As his polls have soured in recent weeks, Donald Trump has turned to an old chestnut, warning about the hellscape that awaits America if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected.

He has said she would “obliterate” Social Security and Medicare, and “destroy” the country. He’s said she would “end” not just fracking but also fossil fuel use as a whole. He has predicted her election would lead to a stock market crash on par with the Great Depression. And on Sunday, he even predicted annihilation.

“There will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III!” Trump said on X.

But if you are looking for your own personal American Nostradamus, you might want to look elsewhere. Trump’s prognostications on this front have regularly proved wrong. Indeed, he predicted many of the same things about the Biden-Harris administration, and they still haven’t happened.

Politics as a business is full of hyperbole, and politicians often warn broadly about their opponents’ plans. But Trump has made very specific predictions about what would befall the country in ways that allow us to examine his track record.

So let’s do that.

A stock market crash/new Great Depression

Perhaps the most illustrative example is Trump’s predictions about the stock market and an economic disaster. Just as he warns of a Great Depression-esque crash under Harris, he warned of much the same with Biden.

“You will have a depression, the likes of which you’ve never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell and it’ll be a very, very sad day for this country,” he said at an October 2020 debate.

“Our country will go into a depression, the likes of which we have not seen since 1929, and maybe worse,” he said in New York that month.

“We will go into a depression, no different than — maybe worse — no different than what happened in 1929. Your stocks will crash, your 401(k)s will be worthless. This is going to happen,” Trump said in August 2020.

Trump added in the same comments, “I’m very good at predicting these things.”

The U.S. economy has not faced a depression or even a recession. The gross domestic product has grown by a similar rate under Biden as it did under Trump (if you exclude the wild swings during the pandemic). The unemployment rate has been similar (again, not including the pandemic). And the stock market has continued to hit new highs — including the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday.

(For more on how the economy under Biden compares to Trump, see our post with all the charts here.)

Trump’s prediction about 401(k)s has also been wrong. After a setback in 2022, balances are higher today than they were when Trump was president, according to numbers from Vanguard.

Lockdowns

“If you vote for Biden, it means no kids in school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas and no Fourth of July together,” Trump said in Arizona in 2020, while warning about lockdowns under a Biden-Harris administration. “Other than that, you have a wonderful life.”

But the first year of the Biden-Harris administration featured extensive school reopenings. The Education Department reported the percentage of public school students learning in-person full time rose from 46 percent when Biden took office to 95 percent by the end of the year. The school data company Burbio did a survey finding similar numbers.

The federal government did not ban family gatherings for holidays or weddings, and many schools held in-person graduations in the spring of 2021.

$7 to $9 gas

“Your gasoline will go up to 6, 7 dollars,” Trump told rallygoers in Michigan on Nov. 1, 2020.

“If Biden got in, you’d be paying $7, $8, $9,” he said the next day in the same state.

Gas prices did rise under Biden, but not to the level Trump predicted. The peak national average for regular unleaded, according to AAA, was just over $5 nationally and $5.22 in Michigan, both in 2022. The current averages are down substantially from that, though — $3.35 nationally and $3.40 in Michigan.

Gas prices under Trump were generally between $2 and $3 per gallon.

China ‘owning’ the United States

“China will own our country if he gets elected. They will own our country,” Trump said in August 2020.

“If Biden wins, China will own the USA, and you know it,” Trump said in October of that year.

This one’s a bit more subjective. But it’s worth noting that Chinese imports have fallen during the Biden administration, even as other countries have become more reliant upon Chinese products. U.S. imports from Mexico actually surpassed those from China.

Wiping out the Second Amendment

“If they get in, they will absolutely — either obliterate it to a point of no return or actually terminate it. And I have no doubt about it. I have absolutely no doubt about it,” Trump said in his August 2020 speech.

“He’ll … confiscate your guns,” Trump added in October.

The Second Amendment still exists, and there has been no real Democratic effort to repeal it or confiscate guns on a broad scale. Congress passed and Biden signed the most significant gun restrictions in decades, expanding background checks and increasing tools for preventing troubled people from having guns. But it was only the most significant because Congress rarely restricts gun rights. (The bill got some bipartisan support.)

Gun manufacturing, meanwhile, has hit new highs under Biden.

Eliminating police departments, borders and religious liberty

While making the prediction about confiscating guns, Trump also predicted Biden would “dismantle your police departments, dissolve our borders” and “terminate religious liberty.”

The federal government hasn’t dismantled police departments, and data suggest police hiring is on the rise after declines stemming from the pandemic and the racial justice protests after the police killing of George Floyd. Illegal border crossings have hit record highs, but our borders have not been literally dissolved (and crossings are now the lowest in four years, dating back to the Trump administration). Religious liberty has not been terminated.

Banning fracking and destroying Pennsylvania energy

Trump often pitched the demise of the energy industry in Pennsylvania.

“Joe Biden will ban fracking and abolish Pennsylvania energy,” he said in Erie, Pa., in October 2020.

“To all the people of Pennsylvania, hear this warning: If Biden was elected, he will wipe out your energy industry,” Trump added.

“Last year, I visited the Shell petrochemical plant in Beaver County, the largest investment in your state’s history,” he said. “Our opponents will put it out of business.”

The Shell plant is still open. Fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) is still legal and has played a key role in sending U.S. crude oil production to new highs, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. And Pennsylvania’s energy industry is the second-largest net supplier of energy to other states.

In the same speech, Trump made another prediction unrelated to energy.

“Kamala — by the way, she will not be your first woman president,” he said.

We’ll see if that prediction pans out in a little more than two months.

Accepting the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris made no explicit mention of the history that would follow her election. Her mentions of women were restricted to descriptions of her work as a prosecutor or to reproductive rights. She mentioned her South Asian heritage only in the context of her mother, who emigrated from India to the United States.

We can assume that Harris’s speech was attuned to public opinion polling of what targeted voters want to hear and, by extension, that the polls or Harris sought not to draw explicit attention to her gender and racial background. Perhaps it was in part because Democrats are still stinging from Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 effort, in which the unofficial campaign slogan — “I’m with her!” — was not subtle about the historic stakes.

Polling from Fairleigh Dickinson University released on Friday, though, suggests that an explicit embrace of Harris’s identity might prove beneficial as Election Day approaches.

The poll took an unusual approach to the question of electoral support, beginning by asking respondents to evaluate the importance of various issues to their vote. A third of respondents got only policy-centered issues, like immigration or taxes. A third had “the race or ethnicity of the candidate” added to the mix. The last third were presented with “whether the candidate is a man or woman” (but not the item about race).

Overall, Harris had a healthy lead over former president Donald Trump, though that came only after the question about issue importance and therefore could have been influenced by the issues offered. Which was the point: The pollsters wanted to determine whether having race or gender at top of mind when choosing a candidate influenced the results.

It did. Overall, Harris had a seven-point lead. Among those who weren’t presented with the race or gender questions — who weren’t “primed,” in Fairleigh Dickinson’s verbiage — Trump and Harris were essentially tied. Among those who had been presented with gender as an issue, Harris had a 10-point advantage. Among those presented with race as an issue, she had a 14-point lead. (The overall seven-point lead combines those three groups.)

Among men, being primed with the gender issue didn’t have much effect. Among women, though, it was the difference between a 16-point Harris advantage (the unprimed group) and a 26-point one. White respondents preferred Trump by 11 points when they weren’t primed on race or gender. When primed on race, they narrowly preferred Harris. Among non-White respondents, Harris’s 16-point advantage among the unprimed jumped to a 36-point one after hearing about race as an issue.

The poll also segmented responses by gender in an interesting way. Respondents were asked whether they saw themselves as “completely” masculine or feminine or some less-strong descriptor, like “mostly” or “slightly.”

About half of men chose the “completely” modifier, a group the pollsters refer to as “traditional” men. Those were by far the strongest supporters of Donald Trump. Men who didn’t select that descriptor preferred Harris by 20 points. The “completely masculine” men preferred Trump by more than 30 points, leading to a Trump lead among men overall.

That includes “completely masculine” men who were primed with the gender issue. Among those who weren’t primed on race or gender, Trump had a 52-point lead.

The intertwining of Trumpism and perceived masculinity appears in other polling, too. On Saturday, the New York Times assessed the overlap of age and gender in its polling conducted with Siena College. The article focused on how younger men (members of Gen Z) felt as though they were disadvantaged by changes in society. What’s striking, though, is that young men didn’t differ much in their views of the election relative to older men. The big gap among younger voters was driven by the extent to which younger women preferred Harris.

What’s useful about the Fairleigh Dickinson poll in particular is that it incompletely incorporates an element of the election that hasn’t yet emerged to a significant extent. Campaigns often test messages and attacks to carefully tailor their messages for television ads and mail. (And, as noted above, speeches.) This poll offers that in a microcosm: What happens to voters if they make their decision while considering what makes Harris unique?

The answer is that she benefits.

Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back in the headlines — not for suspending his campaign last week and endorsing Republican Donald Trump, nor for his recent admission that he was the one who had left a dead bear cub in Central Park as a joke a decade ago.

This time, the macabre spotlight is refocused on Kennedy, the 70-year-old nephew of the late 35th president, because of a resurfaced 2012 interview in which his daughter shared he had once used a chain saw to cut off a whale’s head to bring it home, reportedly to study.

According to Town & Country magazine, Kennedy once heard that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port and “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.”

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, told the magazine then. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

It is unclear why the 2012 interview regained traction this weekend, though it comes just weeks after Kennedy admitted in a social media video that he was behind the bear cub carcass left in Central Park in 2014. In May, Kennedy also revealed that doctors had discovered a parasitic worm in his brain in 2010, though his campaign did not elaborate or provide medical records that could confirm his claim.

Kennedy’s latest bizarre story involving a dead animal has prompted a push by one environmental group to look into whether Kennedy committed felonies if he did indeed saw off a whale’s head and strap it to the roof of his car.

In a letter Monday to government officials, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund requested that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) open an investigation into whether Kennedy violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.

It is illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive, protected under either statute, the group wrote, noting that several whale species in the Atlantic Ocean are included and that “continued possession of any whale skull” would represent an ongoing violation of the law.

“Furthermore, Mr. Kennedy’s apparent transport of the marine mammal skull from Massachusetts to New York, and therefore across state lines, also represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by United States in 1900,” Brett Hartl, national political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, wrote in the letter.

The Arizona-based group endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president last month and was one of several environmental groups that denounced Kennedy’s candidacy earlier this year.

“There are good reasons why it is illegal for any person to collect or keep parts of any endangered species. Most importantly, vital research opportunities are lost when individuals scavenge a wildlife carcass and interfere with the work of scientists,’ the letter continued. “This is particularly true of marine mammals, which are some of the most difficult wildlife species in the world to study. Indeed, some beaked whales are so difficult to observe that the only way scientists have learned about them is when dead ones wash ashore.”

Representatives for Kennedy and for the NOAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. In an email to The Washington Post, Hartl said that if Kennedy had discarded the whale skull in the trash, resulting in the destruction of the evidence, “then he would likely be insulated and not subject to criminal or civil penalties.”

“We are asking for an investigation because it is an unknown and important to resolve. The story made it seem like this was normal behavior for him, so he may also possess additional illegally collected wildlife parts,” Hartl added, referring to the recent video in which Kennedy described collecting a bear carcass and leaving it in New York City’s most popular park.

Kennedy’s campaign was also riddled with plenty of controversies that were not related to animals. Last month, Kennedy faced accusations of sexual assault from a woman who later told The Post that he contacted her by text to privately apologize to her for his behavior.

“I’ve said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy,” Kennedy said on a podcast in response to the allegations. “… I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

Special counsel Jack Smith filed his appeal Monday of U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s decision to dismiss Donald Trump’s classified documents indictment, a ruling the judge made after finding that Smith’s appointment exceeded his power as a government officer.

Cannon’s decision “conflicts with an otherwise unbroken course of decisions, including by the Supreme Court … and it is at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government,” Smith wrote in the appeal.

The July 15 ruling was a stunning rebuke to a historic set of charges, in which the former president was accused of repeatedly breaking the law by allegedly stashing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.

Smith had quickly vowed to appeal Cannon’s decision in the hopes of getting a higher court to revive the case against Trump. He filed his legal argument one day before the formal deadline set by the federal appeals court in Atlanta.

The court filing argues that the implications of Cannon’s decision could extend far beyond special counsel appointments to many other types of government officials.

“The district court’s rationale could jeopardize the longstanding operation of the Justice Department and call into question hundreds of appointments throughout the Executive Branch,” Smith wrote.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

There are a few data points that Donald Trump relies upon to evaluate his political popularity.

There’s polling (though he tends to cherry-pick polls to highlight those that show him doing better and to ignore or misrepresent those in which he’s trailing). There’s the size of his crowds (though here, again, he regularly offers up false assertions about how many people came to see him and how many attended rallies hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris). There’s the stock market (which, continuing a theme, is eternally up because of Trump and down because of Harris, no matter what is happening). And then there’s his old standby: television ratings.

On Thursday, as Harris was preparing to formally accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Trump alerted his followers on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, that he would be “doing a call-in to [Fox News host] Bret Baier and group after her Speech.” He promised to be “very honest in my assessment,” which certainly feels like a doth-protest-too-much thing to say.

The actual appearance was a bit odd. The hosts, Baier and Martha MacCallum, repeatedly tried to get a word in as the brief conversation was wrapping up. (This has historically been one obvious reason that Trump likes doing phone-in interviews.) After it was over, clips of Trump talking about President Joe Biden with Baier and MacCallum gently giving him the hook got a decent amount of traction online. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mocked Trump’s “scream-of-consciousness call to Fox News” and its abrupt ending in a column.

Trump noticed.

“Bret Baier of FoxNews called me, I didn’t call him, just prior to the Kamala Convention speech, and asked me if I would like to critique her after she is finished. I agreed to do so!” Trump wrote on social media Sunday morning. He repeated his criticisms of the speech and then declared Dowd to be “WRONG” in saying he called the network. “I don’t have to make calls to go on TV, or anything else — They call me! It’s called Ratings, I guess, and I’m the ‘Ratings Machine!’”

Let’s set aside the distinction without much difference here involving Dowd saying “call to” in lieu of “call with Fox News.” Instead, let’s focus on how much good Fox’s deployment of the “Ratings Machine” did for their numbers.

Over the course of the convention, Fox News was running a steady and consistent third behind CNN and MSNBC, the other two major 24-hour news channels. This isn’t terribly surprising given that Fox’s audience skews more heavily Republican and therefore was less interested in even the network’s relatively modest coverage of the convention. In the six hours from 6 p.m. until midnight each night, Fox News had over 3 million viewers in only two, both on Monday. MSNBC, by contrast, beat 3 million viewers in 17 of those 24 hours. (These numbers are from AdWeek.)

The worst night for Fox was the night Michelle and Barack Obama spoke. But Thursday, the night Harris accepted, wasn’t that great either. The network had about 2.6 million viewers in the 9 p.m. hour, fewer than half of what MSNBC got. In the 10 p.m. hour, during which Harris began speaking, Fox’s audience fell to 2.3 million.

But then the Ratings Machine kicked in, and Fox News’s audience jumped to … a bit under 2.8 million. It was the network’s third-best hour during the span of the convention, an improvement of about 170,000 viewers over the 9 p.m. hour. It was also less than a third of the audience tuning in to CNN and MSNBC’s convention coverage that hour.

Trump has long insisted that he is a remarkable ratings magnet. During the 2016 campaign, for example, he regularly gave the impression that his show “The Apprentice” was a consistent ratings winner. In reality, it was the top-rated show in the country only once, in its premiere season. The idea that ratings were both a measure of his popularity and something at which he excelled seems nevertheless to have taken root.

On Thursday, it didn’t seem to do much for Fox. Trump has 7.6 million followers on Truth Social, a group he was encouraging to join him as he posted about the Harris speech in real time. The increase from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. was about a half-million people; the increase from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. a third of that.

There’s a better indicator that Trump might not be a Ratings Machine than these metrics, mind you. If Fox News thought that Trump would draw viewers like a magnet, they wouldn’t have tried to cut him off. Instead, they transitioned quickly to Greg Gutfeld’s joke-related show, letting the Ratings Machine presumably get back to his customers at his club.

Lawmakers investigating the assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump visited the site of the shooting in Butler, Pa., Monday and said they were working methodically to produce a definitive, nonpartisan account of an event whose facts remain murky.

The nine members of a House of Representatives task force toured the Butler Farm Show grounds and met with local law enforcement officials. Several members expressed astonishment at the proximity — about 430 feet — between the rooftop where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim on July 13 and the podium from which Trump was speaking to a crowd of his supporters.

“When you’re actually walking these grounds, when you’re actually going to the building, when you’re actually up on the roof … if you can actually look at that, right now, in person … it’s like, okay, I got it, I know where that was,” said Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who represents the Butler area.

The visit was led by Kelly, the panel’s chairman, and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), an army Special Forces veteran who is the ranking Democrat.

The task force, established July 29 by a unanimous vote, is composed of seven Republican and six Democratic lawmakers. It has subpoena authority and has assumed control over all House committee investigations into the assassination attempt and the security lapses that surrounded it.

Crooks was able to fire eight times before he was killed by Secret Service sharpshooters. The bullets killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, seriously injured two others and wounded Trump in his right ear.

Lawmakers from both parties said the panel’s work would transcend political divisions to establish what happened and give the public an accounting they could trust.

“We’re in the midst of an election cycle right now, and all of us are going to have those tough debates,” Crow said. “But in the United States of America, you do not get to attempt to assassinate our elected officials and our candidates. It’s unacceptable. And we are standing here in a bipartisan way to send the message that we won’t tolerate it.”

Four of the seven Republican members of the panel missed the tour: Reps. Mark Green (Tenn.), Mike Waltz (Fla.), Clay Higgins (La.) and Pat Fallon (Tex.). Their absence was not explained at the news conference.

Along with Kelly, GOP Reps. David Joyce (Ohio) and Laurel Lee (Fla.) were there, as well as Democrats Crow and Reps. Lou Correa (Calif.), Madeleine Dean (Pa.), Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.), Glenn Ivey (Md.) and Jared Moskowitz (Fla.).

“It is so important that this task force has the opportunity to do what we did here, to actually walk these grounds, to see this area, to get an understanding of the physical space and where this security shortcoming took place,” Lee said. “And I’ll tell you, for many of us, it raises more questions than we came here with today.”

Panel members declined to answer questions about preliminary findings they might have. Asked about earlier comments made by Waltz, who told the New York Post last week that he was skeptical of reports that Crooks acted alone, Moskowitz said it was “too early to make that determination.”

“I don’t think anyone on the task force has seen any hard evidence that would suggest that would be the case,” the lawmaker said.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service, said the agency is fully cooperating with oversight efforts by the House congressional task force as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s independent review panel, the DHS Office of the Inspector General and the FBI.

“Our desire to learn from this failure and ensure it never happens again is unwavering and we welcome any and all efforts towards that end,” Guglielmi said in a statement.

The panel has said its primary goals are to ensure accountability, prevent future security failures and investigate the communications breakdowns between the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies that enabled an armed gunman to access the roof and nearly kill the former president.

House lawmakers have made clear they want decisive action in response to the security failures.

Late last week, just before Secret Service officials briefed lawmakers on their investigation of the assassination attempt, the agency headquarters notified five agents involved in the Butler rally that they were being asked to work from home on “nonoperational duties,” according to two people familiar with the action who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.

The five included three agents and the top boss from the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office, which took the lead in crafting or overseeing a security plan for Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, and also an agent on Trump’s security detail who visited Butler ahead of the visit to help with that plan, the people said.

The five agents were told to telework, which is not a disciplinary action and does not involve any finding of possible wrongdoing, the people said.

Asked Friday why these employees were instructed to telework, Guglielmi said the Secret Service’s “mission assurance review is progressing, and we are examining the processes, procedures and factors that led to this operational failure.”

“The U.S. Secret Service holds our personnel to the highest professional standards, and any identified and substantiated violations of policy will be investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility for potential disciplinary action. Given this is a personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further,” Guglielmi said in a statement.

Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report

“Don’t let Kamala Harris fool you. Not only does Harris support taxing service workers’ tips, news reports confirm Biden and Harris have weaponized the IRS to confiscate your tip money. Biden and Harris have literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

— Voice-over of Trump campaign ad, released Sunday

One of Vice President Kamala Harris’s first policy proposals after formally securing the Democratic nomination for president was to support ending federal income taxes on tips. Former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, immediately cried foul, saying she stole an idea that he announced in June. Harris announced her proposal earlier this month in Nevada, a battleground state with a gaming and hospitality industry where many workers receive much of their income in tips.

This Trump ad, which earned 8 million views within 48 hours of being posted on X, is intended to suggest Harris is simply playing politics and has no intention of eliminating taxes on tips. With images of actors portraying IRS agents in dark suits and sunglasses invading a person’s home, the ad accuses the Biden administration of having “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

This is all false.

The Facts

Though Harris embraced the idea after Trump, she has released more details of her tip plan than her opponent. She would impose a cap on earnings, perhaps $75,000, to prevent upper-income workers from seeking to declare some income as tips. She would also not exempt Social Security and Medicare taxes from being collected. The Trump campaign has refused to clarify whether tip income would be exempt from payroll taxes, and the ad says “only President Trump has a plan that ends all taxes on service workers’ tips.” That suggests he wouldn’t have the government collect those taxes, either.

Dean Baker, a Social Security expert and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said that would mean substantially lower Social Security benefits for workers who rely on tips, which could have a big impact because people receive much more of their earnings in retirement benefits at lower wages. “If not counting tipped income reduces their average lifetime earnings by $3,000, it would reduce their yearly Social Security benefits in retirement by $2,700, or $225 a month,” he wrote on X.

As for the ad, it uses a classic attack-ad tactic — citing an obscure bureaucratic proposal to make wild allegations. We had to consult with four tax experts and industry officials to even begin to understand what was going on.

The ad relies on an IRS announcement in February 2023 that it was seeking comment on a proposal to consolidate three voluntary tip reporting programs into one called the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA). The federal government for decades has sought to tax tip income, but because tips were largely in cash, it was complicated for both employees and employers. Even though wait staff might receive most of the tips, they often share a portion of their tips with workers in the kitchen or at the front desk. The programs used formulas to calculate what all employees should be earning in tips, with taxes applied accordingly.

Since 2013, the IRS has tried to come up with a new system that streamlined the process and took advantage of new point-of-sale technologies that collect data on tips. After all, Americans increasingly do not use cash to pay for restaurant bills, including tips, and rely instead on credit cards or payment apps. This data makes it easier to determine what an average worker’s tip would be. A study conducted by the Trump administration found that nearly $1.7 billion in tip income had not been reported in 2016.

“It’s pretty good the IRS put this out for comment,” said Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former IRS taxpayer advocate. “The whole point of the proposal is to reduce the number of audits that would need to be done.”

SITCA, like the programs it would replace, would be voluntary. The IRS received comments on the initial draft, and industry officials say the agency has not signaled any intent to enact SITCA.

In fact, the plan has been shelved.

“Treasury and the IRS have no plans to move forward with the voluntary program and, as such, there are no new reporting or compliance components,” Treasury spokeswoman Ashley Schapitl told The Fact Checker. “We continue to carefully consider comments received in response to the proposed guidance.”

The ad, however, falsely claims the proposal has already been implemented, with such lines as: “Biden and Harris have literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

Nope, that’s false.

The ad also tries to project verisimilitude by claiming “news reports confirm” that the Biden administration “weaponized the IRS to confiscate your tip money.” The citations are from conservative news organizations or interest groups in 2023. They were echoing talking points released by House Republicans in 2023 eager to claim that Biden had violated his pledge not to increase audits of people making less than $400,000. The pledge was made after the IRS received an influx of tens of billions of dollars to improve service and boost audits of wealthy Americans.

Last month, the IRS said that as result of the additional resources, it has collected $1 billion in back taxes from about 1,500 delinquent millionaires and billionaires.

Olson said the images in the ad were especially misleading because criminal investigators — the IRS agents who invade homes — are not in the business of conducting audits and because about 85 percent of audits are a letter from the IRS asking for more information.

The Trump campaign noted that the lowest wage earners are audited at a much higher rate than the wealthy. But the report it cited attributed that problem to the IRS being starved of funds and unable to hire enough agents. (This was before Biden obtained $80 billion from Congress for the agency.) In a September letter to Congress, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said the agency was seeking to reduce correspondence audits of people who took advantage of tax credits aimed at lower-income workers.

In a statement, the Trump campaign falsely accused the Biden administration of wanting to hire “an army of 87,000 new IRS agents” (a Four-Pinocchio claim) and insisted Harris and Biden “want this newly empowered IRS to target tipped workers.”

The Pinocchio Test

To recap, the Trump campaign claims Harris can’t be trusted on her no-tax tip plan because the IRS proposed a plan to streamline three programs to help employers calculate tip income. But the proposal has been shelved. So, leaving aside the exaggerations about what the proposal would do, it’s simply false to claim Harris “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

The Trump campaign earns Four Pinocchios.

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The impact of independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspending his presidential campaign Friday and endorsing Donald Trump remains to be seen.

It’s more likely to be a boon to Trump than to Vice President Kamala Harris, given Kennedy was drawing significantly more votes from the right and from would-be Trump supporters. But Kennedy’s share of the vote was at about 5 percent and falling.

One thing that’s relatively evident, though: To the extent the remaining third-party and independent candidates pull votes and even potentially play spoilers, it appears more likely to be at Harris’s expense.

Kennedy’s exit leaves three significant names below Trump and Harris on at least some state ballots: Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent Cornel West.

All three come from left-leaning backgrounds. Stein and West are both generally further to the political left than Harris. Oliver’s potential appeal is harder to define, as it often is with Libertarians. But he’s a former Democrat and left-leaning Libertarian who defeated a more right-wing candidate at May’s Libertarian National Convention.

And the party chairwoman surmised in June, when President Joe Biden was still in the race, that Oliver was “going to pull two-to-one from Biden, as opposed to Trump.”

Plenty of people speculated after the 2016 election that third-party candidates — and especially Stein — cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. That overlooked how Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson counteracted Stein somewhat by pulling votes from the right. But Johnson was a former Republican governor; the field of non-major-party candidates this time isn’t so balanced.

And the limited evidence we have thus far suggests they should have more appeal to the left.

These candidates are pulling such small percentages of the vote (around 1 percent or less) that it’s difficult to say with any certainty who they’re hurting. But the polling offers some clues:

• A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed Stein and West each pulling about 1 percent of Democratic-leaning voters and less than half a percent of Republican-leaning ones.
• A Fox News poll showed both taking 1 percent of Biden 2020 voters; more than either took among Trump 2020 voters. (Both got zero percent from self-described “conservatives.”)
• A New York Times/Siena College poll also showed both taking more from 2020 Biden voters than 2020 Trump voters.
• And a Marquette University Law School poll showed Stein taking 6 percent among less-partisan Democrats, her highest level of support among any group on the partisan spectrum. (She took nothing from any Republican-leaning group.)

Oliver is currently drawing about evenly across party lines in the Fox, Times/Siena and Marquette polls, making him somewhat more of a wild card. But a recent Monmouth University poll showed he was at least an option for more Democrats; 1 percent said they would definitely support him (compared with zero percent for Republicans), and fewer Democrats ruled him out entirely (66 percent) than Republicans (72 percent).

There is plenty to argue against these candidates ever playing spoilers.

Many voters who support them might otherwise just stay home rather than vote for a major-party candidate. You can’t just transfer their votes directly to the side they overlap with more, as many disappointed Democrats did with Stein in 2016.

The numbers we’re talking about here are also very small — significantly smaller than in a race that included Kennedy. And ballot access could pose a hurdle. Stein has so far qualified in about half of swing states and learned she will remain on Wisconsin’s ballot Monday. As for West, Republicans are trying to salvage his ballot spot in Arizona and he was only recently cleared for North Carolina’s ballot. Oliver has more extensive ballot access as the nominee of the Libertarian Party, which is generally the country’s third-ranking political party.

But to the extent these candidates get on the ballot, Stein and West especially, very small numbers could matter. The pivotal states in the last two presidential elections, after all, were decided by less than a point — 0.7 percent in Pennsylvania in 2016, and 0.6 percent in Wisconsin in 2020.

And Stein isn’t the only candidate whose past races showed how those small numbers could make a difference. Oliver was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for Senate in Georgia in 2022. He took just 2 percent, but he forced the race into a runoff.

Former president Donald Trump sought to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to the United States’ deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan on Monday, accusing her and President Joe Biden of overseeing “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”

Days earlier, Harris had taken a not-so-subtle dig at Trump as commander in chief during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She said she would “never disparage [military members’] service and their sacrifice,” a nod to some of Trump’s comments about veterans — including his former chief of staff’s allegation that he called American war casualties “suckers” and “losers,” an account Trump has sharply denied.

With just over two months until the election, Trump and Harris are vying for the high ground on military issues, debating not just who would keep America safe, but also who would best care for the needs of veterans and who holds the U.S. armed forces in the respect they deserve. Neither candidate has served in the military, and both are stressing their diplomatic and foreign policy successes. Both are also surrounding themselves with veterans to vouch for them, including their running mates, who have engaged in their own fierce back-and-forth about military service.

On Monday, Trump attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, joining family members of troops slain in the Aug. 26, 2021, attack outside Kabul’s airport as the United States was pulling out of Afghanistan. The former president sought to tie Harris to America’s chaotic withdrawal, a key decision of Biden’s that Harris has said she was consulted on.

Thirteen U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans died in the attack when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive in the closing days of the grueling U.S.-led evacuation effort. The Biden administration has said the deaths were a tragedy but has stood by the president’s decision to end a 20-year war that he argued was making little progress.

Democrats spent a large portion of their convention last week playing up Harris’s argument that she is ready to be commander in chief on Day One. She recounted meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022 “to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade” and said she had helped mobilize the global response against the Russian invasion.

“I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas,” she said in the speech. “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.”

But Harris also warned that Trump would undo the foreign policy progress of the Biden administration and embolden America’s enemies, saying that he “threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could ‘do whatever the hell they want.’” In February, Trump said he had told a foreign leader he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries he viewed as not spending enough on defense.

The candidates’ argument over who would stand up better for America’s military comes as tensions are flaring around the world, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s war with Hamas to China’s aggression against its neighbors. While Harris has limited experience with the armed forces, Trump has alternately praised the military, criticized generals and questioned America’s alliances, leaving each nominee potentially vulnerable on the issue.

Trump, in an interview released Monday, again disputed years-old reports, including a public statement by his former chief of staff, John Kelly, that he had referred to people killed in combat as “losers.” “Who would say it?” Trump said in the interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL. “Who would say it? Nobody would say it. A stupid person or a person that’s mentally ill.”

Trump also addressed the National Guard Association of the United States on Monday in Detroit.

Trump’s campaign has assembled surrogates with military experience to vouch for Trump and attack the Democratic ticket. A Monday press call featured allies such as retired Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke, now a Republican congressman, and family members of the service members killed in the Afghanistan exit. Last week, the Trump campaign released a letter from Republican lawmakers who served in the military and accused Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of misrepresenting aspects of his National Guard service.

The Harris campaign has turned to its own raft of supporters to stress that the vice president would be a strong commander in chief.

At the Democratic National Convention, Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Marine who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, brought dozens of elected Democratic veterans onstage during his remarks. He pointed out that Trump had spoken ill of a veteran and former prisoner of war, the late Republican senator John McCain. And he said that Project 2025, a blueprint assembled by conservative groups for the next Republican administration, would “slash veteran benefits and force VA hospitals to close across the nation.” Trump has harshly criticized Project 2025.

Still, both presidential candidates’ self-characterizations omit significant details.

While Harris clearly played a role in the Biden administration’s efforts to shore up NATO and support Ukraine — including speeches at the Munich Security Conference and meetings with Zelensky and other allies — her actions were fully in service to Biden’s vision, as might be expected from a vice president. And while the White House has stressed that Harris was a full governing partner, they have not specified what role she played in key decisions.

Harris told reporters in 2021 that she was the “last person in the room” when Biden made the decision to pull out of Afghanistan, but people familiar with the deliberations have said she did not appear to have influence with Biden on an issue where he was deeply entrenched.

Trump, for his part, has pitched himself as a champion of a strong U.S. military, but his comments about service members have repeatedly been criticized as disrespectful. The latest controversy flared when Trump called a civilian medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the top military award recognizing valor in combat, because the latter often goes to people wounded or killed in service, a comment that drew a rare rebuke from the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly [characterize] the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty,” Al Lipphardt, the commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump belittled the sacrifice of McCain — who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and underwent severe torture — saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

While the nominees go after each other, much of the debate has been conducted by a pair of vice-presidential candidates who both served in the military.

Walz and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, are the first veterans who served after Sept. 11, 2001, to be part of a presidential ticket. Vance served four years in the Marine Corps in public affairs, deploying once to Iraq before departing active duty as a corporal. Walz served 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard, including as a command sergeant major, before retiring in 2005 to run for Congress.

Their exchanges have turned bitter at times, with Vance accusing Walz of “stolen valor” for the way he has characterized his service. Walz has said he retired as a command sergeant major. While he did reach that rank, he did not hold it long enough, or complete the required coursework, to hold the rank in retirement, instead becoming a master sergeant, Minnesota National Guard officials have said.

After the issue emerged this month, the Harris campaign corrected its website to remove that Walz was a retired command sergeant major. It also said that Walz “misspoke” while saying during a campaign event that he had carried weapons “in war,” since he did not serve in a theater of combat.

Some Republicans have also criticized Walz for retiring in 2005, saying he must have known that his unit was probably going to deploy shortly to Iraq. Democrats counter that Walz was well within his rights to retire when he did and already had extended his military career with a reenlistment after the 9/11 attacks. And they note that Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.

Republicans, they allege, are attempting to “Swift boat” Walz, using a term that harks back to 2004, when Republicans attacked Democratic presidential John F. Kerry by questioning his service in Vietnam and whether he deserved the Purple Hearts he received for injuries he suffered. Many people who served with Kerry took strong issue with the GOP criticisms.

Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.

More than 200 Republicans who worked for President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) or the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, warning in a letter that a second Trump presidency “will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”

The open letter with the endorsement was first published Monday in USA Today, with 238 signatures.

The group of former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers issued a similar letter supporting Joe Biden when he ran against Trump in 2020. In their new, pro-Harris letter, alumni from those three top Republicans were joined by at least five former staffers to the late President George H.W. Bush.

In the letter, the GOP alumni wrote that they are voting for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, despite policy differences.

“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz,” they wrote. “That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

Those who signed the pro-Harris letter include Jean Becker, George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff; Mark Salter and Chris Koch, former chiefs of staff for McCain; David Nierenberg, Romney’s 2012 campaign finance chair; and David Garman, undersecretary for energy under George W. Bush.

The letter is not only supportive of Harris but critical of Trump. In it, the Republican alumni say Trump presents a threat to the United States and countries around the world, saying that he and his “acolyte,” running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), “kowtow to dictators like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”

The group also wrote that “moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states” were key in securing Biden’s 2020 victory as they “put country far before party” — and that they must once again “take a brave stand” in this election and support Harris over Trump.

In response to the letter, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email that the group “would rather see the country burn down than to see President Trump successfully return to the White House.”

The letter highlights the continued divisions among Republicans over the party’s embrace of Trump. At the Democratic National Convention last week, several Republicans came out in support of Harris.

Stephanie Grisham, who served as Trump’s press secretary as well as chief of staff to first lady Melania Trump, described her evolution from “true believer” to a critic of the former president, saying that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was her last straw, The Washington Post reported. Grisham also claimed in her speech that behind closed doors, Trump mocked his supporters as “basement dwellers.” (In response, the Trump campaign described her as a “stone cold loser.”)

Other Republicans who spoke at the convention included John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., and former congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.