New York City police officers were not systematically fired from their jobs, contrary to the claim by President Donald Trump during a press briefing on August 12.

Back in June, the New York City Council agreed to cut or transfer about $1 billion from the NYPD budget as part of a larger city budget shortfall due to COVID-19 as well as plans to restructure policing in the city. 

This included canceling the hiring of a new class of 1,000 officers due to a citywide hiring freeze. Trump conflated this decision with the firing of active officers.

In a separate move, about 600 anti-crime unit plainclothes officers were reassigned to new roles — rather than fired — closing one of the last chapters of stop-and-frisk, a controversial police practice that involved both uniformed and plainclothes officers temporarily detaining, questioning and searching residents who were overwhelmingly black or Latino.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign released an ad on August 5 that features altered photos of Joe Biden to make it seem as if he was “hiding” in his basement in Delaware instead of taking questions from the press. 

The narrator of the 30-second ad, which was posted on social media, says: “Deep in the heart of Delaware, Joe Biden sits in his basement. Alone. Hiding. Diminished. Refusing to answer questions about the crazy far-left ideas he’s adopted.”

As the narrator says “alone” and “hiding,” Biden is shown sitting on the floor at a watch party for a college football game in December 2019. The uncropped photo, which was taken in Coralville, Iowa, by a Gazette of Cedar Rapids photographer, shows he was neither “alone” nor “hiding” at the gathering, which was also attended by members of the press.

The Gazette called out the Trump campaign for using the “unauthorized and altered Gazette photo to criticize Biden.”

When the ad’s narrator says the word “diminished,” another photo of Biden is shown as he rubs his forehead in what could be a basement. But it’s actually an edited photo of Biden at an outdoor campaign event — also in Iowa — in September 2019. In the original photo, which was taken  by Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine, Biden is holding a microphone and there are trees in the background.

Biden has limited his public appearances during the pandemic, instead doing lots of interviews and virtual town halls from the basement of his home in Delaware. However, neither photos featured in the ad shows Biden in his basement.

Contrary to President Trump’s statement, the U.S. is not “at the bottom of the list” of the worldwide COVID-19 mortality rate, both with or without New York cases. While the mortality rate is lower excluding New York, it remains high when adjusted for population and compared to other countries.

The U.S. mortality rate is currently 48.37 per 100,000 people, the fourth highest rate in the world, following the UK, Peru and Chile, according to data by Johns Hopkins. 

Without New York, the U.S. has a rate of 39.7 deaths per 100,000 people as of August 4. At least 15 of the most affected 20 countries have lower mortality rates than that, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

Although it is true that cases in New York contributed significantly to U.S. numbers at the beginning of the pandemic, there are now spikes in cases at or above New York’s initial level across the country.

In a series of tele-rallies, President Donald Trump distorted Joe Biden’s stance on education, claiming that his Democratic opponent wants to “abolish charter schools” and “end school choice.” 

Trump first made such claims at a tele-rally in Wisconsin on July 17 and again the following day at a tele-rally in Michigan. 

Although it is true that Biden opposes allocating federal funding to “profit charter schools,” schools managed by for-profit companies make up only a fraction of all charter schools.  Biden also does not oppose school choice overall, but only vouchers for private school tuition, which generally allow lower-income students put state dollars meant for their education toward private schools. Last January, Biden explained that “[diverting] public funds to private schools” undermines “the entire public education system.” 

Trump’s distortion of Biden’s stand on education gleaned from the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations, a 110-page document on policy recommendations released on July 8. 

President Donald Trump has been distorting Joe Biden’s immigration proposals. He first issued an indictment of his Democratic rival’s policies during a press conference at the White House on July 14, and continued on the following morning.

But Biden has never proposed to “sign new immigrants up for welfare immediately,” as claimed by Trump. He suggested, instead, to reverse a Trump administration rule that makes it harder to obtain a U.S. visa or green card for immigrants likely to use specific public benefits, such as MedicAid, food stamps and housing assistance. The rule was introduced in July 2019 and took effect the following October. 

The task force on immigration created by Biden advisers along with advisers from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former presidential campaign made a similar recommendation, but neither Biden nor the committee proposed to immediately extend blanket public assistance to immigrants regardless of their legal status.

In remarks Sunday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged schools to provide full-time, in-person learning in the fall despite community transmission of COVID-19 rising in many U.S. states. DeVos suggested that there is no danger “in any way” if kids are in school. 

DeVos’ claim is unsupported and overlooks severe COVID-19 cases — some of which resulted in deaths — among children in the U.S. Although it is true that children are less likely than adults to be infected with COVID-19, tens of thousands of people younger than 18 contracted the virus in the U.S. The data collected so far does not suggest that it is not dangerous “in any way” for kids to return to classrooms. 

Last week, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said the U.S. hasn’t tested enough kids to actually know whether and to what degree kids can drive the spread of the virus. 

In April, the CDC studied the pandemic’s effect on different ages in the U.S. and concluded that social distancing is important for children, too, for their own safety and for that of others. 

Kids could in fact spread the virus among themselves, as well as infect more vulnerable adults, such as teachers, parents and grandparents.

The agency’s current guidance for communities on the reopening of K-12 schools says that “full sized, in person classes” present the “highest risk” of spreading the virus and advises to wear face masks, spread out of desks, stagger schedules, eat meals in classrooms instead of the cafeteria as well as “staying home when appropriate” to help slow down the spread of the virus.

Trump can’t unilaterally cut federal funding for schools, as highlighted by House Democrats on June 8.

“Congress provides federal education funding to support some of the most vulnerable young people in our country,” said Evan Hollander, a spokesman for the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. “The president has no authority to cut off funding for these students, and threatening to do so to prop up his flailing campaign is offensive.”

However, Trump could  restrict some pandemic relief funding and decline to sign or veto future legislation for federal grants and bailouts for schools.

Trump and his administration have previously proposed cutting federal grants for schools as well as reducing the Education Department’s budget, but Congress, which has oversight power when it comes to federal grants, has continued to reject these proposals.

“As with all legislation generally, Congress oversees the grant’s implementation to ensure that the federal administrating agency is held accountable,” as stated in a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service on federal grants.

On June 7, Florida reported an increase of 7,347 cases, with 2,066 of those coming from Miami-Dade County, according to the state’s Department of Health. This marked a state record of a 16.27% positivity rate, which is more than double the national seven-day moving average, according to Johns Hopkins University. The WHO suggested that the rate should remain 5% or lower for at least 14 days before states start to reopen up.

Before Florida started reporting a steady rise in coronavirus cases throughout June, the highest number it had recorded in a single day was 1,413 on April 17.

The state’s 43 hospital ICU’s in 21 counties have hit capacity and show zero ICU beds available, according to data by the Agency for Health Care Administration.

President Donald Trump and his team repeated multiple times that he was responsible for deploying the National Guard to deal with rioting in Minnesota.  The first time Trump took credit for the deployment was during an interview with Nexstar on June 17.

 “I brought it out five days after they started. They wouldn’t use the National Guard. I brought the National Guard to — I told them, I said, ‘You got to get the National Guard.’ We got them in,” he told Nexstar. “Everything stopped in Minneapolis. It was really an amazing thing, actually, to see, and they had no problems after we called out the Guard.”

Two days later, Trump tweeted: “Forced Democrat run Minnesota to bring in the National Guard & end rioting & looting after seeing the destruction & crime in Minneapolis.” 

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany made a similar claim during her official briefing on June 29.

But it was actually Minnesota’s Democrat governor Tim Walz, and not Trump, who deployed the Minnesota National Guard. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, first activated the Guard on May 28, more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to do it himself. According to his office, he was not acting under the president’s advice, but rather under requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul — cities also run by Democrats. Furthermore, the Guard was deployed two days after the riots had started, rather than “five” as Trump said.

As of June 28, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her claim on ABC’s “This Week,” there were 9.95 million confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide. About 25% of those, or 1.2 million, were in the U.S., according to University of Oxford’s project, Our World in Data. This made the U.S. the country with the highest number of cases in the world, followed by Brazil with 1.31 million cases as of that day. However, the U.S. did not have the most cases per capita: as of June 28, they had 7,584 confirmed cases per 1 million people. Nine other nations, including Qatar, Chile , Kuwait and Peru, had higher cases per 1 million people (respectively 32,509.91, 14,007.27, 10,394.65 and 8,370.44).

As for deaths, the U.S. also led all countries, with 125,539, or 25%, of the 498,521 worldwide deaths. But again, the U.S. –  with 379.27 confirmed deaths per 1 million people – had fewer deaths per capita than eight other nations, all in Europe. Belgium ranked first, with 839.72 deaths per capita, followed by the United Kingdom with 640.99, Italy with 574.18 and Sweden with 522.81 deaths per capita.