HELENA — On Friday night, former President Donald Trump spoke for more than 90 minutes in front of a crowd at the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse in Bozeman. Staff from the national project PolitiFact watched the rally, and on Saturday, they released their fact-checking, following up on five of the claims he made during his speech.
As the presidential campaign heats up, PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders says they’ve been looking at claims from both the Republican and Democratic tickets, as well as some of their prominent supporters. She says many of the statements Trump made Friday were ones they heard repeatedly before.
“Because it was our first time fact-checking Trump's appearance in that state and partnering with Montana news outlets, we wanted to highlight some of those repeats for anybody who was hearing it for the first time,” she said.
Three of the claims PolitiFact looked at dealt with one of Trump’s main topics: border security.
“Illegal aliens are stampeding into America,” he said Friday. “By the millions and millions, they're coming from prisons, they're coming from jails.”
Sanders said Trump has on multiple occasions said millions of migrants are coming into the U.S. from jails or from mental institutions. PolitiFact gave that claim its “Pants on Fire” rating, stating it was not accurate and “a ridiculous claim.”
PolitiFact said data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows immigration officials have stopped just over 110,000 non-citizens with criminal convictions since 2021 – though they acknowledge that’s only the number the federal government knows about and it might not be complete. Of that 110,000, some were stopped at ports of entry, and not everyone stopped was let in.
In addition, they said there have been about 8 million encounters at the border since Biden took office, but that may include repeat crossers and it doesn’t indicate how many stayed in the country.
“Sure, some migrants who do manage to cross the border do have criminal backgrounds, but that is not the millions and millions,” said Sanders.
Trump also touted his economic record as president.
“I handed Kamala and Crooked Joe a surging economy with no inflation,” he said. “We had no inflation, we had nothing.”
Sanders said inflation was lower during Trump’s presidency than Biden’s, but it never reached zero. She said it ranged between 1.5% and 3% for most of his term, and it reached its lowest point of 0.1% in May 2020 – at the height of the economic challenges stemming from the COVID pandemic.
“We know from covering economic claims over the years from both sides, there's a lot of cherry-picking involved,” she said.
PolitiFact also called a claim about Kamala Harris’ policy on guns “Mostly False.”
“She wants to have all of your guns taken away,” Trump said Friday. “She wants your guns taken away; you can count on it.”
Harris supported a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons while running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but it wouldn’t have applied to all guns. Sanders said Harris has backed off on her support for a buyback program during this campaign.
“This is a good example of when a politician has an element of truth to work on, but then they exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate,” she said.
Randyn Gregg, a business owner and Republican legislative candidate from White Sulphur Springs, attended the rally with family members – an experience he said was overwhelmingly positive. He said he didn’t think fact-checking was unreasonable, but that people should do their own research and consult a wider variety of resources.
“I take a lot of these fact-checkers with a grain of salt,” he said. “I think that's something that people do need to do, because there might be something that, maybe it's factual, but there might have been some rhetoric that was used.”
For example, Gregg said Trump was making a legitimate point on inflation: that it had stayed in the range where federal regulators wanted it to be during his term. He said there were real contrasts in Republican and Democratic policies on guns, and Trump’s statements underlined them.
“It's really hard with a large group of people just to get into the nuances of certain policies,” Gregg said. “So you kind of need to speak with a broad stroke, a 10,000 or 14,000-foot view, what everyone can understand, and I think that's what President Trump is doing.”
Sanders said PolitiFact understands people may feel that way, but they believe precision in language is important.
“People are free to support whomever they choose on Election Day; PolitiFact does not tell you who to vote for,” she said. “What we do is give people answers about whether what politicians are saying is actually true. We think it does matter when Harris or Trump say things about the other's positions that are not backed up by the facts, and we think it's important for us to fill that gap and provide those answers because we know voters are too busy to do a lot of the research on their own.”
During the rally, Trump alluded to the responses he receives from fact-checkers, as he discussed the pronunciation of Harris’ name.
“You know, she’s got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name,” he said. “And because the press is so dishonest, no matter how you say it, they'll say, ‘You were wrong, you were wrong.’ I don't care if I get it right. Actually, I couldn't care less.”
You can find all of PolitiFact’s recent fact checks – on both parties – on their website.
