During his first press conference since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, former president donald trump said he would debate her on September 10 and pushed for two more debates. The Republican presidential candidate spoke for more than an hour, discussing a number of issues facing the country and then taking questions from reporters. He made a number of false and misleading claims. Many of them have been made before.
Here are some of those claims. ___
CLAIM: “The largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to — I’ve spoken to the largest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he gave his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000.”
THE FACTS: Trump compared the crowd at his January 6, 2021, White House speech to the crowd that attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.
But it is estimated that many more people attended the first than the second.
About 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his speech, according to the National Park Service. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that at least 10,000 people attended Trump’s speech.
Furthermore, Trump and King did not speak at the same location. King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorialwhich looks east toward the Washington Monument. Trump spoke at the ellipsea lawn just south of the White House.
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CLAIM: “No one was killed on January 6.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Five people were killed in the January 6, 2021 riot and its immediate aftermath. Pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol that day during Congress’s attempt to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The dead include Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot dead by police, and Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died the day after a fight with the crowd. Four additional officers those who responded to the riots committed suicide in the weeks and months that followed.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot and killed by a police officer as she climbed through a broken section of a Capitol door during the violent riot. Trump has frequently cited Babbitt’s death as he lamented the treatment of those who attended a rally outside the White House that day and then marched to the Capitol, many of whom scuffled with police.
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CLAIM: “The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m not a Biden fan, but I’ll tell you, from a constitutional standpoint, no matter which standpoint you look at it from, they took the presidency away.”
THE FACTS: There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Democratic Party from nominating Vice President Kamala Harris. That process is determined by the Democratic National Committee.
Harris officially claimed the nomination on Monday after a five-day online voting process in which he received 4,563 delegate votes out of 4,615 delegates cast, or about 99% of the delegates who participated. A total of 52 delegates in 18 states cast “present” votes, the only other option on the ballot.
The vice president was the only candidate eligible for votes after no other candidate qualified by the party’s deadline following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21st.
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CLAIM: Suggests that things would have been different if he had been in office instead of Biden: “You wouldn’t have had inflation. You wouldn’t have had inflation because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems. Now they’re back to the Trump thing because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline went up to $7, $8, $9 a barrel.”
THE FACTS: There would have been at least some inflation if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, because many of the factors that cause inflation are beyond a president’s control. Prices skyrocketed in 2021 as cooped-up Americans ramped up spending on goods like exercise bikes and home office furniture, causing massive disruptions to supply chains. U.S. auto companies, for example, couldn’t get enough semiconductors and had to slash production, sending new and used car prices skyrocketing. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 also sent global gas and food prices soaring as Ukrainian wheat exports were disrupted and many countries boycotted Russian oil and gas.
Still, US oil production hit a global record under Biden earlier this year.
Many economists, including some Democrats, say Biden’s $1.9 trillion financial aid package, passed in March 2021, which gave a $1,400 stimulus check to most Americans, helped fuel inflation by boosting demand. But it didn’t just cause inflation. And Trump $2,000 stimulus checks supported in December 2020, instead of the $600 checks included in a package he signed into law in December 2020.
Prices still rose in countries with policies different from Biden’s, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdombut mainly because of the sharp increase in energy costs as a result of the Russian invasion.
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CLAIM: “Twenty million people came across the border during the Biden-Harris administration — 20 million people — and it could be much higher. Nobody really knows.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s $20 million figure is unsubstantiated at best and he has provided no sources.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 8.2 million arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024. Those are arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed more than once before succeeding, because there were no legal consequences for being sent back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.
In addition, CBP says it apprehended migrants 1.1 million times at official border crossings with Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024, largely through an online asylum appointment system called CBP One.
U.S. authorities also allowed in nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela under presidential authority, provided they had financial sponsors and arrived at an airport.
All together that’s almost 8.7 million encounters. Again, the number of people is lower because of multiple encounters for some.
There are an unknown number of people who have evaded capture, known as “got-aways” in Border Patrol parlance. The Border Patrol estimates how many, but does not publish that number.
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CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was 100% the border czar and all of a sudden over the last few weeks she’s not.”
THE FACTS: Harris was appointed to address the “root causes” of migration in Central America, manifesting in illegal crossings into the U.S., but was not assigned to the border.
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CLAIM: “The cases in New York are being managed completely outside of the Department of Justice.”
THE FACTS: Trump referred to two instances brought against him in New York — one civil and the other criminal.
Neither case has anything to do with the US Department of Justice.
The civil case was filed through a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James. In that case, Trump was ordered in February, was ordered to pay a $454 million fine for lying about his wealth for years as he built a real estate empire that made him famous and won the White House.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state prosecutor, brought the criminal caseIn May a jury Trump found guilty on 34 charges stemming from a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by making a hush-money payment to a porn actor who claimed the two had sex.
___ Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Elliot Spagat and economics writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article. ___
Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.