For the first half-hour of former President Donald Trump’s speech, when he discussed the attempt to assassinate him in Pennsylvania on July 13 and the need for unity in the country, there wasn’t much to fact-check. But then Trump launched into a greatest hits of false and misleading claims FactCheck has been writing about for months, if not years.
Here are just some of the claims, along with a few noteworthy remarks by other speakers:
—Trump said his life was saved because he had turned to look at a chart on illegal immigration when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear. The chart is highly misleading. Trump wrongly claimed the arrow pointing to a low point showed his “last week in office.” It points to April 2020, when apprehensions at the border plummeted during the height of the pandemic.
—Trump revisited one of his most frequent claims, the falsehood that “cheating” caused him to lose the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. Courts across the country have rejected his claims, and election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
—Trump’s son Eric Trump falsely claimed that in 2016, before his father took office, “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” There had been 76 straight months of job growth, and job openings were near record levels.
—The former president falsely claimed that “107%” of U.S. jobs are “taken by illegal aliens,” and added that Black and Hispanic Americans are “being hurt the most.” Since Biden has been in office, employment of native-born workers has increased more than foreign-born workers, which includes people in the country legally. The Black and Hispanic populations also have experienced employment gains in that time.
—Trump falsely claimed Democrats “are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare” because of illegal immigration. In fact, workers who are not authorized to be in the U.S. bolster the finances of both programs rather than draining from them.
—He falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.
—Trump once again made the unsupported claim that other countries are “emptying out” their prisons and “mental institutions and insane asylums” and sending people to the U.S. Experts say there is no evidence of that.
—Former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan wrongly said “crime is out of control” under Biden, while “we had safe streets” under Trump. Violent crime has gone down.
—Eric Trump and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson referred to drug overdose deaths, falsely claiming the Biden administration or others have done nothing to tackle the problem.
—Trump warned that Biden wants to “raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,” but Biden has not proposed anything like that.
—The former president repeated a familiar falsehood, claiming, “We gave you the largest tax cut.” But, as we’ve written before, the 2017 tax cuts were not the largest.
—Trump misleadingly said the IRS “just hired 88,000 agents to go after” middle-income American workers. Additional funding for the IRS will be used for hiring mainly customer service staff, and increased IRS enforcement will focus on those earning more than $400,000.
—Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo falsely claimed, “President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” by Hamas in Gaza. Biden has spoken about efforts to release the U.S. hostages several times since Oct. 7.
—Trump incorrectly claimed that an electric vehicle “mandate” is devastating the U.S. auto industry.
—He made exaggerated claims about the defeat of ISIS and military equipment left in Afghanistan.
—Trump said his administration was “keeping” Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, while Biden gave it up. Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all bases.
—He wrongly said the U.S. had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” during his presidency.
Next month, FactCheck will be fact-checking what the Democrats have to say in their convention on Aug. 19 to 22.
The misleading chart that Trump says saved his life
Trump described it as “the chart that saved my life.” While recounting the events that unfolded during his attempted assassination on July 13 at a western Pennsylvania rally, Trump said it was only because he had turned to look at a chart on apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border — displayed on a large screen behind him — that the bullet that struck his ear did not kill him.
We’ve written about this chart before, and it is grossly misleading. An arrow that points to a low point in apprehensions purports to show “when Trump leaves office.” But the arrow is actually pointing to April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. Apprehensions grew after that, and had more than quadrupled by his last month in office, to a level higher than the month he took office.
Trump never got to that false talking point in the rally. But he did in his speech at the convention.
“I never got to see it [the chart] that day,” Trump said. “But I’m seeing it now and I was very proud. And if you look at the arrow on the bottom … that’s the lowest level of illegal immigrants ever to come into our country in recorded history right there. And that was my last week in office. And then you see what happened after I left.”
In his convention speech, Trump claimed the chart showed that “I handed this administration the strongest border in American history.” But as FactCheck has written, apprehensions at the southwest border were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in. However, it is true that illegal immigration soared after Biden took office, jumping by over 300% in Biden’s first year compared with Trump’s last.
False claim about ‘cheating’ in elections
Trump also touched on one of his most frequently repeated false claims — that “cheating” was the reason he lost the 2020 election to Biden.
Democrats are only “fierce,” he said, “when it comes to cheating on elections and a couple of other things.”
There’s no evidence that Trump’s defeat was due to fraud or cheating. State and federal judges have rejected Trump’s claims, often saying that his legal team provided no evidence of fraud. And Trump’s own election security officials at the time called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump’s aides in the White House told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless, too, according to testimony given to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. What Trump characterized as “fraud” was just part of the “normal process,” as former Attorney General William Barr said in one instance.
“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr told the committee.
Jobs weren’t ‘scarce’ in 2016
Eric Trump claimed that in 2016 — before his father took office — “our economy was struggling” and “jobs were scarce.” That’s false.
As FactCheck wrote in “What President Trump Inherits,” the U.S. economy in 2016 was “experiencing steady if unspectacular growth,” and job openings were “at near record levels.”
In President Barack Obama’s last 12 months in office, the U.S. economy added more than 2.4 million jobs, as measured from January 2016 to January 2017, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The economy under Obama experienced 76 straight months of job growth, from October 2010 through January 2017, the longest streak on record at that time. The streak ended under Trump at 113 months in March 2020, as the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.
In Obama’s last four years, the economy added 10.4 million jobs, an average of 216,000 jobs per month. By contrast, in Trump’s first 37 months — up until the pandemic ended job growth — the U.S. added only 180,000 jobs per month.
All jobs not going to ‘illegal aliens’
Turning to illegal immigration, Trump falsely claimed that Americans are being completely “squeezed out of the labor force” by people in the country illegally.
“By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens,” Trump said, repeating a similar claim that he made at a July 9 rally in which he referred to “net job creation” in the last year.
At the convention, he went on to claim that Black and Hispanic Americans are “being hurt the most” by illegal immigration “because they’re taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population.”
As of June, employment of native-born workers over the prior 12 months went down by 943,000 and employment of foreign-born workers went up by more than 1.1 million, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the foreign-born workers category refers to anyone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen at birth, including legal immigrants. It’s not just people in the U.S. illegally, as Trump suggested. BLS doesn’t have a separate breakdown for employed people who do not have legal status.
Furthermore, as FactCheck wrote on the opening night of the convention, over Biden’s entire presidency, employment of people born in the U.S has increased by more than 7.8 million while employment of foreign-born workers grew by 5.5 million. Foreign-born workers have seen larger employment gains than native-born workers since February 2020, the month before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was not more than 100 percent of the job growth in that time period.
As for Trump’s claim that “illegal immigrants” are taking jobs from Black and Hispanic people, both demographics have seen an increase in employment over the last year, since Biden took office, and compared with February 2020. Also, as of June, the Black unemployment rate was 6.3 percent, down from 9.3 percent when Biden was inaugurated. For Hispanics and Latinos, the unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, down from 8.5 percent at the start of Biden’s term.
Social Security and Medicare claim
Trump claimed, once again, that Democrats “are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare” because of illegal immigration. “All of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it,” he said.
That is not correct. As FactCheck and others have explained, workers who are not authorized to be in the U.S. actually improve the finances of Social Security and Medicare, since even though they have to pay a percentage of their paychecks to both programs, they can’t receive any of the benefits. Biden has said he will “keep strengthening” the programs.
Inflation not ‘worst ever’
Trump falsely claimed that under Biden the U.S. has experienced the “worst inflation we’ve ever had,” and that there was “no inflation” during his time in office.
The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes.
Under Biden, the biggest increase occurred during a 12-month period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1 percent (before seasonal adjustment). BLS said it was the biggest increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.
Inflation has cooled since then. More recently, the CPI rose 3 percent in the 12 months ending in June, according to the BLS.
Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero.
As FactCheck wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the CPI rose 7.6 percent under Trump — an average of 1.9 percent in each of his four years in office. That continued a long period of low inflation, including during the Obama administration (1.8 percent annual average) and under George W. Bush (2.4 percent average).
Trump, Hogan wrong on crime
Repeating an inaccurate theme of the convention, which Trump also mentioned, former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan claimed that “crime is out of control” under Biden, while “we had safe streets” under Trump. Violent crime and murders in the U.S. have gone down during Biden’s term, according to the FBI and other crime data sources.
Trump’s son Eric Trump also wrongly suggested a rise in crime under the administration, when he said that “crime terrorizes our cities and our suburbs.”
As FactCheck wrote on the second night of the convention, in Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.
The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for the first quarter of 2023 show further declines in violent crimes and murders.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association has more recent figures that show an 8.6 percent decline in murders in 69 large U.S. cities from 2020 to 2023, as we’ve written before. And figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, show murders in more than 200 U.S. cities have continued to drop this year overall.
Biden not proposing to raise taxes ‘four times’ higher
Trump warned, “This is the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”
“And people are supposed to vote for them?” Trump asked rhetorically. “I’ve never heard it.”
While Trump regularly warns of massive tax hikes for “everybody,” should Biden be reelected, that doesn’t jibe with anything Biden has proposed.
In his more than three years as president, Biden’s major tax changes have included setting a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent and lowering taxes for some families by expanding the child tax credit and, for a time, making it fully refundable, meaning families could still receive a refund even if they no longer owe additional taxes.
As FactCheck wrote in 2020, when Trump made a similar claim, Biden proposed during that campaign to raise an additional $4 trillion in taxes over the next decade, although the increases would have fallen mainly on very high-income earners and corporations. The plan would not have doubled or tripled people’s taxes at any income level (on average), according to analyses of Biden’s plan by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation.
In March 2023, the TPC’s Howard Gleckman wrote that Biden proposed a 2024 budget that would, on average, increase after-tax incomes for low-income households and “leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households.” The Tax Policy Center noted, “The top 1 percent, with at least roughly $1 million in income, would pay an average of $300,000 more than under current law, dropping their after-tax incomes by 14 percent.”
This March, Biden released his fiscal year 2025 budget, which contains many of the same proposals and adds a few new wrinkles. But it still does not contain any “colossal tax hikes” on typical American families, as Trump has said.
Biden’s latest plan proposes — as he has in the past — to increase the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and to restore the top individual tax rate of 39.6 percent from the current rate of 37 percent. It would also increase the corporate minimum tax rate from 15 percent to 21 percent for companies that report average profits in excess of $1 billion over a three-year period. And the plan would impose a 25 percent minimum tax on very wealthy individuals. The plan also proposes to extend the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan through 2025, and to make the child tax credit fully refundable on a permanent basis.
Biden has said he would only allow individual tax cuts enacted by Trump to expire for filers earning more than $400,000 and married couples making more than $450,000.
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