican drug cartels smuggling guns into the country from across the border.

“Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel … then the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago,” Vance said.

Facts first: Vance’s claim is misleading. There is a proliferation of illegal guns crossing the US-Mexico border – but they are going from the US into Mexico, not the other way around.

Mexico has been plagued by gun violence for years – and the Mexican government has pinned bloodshed on the free flow of guns over the border from the United States.

An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked from the US into Mexico each year, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has said – an average of nearly 550 per day. In 2021, Mexico sued several US-based gun manufacturers claiming they “design, market, distribute and sell guns in ways” that arm cartels in Mexico.

Mexico strictly controls the sale of firearms. There is only one gun store in Mexico, and it’s controlled by the army. That makes the large-scale smuggling of guns from Mexico into the US, where laws are laxer and gun stores plentiful, unfeasible.

From CNN’s Michael Williams

Just the Facts. Part One

Posted on August 26, 2024 by bpriddy

A few weeks ago, we passed along CNN’s fact checking of the Trump-Biden presidential debate. It was a long entry and this one and the one we post on Wednesday combined will be even longer. But we are posting them because the personal discussions we have with others in the 70 days or so before the election are likely to rely on what was said during the political conventions. We believe it is irresponsible to take campaign rhetoric at face value.

We offer these entries because words are cheap on both sides, because political commercials are more manipulative than they are honest, and because we hope it can be a reference for you in stating our own statements honestly and questioning honestly the statements of others.

We recently talked with a friend whose views are different from ours and at the end we agreed that one of the great things about our country is that two friends can have the kind of disagreements we had without them disrupting the respectful relationship we have with each other. So we hope this material furthers intelligent but respectful discussion with you and your friends.

Because we relied on CNN’s Daniel Dale for the debate, we are going back to him and his staff for evaluations of the Republican National Convention today and the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.

The Washington Post and FactCheck.org (which is based at the Annenberg School for Communication Trust at the University of Pennsylvania), Politifact (part of the Poynter Institute which has a truth-o-meter than goes from zero to “Pants on Fire”), The Associated Press which has a webpage at Fact Check: Political & News Fact Check, are among other fact checkers not only for politics but in some cases for other issues.

First—because they went first—the Republicans:

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.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

Bottom of Form

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.

SECOND NIGHT;

Speakers at the second night of the Republican National Convention made many false and misleading claims throughout the night which focused heavily on immigration and crime.

Here is a list of fact checks from CNN’s Facts First team.

Speaker Mike Johnson makes false claim about crime under Biden

After criticizing President Joe Biden as weak, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed in his Tuesday speech at the Republican National Convention that Democrats’ policies have brought communities “dramatic increases” in “violence, crime and drugs.”

Similarly, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik referred to “Biden’s violent crime crisis,” and a video played near the beginning of the Tuesday evening proceedings featured a narrator saying, “It’s not just big cities. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”

Facts First: Johnson’s claims about dramatic increases in violence and crime are false, as is the convention video’s claim that there is a problem “everywhere” with “rising crime.” Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Stefanik’s claim of a “violent crime crisis” under Biden is subjective, but she certainly did not acknowledge that the current numbers under Biden are superior to final Trump-era numbers.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Scalise claims Biden has ‘erode’ American ‘energy dominance’

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claimed Tuesday in his Republican National Convention speech that the Biden administration has “eroded the American energy dominance that President Trump delivered.” He also claimed that Democrats are waging an “assault on American energy.”

Facts First: Scalise’s claims are misleading. The US under President Joe Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has. The world record was set by the US in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, averaging about 12.9 million barrels per day – exceeding the Trump-era record, an average of about 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. US production of dry natural gas also hit a new high in 2023. So did US crude oil exports.

CNN’s Matt Egan reported in December that the US was exporting the same amount of crude oil, refined products and natural gas liquids as Saudi Arabia or Russia were producing, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

None of this is to say that Biden is the reason that domestic oil production has increased; market factors are the key driver of companies’ investment and production decisions, and the Energy Information Administration has credited technological improvements in fracking and horizontal drilling technology that have made oil wells more productive. Egan reported in August: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”

Still, despite Biden’s often-critical rhetoric about fossil fuel companies, some policy moves to get tougher on those companies and his major investments in initiatives to fight climate change, he certainly has not come close to stopping fossil fuel production as Trump has claimed.

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Biden has also approved some significant and controversial fossil fuel projects, including the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and the Mountain Valley gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Scalise on migrants coming to the US

Scalise said Tuesday that migrants are arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed from prison.

“On the border, Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world. Prisons are being emptied,” said Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.

Facts first: There is no evidence for Scalise’s claim that “prisons of being emptied” so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants.

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” said Helen Fair, who is co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the global prison population, and a research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly made such claims in his own speeches and interviews. But Trump has never provided any proof for the claim.

Trump’s campaign has provided CNN with only a vague 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about Venezuela freeing violent prisoners who had then joined migrant caravans.

But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.

The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Lara Trump’s claims about unemployment records under Trump

Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee and the former president’s daughter-in-law, hailed the state of the country during the Trump administration. Among other things, she said there were “record low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women.”

Facts First: These claims need context. Lara Trump didn’t mention that the Trump-era record lows for African American unemployment, Hispanic Americans unemployment and women’s unemployment were all beaten or matched during President Joe Biden’s presidency, though the Trump-era record for Asian American unemployment still stands.

The current record low for the Black or African American unemployment rate, 4.8%, was set under Biden in April 2023.
That beat the Trump-era low that was a record at the time, 5.3% in August 2019 and September 2019. (A cautionary note: This official data series goes back only to 1972.)

The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate hit 3.9% under Biden in September 2022, tying the record low first set in 2019 under Trump.

The unemployment rate among women hit 3.4% under Trump in September 2019 and October 2019, the lowest since the 1950s, but it fell to 3.3% under Biden in January 2023.

The record set under Trump for Asian American unemployment, 2% in June 2019, has not been matched under Biden. The lowest Biden-era rate was 2.3% in July 2023.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Stefanik claims that Biden presidency has led to the highest inflation of her lifetime

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York claimed in her Republican National Convention speech Tuesday that Biden’s presidency has led to the “highest rate of inflation” in her lifetime.

Facts First: This claim is out of date.

While the year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was the highest since late 1981, inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3%. That rate was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Stefanik was born in 1984.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Wisconsin Senate candidate exaggerates the numbers of fentanyl deaths

Eric Hovde, the Republican running for Senate in Wisconsin, claimed in his RNC speech Tuesday that the Biden administration “emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl killing over 100,000 Americans every year” by opening the country’s southern border and allowing “criminals and terrorists to enter the country.”

Facts First: It’s a significant exaggeration that fentanyl kills more than 100,000 Americans every year due to the country’s “open” borders. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2023, including fentanyl, was approximately 75,000, according to estimated and provisional data.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that roughly 107,500 people in the US died from a drug overdose, but that is the total number of people who died from an overdose from any kind of drug.

Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, were involved in the majority of those fatalities, making up nearly 70% of overdose deaths in 2023, but they did not account for all of them.

In fact, compared with 2022, there were around 1,500 fewer overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023. The estimated number of deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants such as methamphetamines increased in 2023.

Specifically, in 2023, there were 74,702 deaths from synthetic opioids, and most of those deaths were from fentanyl. By comparison, in 2022 the estimated number was 76,226, according to the CDC.

It is also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled by US citizens through legal ports of entry, rather than by migrants sneaking into the country. Contrary to frequent claims by Republicans, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized an increasing amount of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills, under Biden.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

For the second consecutive night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. 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.” 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.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Kari Lake on her opponent’s record about voting laws

Kari Lake said Tuesday that Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, her likely opponent in the state’s US Senate race this fall, voted last week to let undocumented immigrants “illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

“These guys are full, they’re full of bad ideas,” Lake said in her speech. “Just last week Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

Fact First: This claim is false.

The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely occurs. When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.

Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”

“Of course, only U.S. citizens should vote,” said Gallego. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”

From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Perry Johnson’s incorrect claim about median family income

Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who previously ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that income rose consistently under Trump.

“Under Trump, family income went up every year. That is a fact,” Johnson told the crowd.

Facts first: Johnson is incorrect. Median family income fell in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in both inflation-adjusted and non-adjusted terms.

Typical family income grew by several thousand dollars during each of Trump’s first three years in office, before adjusting for inflation. But it fell by $1,660 in 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy.

After factoring in inflation, typical family income fell by nearly $2,900 in 2020, after rising in each of the first three years of Trump’s administration.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

THIRD NIGHT:

Night three of the Republican National Convention included former President Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and other speakers who made false and misleading claims throughout the night.

Here is a list of fact checks from CNN’s Facts First team.

Vance’s misleading claim about Trump and the invasion of Iraq

Former President Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, insinuated in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday that Trump had opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Vance said that “when I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq.” After mentioning other past Biden positions as well, Vance said, “Somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong. President Trump knew, even then, that we needed leaders who would put America first.”

Facts First: Vance’s claim is misleading. In reality, Trump did not publicly express opposition to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq before it occurred. When radio host Howard Stern asked Trump in September 2002 whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued a military strike on Iraq might be necessary. And Trump did not express a firm opinion about the looming war in a Fox interview in January 2003, saying that “either you attack or don’t attack” and that then-President George W. Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”

Trump began criticizing the war in 2003, after the invasion, and also said that year that American troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq.
He emerged as an explicit opponent of the war in 2004, the year before Biden did.

But Vance suggested Trump had been right on the invasion itself while Biden got it wrong, and there’s no basis for the claim that they were on opposing sides of the issue.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Kimberly Guilfoyle claims that ‘Trump handed Biden a booming economy’

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and former Fox News host, slammed Biden for his handling of the economy in her speech on the third night of the Republican National Convention.

“President Trump handed Biden a booming economy and a strong nation. All Joe had to do was leave it alone and take a nap,” she said Wednesday.

Facts First: Guilfoyle’s comments are misleading. While the economy did well during the first three years of the Trump administration, it was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. While it had recovered somewhat by the end of 2020, there were still multiple weak points heading into 2021, when Biden took office.

The US economy grew at an annualized and seasonally adjusted rate of 4% in the fourth quarter of 2020. That would usually be a great rate, but it didn’t make up for a weak first quarter and terrible second quarter spurred by the pandemic. For all of 2020, the GDP fell 3.5% from the prior year, the worst decline since 1946.

Also, disposable incomes fell by 9.5% on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter of 2020, and the unemployment rate was 6.7% in December of that year. Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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The US economy shed 140,000 jobs that month — a far worse outcome than economists predicted at the time.

Covid-19 infections had increased that month, prompting some states to take additional containment measures.

Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he entered, largely because of the pandemic.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

RNC video makes outdated claim about US wages

A video that played before Vance’s speech hit Biden over his handling of the economy.

“Under Biden, wages are going down while prices skyrocket,” the video said.

Facts first: The claim in the video is outdated. While inflation outpaced wages during the first half of the Biden administration, that reversed in the middle of last year.

Inflation rose sharply during the early years of the Biden administration but has since slowed to an annual rate of 3% in June. In fact, prices fell in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Meanwhile, real average hourly earnings – which takes inflation into account – began increasing in mid-2023. They rose 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis, from June 2023 to June 2024, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

RNC chairman’s false claim about the 2020 economy

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley said in his opening remarks at the party convention on Wednesday: “Our economy is not nearly as strong as it was four years ago.”

Facts First: This is false.
Four years ago, in mid-2020, the US economy was in dire straits because of the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, the June 2020 unemployment rate was 11%, well over double the June 2024 rate of 4.1%. In late July 2020, the federal government announced that the US economy had just experienced its worst contraction on record – shrinking by an annual rate of 32.9% in the quarter running from April 2020 through June 2020.

We give politicians wide latitude to express opinions, and many Trump supporters have argued that the pre-pandemic economy under former Trump, in 2019 and prior, was stronger than the current Biden-era economy. That’s a matter of subjective debate. But it’s plainly inaccurate that the mid-2020 economy was superior to the current economy.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Newt Gingrich on the war in Afghanistan under Trump

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claimed that “President Trump orchestrated an orderly end to the Afghanistan war with no American killed in nearly two years.”

Facts first: Both of these claims are false.

Although Trump oversaw a deal with the Taliban aimed at the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the war did not end under his presidency. The last US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021 under the Biden administration.

Moreover, there is no period of “nearly two years” under Trump’s presidency where no American service member was killed. During his four years in office, there were 45 US service member hostile deaths, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. The longest stretch without combat deaths was at the end of his presidency, from March 2020 until he left office in January 2021 – less than a year.

From CNN’s Jennifer Hansler

Former Trump intel chief misleadingly says ‘Taliban is back’

Richard Grenell, who served as the acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020, said Wednesday night that under President Joe Biden “the Taliban is back.”

“[A]fter four years of Joe Biden, wars are back, the Taliban is back and members of ISIS have slipped through America’s broken southern border,” Grenell said.

Facts first: The claim that the “Taliban is back” is misleading, as it insinuates the Taliban ever left.

While it’s true that the Taliban returned to power after the United States’ 2021 withdrawal, the Taliban remained present in Afghanistan throughout Trump’s time in office. The US, under the Trump administration, and the Taliban signed a historic agreement in 2020 that set into motion the US’ withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Officials within the Trump administration also met with Taliban representatives “repeatedly” in Doha for nearly a year, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a 2019 report.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Peter Navarro’s false claims about his prosecution for contempt of Congress

The same day he got out of prison after serving his sentence for contempt of Congress, former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro claimed that the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol demanded he break the law.

“They demanded that I break the law because they have no respect for it. I refused,” Navarro told the audience at the Republic National Convention Wednesday, adding that the committee wanted him to betray Trump.

Navarro also claimed that special counsel Jack Smith “indicted and prosecuted me.”

Facts first: These assertions are both false. While Navarro has long claimed that the information subpoenaed by the committee was protected by executive privilege, the judge presiding over his case found evidence did not show that Trump had formally asserted the privilege. And Smith did not prosecute Navarro; the US attorney in Washington, DC, did.

In a ruling last summer, prior to his trial where a jury convicted Navarro of being in contempt of Congress, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Navarro could not argue that Trump asserted executive privilege to shield him from the congressional subpoena.

Mehta concluded that either Trump himself or someone authorized to assert privilege or immunity on his behalf would have had to personally invoke the privilege for it to be validly asserted. The judge said Navarro had not put forward adequate evidence to show such an assertion when he was subpoenaed for testimony and documents by the House committee in February 2022.

A jury in Washington, DC, found that Navarro broke the law in refusing to comply with Congress, not the other way around as the former adviser suggested.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Florida Republican’s false claim about electric tanks

Florida Rep. Mike Waltz said Wednesday that Biden is “focused on building electric tanks.”

“What do we have today with President Biden? What’s he focused on? … here’s my favorite, he’s focused on building electric tanks. Has anyone seen any charging stations in the Middle East for Biden’s electric tanks?”

Facts first: The claim that Biden is focused on building electric tanks is false.

The Army released a climate strategy in 2022 that called for a move toward various kinds of electric vehicles, including “fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050,” but that would not include tanks. And, regardless, a strategy is not a mandate.

An engineer with the RAND Corporation told FactCheck.org of similar claims made by Trump regarding electric tanks in the military: “While it may be true that an electric tank would have limited range, the Army is not planning on fielding or deploying an electric tank, though there have been prototypes of hybrid tanks.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Florida lawmaker’s claim about extremism training in the military

Florida Rep. Brian Mast claimed at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday that the Biden administration has distracted the military “with millions of hours of so-called extremism training.”

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have once again weakened our armed forces and …
distracted our troops with millions of hours of so-called extremism training,” Mast said.

Facts first: The claim that the US military has “millions of hours” of extremism training is false.

While there has been training in the military on extremism, it is not millions of hours’ worth. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered units in 2021 to hold a one-day “stand down” to discuss extremism in the military. The undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness said in a 2022 memo that “discussions about extremist activity” would be included in “periodic training.”

But the Biden administration has also shown an unwillingness to require more training on extremism in the military.

In 2021, the White House said that while the administration “shares the goal of preventing prohibited extremist activities and holding offenders accountable,” it would not support the establishment of an Office of Countering Extremism in the Pentagon “because it would impose onerous and overly specific training.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Burgum claims Biden has waged a ‘war on energy’

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum claimed Wednesday night as he addressed the Republican National Convention that Biden has waged a “war on energy.”

Facts First: This claim needs context. Biden has stressed the importance of renewable energy during his administration, but the US under Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has.

The world record was set by the US in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, averaging about 12.9 million barrels per day – exceeding the Trump-era record, an average of about 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. US production of dry natural gas also hit a new high in 2023. So did US crude oil exports.

Egan reported in August: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Ronny Jackson’s false claim of ‘record-high inflation’

Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas claimed in his Republican National Convention speech on Wednesday that there has been “record-high inflation” under the Biden administration.

Facts First: This is false. The record for US inflation, set in 1920, is 23.7%; the Biden-era peak was 9.1% in June 2022. Jackson could fairly say there was a four-decade high under Biden – that June 2022 figure was the highest since late 1981 – but there was nothing close to a new record.

In addition, Jackson didn’t mention that inflation has fallen sharply since the Biden-era peak two years ago. The current inflation rate, for June 2024, is 3%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Mike Waltz’s false claim about spy balloons

Republican Rep. Mike Waltz said Wednesday that there were no spy balloon incidents during the Trump administration, like the Chinese spy balloon that transited over the continental US in 2023 before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.

“We had a president who defeated ISIS, broke Iran, stood with Israel, always stood with our allies, made China pay. You didn’t see any spy balloons under President Trump, did you?” Waltz said.

Facts first: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.

Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

RNC chairman’s false claim about Russia’s nuclear missiles near Cuba

Whatley claimed in his opening speech on Wednesday evening that Russia has “parked a nuclear missile capable boat” in Cuba.

“Where are we today? Russia has invaded Ukraine,” he said. “They’ve parked a nuclear missile capable boat 90 miles off our shore in Havana, Cuba.”

Facts first: This claim about the status of a Russian boat is false. While Russia did have a nuclear-powered submarine visiting Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy vessels, all of the vessels – including the submarine – have since left.

A group of four Russian Navy vessels arrived in Cuba on June 12 as part of what Pentagon and State Department officials stressed is a routine activity and noted that Cuba has hosted Russian ships every year between 2013 and 2020. A Pentagon spokesperson, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said in June that “given Russia’s long history of Cuban port calls, these are considered routine naval visits, especially in the context of increased US support to Ukraine and NATO exercises.”

The nuclear-powered submarine, the Kazan, was the first of the vessels to leave Havana on June 17.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

RNC video falsely claims there was peace in the Middle East under Trump

A video played early in the Republican National Convention proceedings on Wednesday night claimed that the “strength” of Trump kept “the Middle East at peace.” Whatley had similarly claimed in his convention speech on Monday that the Middle East was “at peace” four years ago under Trump.

Facts First: The claim that there was peace in the Middle East under Trump 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 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 Miller called “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.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video cites right-wing think tank without mentioning it was doing so

A video played at the beginning of Republican National Convention proceedings on Wednesday evening attacked Biden’s handling of foreign policy – and featured a narrator saying, “The Defense News reports today that the US military is in decline and threats from China are formidable.”

Facts First: This claim is misleading. Defense News, an independent publication covering national security, did not itself assert that the US military is in decline. Rather, the publication reported that the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank had made that assertion.

A Defense News article in October 2022 was headlined, “US military in decline, threats from China ‘formidable,’ report says.” The article explained that these assertions came from “a new report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that each year analyzes the strength of the armed forces and the threats to America.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

FOURTH NIGHT:

Former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with the most dishonest speech of the four-day Republican National Convention, making more than 20 false claims by CNN’s count.

Many of the false claims were ones Trump has made before, some of them for years. They spanned a wide variety of topics, including the economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy and elections. Some of them were wild lies, others smaller exaggerations. Some were in his prepared text (like the absurd claim that he left the Biden administration a world at peace), while he ad-libbed others (such as his usual lies that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and that the US is experiencing the worst inflation it has ever had).

Below is a fact check of some of Trump’s false or misleading remarks, plus a fact check of claims made by other Thursday convention speakers.

Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The current inflation rate, 3% in June 2024, is nowhere near the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920.

Trump could fairly say that the inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but it has since plummeted.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s misleading claim about North Korean missile launches during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that he “got along with” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and “we stopped the missile launches from North Korea.”

“But, no, I got along with him,” Trump said, “and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now North Korea is acting up again.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “stopped the missile launches” from North Korea is misleading. While missile launches did pause from North Korea for a period of time during his administration, they started up again before he left office.

A May 2019 launch of what was assessed to be a short-range ballistic missile was North Korea’s first since 2017, which was seen as a sign of growing frustration from Kim on the state of talks with the US. North Korea later launched two more missiles in July 2019, a month after Trump’s high-profile meeting with Kim in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. North Korea conducted four missile tests in 2020.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on his claims of defeating ISIS in “couple of months”

Former President Donald Trump claimed in his RNC speech that “we defeated 100% of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was going to take five years. … We did it in a matter of a couple of months.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “a couple of months” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019.

Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has suggested in past remarks, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said he defeated the terror group with no caveats or credit to anyone else. Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Donald Trump’s misleading claim that federal judge ruled case against him was ‘unconstitutional’

Donald Trump said Thursday that the Florida federal judge who was overseeing the classified documents case dismissed the criminal charges against the former president, finding “that the prosecutor and the fake documents case against me were totally unconstitutional.”

Facts first: Trump’s claim is misleading. District Judge Aileen Cannon wrote in her ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who was prosecuting the case, violated the Constitution. But Cannon specifically did not comment on the validity of the charges Trump was facing, or whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper.

In a 93-page ruling Monday, Cannon said Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution. Cannon said that Smith’s position as special counsel “effectively usurps” Congress’ “important legislative authority,” because Congress should have the authority – not the head of the Justice Department – to appoint such an official.

Cannon also said that Smith’s office was being funded improperly.

But Cannon also specifically noted that she was not deciding any “other legal rights or claims” brought by Trump or his co-defendants in the case.

The judge also said that the Justice Department could potentially revive the case by funding the special counsel through different means. Prosecutors from outside the special counsel’s office could also refile the charges.

From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

Trump on the impact of immigration on Medicare and Social Security

During his Republican National Convention speech, former President Donald Trump again said that Democrats are harming Social Security and Medicare by letting migrants into the US.

“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare because all of these people by the millions are coming in – they’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrants who are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits.

The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency.

“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.

Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.”

“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said.

However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.

“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump on trade deal with China

Former President Donald Trump claimed that he struck a trade deal with China, requiring the country to purchase $50 billion worth of American products. “They buy $50 billion worth,” he said at the Republican National Convention Thursday.

Facts First: The claim that China bought $50 billion worth of American product as a result of a trade deal is false.

Trump is referring to what is known as the Phase One deal he struck with Beijing in December 2019.

While the deal required China to buy $50 billion worth of American agricultural products by the end of 2021 – Beijing did not live up to its commitment.

US agricultural exports to China recovered from the trade war but did not reach the levels in the Phase One commitments, according to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Donald Trump exaggerates how much higher gas prices are right now

Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump described gas prices inaccurately during his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention. He said that “gas prices are up 60%.”

Facts First: The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline nationwide is $3.51 as of Thursday, according to AAA. That’s up about 47% from the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated, when the average was $2.39, not 60% higher as Trump claimed.

Although the United States has a strategic gasoline reserve, which can be tapped by the White House to ease upward pressure on prices, as Biden did in May, gas prices are still mostly determined by market forces, such as global petroleum production and consumer demand, not solely by the decisions of a sitting US president.

From CNN’s Bryan Mena

Trump claims government hired 88,000 IRS agents

Former President Donald Trump, while recounting a conversation he had with a waitress worried about the taxes on her tips, claimed that the government recently hired 88,000 IRS agents to audit individuals.

Facts First: This claim is false.

The 88,000 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

Trump on Biden increasing Americans’ taxes by four times

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim that President Joe Biden wants to hike people’s taxes by four times.

“This is the only administration that said, ‘We’re gonna raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,’” Trump said Thursday in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024.

Biden has not proposed quadrupling Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.”

The Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s proposal would, on average, have raised taxes by about $2,300 – but that’s about a 2.3% decline in after-tax income, not the massive reduction Trump is suggesting Biden wants. And critically, Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman noted to CNN in May that 95% of the tax hike would have been covered by the highest-income 5% of households.

The very biggest burden under the Biden plan would have been carried by the very richest households; the Tax Policy Center found that households in the top 0.1% would have seen their after-tax incomes decline by more than 20%. That’s “a lot,” Gleckman noted, but it’s still nowhere near the quadrupling Trump claims Biden is looking for. And again, even this increase would have been only for a tiny subset of the population. Biden has promised not to raise taxes by even a cent for anyone making under $400,000 per year.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s claim on the situation before the ‘Right to Try’ law

Former President Donald Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 in his convention speech Thursday, which gave terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Before the measure was passed, Trump claimed, terminally ill patients in the United States would have to go to foreign countries to seek experimental treatments or go home to die if they couldn’t afford it.

“Sounds simple, but it’s not, and I got them to agree that somebody that needs it will – instead of going to Asia or Europe or some place – or if you have no money, going home and dying,” he said.

Facts First: This is misleading. It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.

‘“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Trump’s claim about Russian warships near Cuba

Former President Donald claimed in his RNC speech on Wednesday evening that “Russian warships and nuclear submarines are operating 60 miles off our coasts in Cuba. … The press refuses to write about it.”

Facts First: Trump’s present-tense claim that Russian warships and nuclear submarines “are” operating close to the United States is misleading. While Russia did have a nuclear-powered submarine visiting Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy vessels, all of the vessels – including the submarine – have since left.

The vessels left Havana on June 17.

It is also not true that media organizations “don’t want to talk about it.” CNN, along with most other major news outlets, reported on the Russian ships’ positioning.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on military equipment left in Afghanistan

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim, which he has made in speech after speech, that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.

Trump said, “And we also left $85 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim that the ‘world was at peace’ during his administration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday, as many others at the RNC did, that while he was president the world was at peace.

“Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war,” he also claimed later in his speech.

Facts First: Trump’s claim about world peace under his presidency is false. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

US troops were still deployed in combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Somalia continued, as did the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was also ongoing, as were the conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Syria and between Israel and Iran; Islamist insurgents continued their fight in Africa’s Sahel region; there was major violence in Mexico’s long-running drug wars; fighting continued between Ukraine and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine’s Donbas region; and there were lots of other unresolved wars and conflicts around the world.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks armed conflict in countries around the world, said in a June email that it estimates there were active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2020 and again active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2021.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump on Venezuela’s crime rate

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday at the Republican National Convention that “in Venezuela, crime is down 72%” because foreign governments are sending their countries’ criminals to the US.

Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available.

And while it is certain that at least some criminals have joined law-abiding Venezuelans in a mass exodus from the country amid the economic crisis of the last decade, there is no proof Venezuela’s government has deliberately emptied prisons for migration purposes or intentionally sent ex-prisoners to the United States.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s evidence-free claim on immigration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that immigrants are “coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. … Terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before.”

Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that jails around the world are being emptied out so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants, nor for his claim that foreign governments are also emptying out mental health facilities for this purpose. Last year, Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence for his narrower claim at the time that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.

Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told CNN at the time they had not heard of anything that would corroborate Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing.

Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.

In response to CNN’s 2023 inquiry, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung cited one source for Trump’s claim about prisons being emptied for migration purposes – a 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart News about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents that Venezuela had done this. But that vague and unverified claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on US crime statistics

Former President Donald Trump claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that “our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim about a dramatic increase in the crime rate is false. Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall reported violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall reported violent crime.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump blames Biden administration for ‘greatest invasion in history’

During his RNC speech, former President Donald Trump claimed that the Biden administration has done nothing to curb illegal immigration to the US.

“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country—they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East,” Trump said, “they’re coming at levels we’ve never seen before it is an invasion indeed and this administration does nothing to stop them.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the Biden administration is doing “nothing” is incorrect. Illegal crossings at the US border dropped in June and the Biden administration has imposed significant restrictions on asylum along with other measures to curb illegal immigration.

Arrests along the US southern border dropped 29% in June, according to new data released by US Customs and Border Protection, following the Biden administration’s order severely limiting asylum-seeker crossings.“Recent border security measures have made a meaningful impact on our ability to impose consequences for those crossing unlawfully,” CBP Acting Commissioner Troy A. Miller previously said in a statement.

Last month, the Biden administration invoked an authority to shut off access to asylum for migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, a significant attempt to address one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities. It was the administration’s most dramatic move on the US southern border, using the same authority former President Donald Trump tried to use in office.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Trump makes claims about grocery prices rising under Biden

Former President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that groceries are up 57% during the Biden administration.

Facts First: Trump’s claims of grocery prices being up 57% are false and could use some context.

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, hitting a 41-year high, and has slowed since (the Consumer Price Index was at 3% as of June 2024). However, it remains elevated from historical levels. Three-plus years of pervasive and prolonged inflation has weighed considerably on Americans, especially lower-income households trying to afford the necessities (food, shelter and transportation).

Food prices, specifically grocery prices, did outpace overall inflation for much of 2022 and 2023, driven higher by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Still, grocery prices didn’t rise to the extent that Trump claims. Annual food and grocery inflation peaked at 11.4% and 13.5% in August 2022, respectively. Since Biden took office, the CPI “food at home” index is up 21%, which is higher than its 9% typical rise in recent history over a 54-month period, but it’s not 57%.

Through the 12 months that ended in June, overall food and grocery prices were up just 2.2% and 1.1%, respectively.

Certain food categories saw much greater inflation: Notably, egg prices were up 70% annually in January 2023. However, the underlying cause of that sharp increase was a highly contagious, deadly avian flu. Food prices are highly volatile and can be influenced by a variety of factors, especially disease, extreme weather events, global supply and demand, geopolitical events, and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Trump’s misleading claim about energy independence

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the US was “energy independent” during his presidency but that this changed under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: This is misleading. “Energy independent” is a political phrase, not a literal phrase, that can be defined in various ways – and, under Biden, the US has continued to satisfy the same definitions it satisfied under Trump. US production of oil and gas have set records under Biden.

“Energy independent” doesn’t mean the US uses no foreign energy or that it is untethered from global energy markets; this wasn’t the case under Trump and still isn’t under Biden. Experts in energy policy tend to scoff at the term “energy independence,” with three experts telling CNN in 2022 that it is a “horrible term,” “ridiculous term” and “stupid term,” respectively.

But if the term is defined as the US exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported, that has happened in every year under Biden after happening under Trump in 2020 for the first time in decades. (In fact, the US surplus in petroleum trade has grown under Biden as US crude oil production and exports have hit new highs) And if the term is defined as the US producing more energy than it consumes, that has also continued to happen under Biden after happening under Trump in 2019for the first time in decades.

You can read here about the various economic reasons the US has imported foreign energy under both Trump and Biden despite its so-called “energy independence.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on his tax cuts

Former President Donald Trump once again claimed that he signed the largest tax cuts in history during his administration.

“We got credit for the war, and defeating ISIS, and so many things. The great economy, the biggest tax cuts ever, the biggest regulation cuts ever, the creation of Space Force, the rebuilding of our military. We did so much,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump’s false claim US had ‘no’ inflation during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that inflation did not exist during his presidency – drawing a contrast between his administration and that of President Joe Biden, whose early years in office were plagued by decades-high inflation.

“We had no inflation,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: Trump’s comment is false. Inflation was low, but not nothing.

The Consumer Price Index, a common measure of inflation, rose about 8% during Trump’s four years in office. In January 2021, his final partial month in office, it increased 1.4% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump repeats frequent claim about oil drilling and gas prices

As he has done repeatedly on the campaign trail, Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that under a new Trump administration, the United States would “drill, baby, drill, … by doing that, we will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.”

Facts First: Trump’s frequent campaign claim that the US can lower gas prices by producing more domestic oil is misleading.

Under President Joe Biden, US oil production has reached a new record this year, even surpassing output under Trump’s administration. The Energy Information Administration expects crude oil production to hit successive records this year and next, powered by an oil boom in the Permian Basin. As CNN has reported, the US currently produces more oil than any other country on the planet, at about half a million barrels per day more than the prior annual record set in 2019.

Prices at the pump in the US are highly dependent on the global oil market and the US cannot be truly energy independent when it comes to gas prices, energy experts have told CNN. Oil is a global commodity; the global price of oil determines US gas prices and it’s simply impossible to separate that price from shifting global dynamics like Russia’s war on Ukraine or OPEC’s recent decisions to cut oil production.

“Whether we’re drill baby, drilling has more to do with what the price of crude oil is, how healthy is the economy,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, and a former George W. Bush White House official, told CNN recently. “These things are outside of a president’s direct control.” There’s also the fact that the US consumes a different kind of oil than it produces, McNally told CNN last year. McNally compared the light crude the US produces to champagne, and the heavy crude it imports to coffee. US oil refineries are specifically built to separate out the “heavy and gunky” crude we consume, McNally said.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Pompeo falsely claims Biden ‘won’t even talk about’ American hostages in Gaza

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed on Thursday that President Joe Biden “won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” in Gaza.

“And now of course a second war in Gaza. President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held there by the Iranian regime,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that Biden “won’t even talk about” the American hostages in Gaza is false. Biden has spoken about the Americans held in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ invasion of Israel several times since October.

Recently on May 31, speaking about a proposed deal for Israel and Hamas, Biden said American hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal: “[W]e want them home.”

On October 25, Biden said his administration was working “around the clock together with our partners in the region to secure the release of hostages including American citizens … left behind.”

On November 26, he spoke extensively about the release of an Israeli American little girl who was held hostage and said he was pressing for more Americans to be released, adding, “we will not stop working until every hostage is returned to their loved ones.”

Most recently, at the NATO Summit in DC last week, Biden talked about hostages broadly, saying the US “has been working to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, to bring the hostages home, to create a path for peace and stability in the Middle East.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump biographical video includes false and misleading claims

The Republican National Convention played a biographical video about former President Donald Trump before Trump began his own speech. The video included false and misleading claims.

The Trump tax cuts

The video featured a narrator making a claim that Trump himself frequently utters. The narrator said, “The Trump tax cuts: largest in America’s history.”

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. You can read a detailed fact check here.

Global conflict under Trump

The video’s narrator also delivered a version of another claim Trump has made repeatedly, saying Trump’s “strength and resolve” produced “a stable world at peace.”

This claim about world peace under Trump is false, too. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

Americans’ incomes

While attacking President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, the video featured on-screen text that said, “U.S. incomes fall for third straight year,” attributing those words to a Wall Street Journal article in 2023. An image of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was shown on screen at the same time.

This combination of words and images is misleading. The video didn’t acknowledge that the first of the three straight years in which the Wall Street Journal article reported that inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. (The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline.)

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Eric Trump’s false claims about the economy and US global standing in 2016

Eric Trump told the crowd at the RNC Thursday that the “economy was struggling, jobs were scarce” and the US had poor standing on the global stage when his father was elected president in 2016.

Facts First: Eric Trump’s claims are false. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he inherited a strong economy, including a robust labor market, and a nation that was viewed favorably on the global stage.

In 2016, the US added an average of nearly 194,000 jobs per month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In the two years before, those average gains were even higher: 226,000 in 2015 and nearly 250,000 in 2014.

Job gains remained above historical averages in 2017 through 2019, with 177,000 jobs added on average per month.

Eric Trump’s claims that jobs were scarce in 2016 were not accurate. In fact, the US labor market experienced its longest expansion on record starting in 2010 and continuing until March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic crippled global economies, including that of the US.

In addition to inheriting a labor market in good shape, the economy was growing when Trump took office. Real gross domestic product – the widest measure of economic activity – typically grows between 2% and 3%, and it averaged 2.4% between 2014-2016 and then nearly 2.7% during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

Also, the US was well regarded internationally when Barack Obama left office, and those sentiments plunged at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, according to the spring 2017 Global Attitudes Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Pompeo’s claim about the southern border under Trump

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that the US-Mexico border was “closed” during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Facts First: Pompeo’s claim is false.

While Trump tightened the border during his tenure, illegal crossings into the US from Mexico still numbered in the tens of thousands each month leading up to when he left office. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration limited non-essential travel on the US-Mexico border and prohibited migrants from crossing it in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. President Joe Biden later extended the restrictions.

The former president’s biggest effort to “close” the border was met with resistance by federal courts, and the Supreme Court later gave Biden the green light to end the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy.

From CNN’s Devan Cole

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

For the fourth straight night, 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. 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.” 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.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Pompeo’s false claim about spy balloons

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday evening that under former President Donald Trump’s administration, “not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across” the US.

“We’d begun on an honorable exit from Afghanistan, and not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across the United States of America,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.

Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after President Joe Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Linda McMahon’s misleading claim on tariffs

Linda McMahon, who served in the Trump administration as the Small Business Administrator, suggested at the Republican National Convention Thursday that China paid the tariffs that the former president put on roughly $300 billion of Chinese-made goods. “Instead of taxing American companies, Donald Trump put tariffs on China that raised billions of dollars and protected American industries,” she said.

Facts First: This characterization of Trump’s tariffs is misleading.

It’s true that Trump’s tariffs on China raised billions of dollars for the US government, but the duties were paid by US companies – not China.

Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission (USITC), has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.

Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer.

Many economists agree that tariffs act as a tax on American consumers.

“A tariff is just a form of a tax,” Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN earlier this year.

Tariffs can benefit some companies by raising the prices of competing foreign-made goods, but the duties can hurt other companies by raising component parts they need to manufacture.

For example, Trump’s tariffs were imposed, in part, to boost the US manufacturing sector – but that industry lost jobs.

Federal Reserve economists found a net decrease in manufacturing employment due to the tariffs in 2019. That’s mostly because goods became more expensive to US consumers. Plus, retaliatory tariffs put on American-made goods made other US manufacturers less competitive when selling abroad.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

RNC video featuring Reagan’s voice misleadingly twists magazine article

A video played on the final night of the Republican National Convention tried to attack President Joe Biden by featuring quotes from then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous rhetorical questions about the President Jimmy Carter era at a presidential debate against Carter in 1980.

At one point, the video featured Reagan’s voice asking if, compared to four years ago, “Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?” On-screen text answered the question with the words “allies no longer trust the United States,” attributing them to a September 2021 article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Facts First: This quote is misleading. The article in Foreign Affairs didn’t actually declare that allies no longer trust the United States. Rather, the article noted that “critics of President Joe Biden” make the “claim” that allies no longer trust the US after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – but the article then went on to argue that “these concerns about credibility are overblown.”

The convention video also featured Reagan’s voice asking, “Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?” But if you go back precisely four years from the most recent unemployment rate, the answer is: less unemployment. The current unemployment rate is 4.1% for June 2024; four years prior, in June 2020, the unemployment rate was 11.0% amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a reasonable basis for this part of the video, though, if you interpret “four years ago” more broadly to refer to any time in 2020. Before the pandemic, in the first two months of 2020, the unemployment rates were 3.6% and 3.5%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

We’ll have the reviews of the Democratic National Convention from Daniel Dale and his CNN colleagues on Wednesday.

GWOT Failure and its Coattails

Posted on August 12, 2024 by bpriddy

(NOTE—This material originally was posted for August 1, the day before the primary election. It was posted in unreadable form so we are re-posting it today. Although the entry refers to candidates in the primary election, the issues remain for the general election so we are re-posting the entry to discuss those issues because they remain valid for the primary survivors who will make them issues in their new campaigns.)

One would think, to view some Missouri candidates’ commercials that our state is being overrun by fentanyl-fueled escaped mental patients, prison escapees, murderers, rapists, robbers—-and probably some shoplifters and car thieves just to be inclusive—from south of the border. .

Several of these candidates for statewide office have promised to “fix” the illegal immigrant problem (aka “unregistered immigrant” problem), a national issue that has been made only worse by a couple of governors who have “fixed” their problems by shipping immigrants—legally here or not—to other states. The Missouri candidates have not told us how they are going to solve a national problem.

There have been promises of mobilizing all of the law enforcement agencies in the state and even calling out the National Guard to end this overwhelming threat, which sounds like a good time to achieve your dream of driving 150 mph on I-70 because there sure won’t be any deputies or troopers left to catch you because they are out hauling in people generally of Central American origin.

One candidate has stated he personally will drive the buses stuffed with these folks back to the border—to Texas, which has one of the governors shipping immigrants to other states. He could call it “Operation Return to Sender.”

That’s great public policy—getting into an immigrant-shipping war with another state.

Sheesh! What a bunch of nonsense all of this is.

But a lot of our candidates for statewide office have spent campaign funds to go to Texas so they can produce a commercial showing them bravely standing in front of the Great Wall of Trump and most sincerely telling us they will solve the illegal immigrant problem. The whole darned thing.

And there’s a point they hope voters won’t think about—that Biden’s “failed immigration policies” are to a significant degree the failure of the GWOT to do the job our former president promised it would do. Perhaps his “beautiful wall” hasn’t saved us after all.

And by the way, in the eight years since he told us the GWOT would stop the flow of these dangerous men, women, and children—and Mexico would pay for it—we’re still waiting to see the first check signed by the President of our southern neighbor.

If the GWOT was working as well as its advocates said back in 2016 that it would, we wouldn’t have these problems and our candidates could be focused instead on what they will do with the REAL problems Missourians face, including—

—a chronically unfunded mental health system

—domestic homelessness (I haven’t seen any immigrants, legal or illegal, on the streets of Missouri’s Capital City.)

—underfunded payments to nursing homes

—Loss of Medicaid coverage for thousands of Missouri’s children and delays in providing medical care for them.

—Straightening out the state’s troubled foster care program

—Continued weak state compensation to counties for housing state prisoners

—Uncertain future for road and bridge funding

—weak support for veterans hospitals

—-advisability of state funding for stadiums in KC and St. Louis.

—-inadequate health and reproductive care for women (The privately-funded Commonwealth Fund, which focuses on health care issues, recently ranked Missouri 40^th out of 51 states and DC in this category.)

We could go on and on but the only thing the candidates seem to want to go on and on about is the immigrant problem. You’d think we’re being overrun by illegal immigrants from south of the border—all of whom, to hear the candidates tell it, are threats to our society and our safety.

They are quite willing to play fast and loose with the facts when they blame unregistered immigrants for high crime problems.

The Brennan Center, founded at the New York University School of law by former clerks of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Jr., reported in late May:

In the past few months, politicians and certain media outlets have latched on to a narrative that recent immigrants, especially undocumented ones, are causing spikes in crime. Instead of gathering data and examining the issue empirically, they are making this broad assertion based on highly publicized individual incidents of crime by undocumented immigrants. All acts of violence must be taken seriously. But policymakers should not attribute blame to entire classes of people when individuals commit crimes.

The research does not support the view that immigrants commit crime or are incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants might have less law enforcement contact compared to nonimmigrants. Focusing on the facts is imperative, especially given that immigration has become a top issue for voters ahead of the election.

Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite. Studies have also examined the impact of the concentration of immigrants in a community on crime patterns, finding that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and an increase in structural factors — such as social connection and economic opportunity — that are linked to neighborhood safety.

When looking specifically at the relationship between undocumented immigrants and crime, researchers come to similar conclusions. Numerous studies show that undocumented immigration does not increase violent crime; research examining crime rates in so-called sanctuary cities also found no discernable difference when compared to similarly situated cities without sanctuary policies. One study that focused on drug crimes and driving under the influence found that unauthorized immigration status was associated with reductions in arrests for those offenses.

The research also shows that overall, immigrants have a similar or even lower likelihood of incarceration compared to native-born Americans, a trend that holds for immigrants from various source countries. For example, one study found that undocumented immigrants are 33 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. Indications of a negative relationship between immigration and crime also emerge when looking at conviction rates.

In a Texas study, undocumented immigrants were found to be 47 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans. More recently, a study looked at census data over a 150-year period; since 1870, incarceration rates of immigrants are actually slightly lower than U.S.-born people and that gap widens in recent years with immigrants 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.

Despite claims from conservative media and campaign rhetoric pointing to immigration as the cause of crime increases, there is no evidence that immigration — and in particular the recent influx of immigrants to Democratic-run cities — is causing a “crime wave.”

The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that, nationally, 45% of our foreign-born population were naturalized citizens. Another 27% were lawful permanent residents. Another six percent were temporary lawful residents. Only 34% were unauthorized immigrants—some 10.5 million people spread throughout our 50 states.

World Population Review noted in 2020, at the end of the Trump term, that this country “has the highest immigration population in the world at 50.6 million” people, about 15% of our total population. And we welcomed people from more than 200 countries and territories. The Review noted that in 2020, Mexico had the most immigrants to this country (hardly a surprise) at more than 100,000, more than the number of immigrants from India (47,000) and China (41,000) combined. Here’s a compilation of our top ten contributors of immigrants.

Here’s the compilation of our top ten immigrant-contributing countries as of 2020:

Mexico 100,325

India 46,363

China 41,483

Dominican Republic 30,005

Vietnam 29,995

Philippines 25,491

El Salvador, 17,907

Brazil 16,746

Cuba 16,367

South Korea, 16,244

Honestly, do we REALLY have an immigration problem in Missouri? We certainly do not have one that merits the scare language we are hearing from some of our political candidates.

We turn to the American Immigration Council that says only four percent of Missouri’s population are immigrants while another four percent of us are native-born but have at least one immigrant parent. That works out to 122,742 women, 111,553 men, and 24,095 children.

Eighty-six percent of Missouri’s emigrants speak English “well” or “very well.”

Seventeen percent of our immigrants have less than a high school diploma. That’s about double the percent of native-born Missourians. Thirty-one percent of our native-born Missourians have not progressed beyond high school, almost twice the percentage of the immigrant population (18%).

But College education? Sixty-five percent of immigrant Missourians have some college or a college degree or more. That’s five percentage points more than the natives. And when it comes to degrees, 44% of our immigrants have one but only 29% of the natives do.

Now we get to the exportables.

The Pew Trust says we have about 60,000 undocumented immigrants in Missouri. That is only about ONE ONE-HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT (0.01) of our population.

These candidates expect us get all frothy about 1/100^thof 1% percent of the population of Missouri—and they want to expend huge amounts of resources to run them out of the state while refusing to indicate any sort of leadership on more broadly-significant needs for the remaining 99.99% of us.

No matter what you might think of undocumented immigrants, consider the family disruptions that will happen with the great immigrant roundup—More than 34,500 United States citizens live with at least one undocumented family member, according to American Progress.org, which also says two percent of Missouri’s children live with at least one undocumented family member.

The numbers also include 3,010 “dreamers,” young people covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Another 37-hundred people have been granted legal status under the program.

Five percent of Missouri’s labor force are immigrant workers—more than 164,000 people. About 31,400 of those people work in manufacturing, 24,600 are in health care and social assistance. Nineteen thousand more are in accommodation and food services, 19,000 are in educational services and more than 15,500 are in professional. Scientific, and technical services.

Taxes don’t care if someone is legal or illegal. If they get a paycheck, they pay taxes and newamericaneconomy.org says immigrants paid almost two-Billion dollars in federal taxes and more than 790 million dollars in state and local taxes in 2018. UNDOCUMENTED immigrants paid an estimated 107-million dollars in federal taxes and more than 62-million in state and local taxes that same year.

Our immigrants spent $6.8-Billion in Missouri in 2018.

And almost 15,000 of them owned businesses that, in 2018 generated about $400-million in business income.

There undoubtedly are newer statistics but they likely are different only by a few degrees.

About those illegals—

The Migration Policy Institute figures Missouri has 54,000 unauthorized immigrants. About two-thirds are from Mexico and Central America. Two-thirds have been in this state for ten or fewer years.

Four-thousand of them are younger than 16. More than half are 25-55. Eight thousand are married to a United States citizen. Three-thousand more are married to a legal permanent resident.

Twenty-nine percent of the immigrants are not in the work force—many being children and/or stay-at-home parents.

One statistic that is missing from all of these studies is a statistic often cited but does not exist.:

—how many jobs terrible people have “taken” from Missourians. Let’s see some statistics on the “replacement” contention that show a genuine effort to replace American workers with unregistered foreigners.

There is no immigrant Mafia walking into businesses, pointing guns at owners’ heads, and telling them to give a job to an immigrant or to fire a native Missourian so an immigrant can have a particular position. Have you ever seen any help-wanted ads that say, “Native-born Missourians not wanted?” Immigrants are not replacing anybody.

Immigrants are the political whipping boys and girls of too many of our candidates who apparently have nothing significant to offer in terms of initiatives and programs that will help all ends of all boats to rise.

If the GWOT had done its job, these candidates might have nothing to talk about except more important issues that have a direct impact on all of us—-and Heaven forbid that they might ever do that.

The Pot Calling the Kettle—-

Posted on August 12, 2024 by bpriddy

Black? Indian?

It has taken no time for Donald Trump to make ethnicity an attack point in the presidential race. There is no reason for having done it but few, at least on the Left, will accuse Trump of being reasonable anyway. His track record of denigration of others is well-recognized but applauded by many who find his politically judgmental attitudes and actions fit their views of others who do not look, worship, or otherwise fit their guidelines for respect as fellow citizens.

A part of our political system seems unable to survive without finding others who do not deserve to be belittled or even hated, tomust be belittle and hate.

My generation remembers the pronouncements that John Kennedy would take orders from the Vatican if he became President. More recently, we were battered by those who made false claims about Barrack Obama’s birth as well as his ethnic history, including those who pointed to his middle name, Hussein, as an indication he might have had ties to Muslim terrorism.

Now, Donald Trump—-himself a mix of ancestral roots—is raising false insinuations about Kamala Harris with her emergence as a tangible threat to his dreams of absolute power. His attack made before an audience of Black journalists, no less, has underlined and bold-faced one word his critics have used many times to describe him: Racist:

“I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Several people DID look into it and quickly considered the comment one of Trumps most blatant lies and a clear injection of racism into the campaign.

Here’s one fact check:

Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black – FactCheck.org

Trump is hardly one to question the ethnicity of others—–because he has made questionable claims about his own. In fact, he has lied about it. In print.

Natasha Frost of the New York Times has written:

Trump’s international origins make him relatively unusual among American presidents. Of the last 10 presidents, only two—Trump and Barack Obama—have had a parent born outside of the United States. Trump’s own immediate family has been similarly international: Two of his three wives were naturalized American citizens, originally from the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Only one of his five children, Tiffany, is the child of two American-born citizens, while his daughter, Ivanka, is the first Jewish member of the First Family in American history. But so far as his biographers have been able to tell, none of his international roots extends to Sweden.

A-ha. Sweden. Frost, who has looked at Trump’s familial roots, reports Grandpa Friedrich Trump gave up his career as a 16-year old barber in GERMANY and came here in 1885 to escape three years of required service in the German military. But Trump denied the truth of his circumstances, maintaining for years, even in his co-written The Art of the Deal, that Friedrich came here from Scandinavia. A family historian told the newspaper the lie was started by Trump’s father, Fred, who did not want to alienate Jewish clients and friends by acknowledging the family’s German background.

“Trump is the son, and grandson, of immigrants: German on his father’s side, and Scottish on his mother’s. None of his grandparents, and only one of his parents, was born in the United States or spoke English as their mother tongue (His mother’s parents, from the remote Scottish Outer Hebrides, lived in a majority Gaelic-speaking community.),” Frost wrote.

Donald is the grandson of Friedrich, who was not Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish. He was one of more than about one million Germans to immigrate to the USA in 1885—seeking the same things that immigrants look for today. Their “wall” was the Atlantic Ocean.

But Trump’s family overcame that wall. We will leave it to you to consider any irony in his story.

“Trump” as a Swede? Only if his real name was “Trumpsson.”

As for Friedrich, it is not on the list of 100 top names for Swedish boys. The top ten, by the way, are Noah, Hugo, William, Liam, Nils, Elias, Oliver, Adam. August, and Sam

The attack on Kamala Harris was uncalled for. But what else is new when it comes from Donald Trump? And after all, wouldn’t you want to deny your German heritage if you had a running made that once wrote his college roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

Four years ago, reporter Ella Lee of USA TODAY reviewed 28 Trump comments deemed racist. Her conclusion: “Of the 28 listed comments, Trump said 12 of them as plainly stated. Two he said but lack context. Four comments are disputed, eight are paraphrased from similar statements and two he did not say.”

Fact check: 12 of 28 Trump comments deemed racist are direct speech (usatoday.com)

Adequate time has passed and millions of words have been spoken since then that an update is merited, including an evaluation of his claim that he is the best President that black people have had since Abraham Lincoln with no exceptions for Harry Truman’s integration of the military and Lyndon Johnson’s pushing for and signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s.

We are supposed to have some debates in September, depending on how Mr. Trump feels when he takes to Truth Social on any particular day. We will wait to see if he can do more than call people names by then or wallow in more language that is, in the least, insensitive.

The Swede vs. the Indian. What a match that could be.

(NOTE: We have posted a second entry today—-a re-post of a column originally dated August 1 but was unreadable thanks to a huge blunder by your editor, We hope we do not overburden you by this double post.)

Why Speaker Johnson Wants a Fake Law

Posted on July 30, 2024 by bpriddy

House Speaker Mike Johnson admits he doesn’t KNOW that there is a problem with non-citizens voting but he wants a law banning them from doing it. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states,” he said.

Intuition?

Wouldn’t you think that the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives would know this country has had a law since 1996 that bars non-citizens from voting in federal elections?

Johnson started talking about the potential law after a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, whose resident golf course champion told Iowans heading to their caucuses in January that immigrants are Democratic political tools:

“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote. And I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”

—-Which is a load of equine byproduct.

Rebecca Beitsch and Rafael Bernal, writing for The Hill political newsletter in Washington, talked to people who easily refute Speaker Johnson’s claim that “it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have the numbers.” Johnson could have talked to the same people, but who needs facts when your politically-shaped intuition can be used to malign a big segment of our population and the opposing party as well?

The Hill reporters went to Senior Counsel Eliza Sweren-Becker with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights & Elections Program. “We actually do have the numbers, and we know that noncitizens don’t vote illegally in detectable numbers, let alone in large numbers,” she told them. The Center has data from 42 jurisdictions. The study showed only 30 SUSPECTED BUT NOT CONFIRMED noncitizen votes in the 2016 General Election. There were 23.5 million votes cast in those jurisdictions, 0.0001 (one ten-thousandth) of a percent of the votes cast.

There are those who will dismiss these findings because they come from a center named for Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan, considered part of the court’s liberal wing during his 34 years on the court.

So they asked one of the experts at the Libertarian Cato Institute, who called Johnson’s intuition one of the “most frequent and less serious criticisms” about migration.

President Janet Murguia of UnidosUS, the biggest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, says Johnson’s intuition “doesn’t count for anything—doesn’t mean a lick” because Johnson admittedly has no proof.

“Many of our organizations have scoured for any signs of voting that has been irregular or done by folks who are not qualified. There just hasn’t been any evidence. So he can have intuition all he wants, but that does not mean it’s true. It does not mean there is evidence, and it does not mean it’s factual.” She challenged Johnson and his friends to produce specifics and data.

The Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Nanette Diaz Barragan accuses Johnson of finding “another way…to appease the crazies on the right because he’s on the chopping block right now and he’s got to do something to feed them some red bait.”

Johnson’s proposed law would force voters to show they are citizens of the United States to get a ballot. One of the drafters of the questionably-necessary bill, Texas Congressman Chip Roy, maintains, “the most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in our elections.” He says a system to guarantee that only citizens vote in federal elections is needed despite the 1996 law doing exactly that.

Documents such as birth certificates, passports, or naturalization papers would fill that bill, but the Brennan Center has found 5-7% of Americans—millions of people—do not have what Sweren-Becker calls “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.”

Murguia says conservative organizations have been looking into this issue for sometime, especially voting by undocumented people, and, “they just can’t report any great number, if any at all.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has numbers Johnson could have gathered if he wasn’t so busy listening to his intuition. The Foundation’s records dating back about forty years show only about fifty cases of voting by noncitizens, which includes visa holders or legal permanent residents, not just people here illegally.

Politifact, a political fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, a journalism research organization, got no response from the Trump campaign when it asked the campaign to justify his Iowa claim about Democrats loading the voter rolls with illegal immigrants.

But it, too, has numbers that Johnson doesn’t seem to think exist as well as some examples where authorities actually recruited noncitizens to register to vote. In Colorado, for instance, the Secretary of State before than 2022 midterm elections, sent postcards to about 30,000 drivers license holders encouraging them to register before learning they were non-citizens. He had to send an “oops” postcard to all of them and then worked with county clerks to make sure nobody in that group did try to register.

South Carolina federal prosecutors in 2020 charged 19 people with casting ballots they were not entitled to cast in the 2016 election. Three cases were dismissed and sixteen people pleaded guilty. Sixteen people out of more than 4.5 million who voted legally.

And in Georgia, one of the ex-president’s least-favorite people, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said two years ago that investigators had found all of 1,634 non-citizens had tried to register to vote during the last TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

The Hill notes that then-Governor Rick Scott of Florida announced before the 2014 midterms that 180,000 foreign nationals were going to be purged from the voter rolls. That number was reduced to only 2,600. Then it was cut to 198. Finally, only 85 names were eliminated. And how many prosecutions were there? One.

One, out of the 180,000 that Scott claimed were problems. That person was Josef Sever, who faced as much as five years in prison for falsely claiming to be a citizen, or as much as one year if he cast a ballot. Convictions also can result in deportation and might preclude any later opportunities for citizenship. Sever got five months in prison, a light sentence because the judge knew Sever was going to be deported.

Forget facts. Forget that there really are numbers that Johnson claims don’t exist. Forget that we’ve had a federal law on this subject for 38 years. Forget that we heard this one-note song from our former President and his cronies eight years ago when he claimed he would have won the popular vote were it not for three-million votes cast by illegal immigrants (not one of which apparently voted for him).

It was a bogus claim then. It’s a bogus piece of intuition now. But Johnson and other Trump sycophants are going to beat this dead horse as much as they can because our former president wants them to do it.

When Johnson and others start spouting about the need to protect voting integrity, an important question to ask is, “from whom?”

Fake Law, Part One of a Series

Posted on July 29, 2024 by bpriddy

(In this week before the primary election, we are reluctantly embarking on a series of daily observations of campaigns and campaign non-issues that do little to enhance public confidence in the process. We are sorry to be as pessimistic as we might seem. Perhaps the survivors of the primaries will be more responsible in their general election campaigns.

The situation seems to us be so dire that we will not have our regular Tuesday visit with the toy department of journalism—sports.)

FAKE LAW

It makes good headlines.

But it’s a fake issue.

It rallies the core.

But it’s a fake issue.

It paints a false portrait.

And it’s a fake issue.

It misleads voters.

Because it’s a fake issue.

It makes people think there’s a big problem.

But there isn’t.

It tries to capitalize on fear.

But it’s a lie.

And it’s one of the reasons Democrats in the Missouri Senate staged a record-setting filibuster in the last week of a legislative session that was characterized by filibusters from a small group of Republicans who have tried to run the chamber.

The legislation involved was a proposal making it harder to amend the state constitution. A bipartisan vote shut down debate and sent the bill to a committee that would work on compromises that might let it move forward in the last two days of the session.

The fact that Republicans and Democrats did something together put the Senate’s problem children into a tizzy. Freedom Caucus ringleader Bill Eigel, who apparently thinks one has to disagree disagreeably to succeed in today’s politics, warned Senate colleagues that the caucus would object to any compromises that changes what the FC demands.

And what the FC demanded was passage of a bill that would become partly fake law.

If you’re keeping score, this is the proposal that says no change can be made in the state constitution, even if the statewide vote approves the change, unless voters in five of our eight congressional districts approve. It’s a Republican effort to keep the heavy Democratic vote from the metro areas, and the Columbia area, from offsetting the conservative outstate votes.

It also contains “fake law” provisions prohibiting non-citizens from voting on constitutional amendments—-something already forbidden by Missouri and federal law.

But it sounds good in an election year. Democrats kept the bill from going to a final Senate vote, complaining the language was included just to deceive voters. Eigel said those characterizations were “completely unfair” and the measure presented “a great opportunity” to keep non-citizens from voting.

—Except the ban already is on the books.

Democrats in the Senate, with Republican leaders refusing to take parliamentary action to shut down debate, chewed up three of the precious last five days of the session in a filibuster that lasted 51-plus hours. .

The demagoguery on this issue is going to be with us through November, regardless of any legislative action because MAGA Republicans, in particular, want to use it to beat Democrats—i.e. Joe Biden—over the head on immigration issues.

A few days ago in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. Don’t be surprised if a House committee decides to “investigate,” giving majority members of the committee opportunities to condemn the actions or inactions of the administration to keep illegal immigrants from voting.

Another new committee, in the Missouri House, is going to investigate crime by illegal immigrants, another opportunity to make sure the issue’s political value is not wasted before the election. It has been expanded to include crimes AGAINST immigrants, a fair thing to consider.

We’ve all watched this kind of political circus on other topics.

And that’s what this harping on immigrant voting is. Political circus.

What it is NOT is an issue. We’ll tell you why in our next entry.

Decision

Posted on July 22, 2024 by bpriddy

(Originally this entry was called “Discussion” because it addressed—when written last week—that President Biden might decide to pull out of the presidential race. I didn’t post it because I was going to be out of town through the weekend and didn’t want the comments outdated before they were posted. We’ve done some editing to account for the decision yesterday that President Biden would withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Harris to for President.

Rather quickly the public dialogue about the Democratic ticket for November seems to have reached an important stage.

The matter of President Biden’s mental and physical health has become secondary to the DISCUSSION about his mental and physical health.

We are pretty sure that some sophisticated polling is being done about whether TALK is robbing the Democratic Presidential Campaign of its ability to focus on issues.

Republicans are no doubt relishing the distraction because they are talking about their issues, their ticket clearly assembled and aggressively spreading the GOP word regardless of its truth. Nothing internal is stopping the Trump bandwagon at this point, certainly not Democrats.

The Democrats are limited in talking about their issues because they have one issue right now and it’s a giant one and it is completely internal. The public, including THEIR public, has nowhere to go.

(Events have rendered the original paragraph’s speculation about whether the party would go with Vice-President Harris. That speculation has been fully answered as we revise this. Now back to the original narrative.)

Who should be her running mate? She’s about 60, about average for a President. But an aggressive running mate in the 40s would send an interesting message to many voters who have not been entertained by two geezers calling each other liars.

Plus a running mate in the 40s could dilute whatever advantage among young voters that the Republicans have by running someone who is 39 as their Veep.

(There was some historical stuff in the original post about presidents who had decided not to seek another term but we will hold those until later.)

As we drove home from Indianapolis last night and early this morning, we spent some of that time listening to the coverage on the satellite channels for CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. While CNN and MSNBC had their talking heads discussing possible Harris VP choices and understanding what’s next for the Democratic Part, FOX already was Full Doberman in attacking Harris.

And we thought in those long, dark miles (we got home at 2:30 this morning) about how the complexion of this contest has suddenly changed.

Now, the old man with questionable mental health is the Republican candidate. The shoe is on the other foot and the GOP is stuck with it.

The outlook for Democrats has changed dramatically and all of the sudden they, and Kamala Harris, have control of the spotlight and they’re suddenly gifted with a convention that can have an impact far greater than they had expected.

The immigrant issue now has a new dimension because the presumptive Democrat nominee is from a state that has been dealing with Mexican immigrants for almost 400 years, since Juan Cabrillo led an expedition into the area in 1542. AND Harris’ mother is an immigrant from India and her father is an immigrant from Jamaica.

She would be a formidable debate opponent for Donald Trump who has given her a derogatory nickname. But he’ll need something more than a nickname for her when he meets her on a debate stage. You can be guaranteed that a Trump-Harris debate would not degenerate into a discussion of golf scores. One does not become a federal prosecutor and then the Attorney General of California without some sharp edges. By now, he should have some appreciation for the skills of prosecutors.

President Biden’s decision within hours awoke the sleeping Democratic Giant and now it is Mr. Trump and the Republicans who should be nervous.

And finally, this occurred early this morning.

This race will offer widely contrasting issues of character—-and when all else fails for the undecideds who might make the fractional difference in the polls and at the polling places, character might be the deciding factor.

Contrast President Biden’s response to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump. He called Trump, referring to him in public remarks as “Donald,” not making any dismissive and derogatory comments but only expressing sympathy and respect.

Then consider Mr. Trump’s response to the Biden withdrawal: “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President and is certainly not fit to serve—And never was!” And he ranted on from there, showing once again a distinct lack of character.

And white nationalists who have made Mr. Trump their totem have been presented with a real quandary—The daughter of a Hindu woman born in India and a Jamaican husband, and who is married to a Jew and attends a black Baptist Church in San Francisco now look at Mr. Trump’s chosen running mate, J. D. Vance and they have a fit about Vance’s wife, Usha, who was born in India. Podcaster Nick Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

Trump supporter and J6 veteran James Foxx, has complained, “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”

A few days ago we had a competition between a couple of old coots who were about as exciting as a nursing home checkers game. And all of the sudden, a new head nurse has roared into the parking lot in her Corvette.

Things are about to change.

-0-

Bob Priddy

A journalist's random observations

Category Archives: immigration

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Decision

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