Muslim voters in swing states favor Green Party’s Jill Stein, CAIR survey finds

Muslim voters react to Democratic and Republican candidates' Gaza policies in key states where Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein is leading

Islam Dogru and Hakan Copur

|16.09.2024 - 

NEW YORK

A new survey suggests Muslim voters in key swing states are leaning toward Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein in the upcoming US presidential election, a shift that could impact the race's outcome.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conducted the survey between Aug. 25-27, finding that Stein outperforms her Democratic and Republican rivals in three of six critical swing states.

The poll, which surveyed 1,115 registered Muslim voters nationwide, shows Stein leading among Muslim voters in Arizona with 35%, Michigan with 40%, and Wisconsin with 44%.

Stein’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, leads among Muslim voters in Georgia with 43% and Pennsylvania with 37%, while Republican candidate Donald Trump trails, only securing the most Muslim support in Nevada at 27%.

“Have you seen the latest CAIR poll? We leading with Muslim American voters by at least 5 points in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin!,” Stein wrote on social media.

Criticism over Gaza war

Muslim voters' growing support for Stein is viewed as a message to Democratic and Republican candidates over their continued backing of Israel amid the ongoing Gaza war, with both parties facing criticism from the community.

“Candidates running for office cannot afford to overlook the issues that matter most to Muslim Americans. Ignoring this community or taking their votes for granted could be a costly mistake, particularly in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, where elections are often won by narrow margins,” said CAIR’s Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw.

The overall survey shows Harris leading slightly among Muslim voters nationwide, with 29.4%, while Stein closely follows at 29.1%. Trump trails at 11.2%, and The People’s Party candidate Dr. Cornel West received 4.2% of the Muslim vote.

Gender and ethnic differences were also notable in the survey. Harris is favored by 29% of Muslim men, while 34% of Muslim women support Stein.

Harris enjoys strong backing from Black Muslim voters, with 55.3% supporting her. Stein is preferred by 32.7% of white, Arab, and Turkish Muslim voters.

However, 16.5% of respondents said they were undecided about their vote.

The US has nearly 2.5 million Muslim voters, and despite widespread dissatisfaction, over 90% plan to vote in the Nov.election, according to the survey.

The presidential election's outcome will hinge on a handful of swing states, including Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Electoral votes

With the Electoral College system, where delegates determine the winner, a candidate must secure 270 out of 538 electoral votes to win the presidency. The winner-takes-all system in most states means even a slight lead can result in all of a state’s electoral votes.

The close race between Harris and Trump has drawn particular attention to these states. According to Real Clear Politics, Trump leads Harris by less than 1% in five of the seven key swing states.

Nationally, Harris has 48.4% support compared to Trump’s 46.9%, based on a poll average from Aug. 22-27.

While inflation, economic issues, abortion, and border security dominate the concerns of voters nationwide, foreign policy, particularly the US stance on Gaza, is a significant issue for Muslim voters.

Michigan, with its large Muslim and Arab population and its 15 electoral votes, is a key state where this issue is likely to have an impact. In the February primaries, 13% of Michigan voters cast “uncommitted” votes in protest of President Joe Biden’s Gaza policy.

While many of these voters are critical of both major parties, they are closely watching Harris’s stance on Gaza to determine whether to support her.

 

The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making 

Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok

Drew Harwell, (c) 2024 , The Washington Post

Sat, September 14, 2024

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After Tuesday night’s debate, as former president Donald Trump worked the reporters in the spin room in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris’s TikTok team was busy appealing to a different crowd.

In the digital “war room” at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., they hit the button on their pièce de résistance shortly after midnight: A six-second video that mocked Trump’s performance by showing his lectern inhabited by a laughably dramatic “Dance Moms” star. “I thought I was ready to be back. I thought I was stronger than this but obviously I’m not,” she lamented. “I wanna go home.”

Viewed more than 7 million times, the video was produced by a small TikTok team - all 25 and under, some working their first jobs - given unfettered freedom to chase whatever they think will go viral. Over the past eight weeks, Harris’s social media team has helped supercharge her campaign, harnessing the rhythms and absurdities of internet culture to create one of the most inventive and irreverent get-out-the-vote strategies in modern politics.

They have trolled Trump inside his own social network, Truth Social. They have made viral memes out of bags of Doritos and camouflage hats. In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are conceived, created and posted in about half an hour.

“This campaign empowers young people to speak to young people,” said Parker Butler, the 24-year-old director of Harris’s digital rapid response content, a team that watches all of Trump’s speeches and can blast a clip onto social media at a moment’s notice. “And we’re here to put in the work.”

Trump also has leaped forcefully into social media, seeing it as critical to grabbing voters’ attention in an age of mass distraction. But while Trump has posted attacks on Harris’ intelligence, warnings of economic “disaster” and grim polemics about how America’s “FUTURE IS AT STAKE” - “We’re a nation in decline,” he says in one video, holding handcuffs aloft. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely nobody” - the Harris team has adopted a more playful approach, chasing virality with snarky, upbeat and oddball content delivered at internet speed.

Trump’s team has occasionally worked to mimic Harris’s online energy, but with darker memes. This week, Trump’s Truth Social account posted AI-generated images showing him saving cats from a crowd of dark-skinned men - a reference to the false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. In other images, cats hold up signs reading “Don’t Let Them Eat Us. Vote for Trump!” and “Kamala Hates Me.”

Harris’s “digital rapid response” team, as it’s called, is active on every major social platform, posting family photos on Facebook, hours-long speeches on YouTube and Spanish-language calls to action on WhatsApp. On debate night, they hosted live-streamed watch parties on Twitch, walloped Trump’s untruths on Threads and X, and hyped Harris’s most fiery lines on Instagram and TikTok. Minutes after she claimed Trump rallygoers leave “his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” her team posted the clip with the caption, “Holy s--- 🔥🔥🔥 She just cooked him,” following up with a photo of Harris in a kitchen, smiling.

“They really run it like a fan account,” said Rachel Karten, a social media consultant who writes Link in Bio, a newsletter about online culture. “It’s not like it’s coming from a campaign. It’s like: We talk like you. Even the caption is like: ‘You have to watch this.’”

The online rollout has helped Harris circumvent the tough questions and uncertainties of the traditional political press, allowing her to reach millions of voters who turn to social media as a news source. By the time Harris sat for her first big TV interview as the Democratic nominee, she had already appeared in dozens of social media videos, giving direct-to-camera monologues about Roe v. Wade, chatting on the phone with the Obamas and talking with her running mate Tim Walz about “White guy tacos” and the guitar skills of Prince.

The approach seems to be paying off. The Harris campaign has gotten 100 million more views than Trump on TikTok, despite having half as many followers, according to an analysis of data from Zelf, an online measurement firm.

It’s also gotten under Trump’s skin. He posted a Truth Social video this month saying his campaign had “the greatest social media program in history” and that any claims of Harris’s online success were “misinformation”: “She’s not even a small fraction of what we do. But that’s the way they do it, they lie.” He has also, without evidence, accused her team of paying for fake followers. The Harris campaign responded, “Rent free” - as in, how they’re living, inside his head.

Campaign officials say the digital operation has seen success beyond social media. To some supporters, it’s a big reason the 59-year-old politician is generating interest among young voters.

“That’s kind of like what charisma is today: Can you land well on the internet?” Colton Wickland, 27, said at a rally in Milwaukee last month.

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‘Create the news’

Though only a small fraction of her campaign’s 250-person digital operation, Harris’s social media team is by far its most visible part, running all her accounts and watching for trend-worthy moments they can spotlight in real time.

Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, who has described them as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds,” said the campaign started developing the strategy last year, worried voters had forgotten who Trump was and that the campaign needed “a voice that was more aggressive and hard-hitting” to remind them.

The team faces minimal content-approval checks and “barring objection, we’re gonna go. Everything goes on a five-minute warning,” Flaherty said. “You just gotta trust your people. Our f---up ratio [is as low] as if there were 19 layers of approval.”

A 13-person rapid-response team keeps a shared calendar of all major political events for both Republicans and Democrats and monitors them in shifts to ensure “we are never not watching,” said Butler, the team’s manager. When an eye-catching moment happens - like when Trump said immigrants had “poisoned” the country - the team races to post a clip of it on social media, working shifts that sometimes go past midnight.

“Campaigns are not just responding anymore,” Butler said. “Our job is to create the news.”

Each of the team’s social media “strategists” specializes in an individual platform, catering to its audience, subculture and slang. One strategist, for instance, is solely responsible for Facebook, where Butler said content for baby boomers thrives.

Lauren Kapp, 25, heads the five-person TikTok team. Every day, she wakes around 6:30 a.m. and starts scrolling the video app so she can be ready for their daily 9 a.m. meeting, when the team breaks down what’s trending that day.

A few years ago, Butler and Kapp were both fresh graduates of what Kapp called “the covid class.” Butler, a high school debate champ in Texas during Trump’s presidency, graduated from American University in 2020 and landed work as a video editor for Biden’s campaign. Kapp, who struggled to find a job as a political correspondent after leaving University of California, Berkeley, was hired by the Democratic National Committee as a “vertical video producer” after building a midsize TikTok following under the username “Poli Sci Princess.”

Earlier this year, both shifted from the Democrats’ online operation to the Biden-Harris team, where their job is not to mimic the cinematic editing and high production values of traditional campaign ads but instead to behave like typical TikTok users: reposting other people’s videos, sharing memes and sound bites, and reacting to major news moments, such as the particularly spicy dig Walz took at Vance during a speech in Philadelphia (“omg Tim Walz WENT THERE”).

They’ve “stitched” Trump into clips that tee him up as a punchline and split-screen his comments on abortion alongside the mobile game “Subway Surfers” - a common TikTok tactic for keeping overstimulated viewers’ attention. One post ranked photos of Walz by “aura points,” TikTok slang for a measure of coolness. (Enjoying a state-fair ride with his daughter, Hope, was “+23958 aura.”)

The team records and edits the videos on their phones before sending them over Slack to Butler, who typically reviews and signs off in less than 15 minutes. It can look freewheeling, but the team treats its content strategy like a science. Kapp said she won’t use any TikTok “trending sound” - the short audio clips that users can apply to their own videos - if it’s been used in more than 200,000 videos. “People get bored very easily,” she said.

After the Democratic convention, Kapp had just gotten home from Chicago and was trying to think of ways to emphasize Trump’s links to the conservative policy doctrine Project 2025 when she opted for a wild juxtaposition: a niche TikTok meme of dolphins and rainbows. The single-image post is now one of their most popular pieces of content, with more than 7 million views. Trump’s campaign copied it a few days later.

“You wouldn’t anticipate a political campaign to do it, which is what contributed to the virality of it,” she said.

TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social apps, with 170 million U.S. accounts, and roughly 40 percent of its American users said they use it to keep up with politics or current events, a Pew Research Center survey found last month; Trump’s campaign employs a TikTok team of its own.

For Harris, there’s an awkward hurdle, however: The Biden administration is currently defending in court a potential nationwide ban of TikTok, arguing the Chinese-owned app is a national security threat. Harris’s team uses TikTok on phones with nothing else installed to abide by a federal prohibition of the app on government-owned devices.

The campaign’s online engagement has skyrocketed during the Harris era. On TikTok, their “like-to-view” ratio, a measure of viewer engagement, went from about 10 percent during the Biden months to 25 percent, Kapp said.

And though campaigns dating back to former president Barack Obama have taken social media seriously, the Harris team’s big innovation has been letting a new wave of Generation Z innovators take control, said April Eichmeier, an assistant professor who studies political communication at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

“The under-25 group right now has never known a world without digital media,” she said. “They know how things land on TikTok because that’s their culture.”

The team’s seemingly frenetic and amateurish output conceals a sophisticated strategy, said Lara Cohen, a former executive at X who led some of its top partnerships with media operations and influencers. Each viral video helps them sneak into nonpolitical spaces and reach voters who are undecided or otherwise tuned-out.

“Great ideas die with too long an approval process,” said Cohen, now an executive at the creator-service company Linktree. “Someone’s going to be too worried to do something edgy. And they’re clearly not afraid of that.”

- - -

‘Oh he’s mad lol’

As the campaign’s social media experimentation has exploded, the lines between its online and offline presence have blurred. TikTok-style monologues have appeared in TV ads. Candidate selfies in field offices have appeared, from multiple angles, on Instagram. The campaign’s $40 camouflage “Harris Walz” hat has shown up not just in TikTok videos but on the head of Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff.

Harris and Walz, too, have tried their best to be omnipresent. During the convention, Harris played a name-that-song quiz with a social media show and told another creator that her favorite Chicago food was an Italian beef sandwich. Walz recently appeared on the short-video show “Subway Takes,” in which comedians offer their most controversial or raunchy opinions; Walz extolled the value of home-gutter management.

The goal, campaign staffers said, has been to humanize the candidates in a bitterly contentious race. After a Harris fundraising email said she’d coped with Trump’s 2016 election victory by scarfing down “a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos,” leading one Fox News guest to complain it was not “the response of an elite leader,” Walz’s X account posted a video showing him grabbing her a bag between campaign stops. “Every attack on her only seems to make her more relatable,” one viral Threads post said.

Rather than characterize Trump as a generational threat, Harris’s operation has often worked to cast him as an “unhinged and unserious man” and the butt of a big joke. Last month, when Trump suggested he might back out of this week’s debate, the team layered his video clips with the sound of a chicken. And where previous campaigns were reluctant to amplify Trump’s attacks, the Harris campaign has repeated them verbatim to mock or defang them alongside quips like “Oh he’s mad lol.”

Harris’s team has gone on the offensive inside Trump’s Truth Social, using their 350,000-follower account to needle Trump about his crowd size. Beyond just laughs, one campaign aide said a goal of the account is to rattle and enrage Trump inside his online safe space. After the debate, Harris’s team posted Fox News clips calling Trump’s performance a “train wreck.”

Trump’s campaign has derided Harris’s strategy as juvenile, with a spokesman saying anyone who thinks “using emojis is some cutting-edge message technique … [is] severely out of touch with reality.”

On TikTok, however, Harris’s team has proved so popular that people claiming to secretly run the account has become a meme in itself. To show it’s in on the joke, the campaign posted a video featuring Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who - when asked who runs the account - dryly replies: “It’s obviously me.”

The real test will come in November, when the election shows whether sway on social media can produce real-world power. With less than two months until Election Day, Harris’s TikTok has shown a pivot toward more substantive fare, including a multipart series laying out Trump affiliates’ links to Project 2025.

They’ve also worked to capitalize on a new sense of hope among Democrats. One video, built on a trending clip of poignant music typically used for scenic vistas and sunsets, features a voice-over - “Oh, I wasn’t sad, I just needed a …” - then cuts to a buoyant DNC crowd cheering near an American flag.

“They’ve basically created this digital [fandom] of her,” Cohen said. “It sounds corny, but the most successful people online are the ones who feel unfiltered and authentic and real. That’s what people rally around.”

- - -

Dylan Wells contributed to this report.

A Project 2025 adviser mockingly asked someone to ‘track down’ victims of abortion bans — 17,000 women responded


Derisive TikTok post received viral response from women who have suffered since end of Roe v Wade

Oliver O'Connell
New York
THE INDEPENDENT UK

A former Trump administration staffer, now a senior adviser in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team, accidentally made a case for abortion rights in a failed attempt to undermine an answer by Kamala Harris during Tuesday’s presidential debate.

John McEntee, who served as Donald Trump’s director of White House personnel, is one of the founders of The Right Stuff, a right-wing dating site, and has a large following on TikTok.

His posts feature him sitting at a table, eating, across from the camera, presumably to mimic a date-like setting, while he makes a glib and offensive right-wing talking point, often misogynistic or racist.

In a post this week, which has 1.8 million views on TikTok, he says: “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v Wade was overturned?”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he adds, flippantly.

Well, he could have held his breath because the replies came in thick and fast.

The post now has more than 17,000 comments and they are almost all women sharing their stories of being turned away from emergency rooms in agony, bleeding out in parking lots, at home, in public bathrooms, and sometimes for months afterward.

Others talk about miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, losing their ability to have children, and driving across multiple states to get treatment where it was still legal — often while hemorrhaging. Most of the stories appear to involve wanted or planned pregnancies.

One of the most widely circulating responses to the clip is a video from a woman called Carmen Broesder that was shared on Instagram by the accounts “wordclown” and “agirlhasnopresident”.

Broesder’s ordeal is hard to hear but reflects the experience of many others. During her 19-day miscarriage in Idaho she was given just one dose of pain medicine, turned away from three emergency rooms, blacked out due to blood loss, could not eat because of her pain, and even developed AFib, a heart condition.

​​”I stopped eating so my daughter stopped eating. So I had to eat with tears running down my face cause it was actually painful to eat ‘cause I was in so much pain, everything hurt,” she recalls. “But my daughter needed to eat.”

Broesder adds: “I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws.”

“But yeah, women are bleeding out in parking lots,” she says. “We exist.”

Kamala Harris gave a forceful defense of abortion rights during Tuesday’s presedential debate. (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

During Tuesday’s debate against Trump, Harris responded to a question on abortion: “Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v Wade. And they did exactly as they intended, and now in over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans.”

Harris added: “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage are being denied care in an emergency room because their health care providers are afraid, they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that.”

Arizona's 1864 abortion ban is officially off the books

Arizona’s Civil War-era ban on nearly all abortions is officially repealed

BySEJAL GOVINDARAO 

Associated Press
September 13, 2024, 


PHOENIX -- Arizona’s Civil War-era ban on nearly all abortions officially is being repealed Saturday.

The western swing state has been whipsawed over recent months, starting with the Arizona Supreme Court deciding in April to let the state enforce the long-dormant 1864 law that criminalized all abortions except when a woman’s life was jeopardized. Then state lawmakers voted on a bill to repeal that law once and for all.

Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the bill in May, declaring it was just the beginning of a fight to protect reproductive health care in Arizona.

“I will continue doing everything in my power to protect reproductive freedoms, because I trust women to make the decisions that are best for them, and know politicians do not belong in the doctor’s office,” Hobbs said in a statement.

Abortion has sharply defined Arizona’s political arena since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. As the November general election approaches, the issue remains a focus of Democratic campaigns, and it will be up to Arizona voters to decide whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution.


It was after the state Supreme Court cleared the way for enforcement that Hobbs urged the state Legislature to take imminent action to undo the ban before it went into effect. Republican lawmakers, who hold a narrow majority in both chambers, derailed discussions about repealing the ban. At one point, the roadblocks resulted in chants of “Shame! Shame!” by outraged Democratic colleagues.

Emotions on the House floor and in the gallery ran high as House Democrats were able to garner the support of three Republicans to pass the repeal legislation two weeks later, sending the measure to the Senate for consideration. Two GOP senators joined with Democrats a week later to grant final approval.

Democrats were advocating for the repeal long before the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Even Hobbs called for action in her January State of the State address.

The battle in Arizona made national headlines again when Democratic state Sen. Eva Burch told fellow lawmakers in a floor speech in March that she was going to get an abortion because her pregnancy was no longer viable. She said in an interview that it was her chance to highlight that the laws passed by legislators in Arizona “actually do impact people in practice and not just in theory.”

In the weeks between the high court’s decision and Hobbs signing the repeal into law, Arizonans were in a state of confusion about whether the near-total ban would end up taking effect before the repeal was implemented.


A court order put the ban on hold, but questions lingered about whether doctors in the state could perform the procedure. California Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in on the issue in late May, signing legislation allowing Arizona doctors to receive temporary, emergency licenses to perform abortions in California.

With the territorial ban no longer in play, Arizona law allows abortions until 15 weeks. After that, there is an exception to save the life of the mother, but missing are exceptions for cases of rape or incest after the 15-week mark.

Arizona requires those seeking an abortion prior to the 15-week mark to have an ultrasound at least 24 hours before the procedure and to be given the opportunity to view it. Minors must have either parental consent or authorization from a state judge, except in cases of incest or when their life is at risk.

Abortion medication can only be provided through a qualified physician, and only licensed physicians can perform surgical abortions. Abortion providers and clinics also must record and report certain information about the abortions they perform to the department of health services.

Voters will have the ultimate say on whether to add the right to an abortion to the state constitution when they cast their ballots in the general election.


Arizona for Abortion Access, the coalition leading the ballot measure campaign, was successful in securing the measure's spot on the ballot. The Arizona Secretary of State verified 577,971 signatures that were collected as part of the citizen-led campaign, well over the 383,923 required from registered voters.

If voters approve the measure, abortions would be allowed until fetal viability — the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb, typically around 24 weeks. It also would allow abortions after that time in cases where the mother’s physical or mental health is in jeopardy.

The global gag rule and women’s abortion rights

9th September 2024Leave a Commenton The global gag rule and women’s abortion rights

“Supporters of women’s equality understand that equal participation in the public sphere, and for women living our lives as full human beings, involves the right for women to choose if, and when, to become mothers.”

By Liz Lawrence

In the context of the forthcoming US Presidential election, in which Republican and Democratic parties take very different positions on abortion rights and in which the Democratic presidential contestant, Kamala Harris, is taking a clear pro-choice stance.

Why birth control is essential for women’s liberation

Decades of feminist campaigning in many countries have led to a widespread understanding among feminists, socialists and labour movement activists that access to birth control is essential for women’s liberation. Many trade unions now have pro-choice policies. Debates around access to birth control, both contraception and abortion, often contain debates about the position of women in society. For conservatives who seek to restrict reproductive rights women should primarily be wives and mothers, living in a traditional patriarchal family, with other activities, such as education, employment and participation in public life, secondary to the maternal role.

Supporters of women’s equality understand that equal participation in the public sphere, and for women living our lives as full human beings, involves the right for women to choose if, and when, to become mothers. A human being cannot participate equally in education, employment, politics or any other sphere, if life might be disrupted at any moment by unplanned pregnancy, and if their participation in the public sphere is always subject to the assumption that they might leave any position they occupy at any moment on account of pregnancy and motherhood. This stigma of potential maternity was used for generations to deny women equal opportunities in the workplace.

There are questions of bodily autonomy and access to health care involved. For the anti-abortionists the woman’s body is the property of anyone other than the woman, whether it be her parents, husband or the state. Birth control is healthcare. Without access to birth control many women suffer health damage and risk to life from repeated pregnancies and childbirth.

Why birth control is essential for women’s liberation

The global gag rule is a United States Government ban on foreign NGOs which provide abortion services (including abortion advice) from receiving any US Government funding. It is also known as the Mexico City policy, because this was the venue where it was announced by the US Government at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development.

This ban also affects NGOs which advocate for abortion law reform such as the decriminalisation of abortion. Even if any abortion-related activities are funded by the NGO from other sources, it still loses all US Government funding. The global gag rule originally ended $600 million in money for family planning services.  International Planned Parenthood lost 20% of its funding. Thus, healthcare organisations were faced with a choice of either losing funding or restricting the services they provided.

The global gag rule was first introduced in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan. Since then, each successive US administration has decided either to maintain or lift the gag. This has made funding for abortion-related healthcare services a party-political issue in the USA and a matter of increasingly sharp political division. In some countries such matters can be seen as healthcare issues where there is a bipartisan or multi-party consensus, which is based on respect for the right of women to choose and on medical and scientific evidence. In the USA a change of President can almost immediately mean either the lifting or the re-imposition of the global gag rule, with Democratic Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden all lifting the gag.

In January 2017 President Trump expanded the global gag rule to cover more health areas. It had originally applied to NGOs in the family planning field, but it was extended to all international healthcare assistance and affected nearly $9 billion in healthcare funding. It thus affected areas like HIV education.

The global gag rule restricted the ability of healthcare workers to counsel clients properly and offer a full range of options or to campaign on healthcare issues. It had a chilling effect on health education and advocacy, similar to section 28 or other attempts by governments to limit sex education and advice by sexual health services. It can thus also be seen as a freedom of speech issue.

The health impact of the global gag

Maternal mortality worldwide is unacceptably high. About 287 000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2020.  Almost 95% of maternal deaths occurred in low and lower middle-income countries in 2020, and most could have been prevented by access to better healthcare.

Women in low-income countries have a higher lifetime risk of maternal death. A woman’s lifetime risk of maternal death is the probability that a 15-year-old woman will eventually die from a maternal cause. In high income countries, this is 1 in 5300, versus 1 in 49 in low-income countries.

For many women in the world today pregnancy is a life-threatening condition, as it was centuries ago world-wide. This means women go through pregnancy knowing it could lead to their death or permanent injury to health. This takes a toll on both physical and mental health.

Cutting funding for family planning services leads to more unplanned pregnancies, and may increase the abortion rate. Bans on abortion do not stop abortion; they just increase the likelihood that the procedure occurs under unsafe conditions, with higher rates of mortality and morbidity. The World Health Organisation estimates that 45% of abortions are unsafe.

The global gag has also impacted health education and health advocacy, including HIV/AIDS education and support for marginal and vulnerable groups, including workers in the sex industry. When funding for healthcare is cut, it is often the poorest and most vulnerable who are most affected.

How the abortion issue has been politicised

“My name is Ann Richards. I am pro-choice and I vote.” This is what Ann Richards, Democratic Governor of Texas said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. This is a good example of how women and pro-choice activists can be galvanised by this issue, as is happening now with the Kamala Harris campaign for the US Presidency.

The Republican Party has made alliances with the Christian evangelical right, treating abortion as a key political dividing issue. Ultra-conservatives often pick an issue or two, whether abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights or sex education in schools as a focus for campaigning and as a test of political acceptability.

Right-wing Christian evangelicals and other religious fundamentalists subscribe to a theology in which salvation is linked with conformity to narrowly-defined, traditional gender roles, in which sex is only for reproduction and in which foetal life is given equal or higher status than the life of the pregnant person. Hence the woman who declines motherhood or the person who lives in a same-sex relationship or seeks to change gender cannot be accepted. This is a quest for Gilead, the dystopian society portrayed by Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

Some Republican politicians are Christian nationalists; that is to say, they want to remove the separation of religion and the state, which was one of the major achievements of the American Revolution and to establish some version of a theocratic state. It can be hard for reasonable and liberal-minded people to appreciate just how reactionary all of this is.

Donald Trump and JD Vance use misogyny to mobilise a section of the electorate and to attack their opponents. It may fire up their base, but it will also turn off many American voters. Vance is mentioned often for his notorious remark that the US was governed by ‘childless cat ladies’ and the implication that only parents have a right to an opinion or a vote. Such views are off the wall and have sparked many amusing ripostes. Nonetheless they should not be ignored because they express both a serious level of misogyny and contempt for single people.

What happens in the US presidential election has significant implications for women’s lives and for reproductive rights and healthcare provision world-wide.

---

• Liz Lawrence is a former President of University and College Union (UCU).
• This article was originally published by Anti*Capitalist Resistance on 24th August 2024.
• The Labour Outlook Editorial Team may not always agree with all of the content we reproduce but are committed to giving left voices a platform to develop, debate, discuss and occasionally disagree.

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Harris-Trump presidential debate draws estimated 67.1 million TV viewers

Audience tops estimated 51 million people who tuned in for June’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

People watch the presidential debate between former US President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024 [Godofredo A Vasquez/AP Photo]

AL JAZEERA

Published On 12 Sep 2024

An estimated 67.1 million television viewers tuned in to the first debate between United States Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, media research firm Nielsen has announced.

Tuesday’s debate, hosted by ABC News, saw the Democratic and Republican nominees come face-to-face for the first time in a high-stakes confrontation on issues ranging from the economy to immigration and abortion.

The viewing figures mark a big jump from the estimated 51 million people who tuned in for June’s debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, but fall short of the record 84 million viewers who watched the Republican’s first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016.

TV viewers aged 55 and older made up the majority of the audience, accounting for 41.3 million of those who tuned in, according to the Nielsen data released on Wednesday.

People aged 35-54 made up 16.9 million viewers, while those aged 18-34 accounted for 6.5 million.

By way of comparison, the series finales of popular US sitcoms Seinfeld and Friends attracted 76.3 million and 52.5 million viewers, respectively.

The Nielsen figures only refer to television viewers, excluding those who watched the debate on social media and streaming platforms.

Harris is widely seen as having won Tuesday’s debate.

In a CNN flash poll, 63 percent of viewers said Harris outperformed Trump, compared with 37 percent who said the Republican had a better night.

UN chief says lack of accountability on UN staff killings in Gaza 'unacceptable'

A damaged car with a "UN" marking, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.

September 11, 2024 

UNITED NATIONS — A lack of accountability for the killing of United Nations staff and humanitarian aid workers in the Gaza Strip is "totally unacceptable," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Reuters in a wide-ranging interview on Sept 11.

Guterres also said that establishing a UN peacekeeping force would not be the "best solution" for Haiti, where armed gangs have taken over much of the capital and expanded to surrounding areas, fuelling a humanitarian crisis with mass displacements, sexual violence and widespread hunger.

Ahead of the annual meeting of world leaders at the UN General Assembly later this month, Guterres summed up the past year as "very tough, very difficult."


It has been dominated by the war in Gaza, which began just two weeks after leaders left New York following last year's assembly when Palestinian Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages in a cross-border rampage into Israel, according to Israeli tallies.

Describing Israel's retaliation against Hamas in Gaza — where local health officials say some 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began — Guterres said there have been "very dramatic violations of the international humanitarian law and the total absence of an effective protection of civilians."

"What's happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable," he said.

The Israeli military says it takes steps to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and that at least a third of the Palestinian fatalities in Gaza are militants. It accuses Hamas of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Hamas denies.

Nearly 300 humanitarian aid workers, more than two-thirds of them UN staff, have also been killed during the conflict, according to the UN Guterres said there should be an effective investigation and accountability for their deaths.

"We have courts, but we see that the decisions of courts are not respected, and it is this kind of limbo of accountability that is totally unacceptable and that requires also a serious a serious reflection," Guterres said.

The top UN court — the International Court of Justice — said in July that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and settlements is illegal and should be withdrawn. The 193-member UN General Assembly is likely to vote next week on a draft resolution that would give Israel a six-month deadline to do so.

Guterres said he has not spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has long accused the UN of being anti-Israel — since the deadly Hamas attack in Israel on Oct 7 last year. The pair met in person at the UN a year ago and Guterres said he would do so again — if Netanyahu asked.

Read Also

Shots fired, bulldozers rammed cars during UN standoff with Israeli military

"I have not talked to him because he didn't pick up my phone calls, but I have no reason not to speak with him," Guterres said. "So if he comes to New York and he asks to see me, I will be very glad to see him."

When asked if Netanyahu planned to meet with Guterres on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon said that Netanyahu's schedule hasn't been finalised yet.
Haiti 'scandal'

Guterres' described the current state of the world as "chaotic." He said the conflict in Gaza and Russia's war in Ukraine were "stuck with no peaceful solutions in sight."

When asked about Western accusations that North Korea and Iran are now providing Russia with weapons, Guterres said: "Any expansion of war in Ukraine is an absolutely dramatic development."

Iran has rejected the Western accusations, while North Korea has denied the allegations against it. UN sanctions monitors said in April that debris from a missile that landed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Jan 2 was from a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile.

In Haiti, a UN-backed international force has been slow to deploy — after Haiti asked for help in 2022 — and lacks funds. The United States wants the UN Security Council to ask the UN for a plan to transition the force into a UN peacekeeping operation.

"I don't think peacekeeping is the best solution in a situation like this... peacekeeping means to keep the peace, and that's not exactly the situation we have Haiti," Guterres said. "I find it a scandal that it has been so difficult to mobilise funds for such a dramatic situation."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has not spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the Hamas attack last year. PHOTO: Reuters
Trump looms

Guterres' first five-year term as secretary-general coincided with the US presidency of Donald Trump, who cut funding to the international body, calling it weak and incompetent. Trump is again the Republican president nominee and will face off against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov 5 election.

"We are ready to work in all circumstances in defence of the values of the (founding UN) charter and of the values of the UN," Guterres said when asked if the world body had a contingency plan for a possible second Trump administration.

During his first term in office Trump also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, an international pact to fight climate change, and Trump's campaign said he would do it again if he wins in November. The US is currently a full participant in the accord after President Joe Biden swiftly rejoined in 2021.

"It will survive. But, of course, it will probably survive severely undermined," Guterres said of a second withdrawal from the pact by a potential Trump administration. Guterres has long pushed for stronger action to fight climate change.

With abortion rights a key topic in the US election, Guterres said the US voice was "obviously very important" at the United Nations when it came to the issue of women's sexual and reproductive rights as well as health.

Under Trump's presidency, the US opposed long-agreed international language on women's sexual and reproductive rights and health in UN resolutions over concern that it would advance abortion rights.

Trump also cut funding in 2017 for the UN Population Fund because his administration said it "supports, or participates in the management of, a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation." The UN said that was an inaccurate perception.


On Trump, Russia UN envoy says Ukraine war can't end in one day

Source: Reuters

Fact Checking the Harris-Trump Debate

In their first debate, and first meeting, the presidential candidates attacked each other on the economy, taxes, immigration and abortion.


By Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, D'Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson, Jessica McDonald, Saranac Hale Spencer, Alan Jaffe, Kate Yandell, Ben Cohen, Logan Chapman, Sarah Usandivaras and Ian Fox

Posted on September 11, 2024

Summary

The highly anticipated debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was a combative event in which facts were repeatedly trampled and distorted.In a lengthy exchange on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong, too.Trump referred to a rumor that began on Facebook alleging that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating local pets. City police have said there have been “no credible reports” of that kind of activity.Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by almost $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American families, but most agree it would be substantial.Trump falsely claimed that Harris was sent “to negotiate peace” between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. Days before Russia invaded Ukraine that month, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskky in Germany. She did not meet with Putin, as Trump said.Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” When President Joe Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4% — lower than it was during several administrations since the 1930s.Harris and Trump traded jabs on manufacturing job performance in their respective administrations, with each claiming the other lost jobs, but both sides are cherry-picking from the statistics.Trump repeated his unsupported claim that “millions of people” are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” And he said these migrants were “taking jobs” from “African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that, either.Trump repeated his false claim that everyone — liberals and conservatives — wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.The former president repeatedly said Democrats, including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, were in favor of abortion “in the ninth month” — or even after birth. Abortion that late is exceedingly rare, and abortion after birth does not exist. It’s homicide, and it’s illegal.Harris repeated the assertion that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected, but Trump said that he does not intend to sign such a ban. Harris also tried to tie Trump to Project 2025’s proposal for mandatory abortion reporting, but Trump has tried to distance himself from the document.The vice president claimed Trump’s economic policies led to “one of the highest” trade deficits in American history. But the annual trade deficits during the Biden administration have exceeded those under Trump.Trump again falsely claimed that fraud was responsible for his loss in the 2020 election, and wrongly claimed that none of his lawsuits making that allegation had been decided on the merits.Trump said Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania.” When she was running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris did say she was “in favor of banning fracking.” But in an Aug. 29 interview on CNN and at the debate, Harris said, “I will not ban fracking.”Harris claimed that Trump’s tax proposal would “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.Trump falsely claimed that Harris “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” Harris has not called for taking away all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons.”Trump claimed that he had “no inflation” during his presidency, while inflation experienced under Biden has been “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero. And while Inflation has risen significantly under Biden, it is far below record levels.Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president, and he backed a lawsuit that would have nullified the law.The former president wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” The latest FBI statistics are based on voluntary reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency.Trump falsely claimed that the number of jobs created during the Biden administration “turned out to be a fraud.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a downward revision in the jobs tally during its routine annual revision of jobs data.Trump wrongly claimed that under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”Harris claimed that Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1,” but the former president has said that he was joking when he said he would be a dictator for one day.Trump repeated a popular talking point, calling Harris the “border czar.” She was never in charge of border security, rather, she was tasked with addressing root causes of migration from three Central American Countries.Trump repeated another familiar claim, wrongly saying that the U.S. had left “$85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment” when it left Afghanistan.

The debate was hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

Analysis

Trump, Harris on Jan. 6 Attack on U.S. Capitol

Co-moderator David Muir kicked off a lengthy back-and-forth between the candidates about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when he asked Trump if there is anything “you regret about what you did on that day.”

In his response, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong.

The former president spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol, where members of Congress were gathering to begin the process of accepting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. In his speech, Trump told his supporters that the Democrats stole the election, making numerous false claims about election fraud in swing states, and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject electoral votes for Biden, so that Trump could remain president.

He also told his supporters to march to the Capitol. They stormed the building, attacked law enforcement officers and interrupted the counting of the electoral votes, which wasn’t completed until the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.

In response to Muir, Trump claimed that he had “nothing to do” with the “Save America” rally “other than they asked me to make a speech.” In fact, Trump heavily promoted the rally on social media, telling his followers in one post that a new report proves it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the election” and urging them to attend the Jan. 6 rally. “Be there,” he wrote, “will be wild!”

Trump baselessly claimed that he “went to Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington, D.C.,” Muriel Bowser, and offered to give them “10,000 National Guard or soldiers” for Capitol security. He also falsely claimed that “Nancy Pelosi rejected me,” blaming the then-House speaker for a lack of adequate security.

“It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington did their jobs,” he said. “I wasn’t responsible for security. Nancy Pelosi was responsible. She didn’t do her job.”

As we have written, the claim that Pelosi is responsible for Capitol security is exaggerated. The speaker appoints one member of the four-member Capitol Police Board, which oversees Capitol security. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, also appointed a member.

As for Trump’s claim that Pelosi turned down his request for 10,000 National Guard troops, the House select committee on the Capitol attack said it found “no evidence” of that. In its report, the committee noted that then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said there was “no direct order from the president” to put 10,000 National Guard troops on the ready.

Trump claimed to have new evidence, citing a tape of Pelosi discussing the attack on the day that it happened. “Her daughter has a tape of her saying she is fully responsible for what happened,” Trump claimed. “They want to get rid of that tape.”

Trump is referring to a video released in June by the House Republicans. In the video, which her daughter took on Jan. 6, 2021, Pelosi can be seen questioning the security plans and taking some responsibility for not making sure that security was adequate.

“We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have,” she said. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” When someone in the car said that security officials thought they had sufficient coverage, Pelosi angrily responded, “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”

In the video, Pelosi did not say that Trump offered to provide the Capitol with 10,000 National Guard troops, and she did not say, as Trump claimed, that “she is fully responsible for what happened.”

When asked to respond, Harris recalled being at the Capitol that day — but got some facts wrong.

“On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured and some died, and understand the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” Harris said.

Harris is correct that 140 law enforcement officers were injured on Jan. 6, 2021, but she was wrong to suggest “some died” that day. As we wrote, none of the officers who provided protection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died that day, although five officers did die in the days and months after the riot — including one that died the next day after suffering two strokes. Four other police officers committed suicide.

Harris also went too far when she said Trump “has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The violent attack on the Capitol was the reason for his second impeachment, which charged him with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” But it wasn’t the reason for the federal indictment. In that case, as we have written, Trump was charged with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Notably absent from the indictment, the New York Times reported, was “any count that directly accused Mr. Trump of being responsible for the violence his supporters committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Harris also went on to misleadingly claim that Trump is again threatening violence. “Donald Trump, the candidate, has said, in this election, there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking,” she said. As we have written, Trump made his “bloodbath” remark at a March 16 rally in Ohio, while warning of China building auto manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cause a hemorrhaging of U.S. auto jobs. A campaign spokesperson told the Washington Post that Trump was referring to “an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers” if he loses the election.
Falsehood About Immigrants Eating Pets

In the midst of commenting on immigration, Trump referenced a debunked rumor that has been circulating widely on social media this week.

Referring to immigrants in a southwestern Ohio city, the former president said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

But, according to the Springfield News-Sun, the rumor began in a local Facebook group. “The original poster did not cite first-hand knowledge of an incident,” the newspaper reported. “Instead they claimed that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and found it hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home being carved up to be eaten.”

City police have said that there’s no evidence to support the claims.

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the Springfield police said in a statement provided to several news outlets this week.

And, in an unusual move, one of the debate moderators, Muir, provided some live fact-checking, saying, “ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Indeed, on Sept. 9, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck provided the same statement as the police to ABC News, and said, “Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic.”

Even though there’s no evidence to support the claim, it has been amplified by Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who posted on X on Sept. 9, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

He backtracked the following day, posting on the same platform: “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
Tariffs

Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax,” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American consumers, but most agree it would be substantial.

According to Harris, her opponent “has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.” She said, “Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year.”

As we’ve written, Trump has been inconsistent and opaque about what exactly he is proposing, but most often he has talked about a 10% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. On other occasions, he has floated a baseline tariff as high as 20%.

The estimate cited by Harris, $4,000, comes from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based on a 20% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.

Other nonpartisan groups have come in with lower estimates. Based on a 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tax on imported Chinese goods, the Tax Policy Center estimated a more modest $1,350 cost to middle-income households. Using those same parameters, an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical middle-income household about $1,700 in increased expenses each year. The Tax Foundation estimates such tariffs would amount to an annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.

So Harris has taken advantage of Trump’s inconsistent comments about the amount of his proposed universal tariffs to provide a high estimate of its cost to Americans. But Trump’s claim that his tariffs wouldn’t cost Americans at all is misleading.

Americans are “not going to have higher prices,” Trump said. “Who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.”

As we noted above, economists say American consumers, at least in the short term, would see higher prices due to a universal tariff.

As Erica York, senior economist and research director with the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told us earlier this year, “When the U.S. imposes a tariff, the person in the United States who is importing the good pays a tax to the U.S. government when they import the foreign goods. U.S. tariffs are taxes on U.S. consumers of foreign goods that must be paid by the importer of the good.”
Harris Did Not Negotiate Ukraine-Russia Peace

During an exchange about U.S. support for Ukraine, Trump falsely claimed that Harris was tasked with negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia and their respective presidents.

“Nobody likes to talk about it, but just so you understand, they sent her to negotiate peace before this war started,” Trump said of Harris. “Three days later, [Russian President Vladimir Putin] went in and started the war because everything they said was weak and stupid. They said the wrong things. That war should have never started. She was the emissary. They sent her in to negotiate with [Ukrainian President Volodymr] Zelenskyy and Putin.”

That’s not what happened. As we’ve written, in February 2022, Harris traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference to talk with European leaders about world topics, including Russian aggression toward Ukraine.

In a Feb. 19 speech, she warned that the U.S. and its allies would “impose significant and unprecedented economic costs” if Russia attacked Ukraine. She also had in-person meetings with several heads of state, including Zelenskyy and the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

But Harris did not negotiate peace between Putin and Zelenskyy. Russia reportedly did not send a representative to the security conference that year, and Harris also did not travel to Russia to meet with Putin.

“To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms. Harris,” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Putin, said in July when asked whether Putin had ever talked with Harris.

Prior to the Munich conference, U.S. officials had been warning that Russia planned an invasion of Ukraine. In a Feb. 18, 2022, presser, Biden said, “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days.” Then Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24.
Harris Wrong About Unemployment

While talking about what the Biden-Harris administration inherited from the Trump administration, Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April, as businesses and other services shut down to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But the economy had begun to recover by the time Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, when the unemployment rate had declined to 6.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was not the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, which followed the stock market crash of 1929. The unemployment rate was higher than 6.4% for 65 consecutive months from October 2008 until March 2014, which included periods under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The highest rate during that period was 10% in October 2009, a few months after the “Great Recession,” which began in December 2007, ended in June 2009.

Before then, the unemployment rate had reached as high as 10.8% under President Ronald Reagan in November and December 1982.
Manufacturing Jobs

Harris boasted that the U.S. has “created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, while I have been vice president. … Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.” Trump countered that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month.”

As we wrote recently, both are cherry-picking data points.

The economy added 462,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first two years in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then lost 43,000 in his third year, before the pandemic-fueled recession hit.

The economy then shed nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in the first few months of the pandemic, a little more than half of which returned before Trump left office. So Harris is correct that there was a net loss of manufacturing jobs – 178,000 — over Trump’s full term, but the vast majority of job losses under Trump were due to the global pandemic.

As of August, the U.S. has added 739,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden and Harris — short of the 800,000 mentioned by Harris. (And those numbers may soon change in ways that will markedly change the Biden administration’s record. Preliminary estimates of annual revisions to the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March indicate that the BLS’ monthly estimates may have overshot manufacturing jobs by 115,000.) As for Trump’s claim that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month,” that’s actually an undersell. BLS data show a loss of 24,000 manufacturing jobs between July and August, and a net decline of 39,000 this year.

In other words, the trend under both Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth following an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.
No Evidence for ‘Prisons,’ ‘Mental Institutions’ Claim

Echoing a whopper of a claim he has been making since last year, Trump claimed that “millions of people” crossing the southern border illegally are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Immigration experts told us there’s simply no evidence for that. One expert said Trump’s claim appeared to be “a total fabrication.”

Trump has repeated the claim many times, but he hasn’t provided any credible support for it.

In June, we looked into Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because he has repeatedly linked a drop in crime there with his claim about countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. Once again, during the debate, Trump stated: “Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they’ve taken their criminals off the street and they’ve given them to her to put into our country,” referring to Harris. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.

He said the drop in crime is partly due to worsening economic and living conditions, which have caused nearly 8 million people to leave the country since 2014. The vast majority have settled in nearby South American countries.

Trump also claimed that those coming into the country were “taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” We previously found no evidence for that, either, in employment and union membership data.
Overturning of Roe v. Wade

In discussing abortion, Trump once again repeated his false claim that everyone wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote — and that’s what happened,” he said, also incorrectly crediting six justices on two occasions.

In 2022, after Trump appointed three conservative judges to the court, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in a 5-4 ruling, immediately putting in place restrictions on abortion in nearly half of states. Since then, as Trump went on to note, several states have voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions or reject further restrictions.

Experts have previously told us that Trump’s claim is “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.” Contrary to his claim, most Americans opposed the ending of Roe v. Wade. And even though some scholars have been critical of some of the legal reasoning in the decision, many did not wish to end Roe.
No Abortions ‘After Birth’

In casting his opponent as “radical” on abortion, Trump repeatedly claimed Democrats support abortion “in the ninth month” or later.

“They have abortion in the ninth month,” he said, before alluding to misconstrued comments by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. “He said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.” (Trump initially misidentified him as the former governor of West Virginia.)

“Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump continued, referring to Walz. “He also says, execution after birth. It’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born.”

Trump hit the same point again later, again invoking Northam. “You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth,” he said. “Just look at the governor, former governor of Virginia. The governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside, and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”

As the moderator noted, no state allows people to kill babies after birth. That would be infanticide, and it’s illegal.

Some states do not have gestational limits on abortion, including Minnesota. Last year, Gov. Walz signed a bill protecting abortion following 2022’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The law eliminated nearly all restrictions on abortion, including gestational limits.

It also removed a requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and health” of an infant born alive as the result of an abortion. As one obstetrician explained in an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune, this is so that parents of a dying infant can hold their baby and say goodbye, and not be forced to watch while the child receives futile medical intervention (the law still requires the infant be given proper medical care and be “fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law”).

Most abortions are performed early in pregnancy. According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are for 2021, 80.8% of abortions were performed at or before nine weeks of gestation, and 93.5% were performed at or before 13 weeks. Fewer than 1% were performed at 21 weeks or later. The figures are voluntarily reported and apply to legal abortions in 48 reporting areas in the U.S. (D.C, New York City and all states except for California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey).

In Minnesota, 88% of induced abortions occurred at or before 12 weeks of pregnancy in 2022, according to the latest available data from the Minnesota Department of Health. No abortions occurred in the ninth month.

Trump’s references to Northam are distortions of comments the former governor made in a radio interview in 2019. Trump has previously misrepresented the comments in his State of the Union address that year.

In the interview, Northam, who is a physician, said third-trimester abortion is “done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother’s in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam later clarified that he was not suggesting infanticide, and a spokesperson said Northam was “focused on the tragic and extremely rare case in which a woman with a nonviable pregnancy or severe fetal abnormalities went into labor.”
Trump’s Stance on National Abortion Ban, Pregnancy Monitoring

As she has said before, Harris predicted that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected. But Trump has said this year and stated again during the debate that he would not sign such a ban.

“It’s a lie,” Trump said in response to Harris’ debate claim. “I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban, because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted” — for abortion “to be brought back into the states.” Trump was referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade.

He later again denied plans to sign a national abortion ban, saying, “And as far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of [an] abortion ban, but it doesn’t matter, because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

But it does matter if Congress sends a national abortion ban bill to the next president’s desk. Trump did say during his first presidential campaign and presidency that he would support a federal ban on abortion past 20 weeks in most cases, and he has reportedly more recently privately expressed support for a 16-week abortion ban.

Harris also referenced Project 2025, a conservative document Trump has tried to distance himself from. “Understand, in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” Harris said.

As we’ve written previously, Project 2025 does propose mandatory reporting from states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on miscarriages and abortions. But Trump’s campaign has said that Project 2025 “should not be associated with the campaign.” Trump has recently claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, although parts of it were written by former members of his administration.

When asked in April about whether states with abortion bans “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban,” Trump said such monitoring should be left up to the individual states.
Trade Deficit Higher Under Biden

Moderator Muir asked Harris about the Biden administration’s decision to keep in place a number of the tariffs levied by Trump on other countries.

Harris responded: “Well, let’s be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit — one of the highest we’ve ever seen in the history of America.”

But as we previously wrote, the trade deficit under the Biden administration has exceeded the deficit during Trump’s term.

As of May, the U.S. goods and services deficit over the previous 12 months was $799.3 billion, according to data published in early July by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade deficit that period was about $145.6 billion higher, or about 22.3% more, than in 2020, when Trump was president. The trade deficit in 2020 was the highest annual deficit under Trump, at $653.7 billion.
Trump Refuses to ‘Acknowledge’ 2020 Loss

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In the popular vote, Biden received a total of 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. In electoral votes, Biden garnered 306 to Trump’s 232.

But the former president has continued to spread disinformation undermining the integrity of the election, saying that he would have won if there hadn’t been widespread fraud.

Debate moderator Muir asked Trump, “Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?”

“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” Trump responded, going on to wrongly claim that his election-related lawsuits were rejected on a “technicality.”

“They said we didn’t have standing,” Trump claimed.

But a list of lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 election, compiled by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, shows several cases that were decided on the merits — including some brought by the Trump campaign.

And, as we have written, local, state and federal judges have said that Trump’s lawyers provided no evidence of fraud.

For example, Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Robert Baldi in Pennsylvania rejected the Trump campaign’s attempt to toss out absentee ballots in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia. In doing so, Baldi, a Republican, wrote “that there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots.” The Trump campaign appealed, but Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer upheld the lower court ruling and also noted that Trump’s lawyers made “absolutely no allegations of any fraud.”

Trump’s own election security officials at the time also called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Fracking

Trump repeatedly said that Harris would ban fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. Harris said she would not.

Fracking can impact the environment, including potential contamination of groundwater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“She will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said during the debate in Philadelphia. “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one.”

Moderator Linsey Davis also asked Harris about how her position has changed on fracking. Responding to Davis, Harris said, ”Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020 I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

But when she was a candidate in the 2020 race for president, Harris said that she was opposed to fracking. During a September 2019 CNN town hall, Harris was asked by a climate activist if she would commit to a federal ban on fracking because of environmental concerns for local communities. Harris answered, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, so yes.”

Harris didn’t exactly make her position clear in 2020, as she said in the debate. Instead, in the 2020 vice presidential debate, she said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

More recently, in an Aug. 29 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris said, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”

The Inflation Reduction Act does not refer specifically to fracking, but it does open up federal land to oil and gas leases, which would involve the use of fracking to extract natural gas on some of that land.
Trump Tax Cuts

Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump’s tax proposal seeks to “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion [added] to America’s deficit.”

That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.

As we’ve written, the vice president is referring to a 10-year cost estimate of extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017. If Congress does not act, many of the tax cuts, including the individual income tax cuts, will expire after 2025. Trump has proposed keeping them.

But extending the tax cuts would not just benefit large corporations and billionaires, as Harris suggested.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a July 8 blog item that it would cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years to extend the TCJA’s expiring tax cut provisions. If that happens, less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more, Gleckman said.

For example, under the TCJA, the child tax credit doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and the first $1,400 was made refundable, meaning the credit could reduce a family’s tax liability to zero and it would still be able to receive a tax refund, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income cutoff for the child tax credit, or CTC, also increased from $110,000 to $400,000 for married couples filing jointly. Those earning less than $400,000 also benefit from changes made in 2017 to the individual tax rates and brackets — which also will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts.

Overall, the Tax Policy Center’s distributional analysis found that the tax burden of a typical household in the middle income quintile would decrease by 1.1% should Congress extend the TCJA’s provisions, as compared with a 1.7% decrease in the tax burden for a typical household in the top income quintile.
False Gun Confiscation Claim

Harris, Trump claimed, “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” That’s false. Harris has no such plan.

In 2019, during her first campaign for president, Harris said that she would support a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” — but not all firearms.

“There are certain types of weapons that should not be on the streets of a civil society,” Harris said, referring to assault weapons, which she called “weapons of war,” in a November 2019 NBC News interview, for example. While Harris still supports a ban on purchasing assault weapons, her campaign told us that, as of 2024, she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to give up the assault weapons that they previously purchased.
Inflation

Trump made false claims about inflation during his tenure in office and Biden’s.

During an exchange over Trump’s proposed tariff policy, the former president said that under his administration there was “no inflation, virtually no inflation,” and that the current administration “had the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country.”

Inflation was low during Trump’s presidency, but it wasn’t zero.

As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the Consumer Price Index rose 7.6% under Trump — an average of 1.9% in each of his four years in office. That continued a long period of low inflation, including during the Obama administration (1.8% annual average) and under George W. Bush (2.4% average).

It isn’t true that under Biden the U.S. has experienced inflation “like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history,” as Trump claimed.

The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes.

Under Biden, the biggest increase occurred during a 12-month period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment). BLS said it was the biggest increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has cooled since then. More recently, the CPI rose 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July, according to the BLS.

Altogether under Biden’s presidency, the CPI has risen 19.4%.
Affordable Care Act

Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president. His administration also supported a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2021 that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring the suit.

If he “saved” the ACA, it was not for lack of trying to end it.

In the debate, moderator Davis asked Trump about his recent statement that, if elected, he would keep the ACA, known as Obamacare, “unless we can do something much better.” Davis asked if Trump had a plan to replace the law.

Trump said, “I have concepts of a plan” that “you’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future” and that “I would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive.”

The former president has made similar comments before. During the 2020 campaign, he said, “What we’d like to do is totally kill it, but come up — before we do that — with something that’s great.” He has yet to release a replacement plan for the ACA.

What’s “better” is a matter of opinion, of course. One of the main provisions of the ACA is that it prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their preexisting health conditions, provisions that most notably have affected those seeking to buy their own coverage on the individual market. Trump has expressed support for preexisting conditions protections, but his record shows he has backed ideas that would weaken the law’s provisions.

Trump supported a 2017 GOP bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. He also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.

In late September 2020, Trump signed an executive order that made the general proclamation: “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”

It did not. Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us at the time that the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”

Despite Trump’s comments that he may still replace the ACA, several top Republicans have said the issue is a non-starter in Congress.
Crime

Trump wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” FBI data for 2023 is based on reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency, and the figures show violent crime is trending down.

As we have written, in Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. The 2023 figures are based on data from voluntary reports by 79% of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., representing higher participation than any year during Trump’s presidency.

The final numbers and information about nationwide crime rates, which are adjusted for population, won’t be available until the FBI’s annual crime report is released in October.

The trend in the FBI reports is backed by other credible sources as well.

AH Datalytics’ analysis of data about homicides from more than 200 large U.S. cities showed homicides declined by about 12% in 2023, crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, told us in May. Its data show murders have continued to drop this year overall. The FBI data also track with a large decline in shooting victims in 2023 documented by the Gun Violence Archive.

The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association also show a decline in murders and violent crime. The number of murders went down by 17% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024 in 69 large U.S. cities that provided data.

And finally, the Council on Criminal Justice’s mid-year 2024 crime report representing data from 39 cities found: “Overall, most violent crimes are at or below levels seen in 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020. There were 2% fewer homicides during the first half of 2024 than during the first half of 2019 and 15% fewer robberies. Aggravated assaults and domestic violence incidents also are below levels seen five years ago.”
It’s Not Fraud, It’s Routine Revisions

After falsely claiming the FBI crime data are fraudulent, Trump claimed the “number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.” The jobs data isn’t fraudulent, either.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics last month announced that it would likely revise monthly employment figures based on more comprehensive data — a routine revision it does every year.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever of any manipulation or padding,” David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics, told us when we wrote about Trump’s claims in August. He called the BLS’ recent announcement “completely formulaic,” as it reflected the same pattern of how the BLS has been revising the job figures over many years.

As we’ve written, the BLS publishes monthly employment figures that come from a survey of more than 100,000 employers. Later, it obtains more comprehensive data from state unemployment insurance tax filings that employers submit to determine what taxes they owe to unemployment benefit programs. Once a year, the BLS adjusts its monthly estimates based on those state filings.

This year, the BLS announced on Aug. 21 a preliminary estimate that the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March would likely be adjusted downward by 818,000 jobs. That’s an adjustment of -0.5% to the March level of employment, larger than the average revision over the last 10 years. There have been other large revisions in the past, however.

The annual revision for 2019, under Trump, was a reduction of 514,000 jobs, or -0.3% of the initial March 2019 employment estimate. The 2009 revision was a reduction of 902,000, or -0.7% of the original March 2009 estimate.

BLS’ final estimate for the year ending in March 2024 will be issued in February 2025, when the January employment report is released. That’s when the final revisions have been issued each year dating back to 2004.

The U.S. has added 15.8 million jobs under Biden. An 818,000 downward revision would drop that number to about 15 million.
More Repeats

The candidates repeated several other claims we have fact-checked before:

Economy. Trump revisited one of his commonly repeated claims, saying at the beginning of the debate that, under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”

But the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” under Trump. Economists look to real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth to measure economic health, and that figure exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth more than a dozen times before he took office.

Every president since the 1930s except for Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover has seen a year with at least 3% growth in GDP.

Dictator. The vice president repeated one of her favorite talking points when she claimed Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1.” He said he was joking when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

Harris was referring to a comment that Trump made at a Fox News town hall in December. At the event, Sean Hannity gave Trump the chance to respond to critics who warned that Trump would be a dictator if elected to a second term. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Hannity said. Trump responded, “Except for Day 1.”

Trump went on to say, “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Trump later claimed he was joking with Hannity. In a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

Trump told Bartiromo his “dictator” comment was “said in jest.”

Border czar. Trump falsely claimed Harris is the “border czar.” She’s not.

As we have written, Biden in March 2021 tasked Harris with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative, known as the “Roots Causes Strategy,” seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

Harris was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Afghanistan. If Trump had been president during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind.”

But that’s a gross exaggeration. That figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.

CNN reported in April 2022 that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

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