On the second night of the Republican National Convention, several members of the Trump family, including first lady Melania Trump, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, made a case for another four years for the president.
NBC News is fact checking the speeches as they happen.
Kudlow claims Trump inherited ‘stagnant’ economy. That’s false.
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow claimed Tuesday during his speech at the RNC that Trump, when elected, was “inheriting a stagnant economy on the front end of recession.”
That is false.
Looking at the broadest measure of economic health, gross domestic product, the numbers show that average quarterly economic growth under Trump, 2.5 percent, was almost exactly what it was under President Obama in his second term, 2.4 percent.
In 2016, Trump said he was unhappy that the country’s economic growth rate was under 3 percent a year. Trump said he thought the economy could grow at better-than-4-percent annual rate.
Kudlow also claimed Tuesday night that the economy “was rebuilt in three years,” saying that “unemployment fell to the lowest rate of 3.5 percent.”
The Trump administration rightly takes credit for having low unemployment during his presidency, but the idea that Trump “rebuilt” the economy is misleading. Unemployment under Obama had already been trending downward.
In December of 2019 — before the pandemic hit the U.S. — the unemployment rate was a scant 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been in 50 years.
However, as good as that number was, when Trump took office the rate was already at 4.7 percent. That figure is quite low by historical standards (lower than all of the 1980s as well as most of the 1990s and 2000s). In fact, Obama saw a much steeper drop in unemployment in his second term, a 3.3 drop in the rate, than Trump did in his first three years, a decline of 1.2 points.
The numbers under Trump appear to be the continuation of a trend, not something new.
Job creation numbers offer more evidence for this.
On average, there were more jobs added monthly in Obama’s second term than there were in Trump’s first three years.
On average, the country created 215,000 new jobs a month in Obama’s second term. In Trump’s first three years, the figure was 182,000. They are both good numbers and if you look at the jobs data plotted on a graph, the rise since 2011 actually looks pretty consistent.
There is one indicator that suggests a change under Trump: the rise in the stock market. On Dec. 31, 2019, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 28,538. That was up 56 percent from 18,332, where it was the day Trump was elected in 2016.
From Obama’s second Election Day until 2016, the Dow climbed 38 percent.
Sen. Rand Paul on Trump’s Iraq War opposition
“Joe Biden voted for the Iraq War, which President Trump has long called the worst geopolitical mistake of our generation,” Paul, R-Ky., said on Tuesday night.
This is true, though the contrast omits some key context. Before the Iraq War began, Trump said he supported the invasion of the country in an interview. He did not express a negative opinion about the war until after it had started, according to previous NBC News fact checks.
Biden, too, has changed his mind. Biden has repeatedly said his vote for the Iraq War was a mistake.
Was Trump first president to talk religious freedom at the U.N.?
Cissie Graham Lynch, the granddaughter of evangelical preacher Billy Graham, said Tuesday night that Trump is the first president “to talk about the importance of religious freedom at the United Nations, giving hope to people of faith around the world.”
This is false. Here’s a clip of Obama talking about religious freedom at the U.N.; here’s a news report of George W. Bush doing the same. At the U.N. last year, Trump said he was the first to host a meeting on religious freedom, but he’s definitely not the first to talk up the issue.
