President Donald Trump stepped back into the presidency this week to move quickly to institute a new agenda, but from his inaugural address that continued through a flurry of executive actions, press conferences and interviews, Trump relied on a series of false and misleading information to support his cause.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
Trump misrepresents election results
Claim: Speaking to participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Trump said he won by millions of votes in the 2024 election, which gave him “a huge mandate from the American people, the likes of which has not been seen in many years.” ”
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The facts: Trump’s margin of victory in the 2024 election was not as wide as he makes it seem. He won the electoral vote 312 to 226, including all seven swing states. However, the popular vote was much closer, with Trump receiving 49.9% of the vote with 77,303,573 votes cast to Harris’ 75,019,257 votes (48.4%), according to AP Vote Cast. That’s a difference of 2,284,316 votes. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes.
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Claim: In an interview Wednesday night with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump said he “won the youth by 36 points.”
The facts: that’s incorrect. Former Vice President Kamala Harris won the 18 to 29 age group by 4 percentage points, 51% to 47%; and those ages 30 to 44 50% to 47%, according to AP Votecast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters in the November election.
Trump won voters over 45 against Harris, with 52% supporting him. Just under half, 47%, voted for Harris.
Like all surveys, AP Votecast results are not an official count of how young people voted, instead providing an estimate that is subject to sampling error. However, other estimates from the survey also provide no signal to support Trump’s claims.
California Water policy misrepresented around wildfires
Claim: Trump told Hannity that instead of letting it go into the Pacific, California Gov. Gavin Newsom can “release the water coming from the north” to help fight ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles. “There’s enormous amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water that comes with the snow, comes down when – it like it melts,” he continued. Trump also claimed that “they took out the Spigot from the North to protect the Delta smelt.”
The facts: About 40 percent of Los Angeles’s city water comes from state-controlled projects connected to Northern California, where the Delta Live Fish Smelt, and the state is limiting the water it supplies this year. Still, the Southern California reservoirs that help feed these canals are at above-average levels for this time of year.
The Southern California Metropolitan Water District has enough water in storage to meet about three years of water demand, said Deven Upadhyay, the agency’s interim general manager.
“We can deliver what our agencies need,” he said.
Some fire hydrants in Los Angeles ran dry in early efforts to fight the fires, sparking a swirl of criticism on social media, including by Trump.
But the state’s water supplies aren’t to blame for hydrants running dry and a key reservoir near Pacific Palisades that wasn’t filled. The problem with the hydrants was that they were overflowing and the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty because it was undergoing maintenance.
Newsom has called for an investigation into how the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power managed both issues.
The farm-versus-fish debate is one of the most well-worn in California water politics and doesn’t always fall along party lines. Some environmentalists think Newsom is too friendly to agricultural interests. But that debate is not connected to fire-related water problems in Los Angeles.
Two complex systems of dams and canals channel rain and snowmelt from the mountains in Northern California and route it south. Both transport water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, an estuary that provides critical habitat for fish and wildlife, including salmon and the Delta Smelt.
The delta connects inland waterways to the Pacific Ocean and keeping a certain amount of water flowing through helps support fish populations and the waterway itself.
January 6 attacks on police downplayed
Claim: Asked by Hannity why he pardoned the January 6 rioters who attacked police at the Capitol, Trump said: ‘They were treated like the worst criminals in history. And do you know what they were for? They protested the vote because they knew the election was rigged and they protested the vote. He noted that some rioters engaged with police, “but they were very minor incidents.”
The facts: Capitol rioters engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police and many of the rioters carried weapons, including firearms, knives, brass knuckle gloves, a pitchfork, an axe, a sledgehammer and a bow. They also used improvised weapons, such as flaggers, a table leg, a hockey stick and a stool, to attack officers. One officer was crushed in a door frame and another suffered a heart attack after a rioter pressed a stun gun to his neck and shocked him repeatedly. One rioter was accused of climbing scaffolding and firing a gun into the air during the melee.
The rioters broke through windows and doors, ransacked the Capitol and briefly occupied the Senate chamber. Senators had evacuated minutes earlier. They also tried to break into the living room, break glass windows and knock on doors. But the police held them off with their guns drawn.
About 1,100 of the rioters had been convicted, with about two-thirds of them receiving prison terms ranging from several days to 22 years, before Trump on Tuesday pardoned, commuted the prison terms or promised to dismiss the cases of all 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the riot. About a quarter had been accused of assault or physical violence.
However, it is true that hundreds of people who went to the Capitol but did not attack the police or damage the building were only charged with felonies.
Inflated immigration numbers
Claim: Trump said during his interview with Hannity that it was “a gross miscarriage of common sense” to allow 21 million to enter the US illegally.
The facts: that figure is highly inflated. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports more than 10.8 million apprehensions for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 to December 2024.
Those are arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed paths more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for returning to Mexico. The number of people is therefore lower than the number of arrests.
According to the latest available estimate from the Department of Homeland Security, at least 11 million people were living in the US illegally as of January 2022, 79% of whom were imported before January 2010.
FEMA has not ended temporary housing assistance for Helene survivors
Claim: “The government wouldn’t do it anymore, which is ridiculous,” Trump said during a visit to North Carolina on Friday, referring to temporary housing in hotels provided to Hurricane Helene survivors by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The facts: FEMA is still paying for survivors to stay temporarily in hotels through its transitional shelter assistance program.
“I want to be clear, this program does not end for Western North Carolina,” Brett Howard, federal coordinating officer, said in a statement on Monday. “We understand that survivors have great needs at the time and this program will continue for as long as necessary.”
The agency reviews the eligibility of households in the program every two weeks to ensure they still meet the requirements to receive temporary housing in hotels. Households that do not qualify can submit the decision.
As part of its latest assessment, FEMA found that of the 2,700 households it checked in, approximately 740 were no longer eligible for the temporary shelter assistance program, according to Monday’s statement.
Survivors will now be given three weeks’ notice before being required to check out their hotel room, instead of seven days, “due to extenuating circumstances in western North Carolina,” the statement reads.
“The length of eligibility for an individual survivor will be based on their individual circumstances,” Howard added. “FEMA employees work daily with survivors and in their cases to help them find permanent housing solutions.”
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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/apfactcheck.