Most of the falsehoods uttered by the Republican presidential nominee were claims that have been repeatedly debunked before, some of them for years. They spanned a broad range of subjects, from immigration to the economy to foreign policy to Trump’s record in office to Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Here is a fact check:
Crime
Trump claimed, “Our crime rate’s going through the roof.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024.
There are limitations to the FBI-published data from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data and the submitted data usually has some errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent.
The preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% decline in murder and a roughly 6% decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in Trump’s last calendar year in office in 2020. The preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said earlier this year that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”
After Trump claimed in June that “crime is so much up,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces. She said: “It would be more accurate to say that crime is so much down.”
Inflation
Trump said, “I think we have the worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years. They say it’s 48 years, I don’t believe it.”
Facts First: Trump framed this as an opinion, but it’s baseless nonetheless – wrong in two different ways. First, even when the inflation rate hit its Biden-era peak of 9.1% in June 2022, that 9.1% rate was the highest since 1981 – between 40 and 41 years prior, certainly not “100 years” and not even “48 years.” Second, inflation has declined sharply since the June 2022 peak, and the most recent available rate at the time he spoke, for July 2024, was 3.2% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Global warming and sea levels
Trump argued that the threat of the nuclear war is far more important than the threat posed by climate change. And he said: “The biggest threat? It’s not global warming, where the ocean’s gonna rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”
Facts First: Trump’s claim about the pace of sea-level rise is wildly inaccurate. The global average sea level is currently rising more per year than Trump claimed that it will rise in 400 years.
