Trump’s Biggest Debate Lies the Moderators Let Slide
In case you missed it, the first 2024 presidential debate was a disaster.
President Joe Biden stumbled through responses to basic questions, sending Democrats into a panic over what to do about an aging incumbent who didn’t seem up to the task of running the country. Donald Trump wasn’t much better, struggling to stay on topic and, as he’s wont to do, unleashing a torrent of lies just about every time he opened his mouth.
It’s typically the job of the moderators to call out a candidate when they say something demonstrably false, but CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did no such thing. The duo didn’t even attempt to fact-check the former president, allowing him to freely spew misinformation to tens of millions of viewers. Biden did his best to point out when Trump was lying, but Biden’s best on Thursday night wasn’t anywhere near as good as it needed to be.
It’s impossible to catalog all of Trump’s lies during the debate without publishing an entire transcript of the nearly two-hour event. Here are some of the biggest, though:
Trump attempted to blame Nancy Pelosi for the violence on Jan. 6.
When asked by CNN host and debate moderator Jake Tapper what he would say to “those voters who believed that you violated your constitutional oath through your actions and inaction on Jan. 6, 2021, and worried that you’ll do it again,” Trump responded by deflecting blame to Pelosi.
“Nancy Pelosi — if you just watched the news from two days ago — on tape to her daughter who’s a documentary filmmaker, they say, but she’s saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s my responsibility. I was responsible for this.’ Because I offered her 10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down.
“She can’t be very happy with their daughter because it made her into a liar. She said, ‘I take full responsibility for Jan. 6,’” Trump said.
As fact-checkers were quick to point out, neither Pelosi nor any member of Congress has the unilateral authority to activate the D.C. National Guard — only the president, defense secretary, and U.S. Army secretary can. Despite what he claimed, Trump made no such authorization ahead of or on the day of the riot. In fact, Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the D.C. National Guard commander, testified before the Jan. 6 Committee that in the days before the riot, Pentagon officials had severely curtailed his ability to speedily deploy troops to locations around D.C., and that the approval for National Guard support on Jan. 6 was delayed by the Pentagon for several hours.
What the video released by House Republicans didn’t show was that Pelosi’s recorded statements were part of a longer conversation in which she grilled her staff about why Capitol Police were so unprepared the day of the attack. According to Politico, which reviewed 45 minutes of footage provided to the House by Pelosi’s daughter, the former speaker expressed frustration with law enforcement’s response.
His claims about Pelosi may not have been his most ridiculous lie about Jan. 6. “On Jan. 6 we were respected all over the world,” he said, dodging a question about what he has to say to people who feel he violated his oath on the day of the Capitol riot.
Trump told several egregious lies about abortion
On the issue of reproductive rights and freedoms, Trump claimed onstage that Democrats want to “kill the baby.”
“They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth — after birth — if you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, ‘We’ll put the baby aside, and will determine what we do with the baby,’ meaning, ‘We’ll kill the baby.’”
Trump has told this lie before, and it’s easily disprovable. Ralph Northam, the former governor of Virginia, was not endorsing infanticide in the 2019 statements Trump was referring to, but rather discussing abortions later in pregnancy, and gave a hypothetical example of a mother who had not sought an abortion and gave birth to an infant who was nonviable when asked if he would support abortion up until the moment of birth.
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam said. “The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” Republicans attempted to claim that Northam’s comments referred to a decision to kill the infant, rather than a discussion of palliative or continuing care for a child unlikely to survive long after birth.
Abortions later in pregnancy, after the second trimester, are extremely rare. Only 1 percent of abortions in the United States take place any later than 21 weeks, and are typically the result of a severe fetal anomaly that would result in nonviability or places the life and health of the pregnant person at risk.
Trump also claimed that “everybody wanted” the Supreme Court to kill Roe v. Wade and for abortion law to be determined on a state-by-state basis. Polls have repeatedly shown that a substantial majority of Americans oppose the Supreme Court’s decision.
Trump said he is responsible for bringing the cost of insulin down for seniors
“I heard him say before: insulin. I’m the one who got the insulin down for the seniors,” Trump claimed, emphatically. “I took care of the seniors.”
The Trump administration created a voluntary plan program that allowed seniors on certain health care plans to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed in 2023, capped insulin costs at $35 for everyone on Medicare, not the select Americans whose plan participated in the program created under Trump.
Trump claimed his statements about Charlottesville Nazis were a “hoax”
During Thursday’s debate, Biden raised comments Trump made following a deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally held by neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia. The former president infamously claimed there “were very fine people, on both sides” in a press conference days after a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring dozens of others.
Trump, as he has in the past, claimed that his comments had been misrepresented. “That story has been totally wiped out,” Trump said to Biden.
“He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place,” he added. “Just the other day it came out, where it was fully debunked.” Trump was referencing a recent, controversial fact-check by Snopes, which claimed that “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’”
The claim hinges on the fact that Trump did, at one point later in his rambling statements on Unite the Right, say that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK?”
If one looks at Trump’s comment in context, it’s clear the former president was attempting to shift at least some of the blame for the violence onto counter-protesters and continue defending GOP talking points about the preservation of Confederate monuments. When asked for clarification on exactly who he was referring to, Trump said that “there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” the night before the vehicle attack. “I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.”
The people protesting the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue on Aug. 11, 2017, were a large gathering of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who infamously carried tiki torches around the University of Virginia’s campus while chanting slogans including “White lives matter,” “You will not replace us,” and “Jews will not replace us.”
In order for Trump’s premise to be true, there would have had to be a third — unidentified — group of people operating within the explicitly racist Unite the Right rally who were allied with the neo-Nazis in their opposition to the removal of Confederate statues, but opposed to the extremist racial ideologies promoted by the organizers and attendees of the event. Fundamentally, the president was attempting to give himself rhetorical cover for statements downplaying the role and intentions of the extremists who descended on Charlottesville, and his allies are all too willing to continue entertaining him.
Trump said he had the best environmental record
Trump has roundly dismissed the climate crisis, tapped a coal lobbyist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency while he was in office, and ahead of a potential second term in office has reportedly told fossil-fuel executives that he’ll do whatever they want.
And yet on Thursday night he touted his environmental record, claiming he had “the best numbers ever” while noting how clean the air and water were under his watch. “We had H20,” the former president said. In reality, the Trump administration did all it could to roll back air and water protections, as well as a host of other environmental regulations.
Trump also claimed the Paris Climate Agreement, which Trump pulled America out of and Biden rejoined, is costing the U.S. “trillions” and other nations “nothing.” Biden snapped back that Trump hasn’t “done a damn thing for the environment,” but Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did the best job of explaining the real cost of curbing fossil-fuel emissions during a congressional hearing earlier in the day.
“Wait until you find out how much [we’re spending] on oil and gas subsidies,” he responded to a question about the administration’s environmental policy being too expensive. “Wait until you find out the economic impact that some economists have put at $15 million every hour or every day, trillions of dollars every year, from allowing the environmental conditions in this country and the planet to worsen.”
Trump said Biden called Black people “super predators”
Trump and his campaign have spent a lot of time recently arguing that he’s the best candidate for Black Americans, with part of the former president’s pitch being that they can relate to him more now that he’s a convicted felon. During the debate, Trump also attacked Biden’s credentials as a champion of Black Americans, alleging he called them “super predators” in the 1990s. He did so while responding to a question about climate change.
Trump made the allegation during the 2020 campaign as well, and it was just as false then as it is now. Biden in 1993 spoke about “predators on our streets,” but as CNN pointed out, the only time he used “super predators” was a few years later when he argued against the use of the term. (Hillary Clinton did use the term in the ‘90s, but apologized for doing so in 2016.)
Trump claimed he had the “greatest economy in the history of our country”
It’s just not true. For starters, the Covid-19 pandemic triggered the first contraction in the national GDP since the 2008 financial crisis, massive unemployment, a surge in the national debt, and widespread inflation.
However, while Trump could not have predicted or prevented a global pandemic with far-reaching impacts on the national and worldwide economy, even if one excludes pandemic-era struggles, the claim is still false.
Former President Bill Clinton had stronger average GDP growth throughout his presidency than Trump over his eight years in the White House. According to an Associated Press analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics, Trump’s GDP growth after inflation averaged 2.67 percent if one excludes the pandemic, Biden is currently averaging 3.4 percent.
As the pandemic recovery continues, the Biden administration has managed to push unemployment down to 3.4 percent in its best month. Pre-pandemic, Trump’s lowest unemployment figures clocked in at 3.5 percent. In July 2023, 16 states recorded record-low unemployment levels.
A recent report from the watchdog group the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that — excluding pandemic-related borrowing — found that Trump expanded the national debt by $4.8 trillion during his tenure in office, versus $2.2 trillion under Biden.