Ten Trump Lies – and where they came from

In actuality, according to data compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German-based research organisation which tracks support for Ukraine, Europe has actually contributed more in total than the US. So far Europe (defined as the EU member states plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and the UK) have so far delivered $138 billion in support to Ukraine while the US has contributed $119 billion.

The specific origin-point for the $350bn figure Trump is using remains murky. Even including additional money allocated by Congress but not delivered, the figure doesn’t even come close to half the claimed figure – though obviously Trump may simply not care. Some suggest it may have been a simple mis-reading of the first authorization by President Biden of $350 million in military assistance in February 2022 following Russia’s invasion. 

But some digging suggests Trump might actually mean something else here – that he may not be talking about direct support contributions to Ukraine at all. In February, at the Russia-US summit in Riyadh, one of Russia’s three representatives was a man named Kirill Dmitriev, the Harvard-educated head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs with longstanding ties to the Trump political sphere.

Reporting on the summit, The New York Times mentioned at the time that Dmitriev had presented the Trump team with an economic document which quoted an estimated “opportunity cost” figure – ie, the estimate of profits missed out on by US businesses withdrawing from Russia after the start of the war. That figure was $324bn. It seems most likely that in leaning on the $350bn number that Trump here, simply and plainly, was quoting and continues to quote a talking-point given directly to him by the Kremlin. And I think this thesis is supported by:

Lie: President Zelenskyy’s approval rating is 4%

On February 18th in an address from his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump said he believed Ukraine should hold new elections, questioning the legitimacy of Zelenskyy as a leader. “We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, we have martial law in Ukraine where the leader in Ukraine I mean I hate to say it but he’s down at 4% approval rating,” he said.

Trump’s approval rating is currently 46% in the most recent Gallop poll, 44% in the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, and 47.6% in the most recent ABC News poll. President Zelenskyy’s approval rating as of the beginning of this year was 52% positive, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, but jumped to 67% following his Oval Office confrontation with Trump.

The 4% figure is hard to track down, and most people shrugged it off as just Trump being Trump. But there is evidence that suggests it is actually a reference to an online poll posted on Telegram by Oleksandr Dubinsky, a Ukrainian politician and former member of Zelenskyy’s cabinet who was expelled from the party after being investigated for tax evasion in 2021, then charged with treason in November 2023 as a Russian intelligence asset. 

In the Telegram poll, Dubinsky asked if they would vote for Zelenskyy, or “a mop” – and just under 4 percent of them clicked Zelenskyy. This “poll” was circulated widely among pro-Russian Telegram accounts, making its way to Kremlin propaganda outlets by the following day – which was February 18; the day of the US-Russia summit where Dmitriev presented the “opportunity cost” document to the Trump team in Riyadh.

Lie: Millions of dead people are receiving fraudulent Social Security cheques

In his Joint Address to Congress, Trump said that “millions” of senior citizens over 100 – including 1.3 million people over 150 and 130,000 people over 160, several hundred over 220 and “one listed at 360 years old” – were receiving Social Security money. This is based on “fraud” that Elon Musk and DOGE have claimed to find, but it is based on a misreading of minor and long-standing problems with updating the Social Security Administration’s creaking databases. 

Musk’s more specific regular claim that “150-year-olds” are claiming benefits makes it clear that these are the result of a programming error caused by the fact that the SSA’s system was written in a 60-year-old language called COBOL. With COBOL, a dataset will default to a reference date in 1875, which means that any entry where a birth date is missing or incomplete would default to an age of… 150. Musk either doesn’t understand COBOL or, much more likely, doesn’t care.

Lie: USAID spent $50m sending condoms to Gaza

At a press conference in January, Trump said that his administration had “stopped $50m being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” The claim was first made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt to justify the freezing of USAID funds by Musk’s DOGE. Fox News’s Jesse Watters went further, claiming that the condoms were used by Hamas to make balloons to float bombs over Israel.

Aside from being preposterous, the truth behind this claim is most likely the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation, which has recieved $83m in grant funding for projects on reproductive health in Mozambique. It operates in two provinces there: one called Inhambane, and the other called… Gaza.

Lie: The US government funded “transgender surgery” on mice

In one of the more bizarre moments in Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress in March, the president said that the governments “spent millions making mice transgender.” He later doubled down on Fox News saying the government was funding “transgender surgery on mice.”

A list of studies released by the White House to attempt to back up this claim listed a study which involved the cross-insertion of DNA from one set of mice to another as part of research into cancer treatments. That is a process called “transgenic,” and it seems clear that this came up in a word search and was mistaken – either wilfully or stupidly – to mean transgender.

Lie: California is refusing to release water which could be used to fight wildfires

With several fires ravaging the area surrounding Los Angeles, Trump, who has suggested that he might withhold federal disaster management funds from states like California if they refuse to follow his executive policies on mass deportations, said that Governor Gavin Newsom could “release the water that comes from north” to fight the fires if he wanted to. “There is massive amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water that comes due with the snow, comes down when it melts,” Trump said.

This appears to have come originally from news reports the President engaged with on Twitter that some fire hydrants in LA ran dry during the fire-fighting efforts.

Staffers at Musk’s DOGE flew to California for a stunt, ordering the US Army Corps to turn on a major pump system to release 2.2 billion gallons of fresh water from reservoirs in central California, flooding parts of the San Joaquin valley and wasting water that will be desperately needed by farmers in the summer dry season.

Lie: Politico is funded by USAID to the tune of billions

In February, Trump went on Truth Social with a rant amplifying a viral claim circulating in the right-wing mediasphere that the Politico was receiving large payments from USAID, part of the reasoning given for gutting the aid agency.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” he posted. Musk also boosted the claims, and radio host Dana Loesch called for protests outside the Politico office.

Politico did receive payments from the government totalling $8.2 milllion. But these weren’t “payoffs” – they were government-wide subscriptions to products, including Politico Pro, which includes a suite of data analysis tools, across all government agencies and employees, and other databases and news subscription products by Politico’s parent company, Axel Springer. Only $44,000 of that came from USAID, in subscriptions to E&E News, a subsidiary focused on environment and energy news. 

Lie: Fentanyl is pouring into the US from Canada

Trump said on January 21 that “the fentanyl coming through Canada is massive,” a lie he has repeated often as justification for imposing tariffs on Canadian goods. In his joint address to Congress he doubled down further, saying “they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people, destroying families. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

In fact, just 20 kilograms of fentanyl was seized at the US’s northern border in the past year, a minescule amount, and a 2022 Congressional report concluded Canada was not a concern for fentanyl trafficking. Trafficking of the synthetic opioid from Mexico, another target for Trump’s punitive economic measures, is more significant – almost 10,000 kilograms was intercepted at the Southern border in the same time period. It is worth mentioning that 90 percent of convictions for trafficking offences were of American citizens, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lie: 38,000 Americans died during the building of the Panama Canal

Trump has targeted Panama in what appears to be an effort to retake control of the canal, a key shipping shortcut completed in 1914. Trump regularly claims that the Carter administration “foolishly” gave it away when they relinquished control of the canal in a treaty with Panama in 1978. 

“The biggest project we’ve ever built in this country, dollar wise and every other way, 38,000 people died, Americans, all men just about, laborers and construction people that went to Panama,” Trump said in the Oval Office in February.

Records show that 5,600 people died during the American phase of the construction of the canal, but the vast majority were workers from Barbados and Jamaica. Thousands more died during the earlier French-controlled construction phase, but in total only around 350 white Americans died during the ten-year construction of the canal. Most likely Trump has heard the number of total workers on the canal – around 40,000 – and switched that in as deaths.

Lie: More Americans believe the US is headed in the right direction than before

In his joint address to Congress, Trump said that “now, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. In fact, it’s an astonishing record 27-point swing since Election Day alone.”

There is only one source this can have come from – a poll by Rasmussen, a well-known right-leaning pollster beloved by Fox News – which showed 47% response to “the right track.” Some more relevant polls did show reasonably positive results – notably 45 percent by NBC/Marist/PBS – but these are results that have been seen before.