Jun
30
Fact-Checking the 1st Biden-Trump Debate
“To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.” — tweet from the National Border Patrol Council in response to Biden’s claim
I have to say up front that I did not personally sit through the debate on CNN. I had other stuff to work on and, frankly, did not look forward to sitting through a full debate. Not that I didn’t think it was an important event. I just find these “debates” to be quite aggravating in both format and content.
In any case, I did watch a handful of brief clips from the debate afterward. The two opponents acted about as I expected, including Trump being somewhat annoying — from facial expressions to his tendency towards hyperbole — but performing much better than the seemingly bewildered and at-times incoherent Biden. (That spat about who had the better golf handicap and is fit enough to carry his own golf bag was especially annoying and ridiculous, though.) Thankfully, the sharp folks over at The Daily Signal — in particular, Virginia Allen, Fred Lucas, Tyler O’Neil, and Ken McIntyre — put out an article in which they fact-checked several of the claims made by both debaters, which helps people like me get a feel for the main topics, zingers, and challenges issued.
There were a few stupid claims by Biden et al. that nevertheless needed to be addressed. They include the accusations that Trump recommended drinking bleach and that he also said Nazis are “very fine people” and “Hitler’s done some good things.” For the record, the left-leaning fact-checker sites PolitiFact and Snopes described these claims as “mostly false”, “false”, and “unproven”, respectively.
As per the article’s authors, “Some claims made from the stage were misleading or lacked adequate context.” They addressed a sampling of seventeen such claims, which I list out below and provide the text for four of them:
1. ‘We Had the Safest Border in History, Now We Have the Worst’
2. Biden Accuses Trump of Recommending Drinking Bleach
3. ‘Everybody’ Supported Overturning Roe v. Wade
4. Biden: ‘Constitutional Scholars Supported Roe’
At one point, Biden said of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973: “The fact is the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe. This idea that they were all against it is ridiculous.”
But the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noted for being a liberal jurist, criticized the Roe v. Wade decision and the legal rationale behind it.
Also, numerous other legal scholars who professed to be pro-choice on abortion criticized Roe v. Wade ruling as bad law, among them law professors Laurence Tribe and John Hart Ely and former Kennedy administration solicitor general and Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
However, the claim could be true that a majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told PolitiFact: “It’s very obvious that the vast majority of legal scholars support the result in Roe v. Wade and oppose Dobbs.” But Somin added: “Some have issues with the details of Roe’s reasoning.”
5. In Charlottesville, ‘Very Fine People’
6. ‘Corporate Greed Is the Reason’
7. ‘We Are Not for Late-Term Abortion. Period. Period. Period.’
8. Biden ‘Paid by China’
9. Trump: ‘Lowest Taxes Ever’
Responding to Biden’s blaming him for the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump said: “On Jan. 6, we had the lowest taxes ever, the lowest regulations ever.”
Trump did decrease taxes through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and he did direct the federal bureaucracy to cut regulations, but taxes and regulations during Trump’s term were still higher than at many points in American history.
Before 1913, the United States had no federal income tax. As a result of the progressive movement, the federal government ballooned; the bureaucracy added more than 150,000 pages to the Federal Register in each year of Trump’s presidency.
However, the bureaucracy promulgated 2,964 final rules in 2019 under Trump, the lowest count since record-keeping began in the 1970s and the only tally below 3,000, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In 2022, Biden’s first full calendar year, the federal bureaucracy released 4,429 final rules.
Trump’s general point — that taxes and regulations were lower during his presidency than they became under Biden — is correct. But his statement that he had the “lowest taxes ever” and the “lowest regulations ever” in American history is flatly false.
10. ‘Hitler’s Done Some Good Things’
11. Trump Increased Deficit More Than Any President in One Term
12. Iran ‘Had No Money for Hamas, for Hezbollah’
13. Food Prices ‘Doubled and Tripled and Quadrupled’ Under Biden
Trump claimed the price of food has “doubled and tripled and quadrupled” under Biden’s presidency.
Food prices are up 21.2% since January 2021, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
The average price of gas increased from $2.39 a gallon on Jan. 20, 2021, peaking at $5.016 a gallon in July 2022 before reaching the current average price of $3.225 a gallon, according to the AAA average.
When Biden was questioned on food prices being up as much as “30%” during an earlier interview on CNN, the president put the blame on “corporate greed.”
The average American worker’s weekly paycheck has risen about 14% under Biden, according to EJ Antoni, research fellow in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. That increase is less than the 20% general inflation rate and the 21.2% inflation rate for food, according to Antoni.
14. Amount of Drugs Crossing Border ‘Largest We’ve Ever Had’
Trump said at one point that “the number of drugs coming across our border now is the largest we’ve ever had by far.”
The total number of drugs seized on the southern border has declined steadily over the past four years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
However, the amount of seized fentanyl, a highly lethal drug, increased from 11,200 pounds in fiscal year 2021 to 27,000 pounds in 2023.
As little as 2 milligrams is enough fentanyl to kill an adult American. According to government data, fentanyl poisonings and overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45.
15. Will 10% Tariffs Lead to Higher Prices?
16. Border Patrol ‘Endorsed Me’
17. Trump Blames Pelosi for Jan. 6 Capitol Riot
If you want The Daily Signal‘s findings for all seventeen, you should jump over to the full article.
If you are curious about some fact-checking done by the MSM, here’s a similar article by CBS.
