Fact check: Trump repeats numerous false claims in prime-time address

Joy Malbon has more on U.S. President Donald Trump attributing some of his successes to the use of tariffs as he addressed the nation on Wednesday evening.

U.S. President Donald Trump made a series of false claims during his prime-time address from the White House on Wednesday night, most of which have been debunked before. Here is a fact check.

Inflation and the economy

Inflation under Trump: Near the end of the speech, Trump falsely claimed, “Inflation is stopped.” Inflation hasn’t stopped; the most recent available year-over-year inflation rate at the time he spoke on Wednesday, 3.0% in September, was the same as the rate when Trump returned to office in January – in fact, if you go to multiple decimal places, the September rate was a tiny bit higher – and September was the fifth consecutive month the year-over-year rate had increased.

The year-over-year November rate released the morning after Trump’s speech was 2.7%, but that means prices are rising less quickly than they were in September, not that inflation ceased. (The October number wasn’t calculated because of the government shutdown, which also impacted the government’s data collection in November.)

Inflation under Biden: Trump repeated his false claim that “when I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.”

The year-over-year inflation rate in the last full month of the Biden administration, December 2024, was 2.9%; it was 3.0% in January 2025, the month of Trump’s second inauguration. That’s the same as the most recent available rate at the time Trump spoke on Wednesday, 3.0% in September 2025. (Again, the November rate released Thursday morning was 2.7%). We don’t know who Trump was referring to when he said “some would say,” but neither the December 2024 number nor the January 2025 number was anywhere close to the worst inflation in decades or all time.

It is true that the year-over-year US inflation rate hit about a 40-year high (not a 48-year high) during the Biden administration in June 2022, 9.1%, but even that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920 – and it occurred more than two years before Trump returned. Inflation had plummeted before Trump’s inauguration.

The cumulative increase in prices from the beginning of the Biden administration to the end was also not the worst in US history. Federal figures show that cumulative inflation under Biden was less than half of that during President Jimmy Carter’s term.

Grocery prices: After noting that the price of eggs has plummeted since March, Trump added, “And everything else is falling rapidly.” That is not true even if he was talking specifically about grocery prices, which are up this year. Consumer Price Index data shows that a far greater number of grocery items have increased in price since he returned to office than have decreased.

The most recent available CPI figures at the time he spoke on Wednesday, for September, showed that average grocery prices were up about 2.7% from September 2024; about 1.4% from January 2025, the month Trump returned to office; and about 0.3% from August to September.

The November data released Thursday morning showed that average grocery prices were up about 1.9% from November 2024 and about 1.2% from January 2025.

Prescription drug prices: Trump repeated his false claim that an executive order he issued on prescription drug prices will cut those prices by “as much as 400, 500, and even 600%.” These figures are mathematically impossible; if the president magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut. You can read a longer fact check here.

Gas prices: Trump said, “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country, and some states it by the way just hit $1.99 a gallon.” These claims need context.

As of Wednesday, there were only four states whose average price for a gallon of regular gas was below $2.50, according to data published by AAA: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa and Colorado. (Nine more states had averages between $2.50 and $2.60 per gallon.) The AAA national average was $2.905 per gallon.

No state had an average below Oklahoma’s $2.339 per gallon. And while some individual stations around the country were offering gas for $1.99 per gallon or less, the number was tiny; Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the firm GasBuddy, estimated that it was between 75 and 100 stations of the tens of thousands GasBuddy tracks around the country. (That doesn’t include others offering special discounts.)

Investment in the U.S. this year: Trump repeated his false claim that there has been “$18 trillion” in investment in the US during his second presidency, saying Wednesday, “I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States.” This figure is fiction.

At the time he spoke on Wednesday, the White House’s own website said the figure was “$9.6 trillion,” and even that is a major exaggeration; 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, or vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges. You can read more here.

Immigration and foreign policy

Trump and wars: Trump repeated his false claim that he has ended eight wars this year, saying Wednesday, “I’ve restored American strength, settled eight wars in 10 months.” While Trump has played a role in resolving some conflicts (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.

Trump has previously explained that his list of supposed wars settled includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war; it is a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River. Trump’s list includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.)

And his list includes a supposed success in ending a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration this year – which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.

Trump’s list also includes an armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, where fighting erupted again this month and continued into this week despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration earlier in the year.

One can debate the importance of Trump’s role in having ended the other conflicts on his list, or fairly question whether some have truly ended; for example, killing continued in Gaza in November after the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Regardless, Trump’s “eight” figure is obviously too big.

Migration and Biden: Trump repeated his false claim that “25 million” migrants entered the country under Biden. The “25 million” figure is false; even Trump’s previous “21 million” figure was a wild exaggeration. 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.

Trump also repeated his unsubstantiated claim that, during the Biden administration, foreign countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions to somehow send the people in them to the US as migrants, claiming that “many” members of the supposed “army of 25 million people” were “from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums.” Trump has never provided corroboration for such claims about foreign countries in general or the specific places he has named in the past: Venezuela and “the Congo.” Experts on Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo said during the Biden administration that they had seen no basis for Trump’s stories, the governments of both of the Congo countries told CNN the stories are false, and an expert on the global prison population told CNN she saw “absolutely no evidence” of any country emptying its prisons to somehow release prisoners into the US.

Other topics

Trump’s bill and Social Security: Trump repeated his false claim that the big domestic policy bill he signed earlier this year includes “no tax on Social Security.” The legislation 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 the White House itself has implicitly acknowledged that millions of Social Security recipients age 65 and older will continue to pay taxes on their benefits – and that new deduction, which expires in 2028, doesn’t even apply to the Social Security recipients who are younger than 65.

Biden, crime and law enforcement: Trump falsely claimed that, under Biden, there was “crime at record levels, with law enforcement and words such as that just absolutely forbidden.” Neither of these two claims is true.

There was no ban on the phrase “law enforcement” under Biden; the Biden administration itself used the phrase repeatedly. And crime wasn’t even close to an all-time high under Biden. Crime in the US was far higher in the early 1990s and at various points of the 1970s and 1980s than it has been in the 2020s under either Biden or Trump.

Murder spiked nationally amid the turmoil of the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, under both Trump in 2020 and Biden in 2021. But FBI data showed that both violent crime and property crime declined nationally under Biden in 2023 and 2024. Trump has challenged the FBI data, and while it does have flaws and limitations, there is simply no basis for the notion that crime was at a record high during the Biden era.

By Daniel Dale