Fact check from the only vice-presidential debate of the 2020 election between Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris shows that Mike Pence almost gave misleading, false, exaggerated
Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence wave before the vice presidential debate on Wednesday, October 7, at Kingsbury Hall on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Patrick Semansky/AP
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/07/us/fact-check-harris-pence-debate
VietPress USA News
Fact-Checking the Vice-Presidential Debate
Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris squared off in the only vice-presidential debate of the 2020 election. Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, moderated the debate in Salt Lake City.
Seeking to rebut criticism of President Trump’s handling of the pandemic — Ms. Harris called it the “greatest failure of any presidential administration” — Mr. Pence deployed a number of misleading or inaccurate arguments. He mischaracterized the White House event at which many officials appear to have been infected with the virus, overstated the likelihood that a vaccine will be in widespread distribution by the end of the year and exaggerated the impact of the limited travel ban imposed on China.
Mr. Pence also exaggerated or mischaracterized the Obama administration’s record in dealing with smaller scale pandemics and inaccurately denied that the Trump administration had not dismantled a unit in the National Security Council dedicated to pandemic preparedness. He also employed false, misleading or exaggerated statements in debating abortion, climate change and the administration’s record in fighting the Islamic State.
Ms. Harris overstated some of her arguments. She said the manufacturing sector is in a recession when it is not. She suggested that if elected, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would repeal Mr. Trump’s tax cuts on Day One, a step that would actually require a time-consuming effort to pass new tax legislation in Congress — and in any case Mr. Biden has only proposed rolling back portions of the Trump tax cuts.
A team of reporters from The New York Times fact-checked the debate, providing analysis and context.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Through its expedited vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration is already funding the manufacturing of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines, and has contracts with five drugmakers that have vaccine candidates in late-stage trials.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
It is true that the economy has added back a lot of jobs since the depths of the pandemic, regaining about 11.4 million of the 22 million jobs it lost between February and April. But that rebound had relatively little to do with Mr. Trump’s policies. People came back to work quickly because they had been temporarily furloughed as states and cities shut down amid the virus, and businesses brought workers back to their jobs as they reopened.
— Mr. Pence
False.
Mr. Pence was referring to a gathering at the White House on Sept. 26, when Mr. Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, an event that appears to have produced a cluster of coronavirus infections at the highest levels of the administration. Mr. Trump formally announced the nomination in the Rose Garden, where many of the attendees flouted the recommendations of public health experts by not wearing masks or social distancing. But there was also a private reception indoors, where photos show attendees mingling in close quarters without wearing masks.
It is impossible to say which of those events was responsible for the virus’s spread, but the day’s festivities were not all outside.
— Mr. Pence
True.
Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have declined to weigh in on whether they supported adding seats to the Supreme Court, as some progressives have called for.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Mr. Pence suggested that there remains a question about the chief causes of climate change. But the established scientific consensus is conclusive. The scientific evidence that the combustion of fossil fuels produces emissions that warm the Earth’s atmosphere is ample.
— Ms. Harris
This is misleading.
Ms. Harris is taking Mr. Trump’s comments out of context. He was speaking about the Democrats’ criticism of his administration’s response to the pandemic and comparing it to the “impeachment hoax,” not the virus itself.
“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue,” Mr. Trump said at a February rally in South Carolina. “They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax,” he continued.
— Mr. Pence
This is exaggerated.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris support abortion rights, but that does not mean they call for women to have an unfettered right to terminate pregnancies up until the point of birth. Mr. Pence may have been referring to a debate over a bill proposed last year by Democrats in the Virginia legislature that would have made it easier for women to obtain abortions late in pregnancy if the mother’s physical health or safety were at risk.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Voter fraud in the United States is extremely rare, and voter fraud in voting by mail is also exceedingly rare. And President Trump himself and members of his family and cabinet vote by mail.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Mr. Biden has offered shifting accounts of how he counseled then President Barack Obama. It is clear that he was more skeptical than most other Obama administration officials about the May 2011 operation that killed bin Laden. But saying that he opposed the raid outright, as Mr. Pence also did at the Republican National Convention, is at best a selective interpretation of the available evidence.
— Mr. Pence
This is mostly true.
According to the Covid Tracking Project, more than 111 million coronavirus tests have been performed in the United States since January. But the nation is still falling short of its target of 1.3 million tests per day. Some experts have estimated that 4 million tests per day are necessary to keep the virus in check; others have called for an order of magnitude more.
While the absolute number of tests being done is high, so too are cases of the virus, which has infected more than 7.4 million people in the United States. Many tests have also come under scrutiny for delivering inaccurate results, including rapid tests deployed at the White House, where officials relied too heavily on the products to protect top officials from infection, with disastrous results.
— Ms. Harris
True.
A survey published this month by the Pew Research Center found that few respondents had confidence in either country’s leader, but that western Europeans put more faith in Xi Jinping, the president and Communist Party secretary of China. Across 14 countries, a median of 19 percent said they had confidence in Mr. Xi, and a median of 17 percent said the same of Mr. Trump. Only in Japan and the United States did respondents have more confidence in Mr. Trump than in Mr. Xi, Pew said.
— Ms. Harris
True.
Mr. Trump has not condemned or warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over a C.I.A. assessment that Russia’s military intelligence service covertly offered bounties for the killing of coalition troops, including American service members, in Afghanistan. Mr. Trump said that he did not bring up the report during a phone call with the Russian leader after it was released by the C.I.A.
— Ms. Harris
True.
Ms. Harris was referring to the president’s history of challenging the conclusions of the intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in an effort to help him — and that the country is trying to do so again this year. In July 2018 in Helsinki, Mr. Trump stood next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and made clear that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that Russia had meddled on his behalf.
“They said they think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.” He added: “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that was responsible for the election hacking. Mr. Trump said that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
— Mr. Pence
Mostly true.
It is accurate that the United States’ levels of air pollutants such as smog, soot and asthma-causing nitrogen dioxide have declined steadily over the past 40 years. However, that reduction is largely attributed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on those pollutants, which have tightened over the years. The Trump administration has sought to weaken or freeze those rules.
It is also accurate that the United States typically ranks in the top 10 countries for safe drinking water by most measures. However, the Trump administration has also weakened major Clean Water Act regulations.
— Ms. Harris
This is true.
In July 2015, President Trump described Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war, to a Republican presidential forum: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
The Islamic State did capture huge swaths of Iraq and Syria, but the Trump administration simply continued the same policy to dismantle the terrorist group that former President Barack Obama implemented in 2014. Mr. Trump did speed up decision-making to allow the military to move more quickly on raids, airstrikes, bombing missions and arming allies in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
— Mr. Pence
False.
While it is true that the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions have declined by more than 10 percent in the past decade, more than a dozen other countries — including most of the European Union — have seen declines of more than twice that. Carbon emissions in the United States have declined in part recently because of the recession and collapse of a coal industry that the Trump administration tried to protect.
But U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are on track to begin increasing in the coming years, in part because of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of regulations on carbon dioxide pollution.
— Mr. Pence
This is exaggerated.
Mr. Pence sought to blame the Obama administration for the challenges in responding to this year’s coronavirus pandemic, citing an “empty” Strategic National Stockpile. The stockpile was far from empty.
— Mr. Pence
True.
Mr. Pence made a very precise and therefore accurate claim. But it’s worth noting that these metrics do not fully capture the complex beliefs of a lawmaker.
— Mr. Pence
False.
President Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, has repeatedly declined to answer several important questions about his illness, including when Mr. Trump had his last negative test for the coronavirus and his first positive one.
— Mr. Pence
Mostly true.
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, the typical family of four received a $2,000 tax cut in 2018, the first year that Mr. Trump’s tax cut was in effect. However, the statement is misleading because it suggests that the tax cuts were spread equitably across the country. The bulk of the tax cuts benefited the highest earners. Moreover, many of the individual tax cuts will expire in 2025 unless they are extended.
— Mr. Pence
This is false.
Mr. Biden has described the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on more than $360 billion of Chinese products in the course of the trade war as erratic and self-defeating, and has called for more targeted measures against China, but he has not publicly committed to repealing all of the tariffs.
Mr. Biden actually appears reluctant to commit either way to fully keeping or eliminating the tariffs, and his aides have said that he plans to evaluate the tariffs once in office based on their impact on the American middle class.
— Mr. Pence
False.
Mr. Biden’s climate change plan would end new leases for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas on federal lands, but it does not ban existing fracking on public lands or new or existing fracking on private land.
— Ms. Harris
True.
In a story drawing on several years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Trump “is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years.”
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Mr. Pence was quoting Ron Klain, once Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chief of staff, who was the Obama administration’s Ebola response coordinator.
— Ms. Harris
This is true.
Ms. Harris appeared to be referring to a passage from Bob Woodward’s recent book, “Rage,” which recounts a Jan. 28 White House meeting at which President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Mr. Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” During the same meeting, Mr. Woodward reported, Mr. O’Brien’s deputy, Matthew Pottinger, told Mr. Trump that the virus might rival the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
— Ms. Harris
This is exaggerated.
Economic estimates of job losses resulting from the president’s trade war with China vary but a September 2019 report by Moody’s Analytics estimated the trade fight had already cut overall American employment by 300,000 jobs and reduced economic output by 0.3 percentage points.
— Ms. Harris
True.
Ms. Harris is referring to the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense, a unit under the National Security Council that was established by the Obama administration and focused largely on pandemic preparedness. The team working on the unit was disbanded in May 2018, though a few of its members remained a part of the National Security Council.
— Mr. Pence
This is exaggerated.
This was a reference to a series of questions Ms. Harris asked Judge Brian Buescher in 2018 during hearings on his nomination to a federal District Court seat about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, an organization of Catholic men.
She did not say explicitly that his membership in the organization was disqualifying, but did ask whether Judge Beuscher was aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed same-sex marriage and abortion, and whether he held those views. Some religious groups and Republican senators accused Ms. Harris of exhibiting anti-Catholic bias with the questions.
— Mr. Pence
This lacks evidence.
In 2009, the H1N1 flu virus infected about 60 million Americans and killed an estimated 12,500 people. Mr. Pence suggests that 2 million would have died if this strain of flu were as deadly as the coronavirus — 160 times the actual death toll. There’s not enough data to support the vice president’s statement, and it’s unclear how he arrived at these figures. Mr. Pence may be extrapolating from current estimates of the global burden of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 36 million people around the world and killed more than 1 million.
— Mr. Pence
True.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced and updated the North American Free Trade Pact, passed the Senate in January with a vote of 89 to 10. Ms. Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against the pact.
— Ms. Harris
This is false.
Mr. Biden’s stated campaign plan proposes to repeal some, but not all, of the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017. The House and Senate would have to pass new tax legislation to accomplish that.
— Ms. Harris
Mostly true.
There are a range of estimates by independent economists for how much Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were projected to add to federal budget deficits over the course of a decade. Some of them are in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, including projections from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
— Mr. Pence
This is misleading.
Mr. Trump did not ban all travel from China, nor did Mr. Biden call his executive order restricting travel xenophobic.
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