Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in his conversation with Elon Musk | CNN Politics

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : The number of people listening to the conversationTrump told Musk that "you got a lot of people listening" to the conversation - "like 60 million or something."
49% : "After Trump claimed in June that "crime is so much up," Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces.
49% : The global average sea level is currently rising more per year than Trump claimed that it will rise in 400 years.
48% : In the peak month during this administration for what the government calls border "encounters," December 2023, there were 370,890 encounters nationwide.
47% : Military equipment and AfghanistanAfter talking about the state of US military equipment, Trump said, "We gave $85 billion of it back to Afghanistan, if you can believe it.
46% : Briceño-León noted in his email that you could find a decline of roughly 70% by 2023 if you compared 2018 to 2023 - but Trump was US president until early 2021.
46% : The same was true in the 2017 fiscal year, which encompassed the end of Obama's presidency and the beginning of Trump's.
45% : The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted to CNN in 2019 that in the 2016 fiscal year, ICE reported that Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranked second, third and fourth for the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US.
44% : ICE did not identify any widespread problems with deportations to these countries.
39% : They say it's 48 years, I don't believe it."Facts First: Trump framed this as an opinion, but it's baseless nonetheless - wrong in two different ways.
39% : Trump appeared to be referring to something different: the number of views on his own X post sharing the "space" where the conversation was played.
39% : Also, the same person can be "encountered" multiple times if they keep returning to the border to try again - which is what happened in many cases under Biden when the Title 42 rapid-expulsion authority invoked by Trump during the Covid-19 pandemic was in place into May 2023.
39% : "As he did in his conversation with Musk, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's team, Matthew Colangelo, while making such claims; Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney's office as senior counsel to Bragg.
36% : China's oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year the Trump administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped - and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president.
35% : The situation before Right to TryTrump claimed that before he signed a "Right to Try" law in 2018 to give terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven't yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration, such patients would have no recourse if they did not have the money to travel abroad.
33% : NASA found a jump of 0.3 inches between 2022 and 2023.Gary Griggs, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor of earth and planetary sciences who studies sea-level rise, said last year that Trump's similar claims "can only be described as totally out of touch with reality" and that Trump "has no idea what he is talking about.
31% : Even if you added the estimated number of Biden-era "gotaways" (people who evaded the Border Patrol to enter illegally), which House Republicans said in May was nearly two million, "the totals would still be vastly smaller than 15, 16 or 18 million," Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute think tank, said in late June after Trump used those figures.
31% : "The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven't stopped at all," Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, said in November, when Trump made a similar claim.
30% : "There were also some Congolese migrants apprehended at the US border under Trump.
30% : "Facts First: It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try law.
29% : In 2016, Obama's last calendar year in office, none of these three countries were on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered "recalcitrant" (uncooperative) in accepting the return of their citizens from the US.
28% : Venezuela, crime and migrationTrump claimed: "Venezuela - their crime is down 72%.
27% : They're taking their criminals, their murderers, their rapists and they're delivering them..."Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available.
26% : Attorney General Merrick Garland testified to Congress in early June about the Manhattan case in which Trump was found guilty: "The Manhattan district attorney has jurisdiction over cases involving New York state law, completely independent of the Justice Department, which has jurisdiction over cases involving federal law.
25% : The 2020 election was not rigged, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, his opponents did not cheat and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.
25% : Trump could have fairly said that his sanctions on Iran had made life more difficult for terror groups (though it's unclear how much their operations were affected).
23% : Even if Harris continues to hold this position today - she has not addressed the subject since she began her presidential campaign in July - closing privately-run immigration detention centers would not result in the release of "all" prisoners in immigration detention, let alone all prisoners in regular US jails and prisons; Trump did not specify that he was talking about Harris' past stance on certain immigration detention facilities rather than all prisons.
23% : Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, plus both pro-immigration and anti-immigration organizations in the US, told CNN in March, after Trump made a similar claim, that they had not seen any evidence of Congolese prisons being emptied, let alone evidence of either country somehow having brought ex-prisoners into the US.
21% : Iran and funding for terror groupsTouting his record in dealing with Iran, Trump claimed, "They had no money for Hamas, they had no money for Hezbollah, they had no money for any of these instruments of terror."Facts First: Trump's claim that Iran had "no money" for terror groups during his presidency is false.
20% : Facts First: Trump did express uncertainty about the number, but his "like 60 million or something" claim is false.
19% : "Bank robberies disappear because there is no money to rob; kidnappings decrease because there is no cash to pay the ransoms; robberies on public transportation stop because travelers have no money in their pockets and old cell phones [with] no value," he said.Migration numbersWhile talking about illegal immigration, Trump claimed that, under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, "you have millions of people coming in a month.
19% : Facts First: Trump is wrong.
18% : The Biden administration and Trump's legal casesTrump repeated a claim he has made on numerous occasions during his campaign - that the Biden administration orchestrated a criminal election subversion case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, a criminal fraud case that was brought against him by a local district attorney in Manhattan, and a civil fraud case that was brought against him by the attorney general of New York state.
17% : Trump has also previously made the joke about rising seas creating more oceanfront property.
16% : Trump appeared to be referring to news stories in conservative media that reported that Harris had said in 2019, while unsuccessfully running in the Democratic presidential primary, that she wanted to close privately-run immigration detention centers.
16% : "Trump's tax cutsTrump repeated his regular claim that his signature tax cuts, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, were "the largest tax cut" ever provided.
12% : It's possible Trump had been misled himself; a short clip shared by some Republicans on social media this week did not include the part of Harris' 2019 remarks where she specified that she was referring to privately run immigration detention facilities in particular.
5% : Harris and prisonersTrump claimed of Harris: "She wants to release all the prisoners that are in detention, and some of these guys are really bad.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.