The White House has defended three taxpayer-funded advertisements featuring President Donald Trump by comparing them to ads that were paid for by past presidential administrations. But some legal experts have said the Trump White House commercials are political messages intended to influence the 2026 midterms and may violate U.S. laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds for propaganda.
In banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, the Trump administration has argued that the move is similar to actions taken by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the ban goes beyond what those presidents did.
Vice President JD Vance gave the keynote address on the second night of the Republican midterm convention, which also featured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson and a final send-off from President Donald Trump. Here’s what we found in fact-checking their remarks:
In a nearly two-hour speech at the first Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump promised to pay Americans if Republicans won, and he repeatedly said communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, among other familiar claims.
Q: Did the Trump administration have 60 cherry blossom trees cut down in D.C. to build a golf course?
A: In what the Department of Interior called “routine maintenance,” about 60 trees were removed from East Potomac Park, according to the Washington Post. But only one cherry tree removal was mentioned in that article, and an advocacy group opposed to major changes to the park told us it only knew “for certain” of one cherry tree being cut down.
President Donald Trump and other administration officials are claiming credit for a recent drop in prescription drug prices, citing deals they’ve struck with drugmakers and the launch of the online direct-to-consumer platform TrumpRx. But experts are skeptical those measures have had much impact on prices overall, and they say other factors likely explain most of the decline.
The White House has provided no federal data to support President Donald Trump’s claims that because of his “no tax on tips” policy, “440,000 tipped workers” in Nevada “saved an average of $10,000 on their taxes,” and “130,000 tipped workers” in Georgia “saved an average of more than $7,000 on their taxes.”
In announcing the latest FBI annual report on nationwide crime, President Donald Trump wrongly cast the decline in crime in 2025 as a dramatic turnaround and made misleading claims about the impact of his administration’s policies.
In a recent interview, President Donald Trump falsely claimed to be the “lowest of the last 10 presidents on inflation,” seemingly based on a chart Trump posted to social media that misleadingly compares price growth over the first 18 months of his second term with total inflation at the end of his predecessors’ full four-year terms.
During the signing of an executive order on vaccines, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a deluge of false and misleading claims about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule.