President Donald Trump made false claims about the war in Ukraine, US inflation, and the past fight against the ISIS terror group during his Wednesday news conference at the NATO summit in the Netherlands.
Trump also repeated his unproven assertion that the US’ weekend military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites had left them “obliterated.” As CNN reported Tuesday, an early US intelligence assessment found the core components of the program had not been completely destroyed and that the strikes had likely set back Iran’s nuclear program only by months. (The US continues to collect intelligence on the impact of the strikes and later assessments could come to different conclusions.)
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s assertions on Wednesday.
Russia’s war on Ukraine
When a reporter reminded Trump that he had previously promised to end Russia’s war on Ukraine in “24 hours” but had later said he had been speaking sarcastically, Trump said, “Of course it was sarcastic.”
It was not sarcastic.
When Trump claimed in April that he had made the promise “in jest,” CNN looked into this assertion – and found 53 examples in which Trump pledged on the campaign trail, in an entirely serious tone, manner and context, that he would end the war either within 24 hours of his return to the White House or even sooner than that, as president-elect.
Inflation
Trump again criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not immediately lowering interest rates. Trump said, as he has before, that “we have no inflation.”
That’s not true. The US had an annual inflation rate of 2.4% in May, an uptick from a 2.3% annual rate in April. That April rate was the lowest since early 2021, and lower than some economists expected for April after Trump imposed significant new tariffs, but it’s not “no inflation” whatsoever.
On a month-to-month basis, US consumer prices increased 0.1% in May and 0.2% in April.
The battle against ISIS
Trump repeated his regular assertion that, during his first presidency, “We beat ISIS in a matter of weeks.” He added, “I was told it would take four to five years, we did it in a few weeks.”
In fact, the so-called ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s first presidency, in 2019, not in “weeks.”
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