In the first year of his second term, President Trump has cited an arsenal of falsehoods, baseless claims and distortions to justify significant policy changes on the economy, immigration and deployments of the military.
His case for ushering in a turnaround rests on inaccurate superlatives (the “worst inflation” ever under his predecessor and the “best numbers” now under his presidency), mathematically impossible figures (a “600 percent” decline in drug prices) and evidence-free assertions (the decimation of maritime drug smuggling).
Here’s a fact-check of some of the falsehoods that fueled Mr. Trump’s first year back.
Immigration
What was said
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump has long overstated the unauthorized migration under his predecessor and has wrongly portrayed most migrants as criminals. Likewise, contrary to his claims, most migrants deported in his first year back in office had no criminal convictions.
First, the 25 million figure is more than double than most credible estimates of unauthorized migration under the Biden administration. (And also a few million more than Mr. Trump’s own estimates of 21 million from July.) Mr. Trump has also not provided any evidence of his repeated assertion that “many” of those migrants were criminals and “some of the worst people on earth.”
From the 2021 to 2024 fiscal years, officials recorded roughly 11 million “encounters” of unauthorized migrants at borders and ports of entry, including about seven million at the southwestern border with Mexico. More than a quarter of the migrants were repeat offenders. Republican lawmakers have estimated that about 2.2 million more unauthorized migrants evaded detection during this time. And a March report from the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank that supports lower levels of immigration, estimated that 11.5 million to 12.5 million migrants — both legal and illegal — settled in the United States under the Biden administration.
Most migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Mr. Trump’s first year had no criminal convictions. In late November, of the 65,000 people in detention, about 26 percent had a criminal conviction, 26 percent had pending charges and 47 percent had immigration violations, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit at Syracuse University.
A New York Times analysis of ICE arrests and detentions from Jan. 20 to Oct. 15 of last year found that just 7 percent of those arrested nationwide had a violent conviction. Thirty-seven percent had a previous conviction, with driving under the influence and traffic violations as the most common offenses. A third had no criminal charges at all. And in locales where ICE has conducted high-profile operations — Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and across Massachusetts — more than half had no charges at all.
Overall, the Trump administration has deported about 622,000 people since Jan. 20, 2025. Even if one assumed that all of them had criminal convictions, that would amount to about 2.5 percent of Mr. Trump’s own 25 million figure.
Economy
What Was said
False. Most metrics do not support Mr. Trump’s claim of transforming the economy from the “worst” to the “best.”
Inflation was 3 percent in January 2025, when Mr. Trump took office. That was far from the “worst” recorded — inflation was much higher in the 1980s, when it topped 14 percent. The rate declined slightly to 2.7 percent in December, the most recent month with available data.
Unemployment grew to 4.4 percent in December 2025, up from 4 percent that January. For comparison, unemployment surged to 14.8 percent in April 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, and it was 6.4 percent in January 2021, the last month of Mr. Trump’s first term.
Nominal median wage growth, too, fell to 3.7 by December 2025 from 4.2 percent in January of that year. After adjusting for inflation, real hourly earnings grew at 1.1 percent in both December 2024 and December 2025, while real weekly earnings grew to 1.1 percent in December 2025 from 0.5 percent in December 2024. None of those figures were historically high or historically low.
Gross domestic product did increase to a robust 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025, compared with 1.9 percent in the last quarter of 2024. In comparison, the economy grew at a faster clip in the third quarter of 2023 at 4.7 percent and contracted in the first quarter of 2025 by 0.6 percent.
A White House official cited two less commonly cited economic measures — the Federal Reserve’s industrial production index and its count of shipments of manufacturing orders — hitting record highs under Mr. Trump. But those measures rose slightly from January, when Mr. Trump took office, not from record lows.
Trade
What Was said
This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has long argued, falsely, that the Gilded Age was the most prosperous era in American history because of tariffs. In his prime-time address on the economy, he claimed to have reproduced that prosperity with his tariffs responsible for companies “building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen” and convincing drug giants to lower the cost of prescription medicines by “400, 500 and even 600 percent.”
First, his $18 trillion figure is almost double than the White House’s own tally of investments ($9.6 trillion). While it is possible that the pledges will result in economic gains, those effects have yet to come to fruition.
The $9.6 trillion also includes broad pledges and previously announced projects. And more than half of that amount comes from informal pledges from foreign countries to invest in the United States that experts warn may be unrealistic. For example, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates each pledged more than $1 trillion in investments, which is more than their gross domestic products.
And so far, there is little evidence that Mr. Trump’s tariffs have ushered in a manufacturing renaissance, job and wage growth, or a decline in drug prices. Economists have said that the sustained economic growth in the United States was in spite of tariffs, not because of them.
The manufacturing sector shed 63,000 jobs from January 2025 to December 2025. Construction spending in manufacturing has also declined. Economic activity in the sector in general contracted for 10 consecutive months in 2025, according to a longstanding survey by the Institute for Supply Management.
Mr. Trump’s claim that his tariffs brought a decline of 400 to 600 percent in drug prices is not mathematically possible. A 100 percent decline would mean that the product is free.
The Consumer Price Index for prescription drugs rose by 2 percent from December 2024 to December 2025. Several independent research firms that track drug prices reported that pharmaceutical companies have raised the prices of hundreds of prescription drugs in the new year, with a median hike of 4 percent.
It is true that Mr. Trump has announced deals with several drug manufacturers to reduce the prices of some medicines. But the deals do not address the high cost of most drugs. And Mr. Trump’s tariffs may, on the contrary, raise the prices of drugs manufactured abroad.
Foreign Policy
What Was said
This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has authorized a series of military strikes against boats and the capture of the ousted president of Venezuela based on the faulty premise that its government was flooding the United States with deadly drugs. His contention that the strikes successfully decimated maritime drug trafficking is unsupported and unlikely.
The primary mode of trafficking drugs directly to the United States from Venezuela is by air, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Major maritime routes for trafficking cocaine to the United States largely departed from Colombia, Ecuador and Central American countries, traveling through the Eastern Pacific Ocean (which Venezuela does not border). A 2020 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration noted that just 8 percent of documented cocaine was smuggled through the Caribbean corridor.
The White House cited data from Customs and Border Protection showing that officials with the agency’s Air and Marine Operations in the United States seized a record amount of drugs in July — more than 220,000 pounds — and that number has since fallen to 2,000 pounds in December. But of that figure of 220,000 pounds, more than 200,000 pounds was of marijuana and it is unclear where those interdictions took place. Moreover, C.B.P. is not the only agency that seizes drugs.
As the strikes occurred, the Coast Guard continued to conduct other maritime drug enforcement operations. For example, the Coast Guard reported seizing nearly 20,000 pounds of cocaine across 10 days in November as part of Operation Pacific Viper. The Coast Guard also announced on Thursday the seizure of more than 2,200 pounds of cocaine in a 45-day patrol in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Jeremy McDermott and Steven Dudley, the co-founders of InSight Crime, a Latin America crime and security think tank, wrote in a recent post that while the military strikes had likely disrupted some drug routes, the campaign had not halted trafficking altogether.
“This has not stopped the flow of drugs; it simply forced traffickers to use different routes and modus operandi,” they wrote.
Executive Power
What Was said
This is misleading. Mr. Trump has justified deploying National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities by overstating their crime rates, and then overstating the impact of those deployments. After the Supreme Court ruled in December that he could not deploy the Guard over the objections of local officials in Illinois, Mr. Trump instead asserted his authority to deploy more conventional troops to American cities — an authority, he argued misleadingly, that most other presidents had exercised.
Mr. Trump’s claims about the National Guard’s effect on crime in Portland, Ore., were particularly inaccurate, as the Guard barely had a presence in the city.
In late September, after protests over immigration enforcement in Portland, Mr. Trump announced he would deploy the Guard to the city. Local officials challenged the deployment in court almost immediately. Emails released in court showed — and a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged — that about seven to 10 members of Oregon’s National Guard were briefly sent to an ICE building in downtown Portland from about 11:30 in the morning on Oct. 4 and left sometime at night, after a judge barred the deployment in the afternoon. After the Supreme Court ruling in December, Mr. Trump abandoned his efforts to deploy the Guard to Portland, Chicago and Los Angeles.
The White House cited a decline in crime from September, when Mr. Trump announced the deployment, to November. But even before the announcement and the half-day deployment of a handful of troops in October, crime in Portland had been falling, with homicides already declining by more than 50 percent in the first half of 2025 and violent crime down by 17 percent. Last year, the local police recorded 4,000 to 5,200 monthly offenses from January to November, the month with the most recent data available. The greatest number of offenses were recorded in October, the month with the brief appearance of National Guard troops.
Mr. Trump’s contention that half his predecessors have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the president broad authority to mobilize troops domestically under certain conditions, is overstated and leaves out critical context.
Since the 1790s, 17 presidents have used or invoked the Insurrection Act a total of 30 times, according to a timeline compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice. That’s about 38 percent of all presidents. Most invocations — 19 instances — occurred before 1900. Many of the invocations in the last century occurred during the Civil Rights era. For example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the act after the governor of Arkansas deployed the state’s National Guard to stop nine Black students from enrolling at a high school in Little Rock.
Most recently, President George H.W. Bush invoked the act twice, not 22 times as Mr. Trump said, in 1989 to quell looting after a hurricane in the Virgin Islands and in 1992 to quell unrest after the death of Rodney King. Mr. Bush invoked the act at the request of the California governor. In contrast, local officials in Democratic-led cities and states have resisted Mr. Trump’s deployment of troops.
Linda Qiu is a Times reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
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