Politics
Every Fumble, Checked
Twenty-one claims the president made or amplified in his second term, each with the date, what the record shows, and the fact-check that settled it.
The argument
Every politician gets things wrong, and some of what follows is the ordinary kind of exaggeration every president is guilty of. This page leaves out disputed calls and opinions. It keeps only claims the president made or amplified that a fact-checker rated False or Pants on Fire, or found unsupported or contradicted by the plain record, and it links each one so you can read the check yourself.
The point is not any single slip. It is the pattern in what was said and repeated: claims about elections that undercut trust in voting, claims about vaccines that were wildly wrong, and claims about specific people that were simply untrue. This list is not a count of everything. Most of what has already been checked elsewhere on this site, from gas prices to the Signal chats, is left out here so the list does not repeat.
The list
Claims and the record
Oldest first. Each verdict is the fact-checker’s own.
| When | What he said | What the record shows | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 20, 2025 | The Panama Canal “lost 38,000 lives.” | FactCheck.org found about 7,600 deaths during the American construction phase, fewer than 1,000 of them Americans. | FactCheck.org |
| Jan 29, 2025 | Repeated a White House claim that $50 million had been stopped from going to Gaza “to buy condoms.” | FactCheck.org found it unsupported. The aid group named said no government money bought condoms. | FactCheck.org |
| Mar 4, 2025 | “Biden closed more than 100 power plants.” | The number of U.S. power plants rose by 2,187 from 2020 to 2023. | FactCheck.org |
| Mar 4, 2025 | Canada “allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before.” | Under 1% of seized fentanyl comes through Canada: 43 pounds in fiscal 2024, against 21,148 from Mexico. | FactCheck.org |
| Aug 25, 2025 | Eleven days with no murders in D.C. was “the first time that’s taken place in years.” | A 16-day stretch with no homicides had run from February 25 to March 12 that same year. | FactCheck.org |
| Oct 2025 | “By each boat that we destroy, we save 25,000 American lives.” | Rated Pants on Fire. Eight boats at 25,000 each would be nearly triple all U.S. overdose deaths in a year. | PolitiFact (in Spanish) |
| Nov 9, 2025 | Shared a post saying DOGE stopped a “$2.5 million” yearly Obamacare royalty paid to Obama. | Rated Pants on Fire. The story came from a satire site that says “Everything on this website is fiction.” | PolitiFact |
| Dec 1, 2025 | Shared a post saying Maduro had “publicly surrendered.” | Rated Pants on Fire. The video was from a February 2025 speech. | PolitiFact |
| Jan 29, 2026 | Drugs coming in by sea are “down 97%.” | Rated False. The Coast Guard reported cocaine seizures in fiscal 2025 about 200% above typical annual averages, and seizures cannot show how much gets through. | PolitiFact |
| Mar 9, 2026 | Iran “also has some Tomahawks.” | Rated False. Only the U.S., Japan, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands have them. | PolitiFact |
| Mar 23, 2026 | “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.” | Rated Pants on Fire. He voted by mail himself that month, in Florida’s March 24 special election. | PolitiFact |
| Apr 12, 2026 | He did not want a pope who “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” | Rated Pants on Fire. Pope Leo has called for a world free of nuclear threat, and the Holy See signed the U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons. | PolitiFact |
| Apr 15, 2026 | Sen. Thom Tillis “is no longer a senator.” | Rated False. Tillis was still voting, and serves until January 2027. The host pointed out he was still serving. | PolitiFact |
| May 4, 2026 | “Consumer confidence is way up.” | Rated False. University of Michigan sentiment in March 2026 was the ninth-lowest since 1978. | PolitiFact |
| May 31, 2026 | A perfect 30 out of 30 on a cognitive test is “considered ‘extreme intelligence.’” | Rated False. The test screens for impairment. A perfect score means normal cognition. | PolitiFact |
| Jun 7, 2026 | California’s slow count is because “they’re cheating on the election.” | Rated Pants on Fire. California has about 23 million registered voters, counts mail ballots that arrive up to seven days after Election Day, and requires a manual tally of 1% of ballots. | PolitiFact |
| Aug 3, 2026 | “There was vandalism” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. | Rated False. His own Justice Department dropped the charges, attributing the damage to a “botched installation.” | PolitiFact |
| Aug 10, 2026 | Vaccines given to children are the size of “a bottle of soda.” | Rated Pants on Fire. A dose is 0.5 to 1 milliliter. A 20-ounce soda is about 591. | PolitiFact |
| Aug 10, 2026 | The MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” | Rated Pants on Fire. Asked for evidence, he said only that “some people say it is that way.” MMR has more than 55 years of use and hundreds of millions of doses. | PolitiFact |
| Sep 21, 2026 | His campaign account posted that Roy Cooper was in New York when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. | Rated False. Cooper spoke in New York two days before landfall and was in Raleigh when the storm hit. | PolitiFact |
| Oct 4, 2026 | Brazil’s same-day count shows U.S. cities “take weeks to Rig, I mean, calculate.” | Rated Pants on Fire. Brazil uses one national electronic system with no mail voting. Slower U.S. counts follow state rules, not fraud. | PolitiFact |
Sources: PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, linked in each row
What is true on the other side
- Fact-checkers are not infallible, and conservatives have long argued they rate Republicans more harshly. Each row here links to the reasoning so you can judge it, and each rests on a checkable number or record, not a judgment call.
- Some of these are exaggerations of something real. D.C. did have a long stretch without murders. Sea seizures did fall sharply. The problem is the part that was not true.
- Every president says false things. That is fair. The question is how often, about what, and whether it is ever corrected.
The common rebuttals
“He is just exaggerating. Everyone knows that.”
Some of these are puffery. But telling voters that counting ballots is cheating, or that a childhood vaccine may be lethal while admitting there is no evidence, is not puffery. People act on those claims.
What this means
Each of these can be checked in minutes. Read the sources and judge.