Trump’s 2024 convention speech had more falsehoods than his 2016 one

Former President Donald Trump during the final night at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, on July 17, 2024. A comparison of Trump’s addresses before the Republican National Convention in 2016 and 2024 demonstrates how his relationship to the truth has changed. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By LINDA QUI

Former President Donald Trump’s penchant for fabrication and hyperbole has long been a core tenet of his bombastic persona and political messaging. Two campaigns, one term in the Oval Office and eight years later, Trump has loosened his grasp on the facts even more.

A comparison of his addresses before the Republican National Convention in 2016 and 2024 demonstrates how his relationship to the truth has changed, offering a glimpse of how he will likely cast himself on the campaign trail as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

In 2016, when he accepted the nomination after a bitter primary campaign, with doubts and skepticism lingering over his candidacy, Trump hewed closely to his prepared remarks and paid some heed to the facts.

Last Thursday, he stood before a party altered in his image, after four nights of allies, friends and former foes repeating falsehoods and exaggerations that have become a staple of his speeches, rallies and social media posts.

As a result, the address Trump gave in 2024 was akin to one he might deliver at a rally, and almost twice as long as his speech in 2016 by the amount of words. The number of inaccurate claims also doubled, according to a New York Times analysis. In the span of two minutes of his acceptance speech this year, he rattled off five exaggerated or false claims.

Here’s a breakdown.

Trump veered farther from the facts.

Whereas many of Trump’s claims eight years ago contained a kernel of truth or simply omitted context, many of his claims during his acceptance speech last week were flat-out false.

Take, for example, his statements about crime.

In 2016, he cited a 17% increase in homicides in the United States’ largest 50 cities and said it was the largest increase in 25 years. This was accurate, though it cherry-picked statistics and ignored the overall decline in murders throughout the Obama administration and the decades preceding it.

This year, Trump simply issued a claim that was entirely false: “Our crime rate is going up,” he declared. But violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades and both decreased in the first quarter of 2024, according to a preliminary FBI analysis.

Trump’s use of statistics in 2016 was also more precise.

He stated then that “2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago.” That was accurate in raw numbers. But he omitted that the Latino population had grown and the group’s poverty rate had actually fallen.

In contrast, last Thursday night, he cited a 57% increase in the cost of groceries and 60% increase in gas.

Prices are up in both categories, but nowhere near to that extent. The consumer price index’s food-at-home index has increased about 21% since President Joe Biden took office and gas prices increased by about 35%.

Warnings about immigration were more fantastical.

Since his first bid for president, Trump has made immigration a central pillar of his political platform, reflected in both his convention speeches in 2016 and 2024.

In 2016, he said that “the number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015.” He added that nearly 180,000 immigrants under deportation orders had criminal convictions, but were released from detention.

Both statements were accurate, but lacked context.

The numbers of families apprehended at the border are tracked by fiscal year, which ends in September, not calendar year as Trump’s claim may have suggested. So he was comparing nine months of the 2016 fiscal year with the full 2015 fiscal year, not six months of the 2016 calendar year with 12 months of 2015. And the 180,000 figure referred to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But there was no breakdown of the exact crimes committed by the immigrants. Those convicted of crimes the agency describes as ones of “moral turpitude” — such as murder, kidnapping and aggravated assaults — are placed in mandatory detention under the agency’s policies.

In 2024, Trump’s characterization of unauthorized immigration has become more inflammatory and unmoored in reality.

He claimed that other countries were “emptying out their insane asylums” and jails into the United States and using it as a “dumping ground” for criminals and terrorists. That was why, he said, Venezuela had experienced a 72% decline in its crime rate.

There is no evidence for Trump’s claims. Prison populations all over the world have been increasing, not decreasing. Venezuela’s homicide rate has declined by 41% since 2020, but it dropped by an even greater rate, almost 50%, from 2016 to 2020, when Trump was president.

Trump has also updated past talking points, adding further embellishments that swerve into outright falsehood.

“Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers,” Trump said eight years ago.

There was some evidence for that claim, though gauging the exact impact of immigration on wages and employment is complicated. A comprehensive review of existing research by the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 on the issue found little to no negative effect over the longer term, but native-born Americans without a high school diploma and immigrants who arrived in earlier generations were more likely affected.

Trump repeated that claim last Thursday night, asserting that migrants were “taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population.” But he added, nonsensically, that of the jobs created under Biden, “107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

That was false. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated an increase of 5.1 million in employed foreign-born workers and 8.1 million native-born workers since 2020.

The list of inaccurate superlatives has grown.

Trump sometimes has a point when diagnosing an issue or boasting about an accomplishment, yet he exaggerates anyway.

In his 2016 speech, Trump exercised some caution, declaring the United States “one of the highest taxed nations in the world” and the Iran nuclear deal “one of the worst deals ever made” that brought the United States “nothing.”

At the time, the United States ranked No. 31 of 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product and No. 19 in tax revenue per capita. Whether the Iran deal was the “worst” is a matter of opinion, but the deal lifted economic sanctions placed on Iran in exchange for limiting the country’s nuclear abilities — not “nothing.”

Eight years later, the superlatives were more emphatic and his record no longer “one of” but simply the best. Trump claimed to have presided over not just a strong border and a healthy economy but the “most secure border and the best economy in the history of the world,” and signed not just a large tax relief bill but the “biggest tax cuts ever.” Inflation under Biden, in his telling, was not just making life more difficult for American families but “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”

None of that was true.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, annual average growth was lower under Trump than Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan and the unemployment rate was still higher than historical lows. Apprehensions of unauthorized border crossings at the southern border fell to the lowest point since the 1970s in the 2017 fiscal year, but increased in subsequent years and reached the highest level in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year. Tax cuts enacted under Reagan and Barack Obama were larger than the 2017 tax cut. And peak inflation under Biden was lower than rates in the 1980s.

His attacks on his opponents were still hyperbolic.

Trump’s approach to his Democratic rival differed in 2016 versus 2024. Whereas he criticized Hillary Clinton repeatedly by name and often in personal terms in 2016, he referred more broadly to Democrats in 2024. (This was, perhaps, a reflection of the uncertainty over Biden’s nomination; he formally announced Sunday that he would leave the race.) Nonetheless, the attacks remained overstated to the point of caricature.

Clinton, he said in 2016, “essentially wants to abolish the Second Amendment.” And before her tenure as secretary of state, Trump claimed, “ISIS wasn’t even on the map.”

Neither claim was true. Clinton repeatedly said she supports the right to bear arms, while enacting some gun control measures. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009; the extremist group known as ISIS, or the Islamic State group, emerged in 2004 as al-Qaida in Iraq and changed its name in 2013 to Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS.

Similarly, in his acceptance speech this year, Trump claimed that Biden would “destroy Social Security and Medicare” through illegal immigration and that his administration wanted “to raise your taxes four times.”

None of these claims were true either. Biden has vowed to protect Social Security and Medicare, and unauthorized migrants actually improve the financial health of both programs because they pay taxes but cannot take benefits. And Biden proposed raising taxes on the very wealthy and corporations — not tax hikes across the board — and even those proposals would not amount to an increase of 300%.