Fact check: Trump’s false claims at his NATO press conference
Examining Trump’s Misstatements During NATO Summit Remarks
Fact check – During a press gathering on Wednesday at the NATO summit held in Ankara, President Donald Trump presented yet another collection of inaccurate statements. Several of these echoed falsehoods he had previously shared with reporters during his Tuesday meeting with Turkey’s leader. Below is an analysis of select comments made on Wednesday.
The Investment Figure Controversy
Trump once again asserted that the United States has accumulated “$19.2 trillion” in investments within merely a single year of his current administration. This number remains incorrect, as we documented when he repeated this assertion on Tuesday and on many earlier occasions. At the moment Trump spoke on Wednesday, the official White House website stated that “$10.6 trillion” in “major investment announcements” had occurred during this term—not the $19.2 trillion figure he cited. Even the White House’s own number represented a significant overstatement of genuine investment activity.
A comprehensive CNN investigation published in October revealed that the White House was tallying trillions of dollars in ambiguous investment commitments. Many of these commitments concerned “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than direct investment within the United States. Some vague statements did not even qualify as formal pledges. Additionally, the White House tally incorporated commitments from both American corporations and international organizations.
According to federal statistics released last month, new foreign direct investment in the United States totaled approximately $232 billion in 2025.
Manufacturing Construction Decline
Trump made another assertion regarding industrial development, stating: “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.”
Government data indicates that expenditure on manufacturing construction has consistently decreased throughout Trump’s second term following a surge that characterized most of former President Joe Biden’s tenure. That earlier increase had diminished by the concluding months of Biden’s presidency. Official charts clearly demonstrate the downward trend in both 2025 and 2026.
The seasonally adjusted annual rate for manufacturing construction spending reached roughly $174.8 billion in May 2026. This represented a decrease of approximately 28 percent compared to May 2024, which was the final May under Biden’s administration. The same figure also showed a 28 percent decline from December 2024, Biden’s last complete month in office. Furthermore, the rate fell about 26 percent from February 2025, Trump’s inaugural full month, and dropped approximately 22 percent from May 2025.
Election Claims and Maduro’s Prisons
Trump revisited his claims about the 2020 presidential race, declaring: “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 subsequently repeated his contention that he “won” the 2020 contest but characterized it as a “rigged election.”
Trump has served as president on two separate occasions and has legitimately won two elections. He lost the 2020 contest decisively to Biden. We will not address his exaggerated assertion that he has “been right about everything.”
Regarding former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump reiterated his standard claim that Maduro “had people pour into the country from prisons; they opened up their prisons, they allowed them to come in.” However, Trump has never supplied verification for this assertion. Venezuela experienced substantial emigration during the Maduro period due to economic difficulties, violence, and political instability. Nevertheless, despite repeated requests for documentation from CNN and other news organizations, Trump and his associates have never confirmed his recurring statements that Maduro emptied prisons to remove undesirable citizens from the United States.
Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, stated 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, a global prisons specialist at Birkbeck, University of London, told CNN in 2024 that she had “seen absolutely no evidence” that any nation had emptied prisons to transport prisoners to the United States.
Border Crossing Numbers
Speaking on immigration matters, Trump repeated his incorrect assertion that there were “25 million people, I think more than that, under Biden” crossing the border. The “25 million” number is inaccurate; even Trump’s earlier “21 million” estimate was considerably inflated.
By December 2024, the final complete month of the Biden administration, the federal government had documented fewer than 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants throughout that administration. This count included millions of individuals who were quickly expelled from the country. Even when incorporating the so-called “gotaways” who avoided detection—estimated by House Republicans at approximately 2.2 million—the total could not possibly approach the figures Trump has claimed.
