Do you know Trump and Harris’ talking points? Prep for the presidential debate with fact-checks

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said "the dangers of Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will be on full display" in the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Former President Donald Trump said Harris has "changed every policy" and "doesn’t even know what she is talking about."

It’s safe to assume the first and so far only debate between Harris and Trump will be feisty — and filled with attacks and boasts that need fact-checking.

ABC News will host the debate from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. It comes weeks before millions of voters start casting ballots in the presidential election.

If they stay true to their stump speeches, Harris and Trump will offer opposing visions for the country and critique each other’s records on abortion, the economy, crime, the environment and immigration. They will likely argue about Project 2025, a policy book written by Trump allies with some overlap of his conservative agenda.

Here’s a guide to understanding the facts behind some of their most repeated talking points.

Former President Donald Trump speaks Aug. 22, 2024, during a campaign event in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP)

Trump uses scare tactics when describing immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border. He has misleadingly said that immigrants are taking the jobs of union workers and native-born Americans. He said without evidence that millions are pouring in from other countries’ prisons and mental institutions, and that Democrats are signing them up to vote in this year’s election. Pants on Fire! 

When Trump compares his immigration record with border crossings during the Biden-Harris administration, he presents the number in rosy terms that omit how the COVID-19 pandemic limited immigration drastically worldwide. In the months before Trump left office, illegal immigration was rising. 

Illegal immigration during Trump’s administration was higher than under both of former President Barack Obama’s terms. During the Biden administration, illegal immigration has increased dramatically, reaching historic highs. Trump has faulted Harris, misleadingly referring to her as the "border czar" in charge of immigration enforcement when her role was to examine the root causes of immigration from three Central American countries.

Harris has largely avoided specific answers on immigration. During her Democratic National Convention speech, she blamed Trump for killing a bipartisan border security bill. In defense of the current administration, President Joe Biden has cited statistics from the last few months showing illegal immigration has been decreasing, reaching monthly levels below Trump’s last few months in office.

Harris links Trump to Project 2025. Trump says he’s not involved.
 

A Project 2025 fan is seen Aug. 14, 2023, in the group's tent at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP)

Harris and her allies have criticized several parts of Project 2025, a dense transition policy document for a Republican presidential administration. Harris has sometimes misled about what the plan would do and what it shares with Trump’s agenda. Trump has distanced himself from the plan — knocking some ideas as "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal" — even though many people who worked for his administration, some in high-ranking positions, wrote it.

A Harris campaign ad said "Trump’s Project 2025 … would also require states to monitor women’s pregnancies." But that exaggerates a proposed requirement that states report to the federal government additional maternal mortality statistics and how many abortions and miscarriages happen within their borders — not all pregnancies. Project 2025 authors write that current abortion reporting is voluntary and that "reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors and abortion-related maternal deaths" is essential.

The Harris campaign has accurately said that both Trump and Project 2025 would eliminate the Department of Education. The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies. But a Harris ad’s claim that cutting the department is "defunding K-12 schools" is Half True; most public school funding comes from state and local governments through state income taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Although some schools may feel more of a hit than others, the overall federal share is small.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks about Florida's abortion ban May 1, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP)

Harris’ abortion messaging warns that Trump wants the federal government to play a heavy hand, complete with a national abortion ban. Trump says his agenda is more hands off.

When asked about a national abortion cutoff, Trump has said since April that regulation should be left to the states. Earlier in spring, Trump had floated 15- and 16- week national cutoffs for abortion, and he supported legislation for a 20-week abortion ban in his first year as president. But his states-decide approach has been consistent in this phase of the campaign.

Trump has falsely said Democrats support abortion measures that result in the "execution" of babies "after birth." Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric exaggerates Democrats’ support for broad abortion access to the point of fetal viability, with exceptions for medical emergencies. Killing an unwanted infant after birth is infanticide and is illegal in every state. 

Trump has also falsely said that all legal scholars wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the precedent that guaranteed federal abortion access. As one of the most contentious legal issues of the past half century, Roe inspired legions of supporters and opponents. Before it was overturned in 2022, numerous legal scholars wrote briefs urging the  Supreme Court to uphold the case.

Each side has cast the opponent as overseeing a crime wave. 

Trump said at an Aug. 23 Arizona rally that "there’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office." The statement is Mostly False, because it focuses on one federal data point (the National Crime Victimization Survey) that shows a crime increase while ignoring other federal data that tells a different story. FBI statistics covering roughly the same period found that crime went down, not up. And preliminary data for 2023 and 2024 shows violent crime dropping.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’ running mate, said violent crime increased under Trump, which we rated Half True. Experts said it’s wrong to blame Trump solely for rising violent crime in 2020. A confluence of the coronavirus pandemic and societal upheaval after George Floyd’s 2020 murder fueled the spike. 

Older Americans are one of the most reliable voting blocs, so both candidates are using the age-old tactic of accusing the other of threatening Social Security. Both sidestep that barring congressional action, the program will be in dire straits in about a decade. 

Harris’ campaign talking point is that Trump "intends to cut Social Security," which is Mostly False. In his earlier campaigns and before he entered politics, Trump said that he was open to overhauling Social Security by cutting or privatizing it. In a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said, "There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting," before quickly walking back the statement. His CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign. 

Trump’s campaign website says that not "a single penny" should be cut from Social Security, and he’s repeated similar lines in campaign rallies.

Trump has falsely said that Social Security will be destroyed by immigrants. Immigrants in the U.S. illegally cannot receive Social Security retirement benefits or Medicare coverage. But many do pay taxes. 

Social Security’s fiscal challenges stem from a shortage of workers compared with beneficiaries. Immigration would increase the worker-to-beneficiary ratio, potentially for decades, extending the program’s fiscal life.

President Donald Trump, center, along with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, left, and then, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, participate in a groundbreaking In June 28, 2018, for a Foxconn plant in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (AP)

Although Trump has attacked Harris for inflation under Biden, which peaked at a 9% annual rate in 2022, Harris has said Trump’s tariffs would raise prices for consumers.

Trump has pitched an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20%, plus a 60% levy on goods from China. Harris has said Trump’s proposed tariffs on foreign goods would amount to a national sales tax that would raise prices "on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year." The projected dollar impact on consumers varies, so this rates Half True. Two estimates generally support Harris’ $4,000 figure; two show a smaller impact.

Trump has said Harris wants to quadruple Americans’ taxes, which is also False. Harris’ tax plan, which is based on Biden’s, proposes a tax increase of about 7% over the next decade, which is far lower than the 300% increase that Trump claimed. 

The top 1% of taxpayers, a level that starts at just under $1 million a year in income, would bear about 83% of the proposed Biden tax increase. Taxpayers earning up to $60,400 would see their yearly taxes decline on average, and taxpayers earning $60,400 to $107,300 would see an annual increase of $20 on average.

Chargers are seen Jan. 3, 2023, near parking stalls for electric vehicles outside the Cockeysville Public Library in Cockeysville, Md. (AP)

Trump is likely to mention Harris’ more liberal positions from her 2019 Democratic presidential primary campaign, including her previous opposition to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a practice used to access hard-to-reach oil and gas in rock formations. That matters in the debate’s setting within Pennsylvania, a battleground state in which fracking has boomed. 

Harris currently supports fracking, but Trump predicts she won’t allow it, citing her previous stance.

Harris said during a 2019 CNN town hall, "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking, so, yes. And starting — and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands, right?"

But after Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020, Harris aligned with his policies, which did not involve a fracking ban. 

When CNN host Dana Bash asked Harris about this switch in an Aug. 29 interview, Harris said, "I made (my opposition to fracking) clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking."

During the 2020 vice presidential debate with Republican Mike Pence, Harris said, "Joe Biden will not end fracking." Harris didn’t say she no longer supported a fracking ban, but that Biden would not pursue one. 

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