Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden will confront each other this Thursday in the first debate leading up to this year’s elections, in a televised meeting.
We may hear statements that Donald Trump He has said it before: America has fallen apart under President Donald Trump. Joe Biden. According to Trump, the economy is failing, Latin American countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send people to the southern border, and crime has skyrocketed in the country.
Biden, on the other hand, has claimed he faced a 9 percent inflation rate and $5 gas prices when he took office, and boasts about his administration’s job creation without telling the full story.
Can’t compare the volume of false and misleading claims that Trump has deployed throughout his campaigns and his presidency with the sayings of Biden, who tends to rely more on exaggerations and embellishments than on outright lies. But as the two men prepare to debate tonight, here’s a look at the facts surrounding the false and misleading claims frequently made by the two candidates.
Did the economy grow more under Trump than under Biden? This is what the data says
Trump and his team like to claim that his presidency gave the United States its “greatest economy in history.” That’s not accurate.
First of all, Trump was in charge of managing the COVID-19 pandemic during his presidency, which triggered a massive recession. The government borrowed $3.1 trillion in 2020 to stabilize the economy. Trump had the ‘bad luck’ of leaving the White House with less job creation than when he entered.
But Trump’s team likes to argue that only his pre-pandemic economic record should be judged. So how does that compare?
Economic growth averaged 2.67 percent during the first three years of Trump’s administration. That’s pretty solid. But it’s nowhere near the 4 percent averaged over Bill Clinton’s two terms, from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, growth has been stronger so far under Biden than under Trump.
Now, Trump did get the unemployment rate down to 3.5 percent before the pandemic. But again, the labor force participation rate for people ages 25 to 54 — the core of the U.S. workforce — was higher under Clinton. The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than under Trump.
Trump also constantly talks about how low inflation was under his watch. Gasoline fell to $1.77 a gallon. But of course, That price drop occurred during pandemic lockdowns, when few people were driving.. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.
On the other hand, Biden has misrepresented economic data on occasioneven falsely claiming that gas prices were $5 when he took office. The average price was about $2.39 a gallon the week Biden took office in January 2021, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The president has also said at times that he inherited high inflation. In interviews in May, he said the inflation rate was 9% when he took office in January 2021. It was 1.4% at the time and rose steadily during the first 17 months of his presidency, peaking at 9.1% in June 2022. But it has since fallen, and in May stood at 3.3%.
Biden correctly noted that inflation was a global phenomenon as the global economy reopened after the pandemic.
However, Biden has at times boasted about his economic accomplishments without providing the full context. He has said his administration created a record 15 million jobs in his first three years. While the data supports this, it is partly because Biden inherited a pandemic economyAfter staggering job losses early in the pandemic, the employment recovery began under Trump and continued under Biden when he took office.
Migration to the US: Trump lies about crimes committed by migrants
The massive influx of migrants illegally entering the United States across the southern border has led to a series of false and misleading claims by Trump. For example, he regularly claims that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send them to the United States. There is no evidence to support this.
Trump has also argued that the influx of immigrants is causing “an increase in crime in the United States,” although statistics show violent crime is declining.
Recently there have been high-profile, heinous crimes allegedly committed by people who are in the country illegally. But the FBI statistics do not separate crimes according to the immigration status of the aggressornor is there evidence of an increase in crimes perpetrated by migrants, either along the US-Mexico border or in cities that see the largest influx of migrants, such as New York.
Studies have found that people living in the country illegally are less likely than Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.
Trump maintains the lie that the 2020 election was ‘fraud’
Trump’s lie that he was the real winner from the 2020 election has permeated the Republican Party and its agenda for the past four years, and the former president has shown no interest in reversing that in his current campaign.
Trump has continued to use the disproven claim as fuel to motivate his supporters and sow doubts about the upcoming election resultsinsisting without evidence that anything short of a landslide victory in 2024 would be a sign that Democrats are rigging the vote.
“Radical left Democrats rigged the 2020 presidential election, and we are not going to allow them to rig the 2024 presidential election,” he said at a recent campaign rally in Wisconsin.
Biden beat Trump in 2020 with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and won the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots. Legal challenges to the election were heard and roundly rejected in dozens of state and federal courts, including by judges appointed by Trump.
And despite Trump’s accusations of foul play, members of his own administration and election administrators from his own party have maintained that election safeguards were effective and that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. An exhaustive AP investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 confirmed cases of voter fraud in six battleground states, nowhere near the magnitude required to influence the outcome of the race.
Trump and his allies have made the specter of massive numbers of noncitizens voting in the presidential election their latest rallying cry. That’s not based on facts either.
It is a felony for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in presidential elections, one that states have mechanisms in place to detect. Election administration experts say the number of noncitizens who vote illegally in federal elections is extremely small, and audits of voter rolls in several states confirm that.
