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We’ve fact-checked a lot of claims from the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees — after all, they’re the same two men who faced off in 2020. Some of President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s assertions are well-worn talking points they will likely continue to trot out on the campaign trail.
As a primer for the 2024 election, here’s our guide to the top 10 falsehoods and distortions — so far — in terms of Trump’s and Biden’s propensity to repeat them.
No ‘Rigged Election’
At just about every opportunity, Trump makes the false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” claiming that he and his allies “found tremendous voter fraud” in swing states that he lost, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.
But there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims, and, in fact, there is ample evidence that the 2020 election was — in the words of the Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — “the most secure in American history.”
The fact is, Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election results. In Georgia, for example, Trump not only lost 11 post-election lawsuits, but a statewide hand audit and a machine recount. “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in announcing the results of the audit on Nov. 19, 2020.
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
Barr gave that testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Like Barr, other top Justice Department officials in the Trump administration testified that they repeatedly told Trump the department found no evidence of widespread election fraud. For example, Richard Donoghue, who was deputy attorney general under Trump, told the Jan. 6 committee that he tried “to put it in very clear terms to the president” that “major allegations” of fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada were “not supported by the evidence.” (For more, see our June story “Trump Ignored Aides, Repeated False Claims.”)
Yet, Trump has made baseless claims about a stolen election a key part of his 2024 campaign.
Deficit Decline Due to Pandemic Spending
Biden often misleadingly suggests that his administration is responsible for the federal budget deficit declining from about $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 to about $1.7 trillion in fiscal 2023. “Our administration has already cut the deficit by $1 trillion,” he said during April 9 remarks from Washington, D.C.
But as we’ve written, the large decline in the deficit had more to do with expiring emergency COVID-19 funding than it did with Biden’s policies. Experts have said that his push for more pandemic and infrastructure spending early in his presidency increased deficits. The drop that Biden cites would have been larger in fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 if not for his policies.
Unsupported Illegal Immigration Claim
Virtually every campaign speech Trump has delivered for more than a year has included some version of the unsupported claim that countries around the world are “emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.” As we have reported, immigration experts say they have not seen evidence to support that.
Trump has offered…
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