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Ex-President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris met for their first presidential debate—and Trump unleashed a barrage of lies and misleading claims.
Ex-President Donald Trump took the national debate stage on Tuesday night with the chance to share his agenda for a second term in the White House and win over undecided voters.
Instead, Trump only talked about loose “concepts of a plan,” and spent the bulk of the 90-minute primetime event lying about so-called “stolen” elections, bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade and peeling back abortion rights, and pushing wildly unfounded conspiracy theories about immigrants supposedly “taking over” towns across the US and eating peoples’ family pets.
Here’s a roundup of Trump’s most puzzling lies from this week’s debate:
1. Immigrants are eating household pets in Ohio.
Trump said: “In Springfield, [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
Trump amplified lies that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating pets, repeating ugly, anti-immigrant rhetoric he has promoted throughout his campaigns.
There is no evidence that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio community are doing that, officials say. And moderators even tried to call Trump on his lies during the debate—without much success.
“The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food,” Trump said in response. “People on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”
Trump’s comments echoed claims made by his campaign, including his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Still, there have been no credible or detailed reports about the claims, even as Trump and his allies use them to amplify racist stereotypes about Black and brown immigrants.
Trump and Vance’s ugly lies about Haitian immigrants have been embraced and amplified by wide swaths of the Republican Party, but have also been widely condemned, with some journalists and media critics comparing it to the “blood libel” spread by the Nazis during the Holocaust that paved the path for their dehumanization and extermination of millions of Jews.
2. Trump has “nothing” to do with Project 2025.
Trump said: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. … I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. … some good, some bad.”
Project 2025 is an authoritarian policy playbook crafted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to take over the federal government and enact a far-right agenda with Trump as the president.
The 900-page plan details how a second Trump administration could work to overrule and abolish various agencies in the federal government, consolidate power in the presidency, and then enact wholesale changes that would disrupt nearly every aspect of American life.
In recent weeks, and with polls showing that very few Americans actually support the plan, Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025—including at this week’s debate.
But reports show that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a direct hand in the creation of the Project 2025 agenda—including Trump’s first deputy chief of staff, at least six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries, four people who Trump nominated as ambassadors, and several top enforcers of his controversial immigration crackdown.
3. Harris doesn’t have a plan for her presidency.
Trump said: “My plan is a brilliant plan. It’s a great plan. … [Harris] doesn’t have a plan. … I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.”
Harris has several plans—including some specific policy proposals that she released this year.
Last month, she rolled out a broad set of economic proposals that includes cutting taxes for the middle class, reducing grocery and prescription drug costs, increasing housing supply, lowering the cost of owning and renting a home, and relieving medical debt for millions of Americans.
And this month, Harris also proposed expanding a federal tax deduction for costs that are incurred while starting a business—essentially creating a new fund that would allow the country’s smallest banks to cover the interest accrued on loans to new businesses, and more.
4. Democrats want to sanction the murder of newborn babies.
Trump said: “[Democrats] have abortion in the ninth month. … [Former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam] said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby. … But [Harris’] vice presidential pick [Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz] says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.”
Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that Harris and Democratic-led states want to pass laws that permit abortion until the moment of birth and the execution of babies after birth.
But that is homicide—and it’s already illegal in every state, as ABC News Moderator Linsey Davis made clear.
“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said.
According to recent reports from The 19th News, which examined Trump’s statements at the debate, Trump’s claims have also been repeatedly fact-checked by a wide range of news organizations—including NBC and Scripps News—and they have all rated them “false.”
Only 1% of abortions in the US occur at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy—and in those cases, it’s overwhelmingly the result of threats to the mother’s health or serious fetal abnormalities.
Harris, for her part, said she supports restoring the standard set in Roe—which protected access to abortion until the point of fetal viability, which is usually about 22 weeks of pregnancy.
5. Everyone wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned.
Trump said: “For 52 years they’ve been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states. … And through the genius and heart and strength of six supreme court justices, we were able to do that. … Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.”
Some right-wing scholars wanted to peel back abortion rights. But certainly not all of them.
Poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of Americans—including two-thirds or nearly two-thirds of respondents in multiple polls—wish Roe was never overturned, CNN reports.
Harris called out Trump for the blatant lie in real time during the debate:
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said. “A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
6. Americans are voting on their reproductive rights.
Trump said: “The states are now voting [on abortion rights].”
Twenty-two states now ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe. In some of those states, the fight over abortion access is still taking place in courtrooms. Other states—like Michigan—have added new legal protections for abortion at the ballot box.
But those decisions aren’t always being left up to a vote of the people. In fact, only 24 states allow for citizen initiatives, giving voters the direct chance to determine their abortion laws.
For example, abortions in Iowa are now banned after about six weeks of pregnancy after a district court lifted a temporary block of a 2023 law that banned reproductive healthcare. The Iowa Supreme Court—not a vote of the people—later decided that the ban could be enforced.
7. Trump had “nothing to do” with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump said: “I had nothing to do with [the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021] other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech. … It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the [former] mayor of Washington [Muriel Bowser] did their jobs. I wasn’t responsible for security. Nancy Pelosi was responsible. She didn’t do her job.”
Words matter. During his speech ahead of the riots in Washington DC on Jan. 6, Trump specifically urged the crowd to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory. Trump told the crowd: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That’s after his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, declared: “Let’s have trial by combat.”
While rioters busted down blockades at the Capitol, Trump also didn’t appeal for them to leave the premises until more than three hours after the assault began. He then released a video telling the rioters it was time to “go home,” but added: “We love you. You’re very special people.”
Trump also repeated an oft-stated lie that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) “rejected” his offer to send “10,000 National Guard or soldiers” to the Capitol. Pelosi did not—and still does not—direct the National Guard. As the US Capitol came under attack, she and lawmakers only called for military assistance, including from the National Guard.
8. Violent crime is on the rise in the United States.
Trump said: “Crime [in the United States] is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country is through the roof. … [FBI statistics that show otherwise] were defrauding statements. … They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.”
Various studies have shown violent crime has now dropped to the lowest level in decades, according to reports from the New York Times. Violent crime was also higher in 2020 under Trump than under President Joe Biden, according to police data gathered by the FBI.
The federal data published by the FBI did include crime statistics for thousands of individual cities—and it clearly featured cities that have the highest violent crime rates in the country.
9. The Trump administration did a “phenomenal job” handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump said: “We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic.”
Phenomenal is subjective—but federal data helps illustrate Trump’s pandemic response.
In the final year of Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans reportedly died from COVID-19, and life expectancy fell by 1.13 years—the biggest decrease since World War II.
Reports from Scientific American show that many of those deaths would’ve been avoidable, had Trump not actively suppressed scientific data, delayed testing, mocked and blocked mask-wearing, and convened mass gatherings where social distancing was impossible.
10. Immigrants are “taking over” the country.
Trump said: “We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics, and also unions. … They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that [Harris] and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. … We have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
Economists have reportedly dismissed Trump’s claims of immigrants “taking jobs” away from American citizens as false. In fact, they’ve said a tight job market in recent years has actually delivered record-low Black unemployment and spurred rapid wage gains for American workers.
Reports show Latino business ownership is also up more than 40% since 2019.
And union workers are also in the clear. Data shows that billions of dollars in federal investments have created tens of thousands of new jobs for union workers in recent years as major manufacturers look to expand operations and capitalize on the transition to clean energy.
Additionally, while Republicans often argue that immigration leads to rising crime rates, research from Stanford University has shown that first-generation immigrants aren’t more likely to be imprisoned for crimes than people born in the United States—and haven’t been since 1880.
In fact, both contemporary and historical data—including investigations carried out by major government commissions—have shown repeatedly and systematically that immigration actually is associated with lower crime rates, according to the Social Science Research Council.
11. Every legal proceeding against Trump is a “fake” case.
Trump said: “Every one of those [civil and criminal] cases [filed against me] was started by [Democrats] against their political opponent. And I’m winning most of them and I’ll win the rest on appeal. … It’s called weaponization. … They weaponized the [US] Justice Department. … They used it to try and win an election. They’re fake cases.”
Trump is the first president to be convicted of a felony—as well as the first president to be convicted of 34 felonies, in addition to a barrage of costly losses in various civil cases.
There is simply no evidence that the Biden-Harris administration deployed federal resources to target political opponents or that Biden or Harris had directed the US Justice Department (or local prosecutors) to pursue their prosecutions of Trump, the Washington Post reports.
12. No new jobs have been created under the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump said: “The only jobs [the Biden-Harris administration] got were bounce-back jobs. … I was the one that created them. They know it and so does everybody else.”
The American economy added about 16 million more jobs than it had in January 2021—with new jobs added every month since about that time. And while some of those jobs were the result of a rebounding, post-pandemic economy, federal legislation from the Biden-Harris administration—not the Trump administration—is responsible for much of that growth.
Between February 2020 and August 2024, at least 6.5 million new jobs that didn’t exist before the pandemic were added to the US economy, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—undercutting Trump’s theory that recent economic momentum was only due to the return of old jobs or policies his administration put into effect.
Since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, companies have announced more than $265 billion in new clean energy investments in nearly every state, which are set to create more than 330,000 new jobs—including in construction, manufacturing, and the skilled trades.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is also estimated to support more than 700,000 jobs annually.
13. Trump has the “biggest” rallies in the history of American politics.
Trump said: “People don’t go to [Harris’] rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. … People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
There’s a whole consortium dedicated to tracking this sort of stuff—and proving Trump wrong.
So far in 2024, the Crowd Counting Consortium has logged at least 37 political rallies at which Trump appeared, with an average crowd size of about 5,600 people. And since Harris became the Democratic Party nominee, her reported crowd sizes have ranged from 10,000 to 15,000.
READ MORE: Fact-checking Trump’s lies on abortion during the presidential debate
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Follow Political Correspondent Kyle Kaminski here.
