Fact check: Trump makes false claims about his 2024 victory, the 2020 election, immigration and more at DC rally

At the dawn of a new Trump era, the same old Trump lies.

The day before his second inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump held a campaign-style rally at an arena in Washington, where he repeated some of the most frequent false claims from the campaign trail while also sprinkling in some new falsehoods.

Here is a fact check of some of his claims.

Trump’s victory in Florida: Trump correctly said he won Florida by 13 percentage points in the 2024 election. But then he added, “Nobody’s done that ever.” That’s false; Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon (1972), Ronald Reagan (1980 and 1984) and George H.W. Bush (1988), in addition to various Republican and Democratic candidates in prior decades, won Florida by more than 13 percentage points. Nixon, for example, won it by 44 percentage points.

The 2020 election: Trump lamented what could have happened if only the 2020 election “weren’t rigged,” then added, “But it was.” And he said later in the speech that “they rigged the election.” This is his usual lie; Trump legitimately lost a free and fair election to Joe Biden.

The youth vote: Trump falsely claimed that “we won the youth vote by 36 points” in the 2024 election. He didn’t say how he was defining “the youth vote” — CNN has asked his transition team to clarify — but there’s no basis for his claim by any reasonable definition. While young voters, particularly young men, did shift toward Trump compared with the 2020 election, exit poll data published by CNN found that Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters ages 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters ages 30-39. Even if Harris’ actual margins were smaller — exit poll data is often flawed — there is simply no sign that Trump dominated Harris with young voters.

Pennsylvania in 2024: After crediting billionaire supporter Elon Musk for his campaign efforts in Pennsylvania, Trump claimed, “We ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.” The phrase “like in a landslide” is too vague for us to offer a definitive fact check verdict, but it’s worth noting Trump beat Harris in Pennsylvania by under 2 percentage points.

Small-business optimism: Trump claimed that since the 2024 election, “small-business optimism has soared a record 41 points to a 39-year high.” It’s true that small-business optimism has jumped since Trump’s victory, but the “39-year high” part of the claim is not true if Trump was referring to the commonly cited NFIB Small Business Optimism Index. (CNN has asked his transition team to clarify.) That index has jumped to its highest level since October 2018, less than seven years ago.

Trump’s claim about a 41-point increase appears to be a reference to one component of the optimism index — the percentage of small-business owners expecting the economy to improve. That measure did soar a net 41 percentage points from pre-election October to post-election November.

Trump’s favorite immigration chart: Trump displayed a long-debunked chart about migration numbers at the US southern border, calling attention to a red arrow at the bottom — which the chart claims is pointed at a historically low level of illegal immigration at the time Trump left office in 2021.

But the arrow doesn’t actually point to the time Trump left office. In reality, it points to April 2020, when Trump still had more than eight months left in his first term and when global migration had slowed to a trickle because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border increased each month through the end of Trump’s term.

“The Congo” and migration: Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claim that foreign countries have deliberately emptied their prisons to somehow have criminals enter the US as migrants, and he added, “The Congo’s big on emptying their prisons.” Experts on both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have told CNN there is no evidence for these claims, which Trump’s own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate, and each country’s government has told CNN the claims are baseless.

Venezuela, prisons and migration: Trump repeated his claim that Venezuela “emptied their prisons into our country.” Trump has never corroborated the claim, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they are aware of no evidence for it.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence in the country, said in an email to CNN in June, after Trump made similar claims.

Trump and the military: Trump, talking about military equipment, repeated his false claim that “we rebuilt our entire military” during his first term. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told CNN in November 2023, after Trump made a version of the claim.

Iran and terror groups: Trump repeated his false claim that during his first term, Iran “had no money for Hezbollah, they had no money for Hamas.” Iran’s funding for these groups did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions on Iran had a major negative impact on its economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN in 2024. In fact, Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups including Hezbollah. You can read a longer fact check here.

Harrison said in an email at the time: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term.”

This story has been updated with additional information.