By Robert Farley, Eugene Kiely, Jessica McDonald, Lori Robertson, D’Angelo Gore, Alan Jaffe and Kate Yandell
The Democratic convention wrapped up with Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the party’s nomination for president. She made some misleading or unsupported claims about her opponent, including several FactCheck.org has heard this week.
- Harris claimed former President Donald Trump “intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax” that would “raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.” That’s a speculative estimate from a liberal think tank based on the upper-end of a Trump-proposed tariff on imported goods. And it ignores other Trump proposals that might lower middle-income taxes.
- Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump will give billionaires “another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.
- In warning about the dangers of a Trump presidency, Harris said the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution.” The ruling said a president is entitled to a “presumption of immunity” for “official acts,” but not for “unofficial acts” and “not everything the President does is official.”
- She said part of Trump’s “agenda” is to “limit access to birth control.” Project 2025, a conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation, calls for ending mandatory health insurance coverage of emergency contraception, but Trump has said he opposes placing limits on birth control.
- Harris said Trump and his allies would “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.” However, Trump has said this year that he would not sign a national abortion ban and has suggested he would maintain the status quo on medication abortion.
- The vice president claimed Trump plans to “force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” Project 2025 proposes making such reporting mandatory, but Trump has said it should be up to individual states.
- Harris and other speakers said Trump “encouraged Putin to invade” a NATO country. In context, Trump said he told a NATO member that he “would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” unless the country dedicated more money to defense spending.
- Continuing a theme for the week, Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin made the unsupported claim that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare, pointing to a quote that his campaign says referred to cutting waste and fraud, not benefits.
- Harris also misleadingly claimed that Trump had “tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, and they included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. He did propose cuts for Social Security disability and supplemental income programs.
