Vice President JD Vance gave the keynote address on the second night of the Republican midterm convention, which also featured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson and a final sendoff from President Donald Trump. Here’s what we found in fact-checking their remarks:
- Several Republicans credited the Trump administration for a large drop in the violent crime rate in 2025 and a historically low murder rate. But the recent statistics continue a trend of declining crime in recent years, and criminologists say there are many possible reasons for the drop.
- Kennedy falsely claimed Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the pandemic. Restrictions on religious gatherings were implemented by both parties and typically capped attendance, rather than prohibiting services altogether. Many of those restrictions ended or were made less strict within months.
- Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.” In states that have cashless bail policies, that almost never happens.
- Vance made the dubious claim that U.S. citizens account for all of the job growth during the current administration. Experts told us last year that the specific federal employment data supporting that claim are misleading.
- Johnson inaccurately claimed that Republicans inherited “record high” inflation from the Biden administration. They didn’t. The annualized inflation rate had declined to 3% when Trump entered office — a lower rate than it is now.
- Trump falsely claimed, “I built almost 2,000 miles of [border] wall.” The actual number is about a third of that, and only if including replacement wall rather than new wall in places where there was none before.
- Kennedy made the unsupported claim that Democrats “lost 360,000 children,” who he suggested went on to be trafficked. He’s distorting the findings of a 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general.
- Kennedy misrepresented the available data to suggest that the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing decades of rising obesity rates and declining lifespans. Obesity was already falling before Trump took office, according to one survey, and life expectancy has generally been trending upwards for decades, with the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Kennedy falsely said that U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.” Given that long ago it was common for as many as half of all children to die, this is not remotely true. Most countries today also have higher childhood mortality rates than the U.S.
The convention, the first for the Republican Party during the midterms, was held Sept. 9 and 10 in Dallas.
Claiming Credit for Crime Decline
Multiple speakers at the convention lauded a drop in violent crime in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in the violent crime and murder rates since the FBI began releasing the nationwide crime estimates in 1936. But they misleadingly framed it as a consequence of Trump taking office last year and wrongly cast it as a turnaround from Biden’s time in office.
Violent crime has been falling for several years, after a spike during the 2020 pandemic, which began in Trump’s first term. Criminologists also say there are many factors affecting the crime drop in 2025 and the exact reasons are unclear, as we’ve explained.
“In America right now, because elections have consequences, you are enjoying the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years,” Johnson said. Vance raised the issue in his remarks, falsely claiming that under Biden’s time in office, the U.S. “became a country where violent crime exploded, unless of course you could afford private security,” and later adding that under Trump: “We’ve seen the largest drop of violent crime in the history of the United States of America because we back the police and throw the bad guys in prison. It’s not rocket science.” Trump similarly said, “And it was just announced, you saw that, that we achieved the lowest level of violent crime in 125 years since the year 1900.”
The violent crime rate, per local law enforcement data collected by the FBI, was 389.2 per 100,000 population in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term. In Biden’s last year, 2024, it had dropped to 362.9 per 100,000. In 2025, it dropped further, to 327.6. (See Table 1 after downloading the FBI’s 2025 estimations for crime in the U.S.)
The murder rate declined from 5.1 per 100,000 in 2024 to 4.1 last year. It had been 6.6 in 2020.
Johnson’s and Trump’s references to the U.S. achieving the lowest violent crime rate in 126 or 125 years is actually a reference to the murder rate being the lowest since 1900, per a report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, which used FBI statistics dating back to 1960 and public health data going back to 1900.
“The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, said in a statement. “Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership.”
In an interview last month, Gelb told us that there could be some impact on crime from what the administration is doing, but we don’t know what that is yet. He cited many plausible factors affecting crime. “You know the movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’?” Gelb asked. “That’s what we’ve got here. And when you have so many, so many things happening at once, it can be extremely hard to disentangle.”
Democrats Didn’t Close ‘Every’ Church ‘for a Year’
Kennedy claimed that Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is false. In March and April 2020, states issued orders or guidelines limiting in-person interactions in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Some states did prohibit religious gatherings — as they did with other kinds of mass gatherings — but most had exemptions allowing at least some in-person religious gatherings to continue. These restrictions applied not just to churches but to all places of worship.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of state stay-at-home orders as of April 24, 2020, religious gatherings were barred entirely in just 10 states, while more than 20 states allowed religious services with size limitations and 15 states allowed religious gatherings of any size.
While most of those 15 states were led by Republicans, a few — including Pennsylvania and Michigan — had Democratic governors at the time. And three of the 10 states that barred religious gatherings of any size at that time had Republican governors — Idaho, Alaska and Vermont.
States also began relaxing those restrictions within months. For example, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced that businesses and entities, including churches, could “fully reopen” in late May 2020. An archived version of a New York Times page that tracked state reopening plans shows that, as of July 1, 2020, houses of worship were allowed to be open in all 50 states.
Some states continued to enforce limits on attendance or implemented risk-based frameworks that tightened or loosened restrictions according to an area’s level of spread. California, for example, barred indoor worship in areas experiencing widespread transmission before the Supreme Court blocked that provision the measure in February 2021. But that doesn’t mean “every church in the country” was closed for an entire year.
We asked HHS about the basis for Kennedy’s claim and haven’t received a response.
Cashless Bail
As he has for years, Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.”
As we have written, some states that require cashless bail have exemptions for violent felonies and murder. And in the states where it is possible for a murder suspect to be freed pending trial without cash bail, per a judge’s discretion, it is exceedingly rare.
Numerous states and cities have passed laws limiting the use of cash bail, though each is a little different, and the laws are constantly being revised. Some states with cashless bail policies still allow cash bail for violent felonies and murder, such as New York. Most include some sort of risk assessment to determine whether someone can be held in jail pending trial.
The move in some states toward cashless bail was prompted by those who argued cash bail unfairly punishes those who can’t afford to pay it, leaving them to await trial in jail. Opponents have criticized the laws as soft-on-crime policies that worsens crime.
As we wrote last year, the balance of crime data doesn’t support the idea that crime has worsened as a result of the policies. Violent crime is dropping across the country, including in states that limit the use of cash bail.
When we looked into this issue in 2025, we found just one instance of a defendant facing murder charges being released without bail in any of the handful of states that have enacted some form of cashless bail. In 2024, a Rockford, Illinois, judge released from jail a man accused of first-degree murder pending his trial. The judge said she had concerns about the case and the evidence against the man.
“In Illinois, every case has the discretion of the judge on whether or not to release the accused,” David Stovall, a faculty member in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, told us in 2025. The idea that accused murders are routinely released without cash bail is “a misconception that’s rampant unfortunately.”
Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in 2024 that states that limit cash bail often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.
For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”
A Problematic Employment Comparison
Vance repeated a dubious Trump administration claim about American citizens — rather than “illegal aliens” — accounting for all of the job growth during Trump’s second term.
“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we’ve created 1 million new jobs,” the vice president said. “And unlike the last administration, where most of the job growth went to illegal aliens, 100% of the job growth in the United States of America is going to American citizens, which is exactly where it belongs.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that employment for the native-born population in the U.S. increased by more than 1.3 million from January 2025 to August 2026. In that same period, employment for the foreign-born population decreased by about 994,000.
To be clear, the foreign-born population is not just “illegal aliens.” It includes “legally-admitted immigrants,” some of whom may have since become citizens, “refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants,” BLS says.
In addition, under the Biden administration, the latest BLS data show that native-born employment increased by about 7.5 million, more than the roughly 6.5 million increase in foreign-born employment.
But multiple economists and labor experts have said that particular BLS employment data – which is based in part on its Current Population Survey, or CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau and BLS – should not be used for comparisons like the one Vance made.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, told us in a 2025 interview that with the CPS, the foreign-born and native-born population add up to a predetermined Census Bureau forecast that is done a year in advance. “So, a big decline in the reported foreign-born population” based on the survey “is going to be offset by a reported increase in the native-born population.” He wrote in an August 2025 piece that in the unlikely event that the entire foreign-born population in the U.S. disappeared, the CPS would automatically report that the native-born population increased by millions of people to equal the predetermined Census population estimate.
And, as another economist noted, when the estimated native-born population increases, so does the estimated number of U.S.-born workers. BLS data show that the native-born population has increased by almost 4.7 million since Trump took office, while the foreign-born population in that time has decreased by about 1.9 million. Kolko and other experts said the estimated increase in the native-born population is not realistic or plausible, and suggests the estimates are likely influenced by an increase in foreign-born residents not responding to the household survey or providing inaccurate information to administrators, meaning they said they were born in the U.S. instead of another country.
In his August 2025 piece, Kolko wrote that it’s best to check the unemployment rate for the native- and foreign-born populations. “Ignore the levels of population and employment: they mislead,” he said.
BLS data show that the unemployment rate for the native-born population has increased from 4.3% in January 2025 to 4.6% as of last month. On the other hand, the unemployment rate for the foreign-born population over that period went down from 4.6% to 3.4%.
Johnson’s Deceptive Inflation Tale
In spinning an economic narrative complimentary of Trump, House Speaker Johnson omitted key details, making it seem like Trump had inherited very high inflation when he hadn’t.
Accurately noting that inflation was just 1.4% at the end of Trump’s first term, Johnson proceeded to inaccurately claim that Biden handed Trump back a “total disaster.”
“Joe Biden came in and he reversed the policies and he brought us to a 40-year high of 9.1% inflation,” Johnson said. “So the very moment that Republicans were put back in charge, we started working around the clock to help you and your family — to make life more affordable, and to do everything within our power to bring down the cost of living for everyone in this country. And we’ve succeeded in so many ways. But it takes more than just 20 months to fix the total disaster that we were handed. And to turn the ship of state around.”
This distorts how inflation changed over time. Inflation did hit a high of 9.1% under Biden, but that was for the 12 months ending in June 2022. By the time Trump was back in office, inflation had cooled to a 3.0% annual rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Under Trump, inflation has risen slightly. As of August, inflation for the past 12 months is at 3.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s low inflation in 2020 and Biden’s very high inflation in the summer of 2022 were both partly due to the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Very low inflation in 2020 — below the Federal Reserve’s 2% benchmark — was driven by pandemic-related decreases in the prices of travel-related and in-person goods and services, such as gas, airline tickets and hotels. As we’ve reported previously, some of Biden’s high inflation could be ascribed to his stimulus policies, but the root of the problem was the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the time also pushed up gas prices.
Experts have said not providing the stimulus could have hindered the post-pandemic recovery.
Just before his selective economic history, Johnson also made the false claim outright. “While Republicans inherited from the Biden administration record high inflation and prices,” he said, “we’ve been working every single day around the clock to bring policies to bring down those costs.”
Border Wall
On night one of the convention, Trump claimed his administration has “built over 1,400 miles of wall right on your Texas border.” On night two, Trump said, “I built almost 2,000 miles of wall.” Both numbers are wildly exaggerated.
A total of 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the first Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before.
According to data from CBP as of Sept. 9, another 216 miles of wall have been constructed in Trump’s second term. About 72 miles of that is new primary wall in locations where there were no barriers before.
The construction is largely funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump in July 2025, which allocated $46.5 billion for border wall.
In any case, to date, combining Trump’s first term and second term so far, the Trump administration has built 124 miles of border wall where none existed before. And counting all border wall construction, including replacement wall and secondary walls, a total of 674 miles of wall has been built. As we have written, that is substantial, but it’s about a third of the number Trump claimed.
Another 299 miles of new primary wall are under construction, CBP reported, and 255 miles are in the design phase.
The land border itself is 1,954 miles long, according to the US-Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission. With the new fencing constructed under Trump, there are now about 778 miles of barriers, about 40% of the total southwest border.
Misleading Claim of ‘Lost’ Children
Kennedy, while criticizing Democrats, said, “They somehow lost 360,000 children, and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.” But, as we’ve written, it’s a distortion to claim the children were “lost,” or that only Democrats were responsible for what actually happened.
In an August 2024 report, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said about 323,000 unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. That time frame includes periods during the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
Furthermore, the report did not describe the minors as “lost.” The report said more than 32,000 children did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, and that, as of May 2024, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not issued a Notice to Appear in court – which goes out at the start of removal proceedings – to more than 291,000 minors.
The report said not sending the notices makes it difficult for ICE to “monitor the location and status” of the minors and assure they “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not say those things had happened to the children.
ICE responded to the inspector general’s assessment in a letter that was included in the report’s appendix. ICE said notices go out after a child has been released to a sponsor, and that notices can be delayed for several reasons, such as if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Kennedy Distorts Stats on Obesity, Life Expectancy
Kennedy suggested the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing trends related to diet, obesity and lifespan. But he distorted the available data on obesity and life expectancy, and experts say there’s little evidence to suggest Americans are eating much healthier.
“Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food,” Kennedy said. “Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing. And this is best of all. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.”
Kennedy has repeatedly boasted about a decline in obesity. On Aug. 13, he said obesity had “dropped, for the first time, 3% in the last year.” Eleven days later, he told an audience that the obesity rate had “dropped in this country, for the first time in 40 years, by about 3%.”
But as we wrote at the time, Kennedy’s numbers don’t hold up.
Surveys from the polling organization Gallup, which are based on self-reported height and weight data, do show obesity declining by about 3 percentage points. But that decline happened over several years, not one, and started around 2022. It has continued under Trump, but not on the scale Kennedy claims. The latest Gallup figures put the decline between 2024 and 2026 at 0.7 percentage points.
If Kennedy was referring to the percent change, rather than percentage point, the numbers are still off. Gallup’s latest figures show the obesity rate declining from 37.5% in 2024 to 36.8% in 2026, a difference of 1.9%. The total change from 2022 to 2026 would be 7.8% — but most of that decline happened before Trump took office.
It’s possible Kennedy has access to some early government data on obesity that haven’t yet been released, but we couldn’t find any publicly available source backing up this claim. We’ve asked HHS but have not received a response.
Kennedy is also wrong about a “30-year decline in longevity.” According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. life expectancy rose from 75.4 years in 1990 to 78.8 years in 2019. It fell in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but rebounded to an all-time high of 79 years in 2024.
We asked HHS about the source for this claim as well, but haven’t heard back.
As for Kennedy’s claim that “Americans are eating more real food,” he may be referring to a recent analysis by the bank BNP Paribas finding that, between June 2025 and June 2026, sales of unprocessed or minimally processed foods in certain categories grew 7% faster than sales of ultraprocessed foods in the same categories.
As we’ve explained before, the study measured whether consumers were shifting from more-processed to less-processed products in five specific categories — yogurt, nut butters, frozen meals/vegetables, fruit snacks/candy and cereal/granola. It doesn’t say anything about whether Americans are buying, say, more fresh produce, or spending more or less on ultraprocessed foods outside of those categories. Experts told us there’s little evidence to suggest that Americans are eating healthier diets overall.
Childhood Health
In repeating one of Kennedy’s favorite lines, but with an added twist, the Health and Human Services secretary claimed that “this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world.”
Compared with peer nations, the U.S. does have poor childhood health outcomes and spends a lot on healthcare. But it is an exaggeration to say the U.S. has the sickest children in the world, much less the sickest children in history.
The U.S. has for decades had a relatively high rate of death before age 15 for a high-income nation. That’s according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, which is based on comparisons with 11 other high-income nations. Still, childhood deaths have fallen significantly over time in the U.S. and peer nations alike. KFF explained that “childhood deaths in the U.S. have declined since 1980 on a similar trajectory to comparable countries.”
In the global context, the U.S. has relatively low mortality in childhood. In 2024, 0.8% of U.S. children died before age 15, according to data from the United Nations compiled by Our World in Data. This is slightly higher than the rate of 0.6% among high-income nations overall, but lower than the rate of 1.6% for upper-middle-income countries, 5.2% for lower-middle-income countries or 7.7% for low-income countries.
Again, this is an improvement compared with the historical data. In 1950, 4.3% of children in the U.S. died before age 15. And long ago, of course, children died far more regularly. Historical estimates of child mortality, compiled by Our World in Data, show that roughly half of all children died in many societies across time, including as recently as several hundred years ago in Europe. Historically, many deaths were due to poor nutrition, infectious diseases or a lack of sanitation. Today, many of those infectious diseases are preventable with vaccines.
As for the claim that the U.S. pays “two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays” for healthcare, it is possible Kennedy meant to compare the U.S. to other developed countries. The U.S. does spend the most per capita on healthcare among high-income countries, according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay around 2.5 times more per capita than the average. But it’s not the case that the U.S. pays that much more than each and every country. In the case of Switzerland, for example, the U.S. pays just 1.5 times more per capita.
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