Fact check: Trump, repeating old lies on ‘Meet the Press,’ falsely claims US is the only country with birthright citizenship

President-elect Donald Trump repeated numerous false claims during an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” – including his old lie that the US is the world’s only country with birthright citizenship.

Trump reiterated his intention to try to end birthright citizenship, in which, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, someone born in the US is granted automatic citizenship even if their parents are not citizens. And he asserted, “We’re the only country that has it.”

This is not true; CNN and various other outlets previously debunked the claim when Trump made it during his presidential campaign in 2015 and during his first presidency in 2018. About three dozen countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including US neighbors Canada and Mexico and the majority of South American countries.

Here are some other false and misleading claims Trump made in the portion of the interview that NBC aired on television on Sunday morning. (CNN has not yet reviewed the additional chunks of the interview that NBC released online.)

Crime: Trump falsely claimed, “Crime is at an all-time high.” That is nowhere close to true. Both violent crime and property crime rates have plummeted in the US since the early 1990s and are far below all-time highs. FBI data shows that crime declined again in 2023.

Trump’s tariffs: Trump falsely claimed of the tariffs he imposed during his first presidency: “They cost Americans nothing.” Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, found that Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. The tariffs are paid by US importers, not foreign exporters as Trump regularly claims, and it’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.

Trump and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that, during his presidency, “We had no inflation.” In fact, cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was about 8%.

Biden and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that inflation was so low during his presidency that the Biden administration “didn’t have inflation for a year and a half – they went almost two years, just based on what I had created.” In reality, there was cumulative inflation of about 14% over Joe Biden’s first two years as president; the Biden-era peak for month-over-month inflation, 9.1%, occurred in June 2022, during those first two years.

The 2020 election: Trump vaguely reiterated his lie that he was the real winner of the 2020 election, saying, “I think it’s an easy argument, it was really proven even more conclusively by the win that I had on this one.” His legitimate victory in the 2024 election does not do anything to validate his claims that the 2020 election was stolen,

Migrants and murderers: Trump repeated his frequent false claim there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years.” In reality, as the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have noted, that official figure is about immigrants with homicide convictions in the US today who entered the country over decades, including during Trump’s own administration, not over the past three years or solely under the Biden administration. You can read more here.

Venezuela, migration and prisoners: Trump repeated his regular tale about how Venezuela has supposedly emptied prisons to allow criminals to migrate to the US. Trump has never corroborated this claim, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they haven’t seen any evidence that it is true.

The European Union and trade: Trump repeated a false claim he has repeatedly made about European countries and trade: “They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our food product, they don’t take anything.”

None of this is true.

The US exported about $368 billion in goods to the European Union in 2023 (while importing about $576 billion from the EU that year), US federal figures show. According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports — importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euro. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.) And the US government says the EU was the fifth-largest 2022 export market for US agricultural and related products, behind China, Canada, Mexico and Japan.

Trump and Obamacare: Trump claimed, “I am the one that saved Obamacare.” This is misleading at best. As president, Trump tried to repeal Obamacare but failed because congressional Republicans could not amass enough votes to kill the law in 2017. After that, he and his officials took many steps to weaken the law, though they did continue to operate the Obamacare exchanges – and they refused to defend several central provisions of the law in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, instead arguing that key parts of Obamacare should be invalidated. You can read more here from CNN’s Tami Luhby.

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