Fact check: 10 debunked lies Donald Trump has repeated in the last week alone
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump keeps saying the same false things over and over.
Trump’s lying has always been notable for its audacity – his willingness to make obviously untrue claims that can be very quickly debunked. But it has also been distinguished by its repetitiveness – his unwillingness to stop deploying an exaggerated statistic, baseless accusation or fictional tale after months or even years of debunkings.
Trump has for years had persistently poor poll results on the question of whether he is honest and trustworthy; part of the reason may well be his unwavering devotion to assertions that many Americans already know aren’t true. But his relentlessness also works for him in a way. Because news outlets are naturally focused on new material, some may fact-check a falsehood the first time Trump says it but not the 10th or 100th time. By shamelessly persevering, Trump can eventually get his greatest hits out there with little pushback.
The president’s recent public remarks have featured many old lies. In the interest of not letting them go uncorrected, here is a look at 10 debunked claims he repeated over the past week alone.
Imaginary sub-$2 gasoline
Trump, talking about gas prices, said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, “There’s some places it’s $2. It’s even – it broke $2 in a couple of locations in the South.”
There was no state whose average price for regular gas on Tuesday was below Mississippi’s $2.69 per gallon, according to data published by AAA, and the firm GasBuddy said it did not see a single station, out of the tens of thousands it tracks across the country, that was selling a gallon for $2 or less at the time Trump spoke. (Some drivers get special discounts.) The AAA national average on Tuesday was $3.19 per gallon.
An impossible “1,500%” reduction in prescription drug prices
Trump claimed in early August: “You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%. I don’t mean 50%. I mean 14-, 1,500%.” CNN and others pointed out that this is not only inaccurate but does not make mathematical sense, since a 100% price cut would make the drugs free and a cut of 1,200% or more would presumably mean Americans would be getting paid to buy medications.
Trump has continued using the fake figures anyway.
He promised Monday that “I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,400 to 1,500%,” then Tuesday that “we’re not talking about a 25% cut or a 50 – we’re talking about a 1,500% cut.”
“No inflation” amid continued inflation
There is inflation in the United States. Prices were 2.7% higher in July than they were a year prior and 0.2% higher than they were in June. One can debate how good or bad those figures are. But Trump said Tuesday, as he has repeatedly this summer, that “there’s no inflation.”
The (non-)uniqueness of US mail-in voting
To support his proposal to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, Trump last Monday revived his false claim that the US is the world’s only country where mail-in voting exists. The claim was promptly debunked, again, by CNN and others; dozens of countries use mail-in ballots, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Switzerland.
Trump then repeated the claim in an interview with a supportive radio host three days later. “We’re the only one in the whole world that uses them,” he said.
The water Trump says he sent to Los Angeles (he didn’t) by turning a “valve” (that doesn’t exist)
On Tuesday, Trump told his usual story about how “now they have water” in Los Angeles because he “turned the valve” to send the city water instead of having that “valve” direct the water to the Pacific Ocean.
The story is nonsense – as experts in California water policy have pointed out for months.
First, there is no single “valve” that controls California water flows. Second, what Trump actually did in late January and early February was send billions of gallons pointlessly released from two dams in one part of the state’s Central Valley to another part of that valley, more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The water did not go to Los Angeles, which has no automatic connection to the dams.
The 2020 election, again
Approaching five years after he legitimately lost the legitimate 2020 election, Trump continues to lie about it. He referred Monday to former President Joe Biden as “a guy that got in there with a fraudulent election,” and said Thursday that “I knew the election was rigged and now we found that out definitively, as you can see.”
Nobody has found that out because it is definitively false.
That nonexistent monument law
CNN and others have been reporting since 2020 that this is not what happened. Trump actually issued an?executive order that directed the attorney general to prioritize investigations and prosecutions of people who damaged government-owned monuments and to prosecute offenders “to the fullest extent” allowed under existing federal law, which allowed judges to impose a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Trump has kept telling the false story anyway. Upon signing an executive order Monday telling the attorney general to try to find a way, without violating the First Amendment, to crack down on people who have burned the American flag, the president claimed without any apparent basis that offenders would now “get one year in jail” – and he repeated his old fiction about signing harsh monument legislation. “Just like when I signed the statute and monument act,” he said. “Ten years in jail if you hurt any of our beautiful monuments.”
A phony Ukraine aid total
For months, Trump has claimed the US has given “$350 billion” in wartime aid to Ukraine even though numerous fact checks noted that this is a wild exaggeration. Trump made the “$350 billion” claim five times at a single event on Monday.
The real figure is much smaller than what Trump’s number.
A German think tank that has closely tracked wartime aid to Ukraine says the US allocated about $133 billion to Ukraine (and had committed about $5 billion more) from late January 2022 through June 2025. The website of the US government inspector general overseeing the federal Ukraine response says the US had disbursed about $90 billion for the response through March 2025 (and had appropriated about $95 billion more), including money that was spent in the US and in broader Europe rather than Ukraine itself.
When CNN asked the White House earlier this month about Trump’s claims that the US had provided Ukraine itself with “$350 billion,” an official tried to justify the figure by adding in a bunch of things that are not actually aid to Ukraine – including, absurdly, the cost of US inflation to American households after the Russian invasion.
A fictional story about Biden and South Korea
Trump repeated his long-debunked “$350 billion” Ukraine-aid figure while sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week. Then, this Monday, he repeated his long-debunked story about US relations with South Korea while sitting beside South Korean President Lee Jae-myung.
Speaking of the presence of more than 26,000 American military personnel in South Korea, Trump said, “As you know, South Korea agreed to pay for that during my last term. And then when Biden came in, they complained to Biden that I wasn’t a nice person and he agreed not to pay. He gave up billions of dollars. We were getting paid billions of dollars, but then Biden ended that for whatever reason. It’s unbelievable that he did.”
This is a reversal of reality.
Biden didn’t agree to let South Korea stop sharing the cost of the US military force in the country. Rather, under Biden, South Korea signed two cost-sharing agreements with the US, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that both included substantial South Korean payment increases.
A disproven tale Trump claimed had been proven
Trump told a story on Monday in which he claimed a Democratic governor with whom he has been trading public barbs this month, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, told him during a behind-the-scenes conversation last year, “‘Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime.’” The story was disproven by Trump-friendly Fox News the very same day: it turned out that a Fox documentary show had recorded the conversation, in which Moore didn’t say anything close to what Trump claimed.
Trump was undeterred by the footage. He told a similar story on Tuesday, this time falsely saying Moore had told him, “Sir, you’re the greatest president” – and adding, “They caught him on camera.” In reality, it was Trump who the camera had caught in a lie.
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