Even by Donald Trump’s standard of shameless deviation from the truth, Thursday night’s performance of extraordinary lies may have set a record. From beginning to end, Trump made statements utterly at odds with reality and did so with complete conviction and shamelessness.
“The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounce back jobs, they’re bounced back from the Covid.”
That’s absurd. Under President Joe Biden’s leadership, the country has added an average 394,000 jobs a month. Even if you disregard the months after Covid and the normalization of the economy, Biden still added an average of 276,000 jobs a month. In contrast, Trump added just 182,000 jobs a month even before Covid.
All told, the economy now has 6.2 million more jobs than it had before Covid, all of them added under Biden’s watch.
“What we did was incredible…we got the largest tax cut in history.”
Not even close. As properly measured in relation to the size of the economy, Trump’s tax cut was only the eighth largest, well behind the famous Reagan tax cut as well those enacted during President Barack Obama’s term.
Trump promised that his tax cut would pay for itself. That didn’t happen either. Even excluding the effects of Covid, Trump added $4.8 trillion to the debt (and another $3.6 trillion from Covid aid). By comparison, Biden added only $2.2 trillion in non-Covid debt.
“We call it migrant crime. I call it Biden migrant crime. They’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before.”
Contrary to what Trump (and most polls) say, crime rates have been falling, not rising. Between 2020 and 2024, the violent crime rate fell by 26%. That was after barely improving during Trump’s first three years and the jumping during Covid.
Not well known is that immigrants commit crimes at a lower — not higher — rate than native-born Americans. According to one study, U.S.-born citizens commit violent crimes at a 14.6% higher rate than legal immigrants and at more than double the rate that of undocumented immigrants. A similar pattern is true for property crime and drug violations.
