Fact check: Trump’s false claims at his NATO press conference
Examining Trump’s Misleading Statements at the Ankara NATO Summit
Fact check – During a press gathering on Wednesday at the NATO summit held in Ankara, President Donald Trump presented yet another collection of inaccurate assertions. Several of these statements echoed falsehoods he had previously shared with reporters during his Tuesday meeting with Turkey’s president. Below is an evaluation of select remarks made on Wednesday.
The $19.2 Trillion Investment Claim
Trump once again circulated his recurring assertion that “we have $19.2 trillion” invested within the United States during merely “one year” of his current administration. This number lacks credibility, as we previously documented when he repeated this same assertion on Tuesday and across many earlier occasions. When Trump made his Wednesday statement, the White House website itself reported “10.6 trillion” in “major investment announcements” throughout this term—not the 19.2 trillion figure he cited. Even that White House number represented a significant overstatement of genuine investment activity.
A thorough CNN investigation conducted in October revealed that the White House was tallying trillions of dollars in ambiguous investment commitments. These commitments concerned “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than actual investment flowing into the United States. Furthermore, some vague statements were included that did not even qualify as formal pledges. The White House tally encompasses commitments from both American corporations and international organizations. According to federal statistics released last month, new foreign direct investment entering the United States totaled approximately 232 billion dollars in 2025.
Manufacturing Construction Decline
Trump declared:
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 indicates that expenditure on American manufacturing construction has continuously decreased throughout Trump’s second term following an increase that characterized most of former president Joe Biden’s tenure. That increase had diminished during the closing months of Biden’s presidency. The official chart clearly demonstrates the downward trend in 2025 and 2026. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for manufacturing construction spending reached roughly 174.8 billion dollars in May 2026, representing a decline of approximately 28 percent compared to May 2024—the final May under Biden—and also a 28 percent drop from December 2024, which marked Biden’s last complete month in office. Additionally, the figure fell about 26 percent from February 2025, Trump’s inaugural full month, and decreased approximately 22 percent from May 2025.
Election and Immigration Assertions
Trump repeated his falsehood regarding the 2020 election he lost, stating:
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 that he “won” the 2020 contest but characterized it as a “rigged election.” Trump has served as president on two separate occasions and has legitimately won two elections. He fairly and squarely lost the 2020 race to Biden. We will set aside his exaggerated assertion that he has “been right about everything.”
Regarding former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump repeated his standard claim 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 supplied evidence demonstrating that Maduro-era Venezuela opened prisons specifically for migration purposes. While substantial emigration occurred from Venezuela during the Maduro period due to economic difficulties, violence, and political instability, Trump and his associates have never substantiated his repeated assertions that Maduro emptied prisons to remove undesirable citizens. Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, stated in a June 2024 email to CNN:
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 transport prisoners to the United States.
Finally, Trump reiterated his incorrect assertion about 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” estimate was considerably inflated. By December 2024, the final complete month of the Biden administration, federal authorities had documented fewer than 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants, including millions who were quickly expelled. Even incorporating the so-called “gotaways” who avoided detection—estimated by House Republicans at approximately 2.2 million—the total could not possibly reach the claimed figures.
