Fact check: Trump-Harris presidential debate — truths and falsehoods

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her Republican rival Donald Trump met face to face for the first time in Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia.

During the debate, they exchanged various accusations; here, we fact-check the candidates’ claims.

Harris ‘wouldn’t even meet’ Netanyahu

Trump: Harris “wouldn’t even meet with” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “when he went to Congress to make a very important speech. She refused to be there because she was at a sorority party of hers.”

Half true.

This needs context. Harris did skip Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the US Congress on July 24. She was busy making a previously scheduled keynote speech to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

However, Harris met Netanyahu face-to-face the following day. After that meeting, she doubled down on support for Israel, committing to its defence, but also referred to the growing death toll of the war in Gaza, in which more than 41,000 people have been killed, and said she would not stay silent.

Harris, right, and Netanyahu arrive for a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building [File: Julia Nikhinson/AP]

Trump misleads about military equipment in Afghanistan

Trump: The US “left $85bn worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind” in Afghanistan.

False.

The figure is far lower than Trump stated. When the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s civilian government in 2021, it inherited military hardware the US gave to the government.

However, an independent inspector general report told Congress that only about $7bn of US-funded equipment remained in the Taliban’s hands. According to the report, “The US military removed or destroyed nearly all major equipment used by US troops in Afghanistan throughout the drawdown period in 2021.”

Families board a US Air Force plane during an evacuation at Kabul airport [File: Sgt Samuel Ruiz/US Marine Corps via AP]

Haitian immigrants ‘are eating the cats’

Trump: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

False.

A city spokesperson told PolitiFact that claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing neighbours’ pets to eat are unfounded.

A Springfield spokesperson said the city had no such reports, and police told a local news outlet the department had received no reports of pets being stolen and eaten.

As many as 20,000 Haitian immigrants have come to Springfield. Since 2023, some Haitians have come to the US through the Department of Homeland Security’s humanitarian parole programme that lets people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and their immediate family members request to come to the US legally. They can be paroled into the US for up to two years.

Additional ‘Trump sales tax’ of $4,000

Harris: “Economists have said that the Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.”

Half true.

Trump has repeatedly proposed wide-ranging tariffs on foreign goods, including an across-the-board tariff of 10 percent to 20 percent and a 60 percent levy on goods from China. Although tariffs are imposed separately from the tax system, consumers would feel their effect much the same way as taxes.

However, the specific dollar impact on consumers varies. Two estimates we found generally support Harris’s $4,000 figure; two show a smaller, though still significant, impact.

Trump, on the screen at left, and Harris, right [Matt Rourke/AP]

‘Worst unemployment since the Great Depression’

Harris: “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

False.

The unemployment rate spiked to a post-Great Depression record of 14.8 percent in April 2020 as the COVID pandemic escalated.

Trump was in office then. But he didn’t “leave” Biden or Harris with a post-Great Depression record unemployment rate. By December 2020, the unemployment rate had fallen back to 6.4 percent, which was high for recent history but well below numerous spikes during recessions.

Job creation ‘fraud’

Trump: “It was a fraud, just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

False.

The federal agency that calculates how many people are working handed Democrats an unwelcome present during their August national convention in Chicago: a downward adjustment of the past year’s employment gains by 818,000 jobs.

But Trump claimed the Biden-Harris administration was cooking the books, calling it “fraud” during the debate. However, economists across the ideological spectrum reject Trump’s claim. The process is an annual effort to fine-tune initial data that the agency acknowledges is imperfect.

Abortion: Democrats support ‘execution after birth’

Trump: “They even have … he said, ‘The baby we will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby.’” 

False.

Former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a physician, never said he would sanction the “execution” of newborns. What he said during a radio interview is that in rare, late-pregnancy cases when fetuses are nonviable, doctors deliver the baby, keep it comfortable, resuscitate it if the mother wishes, and then have a “discussion” with the mother.

The issue is that Northam declines to say what that discussion would entail. Trump puts words in the governor’s mouth, saying doctors would urge mothers to let them forcibly kill the newborn, which is a felony in Virginia punishable by a long prison sentence or death.

Harris reacts during the debate with Trump [Brian Snyder/Reuters]

‘Climate change is a hoax’

Harris: “Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real.”

True.

Trump has, on multiple occasions, called climate change and global warming a hoax in speeches, social media posts and interviews.

The source of Harris’s claim that he called climate change “a hoax” was a tweet Trump posted on November 6, 2012. It said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

More than 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists and a majority of domestic and international scientific organisations agree that human activity is causing the Earth to warm. The related long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns are known as climate change.

Harris tried to negotiate a deal between Putin and Ukraine

Trump: “That war should have never started. She was the emissary. They sent her in to negotiate with Zelenskyy and Putin. And she did and the war started three days later.” 

False.

Harris, in her role as vice president, did meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the days before Russia invaded Ukraine. But she did not meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, and there were no negotiations between the three.

Harris met Zelenskyy during the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022. “This is also a chance for me to reiterate the position of the United States as it relates to Ukraine,” Harris said.

“As I have said earlier today to our allies around the world, the United States takes seriously the importance of the integrity and the territorial integrity of Ukraine and your sovereignty. And the United States stands with Ukraine in this regard. If Russia further invades your country, as I mentioned earlier today, we will impose swift and severe economic sanctions.”