We’re now in the final full month of the 2024 campaign, and that means politicians and their allies are frantically seeking votes for their side. And for one side, in particular, that means an increasing onslaught of wild claims, conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods.
That side, of course, is Donald Trump’s. The president who set new benchmarks for false and misleading claims — more than 30,000 of them during his term, in fact — leads a MAGA movement that increasingly shamelessly treats misinformation as a political strategy. Democrats have their faults on this front, too, but there is simply no comparison to Trump’s approach to politics, an approach that so many influential people on his side have also gradually adopted as their own.
The barrage is so constant that it often leaves journalists with a dilemma. How do you tell the story when Trump says for the umpteenth time that he was Michigan’s Man of the Year (an honor the state doesn’t actually award)? Is it a headline every time Trump repeats this fantasy, or do you note the many previous fact checks? Does debunking it just promote it? Trump will often make dozens of false, misleading or baseless claims at a single rally alone, creating a problem of sheer volume as well.
Well, we thought a good way was to walk through a 24-hour period of MAGA misinformation on Monday.
To be sure, this list is not exhaustive. But we sought to highlight the biggest claims from the most prominent individuals (including Trump), along with the most ridiculous claims that gained traction on the right.
1:18 a.m.: Elon Musk promotes a headline claiming former secretary of state John F. Kerry wants to “change” the First Amendment. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) later promote Musk’s tweet, with Lee adding that Democrats “want to end free speech as we know it.” (Kerry did not say he wants to amend the First Amendment. He correctly noted that the First Amendment was a major impediment to cracking down on misinformation and more broadly referenced winning elections to “implement change.”
1:21 a.m.: Musk promotes a post alleging Democrats are flying undocumented immigrants into swing states to win elections. (There is no evidence of this, and it doesn’t make sense for a host of reasons.)
7:16 a.m.: Trump ally Dinesh D’Souza claims a new ad for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign features “paid actors pretending to be former Trump supporters.” (The couple in the ad have been repeatedly profiled as former Trump voters, and the man is a longtime Republican township supervisor. The report D’Souza cited from Sky News Australia relied on a random X user whose claim had already been debunked.)
10:10 a.m.: Politico’s Adam Wren reports that a new ad from Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who is running for governor, features a doctored image of his opponent in front of supporters holding “no gas stoves!” signs. (The signs actually featured the candidate’s name. Braun’s campaign later added a disclaimer saying elements of the ad had been “digitally altered or artificially generated.”)
11:02 a.m.: Trump claims on Truth Social that he was forced to use a 750-seat theater for a Wisconsin rally because the Biden administration wouldn’t provide him more Secret Service protection while it was also protecting the president of Iran at the U.N. General Assembly. Trump claims “50,000 people” were turned away. (The Secret Service was charged with protecting more than just the Iranian president at the large U.N. event in New York. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the capacity at the theater Trump spoke in was actually around 300, and that just a “few hundred more people” were unable to get in.)
11:42 a.m.: Trump claims the federal government and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) are “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” affected by Hurricane Helene. (When pressed for evidence of this, Trump offered none and merely said, “Take a look.”)
12:41 p.m.: Trump claims a photo of Harris being briefed on Helene is “FAKE and STAGED” because her earphones are not plugged into her phone. Many allies repeat the claim. (You can’t see the port of the phone where earphones would be plugged in.)
1:04 p.m.: Cruz claims on X that “425,431 criminal illegal aliens are roaming the streets because Kamala Harris has utterly failed at her job.” (This is false. It refers to recent data from the Department of Homeland Security. The data include those who are in prison, but they are listed as not being detained by immigration officials because they are not specifically in those officials’ custody. Many who complete their sentences cannot be deported for diplomatic reasons. Republicans have also exaggerated Harris’s actual purview in managing immigration, which was focused on the root causes of illegal immigration rather than securing the border itself.)
1:57 p.m.: Trump says at a news conference in Georgia about Helene: “Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now. It’s so late in the season for that.” (Late September is close to the peak of hurricane season, which lasts through November.)
1:57 p.m.: Trump claims he is contacting Musk about getting “Starlink hooked up, because they have no communication whatsoever.” (The Federal Emergency Management Agency had already announced 40 Starlink satellite systems were available, and 140 more satellites were being shipped out.)
2:03 p.m.: Trump claims Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) “has been calling the president, hasn’t been able to get him.” (Kemp himself had said hours earlier that he had spoken with President Joe Biden on Sunday and cast Biden as being helpful.)
7:13 p.m.: House Republicans’ campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, claims “Kamala Harris allowed 13,000 illegal migrants convicted of MURDER to live in the U.S.” (The data pertain to noncitizens who crossed the border at any point in recent decades, not just during the Biden administration — and including the Trump administration. Similar data from 2015 suggest the vast majority of those convicted of crimes were already in the country back then.)
7:56 p.m.: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) echoes the above false claims, as many other Republicans (including Cruz) have in recent days, claiming Harris is “letting in 13,000+ illegal aliens convicted of murder.”
10:06 p.m.: Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) denies on CNN that Trump proposed “one violent day” to send a message about zero tolerance for crime. (Trump used precisely those words, suggesting “one really violent day” and then saying “one rough hour.”)
10:07 p.m.: Donalds in the same interview says crime is “massively up.” (Everyone can cherry-pick data, and the data is imperfect. But the full thrust of it indicates crime is not massively up relative to where it’s been over the past 10 years. In fact, FBI data released earlier Monday showed crime continued to trend downward in the first six months of 2024.)