Former President Trump gave voice to a number of conspiracy theories and discredited statements during Tuesday’s night’s debate, embracing multiple false claims largely circulated by the far-right.
Trump used his platform during the highly watched Philadelphia debate against Vice President Harris to amplify a series of debunked assertions, some of which were refuted in real time by the ABC News moderators.
In addition to doubling down on fabricated claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets, Trump also referenced “execution” of recently born babies, repeated false claims about migrant voting as he claimed he won the 2020 election, and wrongly accused President Biden of taking foreign funds.
Attacks on Haitian migrants
Trump elevated a simmering conspiracy theory to a new level with a line that’s bound to join the pantheon of famous presidential debate moments: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.”
He was swiftly fact-checked by moderator David Muir who noted “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused” by Haitian migrants.
Trump did not back down on his claim despite repeatedly being corrected by Muir, saying at the end of the exchange, “We’ll find out.”
The false allegation regarding immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, was given a national spotlight by Trump’s GOP running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who on a social media post Monday referenced “reports” of instances of pet abduction for slaughter.
Vance backed down somewhat from his allegations, sourcing them to constituent inquiries to his office, but couching with, “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
Vance embraced the right-wing meme machine generated by the backlash to his claim: a social media frenzy to post AI generated images of Trump protecting, riding and otherwise interacting with cats, ducks and hybrid cat-ducks.
The memes played into right-wing “based” culture, where statements on- and off-line are intended to elicit negative reactions from left-wing “woke” observers.
The crescendo of memes-versus-revulsion culminated at the debate, where Trump flatly claimed immigrants “are eating the dogs” before a national audience.
Vance explained his celebration of Springfield memes as a way to draw attention to a city in crisis.
“If every single thing that the media says about this story is false, the verifiable facts are that this community has had their lives destroyed by 20,000 migrants coming in and uprooting life,” Vance told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in post-debate coverage.
But city residents and officials have painted a more nuanced picture of a community overwhelmed by a sudden population boom and an economy revitalized by a renewed workforce.
Renewed false claims about his 2020 election loss
Trump has for years refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, and the debate was no different as he pushed back on the idea that he had accepted the loss to Biden.
“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” Trump said, telling Muir that recent comments in which he spoke about losing by “a whisker” were made “sarcastically.”
Muir commented that he did not detect sarcasm and added that dozens of legal challenges brought by Trump and his allies following the 2020 election were dismissed. Trump claimed “no judge looked at it.” In fact, the false claims underpinning the lawsuits pushed various bar associations to reprimand the attorneys that filed them.
Audits by multiple states, as well as comments from federal officials and election administrators show that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. And judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents dismissed legal challenges for lack of evidence or lack of standing, while the Supreme Court also turned away cases around the 2020 election.
Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in ballots and of U.S. elections as a whole, and did so again on Tuesday night. He also repeated a popular claim on the right that Democrats are registering illegal immigrants to vote in the upcoming election.
“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English,” he said.
It is a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and multiple news outlets have debunked the assertion that migrants entering the country are being signed up in droves to vote in November.
Assertion of post-birth abortion
Trump continued to try to depict Democrats and Harris as radicals on abortion by doubling down on false claims that Democrats support abortion “after birth” and “executing” babies.
It’s a claim he’s repeated many times before, and it’s been widely debunked. As ABC News anchor Linsey Davis said during her real-time fact check on Tuesday, there is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born. Infanticide is a crime in every state.
“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That isn’t happening; it’s insulting to the women of America,” Harris said on stage.
Late-term abortion are extremely rare. According to health research organization KFF, they are expensive and offered by few providers. They occur because of issues like fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment, as well as barriers to care that cause delays in obtaining an abortion earlier in a pregnancy.
“I would dare anyone who makes these kinds of claims against women, sit down with somebody who has had to have an abortion later in pregnancy and tell her that what she did was elective,” said Lauren Brenzel, the campaign director of the ballot initiative in Florida to protect abortion access. “We’re talking about women who have lives planned for their children, who have names for their children, who have built a life in their mind around what being a parent to that child will look like, and who have faced devastating losses because of their own health or because of the health of the child that they were carrying.”
Fourteen states currently ban abortion almost completely, while 11 have gestational bans that restrict abortion at a certain point in pregnancy. An additional 16 states ban abortion at or near “viability,” the point where a fetus can survive outside the womb
Falsely accused Biden of taking money from overseas
Trump on Tuesday also accused Biden of taking money from foreign sources that influenced his actions as president and vice president.
There’s no evidence, however, that Biden ever earned income from overseas during his time in office or afterwards.
“You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because supposedly China paid him millions of dollars. He’s afraid to do it. Between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine. They get all this money from all of these different countries. And then you wonder why is he so loyal to this one, that one,” Trump said.
Biden has said he never took overseas money, and a House Republican investigation failed to find any evidence that Biden earned income overseas.
While the president’s brother and son Hunter Biden did conduct business with China and Ukraine, the investigation was likewise unable to establish that Biden saw any financial benefit from his family’s dealings.
Trump stopped short of making a claim that circulated among the MAGA wing before becoming central to the GOP investigation: that Biden accepted a bribe from foreign governments. That assertion was based on a tip to the FBI from a now-indicted information, accused of fabricating the claim out of political animus for Biden.