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There’s an old saying in journalism: Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. Man eats dog? Big, fake news. So it’s no surprise that Donald Trump’s false claim that migrants are grabbing and munching on cats and dogs in Ohio was perhaps the most memorable moment in last night’s debate.
Others can parse last night’s policy positions, lies, body language, and more from both candidates.
We want to focus on one thing that was also new in a presidential debate: the Big Lie of a stolen election in 2020. When one of the moderators pointed out that judges rejected Trump’s election fraud claims four years ago, the former president complained that “no judge looked at” his evidence because he and other litigants were found to lack standing to sue.
That’s nonsense. Sixty-three courts ruled on the cases brought by Trump and his allies, and they rejected them using language such as “flimsy,” “incorrect and not credible,” and “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations . . . unsupported by evidence.” The Supreme Court likewise refused to rule.
Some courts said the claimants had no standing to sue — but 30 of them looked at the evidence and said that Trump and his allies had no basis for their false claims. According to a group of prominent conservative lawyers, judges, and senators, Trump and his allies lost 29 of those cases. They lost on claims of rigged election machines. They lost on claims of improperly counted ballots. They lost on claims of mail ballot irregularities. They lost on claims of ineligible voters. And they lost on claims of observers being excluded from polling places. Trump won only one of his cases — a ruling in Pennsylvania that affected far too few ballots to change the outcome of the election and had nothing at all to do with fraud.
This year, rather than rigged machines and dead people voting, the rumors revolve heavily around noncitizens voting. States have many systems in place to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote — and only eligible citizens do vote. No matter.
Indeed, some House Republicans are demanding that Congress pass a law effectively requiring citizens to produce a passport or a birth certificate in order to register to vote. There was even the threat of a government shutdown, though that ploy doesn’t seem to have enough votes even in the more conservative chamber.
More ominously, these rumors, fanned by politicians pursuing self-interest, aim to undermine the credibility of the election a few weeks hence. This year, the Big Lie is being pre-deployed.
Linked rhetorically to the false claims about millions of immigrants illegally voting is what Trump calls a “migrant crime wave,” painted as part of a dystopian picture of out-of-control violence.
“Crime here is up and through the roof,” he said. And he blamed immigration: “We have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
My colleagues at the Brennan Center have spent months tracking, contextualizing, and responding to claims that politicians are making about crime. We’ve created an excellent collection of research here.
These are the facts, based on data from the FBI and other leading sources.
Crime rose in 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency. The murder rate, in particular, spiked dramatically. While there are countless factors that contribute to changing crime rates, the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns were clearly a leading cause. As the pandemic receded in 2022, most crime began to decline. In some cities, the declines have been steep, and the rates of some crimes have fallen beneath pre-pandemic lows. We’ve also looked in detail at legal changes such as bail reform and recently conducted the most comprehensive study to date on the connection between bail reform and crime rates. There is simply no evidence that bail reform contributed to the 2020 crime surge.
Trump’s claim that migrants are responsible for a crime wave is equally baseless. If anything, immigration is linked to decreases in both violent and property crime. This scary argument has demagogic appeal: it combines our deep fear of criminality with the nativism that surfaces during difficult times in U.S. history — but it’s a myth.
My colleagues and I will work hard to fight fear with facts as the campaign continues. Keep checking this space and our website for reliable research and analysis.
