Fact check: Trump’s false claims at his NATO press conference
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump delivered another series of false claims at a press conference Wednesday at the NATO summit in Ankara.
His comments included some of the long-debunked lies he told the press while meeting with Turkey’s president on Tuesday. Here is a fact check of some of his Wednesday remarks.
Investment in the US
Trump repeated his frequent false claim that “we have $19.2 trillion” invested in the US in just “one year” of his current presidency.
That figure is fiction, as we noted when he made the same claim Tuesday and on numerous previous occasions.
At the time Trump said it on Wednesday, the White House’s own website claimed there had been “$10.6 trillion” in “major investment announcements” this term, not $19.2 trillion, and even the White House figure was a major exaggeration of actual investment. 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.
The White House figure includes pledges from US-based companies as well as foreign entities. Federal data published last month shows that new foreign direct investment in the US was about $232 billion in 2025.
Factory construction
Trump claimed: “We have the largest number of plants being built for the most money ever in the history of our country – car plants, AI plants, and all other plants, pharmaceutical plants.” In fact, federal data shows that spending on US manufacturing construction has steadily declined during Trump’s second term after a spike that occurred during most of former president Joe Biden’s term (which had abated by the final months of Biden’s term). You can clearly see the 2025 and 2026 decline in this official chart.
The seasonally adjusted annual rate of manufacturing construction spending in May 2026, about $174.8 billion, was down about 28% from May 2024, the last May under Biden, and also down about 28% from December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office. It was down about 26% from February 2025, Trump’s first full month in office, and down about 22% from May 2025.
Trump and elections
Trump lied again about the 2020 election he lost, saying: “I’ve been right about everything, and I have been for a long time. It’s how I got to be president three times. It’s how I won three elections.” He went on to repeat that he “won” the 2020 election but that it was a “rigged election.”
Trump has been president twice and won two elections. He legitimately lost the 2020 election, fair and square, to Biden.
We’ll leave aside his hyperbolic claim that he has “been right about everything.”
Venezuela, prisons and migrants
Trump, speaking of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, repeated his usual claim that Maduro “had people pour into the country from prisons; they opened up their prisons, they allowed them to come in.” But Trump has never provided proof that Maduro-era Venezuela opened up prisons for migration purposes.
There was large-scale emigration from Venezuela amid economic problems, violence and political turmoil during the Maduro era. But despite multiple requests for evidence from CNN and other outlets, Trump and his team have never corroborated his frequent assertions that Maduro emptied prisons to get undesirable citizens to leave for the US; Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of 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 US 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.
Migration under Biden
Trump, talking about immigration, repeated his false claim that there were “25 million people, I think more than that, under Biden” crossing the border. The “25 million” figure is false; even Trump’s previous “21 million” figure was a wild exaggeration. Through December 2024, the last full month of 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.
Oil prices
While speaking about the war with Iran, Trump said: “And you see the oil prices are lower than they were when I started.” He didn’t make clear whether he was talking about when he started his second term or when he started the Iran war in late February, but if it was the latter, his claim wasn’t correct. Both Brent crude (the international benchmark) and West Texas Intermediate crude (the US benchmark) were pricier Wednesday afternoon than they were just before the war, though Brent was slightly below some of its late-February levels as recently as Monday.
Oil prices fell sharply amid the ceasefire between the US and Iran that began this spring and continued into summer. But they have jumped again in the last day – though not to anywhere close to the peaks of March, April and May – amid another exchange of attacks between the two countries, the resumption of US sanctions on Iranian oil sales and a Trump declaration that he thought the ceasefire was “over.”
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