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Fact-Checking Night 2 of the Republican National Convention

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— Eric Trump, President Trump’s son

By most measurements, it is not true that the economy hit heights it had never seen before under President Trump. Before the pandemic, which sent the economy into a tailspin, overall growth was little changed under his administration — and much slower than the rates it had regularly achieved in the 20th century. The job market was strong, but that was a continuation of trends well underway during President Barack Obama’s administration. For instance, unemployment had continued a yearslong decline — one that started in 2009 — and stood at a half-century low of 3.5 percent in February 2020. It is true that Black American and Hispanic Americans were enjoying record low joblessness before the pandemic, but women actually experienced their lowest unemployment rates in the 1950s.

— A video produced for the RNC

Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s third campaign manager for his 2016 bid, was the first woman to run a winning presidential campaign, and three of his White House press secretaries have been women. But the number of high-ranking women in his administration is not record-breaking.

Of the 877 key executive branch nominees put forth by Mr. Trump for positions that require Senate confirmation, about 27.6 percent have been women. Of the 679 that have been confirmed, about 25 percent have been women.

That’s a lower percentage than the appointments of both former President Bill Clinton (37 percent) and former President Barack Obama (43 percent).

At the cabinet level, Mr. Trump has nominated seven women and 32 men. That’s lower than the eight women who served at cabinet-level positions in Mr. Obama’s first term and 10 in his second term, and the nine who served in Mr. Clinton’s second term.

— President Trump

The president’s friendly words about immigrants at the naturalization ceremony stands in stark contrast to almost four years in which he has repeatedly pursued anti-immigrant policies, often fueled by xenophobic language.

The president has largely blocked asylum seekers and refugees fleeing persecution, war and violence. He has built nearly 300 miles of border wall (though without getting Mexico to pay for it). He has made it harder for poor people to immigrate to the United States, imposed travel bans on mostly-Muslim countries, and separated migrant children from their parents at the border.

At times, his has used racist rhetoric, condeming “shithole countries” and complaining that people from Haiti “have AIDS.”

Even as he praised the new citizens on Tuesday, Mr. Trump has long sought to reduce legal immigration into the United States and has recently moved to shrink or eliminate visa programs that allow companies to hire foreigners to work in America. Aides to the president brag about the reductions in overall immigration, saying the efforts are helping to protect Americans from having to compete with immigrants for jobs.

— Pam Bondi, former attorney general of Florida

Hunter Biden did in fact travel with his father aboard Air Force Two to China, and Hunter Biden did meet with a Chinese business partner during the trip. Several days after the trip, a Chinese government-linked private equity fund in which Hunter Biden has been involved, BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., won a business license from the Chinese government.

Hunter was on the board of the fund when it was formed in late 2013, and he later invested roughly $420,000, giving him a 10 percent stake, after his father had left the vice presidency. But Hunter’s lawyer has said that he has never been paid for his role on the board, and has not profited financially since he began as a part-owner. Hunter left the board in April, according to a letter produced by his lawyer. But as of June, he still owned his stake in the fund, which he was trying to sell. His lawyer did not respond to a request for comment about the status of that effort.

— Pam Bondi, former attorney general of Florida

Mr. Biden did make those remarks on China in May 2019. They prompted criticism at the time from Republicans and some Democrats, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was Mr. Biden’s main challenger in the Democratic primary this year.

Mr. Biden’s aides say his comment was the kind of expression of confidence in the superiority of the United States that he has made throughout his political career. And Mr. Biden has made more recent comments on China that portray it as a formidable challenge. He told The Washington Post this year that China is the greatest “medium-term” strategic challenge for the United States. In a Foreign Affairs essay this year, he wrote: “China represents a special challenge. I have spent many hours with its leaders, and I understand what we are up against.”

He added: “The United States does need to get tough with China. If China has its way, it will keep robbing the United States and American companies of their technology and intellectual property.”

— Abby Johnson, anti-abortion activist

Margaret Sanger, the sex educator who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1916, did find common ground with those who advocated eugenics, the widely debunked theory that the human race could be bettered by encouraging people with traits like intelligence and hard work to reproduce. But there is no evidence that she was a racist who intended to “eradicate the minority population.”

Ms. Sanger’s views on race and eugenics have been widely debated. N.P.R. fact-checked similar claims made by Ben Carson in a 2015 interview with Fox News.

In the United States, eugenics intersected with the birth control movement in the 1920s, and Ms. Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences. She also talked about birth control being used to facilitate “the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives,” N.P.R. wrote, adding, “Historians seem to disagree on just how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some contend her involvement was for political reasons — to win support for birth control.”

In 1939, Ms. Sanger founded what she called “the Negro Project,” one of the first major undertakings of the Birth Control Federation of America, a forerunner to Planned Parenthood. It was aimed at giving Black women control over their own fertility and limiting reproduction among poor and uneducated women who could least afford it. Conservatives have argued that it was a racist effort to reduce the Black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, a New York University initiative to examine Sanger’s writings, addressed the project and dismissed such assertions in a 2001 newsletter.

“In fact, the Negro Project did not differ very much from the earlier birth control campaigns in the rural South designed to test simpler methods on poor, uneducated and mostly white agricultural communities,” the papers project wrote. “Following these other efforts in the South, it would have been more racist, in Sanger’s mind, to ignore African-Americans in the South than to fail at trying to raise the health and economic standards of their communities.”

— Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general

It is true that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, despite having no discernible experience in Ukraine or the energy sector, was paid as much as $50,000 a month in some months to serve on the board of the directors of a Ukrainian gas company owned by an oligarch who was widely considered in the international community to be corrupt. And it is true that Vice President Biden, the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, helped force the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, partly by threatening to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the prosecutor. But there is no evidence that the prosecutor was aggressively pursuing investigations into the oligarch or his gas company. Instead, the oligarch’s allies say that the prosecutor was using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from the oligarch and his team — allegations that comport with others that swirled around the prosecutor, who was eventually fired. The pressure campaign to have the prosecutor fired was international, embraced by many Western governments, not just the Obama administration.

— Cissie Graham Lynch, a granddaughter of Billy Graham, the founder of Christianity Today

While there is plenty of room for subjective judgments about what constitutes religious freedom and there are deep divisions between left and right about how politics should intersect with faith, Mr. Biden is a practicing Catholic. There were opening prayers during the Democratic National Convention. And one of Mr. Biden’s close friends, Senator Chris Coons, offered a lengthy testimony to Mr. Biden’s faith, saying Mr. Biden would be “a president for Americans of all faiths, as well as people of conscience who practice no particular faith.”

Ms. Graham Lynch was likely referring to positions Mr. Biden has — such as his support for same-sex marriage or abortion rights — that she personally views as against her faith.

— Abby Johnson, anti-abortion activist

It is true that Mr. Trump has made a huge number of appointments to the bench — 203, including two to the nation’s highest court. And it is true that his appointees have been confirmed with polarizing paper trails, having spent their careers more openly engaged in causes important to Republicans, such as fighting against government funding for abortion, than the appointees of past presidents. But judges do not take the bench as “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” and, upon questioning from senators in confirmation hearings, many of Mr. Trump’s appointees explicitly pledged to apply existing precedent like Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion.

— Larry Kudlow, Trump economic adviser.

A Biden administration is expected to reinstate many of the roughly 100 environmental regulations that have been rolled back or weakened by the Trump administration. But in fact, United States oil and gas have both been increasing at a steady rate since about 2009. And while Mr. Trump ran on the promise of restoring the U.S. coal industry, domestic coal production in 2019 fell to its lowest level since 1978.

— Larry Kudlow, White House economic adviser

Larry Kudlow tried to paint the economy President Trump inherited as “stagnant,” even on the edge of recession, and said that Mr. Trump had turned it around. That is not true.

There were plenty of positive things about the pre-pandemic economy — unemployment was at its lowest level in 50 years, wages were gradually rising, and the economic expansion was at record-length. But those trends were a continuation of what was already happening under President Barack Obama.

Gains in employment, for instance, actually slowed slightly after Mr. Trump took office compared to late in Mr. Obama’s term, simply because he inherited an economy in the later stages of a long-running expansion and there were fewer workers left on the job market’s sidelines.

It’s also wrong to imply that Mr. Trump pumped up growth in the economy overall. Gross domestic product continued to expand at a fairly steady, little changed pace under Mr. Trump’s watch.

— Cissie Graham Lynch, a granddaughter of Billy Graham, the founder of Christianity Today

The Obama administration sought to guarantee access to free birth control for women, and while some groups, including an order of Catholic nuns, have fought that mandate and argued that contraception is tantamount to abortion, scientists have disputed that characterization. It is true that Democrats have argued against religion-based adoption agencies’ ability to refuse to place children in L.G.B.T.Q. homes, as in Michigan, where the state’s attorney general Dana Nessel has called such a refusal of same-sex couples illegal discrimination.

The Obama administration established protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And it is true that Democrats, such as California’s former governor Jerry Brown, have allowed transgender students to choose whether to play on a boys’ or girls’ sports team, and which bathroom or locker room to use, and that the Trump administration has rescinded such protections at the federal level in a rejection of Obama administration guidance.

— John Peterson, owner of Schuette Metals, a second-generation metal fabrication business

The United States Mexico Canada Agreement did replace the 26-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. But while the 2,082-page pact includes some important changes in key areas — like incentives to make cars in North America and reforms to Mexican labor rules — it’s also fair to describe it as an update of the original NAFTA pact.

Much of the new agreement simply updates the pre-existing deal with new laws on the internet, intellectual property protection, state-owned enterprises and currency.

— Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky

The Trump administration did issue a rule in 2018 allowing small businesses and self-employed people in the same industry, state or region to band together and obtain health insurance as if they were a single large employer. Mr. Trump promoted the plans, long a goal of Republicans in Congress, as a way to save people from the “nightmare of Obamacare.”

But last year, a Federal District Court judge in the District of Columbia struck down the rule allowing association health plans, calling them “clearly an end-run around the A.C.A.” The Trump administration appealed and is still waiting for a decision. Association health plans are controversial because they are exempt from many consumer-protection mandates in the Affordable Care Act, like the requirement to provide “essential health benefits,” such as mental health care, emergency services, maternity care, and prescription drugs. Mr. Trump hoped the plans would appeal to middle-class people who found plans through the Affordable Care Act too expensive because their income was too high to qualify for the law’s premium subsidies or discounted deductibles. Critics worried they would destabilize the Affordable Care Act marketplaces by drawing healthy customers away, but there is not abundant evidence that has happened.

— Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky

Mr. Biden did vote for the Iraq War but Mr. Paul is overstating the timeline of Mr. Trump’s opposition. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. In 2002, asked if he supported an invasion, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so.” Mr. Trump spoke out against the war in 2004, a year after it began. It did not stop him from supporting President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Mr. Biden called his vote for the war a mistake in 2005.

— Cris Peterson, dairy farmer.

The strength of the American economy in 2018 may have helped farms like Ms. Peterson’s, but the dairy industry in the United States is still struggling, despite hefty subsidies and support from the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the United States Department of Agriculture said that it had recorded the largest annual decline in the number of licensed dairy operations since 2014. Dairy farmers have also been hard hit by the pandemic, which has shut down restaurants, schools and other major buyers and forced some farmers to dump milk in their fields.

— Jason Joyce, a lobster fisherman from Maine

The United States and the European Union announced a small agreement on Friday that eliminated tariffs on a few products — including American lobster, European glass crystal and cigarette lighters — following a meeting between President Trump and Maine lobsterman in June, where the president said he would press Europe to lower that tariff.

It’s also true that Mr. Trump has been under pressure to help struggling American lobstermen in part because of his own trade policies. American lobsterman had been put at a disadvantage to their Canadian competitors when selling into the European market after Canada and the E.U. signed a trade agreement that cut barriers between the countries in 2016. China also imposed retaliatory tariffs on American lobster as a result of the trade war, further harming the industry.

— Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky

As a senator, Mr. Biden supported the 1999 NATO air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader accused of ethnic cleansing. As vice president, Mr. Biden supported the campaign to oust the Islamic State from Syria in 2014, but he warned against intervening in Libya in 2011 to topple the country’s strongman ruler, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to end wars in the Middle East and Southwest Asia but has yet to fulfill this promise. In February, the United States signed a deal with the Taliban laying out a timetable for the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan within 12 to 14 months if the insurgent group met certain conditions. In recent months, Mr. Trump has repeatedly voiced a desire to leave Afghanistan sooner than that. A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump said there would be fewer than 5,000 American troops in Afghanistan by Election Day in November. There are currently about 8,600 U.S. forces in the country.

In December 2018, Mr. Trump ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria. Roughly 1,000 remained by October 2019, when Mr. Trump ordered withdrawal again. A February report from the Defense Department’s inspector general estimated that 500 troops remained in northeastern Syria and an additional 100 were stationed at a desert outpost in the country’s southeast. There are currently about 5,200 American troops in Iraq — about level with the 5,262 reported at the end of 2016. Though there are plans to reduce the number to as few as 2,500, there are no fixed timetables or numbers.

— Jason Joyce, the lobster fisherman

Among President Barack Obama’s last acts as President was the creation of the Atlantic Ocean’s first national marine monument, banning oil and gas drilling and commercial fishing in an area roughly the size of Connecticut about 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. The creation of the monument was designed to protect endangered whales and turtles, ancient deep-sea coral and species of fish unique to the region, but commercial fishermen fiercely opposed it. Mr. Trump rolled back the monument designation earlier this year, but the reversal is unlikely to help lobstermen, since the area in question lies over 100 miles offshore, while most lobster fishing takes place about three miles offshore.

Mr. Obama also carved out a seven-year exception for lobster and red crab fisheries so the creation of the monument has had little impact on Maine’s lobster landings.

— Myron Lizer, the Vice President of the Navajo Nation

In 2013, President Barack Obama signed into law the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. The act strengthened the Violence Against Women Act with increased protections for Native American women. Years earlier, in 2010, Mr. Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act, which provided for enhanced sentencing by tribal courts. At the time he said, the prevalence of violence against Native American women remains “an assault on our national conscience” that “we cannot allow to continue.” The Violence Against Women Act, first negotiated by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., lapsed during the government shutdown in December 2018.



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