Verifying Truths in the Second Evening of the Democratic National Convention
List of fact checks from our Facts First team. We will update this list throughout the night.
Democrats and Trump's Agenda 2025
Several speakers at the Democratic National Convention have mentioned or alluded to Agenda 2025 as being former President Donald Trump's own agenda. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont talked about "Trump's Agenda 2025." State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta of Pennsylvania used the same phrase. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, speaking about Trump and his running mate Senator JD Vance of Ohio, referred to "their Agenda 2025 plan."
Here is some background information about the agenda, Trump's connections to it, and what Trump has said about it.
What Agenda 2025 is:
Agenda 2025 is being led by The Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank, in collaboration with numerous other conservative organizations. Their initiatives, which began in 2022, resulted in a comprehensive 920-page document titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise," which outlines "hundreds of clear and specific policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards."
The document proposes a range of conservative policy changes in various policy areas, from immigration to healthcare to agriculture to education, as well as a significant overhaul of the executive branch that would increase the president's power.
The document was published in April 2023, when Trump was a strong favorite to win the party nomination but nearly a year before he had actually secured it. The document positions itself as an effort to assist "the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be," in getting off to a strong start if and when they are inaugurated in 2025.
Trump's associations with the initiative:
Agenda 2025 has emphasized that it is "not affiliated with former President Trump." Trump claimed in July that "I know nothing about Agenda 2025. I have no idea who is behind it."
CNN cannot definitively fact-check what Trump may or may not know. However, it is clear that Trump has close ties to Agenda 2025.
A large number of individuals who served in Trump's administration were involved in creating Agenda 2025. CNN reported in July that at least 140 individuals who worked in the Trump administration contributed to the project, including over half of the individuals listed as authors, editors, and contributors to the policy document. For example, six of Trump's former Cabinet secretaries played a role in the project. Tom Homan, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief early in the Trump administration, whom Trump has recently stated he plans to appoint to a second Trump administration, was also involved.
Republican vice presidential nominee Senator JD Vance wrote the foreword for a forthcoming book by a leader of Agenda 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. A Vance spokesperson told Axios in July that "the foreword has nothing to do with Agenda 2025" and that Vance has "previously stated that he has no involvement with" Agenda 2025 "and has numerous disagreements with what they are advocating for."
Trump's stance on Agenda 2025 proposals:
It's unclear how much of the extensive Agenda 2025 policy document Trump supports and how much he rejects. Trump has said that some of the document is "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal," but he has also said "many of the points are fine." He has not specified which proposals he rejects and which he finds acceptable.
Russell Vought, the Trump-era Office of Management and Budget director and one of the former Trump administration officials involved in Agenda 2025, said last month in a hidden-camera video secretly recorded by a British journalism organization: "I see what he's doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. It's interesting that he's not even opposing himself to a particular policy."
CNN reported in July: "Agenda 2025 includes many policy priorities that are in line with those of the former president, particularly those related to immigration enforcement and reducing the power of the federal bureaucracy by making it easier to dismiss civil servants and career officials. However, Agenda 2025 has recently become a controversial topic due to other proposals, such as a ban on pornography and the removal of the morning-after pill and men's contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has not explicitly endorsed."
A spokesperson for Trump's campaign told CNN in August: "President Trump's campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and not any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term."
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Sanders on unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont reminded Democratic National Convention attendees of the difficult times in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic on Tuesday.
"Recall where we were three-and-a-half years ago. We were in the midst of the worst public health crisis in 100 years and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," Sanders said. "Unemployment was skyrocketing."
"This was the reality that the Biden-Harris administration faced as they took office," he continued.
Fact Check:Sanders’ claim about the labor market at the beginning of the Biden administration is not accurate. While unemployment reached a record high of 14.8% in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, unemployment was improving by the time President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
By January of the following year, the nation's labor market showed significant improvement, with millions of Americans returning to work. However, the US still had a long way to go to recover all the jobs that were lost. The unemployment rate reduced to 6.4%.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Pritzker's Misrepresentation of Trump's Covid-19 Remarks
During the second night of the Democratic National Convention in July, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker reiterated a statement made by a Democratic congressman the previous day, regarding something former President Donald Trump said about the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Having highlighted Illinois' handling of the pandemic, Pritzker then commented on Trump, stating, "And Donald? Well, Donald told us to inject bleach."
Fact-check: Pritzker's assertion is misleading. Trump never intended for his 2020 uninformed suggestions about using disinfectants to manage Covid-19 as advice for the public. Trump was merely expressing interest in scientific research on the potential use of disinfectants as a treatment.
At a press briefing in April 2020, Trump expressed curiosity about whether Covid-19 could potentially be treated through disinfectants within the human body, "through injection inside or almost like a cleansing," or by using powerful light "inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other manner." Trump's remarks were met with severe criticism from medical experts as being highly perilous, prompting urgent advisories from public health authorities and disinfectant manufacturers. However, he never explicitly suggested that the public should use such products.
Trump made these unfounded comments following Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, presenting test results indicating that sunlight and disinfectants such as bleach and isopropyl alcohol rapidly killed the coronavirus on surfaces and in saliva. Later, when Trump proposed the notion of injecting disinfectants into people's bodies, he was referring to medical experts exploring this concept as a potential treatment, stating, "And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost like a cleansing, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So we'll see."
CNN’s Daniel Dale
Impact of Expanded Child Tax Credit by Sanders
During his statement during the Democratic National Convention's primetime segment, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a claim concerning the influence of the expanded child tax credit passed during the early days of the President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris' administration.
"We reduced childhood poverty by over 40% through an expanded child tax credit," Sanders mentioned during his remarks.
Fact-check: Sanders' claim needs clarification. It's accurate that the enhanced child tax credit reduced child poverty rates in 2021, but the benefit was only applicable for the year the temporary improvement was in effect.
The American Rescue Plan Act, which was approved by Congress in March 2021, boosted the size of the child tax credit to a maximum of $3,600 (from $2,000) for eligible families, enabling many more low-income families to claim it and distributing half of it on a monthly basis.
This led to a record low child poverty rate of 5.2% in 2021, representing a 46% decrease from 2020's rate of 9.7%, according to the US Census Bureau.
However, with the expiration of the temporary enhancement in 2022, child poverty soared to 12.4%, reaching a level comparable to where it was before the pandemic in 2019. It marked the most considerable increase in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure was implemented.
CNN’s Tami Luhby and Kaanita Iyer
The first sentence could be: "The Democratic speakers at the convention discussed various aspects of former President Trump's Agenda 2025, which is being led by The Heritage Foundation and focuses on conservative policy changes in various areas."
The second sentence could be: "Despite Trump's claims that he knows nothing about Agenda 2025 and is not affiliated with it, several individuals who served in his administration were involved in its creation, including six former Cabinet secretaries."
