Tuesday night’s debate was perhaps more dramatic than most expected, but one characteristic of it was also quite remarkable: the extent to which Donald Trump indulged in outright lies. Significantly, according to independent fact checkers, his number of falsehoods (22) was vastly greater than the single incorrect statement by his opponent, Kamala Harris.
“Despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime.”
It’s Mr. Trump’s claims that are fraudulent. First, violent crime across the United States is down, not up, since President Biden and Vice President Harris took office. At 294 incidents per 100,000 people, these crimes have dropped 26% since 2020. In 2023 alone, the murder rate dropped 13.2%, rapes fell by 12.5% and robberies were 4.7% fewer. (Note that Trump’s claim that crime has dropped in the rest of the world because migration to the U.S. is also false: The world prison population has increased to 11 million in April 2024 from 10.8 million in October 2021.)
Mr. Trump is also incorrect about the propensity of immigrants to commit crimes. Indeed, legal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a still lower rate.
“They aren’t going to have higher prices…. who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.”
The usually arcane and little discussed subject of trade policy occupied a significant portion of debate time, with Trump once again utterly distorting the facts. Most importantly, tariffs are not paid by China or any exporting country. They are paid by companies when the goods arrive in the U.S. and those charges are quickly passed along to consumers. We don’t have to debate this – we have many real life examples. In 2018, Trump placed tariffs on washing machines, whose prices quickly rose by an average $200, significantly faster than overall prices. Then Biden allowed the tariffs to expire and prices quickly fell by $75, leaving their overall increase below the general inflation rate.
What Trump also failed to acknowledge is that tariffs — which are, as Harris contended, a kind of national sales tax — hit those closer to the bottom of the income ladder harder than those at the top. Trump’s current proposal of a 20% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on imports from China would cost the bottom 20% of Americans 6.3% of their after-tax income, but those in the top 20% would only lose 2.9%. The average American family would forfeit at least $2,600 a year and potentially as much as $4,000 a year.
“I got the oil business going like nobody have ever done before…When they took over, they got rid of it.”
That’s an absurd statement. Yes, our net oil imports declined significantly during the Trump administration (although the 2020 drop was in part due to Covid). But no, Biden didn’t shut it down. In fact, we became a net exporter of oil for the first time since at least before 1950.
“We’re in [Ukraine] for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe….They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe.”
Trump got this almost exactly backwards. The U.S. has contributed $98 billion through June while Europe has spent $183 billion to help Ukraine.
