This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact.

As Republicans railed against him at their convention in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden sat for a counterprogramming interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. Biden criticized his 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, and Trump’s choice of running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, whose nomination was announced on the Republican National Convention’s first day.

When asked for his reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump, Biden called out incendiary political rhetoric, saying, “There’s no place at all for violence in politics in America.”

When Holt pressed Biden about his comment to donors a week ago that “it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye,” Biden said that using that word was a “mistake” but he wanted to turn the focus to Trump’s statements and policies.

PBS News’ Deema Zein sat down with Katie Sanders, the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, to look at what we know about a Trump-Vance ticket and what we heard from the main stage on night one.

Biden’s candidacy has been questioned by some Democratic colleagues and donors since his widely panned June 27 debate performance. Biden told Holt he “screwed up” at the debate, but felt debate host CNN should have focused on Trump’s falsehoods. (PolitiFact fact-checked statements by both candidates during the debate.)

Biden also responded to the surprise termination of one of Trump’s criminal indictments. Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case about Trump’s handling of classified documents, saying the appointment of a special counsel violated the U.S. Constitution.

We fact-checked four of Biden’s statements from the July 15 NBC interview.

“J.D. Vance has adopted the same policies, no exceptions on abortion … he signed on to the Trump agenda.”

This is a misleading framing of Trump’s abortion views. Trump has said he supports some abortion exceptions for rape, incest and the pregnant woman’s life; Vance was inconsistent or vague before moving closer to Trump’s views this year.

When Vance, then a Senate candidate, was asked in a 2021 interview with Spectrum News whether laws should allow women to get abortions if they were victims of rape or incest, he said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as “inconvenient” — making it sound as if he didn’t support rape or incest exceptions.

Vance was also asked whether anti-abortion laws should include rape and incest exceptions. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said in response. “At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

​When asked again about the exceptions, Vance criticized the question: “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.” (The Biden campaign highlighted those remarks on the RNC’s first night of the RNC and a Biden campaign spokesperson pointed partly to Vance’s comments in the 2021 interview.)

During a 2022 U.S. Senate debate, Vance said, “I’ve always believed in reasonable exceptions,” according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Vance said the 10-year-old girl who traveled to Indiana for an abortion after she was raped should have been able to get an abortion in Ohio. But the Plain Dealer wrote that “Vance never elaborated on what other ‘reasonable’ exemptions he may support. That’s because there aren’t any. His campaign has said the only exemption he supports in abortion is to protect the life of the mother.”

As a senator, Vance lobbied to defeat Ohio’s 2023 constitutional amendment that enshrined access to abortion. But Vance also wrote on X that “as Donald Trump has said, ‘you’ve got to have the exceptions.”

Vance moved closest to Trump’s known position in a May 19, 2024, interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Vance said, “What I’ve said consistently is the gross majority of policy here is gonna be set by the states. I am pro-life. I wanna save as many babies as possible. And sure, I think it’s totally reasonable to say that late-term abortions should not happen with reasonable exceptions. But I think Trump’s approach here is trying to settle a very tough issue and actually empower the American people to decide it for themselves.”

Vance echoed that point about state policies and “reasonable exceptions” in a July 15 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that aired at the same time as Biden’s Holt interview.

Vance “says there’s no climate change that’s happening.”

Vance has grown more dubious of climate change in recent years, The New York Times found.

In 2020, Vance said in a speech at Ohio State University, “We have a climate problem in our society.”

But in 2022, he told the American Leadership Forum, “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.”

Vance acknowledged that the climate was changing but said that humans had no role. “It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia,” Vance said.

When asked about Vance’s stance on climate change, the Biden campaign cited two statements he made in 2022.

In an interview with “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” Vance sounded dismissive about climate change. “And even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese manufactured electric vehicles. The whole EV (electric vehicle) thing is a scam.”

Later that year, Vance said he had “become persuaded that climate change is certainly happening,” but that “some of the alarmism is a little overstated.”

The League of Conservation Voters gave Vance a “zero” on its 2023 scorecard based on his Senate votes.

In the classified documents investigation, “they looked at me and concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong.”

That’s misleading.

A special counsel investigation of Biden’s classified documents handling concluded that no criminal charges were warranted. However, Robert Hur’s report criticized Biden’s practices in handling sensitive documents, saying he had found evidence that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” as a private citizen after he served as vice president.

Hur found evidence that Biden willfully retained classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s handwritten notes about security and foreign policy. The report detailed some of Biden’s haphazard storage practices, saying some of the Afghanistan documents were “found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”

In a 388-page report, the special counsel also dwelled on Biden’s memory lapses, writing that “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur concluded that despite the investigators’ concerns about how Biden had handled certain materials, a jury would be unlikely to find Biden guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Trump “talks about there’d be a bloodbath if he loses.”

This is missing context.

Trump’s remarks during a March speech in Ohio came in the context of speaking about Biden’s plans for electric vehicles, which Trump said would harm the U.S. auto industry.

Trump’s remarks started with a critique of the United Auto Workers union, which endorsed Biden in January. Trump said that “they want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don’t go far” and said the cars “cost too much” and are made overseas.

“Let me tell you something to China,” Trump said. “If you’re listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal, those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars.”

“If I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole, that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not gonna sell those cars.”

They are more common than the public and elected officials would like to believe, according to one presidential historian. In an op-ed in the New York Times, George Washington University professor Matthew Dallek argued that presidential assassination attempts are “endemic to the political culture” of the country. 

“This tradition contradicts a kind of mythic faith, held widely by Americans, in a political system that shuns the bullet and embraces the ballot,” Dallek wrote. 

The turmoil and unrest precipitated by jarring, brutal events rarely bode well for political stability and, in turn, the markets. In fact, political violence and volatility are often considered a drag on the economy because they create uncertainty—which investors detest. Investors and business leaders want predictable economic environments so they know what to plan for as they steer their companies or invest their money. Even if there’s a downturn, they’d rather see it coming than be caught off guard.  

Political violence can also portend a breakdown in the rule of law, which is critically important to keeping all manner of unsavory business practices like corruption, bribery, and theft to a minimum. 

“Stability and rule of law, that’s how businesses function,” Linkedin cofounder and major Democratic party donor Reid Hoffman said in a CNBC interview last week. 

In an interview with Fortune, Dallek estimated 12 presidents in the 248-year history of the U.S., or about one quarter, have either been killed or nearly killed by an assassination attempt. Prior to Saturday’s shooting the most recent assassination attempt had been against a newly elected Ronald Reagan in 1981. Other presidents in history have also been the victims of unsuccessful attempts on their life. Gerald Ford, Harry Truman, both Roosevelts Theodore and Franklin D., Andrew Jackson, and Herbert Hoover all survived efforts to kill them. (Hoover’s was outside of the U.S. during a visit to Argentina where activists’ plan to blow up the train he was riding in was stopped by law enforcement). A further four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—were killed while in office. 

A ‘string of politically violent moments’ 

The markets, which were already pricing in a Trump victory, saw the sympathy the assassination attempt would engender as a further electoral boost for the former president. 

When they opened on Monday for the first time since the shooting, they reacted accordingly. There was a rally in securities and assets, like Bitcoin, guns and ammo stocks, and the dollar, which are all expected to perform better under a second Trump presidency. The entire market soared as well, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 700 points on Tuesday, setting a record high. Dallek says it’s hard to draw a direct correlation from the assassination attempt to economic outcomes, but the assassination attempt could dampen the economy if it’s seen as a precursor to more unrest. 

If “it is another chapter in this string of politically violent moments, it can have an indirect destabilizing effect on the economy to the extent that people are worried about chaos in the streets, they’re worried about more violence,” Dallek said. 

According to the FBI, since the attack on Trump violent political rhetoric was “ticking up.” Even before Saturday, there was research indicating that the past few years have been characterized by heightened levels of the possibility of politically motivated violence. Starting in 2017, the year Trump was inaugurated, there were 13 federal charges of ideologically motivated threats against public officials, according to data from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. By the time he left office in 2021, that number had more than doubled to 31.  

The fact assassination attempts are relatively common in U.S. history, doesn’t diminish their significance, according to Dallek. “It’s not necessarily a normative judgment about them, it’s a historical reality,” he said. 

‘Grappling’ with the ‘origins’ of presidential assassinations 

Acknowledging their frequency is crucial to ensuring assassination attempts don’t escalate into further political violence. “In order to address a problem, I think the country has got to grapple with its origins,” Dallek said. 

Dallek argued that in the U.S. the problem of assassination attempts stems from three factors unique to America: easy access to guns, the prevalence of conspiracy theories, and America’s libertarian streak that makes certain individuals suspicious of the government. 

Gun control is a heavily debated topic that regularly resurfaces in the aftermath of mass shootings or other such violent crimes. Trump’s shooting was no exception, although discussions were much more muted this time around. Their prevalence is also a distinctly American cultural phenomenon with one 2018 report finding that the U.S. had 120 guns for every 100 people. Another study found just under one third of U.S. adults owned a gun, according to a 2023 Pew Research survey. 

Conspiracy theories are also widespread, said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor and author of Radical American Partisanship, a book on political divisions in the U.S., pointing to age-old examples like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. “The problem is when those conspiracy theories infect our political structure,” she said. 

Conspiracy theories can even influence extremists who act alone, according to Chapman University sociology professor Pete Simi, who studies political extremism and violence. “Especially now with digital technology, social media, and online cultures it’s so easy for an individual to remain on their own, but still be immersed in a broader environment that can be quite encouraging and promoting of violence,” he said. 

Many such conspiracy theories include a distrust of the government, which has long been a feature of American politics. In recent years, trust in the government plunged to its lowest levels in decades, according to Pew Research. Even a slight uptick in trust levels in 2024 meant that a paltry 21% of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing “most of the time.” Just 2% trusted it to do the right thing “just about always.” 

Authorities have yet to determine a motive for the assassination attempt against Trump, so it is still too early to tell if Dallek’s framework would apply in this case. Meaning, it is also entirely possible that Saturday’s shooting was not politically motivated as was the case when John Hinkley Jr. shot Reagan in 1981 or when Charles Guiteau killed Garfield. Hinkley Jr. was a mentally unstable individual who shot Reagan in an attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. Guiteau, also unstable, killed Garfield because he believed he was owed a European consulship.  

Even without a clear-cut motive the attempt on Trump’s life opens the door for more political strife that if left unchecked could spill over into the economy. “Violence begets violence,” Dallek says, “And more violence tends not to be a great economic generator, at least for most Americans.”

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In a leaked phone call with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former President Donald Trump incorrectly suggested that childhood vaccine doses are too large and are dangerous to kids.

Referring to a “massive” vaccine “that is like 38 different vaccines” and “looks like it’s meant for a horse” rather than a baby, Trump claimed in a video clip of the call that was shared online to have seen “too many times” vaccinated children “all of a sudden starting to change radically.”

Although Trump didn’t specify the “sudden” changes, the former president is likely referring to the long-debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, a falsehood he has previously shared. Furthermore, no childhood vaccine or combination of vaccines targets 38 diseases at once. There’s no evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harmful to children.

Trump’s false claims about vaccines immediately preceded an apparent offer to work in some way with Kennedy, who is well known for his anti-vaccine views. Trump also discussed aspects of the attempt on his life at a campaign rally on July 13.

Neither presidential campaign responded to requests for comment and clarification.

The Leaked Call

The video clip of the phone call, which runs under two minutes and shows Kennedy speaking to Trump over speakerphone, was first shared by Kennedy’s son Robert “Bobby” Kennedy III, on X, the Washington Post reported. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the wife of Bobby Kennedy III, is Kennedy’s campaign manager.

According to a screenshot of his original post, Bobby Kennedy III shared the clip of the call, which he said occurred on July 14, because he was upset that Trump had chosen Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate over his father. “He could have picked a unity ticket instead he picked JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance,” he wrote, alluding to a 2022 tweet from Vance about overwhelmed hospitals that included the line, “let’s fire thousands of nurses who refuse to get the vaccine.”

Bobby Kennedy III, however, seems to have misunderstood that Vance, who has a record of opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was being sarcastic in the tweet. Bobby Kennedy III subsequently removed his post with the video “for mistaking sarcasm for real life,” he said on X. But the video had already spread online and remains available on news sites, including NBC News and CNN.

On July 16, when the clip went viral, Robert F. Kennedy issued an apology. “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” he wrote on X. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

“I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system,” Trump said at the beginning of the video, presumably referring to vaccination. “Remember, I said you want to do small doses. Small doses.”

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you should be giving a horse this … And did you ever see the size of it, right? You know, it’s this massive,” Trump continued, trailing off. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy replied.

Trump then appeared to want to collaborate with Kennedy in some capacity. “Anyway … I would love you to do something,” he said. “And I think it would be so good for you. And so big for you. And we’re going to win. We’re going to win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”

Trump proceeded to recount how Biden had called him after the assassination attempt, saying the bullet that grazed him sounded like “the world’s largest mosquito.” The video abruptly ends with Trump commenting on the type of weapon used to shoot him — “an AR-15 or something,” he said, adding, “pretty tough guns, right?”

Throughout the clip of the call, Kennedy was largely silent, only occasionally responding.

Trump’s Vaccine Falsehoods

Trump’s comments in the leaked call are similar to his previous false statements about vaccines. 

For example, in a 2015 Republican primary debate, he recounted an anecdote about a toddler who was vaccinated, developed a fever and went on to develop autism. During that debate, he also advocated “smaller doses over a longer period of time” and used his favored equine language to describe vaccines. 

“I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me,” he said.

Earlier in the decade, he also was preoccupied with vaccine dose sizes or combinations.

“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism,” he falsely declared in a 2012 tweet. 

Two years later, he insisted in a tweet that he wasn’t against “vaccinations for your children,” but was against vaccinations “in 1 massive dose.” “Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!” he added.

There has been intense scientific investigation into the issue, and there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. In fact, a significant body of work refutes the idea — first proposed by a now-retracted and fraudulent study — with study after study failing to find a link. The rise in autism cases in the last several decades is in large part thought to be due to awareness of the condition and changes in how it is defined.

Similarly, there is no evidence that the current vaccine dose sizes or combination vaccines are hazardous to children or that additional “spacing out” of vaccines is needed. As with all medical products, vaccines are not 100% safe, but serious side effects are rare. Deviating from the immunization schedule is risky because children go unprotected and can contract diseases before they are vaccinated.

Children, of course, do not receive all their vaccines in a single dose. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, the number of vaccines given to children has grown over time, as scientists have developed more vaccines that target more diseases, which ultimately prevents more childhood illness. In the process, several combination vaccines have also been developed, which reduces the total number of shots kids need.

For example, perhaps the best-known combination vaccine is the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. There’s also the DTap vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Sometimes children will receive as many as six shots in a single medical visit, CHOP notes. But no shot or combination of shots given in a single doctor’s visit protects against 38 different diseases. In fact, a child given all the vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 2 years of age will be protected against 14 diseases (15 if including COVID-19).

Getting several vaccines at once isn’t a problem. “A number of studies have been done to look at the effects of giving various combinations of vaccines, and when every new vaccine is licensed, it has been tested along with the vaccines already recommended for a particular aged child. The recommended vaccines have been shown to be as effective in combination as they are individually,” the CDC explains on a webpage about multiple vaccinations. “Sometimes, certain combinations of vaccines given together can cause fever, and occasionally febrile seizures; these are temporary and do not cause any lasting damage.”

Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that vaccine doses are too big for children, vaccines are designed to contain the smallest amount of antigen, or active ingredient, needed to mount a protective immune response. Typically, antigens are killed or weakened virus or bacteria, or only a piece of a pathogen, such as a viral protein. This means they actually contain very little antigen relative to an infection — with the added bonus that a person doesn’t need to get sick to develop immunity. (As we’ve written before, with vaccination, age is what matters for dose — not weight.)

“All vaccines expose recipients to a smaller number of antigens (parts of viruses or bacteria that generate an immune response) than the actual virus or bacteria,” CHOP’s website explains. “Even when multiple vaccines are given together, the number of antigens is limited compared with the number of pathogens to which infants are exposed during a normal day. The difference is we know when our children were exposed to antigens through a vaccine, but we aren’t always aware of their exposures to diseases.”

The benefits of vaccines are clear. Globally, childhood vaccinations prevent some 4 million deaths a year, according to the CDC. And in many places, such as the U.S., vaccines have made many childhood illnesses largely a thing of the past. That includes measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, as well as polio, which in mid-century America killed or paralyzed thousands of children a year.

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