CNN WIRE &#8212; Trump makes false claims to military in aircraft carrier speech

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump made numerous false claims in his Tuesday speech to US. service members on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington stationed in Japan.

Trump repeated his regular lie that he won the 2020 election (he lost to Joe Biden). He also deployed some of his favorite recent false claims about grocery prices (they’re up, not “way down”); inflation in general (it’s rising, not “defeated”); presidents and wars (he hasn’t ended eight wars, and it’s not true that no other president ever ended a single one); investment in the U.S. this term (it’s nowhere near “$17 trillion”); the deadliness of the alleged drug boats he has had the military attack (there’s no basis for his claim each boat kills “25,000 people”); and a smattering of other subjects.

Here is a fact check of 11 of Trump’s inaccurate assertions. This is not a comprehensive list of the falsehoods in the speech.

The 2020 election

Trump repeated his usual lie about the 2020 election, saying, “You know, we won the second election by a lot, so we had to just prove it by winning the third — by too big to rig, I called it. It was too big to rig.” Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election fair and square to Biden.

Grocery prices

Trump repeated his false claim that “grocery prices are way down.” Grocery prices are actually up. Consumer Price Index figures for September showed average grocery prices had increased since August (about 0.3%), since September 2024 (about 2.7%), and since January 2025, the month Trump returned to office (about 1.4%). The 0.3% increase from August to September was preceded by a 0.6% increase from July to August, which was the biggest month-to-month jump in three years.

Inflation at present

Trump repeated his false claim that “inflation has been defeated.” This is vaguer than his previous false claim that there is now “no inflation,” but there’s no basis even for the vaguer version. Inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index, has been worsening since May after hitting a four-year low in April. It was about 3% in September, up from about 2.9% in August; the September figure was near-identical to the roughly 3% rate in January, the last partial month of the Biden administration and first partial month of the second Trump administration.

Inflation under Biden

Trump, speaking of the economic situation he inherited, repeated his false claim that “we had the worst inflation in the history of our country.” Trump could have fairly said the year-over-year U.S. inflation rate hit a 40-year high under Biden in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. Trump’s claim was also wrong if he was claiming there was record cumulative inflation over the course of Biden’s presidency. It was about 21%, compared with about 49% during President Jimmy Carter’s term.

Trump and wars

Trump repeated his false claim that “I ended eight wars in eight months,” specifying that the list “includes Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran … Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan,” as well as Cambodia and Thailand.

Trump’s “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.

There was no war between Egypt and Ethiopia for Trump to end; the two countries were in a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River, a dispute that is unresolved. Trump’s list includes another supposed war that didn’t occur during his presidency, between Kosovo and Serbia. (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 from settling an actual war.) And the war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda 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. One can debate the importance of Trump’s role in having ended the other conflicts on his list, or whether some of them have ended for good. Regardless, his “eight” figure is too big.

Previous presidents and wars

Trump also said, “No president that we know has ever ended any war.” We can’t be sure what Trump personally knows, or who “we” is here, but his claim that no other U.S. president has ended a war is false. U.S. presidents have played a major role in ending various wars by winning those wars, including World War I, World War II and the Gulf War. In addition, presidents have brokered numerous peace agreements in wars not being fought by the U.S.

President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in a peace agreement ending a war between the Russian and Japanese empires; Carter played a major role in brokering a 1979 peace agreement to end a long-running state of war between Egypt and Israel; President Bill Clinton played a major role in the 1995 peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War; US administrations have mediated a long list of other armed conflicts.

Investment in the U.S.

Trump repeated his false claim that there is “more than, think of this, $17 trillion, trillion with a T, pouring into the United States of America from all over the world.” He added, “We did $17 — more than $17 — trillion in eight months.” This figure is fictional. The White House’s own website says the “major investment announcements” this term total “$8.9 trillion,” and even that is not actually money “pouring in” at present. A detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges from foreign countries and companies, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, or vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.

Alleged drug boats

Touting the military attacks he has ordered on alleged drug trafficking boats, Trump repeated his false claim that “each one of those vessels that we hit kill on average 25,000 people, American people, every single year. They kill — each one of them kill 25,000 people.”

Aside from the fact that the Trump administration has not presented public proof for his repeated claims that the boats carried fentanyl — the Caribbean, where most of the strikes have occurred, is not known to be a significant fentanyl-smuggling route — his “25,000” number does not make sense. The total number of US overdose deaths from all drugs in 2024 was about 82,000, according to provisional federal data. Trump is essentially claiming, in other words, that his decision to attack a small number of boats prevented more than a full year’s worth of drug deaths.

The president’s figure is “absurd,” Carl Latkin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health with a joint appointment at its medical school, said this month. “He’s claiming that he’s solved the overdose mortality crisis” with four boat strikes, and “that does not have any semblance of reality.”

Migration under Biden

Trump repeated his false claim that, under the Biden administration, “25 million people poured into our country, totally unvetted, totally unchecked.” The “25 million” figure is wildly inaccurate; even Trump’s previous “21 million” figure was a major 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.

Biden’s claims

Trump, complimenting military pilots, repeated his false claim that Biden falsely claimed to have been a pilot: “And see, Biden used to say he was a pilot. He was a pilot, he was a truck dri— whatever, whoever walked in. He wasn’t a pilot.” While Biden did falsely claim during his presidency to have previously been a truck driver, among other inaccurate claims about his biography, there is no record of him having claimed to have been a pilot. In other words, Trump was making something up while mocking Biden for making something up. This wasn’t a one-time exaggeration by Trump; he made the same claim during his presidential campaign.

The Gulf shoreline

Trump spoke of his move earlier this year to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and he repeated his claim that “we have 92% of the shoreline.” But “the 92% number from Trump is bunk,” said Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University professor emeritus of oceanography who has extensively studied the Gulf. MacDonald noted that the roughly even divide in Gulf coastline between Mexico and the US is clear “just by looking at the map.”

The precise breakdown in Gulf coastline between the U.S., Mexico and Cuba depends on how you count (the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency says the U.S. portion is 1,630 miles), but Trump’s “92%” figure is wrong by any reasonable measure; Jack Davis, a University of Florida history professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” said “the U.S. coastline adds up to just under half of the Gulf’s total.” Davis added: “Even if he is referring to the twists and turns of islands and peninsulas and other knotty features, his count is off.”