Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in his conversation with Elon Musk
Former President Donald Trump delivered his usual bombardment of false claims – at least 20 in all – during a Monday conversation with billionaire supporter Elon Musk, which aired on Musk’s social media platform, X.
Most of the falsehoods uttered by the Republican presidential nominee were claims that have been repeatedly debunked before, some of them for years. They spanned a broad range of subjects, from immigration to the economy to foreign policy to Trump’s record in office to Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Here is a fact check:
Crime
Trump claimed, “Our crime rate’s going through the roof.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024.
There are limitations to the FBI-published data from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data and the submitted data usually has some errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent.
The preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% decline in murder and a roughly 6% decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in Trump’s last calendar year in office in 2020. The preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said earlier this year that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”
After Trump claimed in June that “crime is so much up,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces. She said: “It would be more accurate to say that crime is so much down.”
Inflation
Trump said, “I think we have the worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years. They say it’s 48 years, I don’t believe it.”
Facts First: Trump framed this as an opinion, but it’s baseless nonetheless – wrong in two different ways. First, even when the inflation rate hit its Biden-era peak of 9.1% in June 2022, that 9.1% rate was the highest since 1981 – between 40 and 41 years prior, certainly not “100 years” and not even “48 years.” Second, inflation has declined sharply since the June 2022 peak, and the most recent available rate at the time he spoke, for July 2024, was 3.2% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Global warming and sea levels
Trump argued that the threat of the nuclear war is far more important than the threat posed by climate change. And he said: “The biggest threat? It’s not global warming, where the ocean’s gonna rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”
Facts First: Trump’s claim about the pace of sea-level rise is wildly inaccurate. The global average sea level is currently rising more per year than Trump claimed that it will rise in 400 years.
NASA reported in March that the current global average sea-level rise in 2023 was 0.17 inches per year, more than double the rate in 1993. And a World Meteorological Organization report this year said the rate of sea level rise between 2014 and 2023 was about 0.19 inches per year.
In other words, sea level rise is already more than an eighth of an inch annually – and it is accelerating. NASA found a jump of 0.3 inches between 2022 and 2023.
Gary Griggs, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor of earth and planetary sciences who studies sea-level rise, said last year that Trump’s similar claims “can only be described as totally out of touch with reality” and that Trump “has no idea what he is talking about.”
Sea levels rise by different amounts in different locations. For the US, sea levels are expected to rise particularly fast for the east coast and Gulf of Mexico coast – and Trump’s state of Florida, which is bordered by both of those coasts, is expected to be affected more severely than many other coastal states.
In fact, Trump’s claims about sea levels are highly inaccurate for the area near Mar-a-Lago, which is on the Atlantic. Griggs noted in a June email that data from the closest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tide gauge to Mar-a-Lago shows an increase of an eighth of an inch roughly every nine months.
Trump has also previously made the joke about rising seas creating more oceanfront property. In reality, rising sea levels are expected to have devastating consequences not only for many seafront properties but for areas further inland – rendering some communities uninhabitable and others more dangerous, increasing the frequency and reach of flooding, making hurricanes more destructive and damaging infrastructure and ecosystems.
The number of people listening to the conversation
Trump told Musk that “you got a lot of people listening” to the conversation – “like 60 million or something.” He then asked somebody what the number was, but he never corrected his initial estimate.
Facts First: Trump did express uncertainty about the number, but his “like 60 million or something” claim is false. At the time he made this remark, public data on X showed that there were 1.1 million accounts listening to the conversation.
Trump appeared to be referring to something different: the number of views on his own X post sharing the “space” where the conversation was played. But the vast majority of the accounts that viewed the post did not actually listen to the conversation.
Harris and prisoners
Trump claimed of Harris: “She wants to release all the prisoners that are in detention, and some of these guys are really bad. That just came out today.”
Facts First: This is false. There is no basis for the claim that Harris “wants to release all the prisoners that are in detention.” Trump appeared to be referring to news stories in conservative media that reported that Harris had said in 2019, while unsuccessfully running in the Democratic presidential primary, that she wanted to close privately-run immigration detention centers.
Even if Harris continues to hold this position today – she has not addressed the subject since she began her presidential campaign in July – closing privately-run immigration detention centers would not result in the release of “all” prisoners in immigration detention, let alone all prisoners in regular US jails and prisons; Trump did not specify that he was talking about Harris’ past stance on certain immigration detention facilities rather than all prisons.
It’s possible Trump had been misled himself; a short clip shared by some Republicans on social media this week did not include the part of Harris’ 2019 remarks where she specified that she was referring to privately run immigration detention facilities in particular.
But articles by Fox News and The New York Post correctly noted that this was what she said.
Harris’ immigration role
Trump claimed of Harris: “She was the border czar, and people can’t allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign. Now, she’s saying she wasn’t really involved … she was totally in charge.”
Facts First: This is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate, and was never “totally in charge” of the border; Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.
Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong. Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries.
A White House “fact sheet” in July 2021 said: “On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy.
Since March, Vice President Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries (he also mentioned Mexico that day). Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.”
Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far.
Venezuela, crime and migration
Trump claimed: “Venezuela – their crime is down 72%. They’re taking their drug dealers.
They’re taking – frankly, their prisoners, they’re emptying out their prisons. They’re taking their criminals, their murderers, their rapists and they’re delivering them…”
Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available. And while it is certain that at least some criminals have joined law-abiding Venezuelans in a mass exodus from the country amid the economic crisis of the last decade, there is no proof Venezuela has deliberately emptied prisons for migration purposes or intentionally sent ex-prisoners to the United States.
Right-wing website Breitbart published a vague 2022 article about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about freed violent prisoners from Venezuela who had then joined migrant caravans. But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated; experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence in the country, said in an email to CNN in June.
Venezuela’s government does not publish reliable official crime statistics, so it’s hard to get a complete picture. But Briceño-León’s group publishes annual data on violent deaths, which includes homicides, police killings and deaths still under investigation. It found a decline of roughly 26% in the number of violent deaths from 2021 to 2023.
That’s substantial, but not “72%.” Briceño-León noted in his email that you could find a decline of roughly 70% by 2023 if you compared 2018 to 2023 – but Trump was US president until early 2021.
And crime trends in any country always have a complex mix of causes; Venezuela is no exception. Briceño-León argued that while migration has been a factor in the decline, crime has dropped in large part because the economic crisis has reduced opportunities for crime.
“Bank robberies disappear because there is no money to rob; kidnappings decrease because there is no cash to pay the ransoms; robberies on public transportation stop because travelers have no money in their pockets and old cell phones [with] no value,” he said.
Migration numbers
While talking about illegal immigration, Trump claimed that, under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “you have millions of people coming in a month.”
Facts First: This is false. There has not been any month under the Biden-Harris administration where even close to “millions” of people entered the country illegally. In the peak month during this administration for what the government calls border “encounters,” December 2023, there were 370,890 encounters nationwide. Even if you factor in so-called “gotaways,” people who evaded the Border Patrol to sneak into the country, there is no basis for the claim that “millions” of people are entering in a single month.
The number of nationwide encounters was 205,019 in June, the last month for which data is currently available to the public.
Migration numbers, part two
Trump said of migration under Biden and Harris: “I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country, many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums.”
Facts First: Trump’s “20 million” figure is false, a major exaggeration. The total number of “encounters” nationwide from February 2021 through June 2024, at both legal ports of entry and in between those ports, was about 10 million – and an “encounter” does not mean a person was let into the country; some people encountered are promptly sent away. In addition, there is no basis for Trump’s claim that “many” of these migrants have come in from jails, prisons or mental health facilities.
Even if you added the estimated number of Biden-era “gotaways” (people who evaded the Border Patrol to enter illegally), which House Republicans said in May was nearly two million, “the totals would still be vastly smaller than 15, 16 or 18 million,” Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute think tank, said in late June after Trump used those figures.
The “encounters” figures can’t be described as figures on people successfully entering the US. Some encounters involve people who are deemed inadmissible at legal ports and are refused permission to enter. Also, the same person can be “encountered” multiple times if they keep returning to the border to try again – which is what happened in many cases under Biden when the Title 42 rapid-expulsion authority invoked by Trump during the Covid-19 pandemic was in place into May 2023.
In 2023, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung cited one source for Trump’s claim about prisons being emptied for migration purposes – the Breitbart article that has not been corroborated. Even if Venezuela in particular had indeed freed prisoners to allow people to try to migrate to the US, that would be insufficient proof for Trump’s claim that some substantial number of Biden-era migrants are from prisons.
Migration and ‘the Congo’
Trump repeated a claim he has made before about “the Congo” and migration, again without specifying whether he was referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo or the neighboring Republic of Congo.
He said: “From Africa, from the Congo they’re coming, from the Congo. And, 22 people came in from the Congo recently and they’re murderers. And they drop ‘em. They take ‘em out of jails – which is very expensive, you know, to maintain the jails – they don’t do too much maintaining, I can tell you. But they take ‘em out of jails, prisons. They take ‘em out, and they bring them to the United States.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is baseless. Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, plus both pro-immigration and anti-immigration organizations in the US, told CNN in March, after Trump made a similar claim, that they had not seen any evidence of Congolese prisons being emptied, let alone evidence of either country somehow having brought ex-prisoners into the US. Trump’s presidential campaign and an allied super PAC did not respond to requests to provide any evidence. A CNN search of two media databases turned up no evidence.
“Everything he is saying isn’t true,” Democratic Republic of Congo spokesperson Patrick Muyaya Katembwe told CNN in a text message in March. Asked specifically about Trump’s claims about Congolese prisons being emptied of violent criminals, he said, “Never ever, it’s not true.” And, he said, “we want him to stop” telling these stories, since “it’s very bad for the country.”
Serge Mombouli, the Republic of Congo’s ambassador to the US, said in an email to CNN in March: “There is no truth or any sign nor a single fact supporting such a claim or statement.”
There were also some Congolese migrants apprehended at the US border under Trump. You can read a more detailed fact check here.
Deportations to Central America
Trump repeated a story he has told on numerous previous occasions about how, during President Barack Obama’s administration, it was impossible to deport violent criminals to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“In the case of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, some others, you couldn’t get ‘em back … under Obama, you couldn’t get ’em back,” he said. He repeated, “They wouldn’t take ’em back for Obama.”
Facts First: This claim remains false. In 2016, Obama’s last calendar year in office, none of these three countries were on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant” (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted to CNN in 2019 that in the 2016 fiscal year, ICE reported that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranked second, third and fourth for the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. The same was true in the 2017 fiscal year, which encompassed the end of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s. ICE did not identify any widespread problems with deportations to these countries.
ICE officials said there were some exceptions to the three countries’ general cooperativeness, but Trump’s general declaration that the countries were uncooperative was never true.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election
Trump repeated his usual lie about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, saying his opponents have attempted to persecute him through the courts even though he did “nothing wrong” and merely complained about a “rigged election.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim about the election remains false. The 2020 election was not rigged, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, his opponents did not cheat and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.
We’ll leave aside Trump’s subjective claims about his legal cases.
Europe and aid to Ukraine
Trump again claimed that European countries are not pulling their weight with regard to aid to Ukraine. He said, “With Ukraine, so we’re in for $250 billion and they’re in for about $71 billion.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Through June, European countries had committed and provided more aid to Ukraine than the US had during and just before the Russian invasion began in early 2022, according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy think tank in Germany.
The Kiel Institute, which closely tracks aid to Ukraine, found that, from late January 2022 (just before Russia’s invasion in February 2022) through June 2024, the European Union and individual European countries had committed a total of about $205 billion to Ukraine, in military, financial and humanitarian assistance, compared to about $108 billion committed by the US. Europe also exceeded the US in aid that had actually been “allocated” to Ukraine – defined by the institute as aid either delivered or specified for delivery – at about $121 billion for Europe compared to about $82 billion for the US.
The US led Europe on military aid that had actually been allocated, but very narrowly – about $56.42 billion to $56.35 billion.
It’s important to note that it’s possible to come up with different totals using different methodology. But Trump’s claim that the US has committed or provided far more aid than Europe is not true regardless.
Trade with Europe
Trump claimed, “If you build a car in the United States, you can’t sell it in Europe. You just can’t sell it. It’s impossible.”
Facts First: It’s not true that it’s impossible to sell a US-made car in Europe.
According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports — importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euro. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.) The EU’s Eurostat statistical office says that car imports from the US hit a new peak in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, at a value of about 11 billion euro.
Iran and funding for terror groups
Touting his record in dealing with Iran, Trump claimed, “They had no money for Hamas, they had no money for Hezbollah, they had no money for any of these instruments of terror.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Iran had “no money” for terror groups during his presidency is false. Iran’s funding for these groups did decline in the second half of his administration, in large part because his sanctions on Iran had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN in June. Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups including Hezbollah.
The Trump administration began imposing sanctions on Iran in late 2018, pursuing a campaign known as “maximum pressure.” But Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said himself in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups.
“So you continue to have, in spite of the Iranian leadership demanding that more money be given to them, they are using the resources that they have to continue funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatening the state of Israel, funding Iraqi terrorist Shia groups, all the things that they have done historically – continuing to build out their capabilities even while the people inside of their own country are suffering,” Pompeo said in a May 2020 interview, according to a transcript posted on the State Department’s website.
Trump could have fairly said that his sanctions on Iran had made life more difficult for terror groups (though it’s unclear how much their operations were affected). Instead, he continued his years-old practice of exaggerating even legitimate achievements.
You can read a more detailed fact check from June here.
China’s purchases of Iranian oil
Trump repeated his familiar claim that he successfully pressured China into no longer buying oil from Iran.
“Iran was broke because I told China, ‘If you buy from Iran…’ Oil, it’s all about the oil, that’s where the money is. ‘…If you buy oil from Iran, you’re not going to do any business with the United States.’ And I meant it, and they said, ‘We’ll pass,’ and they didn’t buy oil.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president. “The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, said in November, when Trump made a similar claim.
China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran.
Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”
Trump’s tax cuts
Trump repeated his regular claim that his signature tax cuts, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, were “the largest tax cut” ever provided.
Facts First: Trump is wrong. Analyses have found that his tax cut law was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.
In a report released earlier this year, the federal government’s Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills were bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration.
The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product – in other words, how much federal revenue a bill cut as a portion of the economy – over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively. Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group, found in 2017 that the framework for Trump’s tax cuts would make them the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.
Military equipment and Afghanistan
After talking about the state of US military equipment, Trump said, “We gave $85 billion of it back to Afghanistan, if you can believe it. We gave them $85 billion.”
Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.
As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.
The situation before Right to Try
Trump claimed that before he signed a “Right to Try” law in 2018 to give terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration, such patients would have no recourse if they did not have the money to travel abroad.
He said: “You know, people – if they had money, they’d go to Asia, they’d go to Europe. If they don’t have money, they’d go home and die. That’s what happened, they’d go home and die.”
Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try law. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.
Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.
“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.
The Biden administration and Trump’s legal cases
Trump repeated a claim he has made on numerous occasions during his campaign – that the Biden administration orchestrated a criminal election subversion case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, a criminal fraud case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Manhattan, and a civil fraud case that was brought against him by the attorney general of New York state.
Facts First: This is false. There is no evidence that Biden or his administration were behind any of these cases. None of these officials reports to the president or even to the federal government.
Attorney General Merrick Garland testified to Congress in early June about the Manhattan case in which Trump was found guilty: “The Manhattan district attorney has jurisdiction over cases involving New York state law, completely independent of the Justice Department, which has jurisdiction over cases involving federal law. We do not control the Manhattan district attorney. The Manhattan district attorney does not report to us. The Manhattan district attorney makes its own decisions about cases that he wants to bring under his state law.”
As he did in his conversation with Musk, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making such claims; Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg were colleagues in the New York attorney general’s office before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/13/politics/fact-check-trump-musk-20-false-claims/index.htmlAt least trump did expand some jobs. He made the part time position of facts checker into a full time career for many.
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