Trump said he plans to tour the damage over the weekend. But first, on Friday, he plans to go to New Hampshire to hold a rally at an airport hangar. Vice President Pence also plans to campaign, hoping to build on momentum from this week’s Republican convention. (Democratic nominee Joe Biden, meanwhile, has plans to return to the in-person campaign trail.)

Melania Trump talked about her “Be Best” campaign in her speech on Wednesday night. But there has been little to report on since it was launched in May 2018. According to its website, the campaign encompasses the issues of cyberbullying, opioid addiction and general “well-being.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. unemployment rate was just 3.5% — as low as it had been in half a century. But economic growth fell short of what President Trump and his advisers promised. The economy grew 2.2% last year, roughly on par with the pace over the past decade. Growth briefly hit Trump’s 3% target in 2018, following passage of the Republican tax cut. But that now appears to have been a short-lived “sugar high.” While supporters of the tax cut said it would encourage more business investment and spark a decade of sustained 3% annual growth, business investment actually slumped for most of last year. That was partly a result of sagging global demand as well as uncertainty stemming from the president’s trade war.

President Trump’s decision to hold some elements of the Republican National Convention at the White House — one of several instances this week where he blurred the lines between the official work of the presidency and his political work of campaigning — has infuriated good-government watchdog groups, Democrats and traditionalists. The convention had been moved from Charlotte, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., because of the coronavirus.

Vaccines are being developed on a fast timeline, and several companies have received government funding. These companies are ramping up production even before they know a vaccine will work. Each vaccine has to go through a variety of tests to show that it’s safe and effective. That might be done by the end of the year or even sooner, but there's no guarantee. The longer a vaccine is in testing, the more information experts will have about it before its widespread use.

President Trump’s battle cry against socialism is one that has been repeated throughout the Republican National Convention, from his campaign advisers to former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley. In fact, the S-word has been leveled against Democrats for decades.

But Democrats’ propensity to lean toward regulation and empowering the federal government isn’t actually a socialist political system, where the state uniformly provides social welfare services like health care and controls large sections of the economy.

Part of the Trump campaign’s reelection strategy has been to try to make this a choice election rather than a referendum on how Trump has handled the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest test to his presidency. The law-and-order theme is one example of how Trump and Republicans try to draw a contrast with Democrats.

White evangelicals and other conservative Christians have remained, by and large, a bastion of support for President Trump, and this speech includes several lines aimed at that audience. Democrats also have invoked religious themes throughout the campaign in an effort to reach persuadable religious voters. Some Democratic-leaning groups have tried to make inroads with these voters, but evangelicals remain a major voting bloc for Trump and the Republican Party. Over his long political career, Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has spoken about the importance of his Catholic faith. Trump, who was raised Presbyterian, has often leaned on Vice President Pence to help shore up support among his white evangelical base.

The president has reduced the U.S. troop presence in the three countries where the American military has been most active — Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. However, the conflicts have not been resolved, and many in the U.S. national security establishment say the U.S. should maintain at least a limited presence to prevent a resurgence of heavy fighting.

President Trump signaled early on that he has little use for the international order that both Republican and Democratic presidents spent decades assembling after World War II. Since taking office, he has pursued his “America First” foreign policy with gusto, withdrawing from an Asia-Pacific trade agreement, the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and even the World Health Organization. He has questioned the value of NATO and sought to undermine the World Trade Organization. Trump usually says he wants to negotiate better deals. But in most cases, the rest of the world simply moves on, leaving the U.S. increasingly isolated. When the administration asked the U.N. Security Council to reimpose sanctions on Iran this month, the Dominican Republic was the only country to side with the United States.

Nearly every country in the world came together in Paris in 2015 to forge a new agreement on how to fight global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But just a couple of years later, President Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the historic Paris accord.

That has been formally set into motion and the process will be complete in November, right after the election.  

The Trump administration — and in some cases congressional Republicans — have repealed or rewritten numerous regulations affecting the environment, labor, housing, health care and the financial industry. Many of these moves have been challenged in court, often successfully. But some of the deregulatory changes have gone into effect.

As part of its “Phase 1” trade deal with the Trump administration, China agreed to substantially increase its purchases of U.S. goods and services by the end of next year. The two sides reaffirmed their commitment to the deal this week. But so far, China has fallen far short of the promised purchases. The deal relaxes some tariffs on Chinese imports and lifts others. But hundreds of billions of dollars in goods that the U.S. buys from China are still subject to steep import taxes, averaging 19.3%. The deal does not address some of the major structural complaints about China, including its government subsidies for state-owned businesses. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has badly strained U.S.-China ties.

President Trump’s new trade deal with Mexico and Canada passed the House and Senate with remarkably broad, bipartisan support. The agreement, called the USMCA, updates NAFTA, covering things like digital commerce, which barely existed when the original deal was signed a quarter-century ago.

But despite the president’s claims, the USMCA is mostly a cosmetic refresh of NAFTA, not a wholesale replacement. 

The biggest changes affect automakers. They’ll have to include more North American parts in order to sell cars and trucks here duty-free, and a new minimum wage requirement could shift some auto production from Mexico to the United States. The agreement also includes stronger labor and environmental protections, which House Democrats insisted on. And it offers U.S. dairy farmers slightly more access to the Canadian market. On the whole, the USMCA’s economic effects are expected to be modest. The main benefit of the deal is that it avoids the disruption that would have come had Trump made good on his threat to scrap NAFTA without a replacement.

President Trump has promised that he is on the verge of signing a new executive order to put in place a merit-based immigration system similar to ones in Canada and New Zealand.

That has not yet materialized.

He had charged his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner with developing a merit-based immigration reform bill, with provisions sought by business groups. But that stalled. Immigration restrictionist groups, which have strong support from Trump’s base, have fought efforts to boost immigration.

Four years ago, Donald Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall he wanted to build along the U.S.-Mexico border. Since then, the administration says 275 miles of that wall have been built. Mexico has not paid a penny. While Congress has authorized some spending for the project, most of the money for wall construction has been redirected from the military at the president’s insistence. Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon participated in a private effort to raise money for a border wall. Last week, Bannon and three others were indicted on charges that they siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars each from the wall fund for their own personal use. Bannon has pleaded not guilty.

President Trump announced executive orders to lower drug prices on July 24, but health policy experts say they will likely offer only minimal relief, if any. The most talked-about one would tie certain drug prices to the less expensive prices in other countries. But this pertains to only Medicare Part B, and the order hasn’t been implemented. Instead, Trump said he’d give pharmaceutical executives time to come up with an alternative plan; if there was no deal by a deadline (which came and went this week), he’d implement the executive order. There’s no sign yet that the order has been implemented.

Trump signed into law the Right to Try Act in 2018, which allows patients with life-threatening diseases or conditions, and who have already exhausted all approved treatment options, to access certain experimental treatments still undergoing Food and Drug Administration review. But according to one estimate, fewer than a dozen patients have benefited. Patients already have access to experimental drugs through alternate expanded-access programs at the FDA, which were started by previous administrations.

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shared the goal of remaking the federal judiciary. McConnell has led the Senate in approving more than 200 judges, all nominated by Trump. Together, they filled every circuit court vacancy in the country as of June 24 of this year.

“This Senate will have confirmed 200 of President Trump’s nominees to lifetime appointments on the federal bench,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor that day. “And following number 200, when we depart this chamber today, there will not be a single circuit court vacancy anywhere in the nation for the first time in at least 40 years.”

That achievement is one that McConnell has pursued for decades, and it is one that he and Trump both celebrate frequently.

Passed as a part of the 2017 tax-cut law, the “opportunity zones” program allows investors to defer and lower their capital gains taxes if they invest in certain low-income communities. The impact of the policy is difficult to measure because the government is not collecting detailed data on the investments. Critics have charged that it has benefited wealthy investors more than poor residents.

On criminal justice reform, President Trump signed the First Step Act into law in 2018. The law had bipartisan support. It reduced prison sentences for certain offenses and offered incentives for prisoners to participate in training and rehabilitation programs to help prepare them for life after incarceration.

African American, Asian American and Hispanic unemployment did indeed hit their lowest points on record prior to the coronavirus pandemic, continuing a fall that began in the Obama administration.

That said, long-standing racial and ethnic discrepancies have remained. For example, prior to the pandemic, the Black unemployment rate was regularly roughly twice the white unemployment rate. That trend has held for decades. In addition, the jobless rate for white Americans has so far fallen from its pandemic peak more quickly than the rate for Black Americans.

One additional caveat is that presidents generally do not deserve a lot of credit for a booming economy.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed landmark legislation in the 1960s to protect African Americans’ voting rights, as well as to protect them from discrimination. Multiple historians pointed to Johnson, as well as laws and regulations enacted by Presidents Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman, in a thorough June Washington Post fact check of a similar claim from Trump.

President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal two years ago and has imposed unilateral sanctions. Now he wants to restore additional sanctions under the snapback provision of the 2015 deal signed by the U.S. and other world powers. However, the other signatories, including allies of the U.S., say the U.S. cannot impose the snapback sanctions since it is no longer party to the agreement.

President Trump’s support for Israel has been popular with his evangelical base. Trump recently said publicly that he moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem “for the evangelicals,” who express strong support for Israel. The embassy move was met with support from many Jewish and evangelical groups but was criticized by some religious leaders.

President Trump did create a new branch of the U.S. armed forces specifically to deal with space, which he called the world’s newest war-fighting domain. While it has received some mockery, others say it could provide an important coordinating function for defense activities related to space.

Manufacturing has begun to recover from the punch thrown by the coronavirus pandemic, but factories still employed 733,000 fewer people in July than they did a year ago. Factories were in a slump even before the pandemic. After a strong year in 2018, President Trump’s trade war disrupted supply chains and raised manufacturing costs. Factories added just 29,000 jobs in all of last year. Manufacturing plays a smaller role in the U.S. economy than it used to, employing just 8.6% of the workforce. But manufacturing is a major employer in a number of key swing states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.

The U.S. intelligence community said in an Aug. 7 statement: “We assess that China prefers that President Trump — whom Beijing sees as unpredictable — does not win reelection.” The statement also said that Russia is trying to undermine Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign.

Repeatedly calling the novel coronavirus the “China virus” and using phrases like “kung flu” is a way for President Trump to shift blame for the deadly toll of the pandemic away from his own administration. Critics say that the language is racist and that this language could add to the ugly harassment that Asian Americans have already faced. The virus has an official name, SARS-CoV-2, and the World Health Organization says names based on geography can lead to a dangerous backlash against those who live there.

The U.S. is certainly among the top countries when it comes to the sheer number of tests conducted, but there’s also some evidence that China might have surpassed the U.S., with some estimates showing 90 million tests conducted in China, versus 71 million in the United States. Experts have suggested that testing programs should be scaled according to the size of each country’s epidemic, not the size of the population. So a country doing less testing might actually indicate that country has effectively contained its outbreak.

On Sunday, President Trump announced that his administration had granted emergency-use authorization to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients with plasma taken from people who had recovered from the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration says early data from COVID-19 patients who got this plasma as an experimental treatment suggest it can save lives if administered soon after hospitalization. Other experts say the evidence is weak and it needs more study. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn used a misleading statistic to suggest how good the plasma treatment was, drawing deep scorn from other scientists; Hahn later admitted their criticism was justified.

So far, most of the treatments used to treat COVID-19 have been drugs that were originally designed for other diseases. Remdesivir was first tried as a treatment for Ebola, and dexamethasone is a steroid that has been around for decades. Convalescent plasma is not a new concept, having been used for more than a century, although plasma containing antibodies to the coronavirus is, of course, new because the virus is new. Additional new drugs are in the pipeline, but none has shown convincing results yet.

President Trump likes to stress the ratio of COVID-19 deaths to known cases — the case-fatality rate.

But this is seen by public health experts as an unreliable marker of the success or failure of a country’s efforts. For example, in the U.S., a lower rate may simply reflect the rapid spread of the coronavirus among young people — because they are generally less likely to get seriously ill or die, compared with older adults. When it comes to the sheer number of deaths, even adjusted for population size, the U.S. isn’t doing well compared with other peer nations.

While U.S. employers added more than 9 million jobs in May, June and July, that’s fewer than half the 22 million jobs that were lost in March and April as the economy slid into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. What’s more, job gains slowed last month. And at 10.2%, the unemployment rate is still higher than at any time during the Great Recession more than a decade ago. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that more than a million people filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week. Twenty-seven million people were collecting unemployment as of early August.

In an interview with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir last week, Joe Biden was asked if he would advocate for shutting down the country if there were a second wave of COVID-19, combined with the flu, and scientists advised that's what he ought to do.

“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden answered.

Biden and President Trump have repeatedly clashed over whether the economy can be reopened without first defeating the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump has pushed hard to reopen schools and even proposed withholding additional coronavirus relief funds from states that don't open schools in person. The American Federation of Teachers says school reopening can’t take place safely unless virus positivity rates are below 5%, which is the case in about half of states. Some schools that have opened in states such as Georgia and Indiana, where community transmission rates are relatively high, have had to promptly shut down again after a number of students and staff members tested positive.

It is accurate that Joe Biden's tax plan is estimated to raise $4 trillion over the course of a decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But his proposal is primarily focused on high-income households and not on "almost all American families."

In fact, the Democratic presidential nominee has publicly insisted that he won't raise taxes on income under $400,000. For taxpayers with an income above $1 million, he also intends to tax capital gains and dividends at the same rate as ordinary income. And he would raise the corporate tax rate from its current 21% to 28%.

The stock market has staged a remarkable comeback since falling sharply during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Since bottoming out in March, both the S&P 500 index and the Nasdaq composite have regained all the ground they lost during the spring. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is also within a few percentage points of its all-time high. Keep in mind, however, that most of the recent gains have been driven by a handful of big technology companies. What’s more, those gains overwhelmingly flow to the wealthiest Americans. According to the Federal Reserve, more than half of all stock is held by the wealthiest 1% of the country, while the bottom 90% of the population owns less than 13%.

The Republican tax cut passed in 2017 hasn’t come close to paying for itself, despite repeated promises from the president and his advisers. Corporate tax revenues fell 31% in the first year after the cut was passed. Overall tax revenues as a share of the economy declined in each of the two years since the cut has taken effect. While the tax cut contributed to a rising federal deficit, it failed to deliver a sustained increase in economic growth.

President Trump’s trade war with China has prompted some U.S. companies to rethink their supply chains. But in many cases, businesses have shifted production to other suppliers in Asia or Mexico. A survey last year by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found that just 6% of companies operating there were considering moving jobs to the United States.

Crude oil production in the U.S. hit record levels last year, topping 12 million barrels per day. Production has generally been on the rise for more than a decade, thanks to advances in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Oil production has declined this year as the pandemic depressed both demand and prices. Despite President Trump’s support for fossil fuels, coal production continues to shrink. Coal accounted for less than a quarter of the country’s electricity last year. While natural gas is now the leading energy source for electricity, there were days this spring when wind power kept more lights on than coal-fired power plants.

While Joe Biden wants to take on climate change and move the U.S. toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels, he has not called for an end to fracking. Instead, he wants a ban on new oil and gas drilling permits on public lands.

Immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are already ineligible for most kinds of government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Some states do allow undocumented immigrants to attend college at the subsidized rates allowed to other in-state residents. K-12 education, subsidized school lunches, nutritional aid for women, infants and children, and emergency medical care are available to everyone, regardless of immigration status.

In a recent interview with a group of Black and Hispanic journalists, Joe Biden said he would cease additional construction of the border wall, but he did not suggest that he would tear down the existing wall along the southern U.S. border built during the Trump administration.

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Biden told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Despite President Trump's repeated assertion that Biden would allow for “open borders,” the Democratic presidential nominee has said he believes in securing the border.

“I’m going to make sure that we have border protection,” he said in the same interview. “But it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry — that’s where all the bad stuff is happening.”

President Trump has repeated this false claim before. This is not a Biden position.

In the campaign's “unity task force” recommendations, crafted with Sen. Bernie Sanders appointees, Joe Biden calls for eliminating for-profit charter schools — which are a small fraction of all charters — and for greater oversight and accountability for all charter schools, which have seen instances of fraud and mismanagement.

For-profit, online charter schools have drawn particular scrutiny. In 2016, for example, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced a court-approved settlement in which the publicly traded company K12 Inc. would repay California $8.5 million after accusations of aggressive and misleading marketing campaigns, paired with inadequate teaching. The company denied wrongdoing.

The idea that Joe Biden and other Democrats favor abortion up to the end of pregnancy has become a common Republican talking point. In reality, Biden has called for codifying the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide, in federal law. Roe allows states to pass substantial restrictions on abortion after fetal viability, or roughly the third trimester. Some Democratic lawmakers in states, including New York, have worked to repeal restrictions on later abortion that reproductive rights advocates say can interfere with decisions in emergency situations or for women facing pregnancies with severe fetal abnormalities. Similar legislation proposed unsuccessfully in Virginia sparked a major national debate in early 2019.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to abortion-rights opponents that he would appoint conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices. His supporters say he has delivered in the selection of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The Trump administration also has won praise from social conservatives through its efforts to cut federal family planning funds for groups that provide abortions or referrals for abortion at home and abroad. A study in the medical journal The Lancet last year found that such policies have been linked to an increase in abortions in some countries. Substantial changes to the Title X family planning program have prompted many U.S. health care providers to withdraw from the program.

It’s true that the words “under God” were dropped from the Pledge of Allegiance during two daytime meetings at last week’s Democratic National Convention, which President Trump noted in a tweet. However, as FactCheck.org has noted, the words were included each night during the convention’s prime-time slots.

Trump’s decision to highlight the omission is likely to resonate with his conservative, white Christian base, many members of whom express fear that as their cultural dominance is receding, their religious freedoms will be curtailed.

The words “under God” were added to the pledge in the 1950s.

Homeownership is the main way that middle-class families in America build wealth. Historically, many African Americans were locked out of this wealth-building opportunity by discriminatory zoning and lending policies. Almost half a century after Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, the Obama administration sought to enforce its provisions with a rule tying federal funding to communities’ efforts to desegregate housing. The Trump administration repealed that rule this summer. Trump tweeted, “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood.” Trump’s family real estate business was sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent to Black families. The family settled the case with no admission of wrongdoing but was required to become familiar with the Fair Housing Act.

In recent weeks, President Trump has warned ominously about crime and Democrats seeking to “abolish” suburbs, using fear-mongering imagery to appeal to white suburban voters by stirring up racist fears about nonwhite residents who live there or might move there.

It is worth keeping in mind that since the president was elected in 2016, the suburbs have moved leftward. In 2018, they powered the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. And during this year’s Democratic primaries, Joe Biden's Super Tuesday victories were fueled by big margins of victory in the suburbs.

Part of the leftward shift is due to college-educated women, but the composition of the suburbs is also changing; they are becoming more economically and racially diverse.  

Biden has said that he opposes defunding the police. He has said he does support putting conditions on federal aid to police. His campaign has put forward a plan that includes $300 million for community policing initiatives as well as efforts to diversify police forces. Biden’s plan also calls for more funding for social programs.

Trump has made vocal support for the police a keystone of his administration. Attorney General William Barr, for example, has repeatedly praised police officers and talks about the difficult and dangerous job that law enforcement does daily. And in contrast to Democrats, who point to systemic racism as a key factor in police brutality, Barr and the Trump administration more broadly say police violence against Black people is the work of a few bad actors.

This is another instance of Trump leaning heavily into his law-and-order messaging. Overall, crime rates nationwide are either at or near historic lows and have been at those low levels dating back to the Obama administration. There has been a recent spike in violent crime in some major cities, such as Kansas City and Chicago. This summer the administration sent federal law enforcement to those cities and several others as part of a Justice Department initiative dubbed Operation Legend to try to help local authorities fight crime.

In the midst of protests for racial justice, activists around the country have renewed calls to take down Confederate statues and other symbols of white supremacy. In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, Mayor Levar Stoney ordered several monuments removed from city property. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration has been engaged in a legal battle over his efforts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from state property in Richmond. In some communities, protesters have taken matters into their own hands, pulling down statues on their own without state or federal authorization.

Though at least one report on political fallout from unrest in Kenosha, Wis., likely made many Democrats concerned, Joe Biden has — at this moment — a polling lead over President Trump, both nationally and in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Florida and, yes, Wisconsin.

With fewer than 70 days to go until Election Day, it’ll be interesting to see if the polls register any movement following these back-to-back convention weeks. The next significant item on the political calendar: the first Trump-Biden debate on Sept. 29.

Ann Dorn delivered one of the most emotional speeches on the last night of the convention. The White House has sought to use the story of her husband, a retired police captain killed by looters at his friend's pawnshop, to counter stories about police brutality.

Liberalism on campus has become a reliable right-wing culture war issue. Hundreds of liberal professors have faced harassment by right-wing, Trump-supporting groups like Turning Point USA for actions such as giving lectures on Marxism and white supremacy.

This is a reference to the Russia investigation, which examined contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Trump calls the investigation, which was opened by the FBI in July 2016 and eventually taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, a "witch hunt," and he has accused the Obama administration of spying on his campaign.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz determined that the FBI had a proper basis to open the investigation, and he found no evidence of political bias in the bureau's decision to do so. Horowitz did, however, find significant problems with the FBI's handling of surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

Horowitz also determined that the FBI used what are known as confidential human sources to approach Page and two other Trump campaign advisers to try to determine what they knew about Russia's hacking of Democratic emails. Those efforts were consistent with FBI policy, Horowitz said, and he found no evidence of political bias in the decision to use them.

Joe Biden's two sons, Hunter and Beau, attended Biden's own alma mater of Archmere Academy, a small Catholic school in Delaware that currently charges $28,800 a year.

President Trump's son Barron reportedly attends St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Maryland. They charge $44,590 a year for high school students. They will start the year remotely. 

President Trump has struggled to articulate his second-term agenda in interviews, including with The New York Times this week. But in his speech, he ticked through a list of priorities.

In the first 37 months that President Trump was in office — that is, before the pandemic struck — the U.S. economy added 6.8 million jobs. That’s impressive, but hardly unprecedented. In the 37 months before Trump took office, the U.S. economy added 8.2 million jobs.

After Congress rejected his call for a payroll tax cut, President Trump directed the Treasury Department to simply hold off collecting the tax for the last four months of this year. The move would boost take-home pay for workers making up to $104,000 a year. But the break is only temporary, and workers would have to repay the taxes next year, unless Congress decides to forgive them. Trump has also said he’d like to end the payroll tax permanently. That could jeopardize funding for Social Security, which the tax pays for. Democratic senators asked Social Security’s chief actuary how the president’s proposal would affect the popular safety net program. Actuary Stephen Goss responded that if the tax revenue were replaced with other funds, there would be no effect. However, if revenue from the payroll tax were not replaced, Goss estimated that Social Security would run out of money to pay disability benefits next year and exhaust its ability to pay retirement benefits in 2023.  

A popular provision of the Affordable Care Act ensures that people with preexisting conditions can get health insurance. Trump administration officials are arguing in court that the ACA should be struck down as unconstitutional. But they also claim this part of the law would somehow be preserved. It’s unclear how. The administration has not come out with a health plan that would replace the ACA if the Supreme Court strikes it down. President Trump has said he will sign an executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover patients with preexisting conditions, but he hasn’t done it yet — and it’s not clear he means “at no additional charge.”

Teach American exceptionalism is one of two bullet points under education listed in a White House press release covering Trump's second-term agenda. The other is to provide school choice to every child in America.

As outlined in this speech, Trump put forth a heroic narrative of American history — pilgrims, pioneers — as unadulterated inspiration for young people.

This would seem to be in contrast with a growing movement for racial justice — one that confronts Confederate statues and other symbols of structural racism in U.S. history, and one that includes educators emphasizing the legacy of struggle against oppression.

American school curriculum is set by districts and states, not the federal government.

Campus free speech, speech codes and trigger warnings are a hot-button issue for Trump’s base. There have been riots, fistfights and states of emergency after self-declared white nationalists and other right-wing provocateurs have come to campuses. In March 2019, Trump signed an executive order tying federal research grants to the promotion of “free inquiry” on campus.

President Trump has refocused NASA on returning to the moon. The Trump administration has ordered the space agency to put the first woman and the next man on the moon by the end of 2024, which would be in his second term if Trump is reelected. Many in the space community see that timeline as unrealistic, given that NASA still needs to build critical hardware, like a lunar lander.

Trump’s speech lasted about 70 minutes. In contrast, Biden’s speech last week was 24 minutes long. One difference: clapping and cheering from the 1,500 invited guests on the South Lawn of the White House. After Trump finished, elaborate fireworks burst over the Washington Monument, some spelling “Trump” and “2020.” Then, a soloist sang “Hallelujah,” a song by Canadian poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen.