RNC 2024 Day 4 updates: Trump pitches unity, but revives old grievances in longest acceptance speech in history
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.
Latest headlines:
Fact-checking Trump’s claim about his tax legislation
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
Last name in Comperatore's jacket appears to always have been truncated
On stage right now with the former president is Corey Comperatore's firefighter uniform, with his last name spelled as Comperatore -- missing the "a."
It appears his last name was always truncated on his jacket. The Buffalo Township Fire posted the jacket with the same spelling on its Facebook page four days ago.
-ABC News' Lalee Ibssa, Soorin Kim and Kelsey Walsh
Trump repeats claim that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs from Black, Latino populations
Trump repeated his argument made during the presidential debate that undocumented immigrants were taking away jobs from Americans, particularly minority groups.
"Those who are being hurt by millions of people, being hurt, the Black population and Hispanic population," he said without any more details. "Because they are taking the jobs from our Black population and Hispanic population and taking them from unions. The unions are suffering from it," he said.
Fact-checking Trump’s claim that he defeated ISIS
“We got credit for the war and defeating ISIS and so many things, the great economy, the biggest tax cuts ever, the biggest regulation cuts Ever the creation of Space Force, the rebuilding of our military. We did so much," Trump said.
We’ll get to the tax cuts in a second. Here we’ll focus on the claim about ISIS. Trump rightly gets credit for shrinking the territory ISIS controlled. But it’s wrong to say ISIS was or is defeated.
According to data from IHS Markit, a private defense and security research firm, the area controlled by the Islamic State went from 90,800 square kilometers in January 2015 to 6,759 square kilometers in January 2018. That’s a 93 percent reduction in territory.
But the success Trump claims was built upon strategy and attacks that were launched under President Barack Obama.
The campaign to defeat ISIS took shape in September 2014 under the name of Operation Inherent Resolve. According to U.S. Air Force Central Command data, coalition forces engaged the enemy over 33,000 times between the launch of the operation and November 2017. (The Air Force includes strikes taking place in August 2014.) Counting only sorties in which at least one weapon was released, about three-fourths of the action took place during the Obama years. The Air Force reports over 104,000 missiles, bombs and other explosives dropped in the course of the campaign. About two-thirds of that came before Trump took office.
Though ISIS no longer holds territory, it continues to operate and has worked to expand its global presence through affiliates in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, according to the Congressional Research Service.
—PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman