By Jessica McDonald, Kate Yandell, Lori Robertson, Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, D’Angelo Gore and Saranac Hale Spencer
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepted his party’s vice presidential nomination, and repeated claims he has made before about the Republican ticket. Other speakers tried to link former President Donald Trump to Project 2025, among other claims.
- Walz made the unsupported claim that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will “gut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump has promised not to cut either program.
- Walz said the Republican ticket “will ban abortion across this country with or without Congress.” Trump and Vance voiced support for a national ban of some kind in the past, but now both say the abortion issue should be left to the states.
- Several speakers cited Project 2025, a conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation, and tied Trump to its policies. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware went so far as to falsely say Trump “wrote” it. He did not. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, saying “it doesn’t speak for me.”
- Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called Project 2025 “Donald Trump’s roadmap to ban abortion in all 50 states,” alluding to the document’s suggestion that the Comstock Act should be enforced to prevent the mailing of abortion pills. But Trump recently said he would not enforce the Comstock Act.
- Polis’ claim that Project 2025 “puts limits on contraception” and “threatens access to IVF” requires more context. But Trump has said he supports both contraceptives and in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
- House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries misleadingly claimed that “83 percent of the benefits” from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “went to the wealthiest 1 percent in America.” That’s estimated to be the case in 2027, if the income tax changes in the 2017 law expire. In earlier years, the top 1 percent of income earners received a much smaller share of the benefits.
- Along the same lines, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed that Trump only kept a promise to “cut taxes for the rich,” when the Tax Policy Center estimated that the tax law “would reduce taxes on average for all income groups.”
- Former President Bill Clinton said Trump had “implied that if his beautiful people voted one more time, they’d be able to rig it. From now on, they wouldn’t have to vote again.” Trump didn’t say he would rig anything.
- Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on his watch,” referring to Trump’s presidency. Murders and aggravated assaults went up, though the increase all came in 2020. The overall violent crime rate, however, declined slightly.
- Finally, Clinton claimed that since 1989 a total of 50 million jobs were added under Democratic presidents, while just 1 million were added under Republican presidents. The stat checks out, but it’s a bit cherry-picked and is greatly influenced by factors outside a president’s control.
