Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in his conversation with Elon Musk

Washington CNN — Former President Donald Trump delivered his usual bombardment of false claims – at least 20 in all – during a Monday conversation with billionaire supporter Elon Musk, which aired on Musk’s social media platform, X. Here is a fact check: Crime Trump claimed, “Our crime rate’s going through the roof.” Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said earlier this year that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.” After Trump claimed in June that “crime is so much up,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, noted to CNN that the claim is contradicted both by the data from the FBI and from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 70 large US police forces. Migration numbers, part two Trump said of migration under Biden and Harris: “I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country, many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums.” Facts First: Trump’s “20 million” figure is false, a major exaggeration. He said, “With Ukraine, so we’re in for $250 billion and they’re in for about $71 billion.” Facts First: Trump’s claim is false.