During Tuesday night's presidential debate, Donald Trump made at least 30 false claims—and he got away with most of them, in spite of the ABC News anchors' robust fact-checking of the president in real time.
The moderators stepped in four times to correct the record on the former president’s more outlandish claims during his wild showdown with Kamala Harris, including his assertion that illegal immigrants are eating pets and that Democrats support killing babies after they are born. They also flagged his claim that “crime is through the roof,” pointing out data showing violent crime has fallen.
Trump spent much of Wednesday ranting and raving against ABC News on his social media platform Truth Social, posting in rapid-fire succession links from far-right news sources siding with the former president, who said he got a “rigged deal” from the network. He told Fox News the moderators were “correcting everything” he said while letting Harris off scot-free. Why? “Because they’re dishonest," he said.
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But the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, didn’t fact-check Trump on everything. In fact, many of his other lies went unchecked. Here’s what slipped by.
Immigration
Trump repeated one of his favorite false claims about dangerous illegal immigrants flooding the Southern border. “We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” he said, adding that “21 million people” were pouring in.
In reality, there have been about 10 million encounters with migrants at the border since Joe Biden took office. Though there’s no publicly available data about prison time or residents of mental institutions, of the 1.4 million migrants apprehended at the border this year, Border Patrol has found only about 1 percent have criminal convictions.
The Economy
Trump lied about the state of the economy during his own presidency and Joe Biden’s.
“I had no inflation, virtually no inflation,” he said. “They had the highest inflation, perhaps in the history of our country.”
Though inflation fell at the end of Trump’s term, the cumulative rate over the course of his presidency was about 7.8 percent, according to CNN. And though inflation has been much higher since Biden took office, it has fallen over the past two years and came nowhere close to previous historic highs seen in the 20th century.
Trump also said the only jobs created under the Biden administration were “bounce-back” jobs that were lost to the pandemic but have now appeared again. However, employment totals passed their pre-pandemic levels in the summer of 2022, and the U.S. has added millions more jobs since then.
Ukraine
On the topic of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Trump alleged that Harris met with Vladimir Putin to try to stop him from invading Ukraine but that “three days later, he went in, and he started the war because everything they said was weak and stupid.”
Harris didn’t meet with Putin, but she did meet with U.S. allies at the Munich Security Conference in the days before the war began.
Trump also said the U.S. has given over $100 billion more to Ukraine than Europe has. According to a tracker from the German-based Kiel Institute, Europe had allocated and committed tens of billions more.
Joe Biden
At times, Trump seemed to long for his old opponent, mentioning Biden throughout the evening. In addition to the wild claim that the president “hates” Harris, his handpicked successor, the former president accused Biden of receiving “millions of dollars” from China and Ukraine and of orchestrating the criminal cases against him.
There is no evidence for either claim.
Other Lies
Trump also falsely said the Central Park Five “pled guilty” and “killed a person,” both of which are not true. They pleaded not guilty but served years in prison after they were falsely accused of the brutal sexual attack on a jogger, before they were exonerated years later. Trump took out full-page ads in the city’s newspapers against the five teenagers, suggesting they be put to death.
He said former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “was responsible” for the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol because “she didn’t do her job.” Trump was indicted for conspiracy to subvert democracy for his role in the deadly insurrection, the day he invited unruly supporters to come to Washington and “fight like hell” to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
He also wasted no opportunity to lie about his opponent on the debate stage, employing a familiar attack about her previous presidential bid. “When she ran, she was the first one to leave because she failed,” he said.
In fact, more than a dozen candidates dropped out of the crowded Democratic primary field before Harris in 2019, including several governors, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
