Fact check: Trump repeats numerous debunked claims at UK news conference with Starmer

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump used his Thursday news conference with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer to deliver a laundry list of long-debunked false claims about a variety of subjects, including inflation, immigration, tariffs and the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house.

The 2020 election: Trump told his usual lie about the 2020 election he lost, saying, “We won in 2020, big.” He was defeated fair and square by Joe Biden.

Current inflation: Trump falsely claimed, “We’ve already solved inflation, we solved prices.” This is vaguer than his frequent false claim that there is “no inflation,” but there’s no basis even for the vaguer version. Inflation has been worsening since May after hitting a four-year low in April. It was 2.9% in August, up from 2.7% in July; the August figure was the highest figure since it was 3% in January, the last partial month of the Biden administration.

Biden-era inflation: Trump repeated his false claim that “we inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country,” adding, “We had inflation the likes of which we’ve really never seen. They say 48 years and I’ll accept that, but I really don’t. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country.” Even the peak year-over-year inflation under Biden, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in between 40 and 41 years, not 48 years and certainly not in US history; it was nowhere close to the all-time high record of 23.7%, set in 1920. And inflation then plummeted to the 3% level it hit in Biden’s last partial month in office.

Who pays tariffs: Trump, who habitually makes the false assertion that foreign countries pay the tariffs he has imposed on US imports of those countries’ products, said this time, “China is paying a very large tariff right now to the United States.” It is US importers, not China, who make the tariff payments to the US government, and those importers often pass on some of the costs to consumers.

US aid to Ukraine: Trump delivered a vaguer version of his oft-repeated claim that the US has given $350 billion in wartime aid to Ukraine, this time saying, “The United States is into that war for $350 billion.” He didn’t define “into that war,” but if it was his usual assertion about US aid, it is false. A German think tank that has closely tracked wartime aid to Ukraine says the US allocated about $135 billion to Ukraine (and had committed about $5 billion more) through June, at current exchange rates. The US government inspector general overseeing the federal Ukraine response says the US had disbursed about $94 billion for the response as of the end of June 2025 (and had appropriated about $93 billion more), including money that was spent in the US and in broader Europe rather than Ukraine itself.

Migration under Biden: Speaking of migration to the US under Biden, Trump complained about the number of people entering the country without being vetted, then said, “25 million, in my opinion, that would be about 25 million.” 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 prisons: Trump repeated his claim that, under Biden, there were “prisons from the Congo being released into the US, prisons opened up in Venezuela and many other countries, pouring into the United States.” Trump has never provided corroboration for such claims about foreign countries in general or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the neighboring Republic of Congo, or Venezuela in particular. Experts on all three countries said during the Biden administration that they had seen no basis for Trump’s stories, the governments of both of the Congo countries told CNN the stories are false, and an expert on the global prison population told CNN she saw “absolutely no evidence” of any country emptying its prisons to somehow release prisoners into the US.

Pelosi and January 6: Trump falsely claimed he had been proved right in his frequent claims that Democratic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops on January 6, 2021, the day of the pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol; Trump said, “They found out that Nancy Pelosi actually was offered the 10,000 soldiers and she turned them down.” It’s not clear who “they” are, but Trump’s claim remains uncorroborated – and the House speaker, who has no power over the District of Columbia National Guard that is under the control of the president himself, wouldn’t have had the authority to reject the offer even if it had been presented to her, which she has steadfastly said it never was.

The House January 6 committee: Trump vaguely repeated his false claim that the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol “found out many things that were very bad, so they deleted and destroyed all information.” They didn’t. The committee preserved a large volume of documentary evidence with the National Archives, in addition to releasing a lengthy public report, more than 100 interview transcripts, and various other written and audiovisual materials. There has been a dispute between Republicans and Democrats over the preservation of certain records, but there’s no basis for saying “all information” was eradicated.

A gaffe about a conflict: Trump boasted again about his role in settling conflicts between various countries, and he said at one point, “To think that we settled Azerbaijan and Albania, as an example; it was going on for years.” This was just a gaffe, but since Trump has made the same one before, it’s worth explaining to readers that he meant Azerbaijan and its neighbor Armenia, not Azerbaijan and Albania.

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