Trump’s 100th Day Spin

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To commemorate his first 100 days in office this term, President Donald Trump gave a speech in Michigan and granted interviews to several news outlets. In our review of his remarks, we found false and misleading claims, including quite a few Trump has made before:

• The president insisted that an immigrant who was deported to El Salvador has tattoos on his knuckles that say “M-S-one-three,” but the actual letters and numbers in a photo Trump shared are an “obvious digital manipulation,” an expert told us.

• Trump said the FBI had confirmed that “gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela” to the U.S. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

• Trump took credit for recent increases in military recruiting, but those gains began under his predecessor and before he won reelection in November.

• He misleadingly said that a House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion in Medicaid spending over a decade would “look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” adding that “nobody minds that.” One expert told us the cuts are “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.”

• The president claimed that since January, “job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers … for the first time in nobody even knows when.” But there were several two-month periods in 2024 when native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment, which includes U.S. citizens born abroad.

• Trump claimed that there were “$7 to $8 trillion” in business investments in the U.S. since he took office, but the White House said more than $5 trillion in future investments have been announced. He also falsely claimed that under former President Joe Biden “nobody was really investing in this country,” including Apple.

• He misrepresented Democrats’ concern about deportations, wrongly saying that they were “claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.” Democrats have been critical of the lack of legal due process afforded to those who were deported.

• Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.” The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement and no broad ban.

• The president cited a Trump-friendly polling firm to boast that “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction.” Other polls show most people think the country is on the wrong track.

• He wrongly said “we’re doing great” with international tourism, which he said would become apparent in the next six months. But there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were the previous March.

Trump also repeated claims we’ve checked before about inflation, gasoline and egg prices, trade deficits, education, illegal immigration and more.

We reviewed his speech in Warren, Michigan, on April 29, and his recent interviews with ABC News and Time.

Knuckle Tattoos

The president claimed in his interview with ABC News that Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant who was deported without a hearing to El Salvador in March — had tattoos on his knuckles that labeled him as a member of the gang MS-13.

“He said he wasn’t a member of a gang and then they looked and on his knuckles he had MS-13,” Trump said.

The president was referring to a photo that he first shared on his social media platform, Truth Social, on April 18 and then shared again on April 21.

The photo appears to show tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s left hand, with each one labeled — “Marijuana,” “Smile,” “Cross,” “Skull.” Above each tattoo is text that shows a letter or number — “M,” “S,” “1,” “3.”

In the exchange between Trump and Terry Moran, ABC News’ senior national correspondent who conducted the interview, it appeared that the president understood the “MS13” to be part of the tattoo rather than text added to show an interpretation of the meaning of the tattoos.

Moran tried to point out that the actual letters and numbers were Photoshopped onto the image Trump shared, but the president insisted Moran was wrong, that his tattoos actually said “MS13.” When Moran tried to move on, saying, “We’ll agree to disagree,” the president refused to let the point go and said Moran’s corrections were an example of “why people no longer believe the news.”

See the full exchange here:

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, described the text in the photo as an “obvious digital manipulation” in an email to us.

“What was done here is that the Trump administration took what appears to be a real photo (although I’m not able to authenticate that because what we are seeing here is a printout of a photo), ‘interpreted’ the four tattoos to be MS13, and then digitally added that annotation to the image,” Farid said.

We asked the White House to clarify whether or not the photo had been annotated, but we didn’t receive an answer. Instead, we got an emailed statement from White House spokesman Kush Desai saying, “Ask any law or immigration enforcement official who’s been on the ground about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattoos: they’re MS-13.”

The Washington Post asked eight law enforcement officials and gang researchers for their interpretations of the tattoos and got mixed responses, with some saying that the tattoos could be interpreted as showing an affiliation with MS-13 and others saying that they are not a code for gang affiliation. Other news outlets have also reported on expert analysis of the tattoos, with most concluding that the tattoos do not signify gang affiliation.

Even though we don’t know what the tattoos mean — if they mean anything at all — we do know that Abrego Garcia had only the depictions of a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull tattooed on his left hand when he was photographed at the prison in El Salvador in April. He did not have “MS13” displayed on his knuckles.

Intelligence Reports on Gangs and Venezuelan Government

Trump claimed the FBI has confirmed that the Venezuelan government has been emptying its jails and sending gang members to the U.S., which Trump has been saying for more than a year. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

In a presidential proclamation issued on March 15, Trump designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and claimed the gang “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” referring to the president of Venezuela.

While we have reported that Trump has provided scant evidence for this explosive claim, in his speech in Michigan, Trump said, “The FBI recently assessed that these vicious gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela to foment violence and instability in the United States of America.”

On April 23, Fox News Digital said it talked to an unnamed “senior administration official” who shared unclassified portions of an FBI assessment that “some Venezuelan government officials ‘likely facilitate’ the migration of members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua from Venezuela to the United States to advance the Maduro regime’s objective of undermining public safety in the U.S.”

According to the news report, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime.”

The Fox News report came a week after the Associated Press reported just the opposite.

Citing anonymous “U.S. officials,” the AP reported, “A new U.S. intelligence assessment found no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government, contradicting statements that Trump administration officials have made to justify their invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan migrants.”

According to the AP, the classified assessment was the work of 18 agencies that make up the intelligence community. “It repeatedly stated that Tren de Aragua … is not coordinated with or supported by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, or senior officials in the Venezuelan government. While the assessment found minimal contact between some members of the gang and low-level members of the Venezuelan government, there was a consensus that there was no coordination or directive role between gang and government,” the story stated.

The report noted that of the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. government’s intelligence community, “only one — the FBI — did not agree with the findings.” According to the Washington Post, which relied on “two people familiar with the matter,” the FBI “assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard criticized the National Intelligence Council report highlighted in the AP story, telling Fox News, “The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be accountable under the full force of the law.”

Inflating Impact on Military Recruitment

Near the end of his Michigan speech, Trump turned to the military and took credit for recent increases in recruiting that began under his predecessor.

“After years of missed targets, our military suddenly has the best recruiting numbers in 30 years,” the president said.

He’s right that recruitment numbers have been up following a slump from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the increase predated his election in November.

At the end of the most recent fiscal year, which finished in September, the Defense Department announced that it had recruited 12.5% more people than it had the previous fiscal year.

Every branch of the military reached its recruitment goal for fiscal year 2024, except for the Navy, according to the Defense Department.

A chart complied by the Congressional Research Service shows that the Army, Air Force and Space Force exceeded their goals.

Taren Sylvester, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, told Military.com in March, “The incoming administration is claiming all of these upticks are a result of the election swing and people now thinking they want to go into the military after the policy changes.”

But, they said, “Whether or not that holds out, we won’t see for another six, 12, 18 months. The shifts that we’re seeing now are reflective of the work that’s been done over the past two to five years.”

Medicaid

In the Time interview, Trump was asked about the House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, as part of the process of extending expiring tax cut provisions and enacting some new tax cuts. “I don’t think they’re going to cut $800 billion. They’re going to look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump said, adding that “nobody minds that.” That’s misleading.

While it’s still unknown how specifically Republicans would trim the Medicaid budget, experts told us such large cuts in federal funding would have a significant impact, leaving states with tough choices on raising revenue, cutting other parts of their budgets or cutting their Medicaid programs.

As we’ve explained, the budget calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in spending over 10 years, and the committee’s options for those reductions are mostly limited to Medicaid, a federal-state program that provides health care for low-income people. Medicare, the federal program that covers seniors, could also be cut, but that’s even more politically challenging.

“The place where they have the ability to make cuts is going to be in Medicaid,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us. Cuello said an $880 billion cut is “gigantic” and “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.” It would be about an 11% cut to federal Medicaid funding over the decade.

Native- and Foreign-Born Workers

In Michigan, Trump claimed that because of his administration, employment growth for U.S-born workers is now higher than for foreign-born workers.

“In three months, we have created 350,000 jobs,” Trump said. “For the first time in recent memory, job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers. This is for the first time in nobody even knows when. Americans now are doing better than foreign workers.”

Although he said in three months, Trump appears to be referencing the two-month increase in employment from January to March, which is the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that period, native-born employment increased by 613,000 and foreign-born employment — which includes foreign-born American citizens — increased by 451,000. But it hasn’t been long since that last happened.

There were several times in 2024 when a two-month increase in native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment (August 2024-October 2024, May 2024-July 2024, March 2024-May 2024 and February 2024-April 2024). If Trump was just comparing previous periods of January to March, the last time it happened was January 2022 to March 2022. (The White House didn’t tell us which months Trump was comparing.)

Business Investments

Trump touted announcements of investments by private companies, wrongly claiming that under Biden “nobody was really investing in this country” and that Apple “never invested” in the U.S.

In his ABC News interview, Trump claimed that there has already been more private-business investment in the U.S. during his administration than there was in any year during Biden’s presidency.

“We’ve got $7 to $8 trillion being invested in our country in two months,” Trump said. “Biden didn’t have that over a year. I mean, if you look at Biden, nobody was really investing in this country.”

In his Time interview, Trump mentioned investments by chips companies, car companies and Apple. “Apple is investing $500 billion in building plants. They never invested in this country,” Trump said.

The White House said on April 29 that Trump “has secured over $5 trillion in new U.S.-based investments in his first 100 days.” These investments haven’t already happened; they’re announcements by companies of future investments, sometimes over several years.

Private companies also made such announcements when Biden was president. In a November 2024 statement, Biden announced that legislation he signed — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — had “helped attract over $1 trillion in announced private-sector investments.” In his final month in office, Biden’s administration issued a report on the results of his “Investing in America” agenda.

And Apple certainly has announced similar investments in the U.S. before. In April 2021, under Biden, the company announced a $430 billion investment over five years. That was after it announced a $350 billion investment under Trump in 2018. When it announced in February its latest plan to investment more than $500 billion in the U.S. over four years, the company said its “new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing.”

Misrepresenting Democrats on Deportation

The president also touted the deportation of about 250 immigrants his administration has accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The men were flown to a mega prison in El Salvador on March 15.

During the Michigan rally, Trump played a video that had originally been posted by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele showing the immigrants arriving in shackles and having their heads shaved.

“The radical left Democrats, who are so bad for this country, are fighting to protect [Tren de Aragua] — you just saw that — and MS-13 criminals,” Trump said. “But the second we try to deport them, the radical Democrat party is racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth. … They’re racing to the courts to help them. … They’re claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.”

But that misrepresents what’s happened. Democrats who have opposed the administration’s action have largely expressed concern over the lack of due process for those who were deported, arguing that noncitizens who are targeted for deportation are, in most cases, entitled to a hearing beforehand.

“Due process is the language of a constitutional democracy, and so we have to speak that language so people can understand other people’s situations,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Politico in April. “And I do believe that if we don’t stand up for the due process rights of non-citizens, they will quickly trample the due process rights of citizens.”

A letter from Raskin and other House Democrats to administration officials echoed that sentiment. “Due process and separation of powers are matters of principle,” Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York told the Associated Press on April 17. “Without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

Food Dyes

In his speech, Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.”

There’s less here than meets the eye. The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement yet and no broad ban of synthetic food dyes.

According to an April 22 Food and Drug Administration news release, the agency is starting the process of revoking authorization for two food dyes, Citrus Red 2 and Orange B, which are only approved for very narrow purposes. The agency is “[w]orking with industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes,” the release said. (The FDA announced a ban of a ninth synthetic dye, Red 3, in January, and the new FDA release said the agency was requesting that companies remove it from food sooner than required.)

In remarks at an April 22 press conference announcing the new measures to phase out synthetic food dyes, Kennedy praised food companies “for working with us to achieve this agreement or this settlement.” But, when pressed, he said, “I would say we don’t have an agreement. We have an understanding.”

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said at the same press conference, “I believe in love, and let’s start in a friendly way and see if we can do this without any statutory or regulatory changes, but we are exploring every tool in the toolbox to make sure this gets done very quickly.”

Kennedy subsequently incorrectly claimed a broad ban of synthetic food dyes. “We announced last week the ban on the nine petroleum-based synthetic dyes, food dyes,” he said in an April 30 Cabinet meeting.

Some companies have announced decisions to phase out synthetic dyes in certain products. For instance, PepsiCo on April 24 said that it would no longer include the dyes in certain snack foods by the end of the year. And a spokesperson for WK Kellogg last week told the New York Times that the company would phase out synthetic dyes from cereals sold in schools.

Right Direction/Wrong Direction

Citing popular support for his agenda, Trump said at the rally in Michigan that “as a result of our policies, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. … Has never happened before.”

Trump is referring to a Rasmussen Reports presidential approval poll released in mid-February that found — for the first time in over 20 years (not ever) — a plurality of Americans (47%) believed the country was headed in the right direction, more than the 46% who felt it was headed in the wrong direction. However, that lead is within the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points, and it comes via a polling firm many consider to be conservative-leaning. Also, more recent polling from Rasmussen in late April has the “right direction” camp falling to 42%.

And other recent polls found widely different results.

Marquette University surveys have found that while the right track/wrong track divide has been narrowing over the last six months, a majority of Americans still think the country is on the wrong track. An early February survey found 38% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, while 62% believed it is on the wrong track. That narrowed even further to 42-58 in late March.

Surveys from YouGov also indicate a majority of Americans believe America is “off on the wrong track.” The most recent poll in late April found 36.5% of Americans believed the country is “generally headed in the right direction,” while 54% said it was “off on the wrong track.”

Gallup poses its question slightly differently, but in its most recent poll in early April, 34% said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, while 64% said they were dissatisfied.

Tourism

In his ABC News interview, Trump contradicted host Terry Moran’s claim that “travel is down into the United States from around the world.”

“We’re doing great,” Trump insisted.

“Tourism is gonna be way up,” Trump said. “Wait till you see the numbers. The tourism is way up. … Tourism’s doing very well. … Wait till you see the real numbers come out in about — in six months from now.”

We can’t predict what the tourism numbers will show in six months, but Moran was correct that travel to the U.S. is currently down. According to the Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office, there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were in March 2024. Those figures do not include data from Canada, nor land arrivals from Mexico.

Repeats

Inflation. Trump claimed that during the Biden administration the U.S. had “probably the worst inflation we’ve ever had.” Under Biden, the annualized rate of inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, which was less than 14.8% in March 1980 and 23.7% in 1920. When Biden left office in January, the rate was down to 3%, and it was down to 2.4% in March under Trump.

Gas and egg prices. Arguing that prices have declined, Trump claimed that “gasoline hit $1.98 in a few states … the last couple of days,” and the cost of “eggs are down 87%” since he took office. There are no states where the average cost of a gallon of regular grade gasoline has dropped below $2; the national average was $3.13 as of the week ending April 28, according to the Energy Information Administration. Also, the average retail price of eggs was up, not down, in March, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Even the average wholesale price that retailers pay for eggs sold in stores has not decreased by as much as Trump said. As of April 25, it was down 61% from its peak in early March.

Trade deficit. Defending higher tariffs on imports of foreign goods, Trump, referring to the trade deficit, said, “We were losing $3 to $5 billion a day on trade. We were losing a trillion and a half to $2 trillion a year.” The trade deficit in goods and services was about $918 billion in 2024 and the trade deficit in goods alone was about $1.2 trillion. Divide either by 365 days, and you get an average per-day deficit of between $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion. Either way, economists have said a trade deficit doesn’t mean the U.S. is losing money.

U.S.-China trade. When talking about the 145% tariffs that he put on imports of Chinese goods, Trump said China was “making from us a trillion dollars a year,” appearing to again exaggerate the trade gap between the U.S. and China. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services in 2024 was about $263 billion, and last year the U.S. imported a total of about $462.5 billion in Chinese goods and services combined.

No EV mandate. Trump claimed that he “terminated Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” but there was no such mandate. In March 2024, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency finalized new fuel efficiency standards for certain vehicles. The rules were expected to increase purchases of electric vehicles in the U.S., but there was no requirement for drivers to buy them. Carmakers could have met the new standards by also making more efficient cars that run on gas, experts told us.

Education. “Last month I signed a historic executive order to begin the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education,” Trump said. “We’re going to send it back to our states to run. I mean, how the hell bad can we do? We’re like in last place.” As we have written, U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

DOGE Savings. Trump said that his new Department of Government Efficiency had “found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.” The DOGE website now claims $160 billion in savings, providing a “Wall of Receipts” that purports to back up about $63 billion of that. It’s unclear how much, if any, of these savings amount to fraud or abuse, as opposed to spending that the administration deems wasteful.

WHO. In discussing his withdrawal from the World Health Organization, Trump repeated his claim that previously, China paid just $39 million, while the U.S. paid around $500 million. Those figures are inaccurate. While the U.S. has paid much more than China — most of it voluntarily — China has paid more than that. Trump also claimed that Biden “could have signed up for $39 million or less.” That’s not how the global health group’s funding works. Since 2020, the required dues for the U.S., based on GDP, have been more than $200 million for each two-year period.

Illegal immigration. Trump claimed that the Biden administration was allowing “gang members,” “murderers,” and people from “prisons, mental institutions” to illegally enter the U.S. “We had many murderers, 11,888, they think. Some murdered more than one person,” he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said last year that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder who were in the U.S. and not being detained by ICE. But the Department of Homeland Security told us that the “vast majority” of them entered the country and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration.”

Jan. 6 committee. Trump attacked the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying, “Nobody mentions the fact that the unselect committee of political scum … they destroyed all evidence, they burned it, they got rid of it, they destroyed it, and they deleted all evidence.” In fact, the committee made public a nearly 850-page report with evidence from its investigation. It also published videos, transcribed interviews, depositions and other documents. But the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, did acknowledge in a July 2023 letter that the committee “did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities.”

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