Inflation hasn’t “stopped.” Consumer prices are up during this presidential term, not “down.” Grocery prices are rising, not starting to fall “rapidly.” US businesses and consumers, not China, pay US tariffs on Chinese imports. It’s impossible to reduce prescription drug prices by “thousands” of percentage points, since this would mean Americans would be getting paid to acquire their medicines.
President Donald Trump made numerous false claims about inflation in a Tuesday speech to the Detroit Economic Club. He also delivered a bunch of falsehoods about broader economic subjects and about a variety of other issues he abandoned his teleprompter to discuss, including elections and immigration.
Here is a fact check of some of his remarks.
Economy, prices and taxes
The state of inflation: Trump falsely claimed, “Inflation is stopped.” Inflation very much continues. The new Consumer Price Index report, released the morning of Trump’s speech, showed that average consumer prices were 2.7% higher in December than they were a year prior and 0.3% higher than they were in November. (At another moment in the speech, Trump made a vaguer claim that there is now “almost no inflation.”)
Prices under Trump: In his conclusion to the speech, Trump falsely claimed, “Prices are down.” Earlier, he scoffed at Democrats who say the midterms would be about affordability, saying, “It’s an election about high prices, that was caused by the Democrats, and that I brought down a lot.” While it’s fair for Trump to point out there was high inflation under Biden’s Democratic administration – though economists debate how much was caused by Democrats’ policies – overall consumer prices are up, not down, during Trump’s second presidency. As of December, average consumer prices were about 2.2% higher, on a seasonally adjusted basis, than they were in January 2025, the month Trump returned to office. Some products got cheaper during that period, but far more products got more expensive.
Grocery prices: Trump falsely claimed, “Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down.” The new Consumer Price Index inflation report released earlier on Tuesday showed grocery prices spiked from November to December at the fastest month-to-month rate, 0.7%, in more than three years; they were 2.4% higher in December than they were a year prior. It’s possible that these figures were affected by how the fall government shutdown affected the government’s data collection efforts, but regardless, there is no basis for Trump’s claim that overall grocery prices are beginning to fall quickly. (Trump repeatedly made such claims in 2025 even as data repeatedly showed grocery prices continued to rise.)
Prescription drug prices: Trump repeated his false claim that prescription drug prices are “going to be coming down thousands of percents” because of his “Most Favored Nation” policy, adding, “We’re standing up to special interests and slashing prescription drug prices by 300, 400, 500 and even 600%, and more.” These claims are debunked by math itself; if the president magically got drug companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut, while a decline of more than 100 percentage points would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications, which is not happening. You can read a longer fact check here.
Biden and inflation: Trump repeated his false claims that the Biden administration had “the worst inflation in the history of our country” and that “we inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country” – then, in an unusual acknowledgment of fact checks, noted that the media has corrected this claim and “would say 49 years.” The “49 years” figure is closer to the truth, but even that is an exaggeration. The year-over-year US inflation rate hit about a 40-year high during the Biden administration in June 2022, when it was 9.1%. That was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920 – and it occurred more than two years before Trump returned. Inflation had plummeted before Trump returned to office in January 2025, when it was 3.0%.
Investment in the US: Trump repeated his regular false claim that “we’ve got $18 trillion being invested in our country,” boasting at another point in the speech that he had supposedly secured these investments in less than a year back in office. The $18 trillion figure is fiction. At the time Trump spoke, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term was “$9.6 trillion,” and even that is a major exaggeration; a detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.
Economic growth: Trump falsely claimed, “We have the highest growth we have ever had.” The economy did post robust growth in the third quarter of 2025, the most recent period for which the data is available – gross domestic product increased by an inflation-adjusted annualized rate of 4.3% – but that was the fastest rate since 2023, not close to the fastest of all time. The economy grew much faster in the third quarter of 2020 and in 2021, for example, as it emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. Aside from the pandemic era, there was much faster growth than there was in 2025 on various previous occasions.
Gas prices: Trump claimed that gas prices are “under $2 in many places,” saying, “We have some states, it is $1.95, $1.99, $1.97.” This needs context. On Tuesday, there was no state with an average gas price below $2 per gallon; the lowest average in any state was about $2.23 per gallon, in Oklahoma. There were some individual gas stations below $2 per gallon, but a tiny percentage of the total. The firm GasBuddy told CNN that it found about 464 stations across the country below $2 on Tuesday (aside from special discounts), about 0.3% of the roughly 150,000 stations the firm tracks.
Trump could fairly say gas prices have fallen during this presidency, declining from a national average of $3.08 per gallon on his inauguration day in January 2025 to a national average of $2.82 per gallon on Tuesday.
Who pays tariffs: Talking about how he believes his tariff policy is succeeding, Trump falsely claimed, “China is one of our biggest taxpayers right now. China, would you ever believe you would hear that?” Tariff payments on products imported from China are made by US importers, not China itself, and importers often pass on some or all of the added costs to the final consumer.
Taxes on Social Security: Trump repeated his inaccurate claim that he had achieved “no tax on Social Security for our seniors.” The big domestic policy bill Trump signed in 2025 did create an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax deduction for individuals age 65 and older (with a smaller deduction for individuals earning $75,000 per year or more), but the White House itself has implicitly acknowledged that millions of Social Security recipients age 65 and older will continue to pay taxes on their benefits – and that new deduction, which expires in 2028, doesn’t even apply to the Social Security recipients who are younger than 65.
Fraud and the federal budget: Trump baselessly claimed that eliminating fraud in federal programs would balance the federal budget, saying, “If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget.” The annual budget deficit far exceeds the estimated amount of money the federal government loses to fraud each year – an estimate Trump cited earlier in the Tuesday speech.
Trump correctly said that the government loses about half a trillion dollars to fraud. That’s the high side of a first-of-its-kind estimate the federal Government Accountability Office released in 2024, which found that $233 billion to $521 billion is lost to fraud annually. But the federal budget deficit came in at just under $1.8 trillion for the most recent fiscal year, which ended in September, according to the Treasury Department – more than triple the estimated fraud total.
Elections
Trump and Michigan: Trump claimed, “We did good in Michigan,” then falsely added, “We won the whole thing in Michigan, didn’t we, huh? Three times we won. You know that, right? They didn’t give us credit the second time, but we won the second time.” Trump won Michigan in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections but lost to Joe Biden, fair and square, in the 2020 election – by 154,188 votes, about 2.8 percentage points. There is no basis for Trump’s suggestions that the 2020 result was fraudulent; in 2021, an investigation led by Republican state senators in Michigan found there was “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan’s 2020 election.
Trump and the popular vote: Trump falsely claimed, “I won the popular all three times too,” adding, “But we’re not gonna get into that.” Trump won the US popular vote in the 2024 election but lost it in the two previous elections – by roughly 2.9 million votes in the 2016 election and by roughly 7.1 million votes in the 2020 election.
Immigration and foreign affairs
Migration under Biden: Trump criticized former Biden for “letting in 25 million people” as migrants. The “25 million” figure is false; even Trump’s previous “21 million” figure was a wild exaggeration. Through December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total was even close to what Trump has said.
Migration and murder: Trump also repeated a claim that Biden allowed in “11,888” murderers as migrants. He was inaccurately describing federal data.
The Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have previously noted the figure it appears Trump was referring to when he uses the “11,888” number is about non-citizens who entered the US not just under Biden but over the course of multiple decades, including during Trump’s own first administration; were convicted of homicide at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are still in the country while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket.” The figure – which was around 13,000 when ICE released it last year – includes people who are currently serving their prison sentences, not roaming free as Trump has also claimed. And it includes people who entered the country legally as well as people who entered illegally. You can read more here.
Venezuela, migration and prisons: Trump repeated a claim that is a staple of his public remarks but that he has never proven: “One of the reasons I was so angry at Venezuela, they emptied their prisons almost entirely into the United States of America.”
There was large-scale emigration from Venezuela amid economic problems, violence and political turmoil during the Maduro era. But despite multiple requests for comment from CNN and other outlets, Trump and his aides have not proven that Venezuela emptied its prisons (or mental health facilities, as Trump has also claimed) to somehow send undesirable citizens into the US.
Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence, said in an email to CNN in June 2024: “We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country.”
Helen Fair, an expert on global prisons at Birkbeck, University of London, told CNN in 2024 that she had “seen absolutely no evidence” that any country had emptied prisons to send prisoners to the US, let alone that numerous countries had done so as Trump has claimed.
Panama Canal construction deaths: Chastising former President Jimmy Carter for handing control of the Panama Canal to Panama, Trump said, “Even though we lost 36,000 people to the mosquito, you know that, right? To the mosquito and a certain snake, which was not a very nice reptile.”
The US didn’t lose even close to 36,000 people building the canal. While the century-old records are imprecise, they show about 5,600 people died during the canal’s American construction phase between 1903 and 1914 – and “of those, the vast majority were Afro-Caribbeans,” such as workers from Barbados and Jamaica, Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book “The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal,” told CNN after Trump made such claims in 2025.
The late historian David McCullough, author of another book on the building of the canal, found that “the number of white Americans who died was about 350.”
Thousands of additional workers, perhaps around 22,000, died during the French construction phase that preceded the American phase. But Trump has explicitly said on previous occasions that he is talking about US deaths in particular, and he used the phrase “we” this time.
Trump and wars: Trump repeated a familiar false claim about his role in foreign affairs: “I ended eight wars.” While Trump has played a role in resolving some conflicts (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.
Trump has previously explained that his list of supposed wars settled includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war; it is a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River. Trump’s list includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.) And his list includes a supposed success in ending a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration this year – which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.
Trump’s list also includes an armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, where fighting erupted again in December despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration earlier in the year.
One can debate the importance of Trump’s role in having ended the other conflicts on his list, or fairly question whether some have truly ended; for example, killing continued in Gaza after the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Regardless, Trump’s “eight” figure is obviously too big.
CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed to this article.
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