Below are some fact checks of their claims.
FACT CHECK: Trump’s claims about 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
FACT CHECK: Trump falsely claims “everybody” wanted abortion back to go the states
Former President Donald 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
FACT CHECK: Biden falsely claims he’s the only president this decade who doesn’t have any “troops dying anywhere in the world”
President Joe 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 President Donald 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
FACT CHECK: Biden on support from the Border Patrol union
President Joe Biden said the Border Patrol union endorsed him, and then appeared to clarify and said the group “endorsed (his) position.”
Facts First: This is misleading. The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, backed a bipartisan border deal reached by senators that included some of the toughest security measures in recent memory, but didn’t endorse Biden. The deal failed in the Senate.
In a post on X, the union swiftly responded to the president Thursday: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”
From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez
FACT CHECK: Trump on the National Guard in Minneapolis
Former President Donald Trump said that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
“When they ripped down Portland, when they ripped down many other cities. You go to Minnesota, Minneapolis, what they’ve done there with the fires all over the city – if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.”
Facts First: This is false. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.
From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Daniel Dale
FACT CHECK: Trump on the European Union’s trade practices
Former President Donald Trump, complaining about the European Union’s trade practices, claimed that the EU doesn’t accept US products, including American cars. “They don’t want anything that we have,” Trump said Thursday. “But we’re supposed to take their cars, their food, their everything, their agriculture.”
Facts First: It’s not true that the European Union won’t take American products, including American cars, though some US exports do face EU trade barriers and though US automakers have often had a hard time gaining popularity with European consumers.
The US exported about $368 billion in goods to the European Union in 2023 (while importing about $576 billion from the EU that year), federal figures show. According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports — importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euro. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.) The EU’s Eurostat statistical office says that car imports from the US hit a new peak in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, at a value of about 11 billion euro.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Ella Nilsen
FACT CHECK: Trump falsely claims Iran “had no money for Hamas” during his presidency
Former President Donald 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
FACT CHECK: Biden on drug prices
President Joe 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.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
FACT CHECK: Trump falsely claims Biden has used the term “super predators”
Former President Donald Trump claimed that President Joe 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
FACT CHECK: Biden on Black unemployment
President Joe Biden attempted to contrast himself from his predecessor on the economy, particularly on the unemployment rate among Black Americans, which he claimed has been the lowest during his presidency.
“Black unemployment is the lowest level it’s been in a long, long time,” Biden said.
Facts First: This is false. Black unemployment is not the lowest it’s been in a long time.
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.1% in May 2024, higher than a record set under the administration when it fell to an adjusted low of 4.8% in April 2023. The previous record was set less than four years prior during the Trump administration, when it fell to a seasonally adjusted 5.3% in August 2019.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer
FACT CHECK: Trump on job growth during Biden’s presidency
Former President Donald Trump said of President Biden, “The only jobs he created were for illegal immigrants and ‘bounce-back jobs,’ a bounce-back from the Covid.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims that the job growth during Biden’s presidency has been all “bounce-back” gains where people went back to their old jobs is not fully correct.
Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. Following substantial relief and recovery measures, the US started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic (February 2020) employment totals in June 2022.
The job gains didn’t stop there. Since June 2022, the US has added nearly 6.2 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record. In total under Biden, 15.6 million jobs have been added.
But it’s not entirely fair nor accurate to say the jobs gained were all “bounce-back” or were people simply returning to their former positions.
The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities.
Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own businesses.
When the pandemic was more under control and in-person activities could fully resume, those industries faced worker shortages.
The pandemic recovery included what’s been called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, where people – for a variety of reasons – switched jobs or careers.
From CNN’s Alicia Wallace
FACT CHECK: Trump on the Paris climate accord
Former President Donald Trump claimed that the Paris climate accord would have cost the US $1 trillion, that it was the only country that had to pay, and that China, India and Russia weren’t paying. Trump called the accord “a rip-off of the United States.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that the US would alone have had to pay $1 trillion as part of the Paris climate accord is wildly inflated.
As part of the Paris agreement, in 2009, the US and other developed nations, including Western European countries, committed to collectively contribute $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer, developing countries, predominantly in the Global South, adapt to the impacts of climate change like sea level rise and worsening heat. Developed nations met their collective goal two years late in 2022, but the figure has never been as high as Trump was suggesting – and the US has certainly never paid $1 trillion in international climate finance.
Under the Obama administration, the US paid $1 billion of a $3 billion commitment it originally made in 2014. After Trump pulled the country out of the Paris accord, the US paid nothing to the global finance goal. And while President Joe Biden pledged $11.4 billion annually from the US, this level of funding hasn’t materialized. That’s because Congress, responsible for appropriating the nation’s budget, has allocated only a fraction of that – roughly $1 billion in 2022.
Trump is correct that countries including China, India and Russia have thus far not contributed to international climate finance. However, China’s position as the largest global emitter means many countries are pressuring it to contribute to international climate finance through a formal process.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
FACT CHECK: Trump on Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor
Former President Donald Trump brought up an anti-Biden lie about Ukraine that has been a mainstay of both the 2020 and 2024 presidential cycles, plus Trump’s 2019 impeachment.
Trump slammed Biden for supposedly “telling the Ukrainian people” to “change the prosecutor, otherwise, you’re not getting $1 billion,” referring to Biden’s efforts to remove Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016. Trump also claimed the Ukrainian prosecutor’s ouster was related to Biden’s “son,” referencing Hunter Biden, who at the time was on the board for a prominent Ukrainian energy company.
“If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo,” Trump quipped.
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false.
Since 2019, Trump and his Republican allies have falsely accused Joe Biden of abusing his powers while serving as vice president to get a top Ukrainian prosecutor fired, supposedly because the prosecutor’s probe into the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings threatened his son, Hunter Biden.
This claim was never true and has been repeatedly debunked. Nonetheless, it is one of the most-cited talking points used by Republicans against Joe Biden during any discussion about his ties to Ukraine.
In reality, Joe Biden’s actions toward the prosecutor were consistent with bipartisan US policy, and was in lockstep with what America’s European allies were pushing for at the time. They sought to remove the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption in Ukraine – including at Burisma.
The Obama administration, career US diplomats, US allies, the International Monetary Fund and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, and even Senate Republicans, among others, all made clear that they were displeased with the performance of Viktor Shokin, who became Ukraine’s prosecutor general in 2015.
It is not clear how aggressively Shokin was investigating Burisma or its oligarch owner – or if there was even an active investigation – at the time that Joe Biden successfully pushed for Shokin’s firing in 2016.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Senate Republicans led a probe to find evidence on whether Biden abused his position to help his family financially, but came up empty. As the 2024 campaign approached, House Republicans put these false claims at the center of their now-flatlined impeachment inquiry into Biden.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
FACT CHECK: Trump on tariffs
Former President Trump claimed that his proposal to impose a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the US would not raise prices on Americans and instead cost other countries.
“It’s just going to cost countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China, and many others,” Trump said.
Facts first: This is false. Study after study including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission(USITC), have shown that American consumers and industries bear almost the entire cost of US tariffs, including those duties previously imposed by Trump.
When the US puts a tariff on an imported good, the cost of the tariff comes directly out of the bank account of an American importer when the foreign-made product arrives at a US port. It’s possible that some foreign manufacturers lowered their prices to stay competitive in the US market after Trump raised tariffs – but not enough to keep the cost paid by American importers the same as before.
As of June 12, American importers have paid more than $240 billion for tariffs that Trump imposed – and President Joe Biden mostly left in place – on imported solar panels, steel, aluminum, and Chinese-made goods, according to US Customs and Border Protection. The USITC found that US importers, on average between 2018 and 2021, ended up paying nearly the full cost of the tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs. For each 1% increase in the tariff rate, the price paid by the American importer also went up 1%.
Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer. For example, American shoe seller Deer Stags, which imports most of its product line from China, decided to do a little bit of both.
It was harder to get customers to pay more for existing styles that Deer Stags had carried for a long time, company president Rick Muskat told CNN.So the company ended up eating the cost of the tariffs placed on some older styles and charging more for some new items.
Economists generally agree that tariffs drive up prices . The Peterson Institute for International Economics recently estimated that Trump’s proposed 10% across-the-board tariff, together with his proposal to impose a 60% tariff on all imports from China, would cost the typical middle-income household at least $1,700 a year. And JP Morgan economists estimated in 2019 that the tariffs Trump imposed on about $300 billion of Chinese-made goods would cost the average American household $1,000 a year.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco
FACT CHECK: Trump repeats frequent false claims about his criminal cases
Former President Donald Trump repeated his frequent claims that President Joe Biden and his Justice Department were behind Trump’s four indictments, including the Manhattan hush money case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
“He indicted me because I was his opponent,” Trump said of Biden.
Of the Manhattan conviction, Trump said: “That was a case that was started and moved. They moved a high-ranking official at DOJ into the Manhattan DA’s office to start that case.”
Facts First: There is no evidence supporting either of Trump’s claims.
Grand juries made up of ordinary citizens – in New York, Georgia, Florida and Washington, DC – approved the indictments in each of Trump’s criminal cases. There is no basis for the claim that Biden ordered Trump to be criminally charged or face civil trials.
There is also no evidence that Biden or the federal Justice Department had any role in launching or running Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution – and Bragg, a Democrat, is a locally elected official who does not report to the federal government. The indictment in the case was approved by a grand jury of ordinary citizens.
Trump’s two federal indictments were brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort, much less that Biden personally ordered the indictments. Garland has said that he would resign if Biden ever asked him to act against Trump but that he was sure that would never happen.
As he did during the debate, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making claims about the Justice Department’s involvement in the New York case. Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg had been colleagues before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.
Before Colangelo worked at the Justice Department, he and Bragg worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general, where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.
FACT CHECK: Biden on border crossings dropping during his administration
President Joe Biden said border crossings dropped 40%, arguing that the numbers are better than when Trump left office.
“What I’ve done since I changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally,” Biden said.
Facts First: This is misleading.
The number of daily encounters at the US southern border dropped 40% following President Joe Biden’s executive action restricting asylum access earlier this month. While there’s been a recent drop in border crossings, the number of people crossing the US-Mexico border was generally lower during the Trump administration.
From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez
FACT CHECK: Trump on other countries doing business with Iran during his presidency
Former President Donald Trump claimed that China, among other countries, “passed” on doing business with Iran during his presidency after he vowed that the US would not do business with any country that does so.
“Iran was broke. Anybody that did business with Iran, including China, they couldn’t do business with the United States. They all passed,” Trump said.
Facts First: This is a false claim.
China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year his administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president.
“The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, told CNN in November.
China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran.
Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or they may transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”
Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer
FACT CHECK: Trump on the impact of immigration on Medicare and Social Security
Former President Donald Trump said at least twice during the debate that President Joe Biden will destroy Social Security and Medicare by putting migrants entering the US on the benefits.
“These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrantswho are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits.
The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency.
“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.
Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.”
“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said.
However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.
“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
FACT CHECK: Trump repeats lie about 2020 election
Former President Donald Trump reiterated election lies, claiming that he didn’t accept the results of the 2020 election because of voter fraud.
“I would’ve much rather accepted these, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump’s election claims remain false.
The 2020 election was not rigged or stolen, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, his opponents did not cheat, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer
FACT CHECK: Trump on his own comments after 2017 Charlottesville march
President Joe Biden denounced Donald Trump for saying in August 2017 that “very fine people” were among the participants in a hateful “Unite the Right” event days prior in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event was organized by White nationalists after the city decided to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park. The participants included neo-Nazis, one of whom murdered a counter-protester, and prominent public racists.
But Trump claimed that Biden’s recall of his remark was “made up” and a “nonsense story.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Biden’s description of his comments is a “nonsense story” is itself false. Biden fairly characterized Trump’s comments about the events in Charlottesville.
The claim that Trump’s “fine people” comment is a “hoax” and “nonsense story” is based on the inaccurate premise that there were peaceful non-racists attending an aggressively hateful marchthat was held in Charlottesville the night before the main daytime protest that featured prominent White nationalists as advertised speakers.
And supporters of the “hoax” claim have noted that, when Trump told reporters days later that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” he had also said “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally” – and had specified that he was talking about other unnamed people he claimed had been at the nighttime march “protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”
But there has never been evidence that such a benign group was present at the march. The march – which testimony in a 2021 civil trial showed was organized by White nationalists – was a bigoted gathering at which participants chanted Nazi and White nationalist slogans targeting Jews and others, and displayed Nazi symbols, while carrying Tiki torches.
CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, who has extensively reported on the Charlottesville gathering, noted that the torch march was organized quietly in White nationalist “alt-right” online spaces and intended to be a surprise event that was known in advance only to a select group of like-minded people.
So, it’s not clear how people who were not supportive of White nationalism might have come to be part of the crowd or why such people would have remained there if they had somehow stumbled in. And Trump has never identified any non-racists who participated.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Chandelis Duster
FACT CHECK: Trump on Democrats killing babies “after birth”
Former President Donald 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.
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.
CNN
