Washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump made numerous false claims in remarks at the first Cabinet meeting of his new administration. The falsehoods spanned a wide variety of topics, including aid to Ukraine, trade with the European Union, the history of the EU, inflation, mail-in voting, drug overdose deaths, and where the US stands in international education rankings.
Trump also left out critical context from two claims related to Elon Musk’s efforts to reshape the federal government. Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s statements.
Ukraine and Europe
US vs. European wartime aid to Ukraine: Trump repeated his regular false claim that the US has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine while Europe has collectively provided just $100 billion in aid to Ukraine. That is not close to correct.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank that closely tracks wartime aid to Ukraine, Europe – the European Union plus individual European countries – had collectively committed far more total wartime military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine through December 2024 (about $259 billion) than the US committed (about $125 billion). Europe had also allocated more military, financial and humanitarian aid (about $139 billion) than the US allocated (about $120 billion).
The US did have a slim lead in one particular category, military aid allocated, providing about $67 billion compared to about $65 billion from Europe. But even that was nowhere close to the giant gulf Trump described.
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 has said on its website that “as of September 30, 2024, the U.S. Ukraine response funding totals nearly $183 billion, with $130.1 billion obligated and $86.7 billion disbursed” – and that includes funding spent in the US or sent to countries other than Ukraine.
Obama’s Ukraine aid: Trump revived a false claim he regularly made during his first presidency about the Obama administration’s military aid to Ukraine, saying that “they said” that Obama “gave sheets.” While he didn’t say who “they” are, it’s not true that the Obama administration merely provided bedsheets to Ukraine (or “pillows and sheets,” as Trump used to say). While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.
The European Union and trade: Trump repeated a false claim that the European Union doesn’t “accept, essentially, our farm products.” The claim is false even with the “essentially” qualifier. The EU bought $12.3 billion worth of US agricultural exports in the 2023 fiscal year, making it the fourth-largest export market for US agricultural and related products behind China, Mexico and Canada, according to official data.
The formation of the European Union: Trump repeated his false claim that the European Union “was formed in order to screw the United States; I mean, look, let’s be honest.” Experts on the EU told CNN during Trump’s first presidency that there is no basis for such claims, noting that US presidents had consistently supported European integration efforts.
“The President’s claims are preposterous,” Desmond Dinan, a public policy professor at George Mason University who is an expert in the history of European integration, said during Trump’s first presidency. “The European Communities (forerunner of the EU) were formed in the 1950s as part of a joint US-Western European plan to stabilize and secure Western Europe and promote prosperity, by means of trade liberalization and economic growth, throughout the shared transatlantic space.”
Trade
Tariffs on China: Trump repeated two of his regular false claims about tariffs on imported Chinese products. He falsely claimed that the US took in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs “from China” during his presidency, then falsely claimed that before his presidency, no other president took in even “10 cents.”
The US was generating billions per year in revenue from tariffs on China before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since the 1700s. Second, US importers pay these tariffs, not China, and often pass on some or all of the cost to US consumers. Study after study has found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Trade with Canada: Trump repeated his vague claim that the US is losing $200 billion per year to Canada; he didn’t define “lose,” but this is how he generally refers to trade deficits, and he has previously claimed the US has a $200 billion annual trade deficit with Canada.
In fact, the US goods and services trade deficit with Canada was about $40.6 billion in 2023, according to US government figures; even if you only consider trade in goods and ignore the services trade at which the US excels, the US deficit with Canada was about $72.3 billion, still far shy of Trump’s figure. And it’s worth noting that the deficit is overwhelmingly caused by the US importing a large quantity of inexpensive Canadian oil, which helps keep Americans’ gas prices down.
Economy, education and health
Inflation during Trump’s first term: Trump repeated his false claim that there was “no inflation” under his first presidency. In fact, year-over-year inflation was 1.4% in the month he left office, January 2021 – relatively low, but not nonexistent – and prices rose about 8% from the beginning of that presidency to the end.
Inflation today: Trump baselessly claimed that “the inflation is stopping, slowly.” Inflation rose to 3% in January (a month largely under the Biden administration), and there is no indication that it is “stopping,” slowly or otherwise; Trump is pushing various policies that many economists describe as inflationary, notably including a variety of tariffs on imported goods. (Some low level of inflation is generally considered healthy for an economy, so the Federal Reserve targets a rate of 2% rather than stopping inflation completely.)
Education rankings: Trump repeated his false claim that the US ranks dead last, 40th out of 40 countries, in international education rankings. When asked by CNN to identify any education rankings list in which the US placed 40th out of 40, the White House couldn’t do so. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have noted that even among the wealthy, developed countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US ranks well above average in reading and science and below average, but still far from last, in math.
Fentanyl deaths: Trump repeated his inaccurate rejection of official statistics on overdose deaths, claiming that “we lose 300,000 people a year to fentanyl, not 100 (thousand), not 95 (thousand), not 60 (thousand) like you read…close to 300,000 people, dead.”
There is no basis for Trump’s “300,000” figure. In the 12-month period ending in September 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there were 55,126 deaths involving synthetic opioids including fentanyl – a terrible figure, 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.
Foreign affairs
Trump and the defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his false claim that he “got rid of” the ISIS terror group in just “three weeks” even though “people” had told him it would take five years. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.
Mail-in voting: Trump falsely claimed, “We’re the only country in the world that has mail-in voting.” Various other countries, including Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Spain allow some or all voters to vote by mail, though the specifics of their policies vary.
Fentanyl and Canada: Speaking of fentanyl, Trump claimed, “A lot of it comes through Canada.” It’s debatable what counts as “a lot,” but US official statistics show that, of 21,889 pounds of fentanyl seized by US border authorities in the 2024 fiscal year, about 0.2% – 43 pounds – was seized near the Canadian border. That’s compared to 21,148 pounds at the Mexican border, about 96.6%.
Military equipment and Afghanistan: Trump repeated his exaggeration that the US left tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment to the Taliban when President Joe Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021. The Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021.
Government workers and spending
The five accomplishments email: Trump, speaking of the federal employees who did not respond to an Elon Musk email blast asking them to list accomplishments from the previous week, said, “Usually that means that maybe that person doesn’t exist, or that person doesn’t want to say they’re working for another company while being paid by the United States government.” He added that these million people who didn’t respond are “on the bubble” for continued employment even though “maybe they don’t exist.”
But Trump didn’t explain that there are benign explanations for the large number of non-responses. Leaders at multiple federal agencies told their employees not to respond to the email, and the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management told agencies that replying was voluntary. And some employees may have been sick, on vacation, on leave or without access to their email account by the response deadline of Monday; the email was sent to federal employees on Saturday.
In other words, a non-response certainly doesn’t mean a federal employee is imaginary or that they are a real person improperly moonlighting at a second job on government time.
Deceased people and Social Security: Trump said of Social Security: “You see people that are 200 years old that are being sent checks for Social Security. Some of them are actually being sent checks. So we’re facing that down.”
It’s certainly possible that some Social Security checks are being sent to some long-deceased people. But as Musk insinuates that millions of long-deceased people might be getting money, it’s important to note that Social Security already has a system in place to stop payments to people listed as being age 115 and older.
A 2023 report from the inspector general who monitors the Social Security Administration found 18.9 million people age 100 or older who were not marked as deceased on their entry in a Social Security database, an issue Musk has discussed. But while the inspector general was critical of the Social Security Administration (SSA) over the issue, she also found that only 44,000 of these 18.9 million people were receiving payments.
Even those 44,000 payments were not obviously fraudulent or erroneous. The inspector general noted that a larger number of living people in the US, an estimated 86,000, were age 100 or older.
“Regarding the 44,000 figure, I’m confident that the vast majority of those are legit payments. So while there probably is some fraud, I don’t think these numbers show any evidence of it,” Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank who served as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration during the George W. Bush administration, told CNN last week.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, who was elevated to that post by the current Trump administration, tried to set the record straight in a February statement.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said.