Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump made multiple false claims in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, though he largely stuck to a prepared text.

Here is a fact check of some of his assertions.

Trump and wars

Trump, repeating a frequent false claim, said, “Since I took office, it has been my great honor to settle eight wars.”

He specified that he was talking about conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand; Kosovo and Serbia; Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo; India and Pakistan; Armenia and Azerbaijan; and the war in Gaza. And he has previously claimed that the other two wars he ended were last year’s brief conflict between Israel and Iran and a supposed war between Egypt and Ethiopia.

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

His list includes two situations that were never actually wars during his tenure. The situation between Egypt and Ethiopia was a diplomatic dispute over an Ethiopian dam project, not a war, and the mysterious supposed issue he says he resolved between Serbia and Kosovo was also not a war.

In addition, the war involving Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has not ended despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration. And though Trump cited the war in Gaza, Israel continues to conduct frequent attacks in the enclave despite a US-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Trump did help to end the brief 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran, though Israel proceeded to join the US in starting another war against Iran in 2026.

Global warming

Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”

There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.

First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, explains the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a 2023 report from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”

Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization reported in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA also found — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.

Third, experts widely disagree that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but some estimates total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization says, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”

Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that isn’t how an expert report framed the issue.

A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be larger. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program reported earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years.”)

Investment in the US

Trump delivered a more cautious version of his inaccurate previous boast that $21 trillion in investment is pouring into the US, this time saying, “We’ve secured commitments for $21 trillion in new investments from all over the planet.” His figure has no apparent basis even with the “secured commitments for” caveat; the White House has never been able to substantiate it.

When the president spoke at the UN, the White House’s own website claimed there had been “$11.2 trillion” in “major investment announcements” during Trump’s second term, far less than the “$21 trillion” in commitments the president cited. And a detailed CNN review in 2025 found the White House list was counting trillions 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 shows that new foreign direct investment in the US was about $232 billion in 2025.

The US and munitions

Trump defended the Iran war at length. And he claimed, “The cowards and traitors would love to say the United States is low on munitions, but that’s not true. We have more munitions than we could ever possibly even think of using, and we’re building them at levels that we have never done before.”

We don’t have access to classified information on the precise current state of US munitions stockpiles, and it’s not clear who Trump is calling “cowards and traitors.” But it’s not just CNN and other media outlets that have reported that the war with Iran has depleted at least some US munitions levels; the federal inspector general overseeing the Defense Department and the nonpartisan federal Congressional Budget Office essentially said the same in separate reports released last week.

The inspector general report, which discussed the period from the beginning of April through the end of June, said a Defense Department acquisitions office “said that the munitions expenditure in (the war) has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”

The report said the acquisitions office also noted that while the Pentagon “has begun to implement mitigation strategies, the defense industrial base requires ‘significant lead time’ to expand production capacities.” The report specified: “The most persistent bottlenecks remain in the production of solid rocket motors, the availability of high-grade explosives and propellants, and the recruitment of skilled manufacturing labor.”

The Congressional Budget Office report said there is a “shortfall” of missile defense interceptors and that the war will leave “the United States with a reduced inventory of interceptors for several years.” The report said the Defense Department had a “limited” inventory of interceptors even before Israel and the US attacked Iran during a brief conflict in June 2025, and that the budget office’s research indicates the US “has probably used between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of those munitions since June 2025.”

“Given the number of missile defense interceptors that DoD has recently used, their currently low production rates, and the historical difficulty of scaling up their production, rebuilding DoD’s inventory of interceptors would probably take at least five years — even if production was increased,” the report said.

The Defense Department has consistently said it’s not true that there are any munitions shortfalls, and it did so again last week.

Crime in Washington, DC

Trump again overstated the decline in crime that various US cities have experienced during his second term. He said most important was that “when I arrived on January 20 of last year in Washington, DC, it was riddled with crime, and now crime is down 87%, and we’re going for 100.”

That “87%” figure isn’t close to accurate.

While overall crime in Washington is indeed down this year, as is crime in much of the country, the local police department had still recorded and publicly reported more than 15,000 total crimes through Monday — a reduction of about 23% from 2024 as of the same date, not the 80-plus percent Trump has repeatedly claimed. (It was a reduction of about 15% compared with 2025 as of the same date.)

The Washington Post reported in August on the White House’s inability to substantiate his claims that crime in the capital had dropped by 81%, 88% or 92%. The Post wrote: “When asked to clarify Trump’s remarks about D.C. crime drops, White House officials pointed to arson incidents, which dropped from four in 2025 to one in 2026. The White House also cited the District’s homicide rate, which has fallen significantly in recent years, but not by the rates cited by Trump.”

If Trump wanted to refer to reductions in specific crime categories, he could do so explicitly.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.