Fact check: Trump makes more than 20 false claims at news conference

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump held a news conference on Thursday in which he continued to be highly dishonest – again making more than 20 false claims, as he also did in his Monday conversation with Elon Musk.

Many of Trump’s inaccurate Thursday claims have been debunked for years. But some of them were relatively new. At one point, he claimed that his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, was responsible for a California policy he claimed allows people to rob stores.

“They had a recent article, and I didn’t know this, but you’re allowed to rob a store as long as it’s not more than $950. Has everyone ever heard of that? You can rob a store, and you have these thieves going into stores with calculators calculating how much it is. Because if it’s less than $950 they can rob it and not get charged. That was her that did that,” Trump said.

Facts First: This claim is false in two significant ways.

First, theft under $950 remains illegal in California; it is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. It’s certainly true that some misdemeanor cases are never prosecuted, but Trump at the very least left open the impression that the state – and Harris herself – made theft under $950 legal.

Second, Harris was not the person who “did that.” In 2010, the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed a law that increased the dollar threshold to trigger felony grand theft charges from the previous level of $400 to a new level of $950. Then, in 2014, California voters affirmed that $950 threshold (and created a new crime of shoplifting) as part of a referendum, approved with nearly 60% support, that reduced penalties for a variety of non-violent offenses.

Harris did not take a public position on the referendum, deciding to stay neutral in her role as state attorney general.

Some critics of Harris and the ballot proposal, known as Proposition 47, have argued that she implicitly supported the proposal by having her office write a favorable ballot summary for the proposal. Regardless, that’s a long way from Trump’s claim.

Here is a fact check of some other false claims Trump made Thursday.

Walz and bathrooms: Trump claimed that Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “signed a bill that boys’ bathrooms – all boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota – will have tampons.” But as PolitiFact has reported, the bill Walz signed in 2023 does not say “all boys’ bathrooms” will have tampons.

Rather, the bill requires that tampons be provided to “all menstruating students” in fourth grade through 12th grade in bathrooms students regularly use – and leaves it up to school districts to decide how to comply. Districts can, for example, provide tampons to transgender boys by placing the items in unisex bathrooms. A spokesperson for the state’s largest school district told Minneapolis’ Star Tribune newspaper earlier this month that it does not provide tampons in boys’ bathrooms, instead providing them in “nongendered bathrooms,” girls’ bathrooms and via health staff.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision: Trump claimed, “As you know, the Supreme Court ruled recently on immunity, and I’m immune from all of the stuff that they charged me with.”

Wrong. The Supreme Court did not give Trump blanket immunity against “all” of the charges he is facing, even in his federal election subversion case in particular; the court ruled that he has immunity for “official acts” taken during his presidency but that “the President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.” Trump’s own lawyer conceded to the court that some of the acts at issue in the case were not official.

The case has now been sent back to a federal district court judge to figure out how the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling applies to the specific allegations against Trump.

“Lock her up” chants: Trump, complaining that Democrats want to put him in prison, falsely claimed he discouraged his supporters’ “lock her up” chants about Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, asserting that he would respond, “Easy, just easy.” In fact, Trump sometimes said “lock her up” himself, sometimes called for Clinton’s imprisonment using different language and many other times paused his speeches and stood in silence to allow the chants to continue.

US energy: Trump claimed “we don’t have energy.” That’s wrong even if he is solely referring to fossil fuel production. The US is producing more crude oil than any country ever has.

Mortgage rates: Trump claimed mortgage rates are “now at 10%.” The standard, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.49% in the week that ended on August 15, mortgage financing giant Freddie Mac said Thursday.

Inflation under Trump: Trump claimed he handed Harris and President Joe Biden an economy “with no inflation.” That’s also not true. Inflation was about 1.4% in the month Trump left office, which is low but not nonexistent, and cumulative inflation under Trump was about 8%.

His civil fraud case: Trump repeated a false claim about his civil fraud trial, claiming he “won the case” at an appeals court but a lower court judge still required him to pay a large fine. He did not win the case at the appeals court.

Harris’ immigration role: Trump claimed that Harris has been “border czar” during her vice presidency. In reality, Harris was given a more limited immigration-related assignment, leading diplomacy with Central American countries in an attempt to address the “root causes” of their citizens’ migration; Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been in charge of border security during the Biden administration.

Awareness of Harris: Arguing that Harris’ support will decline when Americans get to know her better, Trump repeated a previous claim that “nobody” even knows her last name is Harris. This is obvious nonsense.

The 2020 presidential election: Trump claimed that he received 10 to 12 million more votes in the 2020 election he lost than he did in the 2016 election he won, which is accurate (it was about 11.2 million more votes) – but then added, “And that’s not including other votes, that we can talk about it another day.” There is no pool of legitimate “other votes” that were not included in Trump’s total.

Foreign governments and immigration: Trump repeated his regular baseless claim that foreign countries are deliberately “bringing” criminals and people “from mental institutions and insane asylums” to the US as migrants, even “driving them through” the border. Trump’s own campaign hasn’t been able to substantiate these claims, and experts say they have found no evidence for them.

China, Iran and Hamas: Trump repeated a regular claim that during his presidency, “Hamas had no money because Iran had no money,” suggesting this was because he successfully pressured China and others to stop buying oil from Iran. In fact, Iran’s funding for Hamas and other terror groups never stopped during his presidency, though it did decline, and China never stopped buying oil from Iran, though its purchases did decline before rebounding later in his presidency.

Nord Stream 2: Trump falsely claimed, “I ended Nord Stream 2. The pipeline was dead.” He didn’t kill the pipeline. He signed sanctions related to the project into law about three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already about 90% complete, and the state-owned Russian company behind the project announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming.

Military equipment and Afghanistan: Trump repeated his familiar wild exaggeration that the US left $85 billion in military equipment to the Taliban upon the Biden-era withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Defense Department has estimated that this equipment was valued at about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021.

Money from Russia: Trump repeated his baseless claim that Biden received $3.5 million from the wife of a former mayor of Moscow. This money was sent to a firm connected to Biden’s son Hunter Biden, whose former business partner has testified that it was meant for him and not Hunter Biden; regardless, it didn’t go to Joe Biden.

Chris Wallace and this money from Russia: Trump repeated his false claim that journalist Chris Wallace, now of CNN and formerly of Fox News, tried to stop him from talking about this money from Russia during a presidential debate Wallace moderated in 2020, saying, “You shouldn’t be talking about that.” Wallace never said that; as the transcript shows, Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer a question about the money, not to stop Trump from asking the question.

Tariffs on China: Trump claimed he took in “hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs from China” and that no previous president had taken in “10 cents” from tariffs on China. Both claims are wrong. Study after study has found that Americans paid the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, and the US was generating billions per year in revenue from tariffs on China before Trump took office.

Trump’s trade deal with China: Trump claimed that, during his presidency, China was “adhering to” the terms of a trade deal he made, in which China was supposed to buy tens of billions worth of additional US exports. China did not come close to living up to its purchase commitments.

Deportations to Central America under Obama: Trump repeated his usual inaccurate story about how the Obama administration supposedly couldn’t deport violent criminals to Central American countries; he didn’t name the countries this time, but told the same story on Monday about Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In 2016, Obama’s last calendar year in office, none of these three countries were on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant” (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.

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