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 send-off from President Donald Trump. Here’s what we found in fact-checking their remarks:
An ad from a super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley features a heart-wrenching testimonial from the father of a woman who was murdered in 2025. The ad falsely implies the accused murderer was one of the prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic when Whatley’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, was governor of North Carolina. Cooper had nothing to do with the accused murderer’s release.
In the Ohio Senate race, a Republican ad blames former Sen. Sherrod Brown for a deadly crash in April on an Ohio interstate in which an immigrant was charged with vehicular homicide. But there’s no evidence of any tie between Brown’s votes on immigration, as the ad suggests, and the suspect in this incident.
In announcing the latest FBI annual report on nationwide crime, President Donald Trump wrongly cast the decline in crime in 2025 as a dramatic turnaround and made misleading claims about the impact of his administration’s policies.
Our quarterly series presents just the statistics on various measures since Trump reentered the White House.
Our first quarterly update of various economic and social indicators under Trump’s second term as president.
At the one-year mark of Trump’s second term, we launch our “numbers” series, providing various statistical measures of his presidency thus far.
Our annual recap of the worst falsehoods of the year.
Defending Chicago in a recent Fox News interview, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said it was “not in the top 30” of “big cities” with the highest rates of murder. But in 2024, Chicago had the 15th highest murder rate among U.S. cities with at least 250,000 residents, according to FBI data. It ranked higher if limiting to cities with even larger populations.
While President Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding Portland and Chicago has largely focused on overall crime, National Guard deployments are specifically targeted at protecting federal immigration operations and facilities. Here, we’ll unravel some of the rhetoric about what’s happening in those cities, what the Trump administration is doing and under what authority, and what the courts have had to say about it so far.
