Walz-Vance Debate—Fact Checked

Vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance went head-to-head on Tuesday evening in what may well be the last televised debate of the 2024 election.
The Minnesota governor and Ohio senator were quizzed by CBS moderators on topics ranging from defense and abortion to climate change and the economy.
While Kamala Harris has said that she would be available for another debate before November 5, Donald Trump has said “it’s too late do another.”
Newsweek has assessed some of the key claims made during what could be the final televised matchup before Americans take to the polls.
CBS moderators guided the candidates through topics, starting with defense in the wake of escalating conflict between Israel and Iran.
Walz: “His chief of staff John Kelly said that he was the most flawed human being he’d ever met, and both of his secretaries of defense and his national security advisers said he should be nowhere near the White House.”
According to a CNN report from October 2020, Kelly told friends Trump was “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
“The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else,” Kelly reportedly said.
Mark Esper, who previously served as secretary of defense under Trump, said earlier this year: “I am concerned, I think it’s likely that if he returns to the White House, he will completely cut off support for Ukraine, and that will begin the slow collapse of the alliance behind Ukraine and lead to their increased vulnerability against Russia.”
However, former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller has not made comments saying Trump should not be near the White House.
Walz: “You called your running mate, Donald Trump, unfit for the nation’s highest office.”
This is true. Vance said this in 2016 in an article for the New York Times.
Vance: “Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.”
Harris had nothing to do with this. In 2015, as part of an international deal with Iran called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran agreed to cut back on nuclear enrichment programs in exchange for the unfreezing of its own assets.
This was not funding given to Iran. The amount quoted refers to foreign assets that belonged to Iran and were frozen by sanctions imposed to impede its nuclear program. Harris was not part of the Obama administration that oversaw this. China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the wider European Union bloc all also agreed to lift sanctions on Iran.
The U.S. under the Biden administration did, however, agree to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil funds held in a South Korean bank, as well as return five Iranian prisoners who have faced charges in the U.S. in exchange for five Americans.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the frozen assets were monitored by the U.S. and could only be used for humanitarian purposes.
Walz: “We had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program, the inability to advance it. Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place”
As president, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 nuclear deal Washington had signed with Iran and world powers, claiming it “failed to protect national security interests.” The deal has not been restored since.
Walz: “When Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. ”
In 2019 a U.S. spy drone was shot down by Iran, claiming the unmanned craft that was in its airspace. As reported by The Guardian, as officials crafted a response Trump tweeted “Iran made a very big mistake” but later said he thought it was “hard to believe it was intentional.”
Walz: “And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”
At a campaign event in Milwaukee in October, when asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq that left “more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured”, Trump replied: “What does injured mean? Injured means, you mean, because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.”
Vance: “This idea that carbon emissions drives all of the climate change, well, let’s just say that’s true just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science…”
Vance’s comments suggest there is doubt about the causes of climate change. The United Nations states that fossil fuels are “by far” the largest contributor to global climate change.
The EPA states that the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat and make the planet warmer, from human activities in the United States is from burning fossil fuels.
Vance: “Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to more energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”
This echoes comments Vance made in August 2024 saying that the Inflation Reduction Act shipped more manufacturing jobs and production of energy efficient technology to China.
However, as The Washington Post stated in a Fact Check of these comments earlier this year, while China leads in the production of technologies such as solar panels, the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act were to increase manufacturing of technologies within the United States.
The Department of Energy stated in a recently published report that clean energy employment increased by 142,000 jobs between 2022 and 2023. The previous year’s report stated an increase of 114,000 clean energy jobs between 2021 and 2022.
Walz: “Donald Trump called it [climate change] a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.”
Trump has said this on many occasions. However, his comments have not always been consistent, stating in a CBS interview in October 2018, “I don’t think it’s a hoax,” and in 2019 saying “Climate change is very important to me,” as reported by the BBC.
In an interview with Elon Musk in August, Trump said that global warming was not “the biggest threat,” dismissing it elsewhere as “weather.” He has previously made mocking comments saying that changes in sea levels would “create more oceanfront property. That’s what it’s going to do.”
Vance: “We haven’t built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years.”
The Vogtle Unit 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia began commercial operation on April 29, 2024, as stated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The next youngest reactor was Vogtle Unit 3, which began commercial energy generation use in 2023.
The Tennessee Valley Authority Watts Bar 2 was commissioned in 2016 but had been in development since the 1970s. Nuclear power facility production has been slow in the past 40 years, Vogtle being the only plant built from scratch for decades.
Vance: “Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies, 94 executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates.”
This appears to refer to two different things. Joe Biden did end construction of Trump’s border wall program and the “Remain in Mexico” program where migrants were sent to Mexico to await immigration hearings. However, other policies such as Title 42 were kept in place until 2023, replaced by Title 8. Title 8 has more severe consequences for migrants who do not qualify for entry into the country as they will not only be deported, but will also be banned from reentering the country for at least five years.
The “94 executive orders” appears to refer to a report from think tank the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) which claimed that in the first 100 days of office, Biden took “94 executive actions on immigration.” The report was used earlier this year by Republican representatives to criticize Biden’s immigration record.
However, as the MPI has previously told Newsweek, the executive actions “covered a wide range of areas, and thus could not be described as all focused on the border,” noting the section of the report titled “Biden’s Actions Away from the Southern Border.”
“As with the 472 executive actions taken during the Trump presidency, there have been a wide range of issue areas covered, many having nothing to do with the U.S.-Mexico border,” the spokesperson added.
Vance: “And what it’s meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country.”

The link between immigration and fentanyl trafficking is disputed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said that 90 percent of fentanyl is trafficked primarily in cars and trucks. In fiscal 2023, 86.4 percent of individuals sentenced for fentanyl trafficking were U.S. citizens, as stated by the United States Sentencing Commission.
Walz: “And the consequences in Springfield were the governor had to send state law enforcement to escort kindergartners to school, I believe.”
The Minnesota governor mentioned the false claims popularized by Trump that migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating pets. Reports state that Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine did deploy state highway patrol officers to schools in Springfield after bomb threats following Trump’s repetition of the false claim.
The extent of protection for kindergartners has not been specified.
Vance: “So we’ve got 20-25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country.”
A recent analysis by Poynter showed that multiple estimates from immigration groups, including those which favor reduced immigration, show the top figure for undocumented migrants living in the U.S. was 16.8 million as of 2023. They rated the claim that “20-25 million” undocumented migrants are living in the U.S., previously said by Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio, as false.
Vance: “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them hopefully are at homes with their families.”
This is not true. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that between fiscal years 2019-2023, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not appeared in court for immigration proceedings. The audit found that ICE “was not able to account for the location” of all these children.
The audit also said ICE had not issued orders for 291,000 children to appear in court.
The 320,000 claim echoes a similar statement Trump made recently where he combined these two sets of figures. The audit did not state that the 291,000 without court orders were missing, nor did it say that all 32,000 children could not be located. ICE is not a child welfare authority and unaccompanied migrant children are placed in shelters or with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is meant to monitor placements.
Furthermore, the audit reporting monitored figures recorded under the Trump and Biden administrations.
While the audit noted that the children were vulnerable to practices such as sex trafficking, Vance’s comments that these children have been sex trafficked, however, is not supported by immediately available evidence. Newsweek has contacted Vance’s representatives for comment.
Walz: “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies. It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access to infertility treatments.”
Project 2025 does not state this. While it does include plans to limit access to abortion, there are no statements about having a pregnancy registry, although it has called for mandatory collection on data for miscarriages and abortions.
As stated by PolitiFact, in response to a similar claim that Walz made in September, while the document does not mention restricting specific fertility treatments, it does include language supporting the rights of fetuses and embryos.
The document also does not advocate getting rid of all contraception but does call to “eliminate” access to the week-after-pill, Ella, which it claims is an abortifacient.
The Trump campaign has repeatedly tried to distance itself from Project 2025, despite the scores of former Trump officials and allies that have contributed to it. Vance is connected to organizations and individuals tied to The Heritage Foundation, which released the document.
Vance: “As I read the Minnesota law that you signed into law…the statute that you signed into law, says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late term abortion.”
Vance’s summary is wrong. The 2023 law referred to here changed the phrase “a born alive infant as a result of an abortion” to “an infant who is born alive.” It states explicitly “An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.
“All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.”
Vance: “I never supported a national [abortion] ban.”
Vance said during a podcast recording in 2022 that “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
Walz: “He [Trump] gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top caste.”
Analysis by the Tax Policy Center from 2017 found that higher-income households, would receive “larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income” and that the largest cuts, as a share of income, went to taxpayers in the 95th to 99th percentile, the bill would reduce taxes “on average for all income groups.”
Vance: “Donald Trump’s economic policies delivered the highest take-home pay in a generation in this country.”
Under Trump’s administration, non-seasonally adjusted real median household income and real median personal income peaked in 2019, slumping the year after.
However, this had been increasing every year, year-on-year, since 2014. Newsweek has contacted Vance representatives for further comment.