President Donald Trump made only a smattering of false claims in his inaugural address on Monday, mostly sticking to vague rhetoric, subjective assertions and uncheckable promises of action.
But in an unscripted second speech on Monday, to supporters who had gathered in the US Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall, Trump returned to his typical pattern of rapid-fire lying — making false claims about elections, immigration and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, among other subjects. He then made additional false claims in a freewheeling third speech at Washington’s Capital One Arena.
Here is a fact check of some of his Monday claims.
Tariffs: In his inaugural address, Trump said, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” But this description of tariffs is false. Tariffs imposed by the US government are paid by US importers, not foreign countries, and it’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers. Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, found that Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products in his first term.
Additionally, Trump mentioned creating a new “External Revenue Service” to collect revenue from tariffs on imports, a plan he has mentioned before. Again, it is US importers, not foreign exporters, who pay tariffs on imported goods — and often pass some or all those costs to US consumers.
Inflation rates: Trump falsely claimed during his inaugural address that the US experienced “record inflation” during the Biden administration. Trump could fairly say the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. (And the rate has since plummeted. The most recent available inflation rate at the time Trump spoke here was 2.9% in December.)
Prisons and mental institutions: Trump spoke in all three speeches of migrants having come from foreign prisons and mental institutions into the US under President Joe Biden, a frequent refrain during his 2024 campaign. In the first speech, he said “many” Biden-era migrants have come from such facilities; in the second speech, he said, “We don’t want the jails of every country in the world virtually being deposited into the United States”; in the third, he said, “All over the world they’re emptying their prisons into our country; they’re emptying their mental institutions into our country.”
All of this is uncorroborated. Trump and his presidential campaign have never corroborated the claim that “many” Biden-era migrants have come from prisons or mental institutions, though it’s of course possible that some migrants spent time in such facilities. And Trump’s campaign could not substantiate his stories about numerous foreign countries supposedly opening up such facilities to somehow bring the people in them into the US.
The president has sometimes tried to support his narrative by asserting the global prison population is down. But that’s incorrect. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.
“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June.
Venezuela and migration: Trump spoke in the arena speech about gang members being “taken off the streets of Venezuela and deposited into our country,” claiming crime in Venezuela has plummeted “because they took their criminals and gave them to us through an open border policy of the previous administration.”
Trump has never corroborated his claims about Venezuela’s supposed practice of somehow intentionally bringing its unwanted criminals into the US under Biden, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no evidence for them.
Pelosi and January 6, 2021: In the post-inaugural speech, Trump repeated his false claims that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and that Pelosi “admitted it on tape, that her daughter made.”
There is no evidence Pelosi turned down such an offer — and it is the president, not the speaker, who is in charge of the District of Columbia National Guard, so Pelosi wouldn’t have had the power to reject the offer even if it had been made to her, which Pelosi says it wasn’t. In addition, Pelosi is not on tape admitting that Trump’s story is correct.
In a video recorded by her filmmaker daughter Alexandra Pelosi on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans, who posted a 42-second snippet on social media in June, Pelosi was shown expressing frustration at the inadequate security at the Capitol, and she said at one point, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But that general statement is clearly not a specific admission that she had rejected a Trump offer of 10,000 troops.
In fact, another part of the video appears to undermine Trump’s frequent claims that Pelosi was the person who turned down a National Guard presence in advance of January 6. She said, “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”
After Trump began making reference to this video in June, Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th. Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”
The legitimacy of the 2020 election: In his post-inaugural speech to supporters, Trump returned to his lie that the 2020 election “was totally rigged”; he made the “rigged” claim again in the arena speech. Trump legitimately lost a free and fair election to Biden.
Democrats and the 2024 election: Trump falsely claimed in his post-inaugural speech that unspecified opponents “tried” to rig the 2024 election but were unable to do so. This is nonsense, too; Trump beat former Vice President Kamala Harris in a free and fair election.
California and the 2024 election: In the post-inaugural speech, Trump said, “I think we would’ve won the state of California” if the state had stronger voter identification laws. There is simply no basis for the claim; there is no sign of mass fraud in California, and Trump lost to Harris thereby more than 3 million votes.
Trump’s margin of victory in Alabama: In the post-inaugural speech, Trump falsely claimed, “We won Alabama by 48 points.” Trump did win the conservative state by a large margin, but not as large as he claimed; he beat Harris there by about 30.5 percentage points.
Border wall construction: Trump repeated his false claim in his post-inaugural speech that he had “571 miles of wall” built on the southern border during his first administration. That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.
China and the Panama Canal: Trump vowed in his inaugural address that the US will take back the Panama Canal — and falsely claimed that “above all, China is operating the Panama Canal.”
There are valid questions about Chinese influence over infrastructure on and around the Panama Canal. Most notably, a subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company operates a port at each end of the waterway, having first won the bidding competition for the contract in the 1990s. But Panama has run the canal itself since the US handed it over to the country in 1999. Specifically, the canal is operated by the Panama Canal Authority, whose administrator, deputy administrator and 11-member board are Panamanians selected by Panama’s government.
The vast majority of its employees are Panamanian. It is Panama that decides which companies get awarded the contracts to run the ports on the canal. And other canal ports are operated by companies that are not Chinese — including one run by an American-Panamanian joint venture.
“The Canal is and will continue to be Panama’s and its administration will continue to be under Panamanian control with respect to its permanent neutrality,” Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said in a statement Monday. Without mentioning China directly, Mulino also appeared to reject Trump’s claim that China is operating the canal, saying, “There is no presence of any nation in the world that interferes with our administration.”
Trump and “the youth vote”: As he did the day before the inauguration, Trump falsely claimed in his arena speech Monday that “we won the youth vote by 36 points” in the 2024 election. He didn’t say how he was defining “the youth vote” — his transition team didn’t respond to CNN’s Sunday request for clarification — but there’s no basis for his claim by any reasonable definition.
While young voters, particularly young men, did shift toward Trump compared with the 2020 election, exit poll data published by CNN found that Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters ages 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters ages 30-39. Even if Harris’ actual margins were smaller — exit poll data is often flawed — there is simply no sign that Trump dominated Harris with young voters.
China’s oil purchases from Iran: In the arena speech, Trump repeated his false story about how he supposedly pressured China into stopping its purchases of oil from Iran during his first presidency. China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped — and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president. “The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, told CNN in 2023.
China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year as president. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran.
Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)
Iran and terror groups: In the arena speech, Trump repeated his inaccurate boast that Iran “didn’t have money for Hamas” and “didn’t have money for Hezbollah” during his presidency. Iran’s funding for these groups did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions on Iran had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN in 2024. In fact, Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups including Hezbollah. You can read a longer fact check here.
This story has been updated to include additional information.
CNN’s Bryan Mena, Alicia Wallace, Phil Mattingly, Michael Rios and Elizabeth González contributed to this report.
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