Featuring everything from a monumental presidential election to back-to-back record-breaking natural disasters, 2024 was rife with misinformation, misrepresentations, and misleading claims. FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has rounded up its list of the biggest falsehoods of 2024, including claims from President-elect Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In no particular order, here are just a few of FactCheck.org’s whoppers of 2024:
Misuse of FEMA funds conspiracy: Following the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in October, Trump inaccurately claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden Administration diverted billions of dollars of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding away from hurricane relief and to housing for immigrants in the country illegally. While FEMA helps administer grants that provide shelter and other supplies to migrants, via the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, that funding comes from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection budget, an entirely different agency within DHS.
Trump and Harris’s false and misleading abortion claims: In a video posted in April on Truth Social, Trump asserted that “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” that Roe v. Wade be overturned, a claim legal scholars deemed “clearly false,” “utter nonsense,” and “patently absurd.” Although Trump was wrong about a legal consensus on overturning Roe, he did not, as Harris claimed in her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, promise to sign a nationwide abortion ban. As FactCheck.org explained, Trump stated that the decision to ban abortion should be left up to individual states.
Trump’s inaccurate migrant crime narrative: Contrary to Trump’s characterizations, immigrants did not eat the pets of Springfield, Ohio, nor did they cause the “Worst Crime Wave in History.” During the only debate between Trump and Harris, Trump perpetuated a rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating residents’ pets. As FactCheck.org reported, there’s no credible evidence that Haitian immigrants have harmed pets in Springfield, Ohio. In fact, according to the City of Springfield, Haitian immigrants “are more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators in [the Springfield] community.”
Earlier in the year, Trump falsely claimed that immigrants are causing the largest crime wave in American history despite data showing that violent crime has sharply decreased since peaking in the 1990s and the lack of evidence supporting an uptick in crimes committed by immigrants.
Read FactCheck.org’s full list of this year’s whoppers here.
