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 already been debunked. Here’s a fact check.
Inflation and the Economy
Inflation under Trump: At the end of the speech, Trump falsely claimed, “Inflation has stopped.” Inflation has not stopped; The year-over-year inflation rate in September, 3.0%, was the same as the rate when Trump returned to office in January — in fact, if you go to several decimal places, the September rate was a little bit higher — and September was the fifth consecutive month the year-over-year rate rose.
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 December 2024, the last full month of the Biden administration, 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 that Trump talked about on Wednesday, 3.0% in September 2025. (November is scheduled to be released every Thursday morning.) We don’t know who Trump was referring to when he said “someone will say,” but neither the December 2024 number nor the January 2025 number were the closest at any time or decade.
It’s true that the year-over-year US inflation rate hit a 40-year high (not a 48-year high) of 9.1% in June 2022 during the Biden administration, but even that was nowhere near the all-time record of 23.7% set in 1920 — and that happened two years before Trump returned. Inflation had fallen before Trump’s inauguration.
The cumulative rise in prices from the beginning to the end of the Biden administration was also not the worst in US history. Federal statistics show cumulative inflation under Biden has been less than half that of President Jimmy Carter.
Grocery prices: “And everything else is going down fast,” Trump added after seeing egg prices drop since March. That’s not true if he was talking specifically about grocery prices, which have risen this year. Consumer Price Index data shows that grocery items are on the rise increased After he returned to office, the price has decreased. The most recent CPI figures available at the time of speaking Wednesday for September showed average grocery prices rising 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.
It’s possible November data, scheduled for release Thursday, will show a month-over-month decline in grocery prices, but grocery prices will almost certainly still be higher for Trump’s tenure.
Prescription drug prices: Trump repeated his false claim that his executive order on prescription drug prices would “cut those prices by 400, 500, and 600%.” These figures are mathematically impossible; If the president magically got companies to drop the price of all their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut. You can read a longer fact check here.
Gas Price: “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon in most of the country, and some have even gone as high as $1.99 a gallon,” Trump said. These claims require context.
As of Wednesday, there were only four states whose average price for a gallon of regular gas was less than $2.50, according to data published by AAA: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa and Colorado. (Nine additional states averaged between $2.50 and $2.60 per gallon.) The AAA national average was $2.905 per gallon.
No state average was lower than Oklahoma’s $2.339 per gallon. And while some individual stations across the country were offering gas for $1.99 per gallon or less, the numbers were small; Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at the firm GasBuddy, estimated that it was between 75 and 100 stations out of thousands of GasBuddy tracks across the country. (This does not include others with special discounts.)
Investing in the US this year: “I have secured a record $18 trillion in investment in the United States,” Trump said Wednesday, repeating his false claim of “$18 trillion” in investment in the U.S. during his second term as president. This figure is imaginary. At the time he spoke on Wednesday, the White House’s own website said the figure was “$9.6 trillion” and that too was a huge exaggeration; A detailed CNN review in October found the White House counting trillions of dollars on vague investment promises, promises that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the U.S., or vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of a promise. You can read more here.
Immigration and Foreign Policy
Trump and War: Trump repeated his false claim that he ended eight wars this year, saying on Wednesday, “I have restored American power, resolved eight wars in 10 months.” Even if Trump played a role in resolving some of the conflicts (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.
Trump has already explained that his list of alleged wars includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that was not really a war; It is a long-running diplomatic dispute over an Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile. Trump’s list includes another alleged war between Serbia and Kosovo that didn’t actually happen during his presidency. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the outbreak of a new war between the two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different from resolving an actual war.) And his list includes alleged success in ending wars involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, but that war continued in the wake of this year’s peace accords led by Trump. fight
Trump’s list also includes the armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, where fighting broke out again this month and continued this week despite a peace deal brokered by the Trump administration earlier in the year.
One can debate the importance of Trump’s role in ending other conflicts on his list, or question whether anything has really ended; For example, killings continued in Gaza in November following the October ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. However, Trump’s “eight” figure is clearly too big.
Migration and Biden: Trump repeated his false claim that “25 million” immigrants entered the country under Biden’s leadership. The “25 million” figure is incorrect; Trump’s earlier “21 million” figure was also a wild exaggeration. As of December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded 11 million nationwide “encounters” with immigrants during that administration, including millions who were quickly deported. Even when adding so-called gateways who escaped detection, which House Republicans estimated at about 2.2 million, the total was nowhere near what Trump said.
A U.S. Army soldier closes a gate at the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, on January 24, after President Donald Trump ordered more military personnel to the border with Mexico as part of steps to address immigration. – Charlie Tribleau/AFP/Getty Images/File
Trump also repeated his unsubstantiated claim that, during the Biden administration, foreign countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions somehow to send them to the U.S. as immigrants, claiming that “many” members of the “army of 2.5 million people” came from “prisons and prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums.” Trump has never provided support for such claims about foreign countries in general or specific places named in the past: Venezuela and “the Congo.” Experts on Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the neighboring Republic of the Congo said during the Biden administration that they saw no basis for Trump’s stories, the governments of both Congolese countries told CNN that the stories were false, and an expert on the global prison population told CNN that he saw “absolutely no evidence” of either country releasing its prisoners to US prisons.
other subjects
Trump’s Bill and Social Security: Trump repeated his false claim that the major domestic policy bill he signed earlier this year included “no tax on Social Security.” The law created an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax cut for people 65 and older (with a smaller cut for people making $75,000 or more per year), but the White House itself has publicly acknowledged that millions of Social Security recipients 65 and older will continue to pay their taxes. In 2028, Social Security recipients under age 65 also no longer apply.
Biden, Crime and Law Enforcement: Trump falsely claimed that, under Biden, “crime was at record levels with law enforcement and words like total prohibition.” Neither of these two claims is true.
Under Biden there was no restriction on the phrase “law enforcement”; The Biden administration itself used the phrase frequently. And crime wasn’t even close to an all-time high under Biden. Crime in America was much higher in the early 1990s and at various points in the 1970s and 1980s than it was in the 2020s under Biden or Trump.
Under the leadership of both Trump in 2020 and Biden in 2021, homicides rose nationally amid the turmoil of the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. But FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime fell nationally in 2023 and 2024 under Biden. Trump has challenged that the FBI data has no basis and that there is no limit. That crime was at a record high under Biden.
This story has been updated with more details.
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