Fact-checking Day 1 of the 2024 Democratic National Convention
The first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention featured many attacks on former president Donald Trump, some of which quoted him out of context. Here’s a roundup of a dozen claims that caught our attention, in the order in which they were made.
“We tried to expand Social Security and Medicare. Donald Trump tried to cut them year after year after year.”
-Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill.
This is mostly false. Earlier on this first day of the convention, we noted this about the Harris-Walz campaign’s social media post version of this claim.
On Medicare, virtually all anticipated savings sought by Trump would have been wrung from health providers, not Medicare beneficiaries, as a way of holding down costs and improving the solvency of the old-age health program. Trump, in fact, borrowed many proposals from Barack Obama, who had failed to get them through Congress.
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which seeks to lower the budget deficit, closely studied the Trump proposals each year.
“The basic argument here is quite ridiculous,” he said of the Harris-Walz campaign post. Goldwein noted that the Inflation Reduction Act, in which Harris cast the tiebreaking vote for passage, also reduced health-care costs for Medicare, such as through inflation caps. “By the same logic, you could say Joe Biden cut Medicare.”
As for Social Security, Trump kept his promise not to touch retirement benefits, bucking longtime efforts by Republicans to raise the retirement age. But Trump did seek, without success, to reduce spending for Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration.
Goldwein said that the reductions generally were intended to make the programs more efficient, such as eliminating double payments of both unemployment insurance and disability (also sought by Obama). He also said the proposals were relatively small.
Trump has insisted he will not cut benefits for Medicare or Social Security if he is elected president again.
“He (Trump) told us to inject bleach into our bodies.”
-Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
This is exaggerated. Trump did not say people should inject bleach into their bodies. Instead, at a pandemic briefing in 2020, he spoke confusingly of an “injection inside” of lungs with a disinfectant. He made the remarks after an aide presented a study showing how bleach could kill the virus when it remained on surfaces. Trump later claimed he was speaking “sarcastically,” though he seemed serious at the time.
Readers can judge for themselves. Here are his full remarks on April 23 that year: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
“When Donald Trump was president, corporate America ran wild. Donald Trump did not bring back the auto industry. When Donald Trump was president, auto plants closed. Trump did nothing.”
-Shawn Fain, United Auto Workers president
This is exaggerated. Trump often falsely bragged that before he became president, no new auto plants had been built for decades, but there were some new plants built during his presidency. Until the pandemic, Trump’s overall record on auto industry jobs was pretty good. From February 2017 to February 2020, just before the pandemic crashed the U.S. economy, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows a gain of 34,100 auto manufacturing jobs and 36,400 auto retail jobs - for a total of more than 70,000 jobs in three years.
“She (Kamala Harris) won’t be sending love letters to dictators.”
-Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton
This is in the eye of the beholder.
In 2018, Trump said of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: “We fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, in his 2020 book “Rage,” revealed that Trump had permitted him to read and transcribe 27 letters and wrote that “Trump has personally said they are ‘love letters.’” Woodward quoted parts of the letters, and the full file of letters was made available to North Korea expert Robert Carlin, who analyzed them for Foreign Policy magazine.
In one letter, written in 2019, Trump “incredibly” closes with “your friend,” Carlin writes. But the letters are mostly an exchange of negotiating positions on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
“In their totality, they are a highly illuminating reflection of the fundamental misperceptions between the two sides,” Carlin said. “As a close read makes clear, it was the letters, perhaps more than any other aspect of diplomacy and statecraft, that set the stage for the train wreck that was the 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi and the subsequent breakdown of communication.”
“It has to be some form of punishment for the woman. Yeah, there has to be some form.”
-Trump, quoted in a DNC video
Trump quickly walked back this statement. This March 3, 2016, quote from Trump pops up in the video as a woman, Amanda Zurawski, describes how she was not able to seek an abortion in Texas after her water broke early and her pregnancy was no longer viable. “I was punished for three days, having to wait for either my baby to die or me to die, or both. I was stuck in this horrific hell of both, wanting to hear her heartbeat and also hoping I wouldn’t,” Zurawski said.
The juxtaposition might leave the impression that Trump still believes this. But he walked back the statement the same day he made it in a town hall.
“If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,” Trump said in a statement. “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb.”
“JD Vance says women should stay in violent marriages, and that pregnancies resulting from rape are simply inconvenient.”
-Kentucky governor Andy Beshear
Vance has said his comments have been twisted by Democrats. Here they are in context so readers can make their own judgment.
Violent marriages: In a 2021 event Vance participated in at Pacifica Christian High School in California, concerning his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the moderator asked Vance: “What is causing one generation to give up on fatherhood when the other one was so doggedly determined to stick it out even in tough times?”
Vance praised his grandparents, who raised him, for staying together, even though his grandmother once poured lighter fluid on his grandfather and struck a match after he came home drunk, he wrote in his book.
Vance said: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’ And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
Inconvenience: In a 2021 interview Vance was asked whether laws should allow women to get abortions if they were victims of rape or incest.
“My view on this has been very clear and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong,” Vance replied. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
“I ran for president in 2020 because of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017 … When the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, ‘there are very fine people on both sides.’ My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant.”
-President Joe Biden
Trump’s meaning is in dispute. The march on Charlottesville by white supremacists in August 2017 – and President Trump’s response to it - was a central event of his presidency. Over the course of several days, Trump made a number of contradictory remarks, permitting both his supporters and foes to create their own version of what happened.
Biden has frequently claimed that Trump said the white supremacists were “very fine people.” But the reality is more complicated. Trump was initially criticized for not speaking more forcefully against the white nationalists on the day of the clashes, Aug. 12. Then, in an Aug. 14 statement, Trump actually condemned right-wing hate groups – “those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
But Trump muddied the waters on Aug. 15, a day later, by also saying: “You had people - and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists - because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” It was in this news conference that he said: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Trump added: “There were people in that rally - and I looked the night before – if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones.”
The problem for Trump is that there was no evidence of anyone other than neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the Friday night rally on Aug. 11. He asserted there were people who were not alt-right who were “very quietly” protesting the removal of Lee’s statue.
It’s possible Trump became confused and was really referring to the Saturday rallies. But that’s also wrong. A Fact Checker examination of videos and testimony about the Saturday rallies found that there were white supremacists, there were counterprotesters - and there were heavily armed anti-government militias who showed up on Saturday.
The evidence shows there were no quiet protesters against removing the statue that weekend.
“(We’re) removing every lead pipe from schools and homes so every child can drink clean water.”
-Biden
This is exaggerated. Biden secured $15 billion through the bipartisan infrastructure law for lead pipe replacement. But the Environmental Protection Agency has projected that replacing the nearly 10 million lead pipes that supply U.S. homes with drinking water could cost at least $45 billion.
“More children in America are killed by a gunshot than any other cause in the United States – more die from a bullet than cancer, accidents or anything else in the United States of America.”
-Biden
This is not quite right. Biden is using a statistic on gun deaths of “children and teens,” meaning it includes deaths of 18- and 19-year-olds, who are legally considered adults in most states. When you focus only on children - 17 and younger – motor vehicle deaths (broadly defined) still rank No. 1, as they have for six decades, though the gap is rapidly closing. Deaths of children from gun violence have increased about 50 percent from 2019 to 2021, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows.
“We know from his own chief of staff, four-star General John Kelly, that Trump while in Europe would not go to the gravesites in France of the brave service members who gave their lives in this country, he called them ‘suckers and losers.’ ”
-Biden
Kelly did not exactly say this. Trump, on repeated occasions, had vehemently denied this story. In 2023, however, 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.”
Note that Kelly’s statement is carefully worded and does not directly say Trump refused to visit the graves because he thought they were losers, as Biden claimed. He says Trump thinks war dead are losers and he did not want to go to the cemetery. Both could be true - but not connected.
“We have a thousand billionaires in America. You know what is their average tax rate they pay? 8.2%.”
-Biden
Biden is comparing apples and oranges.
The “lower tax rate” refers to a 2021 White House study concluding that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers paid an effective tax rate of 8 percent. But that estimate included unrealized gains in the income calculation. That’s not how the tax laws work. People are taxed on capital gains when they sell their stocks or other assets. So this is only a figure for a hypothetical tax system.
According to IRS data on the top 0.001 percent - 1,475 taxpayers with at least $77 million in adjusted gross income in 2020 - the average tax rate was 23.7 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers (income of at least $548,000) paid nearly 26 percent.
“Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again … He’s probably seeing a bloodbath if he loses - in his words.”
-Biden
Trump is being quoted out of context. Biden suggests Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election. But in a March 16 rally, Trump used the word when talking about the impact of Chinese electric vehicles on the U.S. auto industry.
“China now is building a couple of massive plants where they’re going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they’re going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border,” Trump said. “We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole - that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”
The Trump campaign noted that one of the definitions of “bloodbath,” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a major economic disaster.” It also means “a notably fierce, violent, or destructive contest or struggle.”
Trump, of course, frequently quotes his opponents out of context and unfairly twists their words.