Fact check: 18 false claims Trump made on ‘60 Minutes’

President Donald Trump littered his new “60 Minutes” interview with a wide-ranging assortment of false claims, the vast majority of them previously debunked. We counted at least 18 inaccurate assertions.

Trump told his usual lie that the free and fair 2020 election was stolen from him. He lied again that grocery prices “are down” even after CBS’ Norah O’Donnell informed him they are up. He declared once more that there is now “no inflation,” though there certainly is, and then that inflation is 2% or “even less than 2%,” though the most recent available Consumer Price Index figure is now up to 3%.

The president also deployed multiple other fictional numbers during his exchanges with O’Donnell, which were recorded Friday and released by CBS on Sunday.

And Trump made a variety of additional false claims on several subjects, including the government shutdown, the artificial intelligence boom, tariffs, his first impeachment and his former legal battle with “60 Minutes” itself.

CBS posted a full transcript of the interview, which O’Donnell said ran for nearly 90 minutes, and a nearly 73-minute video; it aired about 28 minutes on television.

Here is a more detailed breakdown of Trump’s claims.

Grocery prices

When O’Donnell noted that Americans have “seen their grocery prices go up,” Trump repeated his regular false claim that grocery prices are actually declining: “No, you’re wrong. They went up under Biden. Right now they’re going down. Other than beef, which we’re working on, which we can solve very quickly.” Trump repeated later in the interview, “Our groceries are down.”

Grocery prices are up under Trump — and while there has been a particularly large increase in the price of beef, there have also been increases in the price of numerous other products. Consumer Price Index figures for September showed average grocery prices had increased since August (about 0.3%), since September 2024 (about 2.7%), and since January 2025 (about 1.4%), the month Trump returned to office. Prices in all six major grocery product categories tracked by the Consumer Price Index, such as “fruits and vegetables” and “cereals and bakery products,” are up over the past year.

Inflation under Trump

Trump falsely claimed, “We have no inflation” and “we don’t have any inflation.” (He said at another point of the interview that “essentially we don’t have inflation.”) He also falsely claimed, “We’re down to 2%, even less than 2%.” There is inflation; it has been worsening since May after hitting a four-year low in April; and it’s not 2% or less than 2%. The year-over-year rate was about 3% in September, up from about 2.9% in August; the September figure was nearly identical to the roughly 3% rate in January, the last partial month of the Biden administration and first partial month of the second Trump administration.

Inflation under Biden

Trump falsely claimed that President Joe “Biden gave me the worst inflation rate in the history of our country” and that “I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” Trump could have fairly said the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high under Biden in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920 — and, again, the rate then declined to about 3% in January 2025, the month Trump took over from Biden. Trump’s claim was also wrong if he was claiming there was record cumulative inflation over the course of Biden’s presidency. It was about 21%, compared with about 49% during President Jimmy Carter’s term.

Investment in the US

Trump repeated his frequent false claim that “we have $17 trillion being invested in the United States right now,” then said moments later that it is “more than $17 trillion right now.” This “$17 trillion” figure is fictional even without the “more than.” As of the time the “60 Minutes” interview aired on Sunday, the White House’s own website said the “major investment announcements” this term totaled “$8.9 trillion” — and a detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges from foreign countries and companies, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, or vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges. You can read more here.

Who pays tariffs

Trump claimed, as he often does, that China and other foreign countries pay the tariffs he has imposed on their exports. In reality, US importers, not China or other foreign countries, make the tariff payments to the US government, and they often pass on at least some of the costs to consumers; study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, found that people and entities in the US bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on Chinese products.

AI and power

Trump correctly noted that some artificial intelligence companies are moving to generate their own power on the same sites as their energy-hungry data centers — but falsely added that letting companies make their own electricity “was my idea, which nobody, frankly, had thought of.” There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim that he came up with this idea. News articles last year, when Trump was an out-of-office candidate for president, discussed how AI companies were already experimenting with on-site power generation and how the Biden administration was on board with the idea; one article from April 2024, for example, discussed how the Energy Department was “exploring how energy-hungry tech firms might be able to host small nuclear plants on the campuses of their massive data centers.”

Strikes on alleged drug boats

After Trump was asked about the recent US military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, he said, “Every one of those boats kills 25,000 Americans. Every single boat that you see that’s shot down kills 25,000 on drugs, and destroys families all over our country.”

Aside from the fact that the Trump administration has not presented public proof for his repeated claims that the boats carried fentanyl, the drug involved in the highest number of US overdose deaths — the Caribbean is not known to be a significant fentanyl-smuggling route — his “25,000” number does not make sense. The total number of US overdose deaths from all drugs in 2024 was about 82,000, according to provisional federal data. Trump is essentially claiming, in other words, that attacking 16 boats prevented more than four years’ worth of American overdose deaths.

The president’s figure is “absurd,” Carl Latkin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health with a joint appointment at its medical school, said in October. “He’s claiming that he’s solved the overdose mortality crisis” with four boat strikes, and “that does not have any semblance of reality.” You can read a longer fact check here.

Trump and wars

Trump repeated his false claim that he “knocked out eight wars,” adding, “I took eight wars and stopped (them) during an eight-month period” this presidency. Reading from a paper, he listed “Cambodia-Thailand,” “Kosovo-Serbia,” “the Congo and Rwanda,” “Pakistan and India,” “Israel and Iran,” “Egypt and Ethiopia,” “Armenia and Azerbaijan,” and “Israel and Hamas.”

Trump’s “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.

There was no war between Egypt and Ethiopia for Trump to end; the two countries were in a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River, but that is not a war, and the dispute is unresolved. Trump’s list includes another supposed war that didn’t occur during his presidency, between Kosovo and Serbia. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different from settling an actual war.) And the war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration this year — which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.

One can debate the importance of Trump’s role in having ended the other conflicts on his list, or fairly question whether some of them have truly ended. For example, killing has continued in Gaza after the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Regardless, Trump’s “eight” figure is too big.

Biden and aid to Ukraine

Trump repeated his false claim that “Joe Biden gave $350 billion to Ukraine, including a lot of weapons, a tremendous amount of weapons.” The “$350 billion” figure isn’t close to accurate.

The US government inspector general overseeing the federal Ukraine response says the US had disbursed about $94 billion as of the end of June 2025 (and had appropriated about $93 billion more), including money that was spent in the US and in broader Europe rather than Ukraine itself. And a German think tank that has closely tracked wartime aid to Ukraine says the US allocated about $135 billion to Ukraine (and had committed about $5 billion more) through August, at current exchange rates.

The shutdown, Democrats and immigrants

Talking about the ongoing government shutdown, Trump said of Democrats, “I can’t give them $1.5 trillion so that they can give welfare to people that came into our country illegally.” But that is not what Democrats are seeking.

Democrats are primarily proposing to reverse Trump-approved cuts to Medicaid and other health programs and to extend the enhanced pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Undocumented people are not eligible for either Obamacare subsidies or federal Medicaid insurance coverage (though hospitals are required to provide people with emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay).

Trump’s White House itself has claimed that Democrats are proposing to spend about $193 billion (not $1.5 trillion) on health care for “illegal immigrants and other non-citizens” and the White House published an itemized list that makes clear that even by its own contested calculations, the majority of even that smaller sum would be for these “other non-citizens” who are in the US legally.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group, has estimated that the spending proposal the Democrats released in September would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. But that figure is not about spending on undocumented people in particular.

Foreign leaders, prisons and migration

Trump repeated his regular claim that foreign countries are deliberately emptying their prisons to somehow send inmates to the US as migrants, at one point identifying Venezuela as a supposed culprit and at another point speaking more broadly — saying “very smart” foreign leaders “want people that are bad out” and so “what do they do? They open their jails, they let ‘em out. They get rid of their drug dealers, they let ‘em out. But you know who else they get out? The people that are on welfare that aren’t working. In other words, they have people that just don’t work. They don’t want people that just don’t work, so they put them into our country.”

Trump has never substantiated such claims, though he has been making them since his 2024 campaign. Experts on international prison policy and crime in Venezuela have told CNN they have seen no evidence of Venezuela or any other country emptying jails for migration purposes, let alone that these countries actively inserted former prisoners into the US.

Migration under Biden

Trump repeated his false claim that 25 million migrants were allowed into the country under Biden, though he was more tentative this time than usual, saying, “Probably, I say, 25 million people were let into our country. A lot of people say it was 10 million people. But whether it was 10 or — I believe I’m much closer to the right number. Of the 25, many of them should not be here.”

The “25 million” figure is wildly inaccurate; even Trump’s previous “21 million” figure was a major exaggeration. Through December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total was even close to Trump’s claim.

Legal issues, impeachment and the 2020 election

Previous presidents and the Insurrection Act

Trump spoke of the Insurrection Act, which gives the president sweeping powers to deploy troops to US states if certain vague conditions are met, and said, “Do you know that some of the presidents, recent ones, have used it 28 times? 28 times.” No president has invoked the act on more occasions than President Ulysses S. Grant’s six (after the Civil War in the 1800s), and no president has invoked it since President George H.W. Bush in 1992, according to research published in 2022 by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. In fact, the Insurrection Act and the similar laws that preceded it have been invoked on a total of 30 occasions in US history, the Brennan Center found.

Trump also said, “Do you know how many presidents have used the Insurrection Act? Almost 50% of ‘em.” That’s at least a slight exaggeration. Seventeen of the 45 presidents to date, so just under 38%, have invoked the act or its precursor laws, according to the Brennan Center. You can read more here.

Trump’s legal dispute with “60 Minutes”

Trump discussed his now-resolved legal dispute with “60 Minutes” over an edit the show made to an October 2024 interview with his election opponent, then-Vice President Harris — and, as CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter noted Sunday, Trump falsely claimed this supposedly “election-changing” interview occurred “two nights before the election.” The interview actually happened on October 7, 2024, four weeks and a day before Election Day on November 5, 2024.

This wasn’t the first time Trump made the Harris interview sound closer to Election Day than it was. He falsely claimed in June that it occurred “the day before the election.”

Trump and the Justice Department

CBS’ O’Donnell noted the recent indictments of three targets of Trump criticism — former FBI Director James Comey, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James — and asked him whether he instructed the Justice Department to “go after them”; Trump responded, “No, and not in any way, shape or form. No.” But this is obviously false: he recently put public pressure on the Justice Department to go after Comey and James.

Trump wrote in a September social media post directed to “Pam” — Attorney General Pam Bondi, the head of the Justice Department — that Comey, James and Schiff are “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” that “we can’t delay any longer” and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” (Trump intended the post to be a private message to Bondi, a source familiar with the matter told CNN after The Wall Street Journal first reported it.) Trump did not mention Bolton in that social media post; however, it’s worth noting he previously made public calls for his former adviser to be imprisoned over Bolton’s alleged inclusion of classified information in a memoir.

A false story about Democrats and Trump’s first impeachment

Trump delivered another version of a false story he has told since 2019 about Democrats’ response to a phone call that year in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden, who was his looming opponent in the 2020 election. This time, Trump said, “The Democrats knew that I wasn’t guilty, because they didn’t know the — the call was — I didn’t know either: The call was essentially taped. So we knew exactly what the call — when they found out that the call was taped, Nancy Pelosi went crazy. She said, ‘You made me go into this mess.’ She screamed at all these people that made her do it, bad people like (Democratic Rep. Adam) Schiff, etc., etc.”

Trump’s narrative is thoroughly inaccurate.

Pelosi could not possibly have been angry with Schiff or other allies after finding out the call was “taped” because, more than six years later, there is still no known US tape of the conversation; presidential calls with foreign leaders are not typically recorded by the American side. In reality, the day after Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry in September 2019, Trump’s White House released a rough written transcript of the call. There has never been any indication that seeing the rough transcript made Pelosi feel she had been deceived into the impeachment push; the day the document was released, Pelosi issued a scathing statement accusing Trump of “lawlessness” and attempting “to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” A Pelosi spokesperson told CNN in 2024 that a Trump story similar to the one he told on “60 Minutes” was “fact-free nonsense.”

Trump and the Presidential Records Act

Trump decried the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in 2022, during the investigation into his handling of classified documents after his presidency, and he brought back his false claim that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to possess these documents: “They took things that I was allowed to have … under the Presidential Records Act, that I was allowed to have. I had records. I was allowed to have them.”

That’s not true. The Presidential Records Act clearly says that all presidential records belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. The key sentence from the law is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told CNN when Trump made such claims during the Biden administration: “Under the Presidential Records Act, not a single document pertaining to the official business of the White House — classified or unclassified — should have been carted off to Mar-A-Lago. President Trump might consider such records to be ‘his,’ but they are not.”

That doesn’t mean Trump committed a criminal offense; the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute, and Trump was charged in 2023 for allegedly violating other laws. (A judge appointed by Trump dismissed the case in 2024, declaring that the appointment of the special counsel who brought the charges violated the Constitution.) But Trump was, again, wrongly describing what the act says.

The 2020 election

Trump uttered his regular lie that the 2020 election “was rigged and stolen,” saying at other moments of the interview that “this was a rigged election” and that “one thing I can tell you, the 2020 election was rigged.” Trump legitimately lost a free and fair election to Biden. Trump also falsely claimed, “And it’s been caught … and you see the same information that everybody else does. And it’s coming out now in spades.” Trump didn’t explain what he was talking about, but no election-rigging or widespread fraud has “been caught.”