Darren Samuelsohn is a senior policy reporter for Politico.

From the minute that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton open their mouths at the debate on Monday night, they’re going to be relentlessly fact-checked—by each other, by the media, and, of course, by POLITICO.

But at this point in the year, they’ve already stretched the truth enough times that we can do better than real-time fact-checking—we can offer a preview: the facts they love to stretch, because they keep doing it.


If the candidates’ stump speeches and past debate performances are any indication, there will be plenty of opportunities for all to point out the missteps, truth-stretching and moments where they’re just plain wrong.

Here are some of the statements to watch out for in Monday’s debate—six topics on which Trump and Clinton fudge the truth on a frequent basis.

Trump’s claim: “I was totally against the war in Iraq.”

The truth: Trump was for the Iraq War before he was against it.

It doesn’t matter to Trump that fact checkers keep calling him out over his insistence he was against the U.S. going to war in Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion. He keeps saying it anyway, including twice just last week during a rally in Fort Myers, Florida.

But his repeated claims do not erase the record. It all starts with a September 2002 Howard Stern interview first uncovered by BuzzFeed, in which Trump responds to the question of whether he agreed with the Bush administration as it tried to sell the country on the need to go to war. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump replied.

From there, several other fact-checking outlets have uncovered instances where Trump hardly sounds like a peacenik. In an interview with Fox News in late 2002, about three months before the war began, Trump actually sounded impatient about George W. Bush’s dithering on launching an attack. Then, speaking with the same network just two days after Bush announced the start of the war, Trump sounded a bullish note on how he thought the invasion would affect the economy, predicting the stock markets would “go up like a rocket.”

Trump didn’t make his first public forays into the anti-war world until summer 2004, when he called the war a “mess that we’re in” during a lengthy Esquire profile.

Clinton’s claim: “What I did [with emails] was allowed by the State Department …”

The truth: Those damn emails weren’t "allowed."

The former secretary of state has apologized and said she made a mistake in setting up a private server to use for work-related emails. “I’ve got no excuses,” she told an Orlando, Florida, ABC station last week when asked about her trustworthiness in the wake of months of harsh headlines about how she communicated while running the State Department.

But Clinton has also been on shaky ground in how she’s characterized the authorization she had for what she did. “What I did was allowed by the State Department, but it wasn’t the best choice,” she said last October during a Democratic primary debate. She repeated that explanation in May when a national ABC News reporter broached the topic during an interview.

In fact, the State Department’s inspector general explained in May that it found “no evidence” that Clinton requested help or got approval to set up her private email system. And if she had asked, Foggy Bottom wouldn’t have given her the green light because of its own internal rules about federal record-keeping and the “security risks” associated with potential hackers.

What’s more, even Clinton had ruled out the very same behavior she engaged in when it came to her State employees. Yes, that’s her electronic signature on a June 2011 cable published by Fox News showing her ordering her federal employees to “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.”

Trump’s claim: “Fifty-eight percent of African-American youth are not working.”

The truth: Trump is way off on the data about black youth.

Trump has been pretty upfront with African-Americans, urging them to drop their longtime loyalty to the Democratic Party because that support has amounted to little in the way of economic success. “What the hell do you have to lose?” he asked during a visit to Central Michigan last month.

To bring his point home, one of Trump’s favorite riffs is about just how few young African-Americans have jobs right now. For example, during a stop in High Point, North Carolina, last week, Trump said that “58 percent of African-American youth are not working.”

Trump should know better than to keep using that line. He’s been flogged repeatedly by fact checkers for similar statements.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the latest data actually show that the unemployment rate for African-Americans ages 16 to 24 is 15.7 percent.

The Trump campaign maintains that it gets to the 58 percent figure by counting up both the young people who are trying to find jobs but can’t get them and also the ones who are “not in the labor force.” But that’s a pretty misleading way of sizing up the situation. Under his definition, Trump is counting busy students as unemployed, whether or not they’re looking for a job.

Clinton’s claim: “Under [Obama’s] leadership, we’ve created 15 million new private-sector jobs.”

The truth: Obama’s jobs record isn’t quite so rosy.

President Barack Obama isn’t on the ticket this year, but his economic agenda certainly is.

So it’s no wonder that Clinton won’t budge from one of her favorite lines this campaign about the number of private-sector jobs that have been created since the economic collapse that crushed the country at the tail end of the Bush administration.

Here’s how Clinton said it earlier this month in front of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: American businesses “have created 15 million new jobs since the recession.” At the Democratic National Convention in July, she said that since Obama took office, there have been “nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs.”

This is an overstatement by about 5 million jobs.

Clinton’s measurements are based off the rock bottom of the economic collapse, which didn’t come until February 2010, when Obama had been in office for more than a year. In fact, if she’s going to claim a job number for the Democratic administration in which she served, she should begin with January 2009, when Obama was sworn in as president.

Sure, the country’s economic situation in those initial months was still a byproduct of the Bush years, but it’s the most complete assessment of Obama’s time in office. And, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the net job growth in the U.S. during the current president’s two terms is about 10.5 million new private-sector jobs.

Trump’s claim: Clinton supports “open borders” and a “550 percent increase” in Syrian refugees.

The truth: Trump is wrong about Clinton’s plans for immigration and refugees.

Some of Trump’s loudest applause on the campaign stump comes when he talks about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, a barrier that he says the Mexicans will pay for. But the same applause lines about immigration that go over so well with adoring crowds have earned him the wrath of fact checkers.

For starters, Trump can’t seem to accept that there are indeed solid numbers on how many illegal immigrants are in the U.S. “It could be 3 million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is,” he said last month. But the Department of Homeland Security in 2012 put out a figure on this exact topic: 11.4 million. And if he wants more recent data, he can go to the Pew Research Center, which earlier this week tallied up the total at 11.1 million in 2014.

Trump is also inaccurate when it comes to his descriptions of Clinton’s immigration stance. No surprise here, really, given that we are in a presidential campaign. But Trump said again last week during a North Carolina rally that his Democratic opponent was for “open borders.” In fact, her position includes supporting recent immigration legislation that sought to heighten the country’s border security while installing a new system that finds people who have overstayed their visas and has them removed from the U.S.

Clinton’s plan for handling the Syrian refugee crisis keeps getting similarly bungled by Trump. Last week provided the latest instance of this, when Trump issued a statement vowing to oppose Clinton’s “550 percent increase in the number of refugees from the conflict in Syria.”

The truth is, there’s no basis in that figure. Trump has taken a plan Clinton issued where she said she would welcome 55,000 additional refugees from the war-torn country over the course of a single year, and extrapolated it out at the same rate of expansion for the duration of a four-year term. On top of that, Trump’s assumption implies Clinton would continue with the Obama administration’s latest budget proposal for fiscal year 2017, where the U.S. would accept 100,000 refugees. Clinton, in fact, has said no such thing.

Clinton’s claim: Trump “doesn’t make a thing in America except bankruptcies.”

The truth: Actually, Trump has made some things in the USA.

Plenty of fun has been had by Clinton and her entire campaign mocking Trump on the hypocrisy of his vows to bring jobs back to the U.S. when his own private businesses routinely look elsewhere for materials.

“He doesn’t make a thing in America except bankruptcies,” Clinton said during a Philadelphia rally on the day after the end of the DNC. A week later in Colorado, she doubled down, “Now, when Donald Trump is asked about where he makes things, he makes them anywhere else but America.”

Two of her staffers even trolled Trump at his own New York skyscraper’s gift shop, making a video of their summertime adventure buying a Trump shirt made in Lesotho, a Trump tie made in China and a Trump hat from Peru.

By all means, the Clinton campaign is on some solid ground for bashing Trump in going outside the U.S. for many of his products. A variety of fact-checking sites have also backed up the Democrat by going on their own Trump shopping binges to purchase everything from cuff links and eyeglasses made in China to a suit made in Indonesia.

But while Trump acknowledges he has indeed outsourced some of his supply chain, some items that carry his famous last name appear to be very much made in America.

According to the website Politifact Virginia, Trump products manufactured in the U.S. include the cologne “Success by Trump,” Trump Ice Natural Spring Water (sourced from New York or Vermont) and Trump Wine, though the winery’s website includes a disclaimer that the presidential nominee himself has nothing to do with the company.