Vice President Kamala Harris took the podium Thursday night in Chicago on the fourth and final night of the Democratic National Convention to accept her party's nomination for president.
The Scripps News team monitored the speech to fact-check some of her remarks.
CLAIM: Harris said the United States Supreme Court just ruled that former President Donald Trump is "immune from criminal prosecution."
- According to SCOTUSBlog, while the Supreme Court didn’t grant presidents total, unconditional immunity, it did grant them immunity for “actions relating to their core powers” and said that “there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.” Lower courts are now tasked with considering if any of the charges against Trump center on "official or unofficial" conduct.
CLAIM: Harris said Trump "intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax— call it a Trump tax — that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year."
- This figure comes from an estimate by the progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund, which calculated the cost of proposed tariffs on imported goods. The analysis is dense. The CAP Action Fund went through the goods the U.S. Census says we're projected to import in 2025, then calculated what the tariff on them would be and divided that by the number of American households. That figure was then adjusted for government estimates on how much middle-income households spend overall relative to other consumers. The left-leaning group projects this will hit lower- and middle-income households harder, since they spend a larger percentage of their income on goods than high-income households do.
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CLAIM: Harris claimed Trump "and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nation-wide abortion ban with or without Congress."
In a post on Truth Social earlier this year, Trump said that states should determine whether to allow abortions.
"At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people," Trump added. "You must follow your heart or — in many cases — your religion, or your faith. Do what's right for your family. Do what's right for yourself. Do what's right for your children. Do what's right for our country and vote, so important to vote.
CLAIM: Harris said, "We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act."
- Trump has stated in recent campaign rallies that he does not plan to cut funding for Social Security, Medicare, or repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump said at a campaign rally on Aug. 14, 2024, that while the Affordable Care Act "stinks," he plans to keep it in place "unless we can do something much better."
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CLAIM: Harris said that we know what a second Trump term would look like because it's all laid out in Project 2025.
- This is a reference to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s proposed plan for "the next conservative President.” Democrats have tried to tie Trump to this policy document. There's some reasoning behind it: Several of his former staffers helped write it. However, it's important to note that Trump's official platform is called Agenda 47. It has some overlap with Project 2025, but they're not the same.One such area of overlap is the subject of mass deportation of undocumented migrants, which both Trump and the Heritage Foundation list as an item in their agendas. However, while Project 2025 also says “TikTok… should be outlawed,” that’s not part of Agenda 47 — and Trump has gone on record as saying he is against such a ban.
