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:
In a nearly two-hour speech at the first Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump promised to pay Americans if Republicans won, and he repeatedly said communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, among other familiar claims.
In his campaign’s latest TV ad, Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper of North Carolina highlights the issue of affordability using direct quotes from his Republican opponent. They are, in fact, direct quotes from Michael Whatley — but they are a bit dated, and some of the comments were more defensible or true at the time when Whatley made them.
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 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.
In Alaska’s tossup Senate race, Democrat Mary Peltola has put out a new ad misleadingly accusing Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of casting “the deciding vote” to keep the Epstein files “hidden.” While Sullivan voted against considering an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill that would have released the files earlier, he, like the rest of the Senate, supported a bill to make the records public.
New Jersey’s governor announced that “a software error” in the state’s motor vehicle registration system resulted in 6,600 noncitizens being improperly added to the state’s voter registration list. The state’s preliminary investigation found that up to 400 votes were cast by noncitizens, far fewer than the “thousands of votes” claimed by President Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump continues to insist damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of vandalism, despite a Department of Justice motion filed on July 31 that placed the blame squarely on a contractor’s “botched” installation of the pool coating “and not vandalism as initially represented” by the Department of Interior.
Our quarterly series presents just the statistics on various measures since Trump reentered the White House.
In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country.