Fact-checking Day 4 of the DNC: Roundup from PolitiFact
ABC News has compiled fact checks from PolitiFact that took place during the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Vice President Kamala Harris closed out the four-day convention by formally accepting the party’s presidential nominee.
A multitude of speakers took the stage before her on Thursday, ranging from family members, politicians and veterans.
Fact-checking Harris' claim Trump killed the border bill
Harris is correct that Trump helped kill a bipartisan border security bill endorsed by the Border Patrol union.
In February, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a border security bill that would have given immigration officials more funding and changed how asylum is decided for people arriving at the United States southwest border.
Sens. Chris Murphy, D-CT., James Lankford, R-OK. and Kyrsten Sinema, I-AZ co-sponsored the bill.
The National Border Patrol Council — the U.S. Border Patrol's union endorsed the bill.
The bill failed to pass the Senate twice. Trump urged its demise.
"Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill," Trump posted Feb. 5, the day after the bill was introduced, on Truth Social. He said the bill was a "great gift to the Democrats," and that it absolved them from the "HORRIBLE JOB" they had done on immigration.
In each vote, a few Democrats and Republicans broke from party lines to vote against and for the bill, respectively.
Fact-checking Harris' claim Trump would deploy the military against US citizens
In a litany of attacks against Trump, Harris cited the former president's "explicit intent to deploy our active duty military against our own citizens."
In 2023, Trump told voters at a campaign rally in Iowa that he wouldn't wait for governors or mayors to "get crime out of our cities" by calling in the military.
Calling New York City and Chicago "crime dens," Trump said, "And one of the other things I'll do — because you're supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I'm not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it, and we're going to show how bad a job they do ... We don't have to wait any longer."
Fact-checking Harris’ abortion attacks on Trump
Harris said, “As a part of his agenda, [Trump] and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress. And get this … He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions.”
Most of the language in Harris’ claim stems from the policies in Project 2025. But it’s not all accurate. Project 2025 doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access. In addition, what’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda doesn't line up with either Harris’ description or Project 2025’s wish list.
Project 2025 suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services Department should "return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care."
The manual recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion, which is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63% of abortions in 2023. (In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.)
If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting limits on its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven and requiring that it be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. It also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, which bans the mailing of "obscene" materials, with respect to mifepristone. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.
The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders; would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds; and calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.
The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involve a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.
As for how this all aligns with Trump's views, the former president recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. He said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court "approved" it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication or other kinds of abortions.
Fact-checking Mark Kelly: 'Trump skipped his intelligence briefings'
Trump was not known to look through the Presidential Daily Brief regularly or read it to completion. He relied instead on oral briefings that he received from intelligence officials every few days.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote in his memoir that "Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand."
Fact-checking Kinzinger's jab on Vance and Ukraine
Former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger criticized the foreign policy positions of Trump and Vance, saying at one point that Vance said, "I don't care what happens in Ukraine."
"And he wants to be vice president?" Kinzinger asked.
Vance did say something close to that, days before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In an interview with former Trump administration official Steve Bannon in February 2022, Vance said, "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other."
Fact-checking Ruben Gallego's claim about veteran unemployment
Arizona Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ruben Gallego talked about veterans issues in his remarks, claiming "Kamala Harris has delivered more benefits to more veterans than ever before, and has achieved the lowest veterans unemployment rate in history."
Leaving aside what Harris did specifically to lower unemployment for veterans, the numbers show that the unemployment rate for veterans in 2023 dropped to 3%, the lowest average the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded since it began tracking the veterans data in 2020.
Fact-checking Mark Kelly's claim Trump invited Russia to do 'whatever the hell they want'
Trump made the comment Feb. 10 at a Conway, South Carolina, rally as he described a conversation with an unnamed NATO country leader during his presidency.
Trump said he'd let Russia "do whatever the hell they want" to NATO nations that didn't pay for collective defense.
"I got them to pay up," Trump said. "NATO was busted until I came along. I said, 'Everybody's gonna pay.' They said, 'Well, if we don't pay, are you still going to protect us?' I said, 'Absolutely not.' They couldn't believe the answer, and you never saw more money pour in."
We can't fact-check whether that conversation happened, but we can examine how and why European defense spending changed under Trump (and other leaders). Experts said Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine spurred the defense spending increases.
