Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate — far more than Biden
Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.
Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.
Trump’s repeat falsehoods included his assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth, that every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, that there were no terror attacks during his presidency, that Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency, that the US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators,” that Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries, that Europe accepts no American cars, that he is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and that fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.
Trump also added some new false claims, such as his assertions that the US currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China. Both records actually occurred under Trump.
Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. He used false numbers while describing two of his key Medicare policies, falsely claimed that no US troops had been killed on his watch, repeated his usual misleading figure about billionaires’ tax rates, baselessly claimed that Trump wants to eliminate Social Security, falsely said that the unemployment rate was 15% when he took office, inaccurately said that the Border Patrol union had endorsed him before clarifying that he was talking about agents’ support for the border bill he had backed, and exaggerated Trump’s 2020 comments about the possibility of treating Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant.
Here is a detailed fact check from CNN’s reporting team of some of those claims.
Trump on abortion policy after Roe v. Wade
Trump repeated his frequent claim that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the power to set abortion policy returned to individual states.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Poll after poll has shown that most Americans – two-thirds or nearly two-thirds of respondents in multiple polls – wish Roe would have been preserved.
For example, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in April 2024 found 65% of adults opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. That’s nearly identical to the result of a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in July 2022, the month after the decision. Similarly, a Marquette Law School poll in February 2024 found 67% of adults opposed the decision that overturned Roe.
A NBC News poll in June 2023 found 61% opposition among registered voters to the decision that overturned Roe. A Gallup poll in May 2023 found 61% of adults called the decision a bad thing.
Many legal scholars had also wanted Roe preserved, as several of them told CNN when Trump made a similar claim and said, “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade” in April.
“Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, said in April.
“Donald Trump’s claim is flatly incorrect,” another legal scholar who did not want Roe overturned, Maya Manian, an American University law professor and faculty director of the university’s Health Law and Policy Program, said in April.
Trump’s claim is “obviously not” true, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on the history of the US abortion debate. Ziegler, who also did not want Roe overturned, said in an April interview: “Most legal scholars probably track most Americans, who didn’t want to overturn Roe. … It wasn’t as if legal scholars were somehow outliers.”
It is true that some legal scholars who support abortion rights wished that Roe had been written differently; the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of them. But Ziegler noted that although “there was a cottage industry of legal scholars kind of rewriting Roe – ‘what Roe should’ve said’ — that isn’t saying Roe should’ve been overturned. Those are very different things.”
You can read more here.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Trump on Democrats killing babies “after birth”
Trump repeated his frequent claim that Democrats will kill babies in the “eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth.” Trump pointed to the former Virginia governor’s support of a bill that would loosen restrictions on late-term abortions as an example.
Trump also said later in the debate that some “Democrat-run” states allow babies to be killed after birth.
Facts First: Trump’s claim about Democrats killing babies after birth is nonsense; that is infanticide and illegal in all 50 states. A very small percentage of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
According to data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 0.9% of reported abortions in 2020 occurred at 21 weeks or later. (Many of these abortions occur because of serious health risks or lethal fetal anomalies.) By contrast, 80.9% of reported abortions in 2020 were conducted before 10 weeks, 93.1% before 14 weeks and 95.8% before 16 weeks.
Former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, voiced support for a state measure that would significantly loosen restrictions on late-term abortions when the fetus was not viable. Northam was not talking about infanticide.
There are some cases in which parents decide to choose palliative care for babies who are born with deadly conditions that give them just minutes, hours or days to live. That is simply not the same as killing a baby.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Jen Christensen
Trump on his previous comments about US military members killed in action
Trump denied that he had used the words “suckers” or “losers” to describe members of the US military who had been killed in action, after Biden pointed to the remarks to criticize his predecessor’s record for veterans.
Biden touted his visit to a World War I cemetery, where he said Trump “refused to go” and told a four-star general it’s because “they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.”
Trump claimed the remark was “made up” by Biden.
Facts First: The Atlantic magazine, citing four unnamed sources with “firsthand knowledge,” reported in 2020 that on the day Trump canceled a visit to a military cemetery in France where US troops who were killed in World War I are buried, he had told members of his senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The magazine also reported that in another conversation on the same trip, Trump had referred to marines who had been killed in the region as “suckers.”
John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security, has said on the record that in 2018 Trump did use the words “suckers” and “losers” to refer to servicemembers who were killed in action. Kelly told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto for Sciutto’s 2024 book that Trump would say: “Why do you people all say that these guys who get wounded or killed are heroes? They’re suckers for going in the first place, and they’re losers.”
There is no public recording of Trump making such remarks, so we can’t definitively call Trump’s denial false. But the account of Trump’s comments does not solely rest on unnamed sources from the article in The Atlantic.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer
Biden on his record as commander-in-chief
Biden claimed that he is the only president this decade “that doesn’t have any … troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” referring to former Trump.
“Truth is, I’m the only president this century, that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” Biden said.
Facts First: Biden is wrong. US service members have died abroad during his presidency, including 13 troops killed in a suicide bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Thirteen US service members — including 11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman — were killed in the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Three US soldiers were also killed this year at a small US outpost in Jordan in a one-way drone attack launched by Iran-backed militants. And two US Navy SEALs died in January off the coast of Somalia while conducting a night-time seizure of lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen.
Other US service members have also died abroad in training incidents, including five US soldiers who died in a helicopter crash in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission, and eight US airmen who died in a CV-22 Osprey crash in November 2023 off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.
From CNN’s Haley Britzky
Trump on politicians using the term “super predators”
Trump claimed that Biden called Black people “super predators” for a decade in the 1990s.
“What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them ‘super predators’ – in the 1990s – we can’t forget that,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden never publicly deployed the phrase “super predators” or endorsed the criminological theory behind it (which held that there was a new breed of highly and remorselessly violent young offenders). Biden did, however, refer to “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” while promoting the 1994 crime bill.
As reported by CNN’s KFILE in 2019, Biden said in a 1993 Senate floor speech in support of the crime bill that “we have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” And he urged the government to focus on the people he said were in danger of becoming “the predators 15 years from now” if their lives weren’t changed – “the cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.”
But Biden did not speak of “super predators.”
Four years later, in a 1997 hearing, he noted that the vast majority of youth criminal cases involved nonviolent offenses and said, “When we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called super predators.”
It was Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, who affirmatively used the phrase “super predators” as she argued in support of the 1994 crime bill (in 1996). She said in 2016 that she shouldn’t have used that language.
Trump wrote in a 2000 book that he supported tougher sentencing and street policing and warned of “wolf packs” of young criminals roaming the streets – and he cited a since-discredited statistical analysis that was linked to the “super predator” theory.
From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Daniel Dale
Trump falsely claims Iran “had no money for Hamas” during his presidency
Trump claimed that when he was president, Iran “had no money for Hamas” and no money “for terror.”
“Do you wanna know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke,” he said. “They had no money for Hamas, they had no money for anything. No money for terror. That’s why you had no terror, at all, during my administration. This place, the whole world is blowing up under him.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Iran had “no money for Hamas” and “no money for terror” during his presidency is false. Iran’s funding for such groups did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions on the country had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN earlier this month.
Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups including Hezbollah. The Trump administration began imposing sanctions on Iran in late 2018, pursuing a campaign known as “maximum pressure.” But Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said himself in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups. “So you continue to have, in spite of the Iranian leadership demanding that more money be given to them, they are using the resources that they have to continue funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatening the state of Israel, funding Iraqi terrorist Shia groups, all the things that they have done historically – continuing to build out their capabilities even while the people inside of their own country are suffering,” Pompeo said in a May 2020 interview, according to a transcript posted on the State Department’s website.
Trump could have fairly said that his sanctions on Iran had made life more difficult for terror groups (though it’s unclear how much their operations were affected). Instead, he continued his years-old practice of exaggerating even legitimate achievements.
You can read a more detailed fact check from earlier in June here.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden on drug prices
Biden touted two measures that his administration and congressional Democrats have enacted to reduce drug prices.
“We brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for a insulin shot as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug … beginning next year,” Biden said.
Facts First: Biden is wrong. He incorrectly described two key provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that aim to reduce prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.
Under the law, Medicare enrollees don’t pay more than $35 a month for each insulin prescription.
The law also placed a cap on Medicare’s Part D drug plans so that seniors and people with disabilities won’t pay more than $2,000 a year in out-of-pocket costs for medications bought at the pharmacy, starting in 2025. Biden corrected himself later in the debate to use the $2,000 figure when talking about the cap on those out-of-pocket costs.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
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