President Donald Trump made a sequence of false claims at his Monday press conference about the war with Iran, throughout which his remarks strayed into different foreign policy points.
Trump additionally made a number of uncorroborated claims that may’t be definitively fact-checked, equivalent to an assertion that each dwelling former president is now saying “to their friends” that the US ought to have attacked Iran way back. Here’s a rundown on a few of his checkable remarks.
Trump’s e book and Osama bin Laden: Trump repeated his long-debunked lie that he wrote in a 2000 e book that the authorities wanted to kill Osama bin Laden.
After Trump accurately famous that the US killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani on his orders in 2020, Trump added, “I did one other, but this one was not picked up: Osama bin Laden. If you read my book, I said, ‘You got to take him out’ – one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book.”
In actuality, the e book didn’t supply any recommendation about the right way to cope with bin Laden, not to mention do something about bin Laden; it talked about bin Laden just once in passing. The terrorist was killed by US forces in a 2011 raid ordered by then-President Barack Obama greater than 5 years earlier than Trump took workplace.
Iran and US planes: After noting that US ally Kuwait accidentally shot down three US planes earlier in the Iran war, Trump stated, “The only planes, really, that we lost were – friendly fire, they call it.” But the focus of this very press convention was the rescue of two airmen whose F-15 fighter aircraft was shot down by Iran final week, as Trump stated himself in his remarks. In addition, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine confirmed throughout the press convention that, throughout the rescue effort, the US additionally misplaced an A-10 Thunderbolt II shut air help aircraft after it was hit by Iranian fire and the pilot ejected. And Iran destroyed a US E-3 Sentry early warning and control (AWACS) plane in a strike on a base in Saudi Arabia. (This will not be meant as a complete listing of planes misplaced throughout the war for causes apart from pleasant fireplace.)
Trump and wars: Trump repeated his acquainted false declare that “I’ve ended eight wars.” As we’ve repeatedly noted, his listing contains two conditions that had been by no means really wars (a diplomatic dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia and a thriller state of affairs between Serbia and Kosovo) and not less than one war that didn’t really finish (involving Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Maduro and prisoners: Trump claimed, as he has on quite a few earlier events, that ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had “released hundreds of thousands of people from jails into our country” throughout his tenure as chief. Trump and his aides have by no means substantiated this declare, and specialists on Venezuela beforehand told NCS and different retailers that they knew of no foundation for it.
The US army in South Korea: Trump once more exaggerated the US army presence in South Korea, saying that “we have 45,000 soldiers in South Korea” and then repeating the “45,000” determine shortly after. According to public Defense Department data, there have been 26,722 US army personnel in South Korea as of December 31, 2025, together with 23,495 on energetic obligation. There is not any indication that roughly 20,000 further troops have been despatched to the nation in early 2026.
Harris and the border: Trump repeated his false declare that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “a border czar who never went to the border.” Harris visited the border twice as vice chairman, once in 2021 and once in 2024, and the Biden White House repeatedly stated she was by no means the “border czar” – noting she had been given a narrower “root causes” mission of main diplomacy with Central American nations in an try to deal with the causes for his or her residents’ migration to the US.