Trump leaned into his usual talking points during his RNC speech.
On the fourth and final day of the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump gave a highly anticipated speech, which he said beforehand would call for unity following his assassination attempt.
However in his first speech since the incident, Trump leaned into his usual talking points, slamming President Joe Biden, Democrats and other critics on a wide variety of issues from the economy, immigration and crime.
For over an hour, Trump went off script much to the crowd's delight. The former president told them he was grateful for their support after his brush with death but argued that the country needed to be fixed due to Biden's policies.
The night also included wild speeches from guests such as Hulk Hogan and Eric Trump, who echoed some of the former president's rhetoric bashing Biden and the Democrats.
Trump said he would reverse government regulations to encourage the development of electric vehicles, saying in doing so, he’d be “saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now.”
That’s inaccurate. During Biden’s presidency, employment in auto and parts manufacturing had risen by 127,800 jobs through December 2023.
—PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman
The RNC crowd cheered Trump after he referred to COVID-19 as the "China virus."
The term has been seen as a racist remark against Asian Americans.
During his presidency, Trump said, the U.S. had the best economy in the history of our country, "no inflation," and soaring incomes.
One of the strongest ways to assess the economy is the unemployment rate, which fell during Trump’s presidency to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Joe Biden, matched or exceeded those levels.
Another measure, the annual increases in gross domestic product, were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.
Wage growth increased under Trump, but to say they soared is an exaggeration. Adjusted for inflation, wages began rising during the Barack Obama years and kept increasing under Trump. But these were modest compared with the 2% a year increase seen in the 1960s.
Another metric — the growth rate in personal consumption per person, adjusted for inflation — wasn’t higher under Trump than previous presidents. For many families, this statistic serves an economic activity bottom line, determining how much they can spend on food, clothing, housing, health care and travel.
In Trump’s three years in office through January 2020, real consumption per person grew by 2% a year. Of the 30 nonoverlapping three-year periods from 1929 to the end of his presidency, Trump’s periods ranked in the bottom third.
As for inflation being zero, that’s also wrong. It was low, ranging between 1.8% and 2.4% increases year-over-year in 2017, 2018 and 2019. This is roughly the range the Federal Reserve likes to see. During the pandemic-dominated year of 2020, inflation fell to 1.2%, because demand plummeted as entertainment and travel collapsed.
-PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson and Aaron Sharockman
Trump several times tonight — and many, many, many times before — has claimed the tax legislation passed during his presidency was the largest tax cut ever.
False. Trump has repeated this statement often. When it was passed, Trump’s tax cut was, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranked seventh.
He also said, “People don't realize I brought taxes way down, way way down, and yet, we took in more revenues the following year than we did when the tax rate was much higher.”
That’s technically true, but misleading.
If you look at when the tax bill passed, it’s not clear at all that an increase in tax receipts followed the bill’s passage. Every year, the U.S. population grows, and — except during a recession — the size of the economy grows, too. "So you’d expect receipts to be higher every year, all other things equal," said Benjamin R. Page, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, told PolitiFact previously.
If you look at when the tax bill passed, it’s not clear at all that an increase in tax receipts followed the bill’s passage. For the three months of fiscal 2018 prior to the tax cut, individual income tax collections rose by 10.8% over the equivalent period from 2017. But the rise for the seven months after the tax cut was 6.7%.
And if you look at total tax collections from every category, rather than just individual income taxes, the picture is even worse. During the seven-month period after the tax bill passed, total receipts actually fell slightly compared to the equivalent period in 2017, by about a tenth of a percentage point.
Perhaps the most revealing comparison takes into account the May-to-July period, because it excludes the spike in payments in April, when most Americans pay taxes on income generated in 2017, before the tax law was passed. During that period, individual income tax collections fell by about 1% compared to 2017.
—PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson and Aaron Sharockman
