Vice President Kamala Harris’ marketing campaign stated “the hazards of Trump’s Undertaking 2025 agenda might be on full show” within the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Former President Donald Trump said Harris has “modified each coverage” and “doesn’t even know what she is speaking about.”
It’s protected to imagine the primary and up to now solely debate between Harris and Trump might be feisty — and full of assaults and boasts that want fact-checking.
ABC Information will host the controversy Sept. 10 from the Nationwide Structure Heart in Philadelphia. It comes weeks earlier than tens of millions of voters begin casting ballots within the presidential election.
In the event that they keep true to their stump speeches, Harris and Trump will supply opposing visions for the nation and critique one another’s data on abortion, the economic system, crime, the setting and immigration. They may probably argue about Project 2025, a coverage e-book written by Trump allies with some overlap of his conservative agenda.
Right here’s a information to understanding the details behind a few of their most repeated speaking factors.
Trump makes use of scare ways when describing immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border. He has misleadingly stated that immigrants are taking the roles of union workers and native-born Americans. He stated with out proof that millions are pouring in from other countries’ prisons and mental institutions, and that Democrats are signing them up to vote on this yr’s election. Pants on Fireplace!
When Trump compares his immigration report with border crossings in the course of the Biden-Harris administration, he presents the quantity in rosy terms that omit how the COVID-19 pandemic restricted immigration drastically worldwide. Within the months earlier than Trump left workplace, illegal immigration was rising.
Unlawful immigration throughout Trump’s administration was greater than below each of former President Barack Obama’s phrases. In the course of the Biden administration, unlawful immigration has elevated dramatically, reaching historic highs. Trump has faulted Harris, misleadingly referring to her because the “border czar” accountable for immigration enforcement when her position was to look at the basis causes of immigration from three Central American international locations.
Harris has largely prevented particular solutions on immigration. Throughout her Democratic Nationwide Conference speech, she blamed Trump for killing a bipartisan border safety invoice. In protection of the present administration, President Joe Biden has cited statistics from the previous few months exhibiting unlawful immigration has been decreasing, reaching month-to-month ranges under Trump’s previous couple of months in workplace.
Harris and her allies have criticized a number of components of Project 2025, a dense transition coverage doc for a Republican presidential administration. Harris has typically misled about what the plan would do and what it shares with Trump’s agenda. Trump has distanced himself from the plan — knocking some concepts as “completely ridiculous and abysmal” — although many individuals who labored for his administration, some in high-ranking positions, wrote it.
A Harris campaign ad stated “Trump’s Undertaking 2025 … would additionally require states to watch ladies’s pregnancies.” However that exaggerates a proposed requirement that states report back to the federal authorities extra maternal mortality statistics and what number of abortions and miscarriages occur inside their borders — not all pregnancies. Undertaking 2025 authors write that present abortion reporting is voluntary and that “dependable statistical information about abortion, abortion survivors and abortion-related maternal deaths” is important.
The Harris marketing campaign has precisely stated that each Trump and Undertaking 2025 would eliminate the Department of Education. The plan scales again the federal authorities’s position in training coverage and devolves the capabilities that stay to different businesses. However a Harris ad’s declare that reducing the division is “defunding Okay-12 colleges” is Half True; most public faculty funding comes from state and native governments via state earnings taxes, state gross sales taxes and native property taxes. Though some colleges could really feel extra of successful than others, the general federal share is small.
Harris’ abortion messaging warns that Trump desires the federal authorities to play a heavy hand, full with a national abortion ban. Trump says his agenda is extra palms off.
When requested a couple of nationwide abortion cutoff, Trump has stated since April that regulation must be left to the states. Earlier in spring, Trump had floated 15- and 16- week nationwide cutoffs for abortion, and he supported laws for a 20-week abortion ban in his first yr as president. However his states-decide method has been constant on this section of the marketing campaign.
Trump has falsely said Democrats assist abortion measures that end result within the “execution” of infants “after delivery.” Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric exaggerates Democrats’ assist for broad abortion entry to the purpose of fetal viability, with exceptions for medical emergencies. Killing an undesirable toddler after delivery is infanticide and is illegitimate in each state.
Trump has additionally falsely said that every one authorized students wished the U.S. Supreme Court docket to overturn Roe v. Wade, the precedent that assured federal abortion entry. As probably the most contentious authorized problems with the previous half century, Roe impressed legions of supporters and opponents. Earlier than it was overturned in 2022, quite a few authorized students wrote briefs urging the Supreme Court docket to uphold the case.
Both sides has forged the opponent as overseeing a criminal offense wave.
Trump stated at an Aug. 23 Arizona rally that “there’s been a 43% enhance in violent crimes since I left workplace.” The assertion is Mostly False, as a result of it focuses on one federal information level (the Nationwide Crime Victimization Survey) that exhibits a criminal offense enhance whereas ignoring different federal information that tells a special story. FBI statistics masking roughly the identical interval discovered that crime went down, not up. And preliminary information for 2023 and 2024 exhibits violent crime dropping.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’ working mate, stated violent crime elevated below Trump, which we rated Half True. Consultants stated it’s fallacious guilty Trump solely for rising violent crime in 2020. A confluence of the coronavirus pandemic and societal upheaval after George Floyd’s 2020 homicide fueled the spike.
Older People are probably the most dependable voting blocs, so each candidates are utilizing the age-old tactic of accusing the opposite of threatening Social Safety. Each sidestep that barring congressional motion, this system might be in dire straits in about a decade.
Harris’ marketing campaign speaking level is that Trump “intends to chop Social Safety,” which is Mostly False. In his earlier campaigns and earlier than he entered politics, Trump stated that he was open to overhauling Social Safety by reducing or privatizing it. In a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump stated, “There’s quite a bit you are able to do by way of entitlements, by way of reducing,” earlier than rapidly strolling again the assertion. His CNBC remark stands at odds with basically the whole lot else Trump has stated in the course of the 2024 presidential marketing campaign.
Trump’s marketing campaign web site says that not “a single penny” must be reduce from Social Safety, and he’s repeated related traces in marketing campaign rallies.
Trump has falsely stated that Social Security will be destroyed by immigrants. Immigrants within the U.S. illegally can’t obtain Social Safety retirement advantages or Medicare coverage. However many do pay taxes.
Social Safety’s fiscal challenges stem from a scarcity of staff in contrast with beneficiaries. Immigration would enhance the worker-to-beneficiary ratio, doubtlessly for many years, extending this system’s fiscal life.
Though Trump has attacked Harris for inflation below Biden, which peaked at a 9% annual fee in 2022, Harris has stated Trump’s tariffs would elevate costs for shoppers.
Trump has pitched an across-the-board tariff of 10% to twenty%, plus a 60% levy on items from China. Harris has stated Trump’s proposed tariffs on international items would quantity to a nationwide gross sales tax that will elevate costs “on middle-class households by virtually $4,000 a yr.” The projected greenback affect on shoppers varies, so this charges Half True. Two estimates typically assist Harris’ $4,000 determine; two present a smaller affect.
Trump has stated Harris desires to quadruple People’ taxes, which can be False. Harris’ tax plan, which is predicated on Biden’s, proposes a tax enhance of about 7% over the subsequent decade, which is much decrease than the 300% enhance that Trump claimed.
The highest 1% of taxpayers, a stage that begins at just below $1 million a yr in earnings, would bear about 83% of the proposed Biden tax enhance. Taxpayers incomes as much as $60,400 would see their yearly taxes decline on common, and taxpayers incomes $60,400 to $107,300 would see an annual enhance of $20 on common.
Trump is prone to point out Harris’ extra liberal positions from her 2019 Democratic presidential main marketing campaign, together with her earlier opposition to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a follow used to entry hard-to-reach oil and fuel in rock formations. That issues within the debate’s setting inside Pennsylvania, a battleground state by which fracking has boomed.
Harris currently supports fracking, however Trump predicts she received’t enable it, citing her earlier stance.
Harris stated throughout a 2019 CNN city corridor, “There’s no query I’m in favor of banning fracking, so, sure. And beginning — and beginning with what we are able to do on Day 1 round public lands, proper?”
However after Biden picked Harris as his working mate in 2020, Harris aligned together with his insurance policies, which didn’t contain a fracking ban.
When CNN host Dana Bash requested Harris about this change in an Aug. 29 interview, Harris stated, “I made (my opposition to fracking) clear on the controversy stage in 2020 that I might not ban fracking. As vice chairman, I didn’t ban fracking. As president, I can’t ban fracking.”
In the course of the 2020 vice presidential debate with Republican Mike Pence, Harris stated, “Joe Biden won’t finish fracking.” Harris didn’t say she not supported a fracking ban, however that Biden wouldn’t pursue one.
This truth test was initially published by PolitiFact, which is a part of the Poynter Institute.
