Former President Donald Trump repeated a broad range of false claims, internet rumors and outlandish conspiracy theories during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, many of which might have seemed unintelligible without a deep understanding of obscure corners of far-right social media.
It included a variety of baseless claims about abortion, campaign rallies, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and bribes to government officials — not to mention a sensational rumor about immigrants in Ohio stealing and eating pets. And he denied any shift in his perspective on the 2020 election, falsely claiming there was “so much proof” that he won it.
While some of the claims may have been familiar dog whistles to people who spend time on fringe message boards, it’s not clear how the outlandish rumors may have landed with everyone else. The debate drew more than 57.5 million viewers, according to ABC, which hosted it.
Late in the debate right before the second break, Trump released a torrent of vague claims alleging corruption in the Biden administration.
“You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid millions of dollars,” he said. “He’s afraid to do it — between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine. They get all this money from all of these different countries. And then you wonder why is he so loyal to this one, that one, Ukraine, China? Why did he get $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow’s wife? Why did she pay him $3.5 million? This is a crooked administration, and they’re selling our country down the tubes.”
None of that appears to be based in fact. There is a debunked claim that Hunter Biden received $3.5 million from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, which was included in a GOP report four years ago but attributed only to a “confidential document.”
Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about the volume of conspiracy talk during the debate.
Trump’s embrace of internet rumors disappointed some allies who had hoped he would keep the focus on kitchen table concerns such as inflation in the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson vented his frustration during the debate, posting on X that Trump’s “stupid” advisers “got Trump to repeat your lie about the pets.”
And after the debate, some of Trump’s allies kept up the pace with a fresh conspiracy theory about Harris, asserting without evidence that the earrings she wore must have had mini-speakers in them.
Harris, by contrast, seemed to try to use the debate to appeal to people outside her base, mentioning that she’s a gun owner and boasting about how the Biden administration has increased domestic oil production.
The debate offered a sense of how much Trump has been consumed by internet personalities outside the mainstream in his bid to reclaim the White House. Among the people on his plane Tuesday was Laura Loomer, a far-right social media influencer and self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has made sharing pro-Trump fringe conspiracy theories her full-time job.
In recent weeks, Trump has done a series of interviews with right-wing influencers such as Logan Paul and Adin Ross, whose audiences skew young and male.
And Trump’s personal internet brand is now centered on his own social media platform, Truth Social, where his vows to lock up political enemies get a warmer reception than they would on more popular apps, such as Instagram or YouTube.
Tuesday’s debate represented a collision of those two media ecosystems: the relatively small and insular far-right online world and the more traditional nationwide audience.
“In recent years, Democrats have usually been the party that’s too online and stuck in a left-wing bubble,” Josh Kraushaar, a political analyst for Fox News Radio and editor-in-chief of the political website Jewish Insider, wrote on X.
“At this debate, it was Trump who relayed a (false) online social media meme about migrants eating cats that showed his team in its own bubble,” he wrote.
It wasn’t the first time Trump has made a tactical error by revealing his ties to the insular world of the online far right. In a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, Trump declined to condemn white supremacist groups and told one extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” And in 2022, he promoted several posts on Truth Social about the fringe QAnon conspiracy theory.
During Tuesday’s debate, one of Trump’s bizarre claims related to abortion. In response to a question from ABC News moderator Linsey Davis, who asked him about his changing views on the subject, he accused Democrats of supporting “execution after birth” — which isn’t legal in any state, as Davis noted in a fact-check during the debate.
Trump said, in particular, that a former governor of West Virginia whom he didn’t name was in favor of executing newborns. But he was most likely confusing that state with neighboring Virginia and its Democratic former governor, Ralph Northam. In 2019, Northam spoke about nonviable pregnancies in an interview that abortion opponents later distorted, according to fact-checks from The Associated Press and Reuters.
Trump mentioned some internet rumors only in brief asides, as when Harris brought up the subject of his campaign rallies, saying people had started “leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” (Several news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, have reported early departures from Trump rallies.)
Trump fired back without evidence that, at her rallies, Harris is “paying them to be there” — an allegation that the nonpartisan PolitiFact ruled to be false after it spread in right-wing media circles last month.
Other times, Trump raised conspiracy theories that were most likely too vague to be fact-checked. Midway through the debate, Trump spoke about election security and alleged that an unspecified “they” are trying to get illegal immigrants to vote.
“They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” he said in one answer, without giving specifics about who was allegedly involved in the plot.
Trump has in the past alleged that “millions and millions” of votes are cast illegally, some of them by noncitizen immigrants; researchers and news organizations have regularly debunked the claims.
