Trump announces debate challenge to Harris, repeats false claims

Former President Donald Trump, in his first news conference following Vice President Kamala Harris’s nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, announced he would debate her on 10 September and urged for two additional debates. Speaking for over an hour, the Republican nominee addressed various national issues and answered reporters’ questions. During the session, he made several false and misleading claims, many of which he had made previously.

Here is an examination of some of those claims.

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CLAIM: “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”

FACTS: Trump compared the crowd at his speech in front of the White House on 6 January 2021 to the crowd at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on 28 August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King spoke, had an estimated 250,000 attendees according to the National Park Service. In contrast, the Associated Press reported at least 10,000 people attended Trump’s address in 2021. Additionally, King and Trump did not speak at the same location. King spoke from the Lincoln Memorial steps, while Trump spoke at the Ellipse, south of the White House.

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CLAIM: “Nobody was killed on 6 January.”

FACTS: This claim is false. Five people died during and immediately after the 6 January 2021 riot. Pro-Trump rioters breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress worked to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter, was shot by police, and Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day after battling the mob. Four other officers who responded to the riot later took their own lives. Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, was killed as she attempted to climb through a broken Capitol door during the riot.

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CLAIM: “The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan, but I tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away.”

FACTS: The Democratic Party’s nomination process for President is determined by the Democratic National Committee, and the Constitution does not prevent Vice President Kamala Harris from being the nominee. Harris secured the nomination on Monday following a five-day online voting process, receiving 4,563 delegate votes out of 4,615. No other candidate qualified by the party’s deadline after President Biden decided to drop out on 21 July.

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump confirms that he WILL debate Kamala Harris — says it is now up for Harris to accept:

“I look forward to the debates.” pic.twitter.com/sAhJvIjM4o

— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) August 8, 2024

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CLAIM: Suggesting things would be different if he had been in office rather than Biden: “You wouldn’t have had inflation. You wouldn’t have had any inflation because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems. Now they’ve gone back to the Trump thing because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to 7, 8, 9 dollars a barrel.”

FACTS: Inflation would have occurred even if Trump had been reelected in 2020 due to factors beyond a president’s control. Prices soared in 2021 as pent-up consumer demand overwhelmed disrupted supply chains. U.S. auto companies, for example, faced semiconductor shortages, causing car prices to spike. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 also drove up global gas and food prices. Under Biden, U.S. oil production reached a record level earlier this year. Economists argue that Biden’s $1.9 trillion financial support package in March 2021 contributed to inflation by boosting demand, but it was not the sole cause. Trump had supported $2,000 stimulus checks in December 2020. Countries with different policies, such as France, Germany, and the UK, also experienced price hikes mainly due to rising energy costs from Russia’s invasion.

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CLAIM: “Twenty million people came over the border during the Biden-Harris administration — 20 million people — and it could be very much higher than that. Nobody really knows.”

FACTS: Trump’s 20 million figure lacks substantiation. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 8.2 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024. This figure represents arrests, not individuals, as many people crossed multiple times due to pandemic-era asylum restrictions. CBP also reported stopping migrants 1.1 million times at official land crossings with Mexico and admitted nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela under special provisions. This totals nearly 8.7 million encounters. The actual number of people is lower due to multiple encounters. The number of those who evaded capture, termed “got-aways,” is estimated by the Border Patrol but not published.

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CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was the border czar 100% and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she’s not the border czar anymore.”

FACTS: Harris was assigned to address the “root causes” of migration in Central America, which leads to illegal crossings into the U.S. She was not tasked with managing the border directly.

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CLAIM: “The New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice.”

FACTS: Trump referred to two cases against him in New York — one civil and the other criminal. Neither is managed by the U.S. Department of Justice. New York Attorney General Letitia James initiated the civil case, resulting in Trump being ordered to pay a $454 million penalty for inflating his wealth. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought the criminal case, where Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts related to a scheme to influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor.

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