Republican Convention Opening Night

Summary

Speakers in the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention engaged in political spin, particularly in making claims about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s policy positions:

• Several speakers at the convention misleadingly portrayed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which President Donald Trump signed, as exclusively benefiting the middle class, while criticizing Biden’s tax plan as hurting “working families.” The Republican law largely benefited the wealthy, while the Biden proposed tax increases would fall mainly on the top 1% of taxpayers.
• Trump claimed Democrats want to get rid of postal workers, when Democrats have repeatedly tried over Trump’s objections to get $25 billion in emergency funding for the U.S. Postal Service.
• Trump wrongly claimed, “It used to take 17 years, 18 years, 20 years, 21 years … to get approval to build a highway,” but that under his administration, “we have it down to two years.” The latest statistics show the same or a bit longer median time in fiscal 2019 for projects to complete the environmental impact process than it took during the last five years of the Obama administration.
• Donald Trump Jr. said his father “built the greatest economy our country has ever seen.” Not true. Economic growth and job growth have been faster under previous presidents.
• A number of speakers falsely claimed that Biden supported defunding the police, part of a campaign to depict the Democratic nominee as soft on crime.
• Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed that Democrats support policies “like banning fossil fuels” and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley suggested that a Biden-Harris administration would “ban fracking.” While some Democrats back such proposals, Biden has only called for prohibiting new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters.
• Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones claimed that Trump “ended — once and for all — the policy of [mass] incarceration of Black people … caused by no other than Joe Biden.” But just as Biden’s 1994 crime bill alone isn’t responsible for mass incarceration, neither did Trump’s 2018 crime legislation end it.
• Sen. Tim Scott also made the misleading claim that “revenues to the Treasury increase[d] after we lowered taxes in 2017.” That’s true in raw figures, but according to a Brookings Institution analysis, revenue in fiscal year 2018 was lower than in 2017 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
• McDaniel also misleadingly said that Democrats support “[p]olicies that … allow abortion up until the point of birth.” Democrats generally back abortion rights, but Biden isn’t pushing to allow abortions for any reason up until birth. Only 1% of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
• Donald Trump Jr. overstated the reach of the travel restrictions imposed by his father, saying he “shut down travel from China.” That ignores the exemptions that allowed tens of thousands of people to travel on direct flights from China to the U.S. in the months after the restrictions were imposed.
• A Trump campaign advisory board member made the unfounded claim that if not for Trump’s “China travel ban, millions would have died.” The body of research on travel restrictions shows they can, if they’re very strict, delay the path of the spread of diseases but do little to contain them.
• Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Trump Victory Finance Committee Chair Kimberly Guilfoyle, falsely described Biden as an advocate for “open borders.” Biden says his border security focus would be on “high-tech capacity” and the ports of entry “where all the bad stuff is happening.”
• Haley drew a false comparison in saying Biden “is good” for ISIS but Trump “took on ISIS and won.” About half of the territory held by ISIS, or the Islamic State, had been regained under the Obama administration, according to Trump’s own administration.
• Missouri resident Patty McCloskey falsely suggested that Trump eliminated a federal regulation that “forced rezoning” in the suburbs. The 2015 Housing and Urban Development fair housing rule that Secretary Ben Carson announced he will terminate said it “does not impose any land use decisions or zoning laws on