President Donald Trump's claims on Ukraine aid and the economy are completely wrong, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale told anchor Phil Mattingly following the president's joint news conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The news conference had several standout moments, including Trump backtracking on his claim Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a "dictator," and mistakenly referring to Starmer as the Prime Minister of "Great Britain and Ireland" in an informational email update.
"What stood out to you?" asked Mattingly.
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"It wasn't the barrage of false claims we had at the president's cabinet meeting yesterday," said Dale, a frequent analyst of Trump's fabrications. However, he added, there are "two significant things to fact-check nonetheless."
"First of all, the president keeps using a fictional figure for how much aid the U.S. has provided to Ukraine during this war," said Dale. "He said today, it's $300 billion to $350 billion. Simply not true. A European think tank that closely studies this issue puts it at about $125 billion. The U.S. government has used a higher figure, as high as $185 billion, but still nowhere close to what the president says."
The other claim relates to tariffs, which experts often sparred with Trump over.
"He was asked about his claim earlier today that it's foreign countries, not Americans, who paid tariffs, and he stood by it," said Dale. "He said that, you know, in the first term he put tariffs on China, took in hundreds of billions of dollars. Study after study, including one from a bipartisan United States government commission, found that it is Americans who paid those tariffs, and it is American importers who literally make the tariff payments. So importers in this country make the payments and very often pass on those costs to American consumers."
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