A CNN fact-checker has debunked President Donald Trump’s “many false claims” laid out in his hour-long speech to top military officials.
The president addressed senior military leaders in Quantico, Virginia on Tuesday morning in a wide-ranging speech that, according to CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale, included “a lot of lies.”
“There were just so many false claims, and I say that after essentially every speech, unfortunately, from Donald Trump, but I think this is notable because of the audience,” Dale told the network. “He was telling a lot of lies and saying a lot of other inaccurate things, regardless of his intentions, to the U.S.’s top military leaders.”
Such falsehoods included the president’s claims regarding his record on “settling” wars, former President Joe Biden, and the military itself.
“I’ve settled so many wars since we’re here. We’re here almost nine months and I’ve settled seven,” the president told the crowd, repeating a claim he made to the United Nations General Assembly earlier this month.
That isn’t true, Dale said: “Even the examples that President Trump cited himself show that that claim is not true,” such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Despite the two countries signing a peace agreement under Trump, “the fighting continues,” the fact-checker said.
In another example, the president cited Kosovo and Serbia — even though the countries have not been at war during his term.
In June, Trump asserted he was “able to stop” a future conflict between the two nations, but there is “thin evidence” for that, Dale said.
Trump said he often brags about the U.S. having the “strongest military of anywhere in the world,” but his predecessor “never” made the same claim, the president alleged.
“Did you ever hear him say: ‘we have the strongest military’? He doesn’t say it. I say it,” Trump said, with an eyebrow raise.
After showing a clip, Dale cut in: “President Biden said that over and over. This took me about five seconds to find on Google.”
Speaking in September 2023, Biden boasted about the U.S. military’s strength at an event in Tempe, Arizona: “Our US military – and this is not hyperbole; I’ve said it for the last two years – is the strongest military in the history of the world. Not just the strongest in the world – in the history of the world.”
At another point in the speech, Trump suggested that Biden wanted to terminate the Space Force, a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces that Trump established in his first term.
“He got hammered by the people in this room for even suggesting it because it’s very important,” the president claimed.
Dale then stated succinctly: “President Biden never said that. That did not happen.”
Although then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki made a “snarky” comment about the future of the new military branch under Biden, Dale said, the following day, Psaki clarified Space Force has “the full support of the Biden administration” and “we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force.”
The president also repeated — or expanded upon — some familiar falsehoods.
In addition to repeating his “rigged” 2020 election claims, Trump also asserted that under the Biden administration, “the Congo” and Venezuela “opened up their prisons,” allowing the prisoners to enter the United States as migrants.
“There is no evidence that any of that happened,” Dale said. “President Trump’s own team has never been able to offer any corroboration.”
The president also claimed that “25 million” migrants were let into the U.S. during Biden’s term — adding another four million to his previous, baseless claim. In June, Trump suggested “Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country.”
In reality, from 2021 through 2024, there were roughly 10.8 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants, federal data shows.
In a tweet, Dale debunked 13 claims that Trump told the military.
For example, the claims that Portland — where Trump threatened to deploy federal troops — “is burning down,” that Biden gave Ukraine $350 billion, and that the U.S. saw “300,000” drug deaths in 2024 are “not true,” Dale wrote.
