CNN
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President Donald Trump mostly stuck to lofty generalities and promises of action during his second inaugural address, making far fewer checkable claims than he typically does in his speeches.
But Trump did make a smattering of inaccurate statements. Here is a fact check.
Inflation rates: Trump falsely claimed the US experienced “record inflation” during the Biden administration. Trump could fairly say the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high 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 the rate has since plummeted. The most recent available inflation rate at the time Trump spoke here was 2.9% in December.)
From CNN’s Alicia Wallace and Daniel Dale
Tariffs: Trump said, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” But this description of tariffs is false. Tariffs imposed by the US government are paid by US importers, not foreign countries, and it’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers. Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, found that Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products in his first term.
Additionally, Trump mentioned creating a new “External Revenue Service” to collect revenue from tariffs on imports, a plan he has mentioned before. Again, it is US importers, not foreign exporters, who pay tariffs on imported goods – and often pass some or all those costs to US consumers.
From CNN’s Bryan Mena and Daniel Dale
Prisons and mental institutions: Trump delivered a softer version of his standard rally claim that foreign governments are deliberately emptying prisons and mental institutions to send people to the US as migrants. This time, he omitted the part about malicious foreign governments and claimed the Biden administration “provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions, that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”
Trump and his presidential campaign have never corroborated the claim that “many” Biden-era migrants have come from prisons or mental institutions, though it’s of course possible that some migrants spent time in such facilities. And Trump’s campaign could not substantiate his stories about foreign countries opening up such facilities for migration purposes.
The president has sometimes tried to support his narrative by asserting the global prison population is down. But that’s incorrect. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.
“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
This story was updated to include additional information.
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