At a televised town hall in Philadelphia, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made false and misleading claims on COVID-19, health insurance, the 1994 crime bill and more:

• Biden falsely claimed all members of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team in China “came home” before the coronavirus pandemic. The staff was cut, but not eliminated.
• He claimed the Trump administration stopped providing masks for schools. One agency did stop, but another intends to distribute up to 125 million masks for schools.
• Biden claimed he opposed giving states more money for prison systems in 1994. He supported $6 billion in funding, just not the $10 billion that was in the final crime bill.
• The former vice president cited an estimate that 10 million would lose employer-sponsored insurance during the pandemic, but didn’t mention most would regain other coverage.
• Biden left the false impression that 100 million people with preexisting conditions could lose insurance if the ACA were repealed. Those with employer plans couldn’t be denied policies.
• We couldn’t find support for Biden’s claim that “the boilermakers overwhelmingly endorse me.” The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers hasn’t endorsed a candidate.
• Biden wrongly said that the Green New Deal would require the U.S. “to be carbon free” by 2030, but the resolution’s goal is less stringent than that.

The town hall, which aired on ABC, was held in place of the second presidential debate, which was canceled after President Donald Trump refused to participate in a virtual debate. The debate commission decided to switch to a virtual debate after Trump contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized for three days, leaving Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Oct. 5.

At the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Biden fielded questions from socially distanced audience members and moderator George Stephanopoulos. The topics included COVID-19, Trump’s tax cuts, race relations, the Supreme Court, LGBTQ rights, health insurance, restoring bipartisanship, fracking, foreign affairs and the crime bill that Biden sponsored in 1994.

Meanwhile, the president was on NBC News for a one-hour town hall, which we also fact-checked.

CDC Staff Cuts

Biden falsely claimed the Trump administration recalled all the members of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team in China.

“All the way back in the beginning of February, I argued that we should be keeping people in China,” Biden said. “And we had set up in our administration a pandemic office within the White House. There were 44 people on the ground [in China]. I suggested that we should be seeking … to have access to the source of the problem. And to the best of our knowledge, Trump never pushed that. All those 44 people came home, never got replaced.”

As we’ve written before, Biden was referring to a March 25 Reuters report that said the Trump administration had reduced the CDC’s staff in China. But the whole team didn’t come home, as Biden said.

That story, citing CDC documents, said CDC’s Beijing office “has shrunk to around 14 staffers, down from approximately 47 people since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.”

Reuters said the majority of the CDC staffers let go were actually Chinese nationals on the U.S. payroll. There were only eight Americans assigned to the CDC’s Beijing office, and five of them were cut at the start of the Trump administration. A fourth American, a deputy director, was later added.

FEMA and Face Masks

Biden misleadingly said: “The government initially said they were going to provide masks for every student and every teacher and then they said … the president or whomever said, ‘No, no. That’s not a national emergency.'”

In September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would stop reimbursing states for the costs of masks for schools, but the Department of Health and Human Services said it would provide up to 125 million cloth masks for schools.

NPR reported on Sept. 1 that Keith Turi, FEMA assistant administrator for recovery, told state and tribal emergency managers that FEMA would stop on Sept. 15 reimbursing states for cloth masks and other personal protective equipment for places, such as schools, that are deemed nonemergency locations.

“The changes narrow what constitutes an ’emergency protective measure’ and is thus eligible for FEMA’s Public Assistance Program,” according to NPR, which obtained a recording of the call.

But another federal program will still provide masks to schools. HHS’ Public Health Emergency webpage says: “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will be providing up to 125 million cloth masks to states for distribution to schools. The Administration intends for these masks to support students, teachers, and staff in public and private schools reopening, with an emphasis on students who are low-income or otherwise with high needs and schools providing in-person instruction.”

NPR also noted that nothing prevented states from stockpiling such protective equipment before the FEMA policy went into effect.

1994 Crime Bill

When asked about the 1994 crime bill he had championed at the time as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden said the bill contained “both bad and good” things, but he stretched the facts on at least one point.

“I wrote the Violence Against Women Act, that was part of it. Assault weapons ban and other things that were good,” he said. “What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems that they could build – state prison systems.”

Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill. When we wrote about a similar claim in July 2019, his campaign told us the $4 billion difference is what he meant when he said he didn’t support “more money” for state prisons.

The prison funding went to states that had “truth-in-sentencing” laws requiring that people convicted of violent crimes serve at least 85% of their sentences. According to the Department of Justice, 11 states adopted such laws in 1995 and three years later, 27 states and Washington, D.C., met the criteria for the prison construction grants.

This is one of the measures experts have cited in saying the 1994 legislation contributed to already increasing incarceration. “Although incarceration was already rising steadily before the crime bill, several of its provisions helped increase incarceration even further,” experts with the Brennan Center for Justice said in 2016.

The authors said: “On their own, states passed three-strikes laws, enacted mandatory minimums, eliminated parole, and removed judicial discretion in sentencing. By dangling bonus dollars, the crime bill encouraged states to remain on their tough-on-crime course.”

In the town hall, Biden also said the crime legislation “had three strikes and you’re out, which I voted against in the crime bill.”

We found there’s evidence supporting Biden’s claim that he didn’t back the final legislation’s three-strikes provision, but he did vote in favor of one version, a Republican amendment that was added to the Senate legislation. Biden is on record at the time as saying he supported a three-strikes provision for “serious [violent] felonies against a person,” but he was against including nonviolent offenses and expressed concern that minor crimes could get swept up in the measure.

The provision in the final bill said anyone with at least two prior convictions for serious violent felonies, or one of those being a drug distribution or trafficking offense, who then committed a federal serious violent felony would be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

One DOJ-funded research report published in 2000 found that, with the exception of California, the state and federal three-strikes laws had “virtually no impact on the courts, local jails or state prisons.” The report said this type of legislation was “carefully crafted to be largely symbolic,” but also that courts and prosecutors had minimized the impact.

Health Insurance Claims

Biden gave a bleak assessment of what it would mean for millions of people if the Affordable Care Act — perhaps better known as Obamacare — were struck down.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a case aimed at nullifying the ACA a week after the election, and the Trump administration has backed the suit.

“Ten million people have already lost their insurance from their employer and [Trump] wants to take 20 million out of system as well, plus 100 million people with preexisting conditions,” Biden said, suggesting that would be the effect of ending the ACA.

But those numbers need some explanation.

The first figure — 10 million — is a reference to the number of people who are expected to lose their employer-based health insurance during the COVID-19 recession. The former vice president cited the same figure during the first presidential debate on Sept. 29. It comes from an Urban Institute study — but that study also said that most would regain insurance from another source, leaving 3.5 million uninsured.

The study estimated that job losses would cause 10.1 million people to lose their health coverage from April through December. But many would switch to insurance through another family member, Medicaid or the individual market.

The 20 million figure reflects the number of people who had gained coverage by 2016 — two years after the major provisions of the ACA went into effect in 2014.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2017 that if the ACA were repealed and not replaced with new legislation, the uninsured would increase by 32 million over 10 years.

As we’ve written before, it’s unclear what a Republican replacement plan for the ACA might be. The president backed a 2017 GOP health care bill that would lead to 24 million more uninsured in 2026, according to an analysis by the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation.

So, projecting a loss of 20 million people from the insurance system if the ACA were dismantled may actually underestimate the potential effect.

The third figure — 100 million — is an estimate of the number of Americans, outside of Medicare and Medicaid, who have preexisting conditions. Without the ACA, they would lose the preexisting condition protections in that law, which prohibits insurers from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status. 

But, as we’ve written before, to be at risk of being denied insurance, they would have to seek coverage on the individual market, where those without employer or public insurance buy plans. Before the ACA, employer-based plans couldn’t deny insurance, but they could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.

Only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market, while 49% have employer-based plans.

So, suggesting that 100 million people may be denied coverage due to preexisting conditions overstates the potential effect of doing away with the ACA.

Trump has said he would require insurers to cover preexisting conditions, but it’s unclear what those protections would be since the president hasn’t offered a health plan to replace the ACA. 

Boilermakers Endorsement?

When Stephanopoulos asked Biden about comments made by a member of a Pennsylvania boilermakers’ union who was skeptical of Biden’s claims that he won’t ban fracking, Biden responded by saying, “Tell him the boilermakers overwhelmingly endorse me, OK.”

But it’s not clear which union(s) Biden was claiming has endorsed him.

Boilermakers Local 154, the Pittsburgh-based union Stephanopoulos mentioned, has endorsed Trump for president. And the website of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, which claims to represent 60,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada, says: “The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers has not endorsed any U.S. Presidential candidate for the 2020 Election, and the information contained on this webpage in no way serves as an endorsement by the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers for any U.S. Presidential candidate.”

Green New Deal

In attempting to distance his climate change plan from the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution introduced in 2019, Biden made confusing remarks about the latter.

“The difference between me and the New Green Deal, they say automatically, by 2030, we’re going to be carbon free, not possible,” Biden said.

Actually, the Green New Deal — not the “New Green Deal” — doesn’t call for banning all fossil fuels or carbon emissions by 2030. As we’ve written before, its primary climate change goal is to reach net-zero greenhouse emissions in a decade. “Net-zero” means that after tallying up all the greenhouse gases that are released and subtracting those that are sequestered, or removed, there is no net addition to the atmosphere.

When Stephanopoulos pushed back on Biden’s criticism of the proposal and noted that Biden’s own website called the Green New Deal a “crucial framework,” Biden said, “my deal is a crucial framework, but not the New Green Deal.” That’s not what his campaign website says.

“Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” the website says. “It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.”

Editor’s note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

The post FactChecking Biden’s Town Hall appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

In the first and only vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence parroted many of the false and misleading claims we have heard from the top of the tickets.

• Harris misleadingly said President Donald Trump’s tax law benefited “the top 1% and the biggest corporations.” Actually most households received some tax cut.
• Pence said that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden “is going to raise your taxes.” Biden’s plan says that’s true only for Americans making over $400,000 a year.
• Pence said that if the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been as lethal as the novel coronavirus, “we would have lost 2 million American lives.” That’s a misleading comparison.
• Pence said “many” of the people in a crowded Rose Garden event “were tested” for the coronavirus. But testing isn’t enough to prevent infection.
• Harris said President Donald Trump had called the coronavirus “a hoax.” Trump said he was referring to Democrats finding fault with his administration’s response to the coronavirus, not the virus itself.
• Pence claimed Trump “secured” a law that saved 50 million jobs. The package was passed 96-0 in the Senate. A university expert estimated perhaps 5 million to 7 million jobs were preserved.
• Pence said the Trump administration “in our first three years … saw 500,000 manufacturing jobs created,” ignoring jobs lost since the pandemic. As of September, 164,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.
• Harris falsely claimed Trump’s China trade war cost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. The U.S. gained 146,000 factory jobs during the first 18 months after the tariffs took effect.
• The vice president said that “there are no more hurricanes today than there were 100 years ago.” Climate change may not increase the number of storms, but it is making them more severe.
• Pence claimed that the U.S. “has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord.” But many nations taking part in the Paris Agreement have slashed emissions by a larger percentage.
• Pence did not provide the context in which Hillary Clinton said “under no circumstances should” Biden “concede the election.” She said Biden will be the declared winner when all absentee and mail-in ballots are counted, so he shouldn’t concede if it’s still close on Election Day.
• Pence warned that “universal mail-in voting” will “create a massive opportunity for voter fraud.” Election experts say the number of known cases is relatively rare.
• The candidates disagreed on whether the Trump administration had eliminated a team that planned for responses to public health emergencies. It eliminated the director’s role, but consolidated some team functions elsewhere.
• Pence falsely claimed the Trump administration has a plan to protect people with preexisting conditions; it has offered no such plan.
• Harris said that “there will be no more protection … for people with preexisting conditions” under Trump if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. Protections would largely remain in place for those with employer-sponsored health plans, but not on the individual market.
• Pence disputed Harris’ claim that Trump “refused to condemn white supremacists” at the presidential debate. Trump didn’t offer a clear condemnation in the debate; Pence then referred to other instances in which he did.
• Pence repeated the false claim that the Obama administration left the Strategic National Stockpile “empty.” That’s not so.
• Pence claimed that Biden and Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking.” Biden said he wants to ban new permitting on public land; most fracking occurs in non-public areas. 
• Pence wrongly said Trump “suspended all travel from China,” when the restrictions included exceptions.

There were other repeated claims from Pence on the economy, the Osama bin Laden raid and the FBI.

The debate was held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Oct. 7.

Analysis

Taxes

When it came to taxes, both sides spun the facts about Biden’s and Trump’s record and positions.

Harris said Trump “passed a tax bill benefiting the top 1% and the biggest corporations of America.” As we have written repeatedly, while those with higher incomes reaped greater benefits from the tax law, most households received a tax cut.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a Republican-crafted bill that the president signed into law on Dec. 22, 2017 — provided tax cuts to those at all income levels, on average. The Tax Policy Center estimated that about 65% of households paid less in federal income tax in 2018 under the tax law than they would have paid under the old tax laws, while about 6% paid more.

A higher percentage of high-income taxpayers got a tax cut, and that tax cut was, on average, greater than the tax cuts for those with lower incomes (both in dollar amounts and as a percentage of after-tax income). But 82% of middle-income earners — those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000 — received a tax cut that averaged about $1,050 in 2018, the Tax Policy Center estimated.

We should note that most of the individual income tax provisions expire after 2025, which will then shift most of the tax benefits to the top 1%. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the top 1% of income earners would get 20.5% of the tax cut benefits in 2018. That percentage would go up to 25.3% in 2025 and then jump to 82.8% in 2027.

Pence responded with some spin of his own, repeatedly saying that Biden has promised to repeal the Trump tax cuts and that “on day one, Joe Biden is going to raise your taxes.”

It’s true, as Pence said, that during the presidential debate on Sept. 29, Biden vowed, “I’m going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts.” But Pence is ignoring that Biden has repeatedly said he will eliminate the tax cuts in the Trump plan only for those making more than $400,000 a year.

During the vice presidential debate, Harris used the same shorthand that Biden did, saying, “On day one, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill, he’ll get rid of it.”

Pence seized on that comment, saying, “America, you just heard Sen. Harris tell you, on day one, Joe Biden is going to raise your taxes.”

“That’s not what I said,” Harris responded, later adding, “the truth and the fact is Joe Biden has been very clear he will not raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year.”

Biden drew a line with that $400,000 threshold back in May. “Nobody making under 400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised. Period,” Biden said in an interview on CNBC.

Biden has consistently stuck to that promise ever since. In numerous instances, Biden has made clear that he would not repeal the entirety of the Trump tax cuts, but rather that he would eliminate “Donald Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy,” as he put it in the first Democratic primary debate in June 2019.

But direct taxes such as income taxes are not the whole story when it comes to evaluating the impact of Biden’s tax plan. While the Biden plan does not call for any direct tax increases for anyone making less than $400,000, independent tax analysts say Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate will indirectly affect employees due to lower investment returns or lower wages over time.

As a result, most Americans would see a reduction in after-tax income, but “[t]he change would be small for most of those middle- and lower-income households—on average, only a fraction of a percent of their after-tax income—and we estimate that 80 percent of the new tax revenue would come from the top 1 percent by income,” according to John Ricco, a senior tax analyst at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Biden’s tax plan includes provisions such as imposing a payroll tax on earnings over $400,000, restoring a top income tax rate of 39.6% for income above $400,000, and increasing the top corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

Ricco said that “[v]ery few families would be sending larger checks to the IRS (or having more money withheld from their paychecks) under Biden’s proposal.”

But when you include Biden’s plan to increase corporate taxes, the Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis found that “the tax plan will affect 82 percent of families,” Ricco said. “But instead of seeing their taxes go up directly, those additional families are paying the corporate tax hikes in the form of lower investment returns or lower wages over time.”

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model — which estimates the Biden tax plan would raise between $3.1 trillion and $3.7 trillion over 10 years  — middle-income earners would see their after-tax income decline by 0.4%, or $180, on average.

Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, told us via email that “it’s more precise to say that Biden’s plan would lower the incomes of 82 percent of Americans as a result of the tax changes, but not that it would generate a larger direct tax bill for those Americans.”

Swine Flu

In defending his record on the coronavirus pandemic, Pence misleadingly pointed to Biden’s handling of 2009’s H1N1 pandemic.

“When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, not 7.5 million people contracted the swine flu; 60 million Americans contracted the swine flu,” he said. “If the swine flu had been as lethal as the coronavirus in 2009 when Joe Biden was vice president, we would have lost 2 million American lives.”

It’s true that around 60 million Americans are thought to have contracted swine flu — but that’s an estimate based on modeling after the fact, which is not comparable to the raw count of the number of Americans infected with COVID-19. 

And it’s precisely because the influenza pandemic was not especially lethal that fewer precautions were taken to prevent infections.

Pence’s 2 million calculation of deaths appears to be based on a rough estimate of COVID-19’s case fatality rate, or the percentage of people who die who are identified as having the disease. But it’s still a tad high.

According to figures from Johns Hopkins University, the case fatality rate as of Oct. 7 is 2.9% worldwide and 2.8% in the U.S. If applied to the 60.8 million H1N1 infections the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates occurred, that would be around 1.7 million to 1.8 million deaths.

In reality, though, the pandemic influenza strain was not particularly deadly, and the CDC’s estimate is that 12,469 deaths occurred over a year.

Not only has it not been a full year since the novel coronavirus hit the U.S., but those estimates for the 2009 pandemic are based on modeling — not individually counted cases, unlike the COVID-19 tally — and corrected for underreporting. A similarly estimated number of cases and lost lives from COVID-19 would almost certainly be higher than the current figures.

Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives, noted in an Oct. 5 blog post that the actual number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. is likely at least 40 million. 

As we have written, the two viruses were very different and required different responses. Frieden, who was head of the CDC during the H1N1 pandemic, told us that in 2009 it wasn’t necessary to trace contacts or ask people to quarantine. The nation also never temporarily shut down to limit the spread of the virus.

“The current pandemic is much more severe,” he said, “which is why we have used public health and social measures to box in the virus.”

Pence then went on to repeat a misleading claim that Trump has made before. Referring to Biden, Pence said, “his own chief of staff, Ron Klain, would say last year that it was pure luck, that they did ‘everything possible wrong.’”

While it’s true that Klain said something similar at a May 14, 2019, Pandemic and Biosecurity Policy Summit, he has also said that his comments are out of context when presented like that.

As we’ve written before, Klain told us he was talking specifically about delays in the rollout of the vaccine, not the administration’s overall response to the H1N1 pandemic.

Testing Not Enough

So far, the president and 10 other people who attended a Sept. 26 White House announcement of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee have tested positive for COVID-19. In answering a question about the White House not following its own safety guidelines during that incident, Pence said that “many of the people who were at that event … actually were tested for coronavirus” and that “it was an outdoor event, which all of our scientists regularly routinely advise.” 

But, as we’ve written before, testing is not enough to prevent infection. It can take days for COVID-19 to become detectable in an infected person, and the rapid tests used by the White House are less sensitive than traditional tests. 

As Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina explained on Twitter, tests are “not prophylactics.”

“They alone cannot stop the test taker from getting infected. But can serve to stop onward spread from the tester,” he wrote. “To stop from getting infected, masks/social distancing are needed.”

And while outdoor events do mitigate some of the risk of COVID-19 spreading, scientists have made it clear that gatherings such as Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s introduction in the Rose Garden are still dangerous. The CDC classifies large outdoor or indoor gatherings “where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart and attendees travel from outside the local area” as “highest risk.” The CDC also recommends mask wearing among other safety measures to further minimize infection risk.

And while Pence referred to the ceremony as an “outdoor event,” that’s not entirely accurate. In addition to the outside reception in the Rose Garden, there was also an indoor reception in the White House. The New York Times published several photos from that reception, which was attended by the president, Barrett and her family, and other prominent Republicans — all maskless and close together.

Trump’s ‘Hoax’ Comment

When asked about the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19, Harris said, “The president said it was a hoax.” Trump referred to the Democrats’ “new hoax” after talking about the coronavirus at a rally on Feb. 28 in South Carolina, but clarified the next day he was referring to Democrats finding fault with his administration’s response to the coronavirus, not the virus itself.

At the late February rally, Trump said: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. … They tried the impeachment hoax. … They tried anything. … And this is their new hoax.”

The following day, after the first death in the U.S. from the coronavirus, Trump was asked in a press conference if he regretted using the word “hoax.” He replied: “No. No. No. Hoax referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here. I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax.”

Dubious 50 Million Jobs Claim

Pence claimed the president “secured” a program that saved 50 million jobs.

Pence: [Trump] secured $4 trillion from the Congress of the United States to give direct payments to families [and] save 50 million jobs through the paycheck protection program.

First, the cost of the relief package that included the PPP was over $2 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, not $4 trillion.

And the idea that Trump “secured” it is a stretch. He signed it all right, but it passed 96-0 in the Senate with Harris herself voting for it. The House passed the bipartisan measure by a simple voice vote.

The claim that it saved 50 million jobs is much disputed. What we know is that the economy lost 22 million jobs in March and April. How many more might have been lost without the bipartisan aid package can’t be known.

But Richard Prisinzano, director of policy analysis at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model and a former Treasury Department analyst in both Republican and Democratic administrations, puts the jobs saved at between 5 million and 7 million.

Manufacturing Jobs and a Magic Wand

Pence misleadingly said the Obama administration lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs in eight years, while the Trump administration created 500,000 jobs “in our first three years.”

Pence counts the job losses caused by the Great Recession against Obama, but ignores the job losses caused by COVID-19 under Trump. As of September, 164,000 jobs have been lost under Trump.

The fact is that both administrations were saddled with recessions.

Obama, who took office in January 2009, inherited the Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009. The recession and its lingering effects reduced the number of manufacturing jobs by more than 1.1 million in Obama’s first 14 months in office. But after March 2010, when manufacturing jobs hit a low of 11.5 million, the economy added 916,000 manufacturing jobs under Obama.

The net result under Obama: a loss of 192,000 manufacturing jobs.

The uneven but steady rise of manufacturing jobs continued under Trump, until roughly around the time the novel coronavirus struck — although there was a slowdown in 2019 even prior to the pandemic.

In Trump’s first three years, the economy added 475,000 manufacturing jobs. However, all but 19,000 of those jobs were added in the first two years, as the manufacturing sector in 2019 began to slow down. In 2020, the economy so far has shed 661,000 manufacturing jobs — wiping out all the gains from the first three years and then some.

The net result under Trump: a loss of 164,000 manufacturing jobs.

Pence also said this about the manufacturing jobs lost under Obama: “When Joe Biden was vice president we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs and President Obama said they were never coming back. He said we needed a magic wand to bring them back.” 

Obama’s “magic wand” remark came during the 2016 campaign, when Trump was promising to renegotiate trade deals to bring back manufacturing jobs. Obama said “some manufacturers” were returning to the U.S., because of low energy prices and a large U.S. market. But, he added, other jobs would not be returning — requiring retraining for the new manufacturing jobs being created. 

The former president then went on to mock Trump’s promise to negotiate better trade deals, using the term “magic wand.”

“[W]hen somebody says, like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for, that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do?” Obama said, referring to Trump. “There’s — there’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how — what — how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.”

False Factory Jobs Claim

Harris falsely said Trump’s tariffs on goods from China had cost the U.S. 300,000 manufacturing jobs.

Harris: Because of a so-called trade war with China, America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs.

The facts are contrary: The U.S. actually gained 146,000 manufacturing jobs after the president’s tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect July 6, 2018, and before the COVID-19 pandemic forced mass layoffs in March.

To be sure, some economists said the China tariffs contributed to a mild downturn in manufacturing last year, but there were other causes as well, including safety problems with Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft and a strong dollar that made U.S. goods more expensive to buy overseas. But even in the worst month last year (October), the U.S. still had 104,000 more manufacturing jobs than it did when Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Harris was referring to an estimate from frequent Trump critic Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who has estimated that the China trade war resulted in 300,000 fewer total jobs being created in the U.S. But that’s not just manufacturing. And it refers to jobs that might have been created but weren’t, not a loss of current jobs.

We don’t know if Zandi’s estimate is correct. Perhaps more jobs might have been created without the tariffs. But it’s a fact that the economy added 3.4 million jobs overall after the China tariffs took effect in July 2018 and before the pandemic-induced layoffs began in March.

Hurricanes & Climate Change

When asked whether he agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change, Pence pivoted to clean air and conservation, before suggesting that it’s unknown what the cause is.

“Now with regard to climate change, the climate is changing,” he said. “The issue is, what’s the cause, and what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science.”

But scientists have a very good idea of what’s causing climate change: humans. The U.S. government’s own 2018 National Climate Assessment clearly states that the issue is far from unsettled.

“Global average temperature has increased by about 1.8°F from 1901 to 2016,” a key message of the report reads, “and observational evidence does not support any credible natural explanations for this amount of warming; instead, the evidence consistently points to human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, as the dominant cause.”

Later, Pence gave a misleading impression about the link between climate change and hurricanes.

“And with regard to hurricanes, the National Oceanic Administration tells us that actually, that as difficult as they are, there are no more hurricanes today than there were 100 years ago,” he said.

Pence is correct that climate change may not be increasing the raw number of hurricanes. But it has been tied to more extreme hurricanes.

A Q&A from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that Atlantic hurricane activity has “increased since the 1970s,” but that the short length of good hurricane records makes it difficult to say how much of the increase is due to human activity.

“With future warming, hurricane rainfall rates are likely to increase, as will the number of very intense hurricanes, according to both theory and numerical models,” the webpage, which was written to explain the National Climate Assessment, continues. “However, models disagree about whether the total number of Atlantic hurricanes will increase or decrease.”

“Regardless of any human-influenced changes in storm frequency or intensity, rising sea level will increase the threat of storm surge flooding during hurricanes,” the site adds.

The National Climate Assessment itself is even more direct.

“Increases in greenhouse gases and decreases in air pollution have contributed to increases in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1970. In the future, Atlantic and eastern North Pacific hurricane rainfall and intensity are projected to increase,” the report concludes.

“In the future, the total number of tropical storms is generally projected to remain steady, or even decrease, but the most intense storms are generally projected to become more frequent, and the amount of rainfall associated with a given storm is also projected to increase,” it adds.

And the evidence on climate change making hurricanes worse keeps getting stronger. Earlier this year, NOAA scientists published an analysis of satellite data that found between 1979 and 2017, tropical cyclones across the globe became about 8% more likely each decade to be a category 3 storm or higher. The greatest changes in storm severity were in the North Atlantic.

CO2 Emissions

As part of his answer on climate change, Pence also spun the facts on America’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“You know, what’s remarkable is the United States has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord,” he said. “But we’ve done it through innovation. And we’ve done it through natural gas and fracking.”

Pence didn’t give a time frame for the claim, but Trump has made similar boasts in the past, when he said that since 2000, U.S. emissions “declined more than any other country on Earth” — and more than any of the Paris accord signatories.

As we’ve written, that’s only true in terms of an absolute reduction in emissions. Many countries that are part of the Paris pact — which is nearly the entire world — have cut their emissions by a larger percentage, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

In the past decade, numerous industrialized nations have posted larger percentage declines than the United States’ 11% drop between 2010 and 2019, including Denmark (39%), Sweden (31%), the U.K. (29%), Italy (23%), Ireland (15%), France (14%), Germany (13%) and Spain (12%).

Hillary Clinton on Biden Not Conceding

Pence said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Biden not to concede the election to Trump, but Pence did not provide the context in which she made that remark.

Clinton did not say Biden should not concede if Trump wins, as Pence suggested. She said she believes, when all absentee and mail-in ballots are counted, Biden will be the winner, and so he should not concede if the election results are still close on Election Day.

“And now Hillary Clinton has actually said to Joe Biden that, in her own words, that ‘under no circumstances should he concede the election,’” Pence said. He was referring to comments Clinton made during an August interview for Showtime’s “The Circus.”

In the clip, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, asked Clinton: “If it’s a close election, like, say Biden wins, what do you think Trump will do?”

Clinton went on to describe how she believes the Trump campaign is planning on “messing up absentee balloting,” particularly by challenging absentee and mail-in ballots, so that Trump has a “narrow advantage” on Election Day. But Clinton noted that in some cases when “courts had ordered absentee ballots to be counted, if they were postmarked on Election Day, Democrats actually won some important races.”

So, she urged Biden to wait because after all votes have been counted, she believes Biden will be declared the winner. 

“And, you know, Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said.

Mail-in Voting

Pence echoed Trump’s repeated warnings about the potential for large-scale voter fraud due to the expansion of mail-in voting in many states this year in response to the pandemic.

Pence said the Trump campaign is fighting in courthouses around the country to block states from changing voting rules this year “creating this universal mail-in voting that’ll create a massive opportunity for voter fraud.”

By “universal,” Pence is referring to some states automatically mailing absentee ballots to registered voters without voters having to request them.

Elections experts say mail-in voting is somewhat less secure than in-person voting — and in that sense Pence has a point that there may be more opportunities for fraud — but those experts also say that mail-in voter fraud is far less prevalent than the rhetoric of the president and vice president suggest. That’s due in part to measures states use to track and verify the authenticity of mail-in ballots.

“Election fraud committed with absentee ballots is more prevalent than in person voting but it is still rare,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and author of “The Voting Wars,” told us via email back in April. “States can and do take steps to minimize the risks, especially given the great benefits of convenience — and now safety — from the practice.”

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and voter fraud expert, told us that while misconduct in the mail voting process is “meaningfully more prevalent than misconduct in the process of voting in person” it “still amounts to only a tiny fraction of the ballots cast by mail.”

Over the past year, Trump has made numerous false, misleading and unsupported claims about mail-in ballots, some of which we summarized in our Sept. 25 story, “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots.”

Pandemic Planning Team

The candidates disagreed about how the Trump administration handled a National Security Council group dedicated to planning the national response to global health security threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a weird obsession that President Trump has had with getting rid of whatever accomplishment was achieved by President Obama and Vice President Biden. For example, they created within the White House an office that basically was responsible for monitoring pandemics,” Harris said. “They got rid of it.”

Pence shook his head and said, “Not true.”

We’ve written about this issue before. Here’s what actually happened:

The Obama administration created a group tasked with global health security and biodefense within the National Security Council in 2016, following a yearslong Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Shortly after Trump took office, he appointed Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer to lead the group. Ziemer had coordinated the President’s Malaria Initiative under both President George W. Bush and Obama.

Ziemer left abruptly a little over a year later just as a new Ebola outbreak was starting in Congo, and he wasn’t replaced.

Numerous experts and groups at the time had cautioned against doing away with that position, but getting rid of it didn’t necessarily mean that everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of its functions ceased.

Responding to claims at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that the office had been dissolved, Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense for the NSC, said that the group had been reorganized. He wrote in the Washington Post on March 16 that the administration “create[d] the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented.”

Morrison led that directorate for a year, he wrote, before leaving that position. Another official replaced him, he said. The administration has decreased staffing at the NSC, something Morrison said was needed after “bloat” under the previous administration.

Similarly, John Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time Ziemer left, said on Twitter in March: “Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false. Global health remained a top NSC priority, and its expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis.”

Also at the time, Beth Cameron, former senior director for the NSC team under Obama, wrote in the Post that disbanding that directorate “left an unclear structure and strategy for coordinating pandemic preparedness and response.”

Months before the pandemic arose, a report issued in November 2019 by the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies had recommended that the global health security and biodefense directorate be reinstated. It reasoned, “Health security is national security. Strong, coherent, senior-level leadership at the National Security Council (NSC) is essential to guarantee effective oversight of global health security and biodefense policy and spending, speed and rigor in decisionmaking, and reliable White House engagement and coordination when dangerous pandemics inevitably strike.”

The directorate hasn’t been reinstated, but since parts of it have been reorganized elsewhere in the NSC, saying that it was eliminated completely goes too far.

Preexisting Conditions Disagreement

Pence and Harris had a disagreement on whether Trump would eliminate protections for people with preexisting health conditions. We found fault with both.

“Donald Trump is in court right now trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and I said it before and it bears repeating,” Harris said. “This means that there will be no more protections, if they win, for people with preexisting conditions.” Pence replied, “No.”

Harris is correct that the Trump administration supports a lawsuit to strike down the ACA, which prohibits insurers from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status. But she went too far when she said there would be “no more protections, if they win, for people with preexisting conditions,” suggesting everyone with existing health issues would lose all protections. 

Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health. But only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market.

Nearly half of all Americans have employer-based plans, which could not deny insurance even before the ACA — except for a limited period for new employees if they had a lapse in coverage. 

Earlier in the debate, Pence said, “President Trump and I have a plan to improve health care and protect preexisting conditions for every American.” But no plan has been released.

The Trump administration has yet to offer a health care plan that would be implemented in place of the ACA. Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 24 that said “access to health insurance despite underlying health conditions should be maintained” even if the ACA were struck down in court. But he hasn’t provided details, and, as we have written, the executive order is meaningless without an act of Congress. 

Trump’s Debate Response on White Supremacy

In criticizing Trump on issues of race, Harris revisited a controversy from the first presidential debate, saying that “last week, the president of the United States took a debate stage in front of 70 million Americans and refused to condemn white supremacists.”

Pence claimed that was “not true.”

Harris continued: “And it wasn’t like he didn’t have a chance. He didn’t do it, and then he doubled down. And then he said, when pressed, ‘Stand back, stand by.’”

Trump didn’t offer a clear condemnation in the debate; Pence then referred to other instances in which he did.

During the Sept. 29 debate between Biden and Trump, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was willing “to condemn white supremacists and militia groups.” Trump’s first response was: “Sure, I’m willing to do that.” When pressed by Biden to denounce the Proud Boys, a far-right group, Trump told the group to “stand back and stand by.”

Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript from that debate.

Wallace: You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.

Trump: Sure, I’m willing to do that.

Wallace: Are you prepared specifically to do it?

Trump: I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing.

Wallace: But what are you saying?

Trump: I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.

Wallace: Well, do it, sir.

Biden: Say it, do it, say it.

Trump: What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name, go ahead who do you want me to condemn.

Wallace: White supremacists and right-wing militia.

Biden: Proud Boys.

Trump: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem this is a left-wing …

While the Proud Boys has denied it tolerates white supremacy, the Anti-Defamation League says that some members “espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.”

Following the presidential debate, some GOP members called on Trump to clarify his comments and to clearly condemn such groups. “I agree with @SenatorTimScott statement about President Trump needing to make it clear Proud Boys is a racist organization antithetical to American ideals,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted.

In an Oct. 1 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said: “I have said it many times. And let me be clear again. I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.”

Pence during the vice presidential debate responded to Harris in part by saying that Trump has repeatedly “condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” We’ve previously documented a number of instances in which the president has done so.

Stockpile Wasn’t Empty

Pence repeated the false claim that the Obama administration left the Strategic National Stockpile “empty.” That’s not so.

Some personal protective equipment, such as N95 respirator masks, distributed from the stockpile to states during 2009’s H1N1 influenza pandemic was not restocked. But that doesn’t mean there were none of those items available when Trump was inaugurated.

As of 2016, the year before Trump took office, there were at least six warehouses holding “approximately $7 billion in products across more than 900 separate line items,” according to a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition, reporters who were allowed to tour at least one of the U.S. facilities that year described seeing “shelves packed with stuff” and “row after row of containers filled with mystery medications and equipment — including that one item everyone’s been talking about lately, ventilators.”

The federal government had more than 16,000 ventilators in stock — more than it ended up distributing amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fracking/Fossil Fuels

Pence claimed that Biden and Harris “want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.”

He later said to Harris: “You, yourself said on multiple occasions when you were running for president that you would ban fracking. Joe Biden looked a supporter in the eye and pointed and said, ‘I guarantee — I guarantee that we will abolish fossil fuels.’” 

It’s true Harris supported banning fracking during her run as a presidential candidate, and at times during the Democratic primary, Biden did tell environmental activists and protesters that he would “end” or “get rid of fossil fuels.”

But the climate change plan that Biden has proposed does not include a full ban on either fossil fuels or fracking.

It calls for “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.” That would allow for existing fracking permits to continue on federal lands and does nothing to prohibit fracking in non-federal areas — where most crude oil and natural gas is produced. 

“I am not banning fracking,” Biden said emphatically at an Aug. 31 campaign rally in Pittsburgh. 

As for fossil fuels, generally, Biden’s plan is to reduce the reliance on them and reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050. Net-zero means the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S. would be matched by the amount sequestered, or removed, from the atmosphere. In theory, this allows fossil fuels to be used with carbon capture technologies or other sequestration efforts.

China Travel Repeats

Pence repeated a false talking point of Trump’s, saying the president “suspended all travel from China” to combat the coronavirus.

As we’ve written before, the travel restrictions, which went into effect on Feb. 2, were not a total ban as they included exceptions for U.S. citizens, permanent residents and the immediate family members of both. Others who had traveled to China within the prior two weeks were prohibited from entering the U.S.

A New York Times story on April 4 found that nearly 40,000 people had flown on direct flights from China to the United States in the two months after the travel restrictions went into effect.

Pence also claimed that Biden opposed the restrictions and called them “xenophobic.” Biden’s campaign said on April 3 that the former vice president supported the travel restrictions and that his “xenophobic” comment was in reference to Trump’s “long record of scapegoating others,” not the travel restrictions. Biden referred to Trump’s “record of hysteria and xenophobia” on the same day those travel prohibitions were announced.

The Economy

Pence falsely said that Trump had “turned this economy around.”

In fact, as we wrote when Trump took office and after his 2020 State of the Union, the economy was doing quite well when Trump and Pence succeeded President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden in January 2017.

Let’s start with jobs. “Since my election, we have created 7 million new jobs,” Trump said in the State of the Union (taking credit for thousands of jobs created after the election but while Obama was still president). In the 35 months after Trump actually took office, the economy added just under 6.4 million jobs. (Of course, the economy has since been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic and jobs have plummeted.)

But the rate of job growth (pre-pandemic) actually slowed down a bit under Trump. In the 35 months before he took office, the economy added nearly 8 million jobs.

As for gross domestic product growth, the economy had posted seven straight years of annual increases in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP under Obama. It grew 3.1% in 2015, and while it grew less robustly the following year (1.7%), the 2015 rate was higher than the rate in two of Trump’s first three years in office.

It is true that unemployment was quite low in Trump’s first three years. The average rate during Trump’s first three years was 3.9%, compared with an average monthly rate of 7.4% under Obama, 5.3% under George W. Bush and 5.2% under Bill Clinton. But the jobless rate was down to 4.7% by the time Trump took office — well below the historical norm of 5.6%, which is the median monthly rate for all the months since the start of 1948.

Biden’s Stance on Osama bin Laden Raid

Pence at one point made the claim that “Joe Biden actually opposed the raid against Osama bin Laden.”

We wrote about this issue earlier this year, after Biden and the Republican National Committee offered competing takes on the former vice president’s stance on the May 2011 raid.

Biden, as we explained, said publicly in mid-2011 and early 2012 that he advised Obama during a national security strategy meeting in April 2011 to not proceed with the raid until there was further confirmation that bin Laden was actually in the compound in Pakistan. Other officials’ accounts from the meeting offer similar details about his skepticism.

But Biden also claimed — months later and in the time since — that in a private meeting with Obama immediately after that security meeting, he told the president to “follow your instincts,” knowing that Obama was inclined at that time to move forward with the raid.

We don’t know what was said in a private meeting, and Biden’s story has no doubt evolved over time. But it’s worth noting that even the early version of Biden’s recollection holds that he advised Obama to seek confirmation before carrying out the raid — not that he opposed conducting it altogether.

FBI Didn’t ‘Spy’ on Trump Campaign

Pence also said falsely, “The FBI actually spied on President Trump’s and my campaign.” This echoes a claim made frequently over the years by Trump that Obama had spied on his campaign.

But the Justice Department’s inspector general has investigated and found that there is no truth to that allegation.

As we wrote, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government based on information from a “Friendly Foreign Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General report on the origins of the investigation.

The inspector general’s report released in December 2019 found no evidence of illegal “spying” — either before or after the FBI opened the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. 

The report said that the Crossfire Hurricane team conducted an “initial analysis of links between Trump campaign members and Russia,” and then opened four individual cases in August 2016 — on Trump campaign associates George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The IG report reviewed the department’s handling of those four cases. 

“We found no evidence that the FBI used CHSs [confidential human sources] or UCEs [undercover employees] to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the report said. “After the opening of the investigation, we found no evidence that the FBI placed any CHSs or UCEs within the Trump campaign or tasked any CHSs or UCEs to report on the Trump campaign.”

The report said the interactions between the Trump campaign aides and the FBI’s confidential sources “received the necessary FBI approvals” and were “consensually monitored and recorded by the FBI.”

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

Farley, Robert. “Biden’s Position on Osama bin Laden Raid.” FactCheck.org. 8 Jan 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Has Condemned White Supremacists.” FactCheck.org. 11 Feb 2020.

“Interview: Sean Hannity Interviews Donald Trump Live Via Telephone.” Factbase. 1 Oct 2020.

Niedzwiadek, Nick, et. al. “Republicans to Trump: Condemn white supremacy now.” Politico. 30 Sep 2020.

“Proud Boys.” Anti-Defamation League. Accessed 7 Oct 2020.

Shannon, Joel. “Who are the Proud Boys? Far-right group has concerned experts for years.” USA Today. 30 Sep 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey; All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted.” Data extracted 7 Oct 2020.

“Questions for President Obama: A Town Hall Special.” Transcript. PBS NewsHour. 1 Jun 2016.

Keith, Katie. “Trump Administration Asks Court To Strike Down Entire ACA.” Health Affairs. 26 Mar 2019.

Claxton, Gary et al. “Pre-existing Conditions and Medical Underwriting in the Individual Insurance Market Prior to the ACA.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 12 Dec 2016.

“Health Insurance Coverage of the Total Population.” Kaiser Family Foundation. Data extracted 7 Oct 2020.

White House. “Executive Order on An America-First Healthcare Plan.” 24 Sep 2020.

Fichera, Angelo. “Viral Post Overstates Effect of Trump’s Order on Preexisting Conditions.” FactCheck.org. 6 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Latest Voter Fraud Misinformation.” FactCheck.org. 10 Apr 2020.

Kiely, Eugene and Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots.” FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Final Night of the Democratic Convention.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

Congress.gov. H.R.1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Introduced 02 Nov 2017.

Nunns, James R. “An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Revised Tax Plan.” Tax Policy Center. 18 Oct 2016.

Sammartino, Frank. “The Effect of The TCJA Individual Income Tax Provisions Across Income Groups and Across the States.” Tax Policy Center. 28 Mar 2018.

Tax Policy Center. “Distributional Analysis of the Conference Agreement for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” 18 Dec 2017.

Long, Heather. “Joe Biden says he won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000.” Washington Post. 22 May 2020.

Jackson, Brooks. “Republican Convention Night 2.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Distorts Biden’s Tax Plan.” FactCheck.org. 13 May 2020.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “The Updated Biden Tax Plan: Budgetary, Distributional, and Economic Effects.” 10 Mar 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey; All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted.” Data extracted 8 Oct 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Total Nonfarm Employment, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 8 Oct 2020.

Layne, Rachel. “Trump trade war with China has cost 300,000 U.S. jobs, Moody’s estimates.” CBS News. 12 Sep 2019.

The White House. “Remarks by President Trump at Signing of H.R.748, The CARES Act.” 27 Mar 2020.

U.S. Senate Vote #80. 22 Mar 2020.

“2009 H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus).” CDC. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Misleads on H1N1 Swine Flu Testing.” FactCheck.org. 16 Jul 2020.

COVID-19 Dashboard. Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

Shrestha, Sundar S. et al. “Estimating the burden of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) in the United States (April 2009-April 2010).” Clinical Infectious Diseases. Vol. 52, Jan 2011. 

Frieden, Tom. “Covid Epi Weekly: 40 million plus 1. And…NYC is on the brink of a precipice.” LinkedIn. 5 Oct 2020.

Robertson, Lori and Farley, Robert. “Trump Spins Quotes by/About Biden.” FactCheck.org. 14 Sep 2020.

Hayhoe, Katharine et al. Chapter 2, “Our Changing Climate.” In Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. U.S. Global Change Research Program.

“Could climate change make Atlantic hurricanes worse?” NOAA. 29 May 2019.

“Link Between Earth’s Heat and Hurricane Strength Grows.” National Centers for Environmental Information, NOAA. 19 May 2020.

Kossin, James P. et al. “Global increase in major tropical cyclone exceedance probability over the past four decades.” PNAS, 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump’s False ‘Facts’ on the Environment.” FactCheck.org. 5 Sep 2019.

McDonald, Jessica et al. “Trump Twists Facts in Environmental Speech.” FactCheck.org. 10 Jul 2019.

Apparicio, Soila and Natalie Sauer. “Which countries have not ratified the Paris climate agreement?” Climate Home News. 13 Aug 2020.

Data and statistics. International Energy Agency. Accessed 8 Oct 2020.

Jackson, Brooks. “What President Trump Inherits.” FactCheck.org. 20 Jan 2017.

Kiely, Eugene et. al. “FactChecking the State of the Union.” FactCheck.org. 5 Feb 2020.

Kiely, Eugene, Robertson, Lori, and Farley, Robert. “How Old Claims Compare to IG Report.” FactCheck.org. 10 Dec 2019.

Kiely, Eugene, and Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s Misleading Spin on Roger Stone’s Conviction.” FactCheck.org. 13 July 2020.

White House press conference. Transcript. Rev.com. 29 Feb 2020.

Donald Trump Charleston, South Carolina Rally. Transcript. Rev.com 28 Feb 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Considerations for Events and Gatherings. updated 7 Jul 2020.

McDonald, Jessica and Robertson, Lori. “Updated: Q&A on Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis.” FactCheck.org. 2 Oct 2020.

The post FactChecking the Vice Presidential Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

A popular Facebook post asks why an order by President Donald Trump “PROTECTING PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS got almost zero coverage,” and suggests it’s wrong to say he is “trying to eliminate that protection.” Trump is trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which put such protections into place, and his recent executive order, on its own, doesn’t legally guarantee them.

Full Story 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 24 expressing his administration’s intent to end surprise medical billing and ensure health coverage protections for those with preexisting conditions.

But experts say the order is largely symbolic.

Protections for people with preexisting conditions are already in place under the Affordable Care Act, though the administration — as the order emphasizes — wants to get rid of that law.

One Facebook user’s viral post, however, misleadingly suggests that the executive order actually guarantees such protections and that Trump’s action was ignored by news organizations.

“Can someone tell me why Trump signing an EO yesterday PROTECTING PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS got almost zero coverage, and why the left is STILL running ads falsely saying that he is trying to eliminate that protection?” the post, shared 42,000 times, reads. The Sept. 25 post’s text was repeated in at least one other popular post, too.

But if the Affordable Care Act were to be overturned, new legislation would be needed to supplant its safeguards for those with preexisting conditions.

Here’s some of what the executive order says about preexisting conditions:

“My Administration has been dedicated to providing better care for all Americans. This includes a steadfast commitment to always protecting individuals with pre-existing conditions and ensuring they have access to the high-quality healthcare they deserve.”

“…access to health insurance despite underlying health conditions should be maintained, even if the Supreme Court invalidates the unconstitutional, and largely harmful, ACA.”

“It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States to give Americans seeking healthcare more choice, lower costs, and better care and to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.”

The order on its own doesn’t — and can’t — legally ensure such protections for those with preexisting conditions, experts say.

The order “is aspirational,” Karen Pollitz, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation who works on its Program for the Study of Health Reform and Private Insurance, told us in a phone interview. “It has no force of law.”

Likewise, Jennifer Piatt, a research scholar with the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, told Healthline that while Trump “states a policy to preserve coverage for preexisting conditions, a policy statement does not have any legal impact and will not bind insurance companies.”

The Trump administration has backed a lawsuit by several states to invalidate the Affordable Care Act; the suit is slated to go before the Supreme Court in November.

The ACA, often referred to as “Obamacare,” instituted protections for those with preexisting conditions. The law prohibits insurers, in any market, from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status.

Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health status and history.

An estimated 6% of the population received coverage on the individual market in 2018, though Pollitz said “people are kind of constantly churning through this market.”

Prior to the ACA, employer-based insurance policies could also decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period, if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.

JoAnn Volk, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, told us in an email that — if the ACA were overturned — “it would require an act of Congress to reinstate those protections for people with preexisting conditions (which is a growing number, due to COVID-19).”

It is not clear what Trump means when he says he will protect individuals with preexisting conditions. The Trump administration has not offered a comprehensive alternative to the ACA. In 2017, Trump backed Republican plans that would have weakened the preexisting condition protections in the ACA.

Trump’s executive order did garner some news coverage, contrary to the Facebook post’s argument that it got “almost zero coverage,” though many stories noted the symbolic nature of the action.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

Bagley, Nicholas (@nicholas_bagley). “Those executive orders — and that’s most of them — don’t have legal effect. They’re just internal memos with a fancy header. That’s all they are.” Twitter. 24 Sep 2020.

“Executive Order on An America-First Healthcare Plan.” White House. 24 Sep 2020.

“Health Insurance Coverage of the Total Population.” Kaiser Family Foundation. Accessed 1 Oct 2020.

Keith, Katie. “Trump Administration Asks Court To Strike Down Entire ACA.” Health Affairs. 26 Mar 2019.

Levitt, Larry. “Protecting People With Pre-Existing Conditions Isn’t As Easy As It Seems.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 5 Oct 2020.

Mendelson, Dan, et. al. “Repeal of ACA’s Pre-Existing Condition Protections Could Affect Health Security of Over 100 Million People.” Avalere. 23 Oct 2018.

Pollitz, Karen. Senior fellow, Kaiser Family Foundation. Phone interview. 1 Oct 2020.

Ries, Julia. “Why Trump’s Executive Order Doesn’t Protect People With Preexisting Conditions.” Healthline. 28 Sep 2020.

Robertson, Lori. “Biden Misleads on Preexisting Conditions.” FactCheck.org. 1 Sep 2020.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “About the ACA | Pre-existing Conditions.” 31 Jan 2017.

Volk, JoAnn. Research professor, Center on Health Insurance Reforms, Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. Email to FactCheck.org. 6 Oct 2020.

The post Viral Post Overstates Effect of Trump’s Order on Preexisting Conditions appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Note: This story has been corrected. Read more.

Summary

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden met on the debate stage for the first time and stretched or mangled facts on several topics:

• Trump exaggerated instances of election “fraud,” misleadingly citing ballots “found … in creeks” and a case where a thousand voters were mistakenly sent two ballots. Neither is evidence of “fraud.”
• Trump falsely claimed that Biden supports the Medicare for All plan. He never did.
• Biden got it wrong when he claimed there was “15% less violence” during his time in office than today. The violent crime rate dropped under Trump.
• Trump misleadingly claimed people “weren’t allowed to watch” the polls in Philadelphia. Only satellite elections offices, where voters can return mail-in ballots, are open now.
• Trump claimed he had been endorsed by the sheriff in Portland, which isn’t true, and he suggested that Biden had gotten no support from law enforcement officials, which is false.
• Trump boasted that he “brought back 700,000 manufacturing jobs,” which was never true. Currently 237,000 have been lost.
• Trump denied that climate change plays a role in California’s wildfires. Scientists say it’s a contributing factor.
• Both candidates gave potentially misleading impressions of when Americans can expect a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Biden said 10 million people lost their employer-sponsored insurance during the pandemic, but the study he relies upon also said all but 3.5 million of them would regain insurance from another source.
• Biden said Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has “written … that she thinks the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional.” Not quite, though she faulted a 2012 opinion upholding the law.
• Trump claimed that “drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%.” Actually it’s not clear what the impact of his executive orders will be.
• Trump said Biden called military members “stupid bastards,” which Biden denied. The vice president did use those words while addressing troops overseas in 2016, but his campaign has said it was in jest.
• Trump wrongly said Biden “forgot the name” of his college. Biden in 2019 said he “started out of … Delaware State,” but a university official said Biden was referring to announcing his Senate bid on campus.
• Trump said that he has “given big incentives for electric cars.” He’s actually tried to eliminate programs to encourage their manufacture and sale.
• Biden falsely claimed that Trump didn’t try to send experts to China early in the coronavirus pandemic.
• Trump said when Biden was working on the 1994 crime bill, he called African Americans “super-predators.” Actually, that was a phrase famously uttered by Hillary Clinton — not Biden — about some “gangs of kids.”
• Trump said “I don’t think” Kellyanne Conway, his former White House counselor, said “riots and chaos and violence help his cause,” as Biden claimed. Conway did say something like that.
• Biden wrongly claimed that the United States has “a higher deficit with China now than we did before” in talking about trade. The deficit is actually lower.
• Trump claimed that in relaxing the Obama administration’s more stringent fuel economy standards, cars would be $3,500 cheaper. Even going by the administration’s analysis, that’s inflated.

And there were more claims on topics including veterans, the economy and preexisting conditions.

The two presidential candidates debated on Sept. 29 in Cleveland. Fox News’ Chris Wallace was the moderator.

Analysis

Trump’s Flimsy Election ‘Fraud’ Case

Making his case that mail-in voting has already resulted in large scale “fraud,” Trump cited two examples that are not evidence of fraud at all.

“There’s fraud,” Trump said. “They found them in creeks. … They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots, everybody got two. This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.”

In recent days, Trump has referred to ballots found in a ditch or a riverbed or, as he did during the debate, “in creeks.” Law enforcement officials in Wisconsin reported that three trays of mail were found Sept. 21 along the side of a road and in a ditch next to a highway in Greenville. Officials there said the batch of mail included “several” absentee ballots, though a Postal Service spokesman would not comment on whether those were completed ballots, or blank ones being sent to voters, according to the Post Crescent. The paper quoted the county clerk saying election officials started to mail out ballots to voters on Sept. 17.

As for the claim about a thousand people being sent two ballots, that’s true. As NBC4 in Washington reported, election officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, believe up to 1,000 people who requested mail-in ballots may have gotten two by mistake. But it’s not evidence of fraud. Those people who got two ballots won’t be able to vote twice.

Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott said that when every ballot is returned, “we make an entry into their voter record that they have returned a ballot. So if something else shows up, the ballot has already been returned. We can’t count that ballot.”

And despite Trump’s repeated warning about large-scale fraud with mail-in voting, as we have noted, while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in or absentee ballots are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively rare.

It’s Biden’s Health Plan, Not Sanders’

Trump interrupted Biden’s discussion of his health plan to falsely claim that Biden supports Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan. The president wrongly claimed that the two rivals for the Democratic nomination agreed to it in the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations report.

Trump: Joe, you agree with Bernie Sanders — who’s far left — on the manifesto, we call it, and that gives you socialized medicine. Are you saying you didn’t agree?

Biden does not agree with Sanders’ plan. The task force report reflected Biden’s health care plan — which he unveiled in July 2019 during his primary fight with Sanders and others.

Biden’s plan, among other things, offers a Medicare-style public health insurance option as a choice and increases tax credits for individuals purchasing insurance on the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. His website says his plan to “build on the Affordable Care Act” will “insure more than an estimated 97% of Americans.”

Here’s what the task force report says: “Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock health care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. To achieve that objective, we will give all Americans the choice to select a high-quality, affordable public option through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.”

Trump also said “you’re going to extinguish 180 million people with their private health care,” another reference to Medicare for All. Again, Biden doesn’t support that plan.

Violent Crime

Biden was wrong when he said there was “less violence” during his time as vice president than there is “today.”

Biden: When we were in office there were 15% less violence in America than there is today.

It’s true that the number of all violent crimes per 100,000 people declined 15.7% during the Obama-Biden years (even taking into consideration a 6.5% jump in their final two years). That may have been the point  Biden wanted to make.

But the same FBI figures contradict Biden’s claim that there was less violence then than “today.” Annual figures show that last year’s violent crime rate was 5.1% lower than in 2016. Furthermore, the decline seems to have continued into the first half of 2020 according to “preliminary” semiannual FBI figures, despite an alarming 14.8% increase in the number of homicides, compared with the same six months in 2019.

Trump’s Misleading Remarks on ‘Bad Things’ in Philadelphia

Near the end of the debate, Wallace asked whether the candidates would urge their supporters to refrain from civil unrest and also pledge to withhold declaring victory until the election results are certified.

Trump said he was “urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully” and then said: “As you know today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went in to watch — they’re called poll watchers. It’s a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things.”

The day marked the first day that the city opened satellite elections offices — where residents can register to vote, or request and return mail-in ballots — and at least one woman who reportedly claimed to be a poll watcher for the Trump campaign was barred from entering a satellite office in an elementary school.

But the Trump campaign doesn’t have any approved poll watchers in the city, elections officials told the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the satellite offices in operation are not the same as Election Day polling locations — so poll watchers don’t have the same privileges.

Al Schmidt, a Republican and a city commissioner who oversees elections, told the Inquirer: “We don’t give someone a poll watcher certificate to … watch somebody fill out their ballot at their kitchen table.”

Nick Custodio, a Philadelphia deputy commissioner, said in a statement to NBC News that the “Satellite Offices are not Polling Places. Poll watcher certificates have not been issued for any individuals for anything other than poll watching activities on Election Day at Polling Places.”

“Individuals who are not seeking to receive services from a Satellite Office are not permitted to be there for other purposes,” the statement said. “This is particularly important in the current environment as City buildings and offices remain closed to the public due to COVID-19.”

Law Enforcement Endorsements

Trump touted his support from law enforcement organizations, but he was wrong to claim the support of a Portland, Oregon, official. He also went too far in claiming that Biden got no similar endorsements.

“Excuse me, Portland, the sheriff just came out today and he said, ‘I support President Trump,’” Trump said, looking across the stage at Biden. “I don’t think you have any law enforcement. You can’t even say ‘law enforcement.’”

Both of those things are wrong.

The sheriff in Multnomah County, which includes the city of Portland, took to Twitter to clarify that he has not endorsed Trump.

“In tonight’s presidential debate the President said the ‘Portland Sheriff’ supports him. As the Multnomah County Sheriff I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him,” Sheriff Michael Reese tweeted.

Portland rose to national prominence after federal agents arrived there this summer as protests against police brutality and racism boiled following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in May. At the end of July, federal agents agreed to step back and local authorities took over. Reese had expressed concern about the conduct of the federal agents at the time.

Trump has, however, received the endorsement of another sheriff in an area that’s recently gotten national attention — David Beth, the sheriff in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is supporting the president’s reelection bid. Kenosha drew protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August.

As for the suggestion that Biden has garnered no support from law enforcement officials, that’s false. The former vice president is backed by more than 175 current and former law enforcement officials.

Manufacturing Jobs

Biden and Trump sparred over manufacturing jobs, but neither gave an accurate account.

Trump: I brought back 700,000 [manufacturing] jobs; they brought back nothing.

Biden: Even before COVID … manufacturing went into a hole.

The fact is, 237,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost between the time Trump took office and August, the most recent month for which figures are available.

To be sure, there was a gain of 499,000 (but not 700,000) between Trump’s inauguration and November of last year, when the number peaked a few months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival.

From there they slipped a bit but didn’t exactly go “into a hole,” as Biden claimed — declining by only 62,000 by the time Trump declared a national COVID-19 emergency in March. That was followed by a two-month plunge of nearly 1.1 million manufacturing jobs, fewer than half of which have since been regained.

Furthermore, Trump was wrong when he said Obama-Biden “brought back nothing.” Yes, 578,000 jobs were lost during their first four-year term, which included the Great Recession that had begun in 2007 and raged for months after they took office. But 386,000 jobs were in fact “brought back” in their second term.

Climate Change & Wildfires

In an exchange with Wallace, Trump reluctantly acknowledged that greenhouse gases warm the planet “to an extent” but insisted that better forest management could solve California’s wildfire problem.

In fact, scientists’ best estimate is that human activities, including human-produced greenhouse gases, are responsible for more than 100% of the observed warming of the Earth. And while improved forest management techniques can help reduce the risk of some wildfires, climate change and other factors, including humans living in wildfire-prone areas, are also important.

When Wallace asked the president what he believed about climate change, Trump sidestepped the question, saying, “I believe that we have to do everything we can to have immaculate air, immaculate water, and do whatever else we can that’s good.” 

When pressed again on whether he thinks greenhouse gases contribute to the global warming of the planet, Trump said, “I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes.”

He added, “But I also think that we have to do better on forest management of our forests,” explaining that he gets calls about wildfires in California every year, and that “if you had good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls.”

Trump then went on to point to Europe’s “forest cities,” saying that those places avoid fires because they maintain their forests, while California burns “down because of a lack of management.”

As we’ve written, Trump is wrong to say that fires only occur because of poor management and to suggest that human-sourced greenhouse gases are only a small component of warming. 

As University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain told us earlier this month, the Earth “is warming due to the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases resulting from human activities.” Climate change, he said, “is acting as a pervasive force across the landscape and is increasing the severity of wildfire across a wide range of vegetation types–meaning that climate change is an important factor in understanding the severity of *all* of the fires currently burning.”

COVID-19 Vaccine Timing

As he has before, Trump exaggerated the best estimates for when a COVID-19 vaccine will be made available to the American public, claiming that the vaccine companies “can go faster” than the time frames previously provided by government officials.

“Well, I’ve spoken to the companies and we can have it a lot sooner,” Trump said in response to Wallace’s point that both Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield and Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui have said that a vaccine might not be widely available to the general public until the summer. 

The president went on to suggest, without evidence, that any delay would be political.

“They can go faster than that by a lot,” Trump said of the vaccine companies, adding that “we’re going to deliver [vaccines] right away” when Wallace clarified that he was talking about a vaccine for the general public.

Trump is correct that the government plans on shipping vaccines within 24 hours of an authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, but that doesn’t mean all doses would be immediately available to non-prioritized Americans.

Assuming one or more shots are found safe and effective, initial doses for prioritized groups may be available by the end of the year or in early 2021, with members of the general public getting doses after that.

“We may have enough vaccine by the end of the year to immunize probably, I would say, between 20 and 25 million people,” Slaoui told NPR earlier this month. “And then we will ramp up the manufacturing of vaccine doses to be able to, based on our plans, have enough vaccine to immunize the U.S. population by the middle of 2021.”

Biden wasn’t specific about which groups he had in mind when he gave his expected time table for vaccine distribution, but his description left out the possibility of some people receiving shots in 2020. 

“Every serious company is talking about maybe having a vaccine done by the end of the year,” he said. “But the distribution of that vaccine will not occur until sometime beginning or the middle of next year to get it out.”

Again, if a vaccine passes FDA muster, it is plausible a subset of the prioritized population could be immunized this year.

Conway on Violence

Biden and Trump disagreed on whether former White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway said “riots and chaos and violence” happening in certain cities “helps” Trump. Conway did say something along those lines, as Biden said.

Biden: You know his own former spokesperson said, you know, riots and chaos and violence help his cause. That’s what this is about.  

Trump: I don’t know who said that. 

Biden: I do.  

Trump: Who? 

Biden: Kellyanne Conway.

Trump: I don’t think she said that.

Biden was referring to comments Conway made during an Aug. 27 appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

One of the show’s hosts asked Conway if protests for racial justice that turned violent in several cities, including Kenosha, Wisconsin, were all “Donald Trump’s fault,” as some had suggested, including Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Conway said “no,” and added that Trump was the one “trying to get law and order restored.”

She later said she had seen a quote that day from an unnamed restauranteur in Wisconsin who asked, “Are you protestors trying to get Donald Trump reelected?” 

“He knows full stop, and I guess Mayor Pete knows full stop, that the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Conway said, indicating Trump was the “clear choice.”

Biden Spins Health Care Plan Losses

Biden said that 10 million Americans lost their employer-based insurance coverage during the COVID-19 recession. A study did find that, but it also said most would regain insurance from another source, leaving 3.5 million of them uninsured.

Biden: He is not for any help for people needing health care because, he, in fact, already has cost 10 million people their health care that they had from their employers because of his recession.

That figure comes from an Urban Institute study, though the study said most of those 10 million would regain insurance from another source.

The Urban Institute estimated that job losses would cause 10.1 million people to lose their employer-sponsored coverage from April through December. But many would switch to insurance through another family member, Medicaid or the individual market, leaving 3.5 million uninsured in the end.

Urban Institute, July 13, 2020: We find that 48 million people will live in families with a worker who experiences a COVID-19-related job loss in the last three quarters of 2020. Of them, 10.1 million lose employer coverage tied to that job. We estimate 32 percent of these people switch to another source of employer coverage through a family member, 28 percent enroll in Medicaid, and 6 percent enroll in the nongroup market, mainly in marketplace coverage with premium tax credits. Still, we estimate 3.5 million people in this group become uninsured.

The study also said about 500,000 people who were uninsured before the economic impacts of the coronavirus would become eligible for Medicaid and enroll. That would result in a net 2.9 million uninsured.

Other estimates give higher figures for the uninsured. Families USA, which advocates for “health care consumers,” estimated that 5.4 million laid-off workers had lost health insurance between February and May, adding that the estimate didn’t include family members of those workers who also would have lost coverage.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 26.8 million could lose employer insurance as of May 2. The vast majority of those — 79% — would be eligible for subsidized coverage, either through Medicaid or tax credits to help purchase coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. But KKF said it “did not estimate take-up or enrollment in coverage options but rather only looked at eligibility for coverage.”

VA Deaths

Trump said during the Obama-Biden administration, “you had 308,000 military people dying because you couldn’t provide them proper health care in the military.”

But the Trump campaign said that is based on a 2015 report from the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General that didn’t say those were all deaths of people who applied for VA health care, or that the deaths all occurred when Biden was vice president.

The report, titled “Veterans Health Administration: Review of Alleged Mismanagement at the Health Eligibility Center,” said that, as of Sept. 30, 2014, 307,173 of nearly 867,000 “pending” applications for VA health care belonged to individuals who had died, according to the Social Security Administration.

But, as we’ve written before, the report also said that poor record-keeping and data limitations made it impossible to say how many of those individuals died while waiting for care, how many of them had applied for care, or even how many of them were military veterans. 

Furthermore, the report said 84%, or 258,367, of individuals who died with a “pending” application, died more than four years before September 2014, including some who died even before 1998, when the VA established its enrollment database. Former President Barack Obama and Biden took office Jan. 20, 2009.

Unplugging Electric Car Incentives

The president claimed to support the manufacture and sale of electric vehicles during a portion of the debate on climate change, saying, “I’ve given big incentives for electric cars.”

But his record doesn’t reflect that.

A 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service identified three federal programs that incentivize the manufacture or purchase of electric vehicles — the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, which supports production of fuel-efficient vehicles; the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which are aimed at increasing fuel efficiency; and the Plug-In Electric Drive Vehicle tax credit, which gives tax credits to purchasers of electric vehicles.

All three programs predate the Trump administration, and the president has proposed eliminating two of them.

In his budget for fiscal year 2020, Trump proposed eliminating the Plug-In Electric Drive Motor Vehicle Tax Credit, which had been introduced in 2008. The following year, Trump sought to eliminate the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program in his 2021 budget proposal. That program had been established in 2007.

Sending Disease Experts to China

Biden falsely charged that the Trump administration did not try to send experts to Wuhan, China — where the novel coronavirus outbreak emerged late last year — during the early stages of the pandemic.

Biden: He knew all the way back in February how serious this crisis was, he knew it was a deadly disease … we were insisting that the people we had on the ground in China should be able to go to Wuhan and determine for themselves how dangerous this was. He did not even ask [President] Xi to do that. … He said we owe him a debt of gratitude for being so transparent with us.

The former vice president has made similar inaccurate claims before. “[W]hen we were talking … early on in this crisis, we said — I said, among others, that, you know, you should get into China, get our experts there, we have the best in the world, get them in so we know what’s actually happening,” Biden said at a CNN virtual town hall on March 27. “There was no effort to do that.”

In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tried to get CDC personnel to the scene just one week after China reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, 2019, as we have written.

“On January 6, we offered to send a CDC team to China that could assist with these public health efforts,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at a Jan. 28 press conference. “I reiterated that offer when I spoke to China’s Minister of Health on Monday, and it was reiterated again via the World Health Organization today. We are urging China: More cooperation and transparency are the most important steps you can take toward a more effective response.”

More than a week later, Azar said again at a Feb. 7 press conference that “our longstanding offer to send world-class experts to China to assist remains on the table.”

In mid-February a World Health Organization team including two Americans visited China, including Wuhan. The 25-member team, which visited China for nine days from Feb. 16 to Feb. 24, included one official from the CDC and another from the National Institutes of Health. The team issued a 40-page report on Feb. 28 — about two weeks before the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic.

At a briefing of the White House coronavirus task force in March, Trump said that he brought the issue up with Chinese President Xi Jinping personally.

Trump, March 22: And I did ask him whether or not we could send some people, and they didn’t want that — out of pride. I think, really, out of pride. They don’t want — they don’t want us sending people into China, to help them. You know, China is a strong country. They have — they have their scientists and they have their doctors — very smart. A lot of people.

And, you know, but I did discuss that about sending our people in. And, they didn’t really respond. We went again; they didn’t respond.

Preexisting Conditions and the ACA

Biden said Trump was “in the Supreme Court right now trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act” and that “there’s a 100 million people who have preexisting conditions and they’ll be taken away as well, those preexisting conditions, insurance companies are going to love this.” Trump replied: “There aren’t 100 million people with preexisting conditions.”

There are 100 million people with preexisting conditions, not including those with Medicare or Medicaid coverage, according to one estimate from the consulting firm Avalere. It’s unclear what Biden meant when he said “they’ll be taken away as well,” but if the ACA were nullified, they would lose the preexisting condition protections in that law. But only those who seek coverage on the individual market — where those without employer or public insurance buy plans – would be at risk of being denied insurance.

As we’ve written before, the Trump administration has backed a lawsuit to invalidate the ACA, which instituted sweeping protections for those with preexisting conditions. The ACA prohibited insurers, in any market, from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status.

Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health. But only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market.

Employer-based coverage — where 49% of the population gets insurance — couldn’t deny insurance, before the ACA. But those plans could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period, if a new employee had a lapse in coverage. 

It’s unclear what preexisting condition protections would be implemented under the Trump administration in lieu of the ACA, but Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 24 that said “access to health insurance despite underlying health conditions should be maintained” even if the ACA were struck down in court. 

Biden also said that if the Trump-backed lawsuit were successful, it “will strip 20 million people from having insurance.” That’s a reference to the number who gained insurance under the ACA, according to a few estimates. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2017 that if the ACA were repealed and not replaced with new legislation, the uninsured would increase by 32 million over 10 years. (However, “some people would choose not to have insurance,” CBO said, because they had coverage in order to avoid a penalty. That penalty was eliminated effective in 2019.)

Amy Coney Barrett on the ACA

Biden said Trump’s Supreme Court nominee — Judge Amy Coney Barrett — has “written … that she thinks the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional.” Not quite, though she faulted a 2012 opinion upholding the law.

Barrett did criticize Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius, which upheld the ACA but found states couldn’t be forced to expand Medicaid under the law. Writing in January 2017 in the Notre Dame Law School journal, Barrett reviewed a book by Randy Barnett. She said: “In NFIB v. Sebelius, the inspiration for Barnett’s book, Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did—as a penalty—he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power. … Barnett is surely right that deference to a democratic majority should not supersede a judge’s duty to apply clear text. … If the majority did not enact a ‘tax,’ interpreting the statute to impose a tax lacks democratic legitimacy.”

That’s clearly a critique of Roberts’ opinion. But some legal scholars have said the writing doesn’t indicate how Barrett might rule on the ACA case now before the court: California v. Texas. That case concerns whether the elimination of the ACA tax penalty under the 2017 GOP tax law makes the individual mandate (the requirement for most people to have insurance) unconstitutional — and if without the mandate, the entire law must be struck down.

Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told NBC News Barrett’s journal article “doesn’t tell us anything about how she’d rule in a case that’s significantly weaker.” He said that “ACA supporters should be concerned” but “[n]ot panicked.”

Prescription Drugs

Trump said: “I’m cutting drug prices. I’m going with favored nations. … Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%.” Trump signed four executive orders on drug prices in late July, but it remains to be seen how the orders will be implemented and whether they will result in large reductions in prices.

As we’ve explained, the orders, which largely revive past administration proposals, require the Health and Human Services secretary to take various actions, such as moving through the federal rule-making process.

Two of the orders pertain to Medicare beneficiaries. Another order concerns insulin and epinephrine for low-income individuals, and the fourth involves allowing the importation of some drugs.

Trump’s reference to “favored nations” concerns an updated executive order signed Sept. 13. It calls on the HHS secretary to test payment models to tie Medicare drug prices to the lowest price among comparable countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

An HHS spokesperson told us in July that Medicare “currently pays roughly 80% more than other countries” for Part B drugs, which are outpatient drugs administered by a physician. But again, whether this policy could lead to an 80% reduction for those drugs remains to be seen.

CDC Director on Face Masks

On the topic of face masks, Biden wrongly claimed Trump’s “own head of the CDC said … if everybody wore masks and social distanced between now and January, we’d probably save up to 100,000 lives.” 

That was a projection from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — not Dr. Robert Redfield.

On Sept. 3, IHME said its model projected there would be 410,000 cumulative U.S. deaths from COVID-19 by January 2021, and that 122,000 of those deaths could be prevented with increased mask use. As of Sept. 24, the model downgraded its estimate to a total death toll of 372,000 in the U.S., 97,000 of which could be avoided with near-universal masking.

Redfield, though, did say in congressional testimony on Sept. 16 that face masks “are the most important, powerful public health tool we have” against COVID-19.

“I will continue to appeal for all Americans, all individuals in our country, to embrace these face coverings,” he said. “I’ve said it, if we did it for six, eight, 10, 12 weeks we’d bring this pandemic under control. … We have clear scientific evidence they work and they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”

Later that day, on Twitter, he added: “The best defense we currently have against this virus are the important mitigation efforts of wearing a mask, washing your hands, social distancing and being careful about crowds.”

But that’s not the same as saying “100,000 lives” could be saved by wearing masks.

Biden’s ‘Stupid Bastards’ Remark in Context

Biden at one point made reference to a recent story by the Atlantic that, citing anonymous sources, reported that Trump privately denigrated fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump later returned to the point by denying the claim and suggested it was actually Biden who spoke ill of the military.

“What he did, was he said — he called the military stupid bastards,” Trump said.

“I did not say that,” Biden responded.

“And he said it on tape,” Trump continued.

Biden did use those words during a trip to Abu Dhabi in March 2016, and it is on tape. But the full context of the video suggests that Biden was joking, which his campaign has maintained.

After Biden referenced “the incredible sacrifices you make for our country,” he went on to tell the crowd that he has “incredibly good judgment.” He mentions marrying his wife, Jill, then refers to having nominated Lt. Karen Johnson to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy years earlier. Johnson was on stage.

“One, I married Jill. And two, I appointed Johnson to the academy. I just want you to know that,” he said. “Clap for that, you stupid bastards.” He then jokingly called the group a “dull bunch.”

Biden “was jokingly encouraging the audience to clap for an airwoman on the stage,” his campaign said in a recent statement to the Daily Beast.

Delaware State

Trump distorted the context of comments Biden made in 2019 to claim that Biden wrongly said he attended college at Delaware State University, one of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, when he actually went to the University of Delaware.

“You said you went to Delaware State but you forgot the name of your college,” Trump said. “You didn’t go to Delaware State.”

The origin of Trump’s claim is a story in the Washington Times, which included a clip of Biden at a town hall event in Florence, South Carolina, on Oct. 26, 2019, in which he said, when discussing funding for HBCUs, “I got started out of an HBCU, Delaware State.” The paper stated that while Biden “declared last year on the campaign trail that he began his academic career at Delaware State University,” a university official confirmed he was never a student there.

That official, Carlos Holmes, the university’s director of news services, says his response was used in a ”dishonest light.”

“Watched in full context, it is clear that Biden was discussing his long association with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, not making a claim that he had attended Delaware State University,” Holmes told Delaware State News. “He ‘got his start’ when he announced his first run for the US Senate on our campus in 1972 with then-Delaware State College President Luna Mishoe at his side. For three decades, first as US Senator and then as Vice President, Joe Biden has been our advocate and partner to such a critical extent that in 2003 the University awarded him an honorary doctorate.”

Trump Wrong on ‘Super-Predators’

Trump repeatedly claimed that when Biden was spearheading the 1994 crime bill, he called African Americans “super-predators, and they’ve never forgotten it.” Actually, that was a phrase famously uttered by Hillary Clinton — not Biden.

“I never said it,” Biden responded, but Trump continued to insist he did.

We looked into this when Trump made a similar claim in a Fox News interview a month ago, and we couldn’t find any evidence that Biden has used that term.

As then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden did spearhead the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Although the bill received bipartisan support at the time, it has been criticized for some of its provisions, such as mandatory minimum sentencing, and its impact on mass incarceration, particularly of Black men. As we have written, the trend of increasing imprisonment began well before 1994, but experts told us the 1994 law exacerbated the issue.

As we said, it was actually Hillary Clinton who used the phrase “super-predator” in a 1996 speech at New Hampshire’s Keene State College in support of the 1994 crime bill, which was signed by her husband, then-President Bill Clinton.

“They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” Clinton said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Interestingly, Trump often criticized Clinton during her 2016 presidential bid for using that term, and Clinton has since acknowledged, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”

Trump’s Swine Flu Spin

In criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the 2009 H1N1 flu, Trump told Biden “you were a disaster — your own chief of staff said you were a disaster.”

Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, last year said the Obama administration “did every possible thing wrong,” but he said he was talking about delays in the production of a vaccine — not the administration’s overall response. The record supports Klain. 

At a May 14, 2019, Pandemic and Biosecurity Policy Summit, Klain said the administration has “a bunch of really talented, really great people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong.” Klain’s comments following that assessment focused solely on the rollout of vaccines.

“What did that [the experience in 2009] tell us? It told us that the vaccine will arrive late,” Klain said at the pandemic policy summit. “It told us that if it’s not prepared in advance, it will arrive late. If we don’t have the answer before, we’re not going to get the answer in time. And it told us that our systems for deciding how to distribute and administer a vaccine in the time of crisis are going to be badly, badly tested.” 

Shutting Down the Economy

On the subject of reopening businesses that were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump said several times that Biden “wants to shut down the country.”

We don’t know what Biden wants to do, but he did say last month that he’d be willing to shut down the economy if scientists said it was necessary. He has since said he doesn’t think that will be necessary.

In an Aug. 21 interview with ABC News, Biden was asked: “If you’re sworn in come January, and we have coronavirus and the flu combining, which many scientists have said is a real possibility, would you be prepared to shut this country down again?”

Biden said, “I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus.” 

When asked for clarification, he responded, “I would shut it down, I would listen to the scientists.”

In a press conference more than a week later, Biden said another shutdown would likely not be needed if certain steps were taken.

“There’s going to be no need, in my view, to be able to shut down the whole economy,” Biden told reporters Sept. 2. “I got asked by David Muir a question, if I was asked to shut everything down. I took that as a generic question if — am I going to follow the science? I am going to insist — and I insist now, without any authority, that every responsible person in this country, when they’re out in public or not with the cohort that they have lived with because they know they haven’t spread it to their husband, wife, etc., that they wear a mask and keep socially distanced.”

Travel Restrictions to Fight COVID-19

Trump falsely said that Biden had opposed the travel restrictions the president imposed on China on Jan. 31 in an effort to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus. Biden did not say he opposed them at the time. And he later said he endorsed them.

Trump also said that if he had listened to Biden and not imposed the restrictions, millions of Americans would have died rather than 200,000. There is no evidence to support the claim that the travel restrictions saved so many lives.

Trump: If we would have listened to you, the country would have been left wide open. Millions of people would have died, not 200,000. … I closed it and you said he’s xenophobic, he’s a racist and he’s xenophobic. Because you didn’t think we should have closed our country.

As we have written, Biden’s campaign said on April 3 that Biden backed Trump’s decision to impose travel restrictions on China. “Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN. “Science supported this ban, therefore he did too.”

Trump has frequently said, as he did at the debate, that Biden called him “xenophobic” for imposing the restrictions. Trump is right that Biden called him xenophobic. But Biden didn’t make clear why he said that. The Biden campaign has said that was not in connection with the China travel restrictions.

As we have written, on the day the White House announced the restrictions, Biden said at a campaign event in Iowa that as the pandemic unfolds, Americans “need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it.” He added, “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.” The Biden campaign said Biden’s “reference to xenophobia was about Trump’s long record of scapegoating others at a time when the virus was emerging from China,” and that he was not talking about the travel rules.

As for whether the restrictions saved millions of lives, as we reported, there is no evidence to support this, and the White House has provided none. The few studies that have been done estimate travel restrictions the United States and other countries enacted on China had modest impacts, slowing the initial spread outside of China but not containing the coronavirus pandemic. Past studies also have found travel restrictions could delay the path of the spread of diseases, but do little to contain them.

Finally, Trump didn’t “close” the country. The restrictions, which went into effect Feb. 2, barred certain non-U.S. citizens who had traveled to China within the previous two weeks from entering the United States. But U.S. citizens and permanent residents and their immediate families were exempt from the restrictions.

A New York Times story on April 4 found that nearly 40,000 people had flown on direct flights from China to the United States in the two months after the restrictions went into effect. So this was hardly a closure.

Nuking Hurricanes?

Biden said that Trump “has an answer for hurricanes, he said maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.” The president shot back, “I never said that at all. He made it up.”

The back story: Axios reported on April 25, 2019, that Trump had proposed just that. Its story said, “President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.”

Trump denounced the story in a tweet at the time as “FAKE NEWS.”

One of the story’s authors, Jonathan Swan, tweeted back that he stood by the story, adding that the president “said this in at least two meetings during the first year and a bit of the presidency, and one of the conversations was memorialized.”

The issue has not been authoritatively settled.

Trade Deficit with China

Fuel Economy Standards

When Wallace asked Trump why he had relaxed fuel economy standards for vehicles “that are going to create more pollution from cars and trucks,” Trump responded, “Well, not really, because what’s happening is that the car is much less expensive and it’s a much safer car and you’re talking about a tiny difference.”

“And then what would happen, because of the cost of the car, you would have at least double and triple the number of cars purchased,” he added. “We have the old slugs out there, that are 10, 12 years old. If you did that, the car would be safer, it would be much cheaper, by $3,500.”

Trump is referring to his administration’s Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule, which replaced the Obama administration’s stricter set of fuel economy standards. At the core of the policy is the idea that by reducing fuel standards, that would make new cars cheaper, allowing people to replace older and potentially less safe vehicles.

But as we’ve explained before, the administration’s analyses that underpinned that argument were widely viewed as faulty and contrary to the basic principles of economics.

Trump’s $3,500 figure is incorrect, even by the administration’s own analysis. According to the final rule, which calls for increasing fuel efficiency by 1.5% every year instead of 5%, the cost of a new vehicle is estimated to be $977 to $1,083 lower, on average — a good deal less than $3,500.

While Trump also claims the difference to the environment is “tiny,” the government estimates that around 1.9 to 2.0 additional barrels of fuel will be consumed, or the equivalent of 867 to 923 additional million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s around half a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s entire transportation sector.

The post FactChecking the First Trump-Biden Debate appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In remarks about President Donald Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made some questionable statements:

• Biden claimed that a Supreme Court nominee has never been “nominated and installed while a presidential election is already underway.” Yes, voting is underway in some states. But five justices since 1900 were nominated and installed in an election year by presidents running for reelection.
• Biden urged senators to “uphold your constitutional duty” and block Trump’s nominee. The Constitution gives the Senate the power of “advice and consent,” so senators would be upholding the Constitution if they vote on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

The former vice president made a few short appearances during the weekend leading up to the first debate.

On Sept. 26, Biden spoke to the United States Conference of Mayors for less than 16 minutes, and he delivered brief remarks at the virtual L’Attitude conference. On the same day, MSNBC aired an interview with Biden as part of the San Diego-based Latino conference.

On Sept. 27, Biden made remarks about Trump’s selection of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, speaking for less than 14 minutes.

By contrast, Trump made five appearances and spoke for about two hours and 15 minutes, including a campaign rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania. See our story, “FactChecking Trump’s Weekend Claims,” for the many false and misleading claims that the president made over the weekend.

SCOTUS Nomination

In making his pitch for the Senate to delay action on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Biden gave a misleading account of Supreme Court nominees in a presidential election year.

Biden, Sept. 27: Never before in our nation’s history has a Supreme Court justice been nominated and installed while a presidential election is already underway. It defies every precedent, every expectation of a nation where the people, the people, are sovereign and the rule of law reigns.

Biden’s campaign told us that Trump should not be allowed to appoint the next Supreme Court justice because voting has already begun — which is what Biden meant when he said “while a presidential election is already underway.” It is true that early voting has started in some states.

But it is also true that five justices since 1900 were nominated and installed in an election year by four different presidents who were running for reelection. Two of them — William Taft and Herbert Hoover — lost their elections.

Amy Howe, a lawyer, detailed all instances of Supreme Court vacancies in election years since the turn of the 20th century in an article for SCOTUS Blog.

Here is the list of five justices who were nominated and installed in an election year by a president running for reelection, based on Howe’s story, as well as White House, Supreme Court and Senate records.

In every instance, the nomination was made and confirmed by members of the same party — which is the current situation with Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate. The difference, of course, is that the date of the election is much closer this year than it was for any of the nominees who were nominated and approved in the above chart.

Biden also made the curious argument that senators need to “stand up for the Constitution,” and let the next president fill the vacancy left by the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Biden: And I urge every senator to take a step back from the brink, take off the blinders on politics for just one critical moment, and stand up for the Constitution you swore to uphold. … Just because you have the power to do something doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to do right by the American people. Uphold your constitutional duty.

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the supreme Court.” Voting for or against Trump’s nominee — should Barrett clear the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation process — is upholding the Constitution.

The Biden campaign told us that the vice president believes the senators have a duty to use their constitutional power of advice and consent to block the nomination, because Trump has overreached his authority in seeking to fill a vacancy while the election is underway.

Earlier this month, we asked constitutional scholars about Biden’s claim at a speech in Philadelphia that it would be a “constitutional abuse” for a nominee to be installed on the Supreme Court this close to an election. No one said it was.

“It is not an abuse of power – the president and the Senate have that prerogative,” Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, told us.

Biden Repeats

Biden, a former senator who served as vice president under President Barack Obama from January 2009 to January 2017, also repeated some claims that we have written about before.

Aid to state/local governments. In his remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Biden distorted comments made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, claiming that McConnell said, “Let the states go bankrupt.” Biden said, correctly, that the Senate hasn’t taken up a Democratic House-passed bill to provide additional relief from the coronavirus pandemic, including to state and local governments.

As we’ve explained before, McConnell said bankruptcy should be a legal option for states facing money woes unrelated to the coronavirus, such as debt due to pension programs. The Republican senator made those remarks in an April 22 radio interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” saying: “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” when asked about states with budgetary woes predating the pandemic. McConnell, who said he wanted any additional state/local funding tied to COVID-19, made clear in subsequent interviews that he was saying bankruptcy should be “an option” and that he didn’t want any future federal aid to “fix age-old problems” in states “wholly unrelated” to the coronavirus pandemic.

Preexisting conditions. Biden misleadingly claimed that if a Trump-backed effort in court to abolish the Affordable Care Act were successful, “more than 100 million people with preexisting conditions like asthma, diabetes, and cancer could once again be denied coverage.” The figure is an estimate for the number of all Americans, outside of Medicare and Medicaid, with preexisting conditions. Without the ACA, as we’ve explained, they’d lose the preexisting condition protections in that law, but only those who seek coverage on the individual market — where those without employer or public insurance buy plans – would be at risk of being denied insurance.

The Trump administration has indeed backed a lawsuit to nullify the ACA and once specifically argued, in a 2018 letter from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, that two provisions of the law would need to be eliminated if the suit were successful: those guaranteeing that people can’t be denied coverage by insurers or charged more based on certain factors, such as health status. But Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 24 that said “access to health insurance despite underlying health conditions should be maintained” even if the ACA were struck down in court.

He said in remarks that day he would insist that any new health care legislation from Congress “must protect the preexisting conditions or I won’t sign it.” It’s unclear what specifically Trump means by preexisting condition protections. In 2017, he backed Republican bills that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections, and he misleadingly tweeted that one of the bills covered preexisting conditions, despite the fact that insurers could have priced policies based on health status in states that allowed it under the legislation.

But even if the ACA were eliminated and not replaced with something else, it’s misleading for Biden to claim 100 million people “could once again be denied coverage.” Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health. Only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market.

Employer-based coverage — where 49% of the population gets insurance — couldn’t deny insurance, before the ACA. They could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period, if a new employee had a lapse in coverage. 

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

The post FactChecking Biden’s SCOTUS Speech and Repeats appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden claimed President Donald Trump’s effort in court to nullify the Affordable Care Act would “take 100 million people with preexisting conditions and move them in a direction where they can’t get coverage.” But they wouldn’t all lose coverage, as the claim misleadingly suggests, barring highly unlikely circumstances.

The figure is an estimate for the number of Americans, outside of Medicare and Medicaid, with preexisting conditions. Without the ACA, they’d lose the preexisting condition protections in that law, but to be at risk of being denied insurance, they would have to seek coverage on the individual market, where those without employer or public insurance buy plans.

Only 6% of the population gets coverage on the individual market, while 49% have employer-based plans. 

Biden made that claim in an Aug. 27 interview on CNN. Four days later, in a speech in Pittsburgh, the former vice president repeated the figure but presented it differently, saying, “What about Trump’s plan to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and with it the protections for preexisting conditions? It impacts more than 100 million Americans.”

The Trump administration has backed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the ACA. The Supreme Court should hear arguments for that case — California v. Texas — in the fall, with a decision not expected until next year.

The ACA increased protections for those with preexisting medical conditions, so doing away with it — in the absence of any new legislation — would have repercussions. The ACA prohibited insurers, in any market, from denying coverage, charging more or excluding coverage of certain conditions based on health status.

Before the ACA, those buying plans on the individual market could face denials or higher premiums based on their health. Employer-based plans couldn’t deny insurance, before the ACA, but they could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period, if a new employee had a lapse in coverage. 

The 100 Million Figure

While the ACA greatly increased protections for those with preexisting conditions, Democrats have used estimates for the number of Americans with such conditions in misleading ways, as Biden did in his CNN interview.

Biden, Aug. 27: He’s still in court trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Going to take 100 million people with preexisting conditions and move them in a direction where they can’t get coverage.

The Biden campaign pointed us to a 2018 report by the consulting firm Avalere. It found that “102 million individuals, not enrolled in major public programs like Medicaid or Medicare, have a pre-existing medical condition and could therefore face higher premiums or significant out-of-pocket costs if the ACA’s pre-existing condition protections were repealed.”

That’s half of all Americans — beyond those with Medicaid or Medicare coverage — who have preexisting conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes and others.

Chris Sloan, associate principal at Avalere and a co-author of the 2018 report, told us it’s not as if “suddenly” 100 million people wouldn’t be able to get coverage, or would see their premiums go up, if the ACA were eliminated.

But he points out that “particularly right now due to COVID,” there are a lot of people losing their jobs, losing income or switching to other types of insurance coverage.

The Urban Institute estimated that from April to December 10.1 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage due to the COVID-19 economic downturn. Many would switch to insurance through another source, and others would become newly insured, primarily through Medicaid, leaving a net 2.9 million uninsured. 

The report estimated that about 700,000 people would join the individual market, offset by about 500,000 who would leave that market and mostly move to Medicaid coverage.

The ACA expanded Medicaid eligibility, in the 38 states, plus Washington, D.C., that chose to implement the expansion. The law “is serving as a pretty big backstop” to the people who are losing their jobs, Sloan said, more so “than at any other point in the ACA history.”

To be sure, more Americans could be seeking individual market coverage or finding themselves with a gap between employer-sponsored coverage this year or the next than would normally be expected.

The ACA’s impact on employer plans, as it pertains to preexisting conditions, “matters a lot,” Sloan said, in the current economic environment caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

As we’ve explained before, under HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, employer-sponsored plans were prohibited from denying coverage or charging higher premiums based on health status (see Section 702).

But HIPAA didn’t offer as much protection as the ACA. Employer plans could exclude coverage of certain preexisting conditions — not including pregnancy, however — for new employees for up to a year, if the workers had a gap in insurance coverage of more than 63 days. 

If a new employee had continuous coverage for at least a year before, there couldn’t be any coverage exclusions. But if the previous coverage had been for less than a year, say six months, the new plan could refuse to cover preexisting conditions for six months.

There were also complicated HIPAA protections for people moving from employer plans to the individual market. If an individual had 18 months of continuous coverage and had exhausted eligibility for COBRA — which allows individuals to stay on their previous employers’ plan if they pay the full premium — an individual market insurer couldn’t deny coverage or exclude preexisting conditions. But the insurer could charge a higher premium.

“People were certainly subjected to preexisting condition clauses and could be for up to a year,” Timothy Jost, the Robert L. Willett Family Professor of Law emeritus at Washington and Lee University School of Law, told us when we wrote about this issue in 2018. 

The ACA did away with those complex rules, instituting blanket protections against coverage exclusions or charging more based on health status.

All told, the ACA reduced the number of uninsured by about 20 million, according to a few estimates. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2017 that if the ACA were repealed and not replaced with new legislation, the uninsured would increase by 32 million over 10 years. (However, “some people would choose not to have insurance,” CBO said, because they had coverage in order to avoid a penalty. That penalty was eliminated effective in 2019.)

Trump has said he would require insurers to cover preexisting conditions, but it’s unclear what a Republican replacement plan for the ACA might be. The president backed a 2017 GOP health care bill that would lead to 24 million more uninsured in 2026, according to an analysis by the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation.

Those estimates aren’t about preexisting conditions, but they do give a sense of the impact of the ACA on the number with insurance. None of the figures is close to 100 million.

In an October 2019 report, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 27% of nonelderly adults, or 53.8 million people in 2018, had a medical condition “that would likely to have caused them to be denied coverage if they applied for non-group health insurance prior to the effective date of the ACA.” So, if the ACA protections were eliminated and if all of those people sought coverage on the individual, or nongroup, market, they could be denied coverage, according to KFF’s estimate.

The Biden campaign pointed out to us that the 100 million would be at risk of not being able to get coverage — but, again, those Americans would have to be seeking coverage on the individual market to be denied an insurance plan outright.

The post Biden Misleads on Preexisting Conditions appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

At the close of the Republican National Convention, the president distorted the facts on the economy, COVID-19, health care, the military, immigration, policing and foreign affairs:

• Trump again claimed he built the “greatest” and “strongest” economy ever. Pure poppycock. The economy has grown faster under other presidents — and so have jobs.
• Trump claimed that Biden has pledged “a $4 trillion tax hike on almost all American families.” Biden said he won’t boost income taxes for anyone making less than $400,000 a year.
• The president misleadingly claimed his administration will “further” cut drug costs and health insurance premiums. But employer-plan premiums have gone up, and so have prescription drug costs, by a metric Trump has referenced before.
• He falsely claimed that NATO allies hadn’t increased defense spending in “over 20 years.” Baloney. Combined spending by our NATO allies has gone up every year since 2015. 
• Trump said “we obliterated 100% of the ISIS caliphate” in Syria and Iraq. But half of ISIS territory was taken before Trump took office.
• The president falsely claimed he had spent “nearly $2.5 trillion” on “rebuilding our military.” The amount budgeted for procurement over four years is about $600 billion.
• He misleadingly claimed that Biden “opposed the mission to take out Osama bin Laden.” Biden said only that he wanted further confirmation that bin Laden was actually present.
• Trump falsely said Biden would “defund the police.” Biden explicitly said he doesn’t support that.
• The president falsely labeled COVID-19-related restrictions on flights into the U.S. from China and Europe as a “travel ban,” and falsely claimed the policies were put in place “very early.” A government study said the restrictions on Europe were too late to mitigate the introduction of the virus.
• Trump repeated the misleading notion that the U.S. has tested more than any other country. That’s more total COVID-19 tests, but the U.S. has done far fewer tests per confirmed case than many other countries.
• He exaggerated when he said “[w]e developed a wide array of effective treatments,” including convalescent plasma, which he claimed “will save thousands and thousands of lives.” There are only a few known treatments for COVID-19, and convalescent plasma has not yet been shown to be effective.
• The president falsely claimed that America has “among the lowest” COVID-19 case fatality rates and that Europe has “experienced a 30% greater increase in excess mortality” than the U.S. 
• Trump falsely said Biden was “talking about taking the wall down” on the border between the United States and Mexico.
• He claimed that Biden would “increase refugee admissions by 700%,” but that doesn’t account for the fact that the president has slashed the number of refugees allowed to enter the country.
• Trump claimed Democrats left “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance during the party’s convention. The pledge was recited in full each night, but left out during daytime meetings of two caucuses.
• The president falsely accused Biden of condemning rioters only after the Democratic convention. Biden repeatedly condemned violent protests before the convention.
• Trump wrongly claimed Biden promised to “close all charter schools.” Rubbish. Biden opposes funding for “for-profit” schools — about 10% of the total.

Analysis

Economy

Not the “greatest” in history: The president repeated the empty boast that he made the U.S. economy the “strongest” and “greatest” in world history — before this year’s pandemic-induced collapse.

Trump, Aug. 27: Within three short years, we built the strongest economy in the history of the world.

Trump, Aug. 27: In a new term as president, we will again build the greatest economy in history.

It’s true that the U.S. economy is still the largest in the world — but that was true under all recent presidents, and as far back as 1871 by some accounts. But “biggest” isn’t the same as “strongest” or “greatest.”

By other measures, the U.S. economy has been better under other presidents before Trump.

• Growth: When Trump took office, the U.S. economy had been growing for seven straight years. The rate did pick up modestly during his first three years, but not to any historical high, or even to the 4% to 6% rate he had promised. In fact, Trump’s best year was a 3.0% increase in real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product in 2018 — which fell just short of the 3.1% growth achieved as recently as 2015.
  
• Jobs: Total employment growth actually slowed down during Trump’s first three years. During those years nearly 6.6 million jobs were added, a more than respectable number. But nearly 8.1 million jobs had been added in the previous three years. By that measure the economy was stronger just before he took office.
• Unemployment: The unemployment rate was already well below the historical norm when Trump took office and continued dropping to the lowest rate in half a century — 3.5% as recently as February. But it’s been lower many times before. It was under 3% for 11 straight months ending in November 1953, for example.

‘Record’ job gain?: Trump claimed a “record” gain in jobs recently — failing to mention the much larger, record loss that preceded it.

Trump, Aug. 27: Over the past three months, we have gained over 9 million jobs and that’s a record in the history of our country.

That’s true as far as it goes — the gain for the last three months is actually nearly 9.3 million.

But to be truthful, Trump should have said those jobs were re-gained. They amount to less than half the nearly 22.2 million jobs lost — also a record — in February and March as a result of the pandemic.

Furthermore, the job recovery has lately lost momentum. The number of recovered jobs was 4.8 million in June but less than 1.8 million in July. At July’s rate, it will be February of 2021 before employment gets back to the peak level reached last February.

Taxes: Trump said Biden “has pledged a $4 trillion tax hike on almost all American families.” Biden’s plan does not call for any direct tax increases for anyone making less than $400,000. But independent tax analysts say Biden’s plan to raise corporate taxes will indirectly affect employees due to lower investment returns or lower wages over time.

As a result, most Americans would see a reduction in after-tax income, but “[t]he change would be small for most of those middle- and lower-income households—on average, only a fraction of a percent of their after-tax income—and we estimate that 80 percent of the new tax revenue would come from the top 1 percent by income,” according to John Ricco, a senior tax analyst at the Penn Wharton Budget Model. That analysis was the basis for a claim by Eric Trump on the second night of the convention that under Biden’s tax plan, “82% of Americans will see their taxes go up significantly.”

Biden’s tax plan includes provisions such as imposing a payroll tax on earnings over $400,000, restoring a top income tax rate of 39.6% for income above $400,000, and increasing the top corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

Ricco said that “[v]ery few families would be sending larger checks to the IRS (or having more money withheld from their paychecks) under Biden’s proposal.”

“If you’re looking only at individual income taxes and payroll taxes, we find that about 2 percent of all families would see their taxes go up directly under the Biden plan — almost all of them in the top 5 percent by income,” Ricco told us via email.

But when you include Biden’s plan to increase corporate taxes, the Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis found that “the tax plan will affect 82 percent of families,” Ricco said. “But instead of seeing their taxes go up directly, those additional families are paying the corporate tax hikes in the form of lower investment returns or lower wages over time.”

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model — which estimates the Biden tax plan would raise between $3.1 trillion and $3.7 trillion over 10 years  — middle-income earners would see their after-tax income decline by 0.4%, or $180, on average.

“To explain a bit more: because the corporate income tax is remitted by corporations and not people, economists have to make some assumptions about which people ultimately bear the burden of that tax,” Ricco said. “We assume that, in the long run, a quarter of the corporate income tax falls on workers in the form of lower wages. … So while those workers wouldn’t literally be remitting more in taxes, over time they would end up shouldering some of the burden of the tax increase.”

Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, told us via email, that “it’s more precise to say that Biden’s plan would lower the incomes of 82 percent of Americans as a result of the tax changes, but not that it would generate a larger direct tax bill for those Americans.”

Health Care

Trump claimed that his administration will “further reduce the cost of prescription drugs and health insurance premiums,” adding: “They’re coming way down.” But insurance premiums for those with employer-based plans — where nearly half of Americans get their coverage — have gone up, as they normally do.

And while there’s not one standard measure of total prescription drug costs, the metric Trump has pointed to in the past as evidence of a decrease now shows a year-over-year increase.

Premiums: The Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest annual Employer Health Benefits Survey found premiums for single coverage went up 4% from 2018 to 2019 and family coverage premiums rose 5%. That’s for employer-sponsored insurance, which covers 49% of the population.

Insurance premiums usually do go up. Figure 1.10 in the KFF report show they’ve risen each year dating back to at least 1999.

For those who buy their own coverage on what’s called the individual market — 6% of the U.S. population — the story in the past few years has been different. On the Affordable Care Act exchanges, where those who qualify can get tax credits to help cover the cost, premiums experienced “huge swings” due to “considerable turmoil” in 2018 and 2019, as an Urban Institute report put it.

Those premiums on average have gone down in 2020 (by 3.5% for the lowest-cost “silver” level premium) and 2019 (by 0.4%), but that was after a double-digit increase for 2018 plans (up 29.7%), driven by the Trump administration’s elimination of cost-sharing subsidies on the marketplaces and insurer uncertainty over the ACA’s future. When insurers set marketplace premiums for 2019, the Urban Institute’s January report said, “it became clear that many of them had overreacted to the tumult and uncertainty” in pricing 2018 plans. So, those premiums, which do “vary considerably across states,” the report noted, have now dropped.

Prescription drugs: Trump has been using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index for prescription drugs to claim drug prices decreased “last year.” But that talking point, as we’ve explained, is now outdated. The BLS metric — a measure of drug price inflation that aims to capture what consumers, along with their insurance companies or other payers, are paying for a basket of retail prescriptions — now shows a year-over-year increase for 10 months straight.

The president also touted recent executive orders he signed concerning drug prices, saying they “will massively lower the cost of your prescription drugs.” But it’s uncertain what the impact of those orders will be, as we’ve written.

The orders, which largely revive past administration proposals, require the Health and Human Services secretary to take various actions, such as moving through the federal rule-making process. Two of the orders pertain only to Medicare beneficiaries, one of which is still subject to negotiation with pharmaceutical companies and pertains to only a certain class of drugs. 

Preexisting conditions: Trump also proclaimed: “We will always and very strongly protect patients with preexisting conditions, and that is a pledge from the entire Republican Party.” It’s worth noting Trump in 2017 backed Republican plans that would have weakened the preexisting condition protections in the Affordable Care Act.

COVID-19

Travel restrictions: In the space of two sentences, the president made five false or misleading claims about what he wrongly called his “travel ban” on flights from China and Europe.

Trump, Aug. 27: When I took bold action to issue a travel ban on China, very early indeed, Joe Biden called it hysterical and xenophobic. And then I introduced the ban on Europe very early, again.

The travel restrictions on flights from China that Trump put in place on Feb. 2 were not a “ban.” There were exceptions for U.S. citizens, permanent residents and the immediate family members of both. And he did not impose the restrictions on flights from China “very early indeed.” As we have reported, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions by Feb. 2.

Similarly, the travel restrictions on flights from Europe were not a ban. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the travel policy applied only to “the entry of most foreign nationals who have been in certain European countries,” and also did not apply to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, and their immediate family members. (The emphasis is ours.)

The travel restrictions on Europe also weren’t “very early.” In fact, a CDC study found that those restrictions were implemented too late to mitigate the introduction of the virus. They were implemented on March 13; by March 15, the CDC report says, “community transmission was widespread in New York City.”

It is also a matter of dispute as to whether Biden described the travel restrictions on flights from China as “xenophobic.” At a campaign event, Biden did use the term “xenophobia” on the day the White House announced the travel restrictions, but he did not mention the travel restrictions in that speech. The Biden campaign says Biden’s “reference to xenophobia was about Trump’s long record of scapegoating others at a time when the virus was emerging from China,” and that he was not talking about the travel ban.

About two months after the travel restrictions took effect, Biden’s campaign said its candidate supported Trump’s decision to impose travel restrictions on flights from China.

Testing: As he has before, Trump bragged about America’s ability to test and diagnose coronavirus infections.

“We developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system anywhere in the world,” he said. “America has tested more than every country in Europe put together, and more than every nation in the Western Hemisphere combined, think of that. We have conducted 40 million more tests than the next closest nation, which is India.”

According to Worldometer, the U.S. has performed more than 79 million coronavirus tests as of Aug. 28, which is more than Europe’s collective total of 78 million (excluding Russia) as well as the rest of the Western hemisphere (35 million). China, however, purports to have done the most tests, with 90 million.

Trump’s focus on total tests obscures the fact that the U.S. has tested far fewer people than other nations given the size of the American epidemic. On the number of tests performed per confirmed COVID-19 case — a better metric for understanding how well a country is doing in testing — the U.S. lags behind much of the world, per data from Oxford University’s Our World in Data.

As of Aug. 25, or around that date, the U.S. has done only 13 tests per confirmed case, which is well below many countries that have received plaudits for their testing, such as New Zealand (530), Australia (233), Taiwan (177), South Korea (99) and Iceland (42). It’s also below the level of Denmark (137), Norway (73), Finland (61), Canada (41), Germany (45), the U.K. (39), Russia (37), Italy (19) and Spain (15), among others.

On a per capita basis, the U.S. also doesn’t lead on testing, as Bahrain, Denmark, Iceland, Russia, Australia and Lithuania all have done more tests given the size of their populations than the U.S.

Testing itself is also not enough to control an epidemic — it depends on how that information is used, including whether contact tracing efforts can prevent further spread of the disease, which has been hampered by testing delays.

Treatments: The president proceeded to boast about progress on finding therapeutics for COVID-19, inaccurately claiming there are many treatment options that have been shown to be effective — and prematurely concluding that convalescent plasma would save many lives.

“We developed a wide array of effective treatments, including a powerful antibody treatment known as convalescent plasma,” he said. “You saw that on Sunday night when we announced it, that will save thousands and thousands of lives.”

In fact, there are no Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs to treat COVID-19, although physicians can provide supportive care and two drugs have shown benefits in randomized controlled trials in particular patients. 

An antiviral drug, remdesivir, was found to reduce the recovery time, compared with a placebo, in patients who required supplemental oxygen but were not ventilated. The steroid dexamethasone was shown in a U.K. trial to improve survival, but only in patients who were sick enough to need supplemental oxygen.

Contrary to the president’s claim, convalescent plasma has not yet been shown to be beneficial in a randomized controlled trial, although observational studies suggest it may reduce mortality.

As we have written, Trump made the same error during an Aug. 23 briefing announcing that the FDA was issuing an emergency use authorization for the treatment. Citing the results from a Mayo Clinic study, Trump incorrectly said that plasma had been “proven to reduce mortality by 35%” — even though those results did not come from a randomized controlled trial and did not compare plasma against a placebo.

Mortality: Trump has long been preoccupied with the U.S.’s COVID-19 mortality statistics and how they compare with other nations. But as he has done in the past, he overstated how well the U.S. has done to prevent deaths from the coronavirus.

“The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates of any major country anywhere in the world,” he said, referring to the proportion of people who die out of those who are known to be infected. “The European Union’s case fatality rate is nearly three times higher than ours. But you don’t hear that, they don’t write about that, they don’t want to write about that, they don’t want you to know those things.”

“Altogether, the nations of Europe have experienced a 30% greater increase in excess mortality than the United States,” he continued. “Think of that.”

Our World in Data shows that the European Union’s case fatality rate is 7.8%, which is about 2.5 times higher than the U.S.’s 3.1% rate. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. is leading the world.

Although it’s not known how the president is defining a “major country,” the U.S. has the 11th highest case fatality rate out of the 20 countries currently most affected by COVID-19, and the 51st highest case fatality rate out of 169 countries, according to Johns Hopkins University.

That’s better than many European countries, but worse than Austria, Greece, Norway, Australia, South Africa, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and Israel.

Notably, the U.S. fares much worse on deaths per capita, since the case fatality rate depends on testing and favors countries such as the U.S. that were hit later and have ongoing pandemics.

Trump is also wrong that Europe has 30% more excess mortality than the U.S. He has said this before using other percentages — first it was 40%, then 33% — but even with the further lowered number, it’s still groundless.

As we wrote, the latest figures for estimates of excess mortality may show that Europe has more excess deaths in total, but when accounting for population or how much mortality is elevated above normal, it’s the U.S. — not Europe — that does worse.

In our analysis using data from the Human Mortality Database, we found U.S. mortality to be 13.3% higher than normal for the year, versus 10.1% for Europe.

Experts also told us that comparing the U.S. to Europe on excess mortality was both premature and misguided, given that the virus arrived in America later, the U.S. has a younger, less dense population and the U.S. epidemic is still ongoing.

University of Oxford economists Janine Aron and John Muellbauer said a better comparison would be to pit the Northeastern U.S. against the worst-affected European countries. In their analysis of that matchup, they found the U.S. to be “substantially worse” than Europe on all plausible measures of excess mortality.

Military, Foreign Affairs

ISIS caliphate: Trump took too much credit for recapturing territory controlled by ISIS in Syria and Iraq when he said “we obliterated 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

As we have written before, the analytics and consultancy firm IHS Markit estimated that the ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria covered about 35,000 square miles near its height in January 2015. By the time Trump took office in January 2017, ISIS-controlled territory had shrunk to about 23,300 square miles.

At the end of Trump’s first year in office, Brett McGurk, who at the time was the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, said that about 98% of the land had been recaptured by coalition forces. “And significantly,” McGurk said, “50 percent of all the territory that ISIS has lost, they have lost in the last 11 months, since January.”

So, the Trump administration was clearly not responsible for taking back all of the ISIS-controlled territory.

Military spending and pay: As he has in the past, the president falsely claimed that his administration has “spent nearly $2.5 trillion on completely rebuilding our military, which was very badly depleted when I took office.”

Trump’s $2.5 trillion figure roughly refers to the total amount of Defense Department budgets from 2017 to 2020 — which actually totaled $2.9 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Procurement of new equipment made up 20.3% of those 2017-2020 defense budgets, or $590.7 billion. That’s 5.8% lower than the 2009-2012 budgets, which covered President Barack Obama’s first term in office. 

Trump also boasted, once again, about providing “three separate pay raises for our great warriors” in the military. But basic military pay raises are set by a statutory formula, which is “linked to the increase in private-sector wages, as measured by the Employment Cost Index,” as the Defense Department website says.

Trump has asked Congress to provide the amounts set by that formula in three of his four budgets, according to the Congressional Research Service and the White House fiscal 2021 budget proposal. In his first budget, Trump proposed an increase of 2.1% — less than the 2.4% level set by the statutory formula for fiscal year 2018. Congress overrode Trump and provided the full military pay hike, according to CRS. 

NATO: The president got several things wrong when talking about defense spending by countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Our NATO partners, as an example, were very far behind in their defense payments. But at my strong urging, they agreed to pay $130 billion more a year. The first time in over 20 years that they upped their payments,” he said. “And this $130 billion will ultimately go to $400 billion a year.”

Trump has long mischaracterized what alliance members spend on their own defense spending as a “payment” to NATO; it’s not. Nor are the majority of NATO countries required to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense spending in the first place.

In 2006, NATO members agreed to try to spend at least that percentage of their economic output on defense spending, and in 2014, they agreed again to aim to meet that standard by 2024. For most countries, it’s a “guideline” — not a mandate.

It’s not true that Canada and European NATO allies agreed to increase their defense spending by $130 billion more a year. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that’s an estimate of how much more those countries would collectively spend on defense from 2016 to 2020 — not per year. And those nations together are projected to spend $400 billion more on defense by the end of 2024 — not annually.

It’s also not the case that defense spending by other NATO members hasn’t been “upped” in two decades. After years of decreases, combined defense spending by non-U.S. NATO members has increased every year since 2015 — two years before Trump assumed office.

Biden on Osama bin Laden mission: Trump said that Biden “voted for the Iraq War” and “opposed the mission to take out Osama bin Laden.” Biden’s position on going to war with Iraq was complex and nuanced, though Biden did vote in favor of an authorization of military force, a vote he later said was a mistake. As for the mission to target bin Laden, Biden said he opposed the timing of the operation, and suggested that the raid should be delayed in order to take further steps to confirm bin Laden was at the compound in Pakistan.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden voted in 2002 to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. As we wrote when Biden wrongly claimed in September 2019 that he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began, Biden was a consistent critic of the way the Bush administration handled the war. Some of his comments proved to be quite prescient, including his warnings about the likely higher-than-expected cost and length of the war, and the complexity of “winning the peace” once Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled.

In the days and weeks before and after the war started, Biden said that while the hope was that the use of force resolution could be used to leverage further inspections, he also acknowledged it was a vote for the possibility of war.

We should note that while Trump has repeatedly claimed that he publicly opposed the Iraq War before the March 19, 2003, invasion, we could find no evidence that he ever did. In a 2002 radio interview with Howard Stern, Trump said “I guess so” when asked if he supported going to war.

As for Trump’s Osama bin Laden claim, as we wrote when Vice President Mike Pence made the same claim, Biden said he suggested that the raid should be delayed, not scrapped altogether.

Back in January, we looked into various — and sometimes conflicting — accounts that Biden has provided about his advice to Obama about whether to move forward with the raid to kill bin Laden.

Several weeks after the raid, at a time when Obama was gearing up for a reelection campaign, the New York Times on May 26, 2011, reported that Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser in late May 2011 “that he and others had counseled Mr. Obama to be more careful and cautious about the raid” and that he told Obama to “wait another seven days for information.”

At a House Democrats’ annual retreat in January 2012, Biden said that at the April 2011 national security team meeting, he told Obama “my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.”

In May 2012, during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Biden added a new twist to his account, saying that after the team meeting, he privately told Obama, “’Follow your instincts, Mr. President. Your instincts have been close to unerring. Follow your instincts.’ I wanted him to take one more day to do one more test to see if he was there.” Three years later, in 2015, Biden said he privately told Obama, “that I thought he should go, but follow his own instincts.”

We can’t confirm what Biden may have told Obama privately. But even the opinion he gave at the security team meeting — that Obama should wait (a version that was corroborated by others at the meeting) — is not the same as opposing the operation outright.

Policing

Trump baselessly said that a Biden administration would mean “defund[ed] police departments all across America” and a country in which “no one” would be safe. But Biden has said that he opposes “defunding the police,” and Trump has presented no evidence to suggest life under Biden would be more dangerous.

Trump, Aug. 27: The most dangerous aspect of the Biden platform is the attack on public safety. … When asked if he supports cutting police funding, Joe Biden replied, “Yes, absolutely.” … Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America. They will pass federal legislation to reduce law enforcement nationwide. … No one will be safe in Biden’s America.

Trump also said, “the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and New York,” and his campaign ads have suggested such mayhem would be prevalent should Biden make it to the White House. But it’s important to remember that the violence, often in the aftermath of police shootings of African Americans, is occurring on Donald Trump’s watch, not Joe Biden’s.

As we have written, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly and falsely claimed that a Biden administration would eviscerate law enforcement, with Americans subjected to mayhem in the streets and unanswered

Biden has said on a number of occasions that he is opposed to defunding the police, and a Biden spokesman told us the Democratic nominee supports more funding for police for some functions, such as initiatives to strengthen community relationships and for body-worn cameras.

Biden wrote in an op-ed in USA Today on June 10, “While I do not believe federal dollars should go to police departments violating people’s rights or turning to violence as the first resort, I do not support defunding police. The better answer is to give police departments the resources they need to implement meaningful reforms, and to condition other federal dollars on completing those reforms.”

It’s worth noting the federal government pays a small percentage of law enforcement expenses. According to a backgrounder by the Urban Institute, 86% of police funding in 2017 was from local governments, with additional money ponied up by state governments.

The “Yes, absolutely” comment was also cited by Vice President Mike Pence in his address at the convention on Aug. 26. Here is the context for that remark.

In a July 8 interview with progressive activist Ady Barkan about police reforms, Biden was asked about shifting some funding from police to social service agencies for tasks that could be better handled by the latter. “Yes, absolutely,” Biden responded. But as we said, he would support additional funding in some categories.

In a segment of the interview that didn’t appear on YouTube, Biden said he supports reforms, but “that’s not the same as getting rid of or defunding all the police.”(The Washington Post Fact Checker obtained audio of the full conversation.)

Both Biden and Trump have expressed support for the idea of social workers and mental health personnel joining forces with police in some cases, as we’ve explained.

As we’ve written, there is no agreed upon definition for the term “defund the police.” Some critics of the police really do want to abolish police forces as we know them and replace them with other forms of community safety entities. Others advocate shifting some money and functions away from police departments to social service agencies. But in campaign ads and verbal attacks on Biden, Republicans generally use the term to mean devastating budget cuts for law enforcement, something Biden clearly opposes.

Immigration

Trump’s border wall. Trump falsely said that Biden is “even talking about taking the wall down” along the border between the United States and Mexico that the president has so vigorously championed.

That is not the case. As we have written, both a Biden campaign position paper and a list of recommendations drafted by allies of Biden and his vanquished rival Sen. Bernie Sanders call for getting rid of the “national emergency” designation that allows the use of Defense Department funds for the fencing that the Trump administration is erecting. But neither document says anything about tearing down what has already been built.

A wall on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants trying to illegally cross was a major campaign issue in 2016 for Trump and a frequent rallying cry since.

Trump also gave a misleading statistic for how much of the wall has been built. “We have already built 300 miles of border wall,” he said. But as we have written, very few of those miles are new construction.

According to an Aug. 7 story in the San Antonio Express-News, only five miles of new fencing have been constructed. The paper said 260 miles of replacement and secondary walls have been built. The border is about 2,000 miles. The paper said its story was based on data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Refugees: In blasting the Democrats’ approach to immigration, Trump said that Biden had “pledged to increase refugee admissions by 700%.”

But that doesn’t account for the fact that Trump has slashed the number of refugees allowed into the country since he took office.

The last refugee cap set by Obama was for fiscal year 2017 — it allowed for 110,000 refugees to enter the country. The following year, Trump cut the number by more than half, to 45,000. In fiscal year 2019 he cut it further, to 30,000, and, finally, in fiscal year 2020 he set the ceiling at 18,000.

That’s the lowest number since the U.S. refugee admissions program began in 1980.

So, it’s true that Biden’s platform calling for an initial cap of 125,000 is an increase — it’s actually about 600% higher than the current cap — but it’s only about 14% higher than the number set before Trump took office.

Other Attacks on Biden, Dems

Pledge of Allegiance: Trump repeated a misleading claim he first made on Twitter shortly after the Democratic National Convention. He told the crowd gathered at the White House, “During the Democrat Convention, the words ‘Under God’ were removed from the Pledge of Allegiance – not once, but twice.”

Actually, the pledge was recited in full each night of the convention.

The words “under God” were omitted at the start of daytime meetings for two caucuses, though. That appears to be the source of the claim.

Interestingly, the president got it right on the first day of his party’s convention, when he said, “I can promise you a few things, number one, we will not be taking the word ‘God’ out of the Pledge of Allegiance, like they did a number of times at their caucuses.”

But on Aug. 27, Trump reverted to the misleading version of the claim in a night heavy with cultural references.

Abortion: Repeating a version of a claim made by several GOP convention speakers, Trump said: “Joe Biden claims he has empathy for the vulnerable, yet the party he leads supports the extreme late-term abortion of defenseless babies right up until the moment of birth.”

As we’ve already written this week, many Democrats, including Biden, call for codifying into federal law the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. That decision says that states cannot interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion before the end of the first trimester, but can regulate or prohibit abortions once a fetus becomes viable outside the womb.

Most states ban abortion at a certain point in the pregnancy, with exceptions to protect the mother’s life. In 2016, the most recent data available, only 1.2% of abortions were done after 21 weeks.

Condemning rioters: Trump misleadingly claimed that “Biden and his supporters” only began to condemn rioters after the Democratic convention “because their poll numbers are going down like a rock in water. It’s too late, Joe.” Although he did not mention it in his convention speech, Biden repeatedly condemned violent protests prior to the convention.

Trump, Aug. 27: During their convention, Joe Biden and his supporters remained completely silent about the rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities. They never even mentioned it during their entire convention. Never once mentioned. Now they’re starting to mention it because their poll numbers are going down like a rock in water. It’s too late, Joe.

Trump appeared to be referring to a video Biden posted on Twitter on Aug. 26 in which the Democratic presidential nominee responded to the Aug. 23 shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The shooting sparked chaotic and at times violent protests. That all unfolded after Biden spoke at the Democratic convention.

“You know, as I said after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary,” Biden said. “But burning down communities is not protest, it’s needless violence, violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community. That’s wrong.”

That was not the first time Biden has spoken out against rioters. After the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 and the ensuing protests in cities around the country — some of which turned violent or involved looting — Biden did condemn violent protests.

“I say they have a right to be in fact angry and frustrated,” Biden said in an interview on CNN on May 29. “And more violence, hurting more people, isn’t going to answer the question.”

Biden also released a statement, widely reported in the media, in which he said, “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not. The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest. It should not drive people away from the just cause that protest is meant to advance.”

In remarks on racial economic equity on July 28, Biden reiterated that message.

“I’ve said from the outset of the recent protests that there is no place for violence or the destruction of property,” Biden said. “Peaceful protesters should be protected — but arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted — and local law enforcement can do that.”

School choice: Trump wrongly claimed Biden “vowed to oppose school choice and close all charter schools, ripping away the ladder of opportunity for Black and Hispanic children.”

As we have written, Biden opposes federal funding going to “for-profit charter schools,” but schools managed by for-profit companies make up only a fraction of charter schools — about 10%, according to a researcher for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

And while Biden opposes vouchers for private school tuition — the ultimate in school choice for some — he does not oppose students choosing between public schools, magnet schools and high-performing charter schools.

According to a statement provided by a Biden campaign official to FactCheck.org in July, “VP Biden will do everything he can to help traditional public schools, which is what most students attend. As president, he will ban for-profit charter schools from receiving federal funds. He will also make sure that we stop funding charter schools that don’t provide results.” The campaign added that Biden “does not oppose districts letting parents choose to send their children to … high-performing public charters.”

Editor’s Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Sources

Robertson, Lori et. al. “FactChecking Trump’s Weekend Press Briefings.” FactCheck.org. 10 Aug 2020.

Kiely, Eugene et. al. “FactChecking Trump’s ‘Fox News Sunday’ Interview.” FactCheck.org. 20 Jul 2020.

Robertson, Lori and Kiely, Eugene. “Testing, By the Numbers.” FactCheck.org. 12 May 2020.

“COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic.” Worldometer. Accessed 28 Aug 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “How Many COVID-19 Tests Are ‘Needed’ to Reopen?” FactCheck.org. 8 May 2020.

“Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer.” Our World in Data. Accessed 28 Aug 2020.

Ducharme, Jamie. “Patients Are Waiting Weeks for COVID-19 Test Results. Here’s Why That’s a Huge Problem.” Time. 22 July 2020.

“COVID-19 Frequently Asked Questions.” U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Accessed 28 Aug 2020.

“Remdesivir.” NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines. Last updated 24 Jul 2020.

“Corticosteroids.” NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines. Last updated 27 Aug 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump, Hahn Mischaracterize Data on COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

Kiely, Eugene et. al. “Trump’s Talking Points.” FactCheck.org. 24 Aug 2020.

“Mortality Analyses.” Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. Last updated 27 Aug 2020.

McDonald, Jessica. “Trump Touts Misleading and Flawed Excess Mortality Statistic.” FactCheck.org. 24 Aug 2020.

Aron, Janine, et. al. “A pandemic primer on excess mortality statistics and their comparability across countries.” Our World in Data. 29 June 2020.

Aron, Janine and John Muellbauer. “Transatlantic excess mortality comparisons in the pandemic.” 25 Aug 2020.

Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). “The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention. At first I thought they made a mistake, but it wasn’t. It was done on purpose. Remember Evangelical Christians, and ALL, this is where they are coming from-it’s done. Vote Nov 3!” Twitter. 22 Aug 2020.

Fichera, Angelo. “Misleading Claim Swirls Over Pledge of Allegiance at DNC.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

“Speech: Donald Trump Addresses the Republican National Convention in Charlotte – August 24, 2020.” Factbase Videos. YouTube. 24 Aug 2020.

“2019 Employer Health Benefits Survey.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 25 Sep 2019.

Holahan, John , et. al. “Marketplace Premiums and Insurer Participation: 2017 – 2020.” Urban Institute. Jan 2020.

Robertson, Lori. “Bloomberg, Trump Spar on Preexisting Conditions.” FactCheck.org. 14 Jan 2020.

Robertson, Lori. “Trump’s Executive Orders on Prescription Drugs.” FactCheck.org. 31 Jul 2020.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “Trump’s False Claims at NATO.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jul 2018.

Gore, D’Angelo. “Trump Still Distorting NATO Spending.” FactCheck.org. 9 Jul 2018.

NATO. “Funding NATO.” Nato.int. 5 May 2020, accessed 28 Aug 2020.

NATO. “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2013-2019).” 29 Nov 2019.

Guttmacher Institute. “State Bans on Abortion Throughout Pregnancy, As of August 1, 2020.” Accessed 27 Aug 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015.” 23 Nov 2018.

Obama, Barack. Presidential Determination — Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2017. 28 Sep 2016.

Trump, Donald. Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2020. 1 Nov 2019.

“Refugee Admissions and Resettlement Policy.” Congressional Research Service. 18 Dec 2018.

Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations. Joebiden.com. Accessed 28 Aug 2020.

Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s False, Recurring Claim About Biden’s Stance on Police.” FactCheck.org. 21 Jul 2020.

Rieder, Rem. “Trump’s Deceptive Ad on Biden and Defunding the Police.“ FactCheck.org. 12 Jun 2020.

“Police and Corrections Expenditures.” Urban Institute. accessed 26 Aug 2020.

Biden, Joe. “We must urgently root out systemic racism, from policing to housing to opportunity.” USA Today. 11 Jun 2020.

“Biden says federal aid to police should be based on meeting ‘basic standards of decency.'” cbsnews.com 9 Jun 2020.

Jackson, Brooks et. al. “Republican Convention Night 3.” FactCheck.org. 26 Aug 2020.

“Joe Biden’s Emotional Conversation with Activist Ady Barkan.” YouTube.com. 8 Jul 2020.

“The Biden Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice,” joebiden.com. accessed 27 Aug 2020.

“Executive Order on Safe Policing for Safe Communities.” whitehouse.gov. 16 Jun 2020.

Rieder, Rem et. al. “Trump Distorts Biden’s Immigration Plans.” FactCheck.org. 15 Jul 2020.

“The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants.” joebiden.com. accessed 28 Aug 2020.

“Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.”  joebiden.com. accessed 28 Aug 2020

Foster-Frau, Silvia. “Border wall: Hundreds of miles funded, 5 new miles built.” San Antonio Express-News. 7 Aug 2020.

White House. “Press Briefing by Members of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force.” 31 Jan 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump, Biden Spin China Travel Restrictions.” FactCheck.org. 6 Apr 2020.

Department of Homeland Security. “Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad F. Wolf’s Statement on Presidential Proclamation To Protect the Homeland from Travel-Related Coronavirus Spread.” Press release. 11 Mar 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Detection and Genetic Characterization of Community-Based SARS-CoV-2 Infections — New York City, March 2020.” 17 Jul 2020.

Hunnicutt, Trevor. “Biden slams Trump for cutting health programs before coronavirus outbreak.” Reuters. 31 Jan 2020.

Tapper, Jake. “Biden campaign says he backs Trump’s China travel ban.” CNN. 3 Apr 2020.

“Islamic State Territory Down 60 Percent and Revenue Down 80 Percent on Caliphate’s Third Anniversary, IHS Markit Says.” Press release. IHS Markit. 29 Jun 2017.

Department of State. “Update on D-ISIS Campaign.” Transcript. 21 Dec 2017.

Robertson, Lori. “Trump’s False Military Equipment Claim.” FactCheck.org 2 Jul 2020.

Department of Defense. “National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 2021.” Apr 2020.

Department of Defense. “Annual Pay Adjustment.” Undated, accessed 28 Aug 2020.

Kapp, Lawrence. “Defense Primer: Military Pay Raise.” Congressional Research Service. 6 Jan 2020.

Department of Defense. “Defense Budget Overview.” 13 May 2020.

World Bank. “GDP (current US$).” Data accessed 28 Aug 2020.

Silver, Caleb. “The Top 20 Economies in the World.” Investopedia. 18 Mar 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); Total Nonfarm Employment, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 28 Aug 2020.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “Table 1.1.1. Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Gross Domestic Product.” Interactive data extracted 28 Aug 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey; Unemployment Rate, Seasonally Adjusted.” Data extracted 28 Aug 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Twists Biden’s Position on School Choice/Charter Schools.” FactCheck.org. 21 Jul 2020.

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “CMO and EMO Public Charter Schools: A Growing Phenomenon in the Charter School Sector Public Charter Schools Dashboard Data from 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10.”

Manchester, Julia. “Biden: ISIS leader killed despite Trump’s ‘ineptitude’ as commander in chief.” The Hill. 28 Oct 2019.

Farley, Robert. “Biden’s Position on Osama bin Laden Raid.” FactCheck.org. 08 Jan 2020.

NBC News. Transcripts on May 6: Joe Biden, Kelly Ayotte, Diane Swonk, Tom Brokaw, Chuck Todd. 06 May 2012.

CNN. Transcript: The Situation Room. 29 May 2020.

Biden/Harris campaign website. “Remarks by Joe Biden on George Floyd and the Unfolding Situation in Minnesota.” 29 May 2020.

Larsen, Emily. “Protesting is ‘necessary’ but ‘needless destruction is not’: Biden condemns violence around country.” Washington Examiner. 31 May 2020.

Balluck, Kyle. “Biden: ‘We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us’.” The Hill. 31 May 2020.

Biden/Harris campaign website. “Remarks from Joe Biden on Racial Economic Equity.” 28 Jul 2020.

Farley, Robert. “Trump Distorts Biden’s Tax Plan.” FactCheck.org. 13 May 2020.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “The Updated Biden Tax Plan: Budgetary, Distributional, and Economic Effects.” 10 Mar 2020.

Li, Huaqun, Watson, Garrett, and LaJoie, Taylor. “Details and Analysis of Former Vice President Biden’s Tax Proposals.” Tax Foundation. 29 Apr 2020.

The post Final Night of the Republican Convention appeared first on FactCheck.org.