Washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump made at least nine false claims in his Friday remarks to reporters in the Oval Office – including a series of wildly exaggerated statistics on a variety of topics.
Trump used inaccurate figures for the number of votes he received in the 2024 presidential election, US aid to Ukraine, the number of migrants who entered the US during the Biden administration, the US trade deficits with China and Canada, and annual US fentanyl deaths.
He also wrongly declared, again, that Honda announced it is building a new factory in Indiana. He repeated his years-old baseless claim that NATO would no longer have existed if not for his first presidency. He told his familiar unsubstantiated story about large numbers of migrants having come from jails in “the Congo” and elsewhere. And he once more discussed Canada’s dairy tariffs without mentioning a critical fact about them.
Here is a fact check.
While criticizing a federal judge who is presiding over a challenge to one of Trump’s immigration actions, Trump exaggerated his own vote total in the 2024 election – saying of the judge, “He didn’t run for president. He didn’t get much more than 80 million votes.” Trump received about 77.3 million votes in the 2024 election, his highest total in the three consecutive presidential elections in which he was a candidate. There is no basis for his repeated suggestions that the 2024 count was inaccurate.
Tariffs and trade deficits
Honda and Indiana: While touting his use of tariffs on imported goods to get companies to increase their US manufacturing, Trump claimed, as he did in his address to Congress early this month, that Honda is building a new factory in Indiana.
“We have a big one: Honda is building – just announced – a really big plant in Indiana,” he said Friday.
But Honda has made no such announcement. Reuters, citing anonymous sources, reported early this month that Honda is planning to build its next-generation Civic hybrid in Indiana rather than Mexico as originally planned. The report did not say Honda was building a new factory; it already builds vehicles at an existing Indiana plant.
In a statement to CNN on Wednesday, Honda thanked Trump “for recognizing our commitment to manufacturing vehicles in America” and touted its investment of “over $3 billion in advanced vehicle manufacturing in America in just the past three years” – but also noted, “Honda did not announce plans for a new plant in the U.S. at this time.” Honda said Friday, after Trump’s latest remarks, that this statement still stands.
The US trade deficit with China: Trump repeated his false claim that the US trade deficit with China has hit $1 trillion or more, again blaming former President Joe Biden for this supposed situation. Trump said: “We have a trillion-dollar deficit, because of Biden, with President Xi; more than that – I mean, I’ve heard $1.2 trillion.”
Those numbers are not close to accurate. In fact, official federal figures show that the 2024 deficit with China in goods and services trade was $263.3 billion. That’s up from $252.1 billion in 2023 – but lower than in every year of Trump’s first presidency. The 2024 deficit with China in goods trade alone was $295.2 billion.
The US trade deficit with Canada: Reiterating his desire for Canada to become the 51st US state, Trump repeated his false claim that “it costs us $200 billion a year in subsidy to keep Canada afloat.” Trump has repeatedly used this $200 billion figure to describe the US trade deficit with Canada, which is actually far lower than that; official US statistics show the 2024 deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was $35.7 billion and $70.6 billion in goods trade alone. Even if he was this time using the word “subsidy” more broadly, there is no basis for the claim.
Canada’s dairy tariffs: Trump correctly noted that Canada has 270% tariffs on some US dairy products. However, he failed to mention that Canada’s high dairy tariffs only kick in after the US hits a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year – and as the US dairy industry acknowledges, the US is not hitting its zero-tariff maximum in any category of dairy product, so the tariffs aren’t being applied. You can read more here.
Ukraine and NATO
US aid to Ukraine: Trump repeated his regular false claim that the US has provided “$350 billion” in aid to Ukraine. There is no basis for this figure. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank that closely tracks wartime aid to Ukraine, the US had committed about $129 billion in total wartime military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine through December 2024 (at current exchange rates) and actually allocated about $123 billion of that sum.
It’s possible to arrive at different totals using different counting methodologies, but there is no apparent basis for Trump’s “$350 billion” figure. The US government inspector general overseeing the Ukraine response says on its website that the US had appropriated about $183 billion for the Ukraine response through December 2024, including about $83 billion actually disbursed – and that includes funding spent in the US or sent to countries other than Ukraine.
The existence of NATO: Trump repeated his false claim that “NATO was gone until I came along,” since he convinced member countries to spend more on defense. There is no basis for the claim that NATO was vanishing without him. One expert on NATO, George Washington University professor Erwan Lagadec, told CNN in 2023, when Trump made similar comments, that the claim “doesn’t make sense, obviously,” since the only NATO member that had given any indication in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance was the US itself under Trump.
This time, Trump claimed that both the current secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, and his predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, said, “If it wasn’t for Trump you wouldn’t even have a NATO.” It’s not clear what they might have told Trump in private, but neither went nearly that far in public. Both Rutte and Stoltenberg publicly praised Trump for achieving increases in NATO members’ defense spending but didn’t go so far as saying the alliance would have disappeared without him.
NATO members’ spending: Trump repeated his false claim that, before his first presidency, some NATO countries “weren’t paying their bills.” NATO’s target of having its members each spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense is a self-described “guideline” that does not create “bills”; during and prior to Trump’s first presidency, the guideline was written in forgiving language that made clear that it was not a firm commitment. That version of the guideline, created at a NATO summit in Wales in 2014, said members that had yet to reach 2% would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.” In other words, the members that were below 2% in 2014 didn’t even have to promise to hit the target by 2024 – simply to make an effort to do so by then.
Immigration and drug deaths
The number of migrants: Trump repeated his false claim that “21 million” migrants were allowed into the country by the Biden administration, “not even including the gotaways” who evaded detection. This is another major exaggeration. Through December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country; even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total is “21 million.”
Immigration, prisons and mental institutions: Trump repeated his regular but unsubstantiated claim that “many” migrants who crossed the border during the Biden administration “were from jails and prisons and mental institutions,” adding that “many” came from jails in South America, Africa and “the Congo” in particular. Trump has never provided proof for these claims, which his own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate; experts on both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have told CNN there is no evidence for Trump’s previous claims that “the Congo” deliberately emptied prisons to somehow send inmates to the US as migrants; and the government of each of these countries has told CNN that the claims are baseless.
Fentanyl deaths: Talking about the border and drug trafficking, Trump repeated his inaccurate rejection of official statistics on fentanyl overdose deaths: “I think the number is much higher than the 125 (thousand), 115 (thousand) that you – I think it’s closer to 300,000 people a year.”
There is no basis for Trump’s opinion. In the 12-month period ending in October 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there were 52,385 deaths involving synthetic opioids including fentanyl – a terrible number, but nowhere close to what Trump said. Even at the peak, US deaths involving synthetic opioids hovered under 80,000 for any given 12-month period.
When Trump made similar “300,000” claims in 2024, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, told CNN that this is “a made-up number,” saying, “I have no idea where Trump is getting ‘300,000’ from.”
Kolodny said it’s likely that the number of US overdose deaths is undercounted, but that there is no apparent basis for Trump’s insistence that the real number is nearly triple the reported number. And Kolodny said the undercount issue is centered not on overdoses from illicit fentanyl smuggled across the southern border but on seniors’ overdoses from accidentally taking too much of their legal prescription medications.
Trump claimed that, during the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, “nobody was killed” other than Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot by a police officer as she tried to climb through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House of Representatives.
We won’t call Trump’s claim false, but it’s worth noting that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked with pepper spray during the riot, died after suffering strokes the next day. (The chief medical examiner for Washington, DC, found that Sicknick died of natural causes, but also told the Washington Post that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” Experts subsequently noted to CNN that stressful or traumatic events can lead to strokes.) And three other Trump supporters who were at the Capitol on January 6 died in medical emergencies, two from natural causes and one from accidental amphetamine intoxication, according to the chief medical examiner.
