While President Donald Trump proudly boasted Tuesday during his State of the Union address that he had helped secure $18 trillion in investments into the United States during his first year in office, the claim was immediately labeled as false Wednesday by NBC News, which pointed to the Trump administration’s own website as proof.
“I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, pouring in from all over the globe,” Trump touted Tuesday, with the official White House stream of the event queuing up a graphic displaying the $18 trillion figure in real time.
A quick look at the official White House website, however, shows a different number: $9.7 trillion, making the figure Trump touted an overshoot by more than $8 trillion.
Additionally, many of the investments into the United States, as noted by NBC News, were not new investments at all, and were instead either “in line with previous plans” made during the Biden administration, or commitments carried over from the prior administration with “only slight increases.”
Even the White House’s own $9.7 trillion figure – more than $8 trillion less than what Trump claimed on Tuesday – was “misleading,” NBC News wrote.
“More than $2.5 trillion of that isn’t investments, Bloomberg Economics found in November,” the NBC News report reads.
“About $3.5 trillion of that comes from opaque sovereign pledges, and another $3.5 trillion is corporate investments. Of those corporate investments, $2.9 trillion is planned for data centers. Many of the commitments are also over the long term and are likely to be subject to change. For example, it recently took drugmaker Fujifilm Biotechnologies five years to open one factory in North Carolina.”
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