Fact check: Trump’s false claims at his NATO press conference

Examining Trump’s Misstatements During NATO Summit Press Conference

Fact check – During a press gathering on Wednesday at the NATO summit held in Ankara, President Donald Trump presented yet another collection of inaccurate statements. Many of these remarks echoed falsehoods he had previously shared with reporters during his Tuesday meeting with Turkey’s president. Below is an analysis of several of his Wednesday comments.

The $19.2 Trillion Investment Claim

One recurring assertion Trump made was that the United States has received “$19.2 trillion” in investments within a single year of his current presidency. This number is incorrect, as we documented when he first made this statement on Tuesday and on many earlier occasions. When Trump delivered this claim on Wednesday, the White House website itself stated that “$10.6 trillion” in “major investment announcements” had occurred during his term—not the $19.2 trillion figure he cited. Even the White House’s own number represented a significant overstatement of genuine investment activity.

A comprehensive CNN investigation conducted in October revealed that the White House was tallying trillions of dollars in ambiguous investment commitments. These commitments primarily concerned “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than direct investment within the United States. Furthermore, some of these statements did not even qualify as formal pledges. The White House calculation encompasses commitments from both American corporations and international organizations. According to federal statistics released last month, new foreign direct investment flowing into the United States totaled approximately $232 billion in 2025.

Manufacturing Construction Decline

Trump also asserted:

We have the largest number of plants being built for the most money ever in the history of our country – car plants, AI plants, and all other plants, pharmaceutical plants.

Government data contradicts this assertion. Spending on manufacturing construction in the United States has experienced a steady decrease throughout Trump’s second term following a surge that characterized much of former president Joe Biden’s tenure. That surge had subsided during the concluding months of Biden’s presidency. Official charts clearly illustrate the downward trend in both 2025 and 2026. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for manufacturing construction spending reached roughly $174.8 billion in May 2026, representing a decline of approximately 28 percent compared to May 2024—the final May under Biden’s administration. This figure also fell about 28 percent from December 2024, which marked Biden’s last complete month in office. Additionally, the rate dropped approximately 26 percent from February 2025, Trump’s inaugural full month, and decreased about 22 percent from May 2025.

Election Victory Claims

Trump once again misrepresented the 2020 presidential election he lost, declaring:

I’ve been right about everything, and I have been for a long time. It’s how I got to be president three times. It’s how I won three elections.

He subsequently reiterated his position that he “won” the 2020 contest but characterized it as a “rigged election.” In reality, Trump has served as president on two separate occasions and has won two elections. He genuinely lost the 2020 race, decisively and without controversy, to Biden. While we can set aside his exaggerated assertion that he has “been right about everything,” the election claim remains factually incorrect.

The Maduro Prison Claim

Addressing former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump repeated his standard assertion that Maduro “had people pour into the country from prisons; they opened up their prisons, they allowed them to come in.” However, Trump has never produced evidence demonstrating that Venezuela under Maduro opened its prisons specifically for migration purposes. While Venezuela experienced substantial emigration during the Maduro era due to economic difficulties, violence, and political instability, Trump and his advisors have never substantiated their repeated claims that Maduro emptied prisons to remove undesirable citizens from the country.

Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, stated in an email to CNN in June 2024:

We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the US or any other country.

Helen Fair, a global prisons expert at Birkbeck, University of London, similarly told CNN in 2024 that she had “seen absolutely no evidence” that any nation had emptied prisons to relocate prisoners to the United States.

Border Crossing Numbers

Finally, Trump repeated his false assertion regarding immigration, claiming there were “25 million people, I think more than that, under Biden” crossing the border. The “25 million” number is inaccurate; even Trump’s earlier “21 million” figure was considerably overstated. By December 2024, the final complete month of the Biden administration, the federal government had documented fewer than 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants throughout that administration, including millions who were quickly expelled from the country. Even when incorporating the so-called “gotaways” who avoided detection—estimated by House Republicans at approximately 2.2 million—the total remained far below Trump’s claims.