Trump-Harris Debate: Which Misleading Lines Might Each Side Repeat?

The first debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night is likely to feature its fair share of mistruths and exaggerations as the presidential candidates battle for hearts and minds on live television.
The debate on ABC will be the first since President Joe Biden went head-to-head with Trump in June before bowing out of the race and endorsing Harris.
In the relatively brief window that Trump and Harris have been direct political competitors, both major parties have stretched the truth in their attempts to land resonating blows.
Newsweek’s Fact Check team, which will be delivering a verdict on the biggest claims of the evening shortly after the broadcast, has been examining party attack lines for common threads and repetitions of misleading information.
Ahead of the debate, Newsweek has listed some of the oft-quoted topics and issues that have inspired the contest’s more spurious claims.
Throughout the Harris-Walz campaign, Democrats have been targeting Trump’s proximity to Project 2025, a conservative policy document published by the conservative activist group The Heritage Foundation.
Many of the policy plans in Project 2025 on issues such as immigration, education reform and energy echo Trump’s manifesto, titled Agenda 47.
However, Trump has said that the project has nothing to do with him and has labeled some of its ideas “abysmal” and “ridiculous.” That has not done much to dissuade Democrats from repeatedly claiming that Trump would enact the document’s goals if elected in November.
Democrats appear to suggest that Trump is not worth trusting on this one, particularly given the number of his former staffers and allies who worked on the document. Nonetheless, the notion that he will institute Project 2025 is speculative in light of Trump’s lack of outright public support.
This again has been a repeat attack point from the Democrats, saying that Trump plans to strip federal health and benefits programs.
While Trump made defeating Medicare a promise of his presidency he has since rescinded and said he will not introduce cuts to the programs, Point 14 of his policy platform says his administration would “fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.”
Harris’ spokespeople previously told Newsweek that in a second term, “there would be nothing stopping Trump from trying again to gut critical benefits and succeeding.”
Harris has routinely said that protecting and expanding Social Security benefits is a priority. Previously, she co-sponsored legislation that would bring more revenue for Social Security by extending the payroll tax to incomes over $250,000.
While Trump has said that he will “never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare” experts have told Newsweek that his plans for tax cuts could affect Social Security’s revenue.
Trump has not outlined how he plans to address the Social Security shortfall projected to occur in about 10 years.
With the Biden administration’s oversight of record encounters with undocumented migrants at the southern border, the topic of immigration will likely come up, particularly as Harris was tasked as vice president with addressing the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America: Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Facts on immigration and Harris’ responsibilities have been overblown and exaggerated by Trump, his campaign clearly hoping to make ground on immigration policy based on the last three-and-a-half years of government.
Trump has repeatedly inflated the available figures on the number of migrants that officials have encountered at the border, claiming 20 million people have crossed the border. Figures show there were around 8.2 million encounters in the Southwest since January 2021. Figures for people that weren’t stopped—referred to by some as “gotaways”—may bring that total closer to 10 million.
Trump’s claim that Harris was a “border czar” exaggerates the tasks she was assigned concerning immigration. She was not put in charge of securing the border but worked with leaders from the Northern Triangle to tackle its underlying drivers.
Between October 2021 and September 2023, the total number of people classified as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras citizens has fallen annually year-over-year.
However, YTD figures for 2024 surpass last year’s. CBP has reported 365,246 encounters with people from those three nations between October 2023 to July 2024 compared with 346,704 during the same period last year.
Trump’s messaging about Harris’ energy approach and policies has been mixed, falsely accusing her of endorsing policies to force people to buy electric vehicles and claiming she wants to ban fracking.
To be clear, Harris said in 2019 that she thought fracking, the process of drilling for natural gas, should be banned but has walked back those comments. Harris mentioned in her recent CNN interview with running mate Tim Walz her tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which she claimed increased fracking leases.
Her campaign recently told The Detroit News that she did not support an electric vehicle mandate despite her previously sponsoring legislation as a California senator that would have required car makers to sell only zero-emission passenger vehicles by 2040.
The Biden administration has said it wants electric vehicles to make up half of new vehicle sales by 2030, not that it wants to replace all gas vehicles with electric.
Following last week’s shooting at the Apalachee High School in Georgia, Harris’ record and policy positions on gun control have been a target of Republicans. It’s not been quoted accurately.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said last week that Harris wants to confiscate guns from Americans, a claim that Trump has made elsewhere that isn’t true. While Harris has supported an assault weapons ban, restrictions on firearms sales to certain consumers and background checks, she said she supports the Second Amendment.
Democrats and Republicans have heralded major achievements in growth and opportunity during the Trump and Biden administrations, although some of their boasts haven’t been entirely accurate.
Harris previously shared misleading comments about the Biden-Harris record on job growth, claiming that it had created 15 million jobs when the majority were positions that replaced employment lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump has repeatedly claimed the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history when they were the fourth largest. He has also said he led the greatest economy in the U.S. when his records on unemployment and the stock market have since been beaten in the past three-and-a-half years.
A 2021 Fact Check by PolitiFact showed that by several metrics that Trump did not oversee historic growth in the U.S. economy, falling behind Democratic and Republican predecessors on GDP during his term.