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Serious Thumper
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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.
President Donald Trump with first lady Melania Trump addresses the attendees of the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn at the White House, Tuesday, May 19, in Washington, DC.
➡️ 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.
😎 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.
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.
➡️ Democrats
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.
➡️ Elections
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).
(Cont'd)
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