{"id":338547,"date":"2025-12-10T03:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T03:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/338547\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T03:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T03:17:07","slug":"fact-check-debunking-trumps-claims-on-immigration-and-affordability-in-pennsylvania-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/338547\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact check: debunking Trump\u2019s claims on immigration and affordability in Pennsylvania | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump<\/a> made a series of false and baseless claims in Pennsylvania on Tuesday during a speech that was billed as an address on affordability, but quickly became a meandering, campaign-style rally.<\/p>\n

Trump claimed \u2018prices are way down\u2019<\/p>\n

The president, once again, claimed that \u201cprices are way down\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fact, prices have increased during Trump\u2019s second term. The consumer price index shows that average prices were 1.7% higher in September than they were in January, as CNN outlined<\/a> in a recent fact-check. There was a 0.3% increase in consumer prices in September<\/a>, largely due to a 4.1% surge in gasoline prices. Prices were 3% higher in September this year compared with September 2024.<\/p>\n

He also claimed<\/a>, without evidence, that the cost of Thanksgiving turkeys was down by 33% compared with the Biden era. It\u2019s difficult to assess changes<\/a> in Thanksgiving costs: the American Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying group, claimed that the price per pound of frozen turkey was down 16%<\/a> this year, but that wholesale prices for fresh turkey were increasing<\/a> significantly. In a report on Thanksgiving prices, the Los Angeles Times<\/a>, citing a market research company that surveys weekly prices at stores, said the cost of a basket of 11 staples of the holiday meal cost 4.1% more than last year.<\/p>\n

Trump made false and racist claims about Ilhan Omar and Somalia<\/p>\n

In one striking tangent, Trump repeated false claims about Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota representative, prompting his crowd to launch a xenophobic chant of: \u201cSend her back!\u201d<\/p>\n

The president falsely claimed Omar is in the US \u201cillegally\u201d in a racist attack about her and Somalis. \u201cI love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban \u2026 She \u2026 does nothing but bitch,\u201d he said, saying the country has \u201cnothing\u201d and people \u201ckill each other all the time\u201d. Omar fled civil war as a young child, came to the US as a refugee and became<\/a> a citizen in 2000. Trump repeated the claim that Omar \u201cmarried her brother\u201d to get into the US. There is no evidence to support the claim<\/a>, which Omar\u2019s critics have repeated for years. She has previously called the claim<\/a> \u201cabsolutely false and ridiculous\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump also said countries like Somalis were \u201cfilthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime\u201d and repeated the phrase from a scandal in his first term, calling certain nations \u201cshitholes<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump made untrue statements about immigrants and the economy<\/p>\n

Trump falsely claimed that before he took office, \u201c100% of all new, net jobs\u201d in the US went to \u201cmigrants\u201d and \u201cpeople that came into the country illegally\u201d.<\/p>\n

This was an untrue claim<\/a> he repeated often on the campaign trail last year. The number of foreign-born workers increased at a faster rate than that of US-born workers under the previous administration, according to a CNN fact check<\/a>, but the claim that all new jobs went to immigrants, whether documented or not, is baseless. He also falsely claimed that \u201cthe entire prison population\u201d of Venezuela and the Republic of the Congo was \u201cdumped into our country\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump repeated false and exaggerated inflation claims<\/p>\n

While the president\u2019s speech largely veered from the intended focus on affordability, he repeatedly made false and exaggerated claims about inflation, including saying he inherited the \u201cworst inflation in the history of our country\u201d. This is untrue. Inflation did increase under Biden, but was by no means the worst in history, as FactCheck.org recently explained<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump also said he was \u201ccrushing\u201d inflation, and \u201cinflation is stopped\u201d. Inflation declined<\/a> from an annual rate of 3% in January to 2.9% in August, but has remained ahead of the Federal Reserve\u2019s 2% target. In a poll conducted for the Guardian<\/a> and released in October, 74% of survey respondents estimated that their regularly monthly household costs had increased by at least $100 from last year.<\/p>\n

Trump made unsubstantiated claims about ongoing boat strikes<\/p>\n

The president, again, defended his administration\u2019s ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean<\/a>, which officials have said were targeting alleged drug dealers. Trump claimed that, for every boat strike, \u201cWe save 25,000 American lives.\u201d The administration, however, has not publicly provided any evidence to support its claims about the threats the boats posed to the US and their alleged drug-trafficking ties.<\/p>\n

There is, likewise, no evidence<\/a> to support the estimate that a single boat could lead to the overdoses of 25,000 people.<\/p>\n

Trump repeated a series of familiar, fact-free grievances<\/p>\n

Resorting to his campaign rhetoric, Trump again made false and absurd claims about transgender people, who have been repeatedly targeted by his policies. He said Democrats want \u201ctransgender for every member in your family\u201d, adding: \u201cIf they\u2019re not feeling well that night, let\u2019s just change their sex.\u201d He later falsely referred to gender-affirming care as \u201cmutilation\u201d.<\/p>\n

He also said: \u201cBlack people love Trump. I got the biggest vote with Black people.\u201d While Trump made some gains with Black voters<\/a> last year, Black voters overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris. He also falsely suggested he won the 2020 election and that last year \u201cthe real vote was much more than\u201d the results, baselessly suggesting there was widespread fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump made a series of false and baseless claims in Pennsylvania on Tuesday during a speech that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-338547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}