There were few false or misleading claims on the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. Speakers generally made factual statements, told personal stories, expressed subjective opinions or offered uncheckable predictions.
Here is a fact check of one false claim, one misleading claim and one claim that left out some important context – plus some context about Project 2025, a conservative think tank initiative that has been repeatedly invoked by convention speakers.
Democrats on Trump and Project 2025
Various Democratic National Convention speakers have invoked Project 2025, saying or hinting that this project is former President Donald Trump’s own agenda. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont referred to “Trump’s Project 2025.” State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta of Pennsylvania used the same phrase. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, talking about Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, referred to “their Project 2025 agenda.”
Here is some context about the project, Trump’s links to it, and what Trump has said about it.
What Project 2025 is: Project 2025 has been led by The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, working in collaboration with dozens of other conservative organizations. Their efforts, which began in 2022, resulted in a detailed 920-page document, called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” that lays out “hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.”
The document proposes a variety of right-wing policy changes in a variety of policy areas, from immigration to health care to agriculture to education, plus a major overhaul of the executive branch that would significantly increase presidential power.
The document was published in April 2023, when Trump was a heavy favorite to win the party nomination but nearly a year before he had actually secured that nomination. The document bills itself as an attempt to help “the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be,” hit the ground running if and when they are inaugurated in 2025.
Trump’s links to the initiative: Project 2025 has emphasized that it is “not affiliated with former President Trump.” Trump claimed in July that “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”
CNN cannot definitively fact check what Trump might or might not know. But it’s clear that Trump has extensive connections to Project 2025.
A large number of people who served in Trump’s administration were involved in crafting Project 2025. CNN reported in July that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in the project, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to the policy document. For example, six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries played a role in the project. So did Tom Homan, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief early in the Trump administration, whom Trump has recently said he plans to make part of a second Trump administration.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance wrote the foreword for a forthcoming book by a leader of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. A Vance spokesperson told Axios in July that “the foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025” and that Vance has “previously said that he has no involvement with” Project 2025 “and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for.”
Trump’s stance on Project 2025 proposals: It’s not clear how much of the extensive Project 2025 policy document Trump supports and how much he rejects. Trump has said that some of the document is “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” but he has also said “many of the points are fine.” He has not specified which proposals he rejects and which he finds acceptable.
Russell Vought, the Trump-era Office of Management and Budget director who is one of the former Trump administration officials involved in Project 2025, said last month in a hidden-camera video secretly recorded by a British journalism organization: “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”
CNN reported in July: “Project 2025 includes many policy priorities that are aligned with those of the former president, especially as they relate to cracking down on immigration and purging the federal bureaucracy by making it easier to dismiss civil servants and career officials. But Project 2025 has lately become a lightning rod for other ideas Trump hasn’t explicitly backed,” including a ban on pornography and the exclusion of the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act.
A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign told CNN in August: “President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Sanders on unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday reminded Democratic National Convention attendees of the dark times in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Remember where we were three-and-a-half years ago. We were in the midst of the worst public health crisis in 100 years and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Sanders said. “Unemployment was soaring.”
“That was the reality the Biden-Harris administration faced as they entered the Oval Office,” he continued.
Facts First: Sanders’ claim about the labor market at the start of the Biden administration is not true. While the unemployment rate skyrocketed in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, the situation was improving by the time President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
The nation’s self-imposed shutdown in the early months of the pandemic led to millions of people losing their jobs in April 2020 as the unemployment rate shot up to 14.8%.
By the following January, the nation’s labor market had significantly improved with millions of Americans regaining employment – though the US still had a long way to go to recover all the jobs that were lost. The unemployment rate had fallen to 6.4%.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Pritzker’s misleading claim about Trump’s Covid-19 comments
On the second night of the Democratic National Convention, on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker repeated a claim a Democratic congressman had made the previous night about something former President Donald Trump said about the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
After touting Illinois’ handling of the pandemic, Pritzker then said of Trump: “And Donald? Well, Donald told us to inject bleach.”
Facts First: Pritzker’s claim is misleading. Trump never portrayed his ill-informed 2020 musings about the possibility of using disinfectant to treat Covid-19 as actual advice to Americans. Rather, Trump was talking about the possibility of scientists testing the possibility of using disinfectant as a treatment.
During a press briefing in April 2020, Trump expressed interest in scientists exploring the possibility of whether Covid-19 could be treated using disinfectants inside people’s bodies, “by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” or by deploying powerful light “inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” Trump’s comments were slammed by medical experts as highly dangerous, and they prompted urgent warnings from public health authorities and companies that sell household disinfectants. But he never actually said he was suggesting citizens go and use such products.
Trump made the ill-informed remarks after Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, outlined tests in which he said sunlight or disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the coronavirus on surfaces and in saliva.
When Trump jumped shortly afterward to the dangerous idea of injecting disinfectants inside people’s bodies, he was talking about experts somehow testing that idea. He said: “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Sanders on the impact of expanded child tax credit
When touting the accomplishments of the President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a claim about the impact of the expanded child tax credit passed early in their administration.
“We cut childhood poverty by over 40% through an expanded child tax credit,” Sanders said during his primetime remarks at the Democratic National Convention.
Facts First: Sanders’ claim needs context. It’s true that the expanded child tax credit slashed the child poverty rate in 2021, but the benefit only lasted for the one year the temporary enhancement was in effect.
The American Rescue Plan Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress in March 2021, increased the size of the child tax credit to up to $3,600 – from $2,000 – for eligible families, enabled many more low-income parents to claim it and distributed half of it on a monthly basis.
That helped send child poverty – as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure – to a record low 5.2% in 2021, a drop of 46% from 2020, when the rate was 9.7% according to the US Census Bureau.
But in 2022, child poverty soared to 12.4%, roughly comparable to where it was prior to the pandemic in 2019. It was the largest jump in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure began.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby and Kaanita Iyer