Washington(CNN) Former President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign just as he ended his presidency in 2021: with a whole lot of inaccuracy.

Like many of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday was filled with false claims about a variety of topics — from his record in office to his Democratic opponents to the economy, the environment and foreign policy.

Here is a fact check of 20 false or misleading things he said. This is not a comprehensive list.

Afghanistan withdrawal

Trump claimed Tuesday evening that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan upon its military withdrawal in 2021.

“Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

There is not any basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind. As other fact-checkers have previously explained, that was a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. Only part of this funding was for equipment.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Trump claimed his administration “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but it has now been “virtually drained” by the Biden administration.

Facts First: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. He didn’t fill up the reserve, and the reserve is not “virtually drained.”

Though Trump has repeatedly boasted of supposedly having filled up the reserve, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not all because of him — the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress blocked the funding needed to execute Trump’s 2020 directive to buy tens of millions more barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capacity — but nonetheless, it didn’t get filled.

As CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the US reserve remains the largest in the world even though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a major chunk of it to help keep oil prices down in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, prior to the midterm elections). The reserve had more than 396 million barrels of crude oil as of the week ending November 4.

Tariffs on China

Trump also boasted about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”

Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”

Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments — and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing the cost of the tariffs.

Sea level rise

Trump claimed that unnamed people aren’t talking about the threat of nuclear weapons because they are obsessed with environmental issues, which he said, “they say may affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They say the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries with one shot.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false — even if you ignore the absurd contention that people aren’t paying attention to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Ocean Service said on its website that “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 – 12 inches (0.25 – 0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020 – 2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920 – 2020).”

And though Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” in this claim, he strongly suggested that people say climate change may only affect us in 300 years. That is grossly inaccurate; it is affecting the US today. The Department of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”

Drug use and punishment in China

Trump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” at all because of its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying, “if you get caught dealing drugs in China you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day, you are executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they have no drug problem.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is not true, just as it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, like the US, has a large number of people who use (a wide range of) drugs.” The Chinese government has itself reported that “there were 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” as of the end of 2021; in the past, officials in China have acknowledged that the number of registered drug users are a significant undercount of actual drug use there.

And while Trump solely credits harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its rehabilitation, education and anti-poverty efforts.

Presidential records

Complaining about how he is under criminal investigation for taking presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a debunked claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.

“Obama took a lot of things with him,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false — as the National Archives and Records Administration pointed out in August when Trump previously made this claim. Though Trump claimed that Obama had taken millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had itself taken these records to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area — which is near where Obama’s presidential library will be located. It said that, as per federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”

NARA has also debunked Trump’s recent claims about various other presidents having supposedly taken documents to their own home states; in those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the former presidents. It is standard for NARA to set up temporary facilities near where former presidents’ permanent libraries will eventually be located.

Gas prices

As he has on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading figures when discussing the price of gas. He said: “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars, and it’s gonna go really bad.”

Facts First: This is so misleading that we’re classifying it as inaccurate. While the price of a gallon of regular gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that — $2.393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some remote gas stations where prices are always much higher than the national average, the national average Tuesday is $3.759, per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, has an average of $5.423.

Deportations under Obama

Trump claimed Tuesday evening that his administration, unlike Obama’s administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members that had come to America.

“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out. Because their countries where they came from wouldn’t take them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.

Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back their citizens during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

Missile landing in Poland

Trump claimed Tuesday that a missile that was “sent in probably by Russia” landed 50 miles into Poland. “People are going absolutely wild and crazy and they’re not happy,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.

Facts First: This claim is false. While Poland said a Russian-made missile did land in their territory Tuesday, killing two Polish citizens, the explosion happened about four miles west from the Ukrainian border.

Additionally, it remains unclear where the missile was fired from, and why it fell in Poland.

Finishing the border wall

Trump made a false claim about one of his signature policies, a wall at the border with Mexico.

“We built the wall, and now we will add to it. Now, we built the wall — we completed the wall — and then we said let’s do more, and we did a lot more. And we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would’ve been great, and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that,” he said.

Facts First: It’s not even close to true that Trump “completed” the border wall.

According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump — but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not completed. The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280, about 74 miles of barriers were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

Democratic leaders and the National Guard

Trump claimed that Democratic governors and mayors refused to ask for “help” even during “a total breakdown of law and order,” and “don’t want to ever ask to do anything,” so “we sent in the National Guard in Minneapolis and in other places.”

Facts First: This is a false claim Trump liked to make during his presidency. It’s not true that Trump sent in the National Guard to Minneapolis and that Democratic leaders there refused to ask; it was actually Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard amid unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades, first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.

When Trump made this false claim in 2020, Walz’s office told CNN that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul — cities also run by Democrats.

Biden’s acuity

Mocking Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said, “There are a lot of bad things, like going to Idaho and saying ‘Welcome to the state of Florida, I really love it.'”

Facts First: This never happened. Biden, like Trump, has made occasional gaffes in referring to places, but this one is fiction. At a rally earlier this month, Trump claimed that Biden had gone to Iowa and wrongly claimed to be in Idaho; that false claim was published by a satirical website in 2020.

Illegal immigration

Lamenting illegal immigration, Trump said, “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in, not three or four million people. They’re pouring into our country.”

Facts First: False. “There is no empirical basis at all for the idea that 10 million undocumented people have entered under President Biden,” Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California’s law school, who studies immigration, said in a Monday email when CNN asked her about Trump making this claim earlier in November. Julia Gelatt, an expert at the Migration Policy Institute think tank, concurred: “Based on the data available, it is not possible that 10 million unauthorized immigrants have come across the border to the U.S. under President Biden. In fact, the reality is a fraction of that.”

Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump (and head of the Border Patrol under Obama), told The Arizona Republic in an early-November article that the “worst case scenario” for the number of illegal border crossings under Biden through October “could be 6.2 million.” Trump’s estimate was not close even to that estimate.

And there are a bunch of important nuances here. Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 4.3 million total nationwide border “encounters” under Biden, but that number includes people who presented themselves to the authorities to begin the process of seeking humanitarian protection. And while Trump used the word “people,” Ryo emphasized that the number of “encounters” is not the same as the number of separate individuals who have crossed the border. Because many people encountered at the border are rapidly expelled under the Title 42 policy — including more than half of those encountered in the 2021 fiscal year — lots of the same people quickly come back to the border and try again. In the 2021 fiscal year, the recidivism rate was 27%, according to official data.

Inflation in turkey prices

Trump claimed, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Number one, you won’t get it and if you do, you’re gonna pay three to four times more than you paid last year.”

Facts First: This isn’t even close to true. Turkey prices have increased since last Thanksgiving season, but they haven’t come close to tripling or quadrupling. The weighted average advertised supermarket price of a whole frozen hen is 97 cents per pound as of the most recent US Department of Agriculture report — up about 10% from the same time last year. The price of a whole frozen tom was up by about 7%.

And though Trump made these comments while criticizing the Biden administration over inflation, it’s worth noting that the turkey market in particular has been significantly impacted by avian flu.

Trump and wars

Trump said that his critics claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign that there would be a war within weeks if Trump was elected — “and yet I’ve gone decades, decades without a war. The first president to do it for that long a period.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. Trump was president for four years, so he could not possibly have gone “decades, decades” without a war. Also, Trump presided over the US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he obviously didn’t start any of these wars and withdrew some troops from all three countries. And he was commander-in-chief for dozens of US airstrikes, including drone strikes, in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.

Trump and ISIS

Trump gave himself credit for the liberation of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria, saying “the vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was able to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors in less than three weeks.”

Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019, not “less than three weeks” into his presidency in 2017; it’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by “decimated,” but the fight continued long after Trump’s first weeks in office. And Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past. There was major progress against the caliphate under Obama in 2015 and 2016 — and Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing the size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Terrorism under Trump

Trump claimed: “We had practically, just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks, during the Trump administration.”

Facts First: Trump did qualify the claim by saying “practically, just about, not that I can think of,” but it’s not true that there were no terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists during his presidency. Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a terror attack in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was an act of Islamic extremism carried out in support of ISIS. In fact, Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. And Trump’s Justice Department alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

The military’s use of old bombers

Boasting of how he supposedly rebuilt the military, Trump said, “When I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old, we had bombers where their grandfathers flew them when they were new. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber — but not anymore.”

Facts First: It’s not true that Trump ended the use of 60-year-old bombers. The military continues to use B-52 bombers that old; they are now being outfitted with new Rolls-Royce engines to prolong their life even further. (And the B-52 isn’t the only decades-old plane still in use.)

Trump’s popularity along the border

After boasting of how he is viewed by Latinos, Trump claimed that “along the border in Texas, won every single community — I won — every single community.” He said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told him that he had “won every single area along the border, the longest since Reconstruction.”

Facts First: We don’t know what Abbott told Trump, but it’s not true that Trump won every single area along the border with Mexico. Trump lost border states in both of his previous races — California and New Mexico in both 2016 and 2020, Arizona in 2020 — and also lost numerous border communities in Texas and elsewhere both times, as you can see in these New York Times maps here and here.

Trump did make major gains with some Texas border counties between 2016 and 2020, becoming the first Republican in decades to win some of them, but his claim was about how he supposedly won them all. That’s inaccurate.

Inflation

Trump claimed about inflation: “As we speak, inflation is the highest in over 50 years.”

Facts First: This is not true; Trump exaggerated a statistic that would have worked in his favor even if he had recited it accurately. October’s year-over-year inflation rate of 7.7% is the highest since 1982, if you don’t count previous months this year when it was higher. So, ignoring those other Biden-era months, it is the highest in 40 years, not the highest in “over 50 years.”

We might let this go if Trump did not have a years-long pattern of exaggerating numbers to suit his purposes.

In a $1.6 billion defamation suit, Dominion Voting Systems argues that Fox Corp. bosses Rupert Murdoch (left) and Lachlan Murdoch (right) were deeply involved in shaping editorial decisions at Fox News.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In a $1.6 billion defamation suit, Dominion Voting Systems argues that Fox Corp. bosses Rupert Murdoch (left) and Lachlan Murdoch (right) were deeply involved in shaping editorial decisions at Fox News.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In the heat of the moment, right after Election Day 2020, media magnate Rupert Murdoch knew that the hosts on his prized Fox News Channel were endorsing lies from then-President Donald Trump about election fraud.

And he did nothing to intervene to stop it.

Instead, Murdoch, the network’s controlling owner, followed the lead of the network’s senior executives in sidestepping the truth for a pro-Trump audience angered when confronted by the facts.

Asked whether he could have told Fox News’ chief executive and its stars to stop giving airtime to Rudy Giuliani — a key Trump campaign attorney peddling election lies — Murdoch assented. “I could have,” Murdoch said. “But I didn’t.”

That’s the picture that emerges in evidence presented Monday by the voting-tech company Dominion Voting Systems in a blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation suit against both Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp.

Dominion’s legal team is presenting only the evidence it believes will propel its case; Fox Corp. is arguing that the parent company and its top executives are wrongly being held responsible for reporting on the baseless assertions of a president and his advisers.

“Dominion’s lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny,” according to a statement released by a spokeswoman on behalf of Fox Corp. and Fox News.

The Fox statement called Dominion’s stance “extreme,” citing free speech concerns, and characterized the voting-tech company’s legal position as “a blatant violation of the First Amendment” that would “prevent journalists from basic reporting.”

To counter that defense, Dominion’s legal filings summon the words of seemingly authoritative figures: Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch and his top corporate advisers.

Murdoch admits Fox News stars endorsed false stolen-election claim

Speaking under oath, Murdoch confirmed the suggestion by a Dominion lawyer that Fox was “trying to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other.”

Asked by a Dominion attorney whether “Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election,” Murdoch demurred, saying, “Not Fox, no. Not Fox. But maybe Lou Dobbs, maybe Maria [Bartiromo] as commentators.”

The lawyer pressed on. Did Fox’s Bartiromo endorse it?

Murdoch’s reply: “Yes. C’mon.”

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro? “I think so.”

Then-Fox Business Network host Dobbs? “Oh, a lot.”

Fox News prime-time star Sean Hannity? “A bit.”

Pressed whether they endorsed the narrative of a stolen election, Murdoch finally gave in: “Yes. They endorsed.”

Fox denies executives had “direct role” in broadcasting false claims

Dominion initially sued the network and its parent company separately. Fox Corp. has tried to sidestep the case, saying the decisions were left up to the executives and journalists within Fox News.

Similarly, Murdoch sought to distinguish between the two in his sworn remarks. When asked whether Fox News embraced the idea of election fraud, he pointed instead to his own stars: “No. Some of our commentators were endorsing it.”

Fox Corp. argues that Dominion has produced no evidence showing that Rupert Murdoch; his son Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp.’s executive chairman; or other top corporate executives played a “direct role” in the decisions to air election-fraud claims. In their own filing Monday, Fox Corp.’s attorneys say the communications presented by Dominion that involve Fox executives are not directly related to the 115 allegedly defamatory statements at issue in the case.

“After obtaining millions of documents and taking dozens of depositions— including depositions of Fox Corporation’s CEO, Fox Corporation’s Chairman, Fox News’s CEO, Fox News’s President, and dozens of producers, on-air talent, and executives—Dominion has produced zero evidentiary support for its dubious theory,” Fox Corp.’s filing claims.

Even so, Fox Corp.’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, acknowledged under oath that executives in the corporation’s chain of command have an obligation “to prevent and correct known falsehoods.” (Fox Corp.’s and Fox News’ legal defense is handled by a team of outside lawyers led by Dan Webb, a highly regarded Chicago-based corporate litigator.) Some Fox News journalists debunked false election-fraud claims in reports. And star Tucker Carlson sharply questioned the basis for Trump’s outspoken advocate Sidney Powell on his program. But Fox News never corrected the record on all the baseless allegations that unspooled on its airwaves.

Dominion lays out Murdochs’ hands-on role at Fox News after the election

Emails and other communications introduced into the case by Dominion reflect deep involvement by the Murdochs and other Fox Corp. senior figures in the network’s editorial path.

Each Murdoch speaks roughly daily to Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott, she testified. (While Lachlan Murdoch confirmed his daily chat with Scott, Rupert Murdoch said it was only once or twice a week.)

“I’m a journalist at heart,” the elder Murdoch, who is just two weeks shy of his 92nd birthday, said in his deposition. “I like to be involved in these things.”

He had been resolute about defending Fox News’ call of the key state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night — Nov. 3, 2020. Murdoch testified that he could hear Trump shouting in the background as the then-president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told him the situation was “terrible.”

To which, Murdoch said he replied, “‘Well, the numbers are the numbers.'”

“We are still somewhat exposed on Arizona”

Yet a panic set in as pro-Trump viewers abandoned Fox News following the Arizona call. And when hosts scrambled to promote Trump’s false claims of fraud, Fox News executives seized on it as a valuable strategy, according to the evidence presented by Dominion, even as at least two of Fox’s corporate directors and a top corporate official took exception.

By Nov. 5, Hannity was on the air saying, “It will be impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results — that’s a fact.”

And Dinh was warning Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and a top deputy that “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.” The next day, Rupert Murdoch warned that if Trump refused to concede graciously, “we should watch Sean especially and others don’t sound the same.”

Scott forwarded his recommendation to the top executive over prime-time programming, Meade Cooper. Along with another executive, she canceled Pirro’s show that weekend over fears that the “guests are all going to say the election is being stolen and if she pushes back at all it will be just a token,” according to the filings.

On Nov. 7, Fox projected that Biden had won the election. The elder Murdoch told his son that Fox could have gone first once more, as it had in Arizona; “I think it’s good to be careful,” Lachlan Murdoch responded. “Especially as we are still somewhat exposed on Arizona.”

On Nov. 8, Rupert Murdoch emailed Scott to say that Fox News was “[g]etting creamed” by CNN. Under oath, he later said that he, Scott and Lachlan Murdoch held “a long talk” about “the direction Fox should take” that day in response to the falling ratings. They decided together to give play to Trump’s baseless assertions. “[T]his was big news,” Murdoch said in his deposition. “The President of the United States was making wild claims, but that is news.”

The next day, Scott wrote to Rupert Murdoch that Fox needed to retain “the audience who loves and trusts us. … [W]e need to make sure they know we aren[‘]t abandoning them.” And she wrote to Lachlan Murdoch that the network would “highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

By Nov. 13, Raj Shah, a senior vice president at Fox Corp., was advising Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and Dinh of the “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He said that positive impressions among Fox News viewers “dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”

The next day, Lachlan Murdoch warned Scott that a Fox News anchor’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was “[s]mug and obnoxious”; Scott responded that she was “calling now” to remedy. (Anchor Leland Vittert’s final appearance on Fox was in January 2021; he is now an anchor for the fledgling cable news outlet NewsNation.)

Fox News hosts would play a key role in stoking energy ahead of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, protests that became a bloody siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Warnings from a former House speaker and another corporate director

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, an anti-Trump Republican, sits on Fox Corp.’s board of directors. He said he told the Murdochs “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” And he testified that he advised them that the post-election period represented an inflection point in which Fox could pivot away from its prior support for Trump.

Rupert Murdoch played an integral role in advising his two major U.S. newspapers — the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal — to editorialize against Trump’s false claims. Trump’s campaign lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, were no longer welcome on-air by mid-December.

On Jan. 8, Murdoch told a former executive that “Fox News [is] very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person.”

Fox Corp. board director Anne Dias wrote to the Murdochs on Jan. 11, 2021. “I believe the time has come for Fox News or for you, Lachlan, to take a stance. It is an existential moment for the nation and for Fox News as a brand.”

Rupert advised Lachlan, “Just tell her … Fox News, which called the election correctly, is pivoting as fast as possible. We have to lead our viewers which is [] not as easy as it might seem.”

Behind the scenes, however, Fox News chief executive Scott had been wooing Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, major advertiser and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, according to Dominion’s filing. Scott sent Lindell a personal note and a gift while encouraging Fox shows to book him as a guest to “get ratings.”

On Jan. 26, Tucker Carlson had Lindell on his show. Rupert Murdoch told Dominion’s attorneys he could stop taking money for MyPillow ads, “[B]ut I’m not about to.”

An attorney for Dominion suggested, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

According to the filing, Murdoch agreed.

Karl Baker and Mary Yang contributed to this story.

Washington
CNN
 — 

The Conservative Political Action Conference has been the venue for some of former President Donald Trump’s most dishonest speeches – lengthy, lie-filled addresses in which he has regaled friendly crowds with many of his favorite false claims.

He stuck to tradition in his CPAC speech on Saturday, repeating more than a dozen previously debunked statements. (He also made some dubious new claims we’ll look into.) Here’s a fact check of 12 of his remarks.

Trump and the invasion of Iraq

Trump repeated his years-old claim that he had warned the US not to launch an invasion of Iraq.

He said: “Remember I used to say a long time ago, ‘Don’t go into Iraq. Don’t do it!’ But I was only a civilian, so I didn’t get that much press. I said, ‘Don’t go into Iraq, but if you’re going to do it, keep the oil.’ Do you remember I used to say that all the time? Keep the oil. ‘Don’t do it, but keep the oil.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he warned the US not to invade Iraq is false; the claim was debunked eight years ago. In reality, Trump did not publicly express opposition to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq before it occurred. In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued a military strike on Iraq might be necessary; when radio host Howard Stern asked Trump in September 2002 whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly”; and Trump did not express a firm opinion about the looming war in a Fox interview in January 2003, saying that “either you attack or don’t attack” and that then-President George W. Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”

Trump began criticizing the war in 2003, after the invasion, and also said that year that American troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq. He emerged as an explicit opponent of the war in 2004. You can read more here about his shifting positions.

A CNN search in 2019 turned up no examples of Trump saying anything before the war about keeping Iraq’s oil. Trump’s White House did not respond at the time to our request to provide any such evidence.

Trump and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

Claiming that he was tough on Russia during his presidency, Trump brought up the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project from Russia to Germany and claimed, as he has repeatedly before, that “I ended Nord Stream” and that “I stopped it, it was over.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not “end” Nord Stream or render it “over.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The pipeline was damaged later that year in what has been described as a likely act of sabotage.

The 2020 election

Trump returned to his frequent lies about the 2020 election, saying it was a “rigged election” and that “in 2020, they cheated like dogs.”

Facts First: These Trump claims are false. The election wasn’t rigged and Trump’s opponents didn’t cheat. Joe Biden won fair and square. There was a tiny amount of voter fraud that was nowhere near widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state, let alone to have reversed Biden’s 306-232 victory in the Electoral College. 

Biden and Trump’s indictments

Trump said of Biden: “He indicted me.” He also decried supposed “Stalinist show trials carried out at the Joe Biden orders.”

Facts First: This claim is not supported by any evidence. Grand juries made up of ordinary citizens – in New York, Georgia, Florida and Washington, DC – approved the indictments in each of Trump’s criminal cases. There is no basis for the claim that Biden ordered Trump to be criminally charged or face civil trials.

Trump’s two federal indictments were brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort, much less that Biden personally ordered the indictments; Garland has said he would resign if Biden ever asked him to take action against Trump but was sure that would never happen. And there is no sign that Biden has had any role in bringing charges against Trump in Manhattan or Fulton County, Georgia; those prosecutions have been led by elected local district attorneys.

Trump’s indictments vs. Al Capone’s indictments

Repeating one of his regular campaign claims, Trump said, “I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone,” even though Capone was a notoriously vicious gangster.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Trump has been indicted four times. Capone was indicted at least six times, as A. Brad Schwartz, the co-author of a book on Capone, told CNN.

Also, Schwartz noted: “This isn’t a race, of course, but it may be worth noting that Capone is also way ahead in individual counts (the 1931 Prohibition indictment alone added up to five thousand conspiracy charges).” Trump faces 91 total counts over his two federal indictments and two local indictments.

You can read more about Capone’s indictments here.

Trump and Minneapolis

Reviving a claim he began making in 2020, Trump said that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 – over the opposition of the state’s Democratic governor – during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

“I’ll tell you what: If I didn’t bring in the National Guard – ’cause the governor didn’t want to do it, they’d never want to do it … I wish I didn’t wait six days – but if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, wouldn’t even have a city there. That city was going down,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false – and a complete reversal of reality. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

Trump and the border wall

Touting the wall construction on the border with Mexico during his presidency, Trump said, “We built 571 miles of border wall.”

Facts First: Trump’s “571 miles” claim is false, an even greater exaggeration than the inaccurate “561 miles” and “over 500 miles” claims he has made in the past. An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office and subsequently obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said the total number built under Trump was 458 miles (including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers). Trump has sometimes put the figure, more correctly, at “nearly 500 miles.”

Trump and the word ‘caravans’

Speaking about immigration, Trump referred to migrant caravans – then repeated his common campaign claim that he had personally coined the phrase “caravans”: “That was another name I came up with. I come up with good names.”

Facts First: Trump did not come up with the word “caravan,” either in general or to describe groups of migrants traveling together toward the US border during his presidency.

Trump first publicly used a variation of the word as president in a tweet on April 1, 2018 (he wrote, in a tweet about immigration, “’caravans’ coming”). But the word had been used by various others in the same context in the days and weeks prior, including in a BuzzFeed News feature article, two days prior to Trump’s tweet, that was headlined, “A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Dares To Stop Them.”

Merriam-Webster says the word caravan “came to English in the late 16th century, from the Italian caravana, which itself came from the Persian kārvān.”

Trump and ISIS

Trump claimed, as he has on numerous previous occasions, that although he was told it would take “four years” to defeat the ISIS terror group, “I knocked it out in four weeks.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “four weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he suggested later in the speech, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said, “I knocked it out” with no caveats or credit to anyone else: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Electric cars

Trump deployed his familiar criticism of Biden on environmental policy, saying, “All- electric cars. The all-electric mandate. Everybody has to have an electric car.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden has not mandated that “everybody has to have an electric car,” though his administration has made an aggressive push to try to get automakers and consumers to move toward electric vehicles.

The Biden administration has proposed ambitious new tailpipe emissions regulations for automakers, offered tax credits to people who buy certain electric vehicles, invested in new electric vehicle charging stations and ordered federal entities to purchase electric vehicles, among other policies promoting the adoption of these vehicles. But there is no Biden requirement that “everybody” has to drive an electric vehicle.

Depending on how automakers were to respond, the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed new tailpipe rules could, if adopted, require electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032.

The trade deficit

Returning to his criticism of US trade agreements with various countries, Trump said, “And then you wonder why we have a $2 trillion deficit. If you look at it now, it’s gotten to a level that nobody can even believe; it’s so bad under Biden.”

Facts First: Trump’s “$2 trillion” claim is false, a massive exaggeration. The US has never had a $2 trillion annual trade deficit and does not have one under Biden. The overall deficit, which includes trade in both goods and services, was about $773 billion in 2023, down from a record high of about $951 billion in 2022.

China’s oil purchases from Iran

Trump repeated a story about China and Iran that has become a staple of his campaign speeches. He claimed that, as president, he had threatened that he would cut off all US business with China if China bought even “one barrel of oil from Iran.”

He continued: “And President Xi – I told him this – said, ‘All right, well, we won’t do it. We won’t do it.’ They didn’t buy. By the way, they’re buying billions and billion worth of oil right now. But China didn’t buy.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that China “didn’t buy” oil from Iran is false. 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. “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.

China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and also none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports actually ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran. Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”

Again, Haslam and his co-authors quoted Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally:

Together, we will drain the Washington swamp, and we will clean up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We have done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy. It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there.

Critically, the 12 scholars wrote, Trump “did not provide them with explicit instructions as to what to do,” noting that “he didn’t tell anyone to storm the barricades, to invade the speaker’s office or to assault police and security guards.” Instead, he “invoked values of strength, determination and a willingness to fight for justice (using the word “fight” 20 times) without indicating who they should fight or how,” setting a goal for his followers “to ensure that the election results were not certified and thereby to ‘stop the steal’ without specifying how that goal should be achieved.”

For Trump supporters, they continued,

far from being a day of shame and infamy, this was a day of vindication, empowerment and glory. The reason for this was that they had been able to play a meaningful role in enacting a shared social identity and to do so in ways that allowed them to translate their leader’s stirring analysis and vision into material reality.

Leaders gain influence, Haslam and his collaborators argued,

by defining parameters of action in ways that frame the agency of their followers but leave space for creativity in how collective goals are accomplished. Followers in turn exhibit their loyalty and attachment to the leader by striving to be effective in advancing these goals, thereby empowering and giving agency to the leader.

In the case of Jan. 6, 2021, they wrote:

Donald Trump’s exhortations to his supporters that they should “fight” to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election was followed by an attack on the United States Capitol. We argue that it is Trump’s willing participation in this mutual process of identity enactment, rather than any instructions contained in his speech, that should be the basis for assessing his influence on, and responsibility for, the assault.

In conclusion, they argued:

it is important to recognize that Trump was no puppet master and that his followers were far more than puppets. Instead, he was the unifier, activator and enabler of his followers during the dark events of Jan. 6, 2021. As such, rather than eclipsing or sublimating their agency, he framed and unleashed it.

The power of Trump’s speech, they contended,

lay in its provision of a “moral” framework that impelled his audience to do work creatively to “stop the steal” — fueling a dynamic which ultimately led to insurrection. The absence of a point at which Trump instructed his supporters to assault Capitol Hill makes the assault on Capitol Hill no less his responsibility. The crimes that followers commit in the name of the group are necessarily crimes of leadership too.

On Jan. 7, 2021, a full 30 hours after the assault on the Capitol began, Trump condemned the assault in videotaped remarks. “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” he said. He added, “To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

During a CNN town hall in May, however, Trump called Jan. 6 “a beautiful day” and declared that he was “inclined to pardon” many of the rioters.

In a January paper, “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argued that Trump has unleashed profoundly antidemocratic forces within not only Republican ranks but also among a segment of independent voters:

The most confirmed Republican denialists believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one. Among independents, the most confirmed denialists are Christian nationalists who resent what they view as the favored position of racial minorities.

Stewart continues:

The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.

It remains unknown whether Trump will be charged in connection with his refusal to abide by all of the legal requirements of democratic electoral competition. Even so, no indictment could capture the enormity of the damage Trump has inflicted on the American body politic with his bad faith, grifting and fundamentally amoral character.