By D’Angelo Gore, Robert Farley, Lori Robertson, Eugene Kiely and Ian Fox
On a night when the focus was on safety and unity at the Republican convention, a number of GOP leaders also offered up some misleading and false claims FactCheck has seen before.
- Several people described “dramatic increases” in crime under President Joe Biden, as House Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But FBI and other crime data show that violent crime and murders have decreased under Biden.
- Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump said African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women all had “record low unemployment rates” under former President Donald Trump, ignoring the fact that most of those lows were surpassed or matched under Biden.
- Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake falsely claimed that Rep. Ruben Gallego recently “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.” Gallego voted against a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. A 1996 federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting.
- House Majority Leader Steve Scalise parroted the unfounded claim, repeated so often by Trump, that other countries’ “prisons are being emptied” and the inmates sent to the U.S. border.
- Rep. Elise Stefanik claimed that Trump had delivered “the most secure border in our nation’s history.” That’s inaccurate. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year compared with the year before he took office.
- Lara Trump also talked about “our energy independence” under Trump. While the U.S. became a net energy producer and exporter late in Trump’s presidency, that has continued during the Biden administration.
