Fact check: Trump marks one year back in office with numerous false claims

(CNN) — President Donald Trump celebrated the first anniversary of his return to office with many of the false claims he told most frequently during that year.

During a meandering address to reporters at the White House and a subsequent question-and-answer session, Trump sought to tout the progress the US has made since his inauguration in January 2025. But he peppered his remarks with fictional economic figures, familiar false claims about foreign and domestic affairs, his usual lie about the 2020 election he lost fair and square, and a variety of other inaccuracies.

Here is a fact check of some of his remarks.

The economy and taxes

Gas prices: Trump made a false claim about gas prices, saying, “I guess the average now, they’re saying, is $2.31.” Trump didn’t explain who “they” might be, but the national average gas price on Tuesday was about $2.82 per gallon, according to data published by AAA.

Trump also said, “They have places in the country now, $1.99 a gallon. $1.99!” This needs context. On Tuesday, there was no state with an average gas price below $2 per gallon, according to the AAA data; the lowest average in any state was about $2.31 per gallon, in Oklahoma. There were some individual gas stations selling gas for under $2 per gallon, but a tiny percentage of the total. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the firm GasBuddy, told CNN just prior to Trump’s remarks that the firm found fewer than 100 stations across the country below $2 on Tuesday (aside from special discounts) out of the roughly 150,000 stations the firm tracks.

Prescription drug prices: Trump repeated his false claim that agreements he secured under his “Most Favored Nation” policy on prescription drugs are deals “to slash drug prices by as much as 300, 400, 500, and even 600%.” While Trump has secured some deals for price reductions, covering a small fraction of drugs sold in the US, these “300, 400, 500 and even 600%” figures are debunked by math itself; if the president magically got drug companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut, while a decline of more than 100 percentage points would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications, which is not happening. You can read a longer fact check here.

Grocery prices: Trump, touting progress against inflation, claimed that “many of the groceries have come way down.” It is true that some particular grocery products, notably including eggs, have gotten cheaper during his second presidency – but overall grocery prices are up about 1.9%, Consumer Price Index figures show, and far more grocery products have gotten more expensive than have gotten cheaper.

Also, overall grocery prices continue to go up. The Consumer Price Index inflation report for December, released last week, showed grocery prices spiked from November to December at the fastest month-to-month rate, 0.7%, in more than three years; they were 2.4% higher in December than they were a year prior. (It’s possible that these figures were affected by how the fall government shutdown affected the government’s data collection efforts.)

Overall inflation: Trump claimed, “We have no inflation,” though he then quickly added, “We have very little inflation.” (He also repeated the “no inflation” claim and then quickly added that it is “essentially no inflation.”) There’s no firm rule on what constitutes “very little” and “essentially,” but inflation very much continues. The latest Consumer Price Index report, released last week, showed that average consumer prices were 2.7% higher in December than they were a year prior and 0.3% higher than they were in November.

Biden-era inflation: Trump said, “We inherited very high prices.” But then he added a false claim: “We inherited, remember this – inflation was at a historic high. We had never had inflation like that. They say ‘48 years,’ but whether it’s 48 years, or ever, we had the highest inflation, in my opinion, that we’ve ever had.”

Trump didn’t inherit the highest inflation of all time. The year-over-year US inflation rate hit about a 40-year high during the Biden administration in June 2022, when it was 9.1%. 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. By the time Trump returned to office in January 2025, inflation had plummeted to 3.0% – just a bit above the current 2.7% rate Trump described as “no inflation,” “very little inflation” and “essentially no inflation.”

Investment in the US: Trump repeated his regular false claim that “$18 trillion” is being invested in the US because he was elected, adding, “Now it’s probably more than that.” The $18 trillion figure is fiction. At the time Trump spoke on Tuesday, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term 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, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.

Taxes on Social Security: Trump repeated his inaccurate claim that he had achieved “no tax on Social Security,” one of his campaign promises in 2024. 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 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.

International affairs

Foreign countries, migration and prisons: Trump repeated a claim that is a staple of his public remarks but that he has never proven – asserting that “many countries opened up their prisons and dropped them into the United States.” He identified Venezuela, under former leader Nicolás Maduro, as one such country, saying Venezuela “opened their prisons into the United States” to send people in them to the US as migrants.

But Trump has never provided proof that even Venezuela opened prisons for migration purposes, let alone that “many countries” did so and then actively “dropped them into the United States.”

There was large-scale emigration from Venezuela amid economic problems, violence and political turmoil during the Maduro era. But despite multiple requests for comment from CNN and other outlets, Trump and his aides have not proven that Venezuela emptied its prisons (or mental health facilities, as Trump has also claimed) to somehow send undesirable citizens into the US.

Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence, said in an email to CNN in June 2024: “We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country.”

Helen Fair, an expert on global prisons at Birkbeck, University of London, told CNN in 2024 that she had “seen absolutely no evidence” that any country had emptied prisons to send prisoners to the US, let alone that numerous countries had done so as Trump has claimed.

Trump and wars: While again insisting he should win the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump repeated a familiar false claim about his role in foreign affairs: “I ended eight unendable wars.” While Trump has played a role in resolving some conflicts (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.

Trump has repeatedly 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. (On Tuesday, he said, “Egypt and Ethiopia were going to fight over a dam and I got them to stop,” but even if that were true, it would still mean it wasn’t an “unendable war.”)

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 how he supposedly “ended the war with the Congo and Rwanda,” but the war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda 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 in December 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 after the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Regardless, Trump’s “eight” figure is obviously too big.

Previous presidents and wars: After repeating his false claim that he ended eight wars, Trump also falsely claimed, “No president has probably ever settled one war. I don’t know, think of it. I did eight.” While we can’t be sure what Trump personally knows, US presidents have played a major role in ending various wars by winning those wars, including World War I, World War II and the Gulf War. In addition, presidents have brokered numerous peace agreements in wars not being fought by the US.

President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in a peace agreement ending a war between the Russian and Japanese empires; President Jimmy Carter played a major role in brokering a 1979 peace agreement to end a long-running state of war between Egypt and Israel; President Bill Clinton played a major role in the 1995 peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War; US administrations have mediated a long list of other armed conflicts.

The Gulf of Mexico: Trump spoke of how he renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, then repeated a false claim: “Because we have 92% of the shoreline. It always bothered me, I’d say, you know, we have most of the shoreline, Mexico has a small percentage – talks about 8%. We have 92%.”

That “92% number from Trump is bunk,” Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University professor emeritus of oceanography who has extensively studied the Gulf, told CNN when Trump made the same claim in 2025. MacDonald noted that the roughly even divide in Gulf coastline between Mexico and the US is clear “just by looking at the map.”

The precise breakdown in Gulf coastline between the US, Mexico and Cuba depends on how you count (the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency says the US portion is 1,630 miles), but Trump’s “92%” figure is wrong by any reasonable measure; Jack Davis, a University of Florida history professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” said, “The US coastline adds up to just under half of the Gulf’s total.” Davis added: “Even if he is referring to the twists and turns of islands and peninsulas and other knotty features, his count is off.”

NATO members’ defense spending: Trump touted NATO members’ 2025 commitment to spend 5% of gross domestic product on defense-related and security-related spending by 2035 – including at least 3.5% of GDP on the “core” defense requirements that were covered by the previous target of 2% of GDP. Trump claimed: “Got NATO members to agree to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP from 2%, and they pay the 5% and they didn’t pay the 2%.”

But most NATO members are not yet meeting the new higher target, which, again, they have given themselves a decade to meet. NATO estimates show that just three members, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, were at or above 3.5% in core defense spending in 2025, though they may be joined by others in 2026.

“It’s absolutely not true that the Allies are currently ‘paying 5%’ on hard defense, and even by 2035 they’ve only committed to 3.5%, in terms of their defense budget conventionally-understood. As of mid-2025, *no* Ally is spending 5%, in fact not even 4.5%,” professor Erwan Lagadec, who leads the NATO and European Union studies program at George Washington University’s international affairs school, said in an email after Trump made similar claims earlier in January.

Lagadec added: “In 2025 the U.S. was ‘only’ at 3.2%, *down* from 2014 in terms of ratios to GDP (the only country in that situation). Hence the case can be made that the U.S. is now the ‘laggard’ going ‘in the wrong direction’; although of course the fact that the U.S. was spending a lower ratio in 2025 than 2014 on defense could be seen as a sign of success, i.e. the outcome of the other Allies doing more.”

Trump’s claim that “they didn’t pay the 2%” needs context. Although most NATO members were not hitting the 2% target as late as 2023, a majority hit the target in 2024; NATO figures show that 18 member countries were at or above 2% out of 31 countries subject to the target.

Elections

The 2020 election: Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, saying former President Joe Biden was “a man that didn’t win the election, by the way – it was a rigged election, everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught him. We caught him.” Biden legitimately defeated Trump in a free and fair election; Trump’s vague claims that Biden has been “caught” and that unspecified “numbers” have emerged to show Trump won are nonsense.

The 2024 election: Trump again complained of how Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential campaign after his disastrous performance in a July 2024 debate. But Trump again exaggerated his lead over Biden at the time, saying, “I was up by like 25 points on Joe, and they said, ‘Hey, let’s get somebody else.’ It’s never happened.” Trump did lead in most national polls taken after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June 2024 presidential debate, but polls generally showed his lead in the single digits – and sometimes within the margin of error.

Other

NPR and PBS: Trump said he had “signed legislation to cut all taxpayer funding to woke and biased NPR and PBS,” then added, “And they’re sorta gone now, I guess; I heard they’re closed up.” It’s not clear what Trump has “heard,” but both National Public Radio (NPR) and The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) continue to operate even in the absence of the federal funding Trump cut in 2025. That funding made up a fraction of the two entities’ overall budgets, though much more for PBS than NPR.

It is true that the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit that had directed federal funding to public media entities, voted earlier this month to dissolve the entity because of the absence of the funding. But the corporation’s decision didn’t shut down NPR and PBS themselves. And New Jersey’s NJ PBS has announced it plans to close in June in the wake of the loss of federal and state funding, but that isn’t the entirety of PBS as the president suggested Tuesday.

California water policy: Trump again baselessly linked the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025 to California leaders’ decision to use some of the water in the state to “protect a tiny little fish” species in the northern part of the state. The two things have nothing to do with each other, as experts in California water policy have long explained.

Fentanyl deaths: Trump repeated his inaccurate rejection of official statistics on overdose deaths. After noting that he signed an order to declare fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” he claimed that “we lost, I believe, 300,000 people last year, this year.”

Trump’s “last year, this year” wording made it difficult to understand precisely what time period he was referring to this time, but there is no basis for his “300,000” figure regardless. In the 12-month period ending December 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there were 81,711 total overdose deaths in the US (involving all drugs, not just fentanyl) – a terrible figure, but nowhere close to what Trump said. In the 12-month period ending August 2025, the most recent data available, the estimate was 72,836 total overdose deaths.

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.”

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