Fact-checking Trump’s speech marking one year in office 

On the one-year anniversary of the start of his second term, US President Donald Trump spent 104 minutes in the White House press room listing his accomplishments.

Trump started the briefing by showing a stack of photos of people who had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, the site of large-scale raids and counterprotests as well as the fatal shooting of an American citizen by an ICE agent.

Addressing a roomful of reporters, Trump proceeded to highlight policies he has put in place since taking office in January 2025. He sometimes stuck to the prepared text, but often digressed into related and unrelated issues, occasionally repeating remarks more than once.

Trump also took questions, many of which addressed foreign policy, including his efforts to acquire Greenland, his establishment of a “Board of Peace” to oversee reconstruction in Gaza, and the state of the government in Venezuela after the US abduction of its then-leader, Nicolas Maduro.

The press conference came a day before Trump’s scheduled departure to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Economy

On the economy, Trump said, “Everyone said, ‘Oh tariffs will cause inflation.’ We have no inflation. We have very little inflation.”

For Trump’s one-year anniversary, we looked at a wide range of price data for the past year and found that overall prices are still increasing, although some specific items, such as eggs and gasoline, have seen price declines.

Immigration

On immigration, Trump said his administration was prioritising deporting criminals. “We’re focused on the murderers, the drug dealers,” he said.

In his first year, Trump has deported somewhere between 300,000 to 600,000 people. The administration hasn’t published detailed deportation data so it’s unclear how many of those people had a criminal history.

But about 74 percent of the nearly 70,000 immigrants in immigration detention have no criminal convictions, according to reports carried in the US media.

Investments

During the briefing, Trump repeated some inaccurate claims he’s made in the past. He said the US has “secured a record-breaking $18 trillion in commitments for new investments”.

The White House website since mid-November has shown a figure of $9.6 trillion. In addition, experts have cautioned PolitiFact that some of the $9.6 trillion in pledges may not come to fruition and others are unrealistically large compared to the gross domestic product of the countries involved.

Gasoline prices

Trump also said gasoline is “at $1.99 in many states”. In the second week of January 2026, the average price per gallon nationally was $2.78, compared with $3.11 in January 2025.

No state has seen its average price fall below $2. The lowest average price in any state in mid-January was $2.34 per gallon, in Oklahoma.

Four states – Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming – had at least seven stations selling gasoline for less than $2 on January 20, according to the gas price app Gas Buddy, and a handful of other states had between one and four stations selling gasoline for under $2.

Jobs

Trump said that under his predecessor, Joe Biden, “one out of four jobs added was a government job.”

This is exaggerated. Over four years, the economy added more than 16 million jobs, of which about 1.8 million were federal, state or local government positions; that’s about 11 percent of the total.

During Biden’s final year in office, the economy added more than 2 million jobs overall, compared with 473,000 in 2025 under Trump.

Fentanyl overdoses

Trump said 300,000 people died last year because of fentanyl overdoses, but that’s far above the most recent federal data.

In the 12 months before August 2025, about 69,000 people in the US died from all types of drug overdoses, not just fentanyl, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

Ending wars

Trump repeated his assertion that he’d “ended eight unendable wars in 10 months”, an exaggerated claim similar to one we rated Mostly False. He also said “no president’s probably ever settled one war,” which we rated False.