Verifying the Republican National Convention Claims

(CNN) — The third night of the Republican National Convention has begun in Milwaukee.

CNN’s Facts First team is fact-checking the convention and will update this page throughout the night.

Newt Gingrich on the war in Afghanistan under Trump

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claimed: “President Trump orchestrated an orderly end to the war in Afghanistan in which not a single American has been killed in nearly two years.”

Facts first: Both claims are false.

Although Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban that would see US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the war did not end under his presidency. The last US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021 under the Biden administration.

Furthermore, there is no period of “nearly two years” during Trump’s presidency in which no American soldier was killed. During his four years in office, there were 45 U.S. soldiers killed in combat, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. The longest stretch of time without combat deaths was at the end of his presidency, from March 2020 until he left office in January 2021 – less than a year.

By Jennifer Hansler of CNN

Former Trump intelligence chief misleadingly claims: “The Taliban are back”

Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence in 2020, said Wednesday night that under President Joe Biden, “the Taliban are back.”

“After four years of Joe Biden, the wars are back, the Taliban are back and ISIS members have slipped through America’s broken southern border,” Grenell said.

Facts first: The claim that the “Taliban are back” is misleading because it suggests that the Taliban were ever gone.

Although the Taliban returned to power after the US withdrawal in 2021, they maintained a presence in Afghanistan throughout former President Donald Trump’s administration. The US under the Trump administration and the Taliban signed a historic agreement in 2020 that set in motion the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump administration officials also met with Taliban representatives in Doha “on multiple occasions” over the course of nearly a year, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a 2019 report.

By CNN’s Haley Britzky

Rep. Ronny Jackson’s false claim about “record inflation”

Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson claimed in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday that there has been “record-high inflation” under the Biden administration.

Facts first: That is wrong. The record for US inflationwhich was set in 1920 is 23.7%; the peak of the Biden era was 9.1% in June 2022Jackson could certainly claim that there was a four-decade high under Biden – the June 2022 figure was the highest since late 1981 – but he came nowhere close to setting a new record.

In addition, Jackson failed to mention that inflation has fallen sharply since its Biden-era peak two years ago. The current inflation rate for June 2024 is 3%.

By Daniel Dale of CNN

RNC Chairman’s False Claim About Russian Nuclear Missiles Near Cuba

RNC Chairman Michael Whatley claimed in his opening remarks Wednesday night that Russia had parked “a boat armed with nuclear missiles” in Cuba.

“Where are we today? Russia attacked Ukraine,” he said. “They parked a nuclear missile-powered boat 90 miles off our coast in Havana, Cuba.”

Facts first: This claim about the status of a Russian boat is false. Although a Russian nuclear submarine visited Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy ships, all ships – including the submarine – have since left the country.

A group of four Russian Navy ships arrived in Cuba on June 12. Pentagon and State Department officials stressed that this was a routine activity, noting that Cuba hosted Russian ships every year between 2013 and 2020. A Pentagon spokesman, Major Charlie Dietz, said in June: “Given the long history of Russian visits to Cuban ports, these are considered routine naval visits, especially in the context of increased U.S. support for Ukraine and NATO exercises.”

The nuclear submarine Kazan was the first ship to leave Havana on June 17.

By CNN’s Haley Britzky

RNC video falsely claims there was peace in the Middle East under Trump

A video shown at the start of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night claimed that President Donald Trump’s “strength” had preserved “peace in the Middle East.” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley had similarly claimed in his speech on Monday that the Middle East had been “at peace” under Trump four years ago.

Facts first: The claim that peace reigned in the Middle East under Trump is false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords, which Trump’s administration helped negotiate and in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed to normalize relations with Israel in 2020 (Morocco and Sudan followed) there were still many unresolved armed conflicts in the Middle East when Trump left office in early 2021.

The list included the civil war in Yemen, the civil war in Syria, the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on the border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former Secretary of State Aaron David Miller called “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran in the air, on land, and at sea.” In addition, attacks on the United States, its allies, and civilians in unstable Iraq continued.

“That is a highly inaccurate statement,” Miller, who worked on Middle East peace negotiations during his administration and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last fall when Trump himself made a similar claim that he had achieved peace in the Middle East.

Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called the claim “false” when Trump made it. In a November email, she wrote: “The Abraham Accords did not create peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence in Israel and Palestine escalated in the wake of the accords (by any metric you can imagine – death tolls, settlement violence, etc.).”

By Daniel Dale of CNN

RNC video quotes right-wing think tank without mentioning it

In a video played at the start of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy was attacked. A spokesman said: “The Defense News reports today that the U.S. military is in decline and the threats from China are formidable.”

Facts first: This claim is misleading. Defense News, an independent publication that covers national security, did not claim that the U.S. military was in decline. Rather, the publication claimed reported that this claim was made by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation.

An October 2022 article in Defense News was headlined “US military in decline, threats from China ‘massive,’ report says.” The article explained that these claims came from “a new report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that analyzes military strength and threats to America each year.”

By Daniel Dale of CNN

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