Joe Biden and Donald Trump exchanged barbs Thursday evening during the first televised debate of the electoral campaign. AFP verified some of the candidates’ claims on key issues.
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Migrants
Trump falsely claimed that under President Joe Biden, “we no longer have borders,” and that “because of his ridiculous, senseless, and very stupid policies, people are coming in and killing our citizens at a level that we have never seen.
Faced with criticism over the record number of migrant arrivals in the United States, Joe Biden signed an executive order in early June, temporarily closing the border with Mexico as soon as a daily limit is reached.
This amounts to “increased surveillance at the border,” according to Nicole Hallett, director of the Center for Immigrant Rights at the University of Chicago.
Despite some high-profile incidents, including the murder of a college student in Georgia, there is “no evidence” of the migrant crime wave Trump described, she told AFP, noting that “crime is down across the country, although immigration is up.”
Violent and property crime are near their lowest levels in decades, according to the FBI’s 2022 data, the most recent available.
“The overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by citizens” of the United States, said Jeffrey Fagan, professor at Columbia University.
A Cato Institute report released this week showed that immigrants were proportionally less likely to be convicted of murder in 2022 than U.S. citizens.
According to Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director at the Migration Policy Institute, there is no evidence to support claims repeated by Donald Trump during the debate that prisoners and people living in psychiatric facilities are streaming in from the Mexican border.
Inflation
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been passing the buck over who is responsible for soaring inflation.
Joe Biden “caused inflation – I left him a country with almost no inflation”, lamented the billionaire after reciting his favorite – but false – phrase about the advent under his presidency of the largest economy in the history of the United States.
The current president has claimed that his Republican predecessor “decimated the economy” during his four years in the White House.
Both candidates are misleading by omitting the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
At the end of Donald Trump’s term, nearly a year into the COVID-19 crisis, inflation was running at around 1.4%.
It began its ascent in the spring of 2021, reaching 9.1% in June 2022, its highest level in almost 40 years. It then slowly fell back down, and is now around 3%, still higher than the 2% targeted by the American Central Bank (Fed).
Several factors linked to the pandemic are in question, including the billions of dollars injected via the aid plans of the Trump and then Biden administrations, the difficulties encountered in the global supply chain, and even the war in Ukraine.
January 6, 2021
Donald Trump has tried to dodge the accusations he faces over the events of January 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. The former president blamed Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the top congresswoman at the time.
“I offered her 10,000 troops or the National Guard, and she refused,” he falsely said.
Nancy Pelosi would not even have had the power to reject the deployment of the National Guard if Donald Trump had decided to do so, several experts told AFP.
According to the website of the Washington National Guard division, it takes its orders “only from the president”
The parliamentary commission of inquiry into the assault of January 6, 2021 wrote in its final report that Donald Trump had “never given the order to deploy the National Guard” to prevent the excesses.
Donald Trump also reiterated that the 2020 presidential election, lost to Joe Biden, had been marred by “aberrant” fraud. Unfounded accusations that have since been refuted, particularly in court.
