There is so much going on in the news that it can be easy to overlook the fact that the president continues to tell a whole lot of lies.
President Donald Trump delivered a dizzying variety of false claims in his public remarks over the past week. They included inaccurately rosy assertions about the US economy and the war with Iran, baseless attacks against Democrats, and his familiar egregious lies about American elections.
Below is a fact check of 28 separate false claims Trump uttered between Monday and Friday. This is not intended as a comprehensive list, and it doesn’t include multiple Trump claims that are unproven but not definitively debunkable.
Inflation and the economy
1) The inflation Trump inherited: Trump falsely claimed, “When we inherited, when we started, we had the highest inflation in the history of our country.” They didn’t. The year-over-year inflation rate was 2.9% in former President Joe Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and it was 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump took over; those figures are lower than the most recent rate, 3.8% in April 2026, and unremarkable by historical standards. Peak inflation under the Biden administration, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in more than 40 years – but even that 9.1% rate was far from the all-time high of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980.
2) The state of inflation: Trump falsely claimed, “We had inflation, but we’ve got that down.” Trump has not brought inflation down. The most recent inflation rate, 3.8% in April, is the highest since May 2023. Again, it was 3.0% in the month Trump returned to office in 2025.
3) Prices before the war: Trump falsely claimed that, before the war with Iran began at the end of February, “We got the prices down and we got them down to numbers that in some cases people have not seen before.” Overall consumer prices were rising, not falling, before the war; through February 2026, average prices were up 2.9% overall since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Trump could have fairly said that some products have gotten cheaper since the beginning of his second presidency, but even prior to the war, far more products had gotten more expensive.
4) The pre-war inflation rate: Trump falsely claimed that “inflation was at 1.6% for the last three months just prior to the war.” Nope. It was 2.7% in November 2025, 2.7% in December 2025 and 2.4% in January 2026; it was 2.4% again in February 2026, for which nearly all the data was collected before the war began on the last day of the month.
5) Pre-war gas prices: Talking about gas prices, Trump falsely claimed that, before the war, “I was down to, in many cases, less than $2 a barrel – a gallon.” Four nights before the war, on February 24, the firm GasBuddy told CNN that just four stations nationwide, out of about 150,000 it monitors, were selling for under $2 per gallon (aside from special discounts). Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, told CNN on Wednesday there would have been “the same or fewer stations” under $2 on February 28, since prices had been trending upward. The AAA national average for a gallon of regular gas on February 28, the day the war began, was $2.98 per gallon, and the lowest state average was Oklahoma’s $2.47 per gallon.
6) Beef prices: After blaming Biden for high beef prices, Trump falsely claimed that beef “prices are down.” Beef prices have actually spiked during his presidency; the average price of ground beef hit another record high in April, $6.90 per pound. The May average is not available yet, but even if this month happens to register a decline, beef prices will still be far higher than their average of $5.55 per pound in January 2025, the month of Trump’s inauguration.
7) Investment in the US under Trump: Trump falsely claimed, “We have $18 trillion being invested in our country,” saying that this was “in 11 months, because the numbers for the 12th have not come up, so that’s gonna increase it yet further.” The $18 trillion figure is fiction. As of Friday morning, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term was “$10.6 trillion,” and even that was a major exaggeration of actual investment. A detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.
8) Factory construction: Trump falsely claimed, “Factory construction is up.” Total spending on manufacturing construction, the metric the White House previously told CNN that Trump is referring to when he makes such claims, is actually down; in fact, it had declined every single month of Trump’s second term through March 2026, the most recent month with available data. Trump has previously specified that he is comparing manufacturing construction spending this term to spending in 2022, partway through the Biden administration, but he didn’t say that this time – and, regardless, this misleading comparison to 2022 levels lets him take unwarranted credit for the spending spike that occurred under Biden in 2023. You can read more here.
9) Taxes on Social Security: Trump falsely claimed he had achieved “no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” The big domestic policy bill Trump signed in 2025 did create an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax deduction for individuals age 65 and older (with a smaller deduction for individuals earning $75,000 per year or more), but as the White House has implicitly acknowledged, millions of Social Security recipients will continue to pay taxes on their benefits.
10) Democrats’ election victories: Trump falsely claimed of Democrats, “The only way they can win is to cheat.” Democrats, like Republicans, win elections fair and square.
11) Democrats and the size of the Supreme Court: Trump falsely claimed of Democrats in Congress: “They want to go to 21 Supreme Court judges. That’s their perfect number. They talk about 13, but they want to go to 21.” Some Democrat somewhere in the country might have proposed having 21 Supreme Court justices instead of the current nine, but there’s no basis for Trump’s suggestion that this is the position of the party as a whole. A bill supported in recent years by a minority of the Democratic members of Congress would add four seats to the court for a total of 13 justices.
12) Kamala Harris and the border: Trump falsely claimed that Harris “never went to the border” even though she “was the border czar.” Harris visited the border twice as vice president, once in 2021 and once in 2024. (And the Biden administration repeatedly said she was never actually the “border czar” – noting she had been given a narrower “root causes” mission of leading diplomacy with Central American countries in an attempt to address the reasons for their citizens’ migration to the US.)
13) Obama, Biden and reflecting pool spending: Trump’s administration is spending more than $13 million on a project to improve the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, federal records show. Trump falsely claimed at one event, “President Obama and Biden spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix it.” At another event, he falsely claimed these two Democratic presidents “spent much more than $100 million on the reflecting lake” and that “they spent, some people say, $200 million.” These figures are incorrect; the White House could not offer any corroboration for them when CNN inquired this week. The Obama administration spent about $35 million on a contract to try to fix issues with the pool, but that’s not hundreds of millions, and the Biden administration did not go ahead with any major pool repair project. Chuck Sams, who was director of the National Park Service under Biden, told CNN this week that they had received a cost estimate “above $100 million” for a “full rehabilitation” but had not done the project. (Sams said it “would have more than likely moved forward if we had remained in office,” but Trump asserted that it already happened.)
14) The status of the reflecting pool under Obama and Biden: After making his false claim about how much Obama and Biden supposedly spent on the reflecting pool, Trump added another false claim: “Do you know what they got out of it? A closed lake. It never opened and, when it did, it was shut right away.” After the Obama-era repair project, which lasted roughly two years, the pool reopened in August 2012 and has been open for the vast majority of the days since. There have been some short additional closures to deal with various repair and maintenance issues, including one in October 2012, and a small fraction of the pool was closed for an extended stretch of 2015 and 2016 to repair damage caused by the construction of a nearby memorial – but all of that is far from Trump’s claim that “it never opened and, when it did, it was shut right away.”
15) Biden and electric vehicles: Trump declared that he “ended Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” then added moments later, “I ended that whole nonsense. By 2030, you were gonna all have electric cars? I don’t think so.” Biden did make a legislative and regulatory push to get automakers to reduce emissions and adopt electric vehicles, but he never had a requirement for American consumers to possess electric cars; the tailpipe rules for automakers that were unveiled by the Biden administration in 2024 aimed to have electric vehicles make up 35% to 56% of new vehicles sold in 2032.
16) The legitimacy of US elections: Trump falsely claimed at one event, “We have more corrupt elections than third world countries have;” at another event, he falsely claimed that the parts of the country won by Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election “were rigged, by the way,” adding, “We have rigged elections.” US elections are free, fair and not rigged; Harris legitimately beat Trump in various areas even though Trump was the legitimate winner of the election.
17) The 2020 election: Trump falsely claimed that “you know we’re a three-term president” because “we won three times.” Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election and is in his second term as president, having won in 2016 and 2024.
18) The legitimacy of mail-in voting: Trump falsely claimed that mail-in voting “is so crooked” and falsely claimed at another event that “mail-in ballot is, by just the nature of it, it’s going to be corrupt.” Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person voting – but also that all the evidence shows that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.
19) Who uses mail-in ballots: Trump falsely claimed, “We’re the only country in the world that’s doing mail-in ballots.” In reality, dozens of countries use mail-in ballots. The list includes Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
20) Trump’s election defeats in California: Trump falsely claimed, “If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would have won California.” Clearly not. California’s votes are counted accurately, and it’s a Democratic-dominated state in which Trump has lost by massive margins in all three of his races – by 30 percentage points in 2016 (more than 4 million votes), 29 points in 2020 (more than 5 million votes), and 20 points in 2024 (more than 3 million votes).
21) Ballots in California: Trump falsely claimed of California, “They send out 38 million votes. Nobody knows where they’re going.” Both assertions are incorrect. California, which sends a mail-in ballot to all active registered voters, had about 22.6 million voters registered as of about two weeks prior to the last presidential election and about 23.1 million voters registered as of early April 2026; there is no basis for any suggestion that some 15 million excess ballots were distributed in any election, nor that elections offices don’t know where they are being sent. You can read more details here.
22) A ballot-mailing error in Maryland: Trump falsely claimed, “In Maryland, as you probably saw, they had 500 – 500,000 mail-in votes that were corrupt. They were corrupt.” That’s not what happened; the Maryland issue didn’t involve corrupt voting. Rather, Maryland’s elections board said that, because of an error in the printing process, some voters who requested a mail-in ballot before May 14 for the state’s June 23 gubernatorial primaries were sent the wrong party’s ballot. The board said any votes people cast using the incorrect ballots were voided and that voters will be sent a correct replacement ballot.
23) Control of the Strait of Hormuz: Trump falsely claimed, “We have total control of the Strait of Hormuz, as you know, with our blockade.” The US clearly does not have total control of the Strait of Hormuz – as evidenced by something Trump said soon afterward at the same event: “We want it open, we want it free, we don’t want tolls; it’s international, it’s an international waterway.” At the time he spoke, Iran was not permitting free passage through the waterway, though it had done so before the war, and it was requiring ships to pay fees to cross.
24) The state of Iran’s military: Trump falsely claimed of Iran, “All of their material that they use for warfare is gone”; at another event, he falsely claimed, “Everything’s gone.” Though there’s no doubt the US and Israel have degraded Iran’s military capabilities during the war, Trump implicitly acknowledged this week that not “all” material is lost and not “everything” is gone – saying, “They have a little ability. Their missiles are 82% gone, we estimate…Same thing with drones, they’re largely gone but they still have a little capacity.” CNN reported in April that, according to three sources familiar with US intelligence findings, roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers were still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remained in Iran’s arsenal; CNN reported Thursday that four sources said US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated and that “Iran also still maintains ballistic-missile, drone-attack and anti-air capability despite the serious damage inflicted by US-Israeli strikes, according to recent US intelligence assessments, meaning the quick rebuilding of military production capacity isn’t starting from scratch.”
25) Who uses birthright citizenship: Trump noted that there is a looming Supreme Court decision about birthright citizenship, then falsely claimed, “And we’re the only country in the world that has it.” In reality, about three dozen countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including US neighbors Canada and Mexico and the majority of South American countries.
26) Migration under Biden: Speaking about migrants crossing the border, Trump falsely claimed, “You know how many people over four years in the last term? Twenty-five million people.” That figure is fictional, a further exaggeration of Trump’s previous “21 million” figure. Through December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total was even close to what Trump has said.
27) Migration under Trump: Trump falsely claimed that “in 11 months, not one illegal alien was able to get into our country.” This is an exaggeration. US Customs and Border Protection said earlier this month that the authorities hadn’t released any migrants into the country over the last 12 months after encountering these migrants crossing the border. But it’s clear that some migrants evaded authorities to cross the border illegally during that period, though it appears the number of gotaways was much smaller than it was during the Biden administration. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks told the Washington Examiner that on December 18, just 17 migrants crossing the southern border evaded arrest. The Examiner reported that Banks was “anticipating a day in the near future where not a single person who crosses illegally will get away,” but clearly that day hadn’t happened yet.
28) Migrants and murder: Denouncing the Biden administration’s immigration record, Trump claimed, “We had 11,888 murderers, 50% of whom killed more than one person, and they allowed them into our country.” It’s not true that the Biden administration allowed in all these murderers; Trump was, again, inaccurately describing federal data. The Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have noted that the figure it appears Trump is referring to is about non-citizens who entered the US not just under Biden but over the course of multiple decades, including during Trump’s own first administration. They were convicted of homicide at some point, usually in the US after their arrival, and are still in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” – which includes people who are currently serving their prison sentences. You can read more here.
