In his first press conference since Vice President Kamala Harris was named the Democratic presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump said he would debate her on Sept. 10 and pushed for two more debates. The Republican presidential nominee spoke for more than an hour, discussing a range of issues facing the country and then taking questions from reporters. He made a number of false and misleading claims, many of which have been made before.
Here’s a look at some of those claims. ___
CLAIM: “The largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to – I’ve spoken to the largest crowds. Nobody has spoken to larger crowds than I have. If you look at Martin Luther King’s speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same property, same everything, same number of people, if not more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”
THE FACTS: Trump compared the crowd at his speech at the White House on January 6, 2021, to the crowd that attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.
However, it is estimated that far more people were present at the latter than at the former.
According to the National Park Service, about 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where King delivered his speech. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that at least 10,000 people attended Trump’s address.
In addition, Trump and King did not speak at the same location. King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which faces east toward the Washington Monument. Trump spoke on the Ellipse, a lawn south of the White House.
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CLAIM: “No one was killed on January 6.”
THE FACTS: This is false. Five people died in the riots of January 6, 2021, and their immediate aftermath. Pro-Trump rioters broke into the US Capitol that day as Congress attempted to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Among the dead are Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot by police, and Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died a day after battling with the mob. Four other police officers who responded to the riot killed themselves in the weeks and months that followed.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot by a police officer as she climbed through a broken part of a Capitol door during the violent riot. Trump has often mentioned Babbitt’s death while lamenting the treatment of those who attended a rally outside the White House that day and then marched to the Capitol, many of whom fought with police.
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CLAIM: “Joe Biden was stripped of the presidency, and I’m not a Biden fan, but I’ll tell you what: From a constitutional perspective, from every perspective, they stripped him of the presidency.”
THE FACTS: There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Democratic Party from making Vice President Kamala Harris its nominee. That process is determined by the Democratic National Committee.
Harris officially claimed her nomination on Monday after a five-day online voting process. She received 4,563 of the 4,615 votes cast, or about 99 percent of the participating delegates. A total of 52 delegates from 18 states voted “present,” the only other option on the ballot.
The vice president was the only candidate to receive votes after no other candidate qualified by the party’s deadline following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21.
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CLAIM: He suggests that things would be different if he had been in office rather than Biden: “There would have been no inflation. There would have been no inflation because inflation was caused by their energy problems. Now they’ve gone back to Trump because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to cut back because the price of gasoline went up to $7, $8, $9 a barrel.”
THE FACTS: Had Trump been re-elected in 2020, there would have been at least some inflation, since many of the factors that cause inflation are beyond a president’s control. Prices soared in 2021 after locked-down Americans increased spending on goods like exercise bikes and home office furniture, overwhelming disrupted supply chains. U.S. auto companies, for example, couldn’t get enough semiconductors and had to drastically cut production, driving up prices for new and used cars. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 also sent gas and food prices soaring around the world, as Ukraine’s wheat exports were disrupted and many countries boycotted Russian oil and gas.
Nevertheless, US oil production under Biden reached a global record earlier this year.
Many economists, including some Democrats, say Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed in March 2021, which provided a $1,400 stimulus check to most Americans, fueled inflation by increasing demand. But it alone did not cause inflation. And Trump supported $2,000 stimulus checks in December 2020, rather than the $600 included in a package he signed into law in December 2020.
In countries such as France, Germany and the UK, which have different policies than Biden, prices still rose sharply, but mainly due to the sharp increase in energy costs following Russia’s invasion.
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CLAIM: “During the Biden-Harris administration, twenty million people came across the border – 20 million people – and it could be many more. Nobody really knows.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s 20 million figure is unsubstantiated at best, and he provided no sources.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 7.1 million apprehensions for illegal border crossings from Mexico from January 2021 to June 2024. These are apprehensions, not people. Due to asylum restrictions during the pandemic, many people crossed the border more than once before they were successful because there were no legal consequences for being sent back to Mexico. So the number of people is less than the number of apprehensions.
In addition, CBP reported stopping migrants at official land crossings into Mexico 1.1 million times from January 2021 to June 2024, mostly through an online appointment system for applying for asylum called CBP One.
In addition, U.S. authorities, acting on presidential orders, allowed nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the country, provided they had financial support and arrived at an airport.
In total, that is almost 8.7 million encounters. Here, too, the number of people is lower, as some of them are multiple encounters.
The number of people who have evaded arrest is unknown. In border patrol parlance they are referred to as “escapees”. The border patrol estimates the number but does not publish it.
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CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was 100% the border czar and suddenly, in the last few weeks, she’s no longer the border czar.”
THE FACTS: Harris was tasked with addressing the “root causes” of migration in Central America – migration that manifests itself in illegal border crossings into the U.S. – but she was not sent to the border.
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CLAIM: “The New York cases are completely controlled by the Department of Justice.”
THE FACTS: Trump was referring to two cases pending against him in New York – one civil and one criminal.
Both have nothing to do with the US Department of Justice.
The civil case was initiated by a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, in which Trump was fined $454 million in February for lying about his wealth for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to stardom and into the White House.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought the criminal case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of illegally interfering in the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn star who claimed the two had sex.
___ Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Elliot Spagat and business writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article. ___
AP fact checks can be found here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
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An earlier version of this story confused “latter” and “former” in the third paragraph. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, drew a far larger crowd than Donald Trump’s speech near the White House on January 6, 2021.
