In a nearly two-hour speech at the first Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump promised to pay Americans if Republicans won, and he repeatedly said communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, among other familiar claims.
- Trump said every adult citizen would get a “dividend” of $5,000 if Republicans won the House and Senate. He suggested his tariff policies would pay for that, but it would take more than six years for tariffs to cover the $1.2 trillion price tag.
- Democratic socialists are not the same as communists, despite Trump conflating the two and warning that Congress could be “controlled by a communist caucus.” Democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.
- The president repeated the unsupported claim that an unprecedented $20 trillion has been invested in the U.S. from “outside countries and companies.” Trump’s number is nearly double the figure provided by the White House, whose number is itself speculative and dubious.
- He made false and misleading claims about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax reduction. It wasn’t the “largest” tax cut in history. Trump said Democrats voted against no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, but the lawmakers’ opposition stemmed from the tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in Medicaid spending to pay for the legislation.
- Trump twisted the facts in order to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of a woman on train in 2025.
- Trump boasted that more people are working than ever before “by a lot.” About 800,000 more people are working now than in January 2025, but that is largely because the population has also grown. When factoring that in, the labor market is doing slightly worse than when Trump started.
- He falsely claimed that “food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.” With some exceptions, prices have gone up, rising even faster than during the latter part of the Biden administration.
- The president claimed that Americans now “pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” thanks to his policies. There’s no evidence that’s the case.
- Trump made several exaggerated or misleading claims related to immigration. Though the number is low, he wrongly claimed that “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.” He claimed 25 million immigrants poured into the country illegally during the Biden administration. That’s vastly inflated. And he wrongly claimed the Biden administration “allowed” in 11,888 murderers.
- He again falsely suggested that the U.S. became the world leader in oil and gas production during the current administration.
- Trump sought to link Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a 2019 remark by left-wing commentator Hasan Piker that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed has specifically disavowed those comments.
- The president claimed children “born into poverty or families with very little money … will be potentially rich when they turn 18 or 21” due to the new, so-called Trump accounts. Financial experts say it’s unlikely poor parents could contribute enough to such accounts to make that happen.
Trump gave the keynote speech on the first of the two-night convention, which he held to encourage Republican voters. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner,” he said.
The president continued to push the falsehood that he “won the presidency three times,” claiming that “numerous people on the other side are actually admitting it.” Trump lost the 2020 election, and some of his own aides in his first term told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless.
