Donald Trump will paint a grim picture of America while accepting the GOP presidential nomination Thursday. | Getty Trump’s RNC address: Fact or fiction? The GOP nominee rolled out a series of frightening statistics about the state of the nation. They ranged from accurate to incomplete to outright false.

Donald Trump will paint a grim picture of America while accepting the GOP presidential nomination Thursday, describing a crime-ridden nation in economic decline whose standing is slipping abroad.

In his prepared remarks , Trump makes his case with a string of eye-opening statistics. But while some of those stats are spot on, others are misleading due to a lack of context — or are outright falsehoods.


Here’s POLITICO’s fact check of Trump’s Republican National Convention address.

National Security and Immigration

Hillary Clinton proposes admitting new Syrian refugees “despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from.”

That’s untrue. In fact, the federal government has an extensive screening process for refugees—a process that often takes 18 to 24 months to complete and includes in-person interviews and biometric checks. That’s a major reason why the U.S. has taken in so few Syrian refugees, despite President Obama’s promise to increase that number. Trump’s statement may be referring to congressional testimony last year by FBI Director James Comey. He said, “I can’t sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that there’s no risk associated with this.” However, that’s very different than saying there’s no way to screen them whatsoever.

“The number of new illegal immigrant families who’ve crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015.”

Trump’s speech suggests a surge of illegal-immigrant families is swarming into the U.S. over the Mexican border, but Trump’s figures are garbled. Such immigration did pick up this year, but seems to be ticking down again and is still below the surge in 2014 that caught the Obama administration off guard.

Looking just at immigrants crossing as families this year, 29,682 people in families were intercepted coming across the southern border since January, according to the Border Patrol. Total immigrant family crossings in 2015 were 53,840 people, the agency’s stats show.

So, where did Trump get his assertion that the numbers “this year” are more than all of last? He may be using the federal government’s fiscal year that starts in October. Since October, 51,152 people came across illegally in families, versus 39,838 in Fiscal 2015. That sounds high, but in Fiscal 2014, 68,445 illegal family-border crossers were identified.

“The Iran [nuclear] deal ... gave back to Iran $150 billion.”

Trump often criticizes the United States for giving $150 billion to Iran through the nuclear deal. He’s referring to the Iranian assets that the U.S. froze through its sanctions. Experts aren’t certain how much is frozen in total, with many estimating a lower figure.

The nuclear deal allows Iran to access some of this money as the U.S. and other countries lift sanctions on Tehran. However, other sanctions remain in place and so far, Iran has only received a few billion dollars under the deal. The reasons for that are varied and Iran will likely unlock more funds in the months and years ahead. But they haven’t suddenly received a $150 billion windfall as Trump suggests.

Crime: “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by [the Obama] Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities.”

Trump’s picture of a nation beset by violent crime is drawn almost entirely by a spike in murders and shooting in many big cities, but the official, national numbers still show such violence below where it was when President Barack Obama took office.

Trump cites a 17% increase in homicide in America’s 50 largest cities in 2015, a figure that appears to come from a Washington Post analysis of data the paper gathered earlier this year. The FBI’s annual report for 2015 is still not out, but a half-year report out in January had murders up 6.2% nationally. Still, according to the official, full-year national tallies, murder rates have declined nationally under Obama from 5.4 per 100,000 in 2008 to 4.5 in 2014.

Republicans react to Trump's RNC speech Gov. Scott Walker and Representatives John Mica and Mark Sanford react to Donald Trump's speech in Cleveland. Produced by Beatrice Peterson.

Trump’s claim that the blame lies with Obama is also a dubious assertion since the vast majority of policing is done at a municipal or county level. It’s possible Obama’s pronouncements on police-involved violence have contributed to some pull-back on the part of local cops, but it’s difficult to believe that the federal government is the key actor in whatever is behind the surge.

“The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year.”

Trump may actually be understating the case, but the total number of police intentionally killed while on duty each year is relatively small, so it’s hard to know whether swings in the figures represent a trend or random variation.

Trump’s statement seems to be taken from a July 9 USA Today story that said 26 officers had been shot and killed up to that point this year, compared with 18 to the same point last year — an increase of 44%, according to statistics from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Sadly, five more officers have been shot and killed in the past 10 days or so, including three in Baton Rouge, La. Sunday and one in Kansas City, KS Monday, bringing the tally of officer gun deaths to 31, or 58% higher than this point last year, the organization said .

The Economy: “America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.”

The claim, one he’s made on the campaign trail, is untrue. Among the world’s developed nations, the U.S. tax rate is below average. As a share of GDP, the total U.S. tax rate – at all levels of government -- is 24 percent, compared with the 34 percent average in the OECD. Among the 34 OECD countries, just Chile and Mexico collected less in 2012, the Tax Policy Center notes .

Breaking it down into individual income rates, the U.S. still isn’t “one of the highest.” The top federal individual income rate in the U.S. is 39.6 percent, which doesn’t crack the top 40 in the accounting firm KPMG’s list of top rates in over 100 countries. Adding state and local taxes would push the U.S. up, but at the same time the 39.6 percent rate also doesn’t account for deductions and breaks.

“Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000.”

This one is true. In 2000, real median household income was $57,724. By 2014, it was down to $53,657, a bit higher than its post-recession low of $52,605 but still $4,000 below its 2000 level.

“Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers.”

The impact of immigration on U.S. wages is very much in dispute, with many studies finding none at all. Harvard economist George Borjas, the most eminent scholar to doubt immigration’s benefits, worked mightily to demonstrate that immigration was depressing wages for native-born Americans but found no significant effect except for high school dropouts. Between 1990 and 2010, he found, immigration lowered wages for high-school dropouts by 6.2 percent in the short run and 3.1 percent in the long run.

“Nearly four in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African American youth are not employed. 2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when the President took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.”

Trump is technically right that 58 percent of African-Americans between 16 and 24 were not employed in June, but that statistic is highly misleading. That figure includes many people who are not looking for a job — students, for instance. Economists look at the unemployment rate instead. For African-Americans, the youth unemployment rate was 22.4 percent in June.

As for Latinos in poverty, Trump’s claim overshoots federal data. The best data on poverty comes from the Census Bureau. In 2009—the year Obama took office—12.35 million Hispanics lived in poverty. By 2014, the most recent data, it was up to 13.1 million. That’s still a significant increase but the Hispanic population also increased by eight million during that period. For that reason, the Hispanic poverty rate only increased slightly, from 23.2 percent to 23.6 percent.

President Obama has doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing.

Trump is technically right here but he’s using a misleading statistic. The gross national debt did rise under Obama from just under $10 trillion to over $18 trillion at the end of 2015. But that nominal number is meaningless without providing further context of the U.S.’s ability-to-repay that debt. Experts instead look at a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio for a more comprehensive metric. Under Obama, the U.S.’s debt-to-GDP has risen from 67.7 percent to 101.8 percent—a big increase but not a doubling.

Hillary Clinton

America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country.”

The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs peaked at nearly 20 million jobs in 1979. They totaled 16.8 million in 1994, when NAFTA went into effect. They totaled 17.1 million when George W. Bush moved into the White House in 2001 and 12.5 million when he left in 2009.

They now total about 12.3 million after nearly eight years of Barack Obama's administration. Despite the decline in employment, U.S. manufacturing output has doubled in recent decades, thanks to advances in technology. Taken alone, manufacturing in the United States would be the ninth-largest economy in the world, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

As for NAFTA, it was negotiated by the Republican administration of George H.W. Bush, who signed the agreement in Dec 1992. Bill Clinton won bipartisan approval of the pact after defeating Bush in that year's election and signed the implementing legislation in Dec 1993.

“We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.”

Trump goes hard at Clinton for pushing regime change in Syria and elsewhere, but his message on that point is out of step with what one of his biggest backers—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie—told the convention just two nights ago.

The slam of Clinton for supporting regime change is fair enough: she did unsuccessfully press Obama to take a more aggressive stance against the Assad regime in its brutal conflict with rebels. She also joined Obama in declaring that Assad had to go, even though the U.S. has been ineffectual in making that happen.

What’s odd about Trump’s dig against Clinton for being too hostile to Assad is that Christie leveled just the opposite criticism at the former secretary of state Tuesday.

“In Syria, imagine this, imagine this. [Clinton] called President Assad a ‘reformer.’ She called Assad a ‘different kind of leader,’ " Christie said. "There’s now 400,000 now dead — think about that. Four hundred thousand dead at the hands of a man that Hillary defended."

Christie’s quotes of Clinton were somewhat out of context. In the 2011 CBS interview, she appeared to be quoting comments from lawmakers who’d met with Assad (one of whom happens to be current Secretary of State John Kerry), and she never quite said if she agreed with their assessment.

Either way, it might be wise for the GOP to pick a Syria critique of Clinton: either that she coddled Assad or that she unwisely pressed to topple him. To argue both at once could be a hard sell.

As a final note, the inclusion of Iraq on the list of foreign policy failures is a bit of a dig at President George W. Bush, the president who ordered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump has ripped Bush for this before, but Thursday night, his name was omitted for the loyal GOP audience.