Trump’s Inaccurate Anecdote on ‘Right to Repair’ Cars

President Donald Trump waded into the contentious “right to repair” your own auto debate, but he recounted a wildly inaccurate anecdote to bolster his support for consumers.

According to Trump, in remarks on June 4, “They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.”

The following day, at a roundtable on agriculture in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the president again referenced the case.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail,” Trump said. “You know that? Do you know I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to 7 years in jail for getting caught fixing his car or truck? I said — I like to always say, ‘What did he do?’ ‘Sir, he was fixing his truck.’ I said, ‘How long is he getting?’ ‘Seven years.’ I said, ‘Say it again.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard — like two weeks ago. I gave him a pardon because he had to go to jail for fixing his tractor or his truck. Can you believe it?”

The White House did not respond to our request for backup, but Trump appears to be referring to his Nov. 7 pardon of Troy Lake, a Wyoming diesel mechanic who served seven months of a one-year sentence — not seven years — after pleading guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by disabling emissions monitoring systems on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks. (No other pardon in Trump’s second term fits the description.)

'TELL IT LIKE IT IS' FactChecking Trump’s Contentious ‘Meet the Press’ Interview

President Donald Trump walked out of a sit-down interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” That happened after he made, or repeated, a number of false and unsupported claims — some of which Welker pushed back on.

• Trump seized on the slow vote-counting procedures in California to claim, without evidence, that its recent primary election was “rigged.”
• The president falsely claimed that he “didn’t guarantee” that he’d keep the U.S. out of “new wars” in his second term. There are several examples of him making such a promise in 2024.
• He claimed that Iran was “very close to having a nuclear weapon” under a multilateral agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration and wrongly said the country “got all of this uranium during Obama.” Arms control experts say Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.
• The president also said that if he didn’t launch airstrikes against Iran in June 2025, the country would “right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.” That assessment is at odds with reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which said in March 2025 that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”
• He provided no support for his claim that Jan. 6 rioters were “ushered into” the Capitol by “FBI agents.” A 2024 watchdog report said that FBI agents arrived to assist law enforcement after rioters had already broken into the Capitol.
• Trump repeated other claims we’ve written about before regarding gasoline prices, the economy during his presidency, and factory construction.

The interview was recorded on June 5 and aired two days later.

Trump’s Push to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Legislative efforts to make daylight saving time permanent year-round received a boost from President Donald Trump, who criticized the twice-yearly clock-switching as cost-prohibitive.

But there is no strong evidence that Trump’s solution — switching permanently to daylight saving time — would provide the economic boost Trump suggests it would.

The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent year-round unless states opt out, was folded into a motor vehicle safety bill that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21 with a 48-1 vote.

Shortly after, Trump posted his support on Truth Social.

“This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks. Many of these Clocks are located in Towers, and the cost of renting, or using, Heavy Equipment to do this twice a year is prohibitive!” Trump wrote.

Trump Misrepresents Climate Change Scenarios

In a May 16 Truth Social post, President Donald Trump cited updated climate change scenarios to misleadingly claim that experts had “admitted” prior climate change projections were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” The regularly scheduled revision reflects, in part, the progress the world has made on moving away from fossil fuels.

Trump was reacting to a new set of seven scenarios of emissions by the end of the century, proposed in an April 7 paper by an international group of scientists. Over time, the range of plausible scenarios has narrowed. The most pessimistic scenario now shows lower emissions than 15 years ago, when the prior scenarios were developed, while the most optimistic one now shows higher emissions.

Trump, however, used the update to cast doubt on the reality and seriousness of global warming. “GOOD RIDDANCE!” he wrote. “After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

RCP8.5 was the most pessimistic of four scenarios that were selected in 2007 and described in 2011. The scenarios looked at how much the climate might change by 2100, relative to the industrial revolution.