The Commission on Presidential Debates, which organized Monday night’s debate, has said it’s inappropriate for moderators to fact check the candidates.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica,” Janet Brown, executive director of the commission told CNN.
This would appear to be an abdication of the basic responsibility of journalism, which is to inform the public.
It also presents a particular challenge for a debate featuring Donald Trump. The New York Times reports that Trump has “unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random — even compulsive.”
If the debate commission won’t let Lester Holt do his job, we’ll do it for him.
You can use this guide to fact check Trump during the debate.
Trump: “If you look at their numbers, you look at what’s going on statistically. 40 percent in poverty. 58 percent of African-American youth can’t get jobs.”
These poverty numbers are not accurate. According to the US Census Bureau, 24.1 percent of the African American population fell below the poverty line in 2015 — the highest out of any racial group, but nowhere near Trump’s inflated numbers.
The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts unemployment among African American youth at 26.1 percent (Trump has repeated the higher percentage throughout the summer; in June Politifact rated it “mostly false” and explained how Trump had likely inflated the statistics to make an exaggerate talking point).
Trump: “I am under audit. A routine audit. And when the audit is complete, I will release my [tax] returns.”
In February, Trump said he would “at some point, probably” make his tax returns public. But later, he claimed that he could not do so because his returns since 2009 are under IRS audit (at one point suggesting that he is regularly audited because he is a Christian).
The IRS has made it clear that he is still free to release his returns and would not hold it against him, but Trump has not even been willing to release returns from 2008 and before — returns that are not under audit. The last time Trump did reveal his tax filing, in a report by gaming regulators, the documents showed he did not pay a dollar in federal income tax.
In May, Trump was asked to reveal just his tax rate, but told a reporter it was “none of your business.” Trump added that he did not believe voters have a right to see his returns, but that “When the audit ends, I’m going to present them. That should be before the election. I hope it’s before the election.”
In recent weeks, Trump’s son Donald Jr. completely contradicted Trump’s stated reasoning, revealing perhaps the real reason the campaign is remaining steadfastly opaque: “[Trump Sr. has] got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from [the campaign’s] main message.”
Trump: “The [Trump] Foundation is really rare. It gives money to vets. It’s really been doing a good job”
Though Trump has smeared the Clinton foundation as “the most corrupt enterprise in political history” and demanded that it “be shut down immediately,” he has said very little about his own foundation.
Only after months and media scrutiny about his January claims that he had raised $6 million for veterans at a campaign stunt did he finally keep his pledge to kick in $1 million of his own. He berated a reporter for asking about it at the time, “You know, you’re a nasty guy. You’re really a nasty guy. I gave out millions of dollars that I had no obligation to do.”
Surrogates have boasted since that Trump has given “millions and millions” to charitable causes and that the Trump foundation “is his money.” but an extensive examination by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold found that Trump has not has not given any of his own money to the tax-exempt foundation since 2008 — and found less than $10,000 in personal charitable giving over seven years. He also found that even Trump’s pledges of personal charitable donations were often paid out by the foundation or his television production company.
More problematic — and seemingly illegal — was the fact that Trump used the foundation’s money to support a political campaign committee (for which the foundation paid a $2,500 penalty), to settle business debts, and to purchase paintings of himself and sports memorabilia.
Asked last week about these allegations of improper “self-dealing,” Trump offered only an incoherent word salad, stating that ““we put that to sleep just by putting out the last report.” Earlier this month, New York’s attorney general said he is investigating the Trump Foundation over possible improprieties.
Trump: Hillary wants to “bring in 620,000 new refugees from Syria and that region over a short period of time.”
Clinton has called for 65,000 Syrian refugees to be resettled in the U.S., an increase from the 10,000 resettled under the Obama administration. While Clinton proposed this increase once, Trump is effectively adding the 55,000 additional refugees Clinton proposed to resettle and adding it to the 100,000 refugees from all over the world proposed by the Obama administration for FY 2017.
“Trump then multiplies 155,000 times four years to reach 620,000 refugees,” the Washington Post reported. “Clinton has never proposed such a ‘plan,’ so this is an invented figure. Clinton only has proposed an increase of 55,000 refugees for one year.”
Trump: “Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year”
From ThinkProgress’ Esther Lee in August:
According to Trump, undocumented immigrants are a billion-dollar burden on the economy, costing $113 billion in local, state, and federal taxes. The same statistic can be found at the Federation for American Immigration Reform website, an anti-immigrant organization founded by white nationalist John Tanton.
In reality, undocumented immigrants are a net positive to the economy, contributing $11.64 billion into local and state taxes, according to a 2016 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report. What’s more, undocumented immigrants also contributed $35.1 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund between 2000 and 2011, according to a 2015 Journal of General Internal Medicine study. Even Alex Nowrasteh, the immigration policy expert at the Libertarian think tank CATO Institute, called Trump’s claim “nonsense.”
Trump: “Crime is rising”
Trump has tended to overstate crime numbers — he spent most of his Republican National Committee speech using cherry-picked data to tell an exaggerated story about crime in America. The facts don’t back him up.
The latest FBI report — released just today — do show a small increase of 3.9 percent in violent crime in 2015 as compared to the previous year. However, that number is still a bit lower than the 2011 crime level, and much lower — 16.5 percent — than the 2006 violent crime level.
Homicide and manslaughter rates are also on an overall downward trend, according to the FBI.
There has been an uptick in crime rates in certain cities, which has been eagerly seized upon by the press — and Trump — to make dire pronouncements. Trump is right that the homicide rate increased in the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2015, but violent crime has been on the decline for decades.
As detailed by a Congressional Research Service report debunking the hyperbolic headlines, statistically speaking, it’s not good practice to look at a one-year uptick.
From the report:
In general, crime data should be viewed over longer time periods in order to determine trends. For example, even though violent crime and homicide rates have been on a downward trend since the early 1990s, there were years where one or both increased, but those year-to-year increases did not portend a break in the overall trend.
There’s always noise in the data, and this year’s uptick does not definitively indicate a reversal of a two-decade long downward trend. And, just as the overall crime and homicide rate has decreased nationwide, it has also decreased in both large and moderate sized cities across America.
Trump: “Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment.”
Hillary Clinton has never endorsed the repeal of the Second Amendment. She has advocated for stronger background checks prior to gun purchases and a federal prohibition on “straw purchases” to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, domestic abusers, other violent criminals, and the severely mentally ill. She has also opposed special immunity for the gun industry.
We can protect our Second Amendment rights AND take commonsense steps to prevent gun violence. It’s just a question of whether we choose to.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 11, 2016
Clinton disagreed with a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that found for the first time that the right to bear arms was an individual right, rather than a class right, but has also made clear that she does not want to see that case overturned.
Trump, who in the past backed new gun control measures, said last week that he thinks police officers should simply disarm citizens if they find them carry guns — though he later claimed that he only would do that to people in Chicago. His statement after the Orlando Pulse shootings, suggesting that more bar owners should have been armed and firing back, drew criticism even from the National Rifle Association. He later changed his position, claiming he only had meant more armed security guards and employees.
Trump: “Our country doesn’t win… We don’t win. We can’t beat ISIS.”
ISIS lost significant ground in 2016. Experts familiar with the groups workings say the execution of foreign attacks in places like Istanbul and Baghdad were responses to military failures in Syria and Iraq.
“ISIS is reeling and their fighters are fleeing the battlefield,” a senior officer of the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), told Politico in July.
They group lost so much ground in Syria and Iraq that some analysts believe they are preparing for the collapse of their self-proclaimed caliphate.
“They’re not trying to be clever about it,” Will McCants, an expert at the Brookings Institution and author of a recent book about ISIS told the Washington Post, “but they’re really trying to prepare their followers to cope with a ‘caliphate’ that is no longer a caliphate.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s strategy to defeat ISIS is a little more straightforward. His solution to defeating ISIS? “I would bomb the shit out of them,” he told a rally.
Trump’s strategy was denounced by Gen. Ray Odierno, a high ranking military official who commanded troops in Iraq from 2008 to 2010.
“The problem we’ve had is we’ve had outcomes, but they’ve been only short-term outcomes because we haven’t properly looked at the political and economic side of it,” Odierno said last year. “It has got to be three that come together. And if you don’t do that, it will not solve the problem, and that is what I continue to look at.”
Trump: “We’re the highest taxed nation in the world.”
The U.S. is not the highest taxed nation in the world. Trump has repeated this claim several times, and three times, Politifact has debunked it.
To asses the general tax rate, fact-checking site compared the U.S. to 33 other industrialized nations and found that contrary to Trump’s claims, taxation rates in the US “actually [place] “near the bottom or around the middle of the pack.”
Trump’s statement is marginally more true when you get to the specifics of corporate taxes: It is true that the U.S. nominally has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. However, in practical terms, companies actually end up paying less because of deductions and inclusions, so in reality, the actual tax burden on U.S. companies is “far from the highest in the world” according to Politifact.
“By all metrics we looked at, the United States is far from the most taxed nation overall and for businesses,” the site concluded.
Trump: “I have nothing to do with Russia. I have nothing to do with Putin”
The Trump family have promoted themselves and their properties in Russia for years, ABC reported, meaning that the mogul’s presidency could come into direct conflict with his business interests.
“The level of business amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars — what he received as a result of interaction with Russian businessmen,” Sergei Millian, the head of a U.S.-Russia business group who says he once helped market Trump’s U.S. condos in Russia and former Soviet states, told ABC. “They were happy to invest with him, and they were happy to work with Donald Trump. And they were happy to associate — [and] be associated with Donald Trump.”
On press call, fmr CIA deputy director Michael Morell says Trump's Putin "obsession" is "100% consistent with his business interests."
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) September 22, 2016
“Over the last decade, the tycoon has had at least three potential real estate developments in Russia, but those plans never got off the ground,” CBS reported earlier this year. “In a 2007 deposition, he spoke about plans for a Trump International hotel in Moscow and meetings with Russian businessmen.”
Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort also had shady ties to Putin allies, according to the New York Times.
“Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin,” the Times reported.
U.S. intelligence officers are investigating whether one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers is communicating privately with senior Russian officials, Yahoo News reported.
“U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, [Carter] Page [who Trump named as an adviser during an interview with the Washington Post in March] met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source,” told Yahoo. ”U.S. intelligence agencies have also received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide while in Moscow — Igor Diveykin. A former Russian security official, Diveykin now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.”
Trump: “You know, I didn’t want to go into Iraq”
Trump has repeatedly used his alleged opposition to the Iraq War to suggest that his “good judgment” about foreign policy is superior to Clinton’s. But in an September 11, 2002 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, found by BuzzFeed in February, Trump in fact said the exact opposite. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded when asked if he supported an Iraq invasion. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Indeed in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, he called for a “principled and tough” policy toward “outlaw” states like Iraq. “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons. I’m no warmonger,” Trump wrote. “But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion. When we don’t, we have the worst of all worlds: Iraq remains a threat, and now has more incentive than ever to attack us.” There is no evidence that he publicly opposed the invasion until after it had happened.
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Although Trump was reminded of this in a February CNN town hall and he conceded that he “may have said that,” Trump has continued to repeat the false claim that he was “totally against the war in Iraq.”
Trump: “In the history of politics, there has never been a more hostile media than to Donald Trump”
Research shows that overall, the media has been far kinder to Trump than any of the other candidates.
A report from Harvard’s Shorestein Center found that throughout the extended primary season, Trump was boosted up by a disproportionate amount of positive or neutral media coverage. The report analyzed coverage by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
From the beginning, he received disproportionate media attention to his actual political standing. As he garnered more and more media coverage, his poll standings rose — perhaps because overwhelmingly, the coverage he received was either positive or neutral in tone. This positive and neutral coverage was worth the equivalent of $55 million in ad money to his campaign, according to the report.
Clinton, meanwhile, received mostly negative coverage during the primary season.
“In 11 of the 12 months, her “bad news” outpaced her “good news,” usually by a wide margin, contributing to the increase in her unfavorable poll ratings in 2015,” the report concludes. Coverage of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, was “overwhelmingly positive in tone.”
As it became clear that Trump would be the party’s nominee, however, the tenor of media coverage did shift towards more serious reporting — not nearly enough, however, to back up Trump’s claim that he has been singled out for unfair treatment by the media — in fact, not even enough to warrant the claim that he’s received the most negative coverage in the current race.
During the conventions, for example, the Shorenstein center’s research shows that the coverage was overwhelmingly negative on both sides of the aisle. Still, Trump’s received more news coverage overall, and in fact, had a larger voice in Clinton’s coverage than the candidate herself.
“Clinton’s voice accounted for a meager 4 percent of her coverage,” the report finds, while Trump “[supplied] 6 percent of the news reports about her.”
Trump: “I will help women, because we have the women’s health problems. We have a lot of problems.”
Trump’s policies are bad for women, particularly working-class women.
Trump’s childcare plan would only help rich women. Helen Bank, director of childcare and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center, previously told ThinkProgress that his plan, which relies on tax deductions, is “absolutely regressive.” His plan also only applies to married women, excluding fathers, gay couples, and single mothers.
Trump proposed to make birth control an over-the-counter prescription, which would actually make birth control more expensive, and thus more difficult to access, for low-income women. Trump also wants to repeal Obamacare, stripping women of no-copay birth control, which has benefited more than 55 million women.
Trump also supports defunding Planned Parenthood and banning safe, legal abortions. On September 16, the Trump campaign released a letter announcing its “Pro-Life coalition,” led by anti-abortion group SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser (SBA List opposes not only abortion, but also emergency contraception and copper IUDs).
The letter also contained a grab bag of the most extreme positions restricting women’s choice: in it, Trump pledged to nominate anti-choice Supreme court judges, make it permanently illegal for taxpayer money to fund abortions (currently illegal under the Hyde amendment), and sign a law federally banning abortions after 20 weeks.
Trump: “92 million Americans are on the sideline outside of the workforce, and they’re not a part of our economy. It’s a silent nation of jobless Americans.”
Trump’s comment about jobless Americans paints a distorted picture of American workers because he’s not actually talking about unemployment. As of August, there are 94.4 million people over the age of 16 who are considered “not in labor force,” but only 7.8 million of them are “unemployed.” The rest aren’t actually looking for work.
Within that “jobless” number are people over 65 who are probably retired (40 percent) and teenagers who are probably still in school (12 percent), and quite a number of people with disabilities. Many of the rest who aren’t in school are parents (presumably stay-at-home) of children under the age of 18. In other words, 93 percent of Trump’s “jobless” are people who don’t want or need jobs.
When Trump made this claim earlier this month, the Washington Post gave him “four Pinnochios.” Though he has called the unemployment number “one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics,” it is a statistic that serves as a legitimate barometer of the state of the economy. After soaring in the immediate aftermath of the recession in 2009 to 10 percent, it has steadily declined since then and now sits at 4.9 percent.
Trump: “We have cities that are far more dangerous than Afghanistan.”
As the New York Times pointed out: “No American city resembles a war zone, though crime has risen lately in some, like Chicago.”
The claim that some American cities are more dangerous than an actual war zone predates Trump’s run for office. In 2012, Chicago lost 228 people to murder, while in Afghanistan, 144 American service members were killed. Of course, that statistic does not include the number of Afghans killed during that period.
Furthermore, Chicago is a city of nearly three million people whereas only 90,000 troops were based in Afghanistan at that time.
“The murder rate (not the total number of deaths) in Chicago based on those numbers is 8.42 per 100,000 residents,” Mother Jones reported in 2012, after the initial statistic was cited by certain media platforms. “Given that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are involved in an international armed conflict, it’s odd to refer to the all the deaths of US servicemembers as ‘murders,’ but if you were to call this the ‘murder rate’ it would be 160 per 100,000 troops. In other words, being a US servicemember in Afghanistan is about nineteen times as deadly as being a resident of Chicago.”
Josh Israel, Laurel Raymond, Zack Ford, Justin Salhani and Judd Legum contributed to this post.