Facts behind Trump and Biden’s false claims as they arrive face-to-face at debate

Former President Donald Trump has blasted the current state of the US under President Joe Biden, claiming a collapsing economy, countries offloading criminals across the southern border, and soaring crime rates.

Conversely, Biden counters that he took over with a 9% inflation rate and $5 per gallon gas prices. He boasts about his administration’s job creation, though not always providing full context.

While Trump‘s campaign and presidency were rife with false and misleading statements, Biden tends to lean towards exaggerations rather than outright falsehoods. As they gear up for Thursday night’s debate, it’s crucial to scrutinize the veracity of their frequent claims.

Inflation

Economically, Trump’s team touts what they call the “greatest economy in history” during his term, a claim that doesn’t hold up.

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a massive recession during Trump’s tenure, leading to a $3.1 trillion government loan to support the economy, reports the Mirror US.

Trump left office with fewer jobs than when he started, although his supporters argue his economic achievements should only be judged pre-pandemic. Let’s delve into that period.

During the first three years of Trump’s presidency, economic growth averaged 2.67%, a solid figure but not as impressive as the 4% average during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Interestingly, growth has been stronger under Biden than under Trump.

Trump did succeed in reducing the unemployment rate to 3.5% before the pandemic hit. However, the labour force participation rate for people aged 25 to 54 – the heart of the US working population – was higher under Clinton.

The participation rate has also been higher under Biden than Trump. Trump often brags about the low inflation rates during his term.

Petrol prices fell to as low as $1.77 (£1.40) a gallon. But this drop in price happened during the pandemic lockdowns when fewer people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies.

Similarly, average 30-year mortgage rates dipped to 2.65% during the pandemic. These low rates were a result of Federal Reserve efforts to support a weak economy, rather than a sign of strength that Trump now suggests it was.

Biden has also misrepresented the economy at times, including falsely claiming that petrol prices were $5 (£3.96) when he took office. The average price was around $2.39 (£1.89) a gallon the week Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

Biden has been known to claim that he inherited a high inflation rate. In several interviews in May, he stated that the inflation rate was at 9% when he assumed office in January 2021.

However, it was actually at 1.4% and steadily rose during the first 17 months of his presidency, peaking at 9.1% in June 2022. Since then, it has decreased, with data from May showing it at 3.3%.

Biden’s usual narrative is that prices have dropped from their 2022 highs without the widespread layoffs and recession that many economists had anticipated. Biden accurately pointed out that inflation is a worldwide issue as the global economy recovers post-pandemic.

He can argue that the US economy is performing better than its counterparts. The World Bank recently projected that the US economy would grow by 2.6% this year, significantly outpacing the 0.7% growth for the 20 countries using the euro currency or Japan’s 0.7%. However, Biden has sometimes bragged about his economic accomplishments without providing the full picture.

He has claimed that his administration created a record 15 million jobs in its first three years.

While the data supports this, it’s partly because Biden took over an economy impacted by the pandemic. After massive job losses early in the pandemic, job recovery began under Trump and continued under Biden when he assumed office.

Immigration

The recent spike in migrants illegally crossing the southern border into the US has seen Donald Trump unleash a barrage of unfounded and misleading claims. He’s been spinning a yarn that other countries are deliberately offloading their criminals and mentally ill onto American soil, despite there being zero evidence to back up these assertions.

Trump is also pushing the idea that this influx of immigrants is causing a surge in crime across the States. Yet, statistics actually show a decrease in violent crime rates, not an increase.

While there have been some horrific crimes making headlines with undocumented immigrants as the accused, it’s important to note that the FBI does not track criminal activity based on immigration status. Therefore, there’s no concrete data to support a rise in crimes committed by migrants, neither at the border nor in cities like New York, where immigrant populations are growing.

Studies repeatedly find that undocumented individuals are typically less likely to commit violent, drug, or property crimes compared to native-born Americans. The number of people on the terrorist watch list encountered at the border has indeed risen, from 98 one year to 169 the next, with 80 since October 2023.

However, immigration authorities emphasize that such incidents “are very uncommon” and only represent a tiny fraction of the total migrant entries.

Crime

Trump has been caught out making false claims that crime rates have rocketed since he left the White House in 2021, particularly blaming Democratic-led cities which he accuses of being riddled with violence and bloodshed. However, as Biden rightly pointed out, violent crime is almost at its lowest in half a century, despite a spike in 2020.

That year, scarred by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, was Trump’s final year in office. The FBI’s annual crime report for 2022, the most recent year for which yearly data is available, showed that violent crime across the US fell to roughly the same level as pre-pandemic times – a rate of 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people compared to 380.8 per 100,000 people in 2019.

Since 1972, only 2014 had a lower violent crime rate. An FBI quarterly crime report released on June 11 showed this downward trend continuing, with significant reductions in violent crime in January-March compared to the same period in 2023. The report revealed that overall violent crime decreased by 15%, with murder and rape both down 26%, robbery down 18% and 13% fewer aggravated assaults.

Experts have cautioned that while violent crime may have dipped in the first quarter, the preliminary report could be overstating the decline and is open to revision. Property crimes, on the other hand, saw a 7.1% spike in 2022 with car thefts being particularly prevalent.

Yet, recent figures suggest a shift, showing a 15% drop in property crime early into 2023. Ex-President Trump has cast doubt on the FBI’s statistics, claiming they are skewed and don’t capture the real picture.

In his June 15 speech, Trump incorrectly claimed that the stats “no longer include data from 30% of the country including the biggest and most violent cities.”

While it’s true some police departments haven’t submitted their data, the FBI’s new data collection method has helped bridge the gap. The FBI reports that the 2022 crime stats represent 83.3% of law enforcement agencies, covering 93.5% of the US population.

This marks a notable increase from the 2021 report, which was based on figures from just 62.7% of agencies, representing 64.8% of Americans. For those agencies that failed to report, the FBI used estimates based on similar-sized cities.

During his legal battles in New York this April and May, Trump took to social media with false claims that violent crime was “running rampant and totally out of control” in the Big Apple, slamming Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for letting violent crime “flourish at levels never seen before.”

Despite Trump’s alarmist rhetoric, NYC’s crime stats tell a different story, nowhere near the dark days of the early ’90s when the city saw over 2,000 murders a year.

Last year, the NYPD clocked in 391 murders, and projections for this year are looking even better, with under 350 expected. Shootings have plummeted by a whopping 41.4% compared to 2021, though it’s true some offenses like rape, robbery, and felony assault have ticked up.

Elections

The baseless claim that Trump was robbed of the 2020 election has become a core part of the GOP’s playbook over the last four years. The ex-president isn’t backing down from this narrative as he hits the campaign trail.

Trump is still peddling the discredited line to fire up his base and throw shade on the integrity of future elections, claiming without a shred of evidence that only a landslide win in 2024 could be free from Democratic tampering.

“The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election in 2024,” he thundered at a recent rally in Wisconsin. But the facts don’t lie Biden clinched the presidency fair and square in 2020 with a solid 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and a popular vote lead of over 7 million.

Legal challenges to the election results were heard and unanimously dismissed in numerous state and federal courts, including those presided over by judges appointed by Trump. Despite Trump’s claims of election fraud, members of his own administration and party-affiliated election officials have consistently stated that the election safeguards were effective and there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

An extensive AP investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 confirmed cases of voter fraud across six key states – far from the scale needed to alter the election results. Trump and his supporters have raised the specter of large numbers of noncitizens voting in the presidential election as their latest rallying cry.

However, this claim lacks factual basis.

It’s a felony for non-US citizens to vote in presidential elections – a crime that states have mechanisms to detect. Election administration experts assert that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely small, a fact confirmed by audits of voter rolls in several states.

Foreign affairs

Foreign affairs are set to take centre stage in the upcoming debate, with Trump and Biden both poised to flaunt their leadership prowess and sling mud over each other’s record on global issues. The hot-button topics expected to surface include the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, tensions with China, Russia, and Iran, and the resilience of US alliances areas ripe with a history of distorted, debunked, and overblown claims.

Trump has been peddling false narratives about his administration’s backing for Ukraine before Russia’s 2022 invasion. He’s boasted that his team delivered the $400 million aid package approved by Congress ahead of time, despite actually stalling it to coerce Ukraine into probing Democrats.

This very scandal triggered Trump’s first impeachment by the House. Moreover, he’s wrongly blamed past administrations for neglecting Ukraine’s military aid pleas, once claiming “The Obama-Biden administration only sent them meals and blankets”.

Additionally, Trump has kept alive a baseless tale that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US election by hacking Democratic servers and pinning it on Russia. Official statements confirm Russia’s culpability and warn that such Ukraine-blaming theories only serve the Kremlin’s agenda.

“Fictions,” is how Trump‘s ex-special assistant on the National Security Council, Fiona Hill referred to his allegations when confronted by Congress members. “I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Biden has incorrectly asserted responsibility for shaping the international group known as the Quad, including the US, Australia, Japan, and India. His claim last year suggested that he convinced these nations to join forces to maintain equilibrium in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

However, the actual fact is, the group originally came into existence in the early 2000s and was reinvigorated under Trump in 2017.