Cindy Starr

One of the midterms' most visceral GOP ads features a woman attacking Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown over “sex changes for minors — irreversible surgery on kids. Like me.” The woman mentions she got “hormone injections, then surgery — without my parents’ consent. I was a kid.” She uses the words “I was a kid” moments after mentioning the surgery in another ad, too. But as @MorganTrau of News 5 Cleveland noted last week, the woman had the surgery as a 19-year-old adult, for whom no parental consent would be required. In other forums, the woman has openly discussed that she was 19 when she had the surgery. But that's never mentioned in the ads; in both, her words create the clear and false impression she was a minor at the time. Brown has just released a response ad calling the GOP ads "a complete lie," noting the age at which the woman had the surgery and the fact that she had it in Texas, not Ohio. cnn.com/2026/10/08/politics/…

Here are quick fact checks on 16 of President Trump’s claims last night. 1) He claimed, “Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.” Not even close to true. Federal figures show overall prices keep rising, food prices keep rising, and far more products are getting more expensive than getting cheaper. 2) He claimed, “Every single promise I made you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on.” Clearly not . The war in Ukraine didn’t end within 24 hours of his inauguration, inflation isn’t dead, Mexico hasn’t paid for the wall. Etc. 3) He claimed “over $20 trillion” has been invested in the US this term. This figure is fiction even the White House can’t justify. The White House website says “$11.2 trillion,” and even that is a wild exaggeration. 4) He claimed he "won the presidency three times,” then explicitly said he won in 2020. Just lies. 5) He claimed his ballroom will use “zero tax dollars.” The final breakdown is unclear, but the Secret Service has acknowledged that public dollars will be used at least for security measures related to the project, which includes an underground complex. Some Senate Republicans tried this year to get hundreds of millions in public money allocated in part to project-related security. 6) He claimed the ballroom project is “under budget.” There is no actual public budget for it, and cost estimates have steadily increased – from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million to $600 million. 7) He claimed that former NC governor and now Senate candidate Roy Cooper released the man who went on to kill Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte in 2025. But NC’s corrections department has explained that the man served his full robbery sentence and was not released early. The man's release, in 2020, happened months before the state's 2021 lawsuit settlement over pandemic-era prison conditions that resulted in some other offenders getting released sooner than expected. 8) He claimed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was seen wearing a mask just “a few months ago.” No evidence of this; other Republicans have mocked Talarico for masking in 2022, four years ago. Trump also claimed, in what mayyy have been a joke, that Talarico was recently spotted running away and throwing up after eating meat at a barbecue. Clearly didn’t happen. 9) He said gas prices were just $1.85 per gallon in Iowa when he visited before the Iran war. The Iowa average that day was $2.57, per AAA, and GasBuddy found just four stations that day under $2 – at $1.97, to be specific – out of 2,036 stations it tracked there. (Maybe Trump was referring to the E85 ethanol blend only some cars can use, which was around $1.85, but he certainly didn’t say that.) 10) He said the US has the lowest drug prices in the world. Experts say that is not true as a general claim, and the White House hasn’t substantiated it. 11) He boasted that more Americans are working than ever before. That’s true, but it’s a basically meaningless stat because the number of people working rises over time as the population rises. Better ways to measure the labor market show that it has been far from historically strong this term. 12) He claimed “zero illegal aliens” have crossed the border over the last 15 months. Not true; state and federal authorities have acknowledged some migrants evaded apprehension during that period. The Trump administration says it hasn’t “released” any migrants into the country after apprehension, but that’s different than having zero people crossing at all. 13) He claimed “25 million” migrants poured into the country under Biden. This is another fictional figure. Through the last full month of Biden’s term, the government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants…including millions who were rapidly expelled. Even counting “gotaways,” which the House GOP estimated at under 2.5 million, it’s not 25 million people. 14) He claimed Biden or Democrats allowed “11,888 murderers” to enter the country. This is a gross distortion of federal data about non-citizens who entered the US not just under Biden but over the course of multiple decades, including during Trump’s first administration, and were convicted of homicide at some point, usually in the US after their arrival, but remained in the US because they were still serving prison sentences or their original countries wouldn't take them back. 15) He claimed he’d achieved “no tax on Social Security.” His 2025 law created an additional temporary deduction for seniors, expiring after 2028, but the administration has acknowledged millions of Social Security recipients will continue to pay taxes on their benefits. 16) He claimed “trillions of dollars in tariff revenue have come in.” It was in the hundreds of billions, not close to even $1 trillion, even before the big refunds prompted by the Supreme Court decision that ruled some of the tariffs illegal. More details here: cnn.com/2026/09/09/politics/…