Donald Trump confidently making a series of false statements, Joe Biden offensive in substance but very confused in form: the two candidates for the American presidency fought over inflation, immigration and Ukraine during their first debate on Thursday.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump traded barbs Thursday during the first televised debate of the election campaign. AFP has verified some of the candidates’ claims on key issues.
Migrants
Trump falsely claimed that under President Joe Biden, “we no longer have borders”, and that “because of his ridiculous, senseless and very stupid policies, people are coming in and killing our citizens at a level that we have never seen.”
Faced with criticism over the record number of migrant arrivals in the United States, Joe Biden signed an executive order in early June, temporarily closing the border with Mexico as soon as a daily limit is reached.
This amounts to “increased surveillance at the border,” according to Nicole Hallett, director of the Center for Immigrant Rights at the University of Chicago.
Despite some high-profile incidents, including the murder of a student in Georgia, there is “no evidence” of the wave of migrant crime described by Trump, she told AFP, noting that “criminality is declining across the country, although immigration has increased.”
Violent and property crimes are near their lowest levels in decades, according to 2022 FBI data, the most recent available.
“The overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by American citizens,” said Jeffrey Fagan, professor at Columbia University.
A report from the Cato Institute released this week showed that proportionately fewer migrants were convicted of murder in 2022 than American citizens.
According to Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director at the Migration Policy Institute, there is no evidence to support claims repeated by Donald Trump during the debate that prisoners and people in mental health facilities are flooding in from the Mexican border.
Inflation
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been passing the buck over who is responsible for soaring inflation.
Joe Biden “caused inflation – I left him a country with almost no inflation”, lamented the billionaire after reciting his favorite – but false – phrase on the advent under his presidency of the largest economy in the history of the United States.
The current president claimed that his Republican predecessor had “decimated the economy” during his four years in the White House.
Both candidates are misleading by omitting the impact of Covid-19 on the economy.
At the end of Donald Trump’s term, almost a year after the start of the Covid-19 crisis, inflation was around 1.4%.
It began its rise in spring 2021, reaching 9.1% in June 2022, its highest level in almost 40 years. It then slowly fell again, and is today around 3%, still higher than the 2% targeted by the American central bank (Fed).
Several factors linked to the pandemic are in question, including the billions of dollars injected by the aid plans of the Trump and then Biden administrations, the difficulties encountered in the global supply chain, and even the war in Ukraine.
6-January
Donald Trump has tried to dodge the accusations he faces surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington to try to prevent the certification of Joe’s victory Biden. The ex-president blamed Democrat Nancy Pelosi, a senior member of Congress at the time.
“I offered her 10,000 troops or the National Guard, and she refused,” he falsely said.
Nancy Pelosi would not even have had the power to reject the deployment of the National Guard if Donald Trump had decided to do so, several experts pointed out to AFP.
According to the Washington National Guard division, it takes its orders “only from the president,” according to its website.
The parliamentary commission of inquiry into the January 6 assault wrote in its final report that Donald Trump had “never given the order to deploy the National Guard” to prevent the excesses.
Donald Trump also reiterated that the 2020 presidential election, lost to Joe Biden, had been tainted by “aberrant” fraud.
Unfounded accusations which have since been refuted, particularly in court.
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