Fact-checking the Republican convention: What speakers got right (and wrong)

Chris Mueller, Hannah Hudnall, Kim Breen and Eric Litke, USA TODAY
Updated ·14 min read

Donald Trump's new running mate JD Vance highlighted the third day of the Republican National Convention, and we were watching to let you know if he and the night's other speakers strayed from the truth.

High-profile speakers joining the 39-year-old Ohio senator tonight in Milwaukee included Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Donald Trump Jr.

USA TODAY Fact Check Team separated fact from fiction and added context where the speakers don't.

More from the Fact-Check Team: How we pick and research claims | Email newsletter | Facebook page

More: USA TODAY RNC live coverage - Day 3 updates

Michael Whatley claim: JD Vance was born in Appalachia

“Strength looks like a kid. Born in rural Appalachia. Who put himself through school. And answered a call to service when America needed him.” (Chairman, Republican National Committee) 

Vance, who officially accepted his vice presidential nomination Wednesday, was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, which is not in the Appalachian region.

In his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” Vance writes about his upbringing in Ohio and visiting his extended family in Jackson, Kentucky, which is in Appalachia. Some Appalachian people felt misrepresented by the book and said it fed into harmful stereotypes about the region.

-Kim Breen

Donald Trump Jr. claim: Under Biden, US cities have become 'giant crime zones'

"Meanwhile, pro-crime district attorneys have turned our cities into giant crime zones."

The data doesn’t support this claim.

In June, the Associated Press reported that FBI data showed sharp declines in violent crime in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier, following a trend ongoing since a pandemic surge. But experts warned that data was preliminary and likely overstated the drop.

A prior report from the FBI found violent crime in the U.S. also dropped in 2023. Murders were down 13% in the last three months of that year when compared to the same period a year earlier. Overall, violent crime declined 6%.

Many U.S. cities also reported declines in homicides from 2023 to 2024, Axios reported in April. The number of murders fell by nearly 20% in the first three months of 2024 in 204 cities analyzed by AH Datalytics, a criminal justice consulting firm.

- Chris Mueller

JD Vance: Wages soared under Trump

“Worker’s wages went through the roof under Trump.”

There are many ways to measure wage changes, but various metrics show increases while Trump was in office.

According to the Social Security Administration’s national average wage index, American wages increased during the Trump administration, from $50,000 in 2017 to more than $55,000 in 2020. That compares to increases of around $4,000 in the two four-year spans before that, so the Trump bump was more but not extremely so. (This metric tracks wage growth among American workers as a measure of inflation by taking into account federal income tax and retirement plans.)

Real mean household income jumped more, though it was a trend that pre-dated Trump. After remaining steady around $65,000 from 1998 to 2014, household income steadily rose starting in 2015 and through Trump's term, peaking at $78,000 in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Federal Bank of St. Louis.

-Hannah Hudnall, Eric Litke

JD Vance claim: Trump among the 'most successful businessmen in the world'

"(Trump) was one of the most successful businessmen in the world."

In 1971, Trump took control of the company built by his father, New York real estate tycoon Fred Trump, and renamed it the Trump Organization. While Trump has claimed he started with only a "small" $1 million loan from his father, that ignores the fact he joined his father's already successful real estate business and relied on many of his father's connections, The Washington Post reported.

Over the years, Trump's companies have filed for bankruptcy protection six times. Trump's Taj Mahal casino filed for bankruptcy in July 1991, while two other of Trump's Atlantic City casinos declared bankruptcy in 1992. Two other properties, one in 2004 and another in 2009, also filed for bankruptcy, totaling six, according to The Washington Post.

In February, Trump said it would be impossible for him to post a $454 million bond to appeal his New York civil fraud trial, eventually posting a $175 million bond along with several of his co-defendants. In a separate case, Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll over defamatory remarks he made about her.

In May, Forbes said Trump's worth was about $7.5 billion, including about $1.1 billion in real estate and Truth Social's parent company, which is worth about $5.6 billion. In 2022, Trump was ranked 343 on Forbes' list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. He no longer made the top 400 in 2023. In 2024 Forbes listed him 1,438th on its World’s Billionaires List.

- Chris Mueller

Donald Trump claim: Biden's election victory was the result of cheating

"These people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly it’s the only thing they do well."

Trump has repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election, and he did so again in a video aired at tonight's RNC. But an overwhelming amount of evidence shows Joe Biden won the presidency that year with 306 electoral votes. There have been lawsuits, recounts and forensic audits, yet no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud has ever been uncovered.

In a statement released shortly after the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it was "the most secure in American history," and there was "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."

William Barr, Trump's own attorney general, also said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."

The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, when Trump supporters tried to disrupt Congress' certification of the presidential election results, was predicated by the misguided belief that widespread voter fraud swayed the election in Biden's favor.

- Chris Mueller

Mike Waltz claim: No spy balloons over US during Trump administration

“You didn’t see any spy balloons under President Trump, did you?” (U.S. representative, Florida)

Chinese surveillance balloons flew over the U.S. at least three different times during former President Donald Trump's administration, but military officials didn’t know it at the time, multiple news outlets reported in 2023. An “awareness gap” kept the spy balloons from being detected, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, told the New York Times. Objects originally classified as U.F.O.s were later reclassified as Chinese spy balloons.

That news came out soon after a Chinese balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina in February 2023, during the Biden administration. Trump, for his part, called it “fake disinformation.”

-Kim Breen

Tom Homan: Former President Donald Trump slashed illegal immigration

“Under President Trump, we cut illegal immigration by 90%.”

This claim from the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement echoes one former Vice President Mike Pence made multiple times.

But PolitiFact reported in 2022 that Pence’s staff never provided evidence to back it up. Their review found that while some reporting changes affected data, the number of people entering the country illegally actually increased 300% from Trump’s first full month in office to his last full month. The only way to get close to a 90% drop was cherry-picking a comparison between the month under Trump with the highest apprehensions (May 2019) to the one with the lowest (April 2020), which would ignore that immigration increased after that month.

The Cato Institute found that the population of people who had entered the country illegally remained about the same throughout the Trump administration.

-Kim Breen, Chris Mueller

Greg Abbott: 11 million immigrants crossed US border illegally under Biden

"Under (Biden's) watch around 11 million immigrants have crossed our border illegally."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott misses on the number and misleads on the nature of the statistic here.

A report published in January by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Committee on Homeland Security found that there were 8 million migrant encounters in the first three years of Joe Biden’s presidency, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 1.4 million encounters in the first six months of 2024. So that’s 9.4 million, a bit short of the 11 million Abbott claimed.

But notably, these were not people who walked freely across the U.S. border. This is the tally of people who were arrested, expelled or ruled inadmissible to enter, according to the agency definition of encounters.

-Hannah Hudnall

Thomas Homan claim: Deportations reached record high under Trump 

"Deportations rose to the highest level ever." (former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

In 2016, then-candidate Trump promised to launch a massive deportation program. And under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security recorded about 2 million deportations – a combination of removals, returns and Title 42 expulsions – from fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2020, according to PolitiFact.

But this didn’t even exceed the level from his predecessor. During Obama's first term, which includes fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2012, there were about 3.2 million deportations. And during Obama's second term, covering fiscal years 2013 through 2016, there were about 2.1 million deportations, also exceeding Trump's first-term total.

- Chris Mueller

Peter Navarro: Biden administration opened the borders to murderers and rapists

Biden and Harris “opened our borders to murderers and rapists.”

Trump and his allies have made similar versions of this claim in the past, but there’s no data pointing to increased crime rates as a result of people living illegally in the U.S. In fact, evidence suggests the opposite may be true, contrary to this claim from the former director of the U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.

An NBC News review of 2024 crime data found that overall crime levels dropped in cities that received the most migrants. The outlet found that overall crime fell year after year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Washington, D.C., experienced rising levels of crime, but local officials said it was not attributed to the spike in immigrants.

Research suggests immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the U.S.

For example, a 2020 study of Texas crime data by the Cato Institute found that the conviction rate of people illegally living in the U.S. was 45% below that of native-born Americans.

-Hannah Hudnall

Ronny Jackson claim: Biden works from 10 am to 4 pm

"And China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, they do not respect Biden's 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule." (U.S. representative, Texas)

Biden's schedule varies from day to day, but it often runs far later than 4 p.m. In the last two weeks, Biden has worked later than 4 p.m. on all but two days, according to Biden's public schedule.

In late June, following the first presidential debate, Axios reported that Biden is "dependably engaged" between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., but is more likely to become fatigued and have verbal miscues outside of that time period.

- Chris Mueller

Vance, a past Trump critic, now backs former president's 2020 election falsehoods

Vance, first elected to the Senate in 2022, has been supportive of Trump's efforts to undermine the 2020 election. He told ABC News in February that the 2020 election had "a lot of problems" and backed the Trump campaign's scheme involving alternate slates of electors.

There is a massive amount of evidence, including lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and even partisan reviews, that shows Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 with 306 electoral votes. Lawsuits attempting to prove otherwise have universally failed.

Vance also has yet to make an unqualified commitment to accept the results of the 2024 election.

“I think Donald Trump will be the (victor),” Vance told CNN's Dana Bash in May. “And if it’s a free and fair election, Dana, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results. And again, I think the results will show Donald Trump has been elected president, re-elected president.

Vance has been critical of Trump in the past. In 2016, Vance wrote in a message to a friend that Trump could be "America's Hitler," called him noxious and compared him to an opioid. More recently, Vance said he has since changed his mind about Trump.

"I don't hide from that. I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans," Vance told Fox's Sean Hannity.

Vance rose to prominence after publishing his best-selling 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," which was adapted into a Netflix film in 2020.

- Chris Mueller

Ukraine conflict spurs debate in 2024 election

The war in Ukraine remains a key issue for Republicans more than two years after Russia’s initial invasion, and we’re likely to hear about it tonight amid a foreign-policy focus on Day 3 of the RNC.

Many members of the GOP have criticized the U.S.’s ongoing aid to Ukraine and advocated for a swift end to the conflict, including both former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance.

Trump has publicly said he would end the war in Ukraine within a day of returning to the presidency, though he hasn’t provided specifics about how he would do so. At the same time, Vance has suggested European countries shoulder more of the burden of providing aid, opposing a $95 billion national security bill that included security provisions for Kyiv.

USA TODAY has debunked numerous claims about the war in Ukraine:

-Hannah Hudnall

Israel-Hamas conflict lingers, spurs division

The war in Gaza remains a hot-button issue nearly a year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and it’s a topic that’s likely to come up tonight amid an RNC focus on foreign policy.

Republicans have been strong proponents of sending U.S. arms to Israel, with the House passing legislation in May that would force President Joe Biden to cease his brief pause on bomb shipments to the country. One such advocate for sending arms has been former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who garnered criticism in May when she wrote “Finish them!” on an Israeli artillery shell.

Pro-Palestinian protests have been a controversial issue as well as they sweep across college campuses and large cities, with many Republicans labeling them disorderly and antisemitic. Former President Donald Trump took this sentiment a step further when he told an interviewer in March that he thinks Democrats “hate Israel.”

USA TODAY has debunked numerous claims about Israel and the war in Gaza:

-Hannah Hudnall

As convention focuses on border security, debate over immigration policy continues

Immigration is poised to be a key issue on the convention's third day, which is expected to focus on foreign policy and border security.

Under Biden, the number of people taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol has reached a record high, averaging about 2 million people per year, according to The Washington Post.

Trump, meanwhile, has promised the largest deportation effort in U.S. history if he is elected again. He also said he would reinstate strict immigration policies from his first term, limit asylum access at the U.S. southern border and eliminate automatic citizenship for people born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

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In February, Republican lawmakers blocked an immigration bill that would have revamped the country’s immigration and border policies. Biden blamed the bill's failure on opposition from Trump. Since then, Biden has issued executive orders to implement new restrictions on asylum access and speed up the process to get a green card for certain spouses and children of U.S. citizens.

Here are a few claims about immigration we've previously debunked:

- Chris Mueller

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RNC fact check: What conventions speakers got right (and wrong)

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