The final night of the Republican National Convention has kicked off in Milwaukee. President Donald Trump is expected to speak later in the evening.
CNN’s Facts First team is fact checking the program, and this story will be updated throughout the night.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that the US-Mexico border was “closed” during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Facts first: Pompeo’s claim is false.
While Trump tightened the border during his tenure, illegal crossings into the US from Mexico still numbered in the tens of thousands each month leading up to when he left office. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration limited non-essential travel on the US-Mexico border and prohibited migrants from crossing it in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. President Joe Biden later extended the restrictions.
The former president’s biggest effort to “close” the border was met with resistance by federal courts, and the Supreme Court later gave Biden the green light to end the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy.
From CNN’s Devan Cole
For the fourth straight night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign
But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.
The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a post-election November 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday evening that under former President Donald Trump’s administration, “not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across” the US.
“We’d begun on an honorable exit from Afghanistan, and not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across the United States of America,” Pompeo said.
Facts First: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.
Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after President Joe Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.
From CNN’s Haley Britsky
Linda McMahon, who served in the Trump administration as the Small Business Administrator, suggested at the Republican National Convention Thursday that China paid the tariffs that the former president put on roughly $300 billion of Chinese-made goods. “Instead of taxing American companies, Donald Trump put tariffs on China that raised billions of dollars and protected American industries,” she said.
Facts First: This characterization of Trump’s tariffs is misleading.
It’s true that Trump’s tariffs on China raised billions of dollars for the US government, but the duties were paid by US companies – not China.
Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission (USITC), has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.
Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer.
Many economists agree that tariffs act as a tax on American consumers.
“A tariff is just a form of a tax,” Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN earlier this year.
Tariffs can benefit some companies by raising the prices of competing foreign-made goods, but the duties can hurt other companies by raising component parts they need to manufacture.
For example, Trump’s tariffs were imposed, in part, to boost the US manufacturing sector – but that industry lost jobs.
Federal Reserve economists found a net decrease in manufacturing employment due to the tariffs in 2019. That’s mostly because goods became more expensive to US consumers. Plus, retaliatory tariffs put on American-made goods made other US manufacturers less competitive when selling abroad.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco
RNC video featuring Reagan’s voice misleadingly twists magazine article
A video played on the final night of the Republican National Convention tried to attack President Joe Biden by featuring quotes from then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous rhetorical questions about the President Jimmy Carter era at a presidential debate against Carter in 1980.
At one point, the video featured Reagan’s voice asking if, compared to four years ago, “Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?” On-screen text answered the question with the words “allies no longer trust the United States,” attributing them to a September 2021 article in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Facts First: This quote is misleading. The article in Foreign Affairs didn’t actually declare that allies no longer trust the United States. Rather, the article noted that “critics of President Joe Biden” make the “claim” that allies no longer trust the US after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – but the article then went on to argue that “these concerns about credibility are overblown.”
The convention video also featured Reagan’s voice asking, “Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?” But if you go back precisely four years from the most recent unemployment rate, the answer is: less unemployment. The current unemployment rate is 4.1% for June 2024; four years prior, in June 2020, the unemployment rate was 11.0% amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
There is a reasonable basis for this part of the video, though, if you interpret “four years ago” more broadly to refer to any time in 2020. Before the pandemic, in the first two months of 2020, the unemployment rates were 3.6% and 3.5%.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
