In her first press conference since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, former president Donald Trump said he would debate her on September 10th and pushed for two more debates. The Republican presidential candidate spoke for more than an hour, discussing a range of issues facing the country and then answering questions from reporters. He made a series of false and misleading claims. Many of them have been done before.
Here’s a look at some of those claims. ___
CLAIM: “The biggest crowd I ever spoke to – I spoke to the biggest crowds. No one has spoken to bigger crowds than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he gave his speech, his big speech, and you look at ours, the same property, the same everything, the same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25 thousand people.”
THE FACTS: Trump was comparing the crowd at his speech in front of the White House on January 6, 2021, to the crowd that attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
But it is estimated that many more people were in the latter than in the former.
Approximately 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King delivered his speech, according to the National Park Service. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that there were at least 10,000 people at Trump’s address.
Furthermore, Trump and King did not speak in the same location. King spoke of Lincoln Memorial stepswhich looks east toward the Washington Monument. Trump spoke in the ellipsea grassy area south of the White House.
___
CLAIM: “No one was killed on January 6.”
THE FACTS: This is false. Five people died in the January 6, 2021 riot and its immediate aftermath. Pro-Trump protesters stormed the US Capitol that day, amid congressional efforts to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Among the deceased are Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police, and Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died the day after the mob battle. Four additional officers Those who responded to the riot killed themselves in the following weeks and months.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot and killed by a police officer while climbing through a broken portion of a Capitol door during the violent riot. Trump frequently cited Babbitt’s death as he lamented the treatment of those who attended a rally outside the White House that day and later marched to the Capitol, many of whom fought with police.
___
CLAIM: “The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m not a fan of Biden, but I’ll tell you one thing: From a constitutional standpoint, from whatever point of view you look at it, they took away the presidency.”
THE FACTS: There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Democratic Party from nominating Kamala Harris for Vice President. This process is determined by the Democratic National Committee.
Harris officially claimed the nomination on Monday after a five-day online voting process, receiving 4,563 delegate votes out of 4,615 cast, or about 99% of participating delegates. A total of 52 delegates in 18 states voted “present,” the only other option on the ballot.
The vice president was the only candidate eligible to receive votes after no other candidate qualified within the party’s deadline following President Joe Biden’s decision to give up the race on July 21st.
___
CLAIM: Suggesting things would be different if he had been in office instead of Biden: “You wouldn’t have had inflation. You wouldn’t have had any inflation because the inflation was caused by your energy problems. Now they’re back in the Trump business because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to 7, 8, 9 dollars a barrel.”
THE FACTS: There would have been at least some inflation if Trump had been reelected in 2020, because many of the factors causing inflation were outside the president’s control. Prices soared in 2021 after cooped-up Americans increased their spending on goods like exercise bikes and home office furniture, straining disrupted supply chains. North American car companies, for example, were unable to obtain enough semiconductors and had to drastically reduce production, causing new and used car prices to skyrocket. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 also sent gas and food prices soaring around the world, as wheat exports from Ukraine were halted and many nations boycotted Russian oil and gas.
Still, under Biden, US oil production has reached a world record level at the beginning of this year.
Many economists, including some Democrats, say Biden’s $1.9 trillion financial support package passed in March 2021, which provided a $1,400 stimulus check to most Americans, helped fuel inflation at the time. increase demand. But it did not cause inflation by itself. And Trump supported $2,000 stimulus checks in December 2020, rather than the $600 checks included in a package he signed into law in December 2020.
Prices still soared in countries with policies different from Biden’s, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdomalthough mainly due to the sharp increase in energy costs resulting from the Russian invasion.
___
CLAIM: “Twenty million people crossed the border during the Biden-Harris administration – 20 million people – and it could be much higher than that. No one really knows.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s 20 million number is unfounded at best, and he provided no sources.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 to June 2024. Those are arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed the border more than once before making it because there were no legal consequences for being sent back to Mexico. Therefore, the number of people is less than the number of arrests.
Additionally, CBP says it detained migrants 1.1 million times at official land crossings with Mexico between January 2021 and June 2024, largely under an online asylum application booking system called CBP One. .
U.S. authorities also admitted nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela under presidential authority if they had financial sponsors and arrived at an airport.
In total, there are almost 8.7 million encounters. Again, the number of people is smaller due to multiple gatherings for some.
There are an unknown number of people who have evaded capture, known as “fugitives” in Border Patrol parlance. The Border Patrol estimates how many, but does not publish that number.
___
CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was 100% the border czar, and suddenly, in the last few weeks, she is no longer the border czar.”
THE FACTS: Harris was appointed to address the “root causes” of migration in Central America. This migration manifests itself in illegal crossings into the U.S. but has not been designated at the border.
___
CLAIM: “New York cases are completely controlled by the Department of Justice.”
THE FACTS: Trump was referring to two cases brought against him in New York – one civil and one criminal.
Neither has anything to do with the US Department of Justice.
Civil proceedings were initiated by legal action from New York Attorney General Letitia James. In this case, Trump was ordered in February to pay a $454 million fine for lying about his wealth for years while building the real estate empire that propelled him to stardom and the White House.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, State Attorney, brought the criminal case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on 34 criminal counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a secret payment to a porn star who said the two had sex.
___ Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Elliot Spagat and economics writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article. ___
Find AP fact checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
__
An earlier version of this story confused “latest” and “former” in the third paragraph. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963 drew a much larger crowd than Donald Trump’s speech near the White House on January 6, 2021.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
