Two days after an armed man tried to enter the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited rhetoric from Democrats that she said is “inspiring violence” against President Donald Trump and other Republicans. But several of the statements she quoted were stripped of their original context, a point that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries made in a rebuttal.
Republicans say that able-bodied adults who don’t work would lose Medicaid coverage under the House tax-cuts-and-spending bill, while Democrats say the legislation would hurt vulnerable groups. The bill’s main target is those able-bodied adults, but other groups would lose coverage due to paperwork burdens and other provisions in the bill, health policy experts say.
Abrupt changes in staffing and some procedures at the Social Security Administration, coupled with false and misleading claims about widespread fraud, have prompted heated criticism from Democrats, with some statements leaving the wrong impression that benefits are being cut. Experts share a concern that disorderly actions by the Trump administration could cause administrative errors and disruptions, but there has been no proposed change to benefits mandated by law.
As fallout from a Trump administration group chat about a military attack in Yemen continues to unfold, some Democrats are saying the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in the chat goes beyond incompetence — they say it was criminal.
With the recent failure of two midsize banks, some Democrats have blamed deregulation championed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018. While the law did reduce oversight of small and midsize banks, experts are divided over whether deregulation in 2018 ultimately caused Signature and Silicon Valley Bank to collapse.
Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy Twitter was criticized by several prominent Democrats. But a social media post misleadingly claims Democrats didn’t speak out against companies buying out competitors and creating monopolies until Musk bought Twitter. Democrats have opposed monopoly power and encouraged competition for years.
In a press conference in which they called on President Biden to use his executive authority to cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt for individuals, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren misstated a racial disparity statistic.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said, “We are right now at … 25,000 new infections a day and 2,000 deaths a day.” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called those “some funny numbers.” The disparity is largely a matter of semantics.
In another feisty affair, the Democrats traded barbs over contested quotes, crime and Castro. We referee some of the rhetoric.
We examine four claims from the Feb. 19 Democratic debate in this video.