PHILADELPHIA — Top GOP presidential candidates spoke at the Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia this weekend, making their 2024 pitch while also focusing on the culture war issues the controversial political group has railed against.
Three candidates spoke Friday — former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Their speeches included inaccuracies or statements lacking relevant context.
We’ve excerpted some of those and added relevant background here:
Former President Donald Trump
Trump repeatedly accused President Joe Biden and the Department of Justice of trying to interfere with the 2024 presidential election by having him arrested.
“I was arrested,” Trump exclaimed, drawing laughter from the crowd while claiming that his legal troubles are caused by his poll numbers. “Every time they go up, they get more and more radicalized and vicious.”
A federal grand jury indicted Trump earlier this month for allegedly keeping secret and classified documents after leaving office and then resisting government efforts to reclaim them.
Merrick Garland, the U.S. attorney general, in November 2022 appointed a special counsel to investigate the matter. That came three days after Trump announced his third bid for the presidency. The FBI searched his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022 and recovered sets of classified documents.
Biden has said little about Trump’s charges and has not made it a centerpiece of his bid for a second term, while some Republicans running in next year’s primary have highlighted it.
Trump has been lying about the results of the 2020 election since before the results were actually known. His first claim came in a televised speech from the White House in the early morning hours of the day after the election.
He was back at it Friday.
“They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024,” Trump said while claiming Democrats “used COVID to cheat.”
Moms for Liberty’s founding is rooted in pushback to COVID-19 policies in Florida.
Trump has relied on a series of debunked claims about voting in Pennsylvania to insist that he was cheated out of winning in 2020.
His lawyers were heard in state and federal courts, where they advanced arguments about election procedures but produced no evidence of fraud. Judges rejected Trump’s claims.
Trump referenced a debunked internet meme that falsely accused former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam with offering mothers the opportunity to kill their newborn children.
“What do you want to do with the baby?” Trump said. “Would you decide to kill the baby?”
The meme grew from a radio interview that Northam, a pediatric neurologist, did in 2019 about rare instances of third trimester abortions in pregnancies when a fetus is deformed and not viable.
Republicans swiftly weaponized his description of the process to falsely accuse him of condoning infanticide.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
DeSantis pushed back on the characterization that Florida “banned books,” a distinction that comes down to whether you consider removing a book from a school library to be a ban. In a news release in March, he noted that 23 school districts had removed 175 books from school libraries amid a push by Moms for Liberty and other conservatives to restrict books they described as sexually explicit.
DeSantis singled out "Gender Queer," a memoir by nonbinary author Maia Kobabe, as “hardcore pornography” and said, “Obviously, nobody defends this stuff, so it gets removed.”
Schools that have defended the book say it isn’t pornographic and provides value to students coming to terms with their identities. Critics note books targeted by Moms for Liberty and other groups disproportionately are about or written by LGBTQ people and people of color.
DeSantis also falsely claimed California parents can lose custody of children who identify as transgender if they do not consent to gender-affirming health care.
That falsehood, which has spread widely on social media, misrepresents a bill in the state that would allow minors 12 and older to receive mental health counseling or therapy without parental consent. It contains no provisions for removing children from the custody of their parents or guardians, and does not allow for gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent.
DeSantis celebrated Florida’s ban of “critical race theory” from schools and of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming at public universities, saying, “We’re not teaching our kids to hate our country or to hate each other with your tax dollars.”
Opponents say DeSantis and other conservatives are trying to prevent children from learning a fuller version of history and creating a chilling effect for teachers, worried about what they are or aren’t allowed to say.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley
Haley criticized Democrats for arguing voter ID laws would disenfranchise minorities.
“Minorities are capable of going to the DMV and getting an ID. We do it every day,” she said. “They continue to say, ‘Minorities can’t’ ... and I’m going to tell you, ‘Yes, we can.’”
Studies have shown that obtaining a photo ID is more difficult for poor, Black, Latino, and elderly people.
Pennsylvania passed a Republican-sponsored voter ID law in 2012 that faces a series of challenges in court. Along the way, lawyers for Tom Corbett, then the Republican governor of the state, admitted in legal filings that they were offering no proof of voter fraud while attempting to defend the law.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, in legal challenges, noted that obtaining the type of identification necessary for voting was disproportionately more difficult for people of color and the elderly. That added up to more than half a million people who would otherwise be eligible to vote.
Corbett abandoned the law in 2014 after the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court struck it down as unconstitutional. Republicans in the state General Assembly have tried repeatedly to resurrect it.
Trump cited the lack of such a law to make false claims about voter fraud in Pennsylvania during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Haley called transgender athletes’ participation in sports “one of the biggest women’s issues of our time.” She told the crowd her daughter ran track in high school.
“I don’t even know how I would have had that conversation with her. ... How are we supposed to get our girls comfortable with biological boys in their locker room?” she said.
She pivoted to discuss how one-third of teenage girls contemplated suicide in the last year.
While the suicide rate among teen girls is rising, Haley left out another statistic: Research has found LGTBQ youth are at a higher risk for depression, self-harm, and suicide than non-LGTBQ peers. A Denmark study released this week analyzing national suicide data found transgender people have a significantly higher suicide rate than other groups.
Haley accused Biden of overseeing a “debacle” in America’s withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan and suggested that incited several recent national security concerns.
”Did you ever think we’d look at the sky and see a Chinese spy balloon looking back at us?” she said. “You’ve got Russia invading Ukraine. You’ve got North Korea testing ballistic missiles. You’ve got Iran building a bomb.”
While the saga of China’s spy balloon was a weeklong media fixation earlier this year, it was not the first time such an event had happened. Three suspected Chinese spy balloons crossed into American airspace while Trump was president, but that was not made public until after he left office.
Russia’s attempted annexation of Ukraine first started in 2014 while President Barack Obama was in office, with the invasions and seizure of Crimea. That continued while Haley was at the U.N. and Trump was in the White House.
North Korea’s missile program has existed for decades.
As for Afghanistan, Biden withdrew in accordance with a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and Trump’s administration, although he delayed the May 1 departure deadline to Aug. 31. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s one term as president, omitted that from her comments.
Biden in April pointed the finger at Trump when his administration released a 12-page memo that said: “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.”
