Fact check: The many lies Trump told the New York Post

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — Another softball interview. Another series of obvious lies from the president.

President Donald Trump’s conversation with conservative New York Post columnist and podcaster Miranda Devine, released on Wednesday morning, featured some of Trump’s longest-debunked false claims about elections, the economy and immigration. As with his inaccurate comments in a Fox News interview that aired on Saturday, which was conducted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, these assertions went unchallenged.

Here is a fact check of some of his remarks in the Post interview. This is not intended as a comprehensive list.

Elections

Mail-in ballots: Trump falsely claimed, as he has on numerous previous occasions, “We’re the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots. No other country does it anymore.”

In fact, dozens of countries  — including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Switzerland  — allow some or all voters to vote by mail, though the specifics of their policies vary.

The 2020 election: Trump repeatedly uttered his familiar lie that the 2020 election was “rigged,” this time adding that “it’s been proven to be rigged.” Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden, the election wasn’t “rigged,” and – five-and-a-half years later — there is no proof for Trump’s assertion.

Trump also said of Biden: “Should have never been president. He lost the election in a landslide.” Biden actually won the election 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, and he earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

Trump’s election performance: Trump lied of his election performance: “I won it three times.” Trump won the 2016 and 2024 elections and lost the 2020 election.

The 2024 election: Trump described the 2024 election he won as “a great election,” but then said, “They had a lot of rigging going on there too,” adding, “There were areas that were just rigged. I could see it. In other words, rigged against me.” There is no basis for these claims, either; Trump won the election legitimately but lost some communities and states legitimately.

Democrats and elections: Trump repeated his lie that Democrats “couldn’t win” without cheating, also saying, “If they didn’t cheat, they could not win because their policies are so bad” and that “if they didn’t cheat you wouldn’t have them in.” This is simply baseless; Democrats, like Republicans, win elections legitimately.

Ballots in California: Reprising a false claim he made in May, Trump said, “You know, in California, they mail out 38 — I think 38 million ballots.” He added, “And some people get three, four, five ballots. Republicans get, oftentimes, none.” Both of these claims are incorrect. California had about 22.6 million voters registered as of about two weeks prior to the last presidential election and about 23.2 million voters registered as of about two weeks prior to Tuesday’s primaries; there is no basis for any suggestion that some 15 million excess ballots are distributed in any California election. And every active registered voter in the state, no matter their party affiliation, is sent a mail-in ballot; there are occasional administrative errors by counties or the postal service, but there is no basis for Trump’s suggestion that there is some sort of general anti-Republican bias in distributing the ballots.

Political opponents

Talarico and masking: Trump claimed of James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas: “A couple of months ago, he’s wearing a mask.” CNN could find no evidence that Talarico was wearing a mask “a couple of months ago”; some Republicans have lampooned him over a video showing him wearing a mask at an event in 2022. (This wasn’t a one-time exaggeration by Trump; he said in May that Talarico was wearing a mask “six months ago.”)

McConnell’s 2020 reelection: As he has before, Trump took credit for the 2020 reelection of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was the Senate majority leader at the time and has since drawn Trump’s ire. Trump said, “Without me, he wouldn’t have been elected. It was my endorsement that got him elected. He was losing by a lot, I endorsed him, and he won the election quite easily along with everyone else.”

McConnell was never “losing by a lot” in his race in a state that had been electing him to the seat since 1984, had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992, and ended up giving him a victory of nearly 20 percentage points.

A single poll in May 2020, conducted for a group calling for term limits on members of Congress, showed longtime senator McConnell 1 point behind Democratic candidate Amy McGrath, 41% to 40% — but as CNN reported in 2021, this was the only public poll for the entirety of the race in which McConnell was down, and the (now-defunct) political forecasting website FiveThirtyEight never had his chances of winning below 93%. Kevin McLaughlin, who was executive director of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm in 2020, posted on social media after Trump made such claims about McConnell in 2021: “I personally showed Trump polling in the Oval Office that had (McConnell) up 20 points. He knows this isn’t true.”

Immigration

Harris and the border: Trump claimed that former Vice President Kamala Harris “was the border czar” but “never went there.” Harris actually visited the US southern border twice as vice president, once in 2021 and once in 2024; Trump is free to argue that this wasn’t enough, but “never went there” isn’t true. (And the Biden administration repeatedly said she was never actually “border czar” — noting she had been given a narrower “root causes” mission of leading diplomacy with Central American countries in an attempt to address the reasons for their citizens’ migration to the US.)

Border numbers under Biden: Trump falsely claimed that because of Biden’s victory, “like 25 million people” poured into the country over the border; at another point in the interview, he omitted the “like” and said it was “25 million” people.

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 jails: Trump claimed that, under Biden, migrants came into the US from jails and mental institutions – then added, “I mean literally, they emptied out jail, the jail populations; the whole jail was emptied into our country.” Trump and his team have never substantiated his claims about jails being emptied into the US, though he has been making them since his 2024 campaign. An expert on international prison policy, Helen Fair, has repeatedly told CNN that she saw no evidence of any country emptying jails for migration purposes under Biden, let alone that these countries somehow inserted former prisoners into the US. (In the past, Trump has identified Venezuela and “the Congo” as places that had supposedly done this; experts on Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo told CNN during the Biden administration that they had seen no basis for Trump’s stories, and the governments of both of the Congo countries told CNN the stories are false.)

Border crossings under Trump: Trump claimed, “So now the border is sealed. We have nobody coming in. Nobody. We actually had, for the last 11 months, zero people coming, because they don’t even try.” This is an exaggeration. US Customs and Border Protection said in May that the authorities hadn’t released any migrants into the country over the last 12 months after encountering these migrants crossing the border. But it’s clear that some migrants evaded authorities to cross the border illegally during that period, though it appears the number of gotaways was much smaller than it was during the Biden administration. Then-Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks told the Washington Examiner last year that on December 18, just 17 migrants crossing the southern border evaded arrest. The Examiner reported that Banks was “anticipating a day in the near future where not a single person who crosses illegally will get away,” but clearly that day hadn’t happened yet.

Migration and murderers: Describing Democrats as “dumb,” Trump claimed, “We had 11,888 murderers, most of whom committed more than one murder, allowed into our country.” Trump was misleadingly describing federal data, as he has on numerous previous occasions. As usual, he didn’t make clear that, as the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts noted in 2024, the figure it appears he is referring to is about noncitizens who entered the US not just under Biden but over the course of multiple decades, including during Trump’s own first administration. They were convicted of homicide at some point, usually in the US after their arrival, and are still in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — which includes people who are currently serving their prison sentences. And it has never been clear whether there is a factual basis for Trump’s claim that more than half of the people in question committed more than one murder; the White House did not respond in January to a CNN request to explain where Trump might have gotten this information. You can read more here.

Economy

Biden and inflation: After he was asked about people worried about the cost of gas or groceries, Trump said, “I inherited the highest inflation in the history of our country. You know, Biden had like 9, 10% inflation. And I inherited that, and we have it way down.” In fact, inflation is now higher, not lower, than the level he inherited — which was nowhere close to the highest in the history of the country.

The year-over-year inflation rate was 2.9% in Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and it was 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump took over; the most recent rate is 3.8% in April 2026. Peak inflation under the Biden administration, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in more than 40 years — but even that 9.1% rate was far from the all-time high of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980.

Investment in the US: Trump repeated one of his favorite false figures, saying, “We have $18 trillion being invested in the country in just 11 months,” adding that this “$18 trillion” is “a record for any country anywhere in the world.” The $18 trillion figure is fiction. As of Wednesday morning, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term was “$10.6 trillion,” and even that 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.

Gas prices: Trump said of gas prices: “You know, I had it — I had it down to $1.85 a gallon — think of it, $1.85, in Iowa. I was in Iowa just before the war started, and I had it down to $1.85 a gallon in various parts of the country.”

On the day he visited Iowa in late January, a month before he launched the war with Iran, the average price in the state for regular gasoline was $2.57 per gallon, according to AAA; the firm GasBuddy found just four stations in the state selling that day for under $2 per gallon — $1.97, to be specific, not $1.85 — out of 2,036 stations the firm was tracking there. And a CNN reporter noticed that the station right outside the venue where Trump spoke was at $2.69 per gallon that day.

It’s possible Trump was referring to the price of E85, an ethanol-gasoline blend that is sold in a minority of gas stations and can only be used in the small percentage of vehicles that are compatible with it; the blend was selling for around $1.85 per gallon in Iowa at the time of his visit. But, as when he made this claim about Iowa gas prices on previous occasions, he offered no indication in this interview that he was talking about a niche product.

The AAA national average price of gas on February 28, the day the war began, was $2.98 per gallon, and the lowest state average was Oklahoma’s $2.47 per gallon. Four nights before the war, on February 24, GasBuddy told CNN that just four stations nationwide, out of about 150,000 it monitors, were selling for under $2 per gallon (aside from special discounts).

The FBI and January 6

Again playing down the pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump described it as mere “nonsense where the FBI said, ‘Go in. Go in.’ Police: ‘Go in.’” More than five years later, there is still no evidence the FBI or police said this to rioters. It’s also worth noting that Trump was president on January 6 and had personally appointed the FBI director at the time, Christopher Wray.

Before Trump returned to office in 2025, and quickly granted sweeping clemency to nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people charged over the riot, the Justice Department said about 140 police officers were assaulted on January 6; video footage shows how dozens of officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters in a desperate effort to keep them out of the building. In some areas around the Capitol, police were so outnumbered by the mob that they retreated, stood aside or tried to politely engage with rioters to de-escalate the situation rather than fighting or making mass arrests, but that is clearly not the same as explicitly telling rioters to enter.

Though dozens of people criminally charged over the riot claimed in their legal defenses that police had allowed them in, at least 1,270 people were convicted and only two were acquitted on all charges, just one of them in connection with this defense; the judge said he thought this defendant reasonably believed officers had allowed him in, but also said the officers “were grossly outnumbered at that point” and had “acted responsibly and reasonably throughout.”

As for the FBI, the inspector general overseeing the Justice Department found in 2024 that there were zero undercover FBI agents at the Capitol on January 6. And in 2025, after Trump seized on a misleading right-wing media report and falsely claimed the FBI had secretly placed 274 agents into the crowd “just prior to, and during” the riot, his current FBI director, Kash Patel, issued a rare debunking — telling Fox News that the agents “were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police.”

The inspector general found in 2024 that 26 confidential human sources (paid FBI informants) were in Washington that day, but that none of them were authorized to break the law or encourage others to do so; the inspector general found that 23 of them went to Washington on their own, without having been asked by the FBI, while three of them were asked by the FBI to report on specific people considered “domestic terrorism subjects” who were possibly planning to go to rallies on January 6.

None of that is even close to what Trump asserted to Devine.

CNN’s Marshall Cohen and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this item.

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