Within two minutes of speaking at a rally near Detroit to celebrate 100 days of his second term, President Trump told a lie: that he won Michigan “three times.” In fact, he lost the state in the 2020 election.
What followed on Tuesday was an hour and a half filled with many familiar falsehoods and exaggerations about his accomplishments, including on tariffs, immigration and his rollback of Biden administration policies.
Mr. Trump claimed an 87 percent decrease in the price of eggs and gas below $2 a gallon in three states. Both claims were overstated. The wholesale price of eggs has fallen by about 50 percent since he took office, but the retail price of eggs increased from January to March. And there is no state where gas is below $2 a gallon.
He trumpeted the signing of an executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. But three federal courts temporarily paused the order. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case in May.
Mr. Trump claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk, had saved “$150 billion on waste, fraud and abuse.” While the initiative’s website highlights $160 billion in savings, reporting by The New York Times and other news outlets has shown that the figures it posted rely on inflated figures and errors, for example, including a $318 million contract that did not actually exist.
He claimed that he had presided over a turnaround in military recruitment and that “nobody wanted to join the military” six months ago. Military recruitment actually began increasing before his election in November, and the Army recruited more people in August than in January or February.
Mr. Trump also made the case for his tariff policy with misleading claims about global trade.
He again inflated and mischaracterized trade deficits with Mexico and Canada, saying that the United States was “subsidizing” the two countries by $300 billion and $200 billion a year. The trade deficit in goods and services was $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico; a deficit simply means that one country’s consumers are buying more from the other nation, not that it is giving money away.
He claimed that the Biden administration had lost $3 billion a day, a reference to the annual global trade deficit in goods. But by that same logic, his administration had “lost” more: about $4.8 billion daily, based on February’s trade deficit in goods of $135.4 billion.
And Mr. Trump repeated a number of inaccurate talking points recycled from the 2024 election.
He misleadingly called former Vice President Kamala Harris a “border czar” in the Biden administration. Ms. Harris was never appointed the border czar nor tasked with addressing border security. Rather, she was deputized to solve the “root causes” of migration.
He again baselessly accused the Biden administration of engineering a “massive border invasion” of terrorists and murderers. There is no evidence that other countries were “emptying” their jails and mental institutions into the United States, and studies have shown that immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
Mr. Trump also rebuked his predecessor’s climate policy, falsely claiming that the Biden administration imposed an “insane electric vehicle mandate.” While the administration instituted a set of regulations that would, in effect, compel automakers to sell more electric vehicles, there was no ban on gas vehicles.
