President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting with reporters present Tuesday that touched on issues including tariffs, inflation and his “big, beautiful bill” — and he “uttered a whole bunch of false claims in the process,” observed CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.
“As he has repeatedly, Trump falsely claimed Tuesday, ‘We have no inflation,’” Dale wrote in an article for the outlet published later that day. “The US does have inflation — an annual inflation rate of 2.4% in May, an uptick from a 2.3% annual rate in April.”
The reporter noted that while this latter rate was indeed the lowest it has been since early 2021, which surprised economists who predicted Trump’s steep international tariffs would affect U.S. inflation more severely, certainly “it’s not ‘no inflation’ whatsoever.”
Trump has also frequently touted that his so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a massive tax and spending package he signed into law last week, would wholly eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits. The president reiterated the false claim during his meeting Tuesday.
Dale noted that “the White House itself” has already acknowledged to CNN that millions of Social Security recipients above the age of 65 will continue to pay taxes on their benefits — and that, while they’ll receive an annual $6,000 tax deduction, it expires in 2028.
Trump further suggested the letters he recently sent to foreign leaders about new tariff rates are equivalent to “a deal,” which Dale noted is “just not true,” and the president falsely repeated that other countries, rather than U.S. consumers, will foot the bill for these levies.
Trump further claimed that South Korea convinced his predecessor, Joe Biden, to let the country discontinue its payments that help fund the U.S. military presence in South Korea. Dale noted the Biden administration negotiated spending increases, however, which led South Korea “to pay more than it did during Trump’s first term.”
The president on Tuesday went on to gripe about California’s power grid producing “blackouts and brownouts every week,” which Dale debunked quite simply by pointing to an emailed statement from Daniel Villasenor, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“The state has not experienced any rotating outages since 2020 — and in the last three years, no Flex Alert calling to conserve power has even been issued,” Villasenor told CNN. “Not only has our grid been increasingly resilient, it’s also cleaner than ever.”
Read Dale’s full analysis on CNN.com.
