In a lengthy “60 Minutes” interview, President Donald Trump made false and questionable claims about nuclear weapons testing, inflation, and military strikes in the Caribbean Sea. He also repeated numerous misleading claims he has made before on a range of topics.
- Trump justified telling the Pentagon “to start testing” U.S. nuclear weapons by saying that “other countries are testing.” Russia recently tested two nuclear-capable weapons, but North Korea is the only country to do a nuclear weapon test explosion this century.
- Trump falsely claimed, “We don’t have inflation. It’s at 2%.” The Consumer Price Index was up 3% for the 12 months ending in September, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- He also wrongly said that grocery prices are “going down.” The CPI for “food-at-home” increased by 1.4% from January to September.
- Trump claimed that every boat the U.S. military has blown up in the Caribbean Sea since early September “kills 25,000 Americans” with illegal drugs. With nine boat strikes, that would be well over the total U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2023 and 2024. The administration hasn’t provided details on the boats’ cargo.
- In talking about the reasons for the boat strikes, Trump repeated his unsupported claim that Venezuela emptied “their prisons” and “mental institutions” into the U.S. through illegal immigration. Experts, including in Venezuela, told us there’s no evidence for that.
The president touched on the Insurrection Act, ending wars, federal indictments, the autopen, aid to Ukraine, and the 2020 election in making claims we have written about before.
CBS News posted an extended version of correspondent Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Trump that ran over an hour. A shorter version of the program aired on Nov. 2. The full transcript is also available.
