Fact Checking Trump and Vance

It is no secret that Donald Trump and JD Vance have a record of lying about conditions in the United States. Surprisingly and disturbingly, a substantial number of Americans believe them.

Crime

Trump claims that crime has peaked during Joe Biden’s presidency. In fact, recently it has been declining nationally and in Milwaukee. The chart below shows year-to-date homicide and non-fatal shooting data taken from the on-line Milwaukee Police Department dashboard for the three years from 2022 to 2024. Although still disturbingly high, the counts have declined in each of the most recent years.

The next chart, based on data from the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, shows full-year data over a much longer period of time. Before 2020, both homicides and non-fatal shootings were drifting downwards. In 2020, they suddenly surged upwards before peaking and starting to decline.

This pattern was not unique to Milwaukee, as the next graph shows, based on data from 276 cities.

What accounts for this pattern? As was previously noted, the surge in fatal and non-fatal shooting took place in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency.

The obvious culprit is the pandemic. Why would the pandemic have led to a shooting spike? One possible cause is frustration with the pandemic and the restrictions aimed at stopping its spread. Or perhaps fewer people on the streets made the streets less safe.

The economy:

A second topic that Trump consistently lies about is the economy. Here is a typical Trump claim:

I had the country going, just prior to Covid coming in, at a level that nobody had ever seen. And even if you go all four years, it was so good that even with that terrible interruption that destroyed the world, we had the greatest four years. The economy was so great. The job numbers were the best ever.

There are a number of ways to measure the strength of the economy, including the unemployment rate, the gross domestic product, economic inequality, and innovation. Over the years, I have looked at many of these. None support Trump’s claim.

Consider the question of job growth during a president’s term. The next graph shows the annual growth of private sector jobs by president since Truman. Job growth with Democratic presidents is shown in blue; for Republican presidents it is shown in red.

One challenge in any attempt to evaluate the Trump-year economy is what to do about 2020, Trump’s fourth year in office and when Covid hit. Obviously, Trump was not the cause of the pandemic, but one can argue that he made it worse, by pushing false remedies, minimizing its seriousness and, when the vaccine did become available, refusing to prioritize its distribution.

In the end, I chose to drop 2020 from the table and go with his first three years. Including 2020 would have resulted in an annual change in jobs of -0.4%.

The next graph shows Wisconsin jobs using Wisconsin private sector growth. As before, growth under Trump was calculated using his first three years. Including the fourth year converts growth from 0.6% to -0.8%.

The third of these three issues is accessibility of health insurance. In his debate with Harris, Trump claimed he “salvaged” Obamacare. This was repeated by Vance in his debate with Walz. This is a very different stance than he adopted early in his presidency.

For instance, on the first day of his term as president, Trump published the following note in the Federal Register:

It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [“Obamacare”].

Although Trump promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, the repeal part quickly took precedence over the replace part. Only a vote by John McCain prevented its repeal.

What has become obvious with recent events is that Trump has no idea of what to replace Obamacare with nor any interest in developing an alternative. But as Obamacare has become more popular, he has shifted his public position by claiming that he saved Obamacare during his term as president.

As the next graph reflects, Trump’s term as president was the only time that the number of people without health insurance went up. As a report from the Wisconsin Public Forum notes, during Trump’s first three years in office, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 4.6 million (16%).

The same report notes that rural counties in Wisconsin would be the largest beneficiary of Medicaid expansion, yet those are the places that most strongly support Trump.

Increasingly Vance and Trump go beyond lying but defend their lies as a public service. This is perhaps best illustrated by Vance’s defense of his false claims about Haitians killing and eating pets in Springfield Ohio:

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes, If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.