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| Vice-presidential debate: Trump has 'Mt Rushmore' of dictators, says Kaine – live | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| 3.04am BST | |
| 03:04 | |
| Kaine says Trump didn't pay taxes on 9/11 | |
| Question about Syria. Russian-backed Syrian forces and Russian forces are bombing Syrian civilians. Should the United States get involved. | |
| Pence says Syria is a mess. “We’ve got to begin to lean into this with strong, broad-shouldered American leadership. It begins by rebuilding our military... | |
| Pence calls for the establishment of safe zones in Syria, working with Arab partners and an American response to Russian aggression in Syria: | |
| “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.. if Russia chooses to continue to strike... the United States should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime. | |
| Kaine hits Trump for Russian ties: | |
| “Donald Trump again and again has praised Vladimir Putin and it’s clear that he has business connections..” Kaine notes Trump fired former campaign operative Paul Manafort over his Russia ties. | |
| “If you don’t know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, then you’ve got to go back to the fifth-grade civics classes,” Kaine says. | |
| Then he says that the NYT tax story suggests Trump did not pay taxes on 9/11 and that Trump would not rebuild the military. | |
| Pence: “Donald Trump would support our troops.” | |
| Kaine: “He doesn’t pay taxes.” | |
| Pence is kind of seized up on this. He hasn’t stopped Kaine from tying non-payment of taxes to non-support of troops. | |
| Updated | |
| at 3.04am BST | |
| 2.59am BST | |
| 02:59 | |
| Fact check: mass deportations & Syrian refugees | |
| Alan Yuhas | |
| Kaine: Donald Trump supports the mass deportation of 11 million people | |
| During a 10 November primary debate, Trump expressed support for Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, the forcible deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants, sometimes under inhumane circumstances. He was pressed on this support in an interview with O’Reilly, who himself called the operation “really brutal”. | |
| “Well, well, I’ve heard it both ways. I’ve heard good reports, I’ve heard bad reports,” Trump told the Fox News host. “We would do it in a very humane way.” | |
| But Trump has given mixed messages since his early calls for mass deportation, and he has used the phrase “deportation force”. In August of this year, he appeared to have doubts, until finally promising “no amnesty” and a “humane” removal of migrants. | |
| Kaine: the nuclear deal with Iran has prevented Tehran from developing weapons | |
| The nuclear deal with Iran was finalized in July 2015, three years after the end of Clinton’s term as secretary of state, and it does not completely remove Iran’s nuclear program. It removes a reserve of medium-enriched uranium, cuts into its low-enriched uranium, and allows access to international inspectors. | |
| Kaine also appears to exaggerate how quickly Iran could have developed a bomb. During negotiations, intelligence officials and analysts said they believed Iran was two to three months away from bomb capabilities. The terms of the deal extend that “breakout” ability to a year, and have restrictions extending over 10, 15 and 25 years. | |
| Pence: the US doesn’t know who Syrian refugees are and should block them | |
| The government has a fairly clear idea about how many people are in the US without legal authorization. Using data from the Census, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Refugee Resettlement and surveys and analysis from Mexico and Latin American countries, the DHS and nonpartisan Pew Research have each been able to estimate the number, and arrived at similar figures in recent years: around 11.3 to 11.5 million people. The margin of error for these figures is generally around a million people at most – not 20 million as Trump says. | |
| Pew and the DHS both try to account for deaths, under-counted groups, arrivals and departures, and have adjusted their calculations based on decades’ worth of research. Both have found that net migration has stabilized in recent years, and that more undocumented Mexicans are leaving the US than entering it. In other words, recent net migration into the US has hovered near its lowest levels of the last 20 years. | |
| Kaine: blocking Syrian refugees is unconstitutional | |
| On Monday, the seventh circuit court of appeals accused Pence of baseless “nightmare speculation” and compared the governor’s attempt to block refugees to an attempt to exclude black people from his state, Indiana. Pence tried to deny 174 refugees resettlement aid, and the case was taken to court. | |
| “The governor of Indiana believes, though without evidence, that some of these persons were sent to Syria by ISIS to engage in terrorism and now wish to infiltrate the United States in order to commit terrorist acts here. No evidence of this belief has been presented, however; it is nightmare speculation,” Judge Richard Posner wrote in the opinion. | |
| #TBT: | |
| Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional. | |
| Updated | |
| at 3.00am BST | |
| 2.58am BST | |
| 02:58 | |
| They’re still talking about counter-terror. Kaine says alliances are crucial. | |
| That’s why Donald Trump’s claim that Nato is obsolete is so dangerous. | |
| Pence wants to talk about cyber-security. | |
| “We have got to bring together the best experience of this country to understand that cyber warfare is the new warfare... It’s important to remember in this moment that Hillary Clinton had a private server in her home... her private server was subject to being hammered. | |
| An investigation concluded that not one prosecutor would take one additional step, Kaine said. | |
| Pence says that “if your son or my son conducted themselves the way Clinton did, they’d be imprisoned.” | |
| “That is not true,” Kaine says. “That is not true.” | |
| 2.55am BST | |
| 02:55 | |
| Pence: 'you've got to err on the side of safety' | |
| Two different world views on display: | |
| Pence: “You’ve got to err on the side of the safety of the American people.” | |
| Kaine: “By trashing all Syrians? By trashing all Muslims?” | |
| 2.54am BST | |
| 02:54 | |
| Kaine: 'focus on danger, not on discrimination' | |
| Pence says that the Obama administration created Isis by failing to renegotiate a status of forces deal in Iraq. Pence says that the Iran nuclear deal put Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon. | |
| Kaine says the opposite is true. | |
| Quijano asks how Trump’s flagship counter-terror proposal, “extreme vetting” for immigrants, doesn’t address the problem of homegrown terror. | |
| Great question, Pence says, before totally not answering it. He’s talking about Syrian refugees. | |
| Kaine says “you’re violating the constitution by blocking people based on their national origin.” | |
| Kaine: | |
| Hillary and I want to focus on danger. These guys say all Mexicans are bad. ... Donald Trump said keep them out if they’re Muslim. | |
| We should focus on danger, not upon discrimination. | |
| Kaine promises that a Clinton administration would not conduct an anti-terror policy based on discrimination. | |
| 2.54am BST | |
| 02:54 | |
| We take a break from our regularly scheduled fact-checking and live updates to bring you some wacky hand gestures: | |
| 2.50am BST | |
| 02:50 | |
| Kaine says Trump has 'personal Mt Rushmore' of dictators | |
| Next question: Is the terror threat worse now or better? Most Americans feel it’s worse. | |
| Kaine says it’s not as bad, because bin Laden is dead, but we face major challenges. | |
| Kaine then unloads on Trump for his wild speechifying on foreign policy: | |
| “Donald Trump can’t start a Twitter war with Ms Universe without shooting himself in the foot,” Kaine says. | |
| “He said, I have a secret plan,” then he says he knows more than generals, then he says he’d fire the generals: | |
| He trash-talks the military... he wants to tear up alliances... third, he loves dictators, he’s got kind of a personal mount Rushmore... Trump believes that the world will be safer if more nations had nuclear weapons. | |
| Pence is rolling his eyes and rocking. “Oh please,” he says. “Did you work on that one a long time, because it had a lot of creative lines,” Pence says. | |
| “See if you can defend any of them,” Kaine retorts. | |
| 2.48am BST | |
| 02:48 | |
| Fact check: 'open borders' and 'deplorables' | |
| Alan Yuhas | |
| Pence: Clinton and Kaine support “open borders” | |
| Neither ticket supports “open borders”, which the US does not have. Pence appears to be using the word to denigrate Barack Obama’s support for immigration reform and protection for some undocumented people from deportation. But Obama has deported a record more than 2.5 million people since he took office, including a record 438,421 people in 2013, and increased Border Patrol staff to a record 21,444 agents in 2011; his policy could not reasonably be described as “amnesty” or “open borders”. | |
| Clinton supports reform to let people pass background checks and pay back taxes in order to stay in the US, and she supports Obama’s executive actions to shield some migrants, such as people who were brought to the US as children. Like Obama, she supports the deportation for people with criminal records. | |
| Kaine: Trump has “called Mexicans rapists and criminals … He attacked an Indiana born federal judge and said he was unqualified. … He said African Americans are living in hell.” | |
| Kaine is right that Trump has broadly characterized immigrants in derogatory terms, but Trump also almost always gives himself a way out. On 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy, Trump said: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” | |
| Trump’s claim is patently false, as we and fellow fact-checkers have repeatedly shown, since most migrants leave their homes for work or family and the Mexican government has nothing to do with their emigration. Statistics on crime by noncitizens mostly suggest that Mexican migrants – more of whom are leaving the US than entering – don’t affect overall crime rates. | |
| Trump has indeed called judge Gonzalo Curiel unqualified because the American judge is “Mexican”, and said that African Americans are “living in hell”. | |
| Pence: Clinton called half of our supporters “deplorable” | |
| At a fundraiser Clinton said: “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. This group, she said, included “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people. She later regretted the generalization of “half”. | |
| Polling suggests that Trump’s supporters are more likely than other voters to express negative sentiments about minorities. Polls also show lower but significant such sentiment among supporters of Clinton. Her generalization pointed to real racial animus, ignored it among her own supporters and showed how difficult it is to attach a number to racism, even while separate polling shows racism is affecting millions in widespread and systemic ways. | |
| Trump’s complaint contradicts his own past remarks. In 2012, after Mitt Romney was lambasted for dismissing 47% of Americans, Trump agreed, telling Fox News: “You do have a large percentage of people that feel they’re entitled.” Last year he similarly dismissed half of all Americans, telling Fox: “We have a society that sits back and says, ‘We don’t have to do anything.’ Eventually the 50% cannot carry, and it’s unfair to them, but cannot carry the other 50%.” | |
| Kaine: Trump hasn’t apologized to anyone | |
| Trump has expressed regret for having said “the wrong thing” but not said what that thing was or whom he had caused “personal pain”. | |
| 2.46am BST | |
| 02:46 | |
| Kaine says that Trump would go door-to-door, house-to-house, and deport undocumented migrants with a deportation force. | |
| Pence pretends that when Trump said “deportation force” he was just talking about ICE: “We have a deportation force, it’s called immigration and customs enforcement.” | |
| Quijano pushes Pence: Would these migrants be removed? | |
| Pence says, as he has before, that Trump’s plans acknowledges priorities, the first of which is “criminal aliens,” and then visa overstays... these are elements of previous bipartisan plans for reform. | |
| Kaine: “He’s trying to fuzz up what Donald Trump has said. He said we’re building a wall, he said, quote, “they will all be gone”... “We’re a nation of immigrants. .. when Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals... said Judge Gonzalo Curiel was unqualified because his parent was Mexican, I can’t imagine how you can defend that. | |
| Pence does not try to defend that. He looks at Quijano, waiting for the next question. | |
| 2.42am BST | |
| 02:42 | |
| Pence: Trump insults 'small potatoes' compared with 'basket of deplorables' | |
| Next up is immigration reform. Pence says that “Donald Trump has a plan.” | |
| Yes, we know. | |
| Pence describes the plan as increasing border security, helping border patrol, remove “illegal aliens and people who have overstayed their visas,” then we’ll deal with the others. | |
| He doesn’t mention the wall. | |
| Then Pence pivots: “When I listened to the avalanche of insults coming out of senator Kaine...” | |
| “if Donald Trump had said all those things you said he said in the way he said him, he wouldn’t have insulted a fraction of the people Hillary CLinton did when she said we had a basket of deplorables. | |
| That’s small potatoes compared to Hillary Clinton calling a half of Donald Trump’s supporters a basket of deplorables. | |
| Kaine says that Clinton apologized for that remark. Then Kaine asks whether Trump apologized for a long list of bad things that Trump has said and that Kaine has responsibly memorized. | |
| 2.41am BST | |
| 02:41 | |
| Fact check: debt and tax returns | |
| Alan Yuhas | |
| Kaine: ‘The debt explosion on the Trump side is much much bigger than anything on the Clinton side’ | |
| Kaine is correct, according to conservative and nonpartisan thinktanks alike. Clinton’s proposed tax plan would add $191bn to the debt over the long term, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a conservative thinktank. The Tax Policy Center, however, estimates that she would add $1.1tn in revenue in a decade, though much of that would be offset by increased spending. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s plan would add $5.3tn to the debt. | |
| Kaine: Even Richard Nixon released his taxes | |
| Richard Nixon did not release his tax returns while running for president in 1960 or in 1968 – he released them in 1973, after his second term began. In 1968, Nixon only gave a limited glimpse of his to a magazine writer, and only released the returns under pressure from the Watergate inquiry. He released the returns despite an audit by the IRS, which Trump had repeatedly claimed was his reason for not releasing returns. | |
| You can look at Nixon’s returns at the Presidential Tax History Project. You can look at Trump’s 1995 returns at the New York Times. | |
| (PS: If you somehow have access to Trump’s later returns, feel free to send copies along to our offices at 222 Broadway, New York, NY 10038.) | |
| Kaine: Trump and Pence want to privatize social security | |
| Neither Clinton nor Trump has proposed privatizing Veterans Affairs, though Trump has suggested he would appoint someone with private-sector experience to lead the agency (something Barack Obama did in 2014). Trump has also proposed giving veterans an ID card that they could use outside the federal VA system. Pence, on the other hand, supported a 2005 plan that would have modified the program into a private system. | |
| Kaine notes, correctly, that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested and given long sentences. They are also more likely to be shot by police. | |
| Updated | |
| at 2.42am BST | |
| 2.38am BST | |
| 02:38 | |
| Kaine is back: “There is a fundamental respect issue here.. Trump has called Mexicans rapists and criminals.. He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs... attacked a federal judge... said McCain wasn’t a hero because he’s been captured... and he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen.” | |
| Kaine now flips Pence’s accusation from the top of the debate: | |
| I can’t believe that governor Pence would defend the insult-driven campaign that Trump has run. | |
| 2.37am BST | |
| 02:37 | |
| Kaine says it’s important to have a conversation about bias. | |
| Pence: “Why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African American police officer of implicit bias.” | |
| Quijano jumps in, noting that South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott said on the senate floor that he’s been stopped six times for being black. | |
| Pence says he has the deepest respect for senator Scott and “we need criminal justice reform nationally.” | |
| They’re back to agreeing. In fact Pence just referred to “institutional bias in criminal justice.” We just shouldn’t assume the worse about law enforcement, Pence says. “Law enforcement is a force for good.” | |
| 2.34am BST | |
| 02:34 | |
| Relax, everyone. It’s “no contest!” | |
| .@mike_pence is doing a great job - so far, no contest! | |
| 2.34am BST | |
| 02:34 | |
| Pence says his uncle was a cop and he would marvel at his uncle’s sidearm. Police officers are the “best of us,” Pence says. | |
| Pence says, “at the risk of agreeing with you,” I think community policing is a great idea. | |
| Great, everyone agrees! We’re only a half-hour in and everybody agrees. | |
| Then Pence stops agreeing with the Democrat. He decries “the bad-mouthing of people, who seize upon tragedy to use as a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of institutional bias.” | |
| Pence says Clinton has referred to “implicit bias” in law enforcement. “We ought to stop seizing on these moments of tragedy,” Pence says. “Enough of this seizing on every opportunity to demean law enforcement.” | |
| Kaine says people should not be afraid to bring up the issue of bias in law enforcement. | |
| “I’m not afraid,” Pence says. | |
| 2.33am BST | |
| 02:33 | |
| Fact check: wages and Trump's business | |
| Alan Yuhas | |
| Pence: ‘He’s created a business that’s worth billions of dollars’ | |
| There is no direct evidence that Trump’s business is worth billions of dollars – the only tax return publicly available, published by the New York Times last weekend, shows that he reported a $916m loss in 1995. Trump could prove the worth of his business by publishing his returns. Forbes estimates Trump is worth $3.7bn, far lower than his claimed $10bn. | |
| Kaine: Trump would let states decide whether to be rid of the minimum wage | |
| Kaine is correct insofar as Trump has a position on minimum wages, if he’s talking about the federal minimum wage, specifically. | |
| Trump has changed his position on the minimum wage at least three times, including within the span of a single interview. On 26 July, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked him where he would set a federal minimum wage, he repeated a stance from May that the US does not need one: “There doesn’t have to be.” | |
| He then immediately changed his position: “Well, I would leave it, and raise it somewhat.” A day later in Florida he said he wanted a $10 an hour minimum wage, up from the current level of $7.25, and confirmed to a reporter: “federal”. He has most consistently said that states should decide a minimum wage. | |
| Updated | |
| at 2.33am BST | |
| 2.31am BST | |
| 02:31 | |
| Kaine describes a “debt explosion of the Trump plan.” | |
| Next question: law enforcement. Yesterday Trump said the country has race riots every night. Question is, do we ask too much of police officers? | |
| Kaine says, good question. He was mayor of Richmond when there was a high homicide rate there which he cut in half, he says. He says Virginia was a top-ten safe state when he was governor. He says that the key is community policing. Building bonds between communities and the police force. | |
| “That model still works,” Kaine says. Then he hits Trump for backing stop-and-frisk. | |
| “That would be a mistake,” Kaine says, because it hurts police-community relations. | |
| Kaine: “I’m a gun owner, I’m a strong second amendment supporter. But I’ve got a lot of scar tissue.” He talks about the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. He says closing loopholes in background checks are needed. | |
| “We can support the second amendment and do things like background record checks to make it safer.” | |
| 2.30am BST | |
| 02:30 | |
| Evan McMullin, the independent you may or may not know is also running for president, has weighed in from far (far) off-stage: | |
| Sorry @timkaine, @HillaryClinton did not "revive the hunt for bin laden." I was there. | |
| Ben Jacobs interviewed Evan McMullin last month about his longshot candidacy. | |
| 2.29am BST | 2.29am BST |
| 02:29 | 02:29 |
| Fact check: tax cuts and crisis | Fact check: tax cuts and crisis |
| Alan Yuhas | Alan Yuhas |
| Kaine claims that the Bush era tax cuts were a direct cause of the financial crisis: | Kaine claims that the Bush era tax cuts were a direct cause of the financial crisis: |
| The tax cuts signed by George W Bush lowered taxes on income, capital gains and dividends, and had several provisions to help married people, parents and the poor. They greatly benefited the wealthy, and unsurprisingly became a symbol of the way inequality in the US has yawned into a chasm between the rich and everyone else. But while inequality may be a destabilizing force in the economy, the tax cuts themselves were not one of the factors that drove the 2008 crisis. | The tax cuts signed by George W Bush lowered taxes on income, capital gains and dividends, and had several provisions to help married people, parents and the poor. They greatly benefited the wealthy, and unsurprisingly became a symbol of the way inequality in the US has yawned into a chasm between the rich and everyone else. But while inequality may be a destabilizing force in the economy, the tax cuts themselves were not one of the factors that drove the 2008 crisis. |
| A lack of regulation on Wall Street, on the other hand, ranks among the more important causes of the crisis, whose causes include rampant, feckless mortgage lending, irresponsible bundling of those mortgages, and carelessness by ratings agencies and central bankers. | A lack of regulation on Wall Street, on the other hand, ranks among the more important causes of the crisis, whose causes include rampant, feckless mortgage lending, irresponsible bundling of those mortgages, and carelessness by ratings agencies and central bankers. |
| Kaine: ‘15 million new jobs’ gained in the Obama administration | Kaine: ‘15 million new jobs’ gained in the Obama administration |
| Kaine is cherry picking statistics, and the 15 million figure is not correct in context. | Kaine is cherry picking statistics, and the 15 million figure is not correct in context. |
| Since Obama took office in January 2009 the US has created 10.8 million private-sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Clinton is counting back from the depths of the economic recession, in early 2010, which would erase a full year off of Obama’s presidency. | Since Obama took office in January 2009 the US has created 10.8 million private-sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Clinton is counting back from the depths of the economic recession, in early 2010, which would erase a full year off of Obama’s presidency. |