Former President Donald Trump lied and twisted facts repeatedly throughout the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle.
But more than an hour into his head-to-head against President Joe Biden, Trump spoke one simple truth about his first term in the White House.
“We had H2O,” he said.
The declaration came in response to a question about whether he’d take any action to combat the climate crisis if reelected in November.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely immaculate clean air. And we had it. We had H2O,” he said. “We had the best numbers ever and we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything.”
The U.S. did have water during Trump’s first term. That much is true. But while Trump often talked about wanting clean water and air, he was no environmental champion. He rolled back decades of clean water protections and dozens of environmental rules. Much of his deregulatory policy was aimed at lifting up fossil fuel and other extractive and polluting industries.
Trump’s comments left Biden visibly perplexed.
“I don’t know where the hell he’s been,” Biden said, before touting his landmark climate legislation, the sprawling package known as the Inflation Reduction Act, in 2022.
“The cleanest water?” Biden pondered. “He hasn’t done a damn thing for the environment.”
Ahead of the debate, Trump took to social media to share a series of talking points that Andrew Wheeler, his former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and a former longtime coal lobbyist, encouraged Trump to stick to if asked about climate change. Those included touting how “CO2 emissions went down” on his watch while the U.S. “became more energy dominant.”
“During my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever,” the Republican candidate claimed at Thursday’s debate, without providing any context. “My top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.”
