Filmmaker, @CourierNewsroom correspondent, @eVilsublet director, previously @InequalityMedia head of content, @nowthisnews sr politics producer
He/Him/His
Here’s a fact check of some of President Trump’s claims, including a bunch of long-debunked lies, from a single softball New York Post interview released this morning.
Claim: “We're the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots.” Truth: Dozens of countries have mail-in ballots, including Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.
Claim: The 2020 election was “rigged” and has “been proven to be rigged.” Truth: Not rigged, there’s no proof for Trump’s assertion more than five years later, and he lost fair and square.
Claim: Trump won “three” presidential elections. Truth: He won in 2016 and 2024, lost in 2020.
Claim: In the 2024 election, “There were areas that were just rigged…rigged against me.” Truth: Nonsense again; he won that election fair and square but lost some areas of the country fair and square.
Claim: Democrats “could not win” “if they didn’t cheat.” Truth: Democrats, like Republicans, clearly win various elections legitimately.
Claim: California mails out “38 million ballots," and while "some people get three, four, five ballots," "Republicans get, oftentimes, none.” Truth: California mails a ballot to all active registered voters, of which there are 23 million, not the “38 million” figure Trump has used repeatedly; while there are occasional errors by county elections offices and the postal service, there's no general anti-Republican bias in ballot-mailing in the state.
Claim: “I inherited the highest inflation in the history of our country…Biden had like 9, 10% inflation. And I inherited that, and we have it way down.” Truth: The inflation rate the month Trump returned to office was 3.0%, lower than the most recent rate of 3.8%; Biden-era inflation did peak at 9.1%, but that was in mid-2022, and it wasn’t close to the all-time record of 23.7%. Regardless, it had fallen substantially before Trump’s inauguration.
Claim: “We have $18 trillion being invested in the country in just 11 months.” Truth: This is a completely fictional figure. The White House’s own website says there have been $10.6 trillion in “major investment announcements” this term, and even that’s a massive exaggeration that counts vague pledges, not-even-pledges, and pledges that are about mutual trade rather than investments in the US.
Claim: Trump had gas prices at “$1.85 in Iowa” on the day he visited there in January. Truth: The Iowa average gas price that day was $2.57 per gallon, per AAA; GasBuddy found four stations in the state out of 2,036 selling for $1.97 that day, none at $1.85; the station outside the venue where he spoke was at $2.69. (Ethanol-gas blend E85 was around $1.85, but that can only be used in a small percentage of cars, and he didn’t say that was what he was talking about.)
Claim: Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was still wearing a mask “a couple of months ago.” Truth: I've found no evidence for this; the Talarico video many Republicans have mocked shows Talarico wearing a mask in 2022, not 2026.
Claim: Mitch McConnell was “losing by a lot” in the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky but then Trump endorsed him and got him elected. Truth: McConnell, running in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992, led in all but one public poll in that race, and that one exception was a poll conducted for a pro-term-limits group in which he trailed by just one point; he was always the overwhelming favorite.
Claim: The Jan. 6 attack was “nonsense” in which “the FBI said, ‘Go in. Go in.’” Truth: That was a riot perpetrated by Trump supporters, and there's no evidence the FBI ever told rioters to illegally enter the Capitol. DOJ’s inspector general found the FBI had zero undercover agents at the riot…and Trump was president at the time and had personally appointed the FBI director.
Claim: Former VP Harris “was the border czar” but “never went.” Truth: She went to the border twice as VP, and the Biden administration repeatedly emphasized she was never “border czar” but had a narrower assignment focused on the “root causes” of migration from Central America.
Claim: Under Biden, “25 million people” poured over the border. Truth: This is a further exaggeration from the wildly exaggerated “21 million” figure Trump used to use; even counting “gotaways,” it’s not even close to correct.
Claim: Democrats are so dumb that “we had 11,888 murderers, most of whom committed more than one murder, allowed into our country.” Truth: The federal data it appears Trump is referring to is about people who entered the US over the course of multiple decades, *including during Trump’s own first administration.*
Claim: Under Biden, countries emptied their jail populations into the US – “the whole jail was emptied into our country.” Trump and his team have never substantiated this claim even though he’s made it for years, and experts on global prison policy and on the countries he has previously identified as the supposed culprits have told me they’ve seen no evidence for it.
More details: https://t.co/NtFk7PUfwN
Imagine if a woman president crashed the economy and started a war with no end in sight, and her biggest, seemingly ONLY concern was building a ballroom and redecorating the White House.
In the past two weeks, the president has lied that he’d have won California with an honest vote count, that California doesn’t allow people to vote in person, and that California mails out 15 million excess ballots. All absolute nonsense. https://t.co/lCo2EJ9oMv
I’m glad the president did well on the MOCA exam, but it’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test, so a score of 26 or higher represents normal cognitive performance, not extreme intelligence. None of the questions are high difficulty.
🚨 WOW.
Trump’s financial disclosure forms reportedly show he bought between $1 MILLION and $5 MILLION in Dell stock earlier this year.
Then THIS WEEK…
the Pentagon awarded Dell a contract worth MORE THAN $9 BILLION.
Read that again slowly.
Barack Obama remains the most popular political figure in America, with 55-60% favorability.
Hard to get that many Americans to agree on anything.
And he’s one of only 7 US presidents to be elected twice with more than 50% of the popular vote both times.
Did something right.
Trump bragging that his doctors have felt it necessary for him to take four dementia tests and that he considers it a remarkable accomplishment to correctly answer questions like, “What day is it?” and “Which of these animals is a giraffe?”
Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.
The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.
It had fewer than 50 employees.
And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.
Here is the part the administration tried to bury.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.
One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.
A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.
This is public money. Your money.
Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.
And there is more coming.
A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.
https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE
This Ebola outbreak has been a slow motion disaster - 900 cases and and now threatening the U.S..
We know how to stop outbreaks like this. But Trump chose not to stop it. He destroyed our global health team, deliberately exposing us.
1/ Here's the story of how this happened.
Trump could have presided over a very strong economy. All he had to do was...nothing: Inflation was trending downward, the AI boom was raising growth.
Instead, he engineered a global trade war and energy shock, while shrinking America's labor force. https://t.co/JvvlsQ83R8
"In the end, American consumers paid $159 billion in temporary national sales taxes for which most will never be reimbursed a penny. And rather than those taxes being used by the federal government to, say, repave roads or build bridges, most of the money will instead provide corporate windfalls." https://t.co/gkdRAzPBz5