There are limitations to the FBI-published data from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data and the submitted data usually has some errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent.
The preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% decline in murder and a roughly 6% decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in Trump’s last calendar year in office in 2020. The preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said earlier this year that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”
After Trump claimed in June that “crime is so much up,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces. She said: “It would be more accurate to say that crime is so much down.”
Inflation
Trump said, “I think we have the worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years. They say it’s 48 years, I don’t believe it.”
Facts First: Trump framed this as an opinion, but it’s baseless nonetheless – wrong in two different ways. First, even when the inflation rate hit its Biden-era peak of 9.1% in June 2022, that 9.1% rate was the highest since 1981 – between 40 and 41 years prior, certainly not “100 years” and not even “48 years.” Second, inflation has declined sharply since the June 2022 peak, and the most recent available rate at the time he spoke, for July 2024, was 3.2% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Global warming and sea levels
Trump argued that the threat of the nuclear war is far more important than the threat posed by climate change. And he said: “The biggest threat? It’s not global warming, where the ocean’s gonna rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”
Facts First: Trump’s claim about the pace of sea-level rise is wildly inaccurate. The global average sea level is currently rising more per year than Trump claimed that it will rise in 400 years.
NASA reported in March that the current global average sea-level rise in 2023 was 0.17 inches per year, more than double the rate in 1993. And a World Meteorological Organization report this year said the rate of sea level rise between 2014 and 2023 was about 0.19 inches per year.
In other words, sea level rise is already more than an eighth of an inch annually – and it is accelerating. NASA found a jump of 0.3 inches between 2022 and 2023.
Gary Griggs, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor of earth and planetary sciences who studies sea-level rise, said last year that Trump’s similar claims “can only be described as totally out of touch with reality” and that Trump “has no idea what he is talking about.”
Sea levels rise by different amounts in different locations. For the US, sea levels are expected to rise particularly fast for the east coast and Gulf of Mexico coast – and Trump’s state of Florida, which is bordered by both of those coasts, is expected to be affected more severely than many other coastal states.
In fact, Trump’s claims about sea levels are highly inaccurate for the area near Mar-a-Lago, which is on the Atlantic. Griggs noted in a June email that data from the closest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tide gauge to Mar-a-Lago shows an increase of an eighth of an inch roughly every nine months.
Trump has also previously made the joke about rising seas creating more oceanfront property. In reality, rising sea levels are expected to have devastating consequences not only for many seafront properties but for areas further inland – rendering some communities uninhabitable and others more dangerous, increasing the frequency and reach of flooding, making hurricanes more destructive and damaging infrastructure and ecosystems.
The number of people listening to the conversation
Trump told Musk that “you got a lot of people listening” to the conversation – “like 60 million or something.” He then asked somebody what the number was, but he never corrected his initial estimate.
Facts First: Trump did express uncertainty about the number, but his “like 60 million or something” claim is false. At the time he made this remark, public data on X showed that there were 1.1 million accounts listening to the conversation.
Trump appeared to be referring to something different: the number of views on his own X post sharing the “space” where the conversation was played. But the vast majority of the accounts that viewed the post did not actually listen to the conversation.
Harris and prisoners
Trump claimed of Harris: “She wants to release all the prisoners that are in detention, and some of these guys are really bad. That just came out today.”
Facts First: This is false. There is no basis for the claim that Harris “wants to release all the prisoners that are in detention.” Trump appeared to be referring to news stories in conservative media that reported that Harris had said in 2019, while unsuccessfully running in the Democratic presidential primary, that she wanted to close privately-run immigration detention centers.
Even if Harris continues to hold this position today – she has not addressed the subject since she began her presidential campaign in July – closing privately-run immigration detention centers would not result in the release of “all” prisoners in immigration detention, let alone all prisoners in regular US jails and prisons; Trump did not specify that he was talking about Harris’ past stance on certain immigration detention facilities rather than all prisons.
It’s possible Trump had been misled himself; a short clip shared by some Republicans on social media this week did not include the part of Harris’ 2019 remarks where she specified that she was referring to privately run immigration detention facilities in particular.
But articles by Fox News and The New York Post correctly noted that this was what she said.
Harris’ immigration role
Trump claimed of Harris: “She was the border czar, and people can’t allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign. Now, she’s saying she wasn’t really involved … she was totally in charge.”
Facts First: This is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate, and was never “totally in charge” of the border; Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.
Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong. Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries.
A White House “fact sheet” in July 2021 said: “On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy.
Since March, Vice President Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries (he also mentioned Mexico that day). Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.” Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far.
Venezuela, crime and migration
Trump claimed: “Venezuela – their crime is down 72%. They’re taking their drug dealers.
They’re taking – frankly, their prisoners, they’re emptying out their prisons. They’re taking their criminals, their murderers, their rapists and they’re delivering them…”
Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available. And while it is certain that at least some criminals have joined law-abiding Venezuelans in a mass exodus from the country amid the economic crisis of the last decade, there is no proof Venezuela has deliberately emptied prisons for migration purposes or intentionally sent ex-prisoners to the United States.
Right-wing website Breitbart published a vague 2022 article about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about freed violent prisoners from Venezuela who had then joined migrant caravans. But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated; experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence in the country, said in an email to CNN in June.
Venezuela’s government does not publish reliable official crime statistics, so it’s hard to get a complete picture. But Briceño-León’s group publishes annual data on violent deaths, which includes homicides, police killings and deaths still under investigation. It found a decline of roughly 26% in the number of violent deaths from 2021 to 2023.
That’s substantial, but not “72%.” Briceño-León noted in his email that you could find a decline of roughly 70% by 2023 if you compared 2018 to 2023 – but Trump was US president until early 2021. And crime trends in any country always have a complex mix of causes; Venezuela is no exception. Briceño-León argued that while migration has been a factor in the decline, crime has dropped in large part because the economic crisis has reduced opportunities for crime.
“Bank robberies disappear because there is no money to rob; kidnappings decrease because there is no cash to pay the ransoms; robberies on public transportation stop because travelers have no money in their pockets and old cell phones [with] no value,” he said.
