After months of delay, higher tariffs that President Donald Trump had vowed to impose on goods imported from dozens of countries went into effect on Aug. 7. Trump has made a series of false and misleading statements to justify his new tariff policies. Here is a recap of some of his claims that we have fact-checked.
President Donald Trump inaccurately claimed that the murder rate in Washington, D.C., “reached the highest rate probably ever” in 2023, and he ignored a decline in murders since then to justify a federal takeover of the city’s law enforcement.
In justifying the government’s termination of $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine projects, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed mRNA vaccines “fail to protect effectively” against COVID-19 and suggested they are unsafe. The mRNA shots saved millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and have shown promise against influenza.
Hours after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment data showing slow job growth for July and prior months, President Donald Trump fired the BLS commissioner, claiming the job numbers were “phony” and that the commissioner had “faked” other job figures to help Democrats. There’s no evidence the commissioner, or others at BLS, manipulated the data, and Trump hasn’t provided any.
About six months into the second term of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are making conflicting and often misleading assessments of the Trump administration’s impact on inflation and prices. Both sides cherry-pick examples of consumer products to support their claims, while sometimes wrongly taking credit for lower prices or falsely casting blame for rising costs.
In recent months, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has amplified unfounded concerns about the safety of seed oils, a subset of vegetable oils used in infant formula. There isn’t evidence these fat sources are harmful to infants.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claims to have uncovered “overwhelming evidence” that former President Barack Obama and others in his administration manipulated intelligence to “lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” But the foundation for her case is misleading.
Border Czar Tom Homan has been repeating the misleading claim that there are “over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation.” That number includes legal immigrants, not just those who entered the country illegally; about a third of them have only been charged, not convicted; and it’s unclear how many of them have been, or currently are, incarcerated.
Unfounded rumors linking an extreme weather event to human attempts at weather modification are again spreading on social media. It is not plausible that available weather modification techniques caused or influenced the July 4 flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas.
As the Republican budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, nears the July 4 deadline set by the White House, lawmakers have been ramping up the rhetoric. We referee the claims from both sides.