AP FACT CHECK: False claims flood Trump-Biden debate

He came out of his bunker, had the military do tear gas.” THE FACTS: It was law enforcement, not the military, that used chemical irritants to forcefully remove peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square outside the White House on June 1. And there is no evidence President Trump was inside a bunker in the White House as that happened.

President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of fabrications and fear-mongering in a belligerent debate with Joe Biden, at one point claiming that the U.S. death toll would have been 10 times higher under the Democrat because he wanted open borders in the pandemic. Biden preached no such thing. A look at how some of their statements from Cleveland stack up with the facts in the first of three scheduled presidential debates for the November 3 election: VIRUS DEATH TOLL TRUMP, addressing Biden on U.S. deaths from COVID-19: "If you were here, it wouldn't be 200,000 people, it would be 2 million people. You didn't want me to ban China, which was heavily infected... If we would have listened to you, the country would have been left wide open."

THE FACTS: The audacious claim that Biden as president would have seen 2 million deaths rests on a false accusation. Biden never came out against Trump's decision to restrict travel from China. Biden was slow in staking a position on the matter but when he did, he supported the restrictions.

The U.S. restrictions that took effect Feb. 2 continued to allow travel to the U.S. from the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao. The Associated Press reported that more than 8,000 Chinese and foreign nationals based in the two locales entered the U.S. in the first three months after the travel restrictions were imposed.

PORTLAND PROTEST TRUMP: "The (Portland, Oregon) sheriff just came out today and he said I support President Trump."

THE FACTS: That is false. The sheriff of Multnomah County, Oregon — where Portland is located — said he does not support Trump.

The sheriff, Mike Resse, tweeted: "As the Multnomah County Sheriff I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him." Portland has been a flashpoint in the debate over racial injustice protests in the U.S. Police and federal agents have repeatedly clashed with demonstrators gathered outside the downtown federal courthouse and police buildings.

WHITE HOUSE PROTEST BIDEN: "There was a peaceful protest in front of the White House. What did he do? He came out of his bunker, had the military do tear gas."

THE FACTS: It was law enforcement, not the military, that used chemical irritants to forcefully remove peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square outside the White House on June 1.

And there is no evidence President Trump was inside a bunker in the White House as that happened. Secret Service agents had rushed Trump to a White House bunker days earlier as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.

HEALTH CARE TRUMP: "Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%."

THE FACTS: That's a promise, not a reality, and it's a big stretch. Trump has been unable to get legislation to lower drug prices through Congress. Major regulatory actions from his administration are still in the works and are likely to be challenged in court.

There's no plan on the horizon that would lower drug prices as dramatically as Trump claims. Prescription drug price inflation has been low and slow during the Trump years, but it hasn't made a U-turn and sped off in the other direction.

RALLIES TRUMP: "So far we have had no problem whatsoever. It's outside, that's a big difference according to the experts. We have tremendous crowds." .

THE FACTS: That's not correct. Trump held an indoor rally in Tulsa in late June, drawing both thousands of participants and large protests.

The Tulsa City-County Health Department director said the rally "likely contributed" to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases there. By the first week of July, Tulsa County was confirmed more than 200 new daily cases, setting record highs. That's more than twice the number the week before the rally.

ECONOMY BIDEN: Trump will be the "first (president) in American history" to lose jobs during his presidency.

THE FACTS: No, if Trump loses re-election, he would not be the first president in U.S. history to have lost jobs.

That happened under Herbert Hoover, the president who lost the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt as the Great Depression caused massive job losses. Official job records only go back to 1939 and, in that period, no president has ended his term with fewer jobs than when he began.

Trump appears to be on track to have lost jobs during his first term, which would make him the first to do so since Hoover.

VOTING TRUMP, on the prospect of mass fraud in the vote-by-mail process, "It's a rigged election."

THE FACTS: He is exaggerating threats. Trump's claim is part of a months-long effort to sow doubt about the integrity of the election before it's even arrived and to preemptively call into question the results.

Experts have repeatedly said there are no signs of widespread fraud in mail balloting, as have the five states that relied exclusively on that system for voting even before the coronavirus pandemic.

SUPREME COURT BIDEN, on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett: "She thinks that the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional."

THE FACTS: That's not right.

Biden is talking about Trump's pick to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett has been critical of the Obama-era law and the court decisions that have upheld it, but she has never said it's not constitutional. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case on November 10, and the Trump administration is asking the high court to rule the law unconstitutional.