President Donald Trump spoke quickly in a prime-time address to the nation on December 17, but although brief, his message included a number of inaccurate or misleading claims, many of which he has repeated in public speeches for months.
Trump cited several items, such as cars and airline tickets, that he claimed saw price increases under former President Joe Biden and price decreases during his own presidency. We found support for some of Trump's statistics, but not for others, such as the price of Thanksgiving turkeys.
The president made the misleading claim that “for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.” Year-over-year wages have been rising faster than inflation since June 2023, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump falsely claimed that inflation when he took office was the “worst… in our country’s history” and that it had now “stopped.” Inflation was never the “worst” under Biden, and it was 3% in the 12 months ending in January. It rose 2.7% in the 12-month period ending in November.
He said, “Gasoline is now below $2.50 a gallon, and in much of the country, in some states, by the way, it just dropped to $1.99 a gallon.” The national average price was $2.90 a gallon the week of December 15, and the lowest state average was $2.34 in Oklahoma.
Trump claimed that, due to the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year.” The Tax Policy Center estimated the average tax cut would be $800. Only households in the top 1% of income earners would see an average tax reduction of the amount Trump claimed.
When discussing immigrants, Trump’s estimate that the United States was “invaded by an army of 25 million people” is grossly inflated; his claim that many of them came from “prisons and jails and mental hospitals and asylums” is unsupported; and his claim that the Biden administration allowed “11,888 murderers” to enter the country is incorrect.
The president made the mathematically impossible claim that he was able to "reduce the prices of medicines and pharmaceutical products by up to 400, 500 and even 600%."
In his prime-time address, Trump spoke rapidly, at twice the pace of his State of the Union speech, according to a PBS News correspondent. The focus was primarily on the economy and “affordability.”
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Pricing
The president blamed his predecessor for “raising prices and everything to levels never seen before,” but said he is “bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.”
“Under the Biden administration,” he said, “car prices went up 22%,” “gasoline went up 30 to 50%,” “hotel rates went up 37%,” and “airfares went up 31%.” He continued, “Now, under our leadership, they are all coming down, and coming down fast.” He also said that “Democratic politicians made the cost of groceries skyrocket, but we are fixing that too.” He added that “the price of a Thanksgiving turkey is down 33% compared to last year under Biden” and claimed that “the price of eggs is down 82% since March.”
We found support for some of their figures, but not for others.
The White House told us that the data on car, hotel, airfare, and gasoline prices came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but was not more specific. We reviewed seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index (CPI) data, which did show price increases under Biden and, for the most part, price decreases so far under Trump.
The cost-to-income ratio (CPI) for new vehicles rose about 19% during Biden's four years in office, but has increased only slightly, by 0.2%, under Trump from January to November, according to the most recent BLS figures. Meanwhile, the CPI for airfares rose nearly 32% under Biden and has decreased by more than 9% under Trump. Similarly, the CPI for lodging away from home, including hotels and motels, rose more than 33% under Biden and has fallen by approximately 5% under Trump. Finally, the CPI for gasoline, including all types, grew by 34.5% under Biden and has decreased by about 4.6% under Trump.
The BLS also publishes average monthly price data for regular unleaded gasoline. The most recent figures, which are not seasonally adjusted, show a 38% increase under Biden (from about $2.33 to $3.21) and a much smaller increase of about 0.6% under Trump (from $3.21 to nearly $3.23). But those figures differ from the most recent weekly data published by the Energy Information Administration, which shows that the average price of regular gasoline rose nearly 31% under Biden (from $2.38 to $3.11 per gallon) and fell nearly 7% under Trump (from $3.11 to $2.90, as of December 15).
The origin of Trump’s claim that turkey prices were down 33% for Thanksgiving is even less clear, as the White House provided no indication of where the president got that figure. In a November 19 statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation said the average price of a 16-pound frozen turkey was down from the previous year, but only by 16%. The group attributed the decline to grocery stores offering Thanksgiving specials, “attempting to lure consumer demand back into turkey, which led to lower retail prices for the festive bird.” The wholesale prices retailers paid for fresh turkeys were up from the previous year, the federation said.
As for eggs, in November, the average retail price for a dozen Grade A white eggs was $2.86, down about 42% from $4.95 in January, according to the most recent BLS data. Trump was likely referring to wholesale egg prices as of December 12, which had fallen 82% from a peak of $8.17 in March, but wholesale prices are not what consumers pay in stores. Egg prices spiked in 2024 after an avian influenza outbreak led to shortages. When cases began to decline, so did wholesale prices, eventually leading to lower retail prices.
Overall, grocery prices, according to the CPI for “household food”, increased by about 1.17% from January to November, and by about 1.9% since November 2024.
Salaries
“Real” wages, that is, wages adjusted for inflation, have risen since Trump took office in January, and declined throughout Biden’s term. But Trump made the misleading claim that “for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.”
Year-over-year wages have been increasing faster than inflation since June 2023, according to BLS figures.
As we have written before, average weekly earnings for all private-sector workers increased by 16.7% during Biden’s four years in office, but inflation rose even faster. “Real” weekly earnings fell by 4%; for production and non-supervisory workers, the decline was 2%. Inflation hit wage increases hardest in the first half of Biden’s presidency, particularly in 2022. In the 12 months ending in January 2025, Biden’s final year in office, average real weekly earnings increased by 0.6%.
Under Trump, since January, those average real earnings have increased faster; they have risen 1.6%.
“It is still the case that both at the end of the Biden administration and at the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is, inflation has risen more slowly than wages,” Gary Burtless, senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a telephone interview. Burtless said that, based on his reading of various wage measures, “the changes have not been terribly abrupt with the transition from the Biden to the Trump administration.”
Trump referred to a loss of real wages under Biden and wage gains in certain industries since January. A White House spokesperson told us that these figures refer to “annualized growth” using real wage data from the BLS, but we were unable to replicate the figures. For the industries Trump mentioned, since January, average weekly real earnings in manufacturing and construction have increased by 1.7% each; mining and logging saw a 1% increase.
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Inflation
At the beginning of his remarks, Trump said, “Eleven months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it. When I took office, inflation was the worst it had been in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” He later added, “Inflation has stopped.”
Inflation wasn't "the worst... in our country's history" when Trump returned to the White House in January. As we wrote earlier, during Biden's presidency, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 9.1% in the 12 months ending June 2022, which the BLS said was the largest increase in more than 40 years. But annual inflation growth moderated to just under 3% in the last six months of 2024. The United States experienced its worst year-over-year inflation increase since World War I, when it rose 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920, and it was higher than the peak during Biden's presidency at other times in the country's history.
Inflation has not “stopped” either, as Trump claimed. The BLS reported on December 18, the morning after Trump’s speech, that the CPI rose 2.7% in the 12 months ending in November. (The BLS did not collect October data during the government shutdown and did not begin collecting November data until the 14th of that month.)
Petrol
Returning to one of his favorite measures of economic success, Trump claimed, “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon, and in much of the country—in some states, by the way—it just got down to $1.99 a gallon.” Retail gasoline prices are lower than the national average of $3.11 per gallon of regular gasoline when Trump took office, as we have written. But Trump exaggerated the current average price. It was $2.90 per gallon the week of December 15, according to the Energy Information Administration.
He also exaggerated when he said that “in some states” the price “had just reached $1.99 a gallon.” According to data published by AAA, there were no states where the average price was $1.99 per gallon as of December 18. The lowest state average was $2.34 in Oklahoma. (We found some individual stations in some states selling gas for $1.99 or less using GasBuddy, a site that provides price information for more than 150,000 stations.)
OBBBA tax cuts
Trump called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act he signed in July “perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed by Congress” and highlighted provisions that include “no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, and no taxes on Social Security for our great senior citizens.” (As we’ve said, fewer seniors would pay taxes on Social Security benefits, but millions of Americans would still have to pay.)
Trump claimed that because of the tax cuts in the law, “many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year, and next spring is projected to be the biggest tax refund season of all time.” An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the average tax cut in 2025 resulting from the legislation is $800.
Trump addresses the nation from the Diplomatic Room of the White House on December 17. Photo by Doug Mills – Pool/Getty Images.
“I don’t know what Trump means by ‘many,’ but the only income group that receives an average tax cut that even exceeds $9,000 is the top 1%, who earn $1.1 million a year or more,” Howard Gleckman, a nonresident research fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us via email.
When the White House's own Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) analyzed a Senate-backed version of the bill in June, it estimated that within four years, the potential increase in disposable income for a typical family with two children would be between $7,600 and $10,900. But as we wrote then, the CEA's estimate was based on the assumption that real, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product would grow by more than 4 percent each year, at least for the first four years under the law. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group, called those assumptions "fanciful growth assumptions" that are "many times higher" than the estimates of other independent analysts who have modeled versions of the bill.
Immigrants
Trump repeated several inflated, unsupported, or misleading claims about immigrants who came to the United States during Biden's presidency.
“Our border was open, and that’s why our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many of whom came from prisons and jails and mental hospitals and asylums,” Trump said. “They were drug dealers, gang members, and even 11,888 murderers, more than 50% of whom killed more than one person. This is what the Biden administration allowed to happen to our country, and it can never be allowed to happen again.”
Trump's estimate that 25 million unauthorized immigrants entered the United States during Biden's presidency is far too high. We calculated in June 2024 that the figure would be roughly one-third of that, including an estimated 2 million people who evaded Border Patrol apprehension and about 3 million people released with summonses to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2023 there were 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” residing in the United States, including those with some form of protection from deportation, such as parole or those who have applied for asylum. This represents almost 4 million more than the Pew Research Center’s 2019 estimate of 10.2 million.
Trump also repeated—as he does in virtually every speech—his unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants who came to the United States during the Biden administration were released from “prisons and jails and mental hospitals and asylums.” Trump has never provided credible evidence of this.
Finally, Trump’s claim that “11,888 murderers” were “allowed” in the country during the Biden administration is misleading. As we have written, there were roughly that number of non-citizens who had been convicted of murder but were not in ICE custody as of September 2024—a list known as the agency’s non-detained registry.
But the “vast majority” of them entered the country before the Biden administration, and their custody status was determined “well before this administration,” the Department of Homeland Security told us in September 2024, noting that many were in prison. Furthermore, the non-citizens include people who entered the country legally, such as permanent residents. Some of them may also have been deported. We do not know the source of Trump’s claim that “more than 50%” of those on the list “killed more than one person.”
Drug prices
Trump made the mathematically impossible claim that he was able to “cut drug and pharmaceutical prices by as much as 400, 500, and even 600 percent” by negotiating “with the pharmaceutical companies and foreign nations that had taken advantage of our country for many decades.” Of course, reductions of that magnitude would suggest that pharmaceutical companies were paying consumers to take their products, rather than the other way around.
In a May press conference about drug prices, Trump made comparisons similar to his claims of price drops of 400% to 600%. At the time, Trump selectively presented data, stating that drug prices were higher in the United States than in other countries, sometimes by “a factor of five, six, seven, eight times… there are even cases of 10 times more.”
Andrew W. Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, a global public policy research organization based in California, told us at the time that it was “broadly correct” to say that the United States has higher drug prices than other countries, and that “you can find examples of five, six, seven, or eight times higher” for individual medications. But, on average, prices in the United States were 2.78 times higher compared with 33 other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to a RAND report based on 2022 data. The average price was 4.22 times higher for brand-name drugs, which account for 10% of prescriptions filled in the United States.
Other repetitions
Eight wars “resolved”. As is his custom, Trump claimed to have “resolved eight wars in 10 months.” As we have written, international relations experts said the president has played a significant role in ending fighting in five conflicts, although officials from one country (India) dispute Trump’s claim. But some of the international disagreements Trump mentions have not been wars, and some standoffs are not over.
Living place. While promoting his housing reform plans and criticizing Biden’s immigration policies, Trump also said, “A major factor in the rise in housing costs was the colossal border invasion.” Vice President JD Vance made a similar misleading claim about the cause of rising housing prices during Biden’s presidency, as we have written. Immigration does affect housing prices by increasing demand, but economists told us that the primary causes of rising prices in recent years were low mortgage interest rates that fueled demand, the subsequent rise in interest rates, and the low housing supply that dates back to the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Undocumented immigrants are also more likely to rent than to buy, according to experts.
Electricity. The president said, “Electricity costs increased between 30 and 100 percent under Biden… On day one, I declared a national energy emergency.” Electricity costs did increase by 30 percent—not 100 percent—during Biden’s presidency, according to the CPI Electricity Index. But electricity costs continued to rise under Trump from January to November, increasing by 6.8 percent, BLS data shows.
Job. Trump again claimed that “more people are working today than at any other time in American history.” That’s true, but it doesn’t mean much, as we’ve written. The BLS reported that there were nearly 160 million total nonfarm workers in November, the highest number of workers on record. But the United States also has its largest population ever.
“In November, both the labor force participation rate (62.5%) and the employment-to-population ratio (59.6%) changed little from September. These measures showed little or no change during the year,” the BLS reported on December 16. (The labor force participation rate is the percentage of the total population age 16 and over that is employed or actively seeking work.)
Investments. In his prime-time address, Trump said, “I have already secured a record $18 trillion in investments in the United States” through his tariff policy. But a White House website that purports to track “Total U.S. and Foreign Investments” since Trump returned to office reports roughly half that figure, $9.6 trillion, so far.
Experts say even that figure is questionable because it includes promises and planned investments that may not materialize. “[T]hey are really just promises—and often pretty vague ones,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics at the Cato Institute, in an April analysis of Trump’s investment claims.
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