Pick your 2024 Lie of the Year

This week:?3 updates to our Biden Promise Tracker… Biden flip-flops on pardoning his son Hunter … The Supreme Court hears a case that could affect transgender care’s future … Can anyone stop Donald Trump’s push for tariffs? … No, Elon Musk isn’t melting down the Statue of Liberty

What do PolitiFact readers think is the 2024 Lie of the Year?

After a year of falsehoods, inaccuracies and misleading statements, it’s time for our readers to pick their 2024 Lie of The Year.

Every year since 2009, PolitiFact has awarded the Lie of the Year to the most significant falsehood or exaggeration that worked to undermine an accurate narrative. Although editors make the official choice after weighing a year of fact-checking, we also ask our readers to tell us what they think was the past year’s most consequential falsehood.?

In 2023, our readers chose President-elect Donald Trump’s False claim that "They are trying to make it illegal to question the results of a bad election," after he was charged in a federal indictment for efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Our official 2023 Lie of the Year went to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign built on conspiracy theories.

Cast your vote for Readers' Choice Lie of the Year!

Here are links to all of the fact-checks listed on the ballot. (Note: We rated one statement on our Flip-O-Meter, which measures politicians’ consistency on issues, not our Truth-O-Meter, which measures the accuracy of claims.)

1. Donald Trump: The Biden administration stole $1 billion “from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants. … And FEMA is now busted. They don’t have any money.” Pants on Fire!
2. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Patents dating back to the 1800s show that people can control the weather. Pants on Fire!
3. Donald Trump: “In Springfield (Ohio), they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats.” Pants on Fire!
4. Joe Biden: “I will not pardon” Hunter Biden. Full Flop.?
5. Elon Musk: President Joe Biden’s strategy is to “get as many illegals in the country as possible” and “legalize them to create a permanent majority.” False
6. Kamala Harris: Donald Trump would “force states to monitor women's pregnancies.” False
7. JB Pritzker: JD Vance is “known for his obsession with couches.” Pants on Fire!
8. JD Vance: Says Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. Pants on Fire!
9. Donald Trump: Kamala Harris was “Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person.” Pants on Fire!
10. Write your own:?

We’re looking forward to seeing what you think is the biggest whopper of 2024.

— Katie Sanders, Josie Hollingsworth and Ellen Hine

3 updates to our Biden Promise Tracker

• No tax increase. As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised not to raise taxes on households earning less than $400,000; as president, he hasn’t. However, he has changed corporate taxation. Although corporate tax increases tend to focus largely on wealthy people, some lower-income earners may feel the increases’ effects. A higher corporate tax, for example, could depress values for stock shares middle- and lower-income taxpayers own or cause companies to avoid productivity-boosting investments, which could reduce workers' wages long term. But tax experts say these increases affect middle and lower-income workers only modestly. On balance, we rate this a Promise Kept. ?
• Expand affordable housing. Biden promised to increase access to affordable housing and invested toward it. But because of congressional gridlock, his changes were incremental and temporary. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included about $1 billion for affordable housing energy efficiency, but around $100 billion he’d wanted for constructing and upgrading affordable housing was struck from the bill’s final version. The American Rescue Plan Biden signed into law in 2021 included nearly $50 billion in housing and homelessness assistance, but that was largely for temporary emergencies. The Biden administration supported the Downpayment Toward Equity Act of 2023, but the bill died in committee. We rate this promise Compromise. ?
• Prevent for-profit college profiteering. Biden promised to keep for-profit education programs from profiteering off students. In October 2023, he released rules to make for-profit schools and career programs meet minimum standards and disclose the risks and rewards of taking out student loans. The Education Department would use a debt-to-earnings ratio and graduate earnings to assess whether college programs met requirements for “gainful employment.” It’s too soon to know whether Biden’s rules will fulfill his campaign promise because a deadline for reporting data from for-profit colleges and programs was delayed until shortly before he leaves office. But because Biden established the rules and because they’re to take effect before he leaves office, we rate it as a Promise Kept.

Biden flip-flops on pardoning his son

For months, President Joe Biden insisted he wouldn’t pardon his son Hunter Biden, who faced federal charges over guns and taxes. But the president Dec. 1 announced a wide-ranging pardon of his son.

A Delaware jury found Hunter Biden guilty of lying about his drug use on a federal gun purchase form. Hunter Biden also pleaded guilty to charges related to filing and paying taxes from 2016 to 2019. The pardon ends the federal cases.

This was a big shift for the president. On June 6, ABC News’ David Muir asked him, “Have you ruled out a pardon for your son?” Biden said, “Yes.” A week later, during an international summit, Biden told reporters he’d neither pardon Hunter nor commute his sentence.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre long echoed Joe Biden’s sentiment that Hunter Biden would receive no pardon. As recently as Nov. 7, ahead of Hunter Biden’s scheduled Dec. 12 sentencing on the gun charges and Dec. 16 sentencing on the tax fraud charges, Jean-Pierre said, "We’ve been asked that question (about a possible pardon) multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”

In his message announcing the pardon, Joe Biden wrote, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong. … Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but … I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice."

Other presidents also have pardoned relatives. Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother, Roger Clinton, for drug-related charges. Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner, on convictions for false tax returns, witness retaliation and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.

“Using the pardon power in a way that exclusively benefits those who are related to or close to the president is an abuse of the pardon power, which is intended to be used in a way that advances the public good by improving the functioning of the justice system,” Dan Kobil, a Capital University Law School professor, said. “Biden or any president interfering with the justice system to benefit a family member undermines the reasons we gave the president the power in the first place.”

At the same time, Kobil said, “We must also be cognizant that the incoming president has repeatedly promised to use the government to exact ‘retribution’ against his enemies" and it’s “hardly speculative” to believe that Hunter Biden “could be a prime target of the incoming administration.”

Whatever the justification for the president’s pardon, his actions are a complete change in position. We rate it a Full Flop.

— Louis Jacobson

RELATED:?Biden promised to prevent the White House from interfering in federal investigations and prosecutions

Can anyone stop Trump on tariffs?

During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump called tariff “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” He proposed tariffs on U.S. trading partners — a 10% to 20% tariff on all nondomestic goods sold in America; reciprocal tariffs on nations that impose tariffs on the U.S.; and a 60% tariff on goods from China.?

After the election, on Nov. 25, he proposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% tariff on imported Chinese goods.

Economists say Trump following through on these promises could reactivate inflation. Our review of academic studies of real-world tariffs concluded that consumers ultimately shoulder most of the burden in higher prices for goods. Before the most recent tariff proposals, independent groups have estimated that Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical family from $2,000 to $4,000 annually.

If fully applied, the new North American tariffs could raise grocery prices, given that Mexico accounted for 69% of U.S. vegetable imports and 51% of fresh fruit imports in 2022. New tariffs on Canada could also spike gasoline prices, especially in the upper Midwest, which relies on Canadian crude oil imports. Construction prices could also rise; one-quarter of the lumber used in the U.S. comes from Canada, and Canada and Mexico both supply cement, metals, machinery and other homebuilding necessities.

If Trump wants to follow through on the tariffs, there may be no way to stop him. Experts say he could act unilaterally, without support from a Congress that’s perhaps less enthusiastic about tariffs than he is. Agricultural states, which hold significant sway in the Senate, worry about retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners that could blow up long-standing export markets.

"There appear to be few practical or legal barriers to Trump making good on his campaign promise," concluded trade specialists Warren Maruyama, Lyric Galvin and William A. Reinsch with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank focusing on national security.

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have Republican majorities and Trump could exempt certain companies to divide and weaken his opposition. But widespread economic damage, particularly from inflated prices, could reverse Trump’s electoral fortunes, experts said.

"The biggest pushback against unilateral, across-the-board tariffs would likely come from U.S. consumers and U.S. retailers and distributors that purchase the imports, since their prices are likely to jump significantly, probably by close to the full amount of the tariffs," Babson College emeritus economics professor Kent Jones said.

Read more.

— Louis Jacobson

The Supreme Court is weighing trans health bans. Here’s what to expect.

Since 2021, 24 states have banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth, prompting dozens of legal challenges by transgender youth, families and advocates. On Dec. 4, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a case weighing whether Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth is constitutional. Jonathan Skrmetti is Tennessee’s attorney general.

The court may not decide the case until the spring or summer. But the ruling could affect the future of gender-affirming care bans nationwide and how the court will address forthcoming transgender discrimination cases.?

Gender-affirming medical care seeks to support transgender and nonbinary people’s gender identity. For the small population of transgender youth, this involves support mainly through social transition, puberty blockers and hormones as children become adolescents. Gender-affirming surgery is rarely performed on minors.

Tennessee's ban prohibits doctors from performing medical procedures "for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex," as assigned at birth. The law also bars using puberty blockers and hormone therapy as part of gender-affirming care. But those treatments remain available to treat other conditions, such as congenital defects and precocious puberty (when puberty happens too young).

Several transgender young people, their parents and a doctor sued Tennessee over its March 2023 ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, arguing it violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment. The plaintiffs also argue that the law discriminates based on sex because it allows certain medications, such as testosterone or estrogen, to be prescribed to one sex but not the other.?

A Tennessee District Court initially ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and blocked the bill from becoming law. But the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s ruling in September 2023 and let the ban take effect. The U.S. Justice Department joined the families’ petition for the Supreme Court to consider the case, which it granted earlier this year.?

In its legal brief, Tennessee said its law is not discriminatory because it regulates a specific medical procedure for a specific purpose. The state said it does not classify based on sex or transgender status, because the law applies equally to both sexes. The power to regulate safe medical care falls within the state’s authority, state lawyers argued in their briefs.?

"They're arguing they want to ban this form of treatment for this diagnosis," said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ policy research institute at the UCLA School of Law. "But what the plaintiffs are arguing, not explicitly, but in summary, is that this diagnosis is a proxy for a class of person.”

Read Staff Writer Grace Abels’ full rundown of the case.

Quick links to more fact-checks & reports

• Which states have laws about transgender people’s bathroom use, and how are the laws enforced? We investigate.
• No, Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director nominee, didn’t call the agency “gay.”
• There’s no evidence that a new Chick-fil-A policy has sparked calls to boycott the restaurants.
• The Walt Disney Co. still owns ABC and didn’t cancel “The View.”
• Actor Mark Wahlberg didn’t call to fire teachers who removed U.S. flags from classrooms.

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Do you smell smoke??

Here's your Pants on Fire fact-check of the week:?CNN didn’t report that entrepreneur Elon Musk would melt down the Statue of Liberty for metal to build Cybertrucks. The story is bogus.

See what else we've rated Pants on Fire this week.?

Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders will be back next week. Thanks to PolitiFact Audience Director Josie Hollingsworth and Senior Audience Engagement Producer Ellen Hine for helping put this week’s newsletter together.?

Thanks for reading,

Matthew Crowley

PolitiFact Copy Chief