Category: Fact Checking

It is a classic supernatural horror trope: a team of archaeologists dig through the desert sands to reveal the entrance of an ancient Egyptian tomb, sealed and forgotten for millennia. Carved over the door in hieroglyphics they find an ominous inscription, warning that anyone who dares disturb the tomb will suffer a terrible curse. Undeterred, our intrepid team ventures inside, where they discover the mummified remains of an ancient pharaoh and a hoard of golden treasures meant to accompany him to the afterlife. It is the discovery of a lifetime – one that will bring the archaeologists a lifetime of fame and fortune. Unfortunately for them, however, “lifetime” is a very relative term. One by one, the members of the team are struck down by mysterious illnesses and accidents, until not one is left alive.

The trope of the “pharaoh’s curse” is so engrained in our popular image of ancient Egypt that every new archaeological discovery is inevitably met with countless tongue-in-cheek calls to “put that back where you found it”. While the idea of ancient supernatural curses may seem laughable to us today, myths and legends always come from somewhere. So, is there even a tiny kernel of truth to the pharaoh’s curse? Did the Ancient Egyptians actually place curses on tombs to protect them, and have any archaeologists actually died in a manner that defies logical explanation? The answer may surprise you.

Despite a seemingly infinite amount of pop-cultural claims to the contrary, protective ‘curses’ of the type we usually think of are exceedingly rare in Ancient Egyptian tombs. The vast majority of the inscriptions found in these tombs are ritual in nature, containing instructions to help guide the occupant safely to the afterlife. One of the rare exceptions is found in the 6th Dynasty mud-brick tomb or mastaba of Khentika Ikhekhi:

“As for all men who shall enter this my tomb… impure… there will be judgment… an end shall be made for him… I shall seize his neck like a bird… I shall cast the fear of myself into him.”

The 9th Dynasty tomb of Akhifiti, governor of Hierakonopolis, contains a similar warning:

“Any ruler who… shall do evil or wickedness to this coffin… may Hemen not accept any goods he offers, and may his heir not inherit.”

While the tomb of 18th dynasty architect Amenhotep, son of Hapu, bears the following metal-as-f***k inscription:

“As for anyone who will come after me and who will find the foundation of the funerary tomb in destruction…
as for anyone who will take the personnel from among my people…
as for all others who will turn them astray…
I will not allow them to perform their scribal function…
I will put them in the furnace of the king…
His uraeus will vomit flame upon the top of their heads, demolishing their flesh and devouring their bones.
They will become Apophis [a divine serpent who is vanquished] on the morning of the day of the year.
They will capsize in the sea which will devour their bodies.
They will not receive honors received by virtuous people. They will not be able to swallow offerings of the dead.
One will not pour for them water in libation…
Their sons will not occupy their places, their women will be violated before their eyes.
Their great ones will be so lost in their houses that they will be upon the floor…
They will not understand the words of the king at the time when he is in joy.
They will be doomed to the knife on the day of massacre…
Their bodies will decay because they will starve and will not have sustenance and their bones will perish.”

The vast majority of such curses date from the Old Kingdom period of 2700-2200 B.C.E, and are found almost exclusively in the tombs of private individuals or low-ranking politicians, not pharaohs or other nobility. One famous exception, discovered in the Bahariya Oasis and dating to the Greco-Roman period, reads:

“Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose.”

While certainly fitting our popular image of a “pharaoh’s curse”, such inscriptions were likely intended as a reminder for priests to maintain the ritual purity of the tomb, rather than a warning to would-be grave robbers. As for the rarity of these curses, Egyptologists believe that at the time the act of robbing a grave would have been seen as unthinkable and dangerous to write down. Furthermore, while pharaohs and other nobles had armies of priests to maintain and guard their final resting places, private individuals had no such resources, and would thus have taken every possible precaution – including written curses – to protect their own tombs.

But while such curses did technically exist, accounts of supernatural events tied to Egyptian antiquities do not appear until very recently. One of the earliest such accounts appears in Louis Penicher’s 1699 book A Treatise on Embalming, and tells of a Polish traveller who purchased two mummies in Alexandria for use in making medicine – and yes, once upon a time people did eat mummies as well as grind them into paint as fertilizer, but that is a story for another time. According to Penicher, on the journey home the traveller’s ship was beset by rough seas while he was haunted by ghostly visions – neither of which abated until he finally threw the mummies overboard.

The definitive origin of the pharaoh’s curse legend, however, is usually traced to the early 19th century. In 1821, English surgeon and antiquary Thomas Pettigrew held a bizarre spectacle at the Egyptian Hall, in Picadilly, London: the public unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy. The event caused a sensation, inspiring a trend for similar “unwrapping parties” that lasted decades. The spectacle also inspired writer Jane Loudon Webb to write a fantasy novel titled The Mummy: or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, among the first stories to feature a mummy returning to life and taking revenge on those who dared disturb its tomb. This was followed in 1828 by the children’s book The Fruits of Enterprise, featuring similarly animated and vengeful mummies. In 1869 Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, even took a stab at the genre – penning a short story titled Lost in a Pyramid or: The Mummy’s Curse – as did Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his 1892 story Lot 249. Interestingly, many of these early pieces of mummy fiction were written by women and feature female mummies taking revenge on male desecrators, leading some experts like cultural anthropologist Jasmine Day to interpret the texts as thinly-veiled rape-revenge fantasies.

While French philologist Jean-François Champollion announced his decoding of hieroglyphics from the famous Rosetta Stone in 1822, it was many decades before egyptologists were able to translate ancient Egyptian texts with any confidence. Thus, the idea of the pharaoh’s curse was well established long before any actual written curses were discovered or translated, the trope originating not from actual Egyptian history or mythology but from western Orientalist ideas of the ancient Egyptians as a mysterious, darkly spiritual people. But one event above all others popularized the myth and planted it firmly in the public imagination: the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The tomb of the boy king, who ruled from around 1341-1323 B.C.E. until his untimely death at age 18, was uncovered on November 4th, 1922 by a team led by British archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon. Though tiny compared to other royal tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamun’s was the first to be found almost entirely intact, and contained hundreds of intricately crafted grave goods, many crafted from solid gold. The discovery caused a media sensation, sparking a worldwide craze for all things ancient Egyptian.

On November 29, 1922, Carter finished excavating the staircase leading down to the tomb and cut through the door into the tomb itself. According to Egyptologist Henry Breasted, shortly thereafter Carter dispatched an Egyptian worker to run an errand at his nearby house. On approaching the entrance the worker heard a “faint, almost human cry”, whereupon he rushed in to find Carter’s pet canary dead in the jaws of an Egyptian cobra. Since in ancient Egyptian mythology the rearing cobra or uraeus was a symbol of divine royalty, the incident sparked local rumours of a curse. These rumours would only intensify when, four months after the opening of the tomb, Lord Carnarvon suddenly fell ill and died. Eerily, just six weeks earlier egyptologist Arthur Weigall had observed Carnarvon joking and laughing as he entered the tomb. Turning to a nearby reporter, Weigall quipped: “I give him six weeks to live.” Furthermore, just two weeks prior to Carnarvon’s death, the New York World magazine published a letter by English novelist Marie Corelli claiming that a “dire punishment” would befall anyone who opened a sealed tomb. This chain of coincidences sparked another media frenzy, launching the pharaoh’s curse into the public consciousness. Adding to the legend were reports that at the moment of Carnarvon’s death, the power grid in Cairo blacked out and his dog back at the family estate in Highclere, England, let out an anguished cry and suddenly died.

Carnarvon’s demise would soon be followed by a string of mysterious incidents and deaths. On May 16, 1923, American financier George Jay Gould I died of a fever shortly after visiting Tutankhamun’s tomb, while in 1924 Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, the first person to x-ray the pharaoh’s mummy, died of complications from abdominal surgery. That same year, archaeologist Hugh Evelyn White hanged himself, while in 1925, Howard Carter presented his friend Sir Bruce Ingram with a paperweight composed of a mummified hand adorned with a bracelet inscribed with the words “Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.” Shortly after receiving the gift, Ingram’s house in England burned to the ground. And when the house was finally rebuilt, it was destroyed once again by a flood. Other alleged victims of the curse were Egyptian Prince Ali Kamel Fahby Bey, shot dead by his French wife in 1923; Sir Lee Stack, governor-general of the Sudan, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1924; Aaron Ember, a close friend of Lord Carnarvon’s who died in a 1926 house fire; Arthur Mace, a member of Carter’s excavation team who died of pneumonia in 1928; and Captain the Honourable Richard Bethell, Carter’s secretary, who was smothered to death in a Mayfair club in 1929.

These deaths were more than enough to convince the chronically superstitious of the reality of the curse.

Many nervous collectors began sending their Egyptian relics to museums to avoid becoming the next victims, while avowed spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly speculated that the deaths of Lord Carnarvon and others were caused by “elementals” summoned by Tutankhamun’s priests to guard the royal tomb.

But if any of this is starting to convince you that the pharaoh’s curse is actually real, I am sorry to inform you that the legend simply doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, and that all the deaths commonly attributed to the curse are at best only circumstantially connected and at worse complete coincidences. Take, for example, the death that started it all: that of Lord Carnarvon. According to his autopsy, Carnarvon died of septicaemia or blood poisoning, contracted when he accidentally sliced open a mosquito bite on his cheek while shaving. It was an accident that could have happened anytime and anywhere, and was completely unrelated to Tutankhamun’s tomb. The swiftness of Carnarvon’s death was also unsurprising, for the Earl had been in poor health since being injured in a 1903 automobile accident and was prone to frequent bouts of pneumonia and other illness. Nonetheless, true believers pointed to his unusual manner of death as proof of the curse when, during the first detailed autopsy of Tutankhamun’s mummy, a lesion was found in a similar spot on the pharaoh’s cheek.

The other deaths commonly attributed to the curse are even more dubious, with many of the victims having only a tangential connection to the opening of the tomb – or, in many cases, none at all. But perhaps the greatest strike against the legend is that Howard Carter himself – logically the number one target of a curse – lived for another 16 years, dying in 1939 of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Equally long-lived were Achaeologist J.O. Kinnaman, who died in 1961; Lord Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, who died in 1980; and Sergeant Richard Adamson, who guarded the tomb round-the-clock for seven years and died in 1982. Indeed, of the 58 people present when the tomb was opened, only eight died within the next 12 years. More amusingly still, according to magician and debunker James Randi:

“This group died at an average age of seventy-three plus years, beating the actuarial tables for persons of that period and social class by about a year. The Curse of the Pharaoh is a beneficial curse, it seems.”

Though Carter himself dismissed the curse as “Tommy-rot”, he was ironically partially responsible for its spread. As James Randi explains:

“When Tut’s tomb was discovered and opened in 1922, it was a major archaeological event. In order to keep the press at bay and yet allow them a sensational aspect with which to deal, the head of the excavation team, Howard Carter, put out a story that a curse had been placed upon anyone who violated the rest of the boy-king.”

Carter also attempted to ward off reporters by selling the exclusive rights to the story of Tut’s tomb to the Times of London. This arrangement, which caused every other news outlet to be at least a day behind The Times in reporting on the excavation, encouraged reporters to concoct sensational stories to capture the public’s attention. Such wholesale speculation and fabrication led to newspapers reporting that the tomb contained written curses when none, in fact, existed. The only vaguely curse-like inscription in the entire tomb was found on a shrine containing a statue of Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of embalming. This inscription merely states “It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am for the protection of the deceased”, but by the time the translation reached the press it had acquired an additional passage: “…and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever.” Soon, this had metamorphosed further into the far more menacing: “They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death.”

Yet while 100 years have passed since the opening of Tutankhamun’s Tomb, the legend of the pharaoh’s curse is still alive and well. In 1972, when Dr. Gamal Mehrez of the British Museum died after supervising the transfer of Tutankhamun’s treasures to an exhibit in London, his death was widely blamed on the curse. More recently in 2021, the transfer of 22 mummies from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization was blamed for a string of strange incidents across Egypt, including a train crash, a building collapse, and the container ship Ever Given becoming stuck in the Suez Canal. Former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass dismissed the claims as ridiculous, but Hawass himself is not immune to the superstition. In 1996, while moving the mummies of two children from Bahariya Oasis to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Hawass reported being haunted by apparitions of the children in his dreams. The dreams did not stop until the mummies were reunited with that of their father, after which Hawass decided not to put the bodies on display.

In recent years, microbiologists have put forward a scientific explanation for the so-called pharaoh’s curse: mold spores and other microorganisms. Indeed, many different species of mould and bacteria have been found inside ancient Egyptian tombs including Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Pseudomonas, and Staphylococcus – all of which can cause serious health effects if inhaled. However, there is no evidence that any of these organisms were responsible for the deaths of any archaeologists, meaning that the ultimate source of the pharaoh’s curse is the same as it always was: our own fanciful imaginations.

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200 kilometres off the coast of Mozambique lies the island nation of Madagascar. With a land area of 587,000 square kilometres, it is the fourth-largest island in the world after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo; and the second-largest island nation after Indonesia. A French colony from 1896 to 1960, Madagascar has long been the world’s primary producer of vanilla and cloves, though today the island is primarily known as a biodiversity and eco-tourism hotspot, with 90% of its wildlife – including the famous ring-tailed lemur – being found nowhere else. But Madagascar once came close to having a much darker claim to fame: the world’s largest concentration camp. In the early days of the Second World War, the Nazis briefly considered solving the so-called “Jewish Problem” by deporting all of Europe’s Jews to the African island and forcibly holding them there under brutal conditions. While this plan was short-lived, it was instrumental in the eventual adoption of the Final Solution, which resulted in the systematic murder of nearly 6 million Jews. This is the story of the forgotten prelude to the Holocaust.

The idea of deporting or encouraging the emigration of European Jews to Africa – and Madagascar in particular – long predates the Third Reich, and was actively promoted by pro- and anti-Jewish groups alike. Among the first to suggest such a plan was German Orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde, who detailed his proposal in his 1878 work Deutsche Schriften or “German Writings.” Indeed, de Lagarde’s ideas regarding antisemitism, anti-slavism, Social Darwinism, and territorial expansionism are considered instrumental to the development of Nazi ideology.

In 1903, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain proposed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Uganda – then the colony of British East Africa. Chamberlain’s motives for promoting this plan were threefold. First, the rising number of pogroms or anti-semitic riots in Eastern Europe – including the Kishinev Pogrom of April 19-21, 1903 – had resulted in a wave of Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom. Not only was Chamberlain genuinely concerned for the welfare of Eastern European Jews, but he sought to protect the jobs of native British workers from the sudden influx of Jewish immigrants. Second, the Uganda Railway, built between 1895 and 1901, had proven an exorbitantly expensive boondoggle, and had failed to provide the desired return on investment. The emigration of Jews to the region, it was hoped, would boost the local economy and help offset the cost of the railway. Finally, following the conclusion of the Second Boer War in 1902, the British were keen to secure Jewish support for their colonial policies in South Africa.

On August 26, 1903, Theodor Herzl, founder of the modern Zionist Movement, presented Chamberlain’s scheme at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Herzl assured the gathered delegates that the scheme would not interfere with the ultimate Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and would instead provide a temporary refuge for Jews facing persecution in Eastern Europe. By a vote of 295-178, the Congress decided to send an investigatory commission to Uganda to evaluate the proposed territory for settlement. The commission, composed of British explorer Major Alfred Gibbons, Swiss orientalist Alfred Kaiser, and Zionist engineer Nachum Wilbush, arrived in Guas Ngishu in December 1904. While their final report was ambiguous regarding the suitability of Uganda for Jewish settlement, the plan faced strong opposition from both sides on ideological grounds. Many Zionists considered the plan a betrayal of the Zionist program and an unnecessary distraction from their ultimate goal of establishing a Palestinian homeland. Meanwhile, white settlers in British East Africa protested the mass immigration of Jews into the region. As a result, the British Government soon withdrew the offer, while the scheme was officially rejected by the Zionist movement at the Seventh World Congress in 1905.

Undeterred, Congress members Nahum Syrkin and Israel Zangwill formed a separate territorialist movement to explore the resettlement of Jews to Canada, Australia, Mesopotamia, or Cyrenaica (today Iraq and Libya). However, strong opposition from local residents also scuppered these projects. One resettlement plan which did see some success, however, was the Galveston Scheme, which, aided by American banker Jacob Schiff, saw some 9,300 Jews emigrate to southern Texas between 1907 and 1914.

As antisemitism grew increasingly prevalent throughout the 1920s and 30s, Paul de Lagarde’s ideas on forcibly deporting Europe’s Jews to Africa – particularly Madagascar – came back into fashion. In 1937, the Polish government, with the assistance of France, sent a task force to Madagascar to evaluate the feasibility of Jewish resettlement. The task force reported that, due to the climate and poor infrastructure, the island could only accommodate a maximum of 5,000-7,000 families. The plan was thus abandoned.

Just a year later, however, the Madagascar Plan was resurrected in – where else – Nazi Germany. Following the gradual disenfranchisement of German Jews via the Nuremberg Laws and other antisemitic policies, the Nazis’ initial “final solution” was simply to deport them elsewhere. However, few of Germany’ neighbours were willing to accept their Jews. Indeed, in a meeting on December 9, 1938, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet [“Bohn-ay”] informed German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop of the French Government’s own wish to deport some 10,000 of its own Jews – preferably to Madagascar. However, the idea of overseas deportation was shelved once again following the 1939 invasion and occupation of Poland, which furnished Germany with a large neighbouring territory into which it could expel its Jewish population. Under the Nisko Plan, created by Foreign Policy Office chief Alfred Rosenberg and SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, Jews from Germany, Austria and recently-occupied Czechoslovakia and Poland would be transported to and concentrated within a 1,000 square kilometre area south of Lublin, Poland known as the Lublin Reservation. Here, it was hoped, the combination of overcrowding, poor land, and the conscription of Jews for forced labour would result in the eventual decimation and liquidation of the population. The first trainload of 2,700 Czech and Austrian Jews arrived in the Lublin Reservation on October 18, 1939. Though barracks were planned, none were completed, and the first deportees were left to fend for themselves in an open, swampy field with no water and little food. By April 1940, some 95,000 Jews had been transported to the area. Large numbers died of starvation, exposure, overwork, and diseases like Typhus brought about by the cramped, unsanitary living conditions.

However, the Nazis were soon forced to abandon the Nisko Plan – largely for pragmatic reasons. The trains used to transport deportees to the reservation were needed elsewhere for military purposes, while Hans Frank, head of the General Government in German-occupied Poland, opposed the further influx of Jews into his district, claiming it had become “too crowded.” At the same time, the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum or “Living Space” which had underpinned the invasion of Poland was proving to be economically flawed, as the ethnic Germans resettled to areas cleared of native Poles and Jews found themselves with little to do. Finally, the deportation of Jews to Lublin was attracting international condemnation, prompting the Nazis to seek a less conspicuous method of resolving the “Jewish Question.”

Following the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, the idea of deporting Europe’s Jews to Madagascar was resurrected once again. On June 3, 1940, Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, sent a memorandum to his superior, diplomat Martin Luther, proposing the deportation of all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe to foreign territory. He initially considered Palestine as a destination, but quickly rejected this idea for fear of a strong Jewish state being established in the Middle East. Instead, he proposed Madagascar, the use of which could be added to the peace terms once France capitulated. The memorandum read, in part:

“The approaching victory gives Germany the possibility, and in my view also the duty, of solving the Jewish question in Europe. The desirable solution is: all Jews out of Europe.

… In the Peace Treaty France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question, and to resettle and compensate the approximately 25,000 French citizens living there. The island will be transferred to Germany under a mandate. Diégo Suarez Bay and the port of Antsirane, which are [sea-] strategically important, will become German naval bases…

In addition to these naval bases, suitable areas of the country will be excluded from the Jewish territory (Judenterritorium) for the construction of air bases. That part of the island not required for military purposes will be placed under the administration of a German Police Governor, who will be under the administration of the Reichsführer SS. Apart from this, the Jews will have their own administration in this territory: their own mayors, police, postal and railroad administration, etc. The Jews will be jointly liable for the value of the island. For this purpose their former European financial assets will be transferred for use to a European bank to be established for this purpose. Insofar as the assets are not sufficient to pay for the land which they will receive, and for the purchase of necessary commodities in Europe for the development of the island, the Jews will be able to receive bank credits from the same bank.

As Madagascar will only be a Mandate, the Jews living there will not acquire German citizenship. On the other hand, the Jews deported to Madagascar will lose their citizenship of European countries from the date of deportation. Instead, they will become residents of the Mandate of Madagascar.

…Use can be made for propaganda purposes of the generosity shown by Germany in permitting cultural, economic, administrative and legal self-administration to the Jews; it can be emphasized at the same time that our German sense of responsibility towards the world forbids us to make the gift of a sovereign state to a race which has had no independent state for thousands of years: this would still require the test of history.”

Indeed, plans to this effect were already being made in other government departments. At the time, Hitler and his generals were preparing for Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – which could potentially bring millions more Jews and other “undesirables” under German jurisdiction. As such a large mass of people could not be practically interned in Poland or anywhere else in mainland Europe, deportation overseas appeared a preferable solution In a May 1940 memorandum, Concerning the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler declared:

“[I hope to see] the term ‘Jew’… completely eliminated through the massive immigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony”.

Luther discussed Rademacher’s proposal with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, whereupon it came to the attention of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office or RSHA. In January 1939 Heydrich had been appointed by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to oversee the deportation of all Jews from German-occupied territory; he thus insisted that the implementation of Rademacher’s plan fell under his jurisdiction. Thus, on August 15, 1940, Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann released a memorandum titled RSHA: Madagaskar Projekt, outlining the details of the scheme. Heydrich’s plan called for the resettlement of a million Jews every year over a period of four years, with the entire island of Madagascar converted into a giant ghetto and police state administered by the SS. Hitler immediately approved the proposal.

But while France surrendered unconditionally on June 22, 1940, the Madagascar Plan could not immediately be implemented since the British Royal Navy controlled all the sea routes out of mainland Europe. Hitler hoped that after defeating the Royal Air Force and invading Britain in Operation Sea Lion, the British merchant fleet could be commandeered to transport Europe’s Jews to Madagascar. But following the Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain in September 1940, the Royal Navy remained in control of the seas, and the Nazis were forced to shelve the Madagascar Plan once again. Two years later in May 1942, the Allies invaded Madagascar and placed the island under Free French control, denying its use to the Germans. By this time, however, the Nazi program to make Europe Judenfrei or “free of Jews” had taken a far darker turn. At a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, a delegation of German officials including Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann hammered out the details of the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”: the systematic murder of all European Jews in purpose-built death camps. While today the Madagascar Plan is an obscure footnote in the history of the holocaust, it played an important psychological role in convincing the Nazis that the “Jewish problem” could not be solved via internment or deportation. The only solution, they concluded, was extermination.

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An image supposedly showing a young girl posing with former U.S. President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, the late millionaire and convicted sex offender, frequently circulates online.

For example, on Aug. 23, 2024, an X user posted the image with the caption, “Only child molesters support child molesters.” It has appeared on other social media platforms, too, such as Instagram, Reddit and Threads, as well as Chinese-language websites.

“Would you still vote for him if your daughter was in this picture?” one Threads user asked.

“Having a hard time finding this picture anywhere on the internet before like two weeks ago,” another Reddit user commented.

(X user @Youtakingtume)

In short, we found the image contained numerous signs it was generated using artificial intelligence. For instance, the girl’s left hand seemed to be deformed, along with the left sleeve of Trump’s jacket.

(X user @FlyingDutchPall)

Moreover, via reverse-image search, we found a full-size version of the viral image shared on Quora.

(TheGoodRussian Quora profile)

In the original version of the image we spotted more indications the photograph was artificially created. For instance, the faces of people in the background were deformed, Trump had only one leg and Epstein seemed to be dissolving into the couch.

(TheGoodRussian Quora profile)

Given that the in-question photograph was created using AI software, we have rated it as “Fake.”

We’ve fact-checked other Epstein- and Trump-related claims, including debunking a supposed photo of the men on a plane. In July 2023, we investigated another AI-generated image, allegedly showing Trump and Epstein posing with underage girls.

That said, some viral photos of the pair together are genuine. Take this 1997 photograph, for instance, that was taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

In August 2024, users on X promoted a video clip they claimed showed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz being “abusive” toward his 17-year-old son, Gus, pulling on his arm “out of anger” when his family joined him onstage following his acceptance speech as the vice-presidential nominee at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 

However, a close examination of video from Walz’s Aug. 21 speech revealed that he pulled his son’s arm to ensure he didn’t walk directly into a teleprompter. In the same video, Walz’s daughter, Hope, can be seen walking around the opposite side of the same teleprompter.

As we previously reported, Walz and his wife, Gwen, revealed to People on Aug. 7 that Gus “has a nonverbal learning disorder, ADHD and an anxiety disorder — all conditions that they call his ‘secret power.'” 

According to both the NVLD Project and the Cleveland Clinic, nonverbal learning disorders can affect visual-spatial awareness. The NVLD Project website specifically mentions, “spatial awareness (bumping into people and things).”

A YouTube video provided by PBS NewsHour covering Walz’s full speech showed the candidate hugging his wife and his children following the conclusion of his address. In the video, Walz’s family members took turns hugging him. Then they held hands to walk together to the front of the stage.

At the 17:09 mark in the video, Walz noticed his son Gus approaching one of the teleprompters and yanked his arm to help him avoid walking into it.

One of the most highlighted moments from Walz’s speech featured Gus standing and applauding with tears streaming down his face as Walz spoke, saying, “That’s my dad!” In another fact check, we reported that conservative commentator Ann Coulter faced backlash for posting on X that she believed Gus Walz’s reaction was “weird.” Coulter eventually removed the post but did not offer an apology.

Misleading Claims of ‘Anger’ and ‘Abuse’

On Aug. 22 — the day after Walz’s speech — Sophie Louise Delquié, whose X bio identified her as a strategic communications adviser for Senate Republicans and wife of U.S. Sen. JD Vance’s communications director, William Martin, posted (archived): “MUST WATCH: Is it just me or did Tim Walz aggressively yank his son last night on stage? Seems like he could be a very different person behind closed doors…” As of this writing, her post displayed over 5.3 million views.

One user reposted Delquié’s post, adding sarcastically, “Troubling, I’ve just discovered Tim Walz is the kind of dad who won’t let his child walk face-first into a teleprompter. I can no longer relate with his brand of fatherhood.”

Over an hour later, conservative commentator Collin Rugg, who has more than 1.4 million followers on X, misleadingly posted (archived), “Tim Walz is under fire for aggressively pulling his son Gus Walz’s arm on stage at the Democratic National Convention.” He also added, “Some are theorizing that Walz was pulling Gus’ arm out of anger while others say he was simply excited in the moment.” As of this writing, the post had more than 4.9 million views. (Rugg later posted a correction.)

Then, on Aug. 23, Newsmax TV host Greg Kelly shared to his more than 876,000 followers the same upload from Rugg’s post and misleadingly remarked (archived), “Tim Walz is NOT ‘nice’-he’s an ABUSIVE man toward his son. Horrible but Revealing. You can’t hide who you Truly Are. #nojoy.”

Further, the rumor and video spread on X with the description, “Walz’s Aggressive Son Incident at DNC” — an ambiguous and misleading headline that read as if Gus himself became aggressive at the convention. According to text on the page, X’s artificial-intelligence tool Grok was responsible for writing the headline. Small text under the headline said Grok had not updated the headline in three hours, showing the problematic nature of allowing such a tool to display news to users. A disclaimer under the headline read, “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”

Other users also posted numerous misinformed remarks about the same video.

Some Users Acknowledged Sharing Misinformation

After Rugg’s initial post — which mentioned two of Gus’s disorders — he acknowledged in a subsequent post (archived), “Full video of Tim Walz tugging his son’s arm appears to show that he was quickly pulling him so he wouldn’t run into the teleprompter on stage.” He added, “Walz’s daughter, who was next to Gus Walz, walked in front of the teleprompter while Gus, who appeared to be walking right towards the teleprompter, was pulled behind it.”

Juanita Broaddrick, a supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump who has more 1.3 million followers on X and is known for alleging former President Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, responded to one of Rugg’s posts, writing (archived), “Thank you for this, Collin. I’m glad to know the true story. I was quick to jump on it too, I guess, because of my complete and utter dislike of Tim Walz.”

Rugg then replied (archived) to Broaddrick, “I think his facial expression (irritated) threw some people off but in reality, he was just looking out for his son.”

In another post, Rugg said (archived) he grew up with a brother with special needs and added of Gus, “Just imagine the reaction if he ran into the teleprompter and knocked it over on TV. Give [Tim] Walz a pass on this one.”

We reached out to the Harris-Walz campaign, Delquié, Rugg and Newsmax to ask if they had any further comment regarding the aforementioned posts and rumor, and will update this story if we receive any responses.

The recipe is simple: take an empty glass bottle, fill it with gasoline or other suitably flammable liquid, and stuff a piece of cloth – preferably also soaked in gasoline – into the neck. To use, simply ignite the cloth and throw. The quintessential improvised weapon, the Molotov cocktail has become a potent symbol of armed rebellion and violent protest the world over. But who invented this iconic weapon, and how did it get its unusual name?

While improvised incendiary devices have existed for centuries, the Molotov cocktail as we know it first emerged during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, in which the right-wing Falangist forces of General Fransisco Franco fought left-wing Republican forces for control of the country. Franco’s forces, though equipped with the latest combat aircraft by its fascist allies Germany and Italy, were largely lacking in tanks and anti-tank weapons, while the Republicans, backed by the Soviet Union, fielded the latest Russian T-26 and T-28 tanks. The Loyalists were thus forced to improvise their own anti-tank weapons, including satchel charges – essentially shoulder bags filled with explosives – and petrol bombs. While flame might seem like an ineffective weapon against a tank, if a large enough fire can be started on the vehicle’s rear deck, it can starve the engine of oxygen and cause it to shut off, rendering the tank immobile and vulnerable. Most tanks of this era were powered by gasoline instead of the less-flammable diesel, so a fierce enough conflagration could also ignite the fuel tanks or ammunition stored inside the hull. Finally, smoke could be drawn by the ventilation fans into the crew compartment, suffocating the crew and forcing them to bail out. Loyalist forces used a wide variety of incendiary devices throughout the conflict, from the classic glass-bottle petrol bomb to blankets soaked in gasoline or kerosene thrown onto tanks from a high window.

However, the petrol bomb would not get its now-ubiquitous name until the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. In the late 1930s, the Soviet government of Josef Stalin grew increasingly paranoid of the supposed threat posed by neighbouring Finland – especially to the strategically important city of Leningrad which lay only 32km from the Finnish border. In October 1939 the Soviets opened negotiations with Finland, demanding they cede territory along the southern end of the border in exchange for Soviet territory in Karelia to the north. The Finns refused, and on November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland.

The Soviets expected a walkover. Their invasion force of 760,000 soldiers, 6,500 tanks, and 3,800 aircraft faced a vastly inferior Finnish army of only 340,000 soldiers with hardly any tanks or airforce. But the Soviets had two major weaknesses. The first was Stalin’s great purge of 1938, which had decimated the Red Army’s officer corps. The second was the Finns’ superior knowledge of the land and their mastery of winter warfare. Though hopelessly outmanned and outgunned, through the use of highly mobile ski troops, ambushes, and hit-and-run tactics the Finns managed to inflict heavily casualties on the Soviets. Having few anti-tank weapons, Finnish troops relied on near-suicidal tactics like prying off a tank’s tracks using crowbars and the extensive use of petrol bombs. While early in the war these were improvised by the troops themselves, later examples were mass-produced by the government alcohol monopoly Alko at the distillery in Rajamäki. These bombs, some 450,000 of which were produced by the war’s end, consisted of a sealed 750ml glass bottle filled with alcohol, kerosene, potassium chlorate, and tar to allow the mixture to stick to the side of a tank. Instead of a fuel-soaked rag, for a fuze the bomb used a pair of wind-proof storm matches strapped to the sides of the bottle.

These weapon’s famous nickname came from an incident early in the conflict. On the opening day of the invasion, Soviet aircraft bombed the Finnish capital of Helsinki. Among the weapons they dropped was the RRAB-3, a 2-metre long cluster munition holding up to 60 smaller incendiary bombs. Fins on the rear of the bomb caused it to spin as it fell, flinging the submunitions out via centrifugal force and scattering them over a wide area. Facing worldwide condemnation over the invasion, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, claimed that the Soviets were not in fact bombing Finland but rather dropping food aid to starving Finns. In response, the Finns began referring to the RRAB-3 bombs as “Molotov’s Breadbaskets.” In turn, petrol bombs came to be known as Molotovin koktaili or, “Molotov cocktails,” as “ a drink to go with his food parcels.”

Yet despite their heroic resistance, the Finns could not hold back the Soviet onslaught, and on March 13, 1940 the Finnish government signed the Moscow Treaty, ceding 11% of its territory to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the Winter War was an embarrassment for the Red Army, which had suffered casualties of over 167,000 dead and 207,000 wounded compared to the Finns’ 25,900 dead and 43,500 wounded.

Meanwhile, Great Britain was facing its own invasion crisis. Following the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940, a German invasion of the British Isles appeared imminent. With only 40,000 regular troops remaining to defend the island, the government turned to the Home Guard, an organization of 1.5 million civilians otherwise ineligible for regular military service. While strong in numbers, the Home Guard was woefully ill-equipped, to the point that many members were issued sharpened sticks known as “Invasion Pikes” instead of rifles. To make up the shortfall in equipment, British inventors came up with a variety of ingenious and sometimes bizarre weapons which could be easily produced using common materials. Among these was a version of the Molotov cocktail known as the Grenade, Hand or Projector No. 76. Also known as the Allbright-Wilson Bomb or the SIP bomb – short for Self-Igniting Phosphorus – the No.76 consisted of a half-pint glass bottle sealed with a crown stopper, filled with a mixture of benzene, water, white phosphorus, and a strip of raw rubber. Over time the rubber would dissolve in the benzene and render it suitably sticky. When thrown against a target the bottle would shatter and the white phosphorus ignite on contact with the air, setting fire to the benzene-rubber mixture. Due to the highly-volatile nature of the white phosphorus, Home Guard members were advised to store the grenades in water in case the glass bottle broke.

Two versions of the SIP grenade were manufactured: a thin-walled version with a red cap for hand throwing and a thick-walled version with a green cap for use with the 2.5in Northover Projector, a crude mortar designed specifically for Home Guard use. The maximum range of an SIP grenade fired from a Northover projector was around 200 yards, though at this point the grenade would be tumbling so erratically that the chances of actually hitting a tank would be next to nil. British engineers also developed larger versions of the Molotov cocktail concept such as the Flame Fougasse, Demi-Fougasse, and the Hedge-Hopper. These consisted of a 50-gallon drum filled with gasoline and fuel oil and fitted with a guncotton propellant charge, which were hidden at crossroads and other ambush points. When an enemy vehicle approached the charge would be remotely detonated, launching the drum and covering the target in a sea of flame. By June 1941 nearly 7000 flame traps and 6 million SIP grenades had been manufactured and distributed to the Home Guard. Thankfully the feared German invasion never came and none were ever used in combat, though buried caches of them do still turn up from time to time – much to the chagrin of homeowners and construction workers.

The United States also produced an official Molotov cocktail, designated the M1 Frangible Grenade. Similar to the British SIP, it consisted of a small sealed glass bottle filled with various combinations of alcohol, gasoline, naphthalene, or napalm, ignited by white phosphorus or various chemical and mechanical fuzes. Versions were also made filled with chemical warfare agents such as cyanide and mustard gas. These were not intended for use by regular troops but rather for distribution to guerrilla groups in Japanese-occupied Asian countries. But like many such weapons few if any were ever used in combat and all stocks were destroyed at the conclusion of the war. For while cheap and easy to manufacture, Molotov cocktails are often as hazardous to their users as to the enemy, and have thus largely remained a weapon of last resort. Perhaps their most famous use during WWII was during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when a thousand Polish Jews equipped mostly with improvised weapons bravely resisted Nazi attempts to liquidate the ghetto and deport its inhabitants to the extermination camps at Majdanek and Treblinka.

Since the Second World War, Molotov cocktails have been used in conflicts and protests too varied and numerous to list, the simple technology still proving highly effective despite significant advancements in tank design. During the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, for example, Hungarian freedom fighters managed to knock out some 400 Soviet tanks using only homemade petrol bombs. The weapon’s ultra-simple design makes it easy for even the most poorly-equipped fighter to construct using all sorts of materials. And we do mean all sorts. In 2017, protests against the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro saw the introduction of the amusingly named “Puputov cocktail,” which is just what it sounds like: a glass jar or bottle filled with faeces. On May 10, 2017, these weapons – along with jars of paint to block the windows of police vehicles – were widely deployed in a protest action known as La Marcha de la Mierda or Shit March. Thanks to this supreme simplicity and versatility, the humble Molotov cocktail will likely remain the preferred weapon of the underdog for decades to come.

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Air raid sirens blared and curtains of tracer rounds rose into the sky as the ominous drone of aircraft engines grew ever closer. Suddenly, a flight of enemy aircraft swooped low over the sleeping anchorage, unleashing their deadly cargo of torpedoes and bombs onto an unsuspecting fleet. All around, geysers of water and flame erupted into the air, lighting up the harbour in infernal shades of yellow and orange. Anti-aircraft gunners desperately filled the air with a hail of steel and explosives, but still the aircraft kept coming. In little more than an hour, it was all over. When the smoke finally cleared, three mighty battleships – the pride of the fleet – lay at bottom of the harbour.

While this scene might sound familiar, it did not take place on December 7, 1941 in Hawaii. The ships were not American but Italian, and the attacking aircraft not Japanese but British. On November 11, 1940, more than a year before America’s Day of Infamy, the Royal Navy launched the first-ever carrier airstrike against an enemy fleet at anchorage, attacking the Italian Navy’s home port of Taranto. The raid forever changed naval warfare, heralding the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier and setting the blueprint for a later, more well-known surprise attack. This is the story of Operation Judgement, Italy’s forgotten Pearl Harbor.

While today the armed forces Fascist Italy are remembered as little more than a punchline, the country did possess one formidable military asset: its Navy. In 1939, the Regia Marina numbered some 560 ships, including 60 destroyers, 26 cruisers, and 7 battleships like ultra-modern Littorio and Vittorio Veneto. While Italy’s ally Nazi Germany had a powerful land army, its surface navy was very small and posed little threat to Britain and its overseas empire. However, on June 10, 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. That same day, Italian forces invaded the south of France, while four months later Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece. Italy’s entry into the Second World War dramatically upset the balance of power in the Mediterranean, threatening Britain’s access to her colonies via the Suez Canal and placing supply lines between Egypt, Malta, and Greece within range of Italian aircraft. Not only did this force British shipping was to take the long route to India, Asia, and Egypt around the Cape of Good Hope – greatly hampering logistics – but the British Mediterranean fleet was forced to operate as a single unit lest smaller combat groups be picked off by the Italians.

Yet despite its strategic advantage, the Regia Marina was reluctant to sail out and engage British naval forces directly. This hesitance was due to Italy’s weak industrial base, which was unable to quickly replace any losses sustained in combat – especially the large battleships. As a result, Italian Fleet largely remained in its main anchorage of Taranto in the “heel” of the Italian peninsula serving as a fleet in being.

This strategy had been used by navies for more than 300 years, allowing fleets to exert influence over an area without risking its destruction by engaging in direct conflict.

For the British, this state of affairs was untenable. If the Regia Marina would not sail out and fight, then the Royal Navy would have to bring the fight to them. Plans to attack the Italian fleet at Taranto dated all the way back to Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia – today Ethiopia – in 1935. During the Munich Crisis of 1938, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, grew concerned about the threat posed by Italian forces in the region, and advised his staff to review all existing plans for attacking Taranto. Soon after, Pound was approached by Sir Arthur Lyster, captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, who suggested an aerial attack by carrier-borne torpedo bombers as the best means of crippling the Italian fleet. Pound agreed with this assessment, and in August 1939 advised his replacement, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, to carry on planning the attack, now known as Operation Judgement.

The challenges facing the Royal Navy were immense. For one thing, the Royal Navy’s primary torpedo bomber in 1940 was the ungainly-looking Fairey Swordfish. Though introduced in 1936, the Swordfish was a relic of the previous war: an old-fashioned, three-seat fabric-covered biplane with a top speed of barely 230 kilometres per hour. Yet despite this, the Swordfish proved surprisingly robust, reliable, and versatile, capable of carrying such a seemingly limitless variety of ordnance and equipment that its crews affectionately nicknamed it the “stringbag.” To maximize surprise and aircrew survival, planners decided to attack Taranto under the cover of darkness. Still, casualties as high as 50% were predicted.

The aircraft carrier HMS Eagle was selected for the operation, her 24 Swordfish aircraft being fitted with 270 litre auxiliary fuel tanks to allow them to reach their target. These tanks were installed in the centre observer’s position, with the observer being moved to the rear gunner’s position. Half the aircraft were armed with torpedoes and the other half with 250-pound bombs and flares, with the latter instructed to drop their payloads around the harbour to backlight the ships for the torpedo bombers and distract Italian air defences.

However, there was another, more practical problem. Aerial torpedoes of the period could only be used in water at least 23 metres deep, otherwise they would bury themselves in the seafloor before levelling off. Taranto harbour, meanwhile, was only 12 metres deep. Thankfully, the British developed an elegant solution to this problem in the form of a spool of wire connected to the nose of the torpedo. When the torpedo was released, the wire pulled up on the nose, causing it to hit the water horizontally and level off at a much shallower depth.

Operation Judgement was originally scheduled for October 21, 1940 – the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. However, on October 18, a mechanic aboard HMS Eagle was fitting an auxiliary fuel tank to a Swordfish when he dropped one of his tools, striking a spark and setting off an aviation fuel fire that destroyed two aircraft and damaged three more. The operation was thus postponed to November 11 – the date of the next full moon. More bad luck came on November 5 when HMS Eagle’s aviation fuel system was discovered to be faulty. Her air arm was thus transferred to the more modern carrier HMS Illustrious. Then, on November 9 and 10, contaminated fuel in one of Illustrious’s fuel tanks caused three of her Swordfish to experience engine failure and drop into the sea, leaving 21 aircraft to carry out the Taranto attack.

But there was some good news. In the weeks leading up to the attack, British Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft based on Malta flew over Taranto to photograph the harbour and its defences. These photographs revealed that the bulk of the Italian Fleet was present, including the battleships Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, Andrea Doria, Conte di Cavour, Giulio Cesare, and Caio Duilio; the cruisers Pola, Zara, Goriza, Fiume, Trento, Trieste, and Bolzano; and eight destroyers. The battleships were moored in the large outer harbour, while most of the cruisers and destroyers were berthed in the smaller inner harbour, connected to the outer harbour by a small canal. Not only that, but the ships were far less well-defended than the British had anticipated. While the harbour was originally protected by 90 barrage balloons, 60 of these had been destroyed in a storm on November 6 and not yet replaced. And while ships at anchor are typically protected by screens of anti-torpedo nets, the Italians had scheduled a gunnery exercise at sea for November 11 and spent much of that morning removing the nets. The exercise was ultimately cancelled, but most of the nets had not been reinstalled. The British would never have a better chance.

To disguise the movements of the raiding force, Operation Judgement was integrated into the much larger Operation MB8, a series escorted convoys carrying 2,000 reinforcements and hundreds of tons of supplies from Alexandria and Gibraltar to the beleaguered island of Malta. The main strike force, composed of HMS Illustrious and the battleships HMS Ramillies, Warspite, Valiant, and Malaya, sailed from Alexandria on November 4 and met up with the cruisers HMS York and Gloucester and three destroyers then escorting Convoy MW3. This convoy then linked up with the task force for Operation Coat, comprising the battleship HMS Barham, the cruisers HMS Berwick and Glasgow, and three destroyers; whereupon Illustrious, Berwick, York, Gloucester, and Glasgow along with the destroyers HMS Hyperion, Ilex, Hasty, and Havelock split off and gathered off the Greek island of Cephalonia, around 270 kilometres from Taranto. As planned, the complexity of this operation succeeded in confusing the Italians. However, a final reconnaissance flight by a Short Sunderland flying boat on the day of the operation made it clear that some kind of attack was imminent. But with the Regia Marina still reluctant to sail out and face the Royal Navy directly and Taranto harbour lacking radar, the defenders could do little but watch and wait.

The first wave of 12 Swordfish aircraft, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson, took off from Illustrious just before 9 P.M. on November 11. Though the flight soon encountered thick fog, they managed to hold formation – except, that is, for the aircraft flown by Lieutenant Ian Swayne. Finding himself separated from the flight and believing he had fallen behind, Swayne accelerated in an attempt to catch up. In reality, he pulled far ahead, reaching Taranto a full 15 minutes ahead of the other aircraft. The sound of his aircraft’s engine was picked up by Italian sonic detectors and alerted the harbour’s defences, whose nearly 300 anti-aircraft guns began lighting up the sky with tracer rounds. But the trailing 11 aircraft pressed on, as pilot Richard Janvrin later recalled:

“We just had to get through it and it didn’t do much to us. You didn’t think you could be hit by it.”

The main force reached Taranto at 10:58, whereupon one of the bombers dropped sixteen parachute flares east of the harbour before attacking an oil tank farm. Next, three torpedo bombers led by Commander Williamson attacked the battleship Conte de Cavour, with the lead aircraft scoring one hit that blasted an 8-metre hole beneath the waterline. But while banking away, Williamson’s wingtip struck the water and the aircraft crashed:

“I fell out of the plane. We were six feet above the water, so it wasn’t a long fall. The anti-aircraft fire from the shore batteries was so heavy and the water was swirling.”

Williamson and his observer, Lieutenant N.J. ‘Blood’ Scarlett (now how’s that for a badass nickname?) survived by clinging to the wreckage of their aircraft and were soon captured, spending the rest of the conflict as Prisoners of War.

Under heavy fire from Italian shore batteries, the remaining two aircraft pressed home a torpedo attack against the battleship Andrea Doria, but were unsuccessful. Then, three more Swordfish attacked from the north, hitting the battleship Littorio with two torpedoes and narrowly missing the Vittorio Veneto. Meanwhile, the bomber force hit two cruisers with one bomb each and straddled four destroyers.

Back near Cephalonia, the second wave, led by Lieutenant Commander J.W. Hale, began launching from Illustrious around 9:20. While lining up for takeoff, the last two aircraft, flown by Lieutenant W.D. Morford and Lieutenant E.W. Clifford, bumped into each other. While Morford was able to take off, Clifford was held back so repair crews could fix his damaged aircraft. This took around 15 minutes, whereupon Clifford took off and headed for Taranto, confident that he could catch up with the rest of the flight. Meanwhile, the damage to Morford’s aircraft proved more serious than initially thought, and shortly after takeoff his auxiliary fuel tank broke loose and plunged into the sea. Unable to make it to the target, Morford returned to Illustrious.

The first seven aircraft of the second wave arrived at Taranto shortly before midnight. As the bombers dropped their flares around the harbour, three torpedo bombers descended on the battleships, hitting the Littorio again and narrowly missing the Vittorio Veneto. Another aircraft attacked the Duilio and scored a hit, flooding both her forward magazines. One aircraft, crewed by Lieutenant G. Baylet and Lieutenant H. Slaughter, was struck by anti-aircraft fire from the cruiser Goriza and plunged into the harbour. Unlike Williamson and Scarlett, however, both airmen perished. 15 minutes later, as the rest of the aircraft were departing, Lieutenant Clifford finally arrived and made a dive-bombing attack on the cruiser Trento. Unfortunately, his bomb was defective, punching a hole in the ship’s deck but failing to explode. Nonetheless, Clifford managed to escape the harbour in one piece and, at 2:39 AM, was the last to land aboard Illustrious. The raid on Taranto was over – or so the exhausted airmen thought. To their horror, Admiral Cunningham and Captain Lyster announced their intention to attack again the following night, prompting one airmen to remark: “They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once!” Mercifully, foul weather prevented the remaining aircraft from launching, and the task force returned to Alexandria.

Operation Judgement was a stunning success. In only 65 minutes, 20 aircraft and eleven torpedoes sank the Littorio, Conte de Cavour, and Duilio, knocking out half of Italy’s battleship force at a stroke. The bombers were less successful, destroying a seaplane hangar and lightly damaging an oil tank farm, three cruisers, and two destroyers. And while anti-aircraft batteries on shore and aboard the ships had fired nearly 13,500 shells, they only succeeded in shooting down two aircraft and killing two British airmen. Meanwhile, 59 Italian personnel were killed and 600 wounded. Significantly, the Italians failed to turn on their searchlights or get any fighters into the air, aiding the British success. The attack was a significant turning point in naval warfare, demonstrating that the aircraft carrier, not the battleship, was now king of the seas. No longer were ships safe in home port, rendering the age-old concept of the fleet in being completely obsolete. As Admiral Cunningham later remarked:

“In a total flying time of six and a half hours—carrier to carrier—twenty aircraft had inflicted more damage upon the Italian fleet than was inflicted upon the German High Seas Fleet in the daylight action at the Battle of Jutland….[the battle] should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.”

The attack also demonstrated the surprising effectiveness of the supposedly obsolete Fairey Swordfish, which would later play a key role in sinking the German battleship Bismarck and became a formidable weapon in the fight against German U-boats in the North Atlantic. Indeed, the venerable “stringbag” even proved superior to the aircraft designed to replace it, the larger and more modern Fairey Albacore.

Yet despite its historical importance, in strategic terms Operation Judgement was less successful than had been hoped. Cunningham’s intention was to cripple both the Italian fleet and the Regia Marina’s morale, discouraging them from sortieing against the Royal Navy and allowing the Mediterranean fleet to be more effectively split into two carrier battlegroups. As he put it:

“The Taranto show has freed up our hands considerably & I hope now to shake these damned Eyeties up a bit. I don’t think their remaining three battleships will face us and if they do I’m quite prepared to take them on with only two.”

Initially, at least, this goal appeared to have been achieved. In the wake of the attack, the Italians moved their undamaged ships to Naples until the defences at Taranto could be sufficiently bolstered. Meanwhile, salvage and repair work began on the Littorio, which re-entered service four months later. Due to lack of resources, repairs to the other two battleships took considerably longer. Duilio returned to service after seven months, while Conte de Cavour was not yet ready when Italy capitulated and switched sides in September 1943.

But if Cunningham hoped to knock the Italian Navy out of the war and disrupt Axis supply convoys to North Africa, he was to be bitterly disappointed. In fact, between October 1940 and January 1941 Italian shipments to Libya increased by more than 12,000 tons per month. And while the attack on Taranto had made Admiral Inigo Campioni, commander of the Regia Marina, more cautious, he nonetheless launched numerous destructive raids against allied supply convoys in the Mediterranean – the first such action taking place just five days later on November 17. Nevertheless, the Regia Marina would never again be the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean.

It is often claimed that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 was directly inspired by Operation Judgement. Indeed, in the wake of the attack, Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Naito, assistant Japanese naval attaché to Berlin, flew to Taranto to investigate the damage first-hand. In October 1941, Naito discussed his findings with Commander Minoru Genda, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, and Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air armada. However, the connection between the two attacks is often exaggerated, for by this point planning for the Pearl Harbor operation was already well underway. Furthermore, the Imperial Navy had solved the problem of torpedoing ships in shallow harbours long before Taranto, though instead of attaching a wire to the nose like the British, they fitted their torpedoes with breakaway wooden noses and tail fins to make them run shallower. Indeed, about the only thing Japanese planners gained from Takeshi Naito’s report was confirmation that a torpedo attack against a shallow harbour was feasible – a fact confirmed by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida in a 1964 interview.

But while the Japanese had little to learn from the lessons of Taranto, the United States most certainly did. But for various reasons the U.S. Navy failed to act on these lessons – with tragic results. On November 22, just ten days after the Taranto raid, Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark wrote to Admiral James O. Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, requesting the installation of additional torpedo netting around ships at Pearl Harbour. Richardson refused, citing a lack of space and resources. Stark continued to express concern about a Taranto-style attack, and in early December tasked Commander Walter C. Ansel of the Navy’s War Plans Division with preparing a comprehensive report on the security of Pearl Harbor. This report, submitted on January 24, painted a sad picture of Pearl Harbor’s defences and included a long list of recommended improvements. In response, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson approved the stationing of more radar sets, fighter aircraft, and antiaircraft guns around the harbour.

Stark’s concerns were shared by several others in the Navy hierarchy, including Rear Admiral Aubrey W. Fitch, Lieutenant Commander Herbert F. Eckberg, and Lieutenant Commander John Opie, who had been a naval attaché aboard HMS Illustrious during Operation Judgement and had submitted a detailed report on the attack to the Navy Department immediately after docking in Alexandria. Yet despite these concerted efforts to jolt the Navy out of its complacency, practical measures to improve Pearl Harbor’s defences soon became mired in a tangle of bureaucratic inertia and outdated thinking. Admiral Richardson downplayed the risk of an aerial attack, citing factors such as the steep hills surrounding the harbour, the abundance of antiaircraft guns and – astoundingly – the shallow depth of the harbour itself. Admiral Husband Kimmel, who replaced Richardson on January 7, 1941, repeated these arguments, further stating that extra torpedo nets were too expensive and inconvenient and maintaining, against all evidence, that aerial torpedoes could only be dropped in water at least 22 metres deep. He maintained this position all the way up to the morning of December 7, 1941, when he was proven completely, catastrophically wrong – but that , dear viewers, is a subject for another video.

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In February 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris attended an annual security conference in Germany to talk with European leaders about Russian aggression toward Ukraine and other world topics. She didn’t go to Russia, and there is no evidence she met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrary to an unsupported claim made by former President Donald Trump.

Trump has baselessly claimed at least twice in recent days that Harris had a meeting with Putin just days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

“Remember when [President Joe] Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine,” Trump said at a North Carolina campaign rally on Aug. 21. “She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’ And three days later, he attacked. That’s when the attack started.”

The next day, during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump repeated the claim and took it a step further, falsely claiming Harris had been sent to Russia.

He said: “But let me tell you — and a little known fact and the press doesn’t want to talk about, Biden sent — I call her comrade Kamala — sent comrade Kamala to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack. She went. She said — she gave her case. He attacked three days later. He attacked three days later. He laughed at her. He thought she was a joke.”

But it’s not a fact, and there is no reason for the press to talk about it because there is no indication a meeting happened. There’s nothing about such a meeting — let alone a trip to Russia — in the press pool reports, which were filed daily by one of the reporters traveling with Harris. The idea that the press would ignore such a high-level meeting is absurd.

Harris traveled to Germany on Feb. 17, 2022, to attend the annual Munich Security Conference, which lasted from Feb. 18 to Feb. 20. She gave a speech on Feb. 19, in which she warned that the U.S. and its allies would “impose significant and unprecedented economic costs” if Russia attacked Ukraine. She also was scheduled to have in-person meetings with several heads of state, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, according to a background press call about her trip.

But senior Biden administration officials on the Feb. 16 call did not mention Putin, and prior to her trip, Reuters reported that there were no plans for Harris to meet with anyone from Russia or China. Russia did not even send a representative to the conference that year.

In fact, in July, a Putin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, when asked whether Putin had ever talked with Harris, told reporters, “To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms. Harris.”

At the time of the Munich conference, U.S. officials had been warning for a few months that Russia planned an invasion, while Russia repeatedly denied it. On Feb. 18, 2022, Biden said in a press conference, “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days.”

At the end of Trump’s Aug. 22 interview on Fox News, one of the hosts of “Fox & Friends” did some impromptu fact-checking.

“Just as a quick clarification, we don’t have confirmation that the vice president went to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin,” said co-host Brian Kilmeade, who noted that Harris did otherwise travel to Europe days before Russia attacked Ukraine.

We contacted Trump’s presidential campaign to ask for the evidence to support his claim, but we have not received a response.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

On the campaign trail this summer, former President Donald Trump has routinely cast doubt on climate change by falsely claiming that the oceans will rise just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” He’s previously used the same measurement over a period of 250 years. In fact, the current rate of sea level rise is already a little more than one-eighth of an inch each year.

“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Trump said in an Aug. 12 interview on X with Elon Musk, the platform’s owner. “The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like [President Joe] Biden.”

Since June, Trump has used the same figures at least three other times to incorrectly minimize — and even question the reality of — current and projected sea level rise, including most recently at an Aug. 17 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

“The oceans will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years, but they don’t talk about a madman that’s building nuclear missiles right now. That’s your real global warming. It’s not this,” he said. “Your global warming is going to be nuclear weapons. Nobody talks about that. They don’t ever mention it, but they talk about an ocean that’s rising, which will give you slightly more beachfront property if it happens.”

On another occasion, at a rally in Virginia in late June, the former president upped the time frame to 497 years. 

Trump’s latest sea level rise claims are even more extreme than his previous assertion, in 2019, that sea level rise would total one-eighth of an inch “within the next 250 years,” which we fact-checked at the time. Last year, Trump also used the absurdly low rates of one-eighth of an inch over 300 years and one-hundredth of an inch over 350 years.

It’s unclear, as it was in 2019, whether Trump is using the numbers in earnest. His campaign did not respond when asked to clarify. The takeaway, however, is clear: that the risks of climate change are negligible or even nil, when in fact, they are very much real.

Sea level rise is one of the most visible and devastating impacts of global warming. Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that it might only lead to “more beachfront property,” rising sea levels increase coastal flooding, including storm surges, which puts lives and infrastructure at risk. 

Rising sea levels also contribute to coastal erosion, meaning less beach — not more. For every inch of sea level rise, approximately 100 inches of beach are lost, according to NASA oceanographer and climate scientist Josh Willis.

Sea level rise primarily occurs because higher temperatures are melting land ice, which adds water to the oceans, and because warmer temperatures expand the volume of the existing water. (A much smaller contributor is the movement of water on land, such as in lakes and aquifers, to the seas, mostly via groundwater depletion.) The planet is already significantly hotter than it used to be, and it continues to warm, due to past and present releases of heat-trapping pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

Current and Projected Levels of Sea Level Rise

According to the latest data from NASA, the current rate of global sea level rise is 4.2 millimeters, or 0.17 inches, per year. That’s already a bit above one-eighth of an inch annually — and far from Trump’s estimates of that amount over centuries. 

Satellite data show that just since December 2019 — when Trump made his claim of one-eighth of an inch over 250 years — the global sea level has already risen more than five-eighths of an inch.

Sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, and that trend is expected to continue. For example, for much of the last century, oceans rose by an average of 1.4 millimeters, or 0.06 inches, per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But between 2006 and 2015, the average more than doubled to 3.6 millimeters, or 0.14 inches, per year.

Specific locations may be above or below this average, due to a variety of factors, including ground settling, ocean currents and erosion.

Projections for future sea level rise further dwarf Trump’s already low figures. Per a 2022 NOAA technical report, global sea levels are projected to rise 1 foot above 2000 levels by 2100, even in the most optimistic scenario. Those projections grow to 3.3 feet in the intermediate scenario and balloon to 6.6 feet in the high scenario.

Sea level rise over the next 30 years is projected to be the same as the total rise over the past 100 years, according to the report. By 2050, for example, the report says that the sea level along the U.S. coastline is expected to be on average 10 to 12 inches higher than in 2000, with the Gulf and East coasts experiencing even larger increases. This will quintuple the risk of “major” flooding and make “moderate” flooding more common than “minor” flooding is today.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from 2021, provides similar projections: a 7-inch increase in global sea levels by 2050 and a 15-inch rise by 2100, assuming low emissions, relative to levels in 1995 to 2014. Those rise to 9 inches and 30 inches by 2050 and 2100, respectively, under high emissions. These estimates do not factor in various ice sheet processes that are highly uncertain but could — in an unlikely but possible scenario under high emissions — more quickly melt the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland and add another 3.3 feet or more of sea level rise by the end of the century.

As an FAQ for the report explains, past and present emissions have virtually guaranteed at least a third of a foot of sea level rise by 2050, regardless of whether the world cuts its greenhouse emissions. That’s because oceans and ice sheets are still responding to increased temperatures. After 2050, the amount of sea level rise is more difficult to predict and also more dependent on total emissions.

Still, by 2300 — a century short of Trump’s 400-year mark — scientists project that relative to 1995–2014, the oceans will be up to 10 feet higher under low emissions and some 5.6 to 22 feet higher under high emissions. This does not consider ice cliff instability, which refers to a theorized self-perpetuating feedback loop that could radically speed up ice sheet loss as the exposed ends of an ice sheet collapse under high stress. When that is included with high emissions, sea level rise could be as high as more than 52 feet — more than 400 times as much as an eighth of an inch.

A study published in Science Advances on Aug. 21 suggests that the Antarctic ice sheet “may be less vulnerable” to ice cliff instability than previously thought, although much uncertainty remains.

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After Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke at the Democratic National Convention that nominated him as presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate in August 2024, a rumor that Walz had signed a law requiring Minnesotan schools to stock tampons in boys’ bathrooms took on new life (archived):

The claim has appeared multiple times on X, Reddit, and Facebook since Harris picked him as her would-be vice president. The posts had accumulated tens of thousands of views as of this writing and earned Walz the sarcastic moniker “Tampon Tim” (archived):

Menstrual Products for ‘Menstruating Students’

In 2023, Walz signed a school funding bill into law containing a provision that guaranteed access to free menstrual protection to Minnesota students from the fourth through the 12th grade. This legislation required all school districts and charter schools to stock menstrual products, and the language of the law was gender neutral. It read (emphasis ours):

A school district or charter school must provide students with access to menstrual products at no charge. The products must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district. For purposes of this section, “menstrual products” means pads, tampons, or other similar products used in connection with the menstrual cycle.

While the law did not specifically mention boys’ bathrooms, it also did not restrict the rule to female or girls’ bathrooms. Paired with the laws protecting children’s access to gender-affirming care, this would require schools that do not provide gender-neutral restrooms to ensure such products to are available transmasculine students — that is, students who are either trans boys or students born female whose gender expression is masculine — to access them. In theory, this could require the stocking of menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms in some cases, though the editorial board of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune argued that is not the case: 

Critics contend, wrongly, that it mandates menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms. This has unfortunately been used to stoke ongoing culture wars over transgender individuals.

But the law’s actual language provides considerable flexibility for school districts to implement it, according to Deb Henton, the executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

That might mean making these products available for free in various locations for all who need them, such as unisex bathrooms, girls’ bathrooms, the school nurse or the front office, but not necessarily in boys’ bathrooms. Henton, in an interview, lauded the “local control” the law provides for implementation, and said she’s fielded no concerns about its rollout.

At Anoka-Hennepin, the state’s largest school district, the free products are not found in traditional male-only bathrooms, a spokesman said. But they are provided for free to all in “nongendered bathrooms,” girls’ bathrooms or from health staffers.

‘Tampon Tim’ Goes Viral

Megyn Kelly, the conservative television show and podcast host whom former U.S. President Donald Trump once attacked for having “blood coming out of her wherever,” embraced the monicker “Tampon Tim” as criticism of this and other of Walz’s policies (archived):

But in 2024, talk of menstruation was no longer taboo in the public and political sphere. Far from putting people off, the fact that Walz supported such a law was, to many, a demonstration of empathy and good judgment, including from former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (archived): 

How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools! Let’s do this everywhere. pic.twitter.com/hk6v8cs8p4

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 7, 2024

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Summary

The Democratic convention wrapped up with Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the party’s nomination for president. She made some misleading or unsupported claims about her opponent, including several we’ve heard this week.

• Harris claimed former President Donald Trump “intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax” that would “raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.” That’s a speculative estimate from a liberal think tank based on the upper-end of a Trump-proposed tariff on imported goods. And it ignores other Trump proposals that might lower middle-income taxes.

• Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump will give billionaires “another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.

• In warning about the dangers of a Trump presidency, Harris said the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution.” The ruling said a president is entitled to a “presumption of immunity” for “official acts,” but not for “unofficial acts” and “not everything the President does is official.”

• She said part of Trump’s “agenda” is to “limit access to birth control.” Project 2025, a conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation, calls for ending mandatory health insurance coverage of emergency contraception, but Trump has said he opposes placing limits on birth control.

• Harris said Trump and his allies would “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.” However, Trump has said this year that he would not sign a national abortion ban and has suggested he would maintain the status quo on medication abortion.

• The vice president claimed Trump plans to “force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” Project 2025 proposes making such reporting mandatory, but Trump has said it should be up to individual states.

• Harris and other speakers said Trump “encouraged Putin to invade” a NATO country. In context, Trump said he told a NATO member that he “would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” unless the country dedicated more money to defense spending.

• Continuing a theme for the week, Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin made the unsupported claim that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare, pointing to a quote that his campaign says referred to cutting waste and fraud, not benefits.

• Harris also misleadingly claimed that Trump had “tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, and they included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. He did propose cuts for Social Security disability and supplemental income programs.

Analysis

Impact of Trump’s Tariffs

Harris claimed that Trump “intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

She’s referring to Trump’s plan to impose “universal baseline tariffs” on foreign imports. Whether it will cost middle-income families that much is speculative, in part because Trump has been inconsistent and opaque about what exactly he is proposing.

The estimate cited by Harris comes from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based on a 20% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. The group concluded such tariffs would amount to “a $3,900 tax increase for a middle-income family” annually.

Since announcing in February 2023 his proposal for ”universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products,” Trump has most often talked about setting those baseline tariffs at 10%, as he did in an Aug. 18, 2023, interview on Fox News. “I think we should have a ring around the collar, as they say,” Trump said, later adding, “I do like the 10% for everybody.”

But he hasn’t been definitive about that. In an April interview with Time, Trump was asked if that blanket 10% tariff was his plan. He responded, “It may be more than that. It may be a derivative of that.”

At a recent rally in North Carolina on Aug. 14, Trump increased the potential upper-end of the blanket tariff, saying, “We are going to have 10 to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years.”

That prompted the Center for American Progress Action Fund estimate of $3,900, which is based on 20%. Based on Trump’s initial 10% tariff suggestion, the group had previously put the cost to “a typical family” at $2,500 per year.

Other nonpartisan groups have come in with lower estimates. Based on a 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tax on imported Chinese goods, the Tax Policy Center estimated a more modest $1,350 cost to middle-income households. Using those same parameters, an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical middle-income household about $1,700 in increased expenses each year. The Tax Foundation estimates such tariffs would decrease the incomes of those in the middle by 1.5%.

So at best, the figure Harris cited is an upper-end estimate that assumes Trump would enact a 20% tariff on all imported goods (which, in fairness, he has at least floated as an upper-end possibility).

Further muddying Harris’ claim is that Trump has proposed other tax plans that would benefit some middle-income families, such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and tips. According to a Tax Policy Center analysis, eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits would result in an average tax cut of about $630 for about 28% of middle-income families. TPC has not modeled Trump’s tips idea “but the vast majority of middle-income households would not benefit, either because they have no tip compensation or because they get tips but still make too little to pay income tax, even under current law. Trump won’t say if he’d also exempt payroll taxes,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told us via email.

Trump has also proposed to extend the expiring individual tax cut provisions contained in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that he championed in 2017. Gleckman said TPC estimated middle-income households would get an average tax cut of about $1,000 from such an extension. 

So how would the sum of Trump’s proposals affect middle-income families?

“It is impossible to know since Trump has proposed many different, and often inconsistent, proposals,” Gleckman told us via email. “And he’s left out important details for many proposals.”

“Most middle-income households probably would be worse off with a 20% worldwide tariff, if the CAP estimate is right,” Gleckman told us. “At a 10 percent rate, nearly everyone in the middle-income group would be somewhat worse off, even with those other tax cuts. But a middle-income household that now pays tax on Social Security benefits and is paid enough in tips might be close to break-even with a 10% tariff.”

Erica York, senior economist and research director with the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told us via email that it is difficult to evaluate the full impact of Trump’s tax plans because he has haphazardly “tossed out several different tax policy ideas.”

“The ultimate effect on people’s incomes depends on how much of the tariff agenda is fully implemented compared to the tax cuts,” York said. “If tariffs are fully pursued, low- and middle-income taxpayers are likely to see tax increases on net, while upper income taxpayers are likely to still come out ahead.”

For his part, Trump insists — contrary to most economists — that tariffs would not affect Americans’ bottom line.

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Aug. 17. “That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say, ‘Oh, it’s a tax on us.’ No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. … It’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.”

Earlier this year, York told us that, to the contrary, “When the U.S. imposes a tariff, the person in the United States who is importing the good pays a tax to the U.S. government when they import the foreign goods. U.S. tariffs are taxes on U.S. consumers of foreign goods that must be paid by the importer of the good.”

Asked for comment about the specifics of what Trump is proposing and whether it would impact middle-income families, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told us via email: “President Trump successfully imposed tariffs on China in his first term AND cut taxes for hardworking Americans here at home – and he will do it again in his second term.”

Tax Cuts

Harris made the misleading claim that Trump intends to reward billionaires with more tax cuts instead of looking out for the middle class.

“I think everyone here knows he doesn’t actually fight for the middle class,” she said of Trump. “Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends, and he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

As we’ve written, the vice president is referring to a 10-year cost estimate of extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017. If Congress does not act, many of the tax cuts, including the individual income tax cuts, will expire after 2025. Trump has proposed keeping them.

But extending the tax cuts would not just benefit Trump and other billionaires, as Harris suggested.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a July 8 blog item that it would cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years to extend the TCJA’s expiring tax cut provisions. If that happens, less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more, Gleckman said.

Also, President Joe Biden has advocated extending some of the tax cuts — the provisions for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000. Harris has not yet provided a detailed tax plan.

Trump with ‘No Guardrails’

As Harris alluded to in her speech, Trump has repeatedly threatened during the course of the 2024 campaign to investigate and jail journalists and political opponents, and he has said he would consider pardoning everyone convicted for their actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

She then warned what a Trump presidency might mean after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the issue of presidential immunity.

“Consider the power he will have, especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution,” Harris said. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”

The high court did not give the president total immunity from criminal prosecution, as Harris’ remarks suggested.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that a president should enjoy a “presumption of immunity” when carrying out “official acts.” However, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s 6-3 ruling that “[t]he President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.”

The decision was issued after Trump moved to dismiss a federal indictment that accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump claimed a president enjoys “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution, but the Supreme Court didn’t go quite that far. The court returned the case to the trial court with instructions to consider Trump’s specific actions cited in the criminal indictment.

For example, the ruling said Trump is “absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.” The lawsuit alleges that Trump and his unnamed co-conspirators pressured Justice officials to lie to state officials in seven states that Trump lost and tell them that “the Justice Department had identified significant concerns” about the election results. By doing so, Trump hoped to then convince lawmakers in those states to replace “legitimate” Biden electors with “fraudulent” Trump electors, the indictment said.

The high court further instructed the trial court that in “dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.”

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed “fear for our democracy,” writing that “a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution.”

Project 2025 and Birth Control

After speaking about how Trump was proud of appointing conservative judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, Harris made a variety of claims about Trump’s plans to put restrictions on women’s health.

“And understand he is not done,” she said. “As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.”

This is a reference to Project 2025, a 900-page plan for a Republican presidency published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

Earlier in her speech, Harris also tied Trump to the document. “We know what a second Trump term would look like,” she said. “It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisors, and its sum total is to pull our country back to the past.”

Trump, however, did not have a role in crafting the document, and Project 2025 doesn’t serve as the official Republican platform. 

In April 2022, Trump seemed to allude to the effort, calling the Heritage Foundation “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” A CNN review identified at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration who participated in the project, including six former Cabinet secretaries. 

But Trump has since distanced himself from Project 2025, saying he knows “nothing” about it and that he hasn’t even “seen” it. He has vaguely said that he agrees with some of it and disagrees with other parts.

On several key issues, though, Trump’s stance differs from what’s stated in the document. That includes birth control.

As we explained last night, when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made a similar claim about contraception, Project 2025 calls for a health insurance coverage change that could limit access to a particular emergency contraceptive, but it does not target typical birth control methods more broadly.

The document specifically proposes ending mandatory health insurance coverage of Ella, an emergency contraceptive that can be taken up to five days after sexual intercourse. Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurance plans must cover the drug, like other contraceptives and preventive care, at no cost to the patient. The document also calls for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which could indirectly make it more difficult for many to obtain birth control.

But again, Trump has said he opposes placing limits on birth control.

Abortion

Harris also said that “as a part of his agenda,” Trump and his allies would “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.” Other Democrats made similar claims on prior nights of the convention.

But Trump recently has expressed support for the status quo when it comes to medication abortion. He also has said he is no longer in favor of a nationwide abortion ban, preferring to leave the issue up to the states.

During his first campaign for president and in his presidency, Trump said he would support a federal ban on abortion past 20 weeks in most cases. But this year, he has said he would not sign a federal abortion ban. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said on Truth Social in April.

Trump also has recently expressed a desire to defer to the Supreme Court on medication abortion. “Well, it’s going to be available, and it is now,” he told CBS News on Aug. 19, in response to a question about whether medication abortion drugs should be available. “And as I know it, the Supreme Court has said, ‘Keep it going the way it is.’ I will enforce and agree with the Supreme Court.” (In the case in question, the high court said the plaintiffs didn’t have standing, but it didn’t rule on the merits of the challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one of the drugs used in medication abortions.)

Project 2025 has endorsed further efforts to curtail abortion access nationwide. As we have previously written, the manual suggests that the Department of Justice should enforce an 1873 anti-vice law, called the Comstock Act, to prevent abortion pills from being sent through the mail. Experts have suggested the act could be used to prevent the shipment of all abortion-related materials.

In the same Aug. 19 CBS News interview, Trump said he would not enforce the Comstock Act “generally,” while saying “we will be discussing specifics of it.”

Project 2025 also contains further-reaching suggestions that the next conservative president should attempt to limit abortion nationwide, calling the decision to strike down Roe v. Wade “just the beginning.” The president “should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion,” the document says.

As we said, Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, saying he disagrees with some parts and agrees with others.

Miscarriage and Abortion Monitoring

As an extension of the things Trump “and his allies” would do, Harris claimed Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”

Trump himself has not proposed this, but some of it matches what is detailed in Project 2025.

In a section dedicated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Project 2025 notes that states voluntarily report abortion data and calls for the improved reporting of those statistics, including through legislation that requires “states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.”

“HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” the document reads, referring to the Department of Health and Human Services. “It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.”

“Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion,” it adds.

Project 2025 does not include mention of a “national anti-abortion coordinator.” We asked the Harris campaign about this, but they did not immediately respond.

The document does list an “unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” but that proposed position falls under the government’s international development agency. It doesn’t appear to have anything to do with domestic abortion data collection.

In an interview with Time in April, Trump was asked whether he thought states that had banned abortion “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” Trump responded, “I think they might do that,” but said that would be left to “the individual states,” just as he says abortion laws should be determined by each state.

Biden has subsequently twisted Trump’s words to claim Trump said states “should” monitor women’s pregnancies, as we’ve written.

Trump’s ‘Whatever the Hell They Want’ Comments

In her remarks on international relations, Harris said she would ensure that the U.S. will “not abdicate our global leadership.” She continued: “Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies, said Russia could, quote, ‘do whatever the hell they want.’”

Earlier in the evening, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona made a similar comment. Kelly said, “Today, Vladimir Putin is testing whether we’re still that strong. Iran, North Korea and especially China watch closely. What’s Trump’s answer? He invited Russia to do, and these are his words, not mine, ‘whatever the hell they want.’” Following Kelly, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, said: “Trump tells tyrants like Putin, they can do whatever the hell they want.”

But the Democrats omit the context of Trump’s statement and whom he says he was addressing when he made the comment.

At a campaign rally in South Carolina in February, Trump said that when he was president he had told a leader of a NATO member nation that the European partners had to dedicate more money to defense spending. He said that if the country was “delinquent” in its payments to NATO and Russia attacked it, “I would not protect you.” 

“‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump said he told the unidentified NATO partner. “‘No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

So Trump wasn’t addressing Putin directly — though the Russian president likely is aware of Trump’s public remarks. Trump said he was pressuring a NATO member to direct more support to its defense budget.

As we wrote after Trump made those comments, he has long mischaracterized what he calls “delinquent” payments from alliance members to NATO.

Social Security/Mediscare, Again

For the fourth night in a row, Democrats made the unsupported claim that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare — a political talking point we regularly see in presidential races and have referred to as “Mediscare.” Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin kicked it off within the first hour of the evening program, claiming: “Donald Trump was asked what he would do about Social Security and Medicare and he said and I quote, ‘There’s a lot you can do in terms of cutting.’ Cutting? He’s talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare, while giving a huge new tax break to billionaires and corporations?”

But Trump has promised not to cut Medicare or the Social Security retirement program, and his campaign says the quote Baldwin cited referred to cutting waste and fraud.

In a March 11 interview with CNBC, Trump was asked how he would address the rising costs of both programs. Trump said: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.”

Again, the Trump campaign said he was referring to cutting waste and fraud in those programs – and there is evidence to support the idea that Trump wasn’t talking about cutting benefits, as Baldwin and other Democrats suggest.

Harris made a similar claim in her speech, misleadingly saying, “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” As we’ve written before, Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, although his budgets did propose cutting the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs.

His budgets also included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. The watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the Medicare proposals in Trump’s 2021 budget proposal, which were similar to those in the 2020 budget, “represent reductions in costs not cuts to benefits.”

As a candidate in this election, Trump hasn’t released any detailed proposal to cut either program. However, his plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security income for seniors could result in reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits in the next decade, unless Trump provides a plan to replace the revenues that both programs would lose under his no-tax plan. Otherwise, a future Congress and president would have to replace the lost funds.

As for Baldwin’s claim that Trump would give “a huge new tax break to billionaires and corporations,” most of the tax cuts Trump has proposed would benefit taxpayers at all income levels. Most notably, Trump plans to extend the individual tax cuts in the 2017 tax law, as we said. A Tax Policy Center distributional analysis found that for middle-income households, about 86% would pay less in taxes and 13% would pay more in 2027 if those tax provisions are extended.

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