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Trump repeats numerous false claims at Madison Square Garden rally
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Trump repeats numerous false claims at Madison Square Garden rally

The former president Donald Trump repeated a series of false claims, many of which have since been debunked, about immigration and other topics in his speech at a rally Sunday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.

FEMA and Migrants: Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration failed to respond to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, then repeated his familiar false explanation: “You know why? They spent their money bringing in illegal immigrants, so they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina.” He repeated: “They had no money for them. They spent all their money bringing in illegal immigrants.”

FEMA he didn’t spend disaster relief money on undocumented people. Congress appropriated more than $35 billion in disaster relief funds to the agency for fiscal year 2024, according to official FEMA statisticsand also gave FEMA a much smaller pool of money, $650 million in fiscal year 2024, for a program to help communities shelter migrants. Contrary to Trump’s claims, these are two separate pots of funds.

Trump’s favorite immigration chart: Trump has long repeated his denial false claim that his favorite graph of the migration numbers from the southern border – which he thankfully turned his head to look at when a gunman tried to kill him at a campaign rally in July – has an arrow at the bottom which indicates “the day I left. office,” when, he said, the U.S. had “the lowest illegal immigration we’ve ever had in recorded history.”

The chart doesn’t show that. Actually, the arrow it actually indicates April 2020when Trump had more than eight months left in office and when global migration slowed to a trickle due to the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border rose every month until the end of Trump’s term.

Harris’s border role: Trump repeated these false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris: “She was the border czar. She was in charge of the border.” Harris has never been a “border czar,” a label the White House has always stressed is inaccurate, and has never been in charge of border security, a responsibility of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In realitychairman Joe Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking him to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that have led their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.

Migrants, towns and cities: Trump repeated his vow that, if elected, he would liberate every “city and town that has been invaded and conquered” by migrants. This is nonsense; no US city has been overrun by migrants.

Trump’s rally crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania: Trump repeated his wild exaggeration that there were “101,000 people” at the campaign rally he held earlier this month at the same place in Pennsylvania where a gunman tried to kill him in July. CNN affiliate KDKA in Pittsburgh reported that the Secret Service put the crowd at 24,000, while Trump-supporting Blair County, Pennsylvania, Sheriff James Ott said in his speech at the rally itself (more than three hours before Trump took the stage) that he was looking at “21,000 more people.”

Trump and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: Trump repeated his false claim that he had “ended” the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, adding: “It was dead.” Trump 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 percent complete and the Russian state company behind the project announced in December 2020, that construction was resuming.

Trump and the defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his bogus claim that “it took us about four weeks” to defeat the terrorist group ISIS, even though generals told him it would take five years. The ISIS “Caliphate” has been declared fully liberated more than two years in Trump’s presidency.

Trump and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that when he was president, “we didn’t have inflation.” Cumulative inflation during the Trump presidency was about 8%.

Harris and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that Harris’ votes to break legislative ties in the US Senate “caused the greatest inflation in the history of our country.” Aside from the claim about Harris’ role, it is not true that the US had the highest inflation ever during the Biden administration; Trump might rightly say that the US inflation rate it reached a 40-year high in June 2022 when it was 9.1%, but was nowhere near an all-time high register of 23.7%, established in 1920. (And the rate has fallen since then. The most recent inflation rate available at the time Trump spoke here was 2.4% in September.)

Harris and law enforcement: Trump expressed support from police officers and law enforcement organizations, then falsely said of Harris, “I don’t think they have a cop. They’re just looking for a cop.” At the beginning of September101 current and former law enforcement officials, including active sheriffs, police chiefs and other senior officers; released a letter endorsing Harris. A Michigan sheriff gave a televised speech endorsing Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August, as he did a former Capitol Police officer who was injured when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s border wall: The former president repeated his false claim that he had “built 571 miles of wall” on the southern border. This is a significant exaggeration; official government DATA shows that 458 miles have been built under Trump — including the wall built where there had been no barriers before and the wall built to replace previous barriers.

Trump and the military: The former president repeated his bogus claim that “We rebuilt our military, in total — we rebuilt our entire military.”

Trump has done it before clear that it claims to have replaced all military equipment. “This statement is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told CNN. November 2023, after Trump made a version of the claim.

Harrison said in an email at the time: “Furthermore, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It is nowhere near possible to replace even half of the military’s equipment inventory in a single presidential term. I just ran the numbers on military aircraft and about 88% of the aircraft in the US military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighter jets, in particular, we still have F-16s and F-15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”

The 2020 election: Trump repeated his false claim that his opponents “used Covid to cheat” in the 2020 election. There is no basis for the claim that Democrats cheated; many states, including states with Republican chief electoral officers and Republican governors, have changed their election procedures due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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