Trump-Biden presidential debate 2024: Fact-checking claims

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump met on the presidential debate stage for the first time in 2024 on Thursday, June 27.

Under rules from CNN, which hosted the debate, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not qualify. 

The broadcast was historic in several ways, marking the earliest general election debate and the first time since 1960 that a presidential debate was held without a live audience. 

VERIFY fact-checked these claims made by Biden and Trump during Thursday night’s debate.

Trump: “[Biden] inherited almost no inflation and it stayed that way for 14 months.”

The inflation rate when President Joe Biden took office was low, but did increase over time.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the year-over-year inflation rate was 1.4%, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. 

The inflation rate steadily rose over the course of the following 17 months, peaking at 9.7% in June 2022. 

A White House official told VERIFY that “the pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”

The inflation rate of 1.4% in January 2021 was fairly in line with the inflation rate of the previous six months, which fluctuated between 1% and 1.4%. 

The lowest inflation rate during the pandemic was seen in May 2020, when there was a 0.1% inflation rate.

Biden: “Unemployment rate [under Trump] rose to 15%.”

Yes, for one month during the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate under Trump did reach nearly 15%. 

In April 2020, the unemployment rate was at 14.8%, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. By August, the unemployment rate dropped below 10%. It was at 6.4% in January 2021, when Biden took office.

The unemployment rate was between 3.5 and 3.8% from February 2019 to February 2020, the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on the U.S. economy.

The unemployment rate did not make it back down to 3.8% again until February 2022. Since then, the unemployment rate has fluctuated between 3.4 and 4.0%.