FactChecking Day Two of the GOP Midterm Convention

Filed 1h ago · Via FactCheck.org · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Fig Leaf Rag

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Samuel Loxton (artist) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Republican speakers at the party's midterm convention, including Vice President JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump, touted a genuine drop in violent crime and murder rates in 2025, the largest one-year decline since the FBI began tracking the data in 1936. FBI figures show the violent crime rate fell from 389.2 per 100,000 in 2020 to 327.6 in 2025, with murder dropping from 6.6 to 4.1 over the same period, a decline that began well before Trump returned to office. Criminologists, including the Council on Criminal Justice's Adam Gelb, say the causes are murky and vary by city, contradicting the speakers' credit-claiming.

Kennedy separately claimed Democrats ‘closed every church in our country for a year’ during COVID, which is false: Pew's tracking found only 10 states barred religious gatherings entirely, some Republican-led, and by July 2020 houses of worship were open in all 50 states. Trump also repeated his long-running claim that cashless bail lets killers walk free within hours, a scenario fact-checkers have repeatedly found is exceedingly rare given exemptions for violent felonies in most such states.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A real number got dressed up in a costume it didn't need. The crime drop is genuine, but slapping a bow on it and calling it a Trump production ignores that the trend started years earlier under a different administration entirely. When the actual good news isn't dramatic enough, apparently somebody has to write a better script.

Source: Read the original at FactCheck.org → Scored: Fig Leaf Rag · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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