Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in his conversation with Elon Musk

Washington CNN —

Former President Donald Trump delivered his usual bombardment of false claims – at least 20 in all – during a Monday conversation with billionaire supporter Elon Musk, which aired on Musk’s social media platform, X.

Most of the falsehoods uttered by the Republican presidential nominee were claims that have been repeatedly debunked before, some of them for years. They spanned a broad range of subjects, from immigration to the economy to foreign policy to Trump’s record in office to Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.

Here is a fact check:

Crime

Trump claimed, “Our crime rate’s going through the roof.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarterof 2024.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data and the submitted data usually has some errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent.

The preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% decline in murder and a roughly 6% decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in Trump’s last calendar year in office in 2020. The preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said earlier this year that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder