Fact check: Walz makes false claims about Trump on abortion and the economy

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, made false claims Sunday about former President Donald Trump’s stance on abortion and about the state of the economy when Trump left office.

Here is a fact check of the two claims. The Harris-Walz campaign declined to comment.

Walz’s false abortion claim

In a Sunday interview on Fox News, Walz was asked about Minnesota’s abortion law. After discussing that subject, he pivoted to Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. He said: “Donald Trump’s asking for a nationwide abortion ban.” 

Facts First: Walz’s claim is false. Trump is not “asking for” a nationwide abortion ban. Trump has said since the spring that he wants abortion policy to be set by each individual state, not set by the federal government for the whole country. Trump also promised last week to veto any federal abortion ban that Congress passed.

Trump wrote on social media last week: “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT, BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!)”

As a 2016 presidential candidate, Trump did support a federal abortion ban at 20 weeks of pregnancy (with exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk), and he reiterated his support for that policy as president. But he is not supporting a federal ban during his current campaign.

Trump hinted in March that he might announce support for a federal ban at 15 weeks. Instead, however, he announced in April that he wanted abortion policy left to the states.

He has held to that position since. And he has repeatedly said since April that he would not sign a federal ban; he did so again during last month’s presidential debate.

It’s fair game when Walz notes that Trump refused to commit during last month’s debate to vetoing a federal ban. (Trump argued that “I won’t have to,” suggesting such a ban would never be passed by Congress.) And since predictions about the future can’t be fact-checked, we don’t weigh in when Walz claims Trump “will” implement a nationwide ban.
(Walz has repeatedly invoked Project 2025, a conservative think tank initiative in which many former Trump administration officials were involved, though Trump himself wasn’t. The project has called for the enforcement of an old law banning the mailing of abortion medication and devices, which some critics warn could effectively ban abortion without new legislation.)

But Walz here went beyond discussing the past or predicting the future, making a claim about what Trump is supposedly “asking for” at present. And that claim is wrong.

Walz’s team posted the clip of the inaccurate claim on his social media pages on Sunday, repeating the claim in the captions.

Walz’s false economy claim

Walz said in the Sunday interview that residents of Ohio, a state he visited Saturday, “understand when (Trump) left office, we had more people unemployed, percentage-wise, than the Great Depression.”

Facts First: This is false. The unemployment rate was 6.4% when Trump left office in January 2021, down from a pandemic-era peak of 14.8% in April 2020. Conversely, the unemployment rate was above 20% for years of the Great Depression, which lasted from roughly 1929 to 1939, and it was above 10% for almost the entire 1930s.

Vice President Kamala Harris made a similar but more modest false claim during her debate with Trump in September, saying that “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” Even with the significant “since” qualifier, that wasn’t true; the unemployment rate was higher than 6.4% as recently as 2014.