News Reporter: October 2024

Friday 4 October 2024

Fact Checker: 21 suspect claims, mostly JD Vance’s, in the vice-presidential debate

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

In the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) proved he could match his running mate on the falsehood meter, though with a bit more verve and polish. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) misled on occasion, such as claiming Republicans supported a "registry for pregnancies." We fact-checked 21 claims that caught our attention, including:

"We're the cleanest economy in the entire world." — Vance (False, the United States ranked 17th.)
"We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost." —Vance (False, this is a ginned-up number that includes the Trump years.)
"Less than 2 percent of that wall [on the border] got built." —Walz (False, even counting only new barriers, as opposed to replacement barriers, adds up to 8.5 percent.)
"Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies" — Walz (False, it does not.)
"Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care." —Vance (False, Trump acted to kill it repeatedly in a partisan way.)
"Remember he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president." — Vance (False, this is a whitewash of what happened.)

To read the full fact check, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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A false claim of 13,000 migrant murderers 'on the loose'

Donald Trump has a shining new talking point — an outrageously false claim that was fabricated by right-wing media and then embraced by the GOP nominee as an "official" fact.

At a rally on Oct. 1 in Wisconsin, Trump said: "These are the official numbers. These are certified numbers. … In total during her term, it's not even believable, she [Kamala Harris] let in 13,099 convicted murderers. Some of them had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven, one murdered six. I'm looking at these. These are stone-cold killers, and they let in people that are worse than any criminal we have."

Trump often embellishes the "fact" with additional falsehoods. Notice how he said he'd seen a list and some on it had murdered 10 people? There is no such list detailing the killings committed by the 13,099 people. That's just a figment of his imagination.

Here's the truth: Most of these killers are in detention, not prowling the streets, and have been since before Trump was president. It's false to claim they entered during the Biden-Harris administration.

To read the full fact check and find out the Pinocchio rating, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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