Fact check: debunking Trump’s claims on immigration and affordability in Pennsylvania | Donald Trump

Trump claimed ‘prices are way down’

The president, once again, claimed that “prices are way down”.

In fact, prices have increased during Trump’s second term. The consumer price index shows that average prices were 1.7% higher in September than they were in January, as CNN outlined in a recent fact-check. There was a 0.3% increase in consumer prices in September, largely due to a 4.1% surge in gasoline prices. Prices were 3% higher in September this year compared with September 2024.

He also claimed, without evidence, that the cost of Thanksgiving turkeys was down by 33% compared with the Biden era. It’s difficult to assess changes in Thanksgiving costs: the American Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying group, claimed that the price per pound of frozen turkey was down 16% this year, but that wholesale prices for fresh turkey were increasing significantly. In a report on Thanksgiving prices, the Los Angeles Times, citing a market research company that surveys weekly prices at stores, said the cost of a basket of 11 staples of the holiday meal cost 4.1% more than last year.

Trump made false and racist claims about Ilhan Omar and Somalia

In one striking tangent, Trump repeated false claims about Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota representative, prompting his crowd to launch a xenophobic chant of: “Send her back!”

The president falsely claimed Omar is in the US “illegally” in a racist attack about her and Somalis. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban … She … does nothing but bitch,” he said, saying the country has “nothing” and people “kill each other all the time”. Omar fled civil war as a young child, came to the US as a refugee and became a citizen in 2000. Trump repeated the claim that Omar “married her brother” to get into the US. There is no evidence to support the claim, which Omar’s critics have repeated for years. She has previously called the claim “absolutely false and ridiculous”.

Trump also said countries like Somalis were “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime” and repeated the phrase from a scandal in his first term, calling certain nations “shitholes”.

Trump made untrue statements about immigrants and the economy

Trump falsely claimed that before he took office, “100% of all new, net jobs” in the US went to “migrants” and “people that came into the country illegally”.

This was an untrue claim he repeated often on the campaign trail last year. The number of foreign-born workers increased at a faster rate than that of US-born workers under the previous administration, according to a CNN fact check, but the claim that all new jobs went to immigrants, whether documented or not, is baseless. He also falsely claimed that “the entire prison population” of Venezuela and the Republic of the Congo was “dumped into our country”.

Trump repeated false and exaggerated inflation claims

While the president’s speech largely veered from the intended focus on affordability, he repeatedly made false and exaggerated claims about inflation, including saying he inherited the “worst inflation in the history of our country”. This is untrue. Inflation did increase under Biden, but was by no means the worst in history, as FactCheck.org recently explained.

Trump also said he was “crushing” inflation, and “inflation is stopped”. Inflation declined from an annual rate of 3% in January to 2.9% in August, but has remained ahead of the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. In a poll conducted for the Guardian and released in October, 74% of survey respondents estimated that their regularly monthly household costs had increased by at least $100 from last year.

Trump made unsubstantiated claims about ongoing boat strikes

The president, again, defended his administration’s ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean, which officials have said were targeting alleged drug dealers. Trump claimed that, for every boat strike, “We save 25,000 American lives.” The administration, however, has not publicly provided any evidence to support its claims about the threats the boats posed to the US and their alleged drug-trafficking ties.

There is, likewise, no evidence to support the estimate that a single boat could lead to the overdoses of 25,000 people.

Trump repeated a series of familiar, fact-free grievances

Resorting to his campaign rhetoric, Trump again made false and absurd claims about transgender people, who have been repeatedly targeted by his policies. He said Democrats want “transgender for every member in your family”, adding: “If they’re not feeling well that night, let’s just change their sex.” He later falsely referred to gender-affirming care as “mutilation”.

He also said: “Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote with Black people.” While Trump made some gains with Black voters last year, Black voters overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris. He also falsely suggested he won the 2020 election and that last year “the real vote was much more than” the results, baselessly suggesting there was widespread fraud.