The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Yet even that period paled in comparison with the 1950s and 60s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4 percent to 6.6 percent. In postwar 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate reached a low of 3.5 percent under Trump, but it dipped as low as 2.5 percent in 1953.
“In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,’” Goldberg wrote. “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood [during World War I] as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”
However, John R. Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser and later a sharp critic, said the trip was scrubbed because of weather.
In 2023, John F. Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff in 2018 — who had previously not commented on the controversy — issued a statement to CNN that Trump “rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
Absent a recording, there’s no way to definitively confirm the story. Trump references 19 people who denied it — he used to say 25 — but when we examined their statements, 11 were not even with Trump and most of the others were just his communications staff.
There are numerous examples of Trump suggesting that he thinks soldiers who were wounded or died in combat were losers. During the 2016 presidential election, Trump derided Arizona Sen. John McCain’s legacy as a war hero, saying of his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump complained bitterly to Kelly that he didn’t understand why Kelly and others in the military treated McCain, who had been tortured as a POW, with such reverence. “Isn’t he kind of a loser?” Trump asked, according to an unnamed official.
“Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter.”
After the New York Post in 2020 said it had obtained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, more than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including five CIA chiefs, signed a letter saying the release of the emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The letter itself artfully did not say the laptop was Russian disinformation — but in the presidential debates Biden used the letter to falsely claim the laptop story was a “Russian plan,” “a bunch of garbage,” “disinformation from the Russians” and “a smear campaign.”
The emails in question have since been confirmed to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“I got them [NATO] to put up hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Throughout the 2016 campaign, his presidency and now this election, Trump has demonstrated that he has little notion of how NATO is funded and operates. He repeatedly claimed that other members of the alliance “owed” money to the United States and that they were delinquent in their payments. Then he claimed credit for the money “pouring in” as a result of his jawboning, even though much of the increase in those countries’ contributions had been set under guidelines arranged during the Obama administration.
Since 2006, NATO guidelines have asked each member country to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. In 2014, NATO decided to increase its spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, with the goal of reaching 2 percent in each country by 2024. This money does not end up in NATO’s coffers, as Trump often asserts. (Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and is adjusted regularly.)
NATO figures show that the defense expenditures for NATO countries other than the United States have been going up — in a consistent slope — since 2014. As we noted, that’s when NATO decided to boost spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea.
“The secretary general of NATO said Trump did the most incredible job I’ve ever seen.”
When he was president, Trump often attributed quotes to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that could not be confirmed, such as: “Secretary Stoltenberg has been maybe Trump’s biggest fan, to be honest with you. He goes around telling — he made a speech the other day. He said, ‘Without Donald Trump, maybe there would be no NATO.’ ” Stoltenberg said no such thing.
“I offered her [then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] 10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down.”
Trump and his allies have invented the claim that he requested 10,000 troops before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, twisting an offhand comment into a supposed order to the Pentagon. A Colorado judge in November considered testimony on this point and dismissed a Trump aide’s account as “incredible” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
In 2021, we explored this claim twice and debunked it, each time awarding Four Pinocchios. Then, in late 2022, the Jan. 6 committee released its report and dozens of transcribed interviews that provided new details on the meetings in which Trump claims he requested troops at the Capitol.
That report underscored how Trump has little basis to make this claim, saying that he brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and obtuse ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.
“The Unselect Committee, which is basically two horrible Republicans that are all gone now and out of office, and Democrats, all Democrats, they destroyed and deleted all of the information they found because they found out we were right.”
This is false. Trump is seizing on House GOP claims that the Jan. 6 committee archive is missing some records. Not only is that claim rejected by the chair of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), but not even Republicans have claimed “all” of the documents are missing. Instead, we are talking about videos and some sensitive materials — and there is no indication any of these materials concerned the alleged troop order.
First, the committee did not include raw videos as part of the permanent records, but instead provided official transcripts of the video interviews. Thompson also said that some materials gathered by the committee contained “law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses.” That material was sent to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for archival purposes because the Jan. 6 committee dissolved before a full review of the sensitivity of this material was completed, Thompson wrote.
However, according to special counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump, those sensitive materials from the White House and the Secret Service were provided to Trump months ago as part of pretrial discovery.
“Telling the Ukrainian people that … you change the prosecutor, otherwise you’re not getting $1 billion. … That’s quid pro quo.”
Biden’s role as vice president in Ukraine, and his son’s involvement there, make for a complex story that we have examined many times. Trump has seized on kernels of truth to build an appearance of scandal that resonated with his supporters. Trump argued that Biden had demanded a quid pro quo from the Ukrainians, but at its core, Trump’s tale was a fiction: There had been no prosecution or investigation of Biden’s son Hunter in this matter, and Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine were coordinated with the State Department and America’s European allies.
Here’s what really happened: During Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and pressure Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs.
During a 2015 visit to Ukraine, Biden privately told Poroshenko that loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced. After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided. Trump had it completely backward. Biden was thwarting corruption, not abetting it.
Meanwhile, in 2014, Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that was owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden showed questionable judgment in taking such a position while his father had a high-profile role in U.S.-Ukraine relations, and the possible conflict of interest was well-documented in news reports at the time.
Years after Biden forced the ouster of Shokin, the former prosecutor cried foul, falsely claiming he was removed because he had had Burisma in his sights — a story he peddled to Trump’s allies.
“They moved a high-ranking official, a DOJ, into the Manhattan DA’s office to start that case.”
False. There is no evidence that Biden has anything to do with this case, which was brought by Alvin Bragg, a local Democratic prosecutor. Bragg inherited the file from a previous prosecutor, Cyrus Vance Jr. The tenuous connection cited by Trump supporters is that Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors working for Bragg, served as acting associate attorney general, the third-ranking position at the Justice Department, before joining Bragg’s office in late 2022. But prosecutors change jobs all the time — and Bragg’s office had already been working on the case.
“He caused this inflation. I gave him a country with no essentially no inflation.”
Higher prices for goods and services would have happened no matter who was elected president in 2020. Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply-chain issues, as companies had reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe.
“It could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people.”
Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here, he manages to take a real number — about 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it fourfold. Then he offers a prediction to make it sound even larger.
Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 9.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through April. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (more than 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.
CBP has released more than 3.2 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through April, the Department of Homeland Security said. These numbers, however, do not include “gotaways”— which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond. That figure could add an additional 2 million, bringing the total number of migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency to around 5 million.
That’s a big number, but apparently not big enough for Trump.
“What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them superpredators … in the 1990s. We can’t forget that superpredators was his name, and he called it to them for 10.”
This is false. Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill, now seen as a source of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. But Biden never used the term “superpredators” to describe African Americans.
That was Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in 2016.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air. And we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever.”
This is false. As president, Trump cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency and got rid of more than 70 environmental regulations, weakening climate protections. The United States in 2020 ranked 24th in the world, according to the authoritative Environmental Performance Index, a project of Yale and Columbia universities. It ranked 16th for air quality and 26th for water and sanitation. An analysis of EPA data released in 2020 found that after improving for the better part of a decade, air quality in the United States is worsening again — and could be associated with nearly 10,000 premature deaths. Fine particulate matter in the air that Americans breathe fell by 24 percent between 2009 and 2016. But concentrations increased by 5.5 percent in 2017 and 2018, and premature deaths associated with exposure to the dangerous particles spiked by 9,700 in 2018, the study said.
“The Paris [environmental] accord was going to cost us $1 trillion. And China, nothing, and Russia nothing, and India nothing. It was a rip-off of the United States.”
Each country set its own commitments under the Paris accord, so Trump’s comment makes little sense. He could have unilaterally changed the commitments offered by Obama, which is technically allowed under the accord. Indeed, the agreement is nonbinding, so there was nothing in the agreement that stops the United States from building, say, coal plants or gives permission to China or India to build coal plants. Trump’s estimates of the costs came from industry-funded studies that did not consider possible benefits from reducing climate change.
“He wants to raise everybody's taxes by four times.”
This is false. For five years, Biden has been consistent in saying he will not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, which leaves about the top 2 percent of taxpayers. Biden reiterated this pledge in the budget plan he released earlier this year.
“He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.”
There is no evidence that Biden — who unlike Trump has released decades of tax returns — gets money from China and thus is somehow compromised in his dealings with Beijing.
“I took two tests, cognitive tests. I aced them, both of them.”
Trump has frequently mischaracterized the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test aimed at detecting dementia or cognitive decline. He has sometimes suggested that the test included identifying drawings of three animals such as a whale or a tiger. The creator of the test told The Washington Post it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.
“Well, I shouldn’t have to say that [political violence in any form is unacceptable]. But of course I believe that it’s totally unacceptable. And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it’s one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen.”
This is revisionist history. In reality, as documented in the House select committee report on the Jan. 6 attack and other reporting, Trump was reluctant to take action to calm the situation, even as his staff pleaded with him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Trump’s tweets were so inadequate, in the view of staff members, that many resolved to resign. Even his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. found the tweets to be inappropriate. Nearly three hours passed before Trump finally told the rioters to “go home.”
As for the video, it had its intended effect — the riot ended — but it came nearly three hours after Trump learned of the attack. The committee’s report suggests Trump issued the video only once it was clear the riot would fail to end the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Then, after a video, Trump issued one more tweet that left many aides aghast and prompted many to resign: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Election 2024
Follow live updates from the 2024 campaign trail a day after President Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate of 2024. Here are takeaways and fact checks from the debate.
Who is running: President Biden and Donald Trump secured their parties’ nominations for the presidency. Here’s how we ended up with a Trump-Biden rematch.
Key dates and events: Voters in all states and U.S. territories have been choosing their party’s nominee for president ahead of the summer conventions. Here are key dates and events on the 2024 election calendar.
Abortion and the election: Voters in about a dozen states could decide the fate of abortion rights with constitutional amendments on the ballot in a pivotal election year. Biden supports legal access to abortion, and he has encouraged Congress to pass a law that would codify abortion rights nationwide. After months of mixed signals about his position, Trump said the issue should be left to states. Here’s how Biden’s and Trump’s abortion stances have shifted over the years.
