Fact-checking Obama’s Pittsburgh rally for Kamala Harris

Former President Barack Obama launched a sustained attack on Donald Trump’s record and policies Thursday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as Kamala Harris battles Trump for the crucial state ahead of Election Day.

Polls show a neck-and-neck race between Vice President Harris and former President Trump. A new Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday shows Harris is up three points with likely voters in Pennsylvania.

Although Obama did not commit falsehoods, Newsweek he had several claims he made in Pittsburgh that deserve closer scrutiny.

“He wants the middle class to pay the price for another big tax cut that would mostly help him and his country club buddies.”

This is a reference to Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law, which will expire in 2025, was enacted under his presidency in 2017. It creates a flat corporate tax rate of 21 percent, down from 35 percent.

If elected, Trump says he plans to expand his tax cuts and go even further by eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits and cutting the corporate tax rate again, lowering from 21% to 15%.

While the tax cuts may benefit middle-class households, analysts say the largest proportional benefit will go to the wealthy. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, an initiative aimed at analyzing the fiscal impact of public policy, a middle-class household with an income of $80,000 would gain $1,700 after taxes under Trump’s plan, while a household with an income of of $14 million would earn $377,000 in revenue. trump

Penn Wharton’s budget model estimates the plan would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt. While he said his benefit estimates show that low-, middle-, and high-income households would fare better under the plans in a conventional manner, the gains and losses “do not include the additional burden of generational debt futures that have to finance almost the totality of the tax decreases”.

A 2017 Tax Policy Center analysis found that higher-income households would receive “larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income” and that the largest cuts, as a proportion of income, were for taxpayers in the 95th to 99th percentile. The bill would cut taxes “on average across all income groups.”

“Donald Trump was told Mike Pence was in the Capitol about 40 feet from an angry mob chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ and his response was ‘So what?'”

This comes from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election tampering investigation. Late last month, Smith’s office released the 165-page document that presented new evidence against Trump in the election tampering case, in which the former president faces four felony charges.

A redacted version of the document was filed in the public record less than a week later, removing any sensitive information and dozens of names related to Smith’s investigation.

One entry said an aide had spoken to Trump, trying to ensure the safety of then-Vice President Mike Pence during the unrest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“Upon receiving a phone call that Pence had been taken to a safe location (redacted) he rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant (Trump) in the hope that the defendant would take steps to ensure the safety of Pence,” it read.

“Instead, after he delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, ‘So what?’ “

Smith’s briefing says the government does not intend to use Trump’s discussions with White House staff at the time in the trial as evidence, but is only providing it in the briefing as “necessary context” .

In 2022, the video of the rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” was played to the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, he reported. The Washington Post.

“What he’s proposing is basically a Trump sales tax that could cost the average family nearly $4,000 a year.”

this claim has been repeated throughout the Harris campaign. It is based on an analysis by a left-wing think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP). He said Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on imported goods by 10 to 20 percent (60 percent of all goods imported from China) is a $3,900 tax increase for middle-income families.

However, other estimates, such as the Peterson Institute for International Economics, say the proposed 20 percent tariff would cost the typical American household just over $2,600 a year.

“When it comes to health care, you heard it in the debate, Donald Trump has an answer: end the Affordable Care Act.”

Trump has said throughout his campaign that he would not end the Affordable Care Act, which his opponents refer to as Obamacare, despite his repeated efforts throughout his presidency to dismantle it.

“I’m not running to REPEAL THE ACA, LIKE CROOKED JOE BUDEN MISINFORMS AND MISINFORMS ALL THE TIME, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER, STOP INFLATION, DO BIG ECONOMY, STRENGTHEN OUR MILITARY AND DO THE ACA, or OBAMACARE. , LIKE IT IS KNOWN, MUCH BETTER, STRONGER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in March.

However, Trump was asked about this directly in his September debate with Harris, who appeared to suggest that if elected, he might implement a different policy if his administration found a replacement.

“Obamacare was bad health care. It always was,” Trump said in the debate.

“It’s not very good today. And what I said, that if we get something, we’re working on things, we’ll do it and we’ll replace it.”

Newsweek A Trump media representative was reached by email for comment.

“Why was the number of immigrants basically the same when you left office as when you took office?”

According to government data, this is misleading. It’s true that between when Trump took office in 2017 and when he left in 2021, the number of undocumented migrants estimated to be living in the United States hadn’t changed much. However, it had declined, if not much, relative to historical data.

Department of Homeland Security data from 2018 and 2024 show the estimated unauthorized immigrant population was 11.4 million in January 2017, declining to 10.5 million in January 2020. DHS data reported no results for January 2021 due to “substantial challenges related to COVID-19” that affected the reliability of the data source, the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

A recent Pew Research Center analysis of unauthorized immigration, based on augmented data from the US Census Bureau, put the population at 10.5 million in 2021.

However, the unauthorized immigrant population has remained stagnant during nearly two decades of government. According to the DHS analysis, the population has fluctuated between estimates of 10.5 million and about 12 million over the past 19 years. While the number increased between 2020 and 2022, it was still below the all-time high of about 12.2 million in 2007, estimated by Pew.

Newsweek An Obama media representative was reached by email for comment.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the total number of foreign residents in the United States, including US and non-US citizens, increased from 43.7 million in 2016, the first year of the Trump administration, to 45.2 million in 2021.

Southwest border encounters increased between fiscal years 2017 and 2019, from 415,517 to 977,509, according to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The number dropped to 400,651 in 2020, with a sharp decrease in April 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The following year, encounters increased to over 1.7 million.