Trump's falsehoods show no sign of letting up as campaign enters final stretch

With the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election having dramatically shifted since President Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, former President Donald Trump has tried to blunt Vice President Kamala Harris’s momentum by holding a series of press conferences and interviews.

But during an Aug. 8 press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home and private resort, an Aug. 12 interview with Elon Musk on X and an Aug. 15 press conference at his New Jersey golf club, Trump proceeded to make dozens of false or unfounded claims. NPR counted 162 “lies and distortions” at the Mar-a-Lago presser alone.

On his social media platform, meanwhile, Trump added to the growing tally of untruths, claiming that the video and photographs showing a large crowd that attended Harris’s Aug. 7 rally at Detroit Metro Airport had been generated using artificial intelligence.

“She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches,” Trump asserted on Aug. 11 in what amounts to perhaps the most easily debunkable claim in electoral history.

Here’s a look at some of the recent falsehoods Trump has been making as he campaigns for a second White House term.

‘Emergency landing’

At his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump raised eyebrows with a story about a helicopter ride he claimed to have taken with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

"I went down in a helicopter with him," Trump told reporters. "We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was, he was a little concerned."

Trump added that Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris.

Brown later responded that he had never been in a helicopter with Trump and denied ever telling him anything negative about Harris.

‘Border czar’

Seizing on the surge of immigration into the U.S. from across the border with Mexico during the Biden administration, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Harris bears responsibility because she was appointed the nation’s “border czar.”

“She's the border czar. By the way, she was the border czar, 100%,” Trump told reporters about Harris at his Aug. 8 press conference. “And all of a sudden, for the last few weeks, she's not the border czar anymore, like nobody ever said it.”

While Biden tasked Harris with working with Central American nations to understand the root causes of immigration and to stem the number of migrants coming to the U.S., she was never given the “border czar” title.

‘20 million’ undocumented immigrants under Biden

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, roughly 7.3 million encounters with migrants seeking to enter the country illegally have been recorded since Biden became president. Trump has regularly sought to inflate that number, but has not provided any evidence for his claims.

“Twenty million people came over the border in the last — during the Biden-Harris administration,” he said during his Mar-a-Lago press conference. “Twenty million people. And it could be very much higher than that. Nobody really knows what the number is.”

‘Virtually 100%’ of U.S. job creation has ‘gone to migrants’

At a news conference on Thursday in Bedminster, N.J., Trump again resorted to hyperbole and distortion when making the following claim: “Virtually 100% of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants.”

As the Associated Press reported in its fact check of that event, Trump appears to be conflating immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens with those in the country illegally. Unemployment figures for native-born Americans are, in fact, lower than those in the country who are foreign-born.

‘Crime rate’s going through the roof’

During his interview with Elon Musk on Monday, Trump made the case that crime in America was on the rise.

“Our crime rate’s going through the roof,” he said.

Preliminary FBI data show the opposite, however, with a 13% decline in the murder rate for 2023 and a further 26% decline in the first quarter of 2024. Overall violent crime levels fell 6% in 2023, according to the bureau’s preliminary figures, and dropped another 15% in the first quarter of 2024, according to CNN.