Fact-checking JD Vance at RNC midterm convention Night 2

The second and final night of the Republican midterm convention mixed somber tributes for 9/11 and Charlie Kirk with warnings of Democrats using the midterm elections to usher in far-left policies.

In the keynote address, Vice President JD Vance drew a sharp contrast between his party and what he described as “radical Democrats.” 

“The Democrats are running candidates who will tell your children what they’re allowed to say, how they’re allowed to live, and importantly, who they ought to hate, because that’s what the Democrat Party is about in 2026,” Vance said. “It’s not about you. It’s about foreign fraudsters, and it’s about who they hate. And we’ve got to send their asses packing in November.”

When a protester inside Dallas’ American Airlines Center interrupted Vance’s speech and waved the Mexican flag, Vance called the flag the new symbol of the far-left. 

Vance said Republicans are rooting out fraud and abuse, defending the nuclear family and upholding Americans’ “birthright” to inherit prosperity.

Here are fact-checks of some of Vance’s statements. 

“And what did the Democrats do when the fraud they turned a blind eye to reached these catastrophic levels? We found $250 billion dollars of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar.”

Vance takes it too far by portraying only Trump officials as tackling fraud.

In his remarks, he mentioned Medicaid fraud in a Minnesota autism program. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who ran for vice president in 2024, has faced criticism for his response to fraud in the state’s safety net programs. 

But federal prosecutors in Minnesota announced charges against 47 defendants involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future in 2022, when Joe Biden was president. During Trump’s current term, federal prosecutors have continued to prosecute Minnesota safety net fraud, including in a program to provide services for people with autism spectrum disorder. 

The White House in August published a “fraud ledger,” which says the administration uncovered $245.7 billion in fraud. But that does not represent fraud proven in court.

Rather, it’s an estimate based on data analysis. The White House ledger has a separate category for “fraud enforced,” and that total is $59.1 billion in indictments or settlements. 

PolitiFact contacted the White House on Sept. 3 to ask for more details showing how officials arrived at the fraud figure and did not receive that information.

“We’ve created 1 million new jobs, and unlike the last administration, where most of the job growth went to illegal aliens, 100% of the job growth in the United States of America is going to American citizens.”

Vance’s citation for the number of jobs created during Trump’s second term is in the ballpark. According to federal data, the U.S. added 807,000 jobs during that time. 

Still, Trump’s second-term job creation is drastically underperforming the record of his predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as his own first term.

In Trump’s second term, the U.S. has added 38,000 jobs per month on average. That’s compared with an average of 177,000 and 236,000 jobs created per month under the Obama, Biden and first-term Trump administrations — when leaving out the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21.

Vance’s point about who is benefitting most from the job growth under Trump needs context.

Since the start of Trump’s second term in January 2025, the estimated number of foreign-born people employed in the U.S. has fallen by 1.29 million, compared with an increase of 1.74 million among native-born workers. At that rate, the number could grow to 4.7 million more native-born workers over a four-year presidential term.

Job growth for native-born people was more robust under Biden, increasing by 7.5 million. 

Vance’s claim that the job gains flipped from mostly “illegal aliens” under Biden to U.S. citizens under Trump is misleading. Many of the people counted as foreign-born in this data set are either naturalized U.S. citizens or people legally present in the U.S., often for decades.

Vance attacks Talarico on past comments, baselessly references ‘browser history’

Similar to speakers during the convention’s first night, Vance unleashed an attack on Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico. 

“In Texas, you have Democrats, grown men, who seem to be pretty obsessed with trans children,” Vance said. “I gotta say that the president’s very good at nicknames, but Talafrico maybe tops the list. This Talarico guy, he will not shut up about how there are six genders. He will not shut up about how, quote, ‘God is nonbinary.’ I don’t know what the hell that even means, my friends. He won’t shut up about having traditional Christian values makes you a bigot. And I got to say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children? I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history.”

Talarico, a seminarian, once said he loved a group of transgender children who visited the Texas Capitol to advocate for themselves, calling their actions inspiring. Vance presented no evidence to support the idea that Talarico’s actions toward children have been problematic.

Here’s context about some of Talarico’s comments that Vance referred to: 

‘Six genders’: During a 2021 speech in the Texas House of Representatives while debating a bill about transgender youth playing in school sports, Talarico said there are “at least six biological sex characteristics,” referring to traits such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy. 

In a Sept. 9 interview with Fox News, when asked if he still believes there are six sexes, Talarico said “no.”

“I missed the mark on some of my past statements, I’ll be the first to admit it,” Talarico said. “What I meant is there are two sexes and there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities. Obviously I didn’t say it correctly. There are not six sexes, there are two.”

‘God is nonbinary’: During the same 2021 speech while debating a bill about transgender youth, Talarico said, “God is nonbinary.”

The full video shows Talarico saying, “The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”

Talarico told ABC News the statement was “meant to be deliberately provocative” and that he believes people “can’t use human categories to define God.” 

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