Fact-checking Trump's interview with NBC News

President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Llamas for a wide-ranging interview that touched on the administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota, his plans for the Federal Reserve and tensions between the United States and Iran.

At times, Trump made false, exaggerated or misleading claims while discussing the economy, the southern border, crime, election security and a variety of other topics.

Tune in for more of Tom Llamas’ interview with President Donald Trump on Super Bowl Sunday on NBC.

Here is NBC News’ fact-check of those statements:

Economy

Inflation

As Trump touted his administration’s work to improve the U.S. economy, he said:

“I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.”

This is false. When Trump took office in January 2025, prices had declined sharply from the recent highs experienced during the pandemic. In January 2025, inflation was 3%, and it fell as low as 2.3% in April. But after Trump rolled out his global tariffs, inflation rose again, hitting 3% in September. In December, it was 2.7%.

The worst inflation on record was experienced in 1980, when it was more than 14% from March through June.

Jobs

On the jobs front, Trump said: “There are more people working today than at any time in the history of our country.”

The statement is correct. But the labor market’s rate of growth has slowed sharply since he took office, and 2025 was the worst year for job creation since 2020. Excluding recessions, 2025 was the worst year for job creation since 2003.

A total of 584,000 jobs were created last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down significantly from more than 2 million in both 2024 and 2023. In 2022, as the economy bounced back from the pandemic, more than 4.5 million jobs were created. The pace of job creation is also slower than it was in each of the first three years of Trump’s first term.

The pace of wage growth is also steadily slowing. In January 2025, wages were increasing at 3.9%. As of December, wages were growing at a slower 3.6%, BLS data shows.

Investments

At another point, Trump said, “ I have $18 trillion being invested into the country.”

While a number of companies, such as tech firms, semiconductor companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers, have made public commitments to invest in the U.S., many of those commitments are either only slight increases from previous announcements or in line with previous plans. In addition, the commitments and investments touted by the White House on its own website total $9.6 trillion.

A review of the White House list also found the $9.6 trillion figure to be misleading. More than $2.5 trillion of that are not investments, Bloomberg Economics found in November. About $3.5 trillion of that comes from opaque sovereign pledges, and another $3.5 trillion are corporate investments. Of those corporate investments, $2.9 trillion are planned for data centers.

“More than $250 billion of the White House pledges were announced or planned before Trump retook office in January,” Bloomberg Economics researchers also found.

Many of the commitments are also over the long term and are likely to be subject to change. For example, it recently took drugmaker Fujifilm Biotechnologies five years to open one factory in North Carolina.

Immigration and the border

Discussing immigration enforcement, one of the major priorities of his second administration, Trump said: “We are totally focused on criminals, really bad criminals. Now, you could say people that came in illegally are criminals. But I’m talking about murderers from different countries.”

That is inconsistent with recent arrest data, according to reporting by NBC News.

More than a third of the roughly 220,000 people Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal histories, NBC News reported in December.

Trump also said: “We have 11,888 murderers that [Joe] Biden and his group led into our country. We’ve captured a lot of them.”

Trump has repeatedly made this claim, but he appears to be misconstruing a decadeslong tally of noncitizens convicted of homicide here or abroad who are not currently detained. In 2024, ICE told Congress that more than 13,000 noncitizens who were convicted of homicide in the U.S. or abroad were living outside of ICE detention centers.

It’s not clear when many of these migrants arrived in the U.S., as they could have entered at any point over the last four decades or even earlier, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The 13,000 number also includes noncitizens in state and federal prisons.

NBC News reported in June that 6% of those detained by ICE in the eight previous months — which included the first six months of Trump’s administration — were those who had been convicted of murder or sexual assault.

Trump also repeated a false claim that 25 million people entered the U.S. illegally under his predecessor’s watch.

“We allowed in our country, I say, 25 million people with an open-border policy for four years under Biden, and that group — the autopen group, I call them,” he said.

According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 7.4 million undocumented immigrants crossed the border outside of legal checkpoints during the Biden administration. Including people who crossed the border at legal points of entry but without documentation, it is 10.2 million.

Crime

At the national level

Trump repeatedly referred to declining crime levels on his watch in Wednesday’s interview.

“I say it again and again. We have record low crime in the United States. Nobody’s been able to say that for 125 years,” he said.

That appears to be partly true, according to an analysis of crime data published last month by the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent, nonpartisan group.

The group’s January analysis predicted that “when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility” that the homicide level “would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”

The study, however, does not make such sweeping conclusions about other categories of violent crime.

Crime also did not suddenly begin falling when Trump returned to office in January 2025; it has been declining gradually for years. Several years of national data show that crime has consistently been falling in cities and towns across the U.S.

At the city level

Trump also claimed that crime has dipped in cities as a result of his deployment of federal law enforcement officers. But in some of those places, the falling crime trends began before Trump took office.

“So crime now in Minnesota, crime now in Minneapolis is down. Crime in all cities is down. And you know why it’s down? It’s down because of us,” he said. “It’s down in Chicago by 25%, despite the fact that we are always dealing with these people, and they happen to be Democrats that don’t know anything about crime prevention.”

The available data on Minneapolis is mixed. City of Minneapolis data shows that, in 2026, some violent crimes (like assault offenses, motor vehicle theft and sex offenses) have increased over their previous-year levels, while other violent crimes (like homicide, burglary, breaking and entering, and destruction of property) have decreased over their previous-year levels.

In Chicago, the data is clearer. In 2025, violent crime complaints fell from 2024 levels in all categories, according to data from the Chicago Police Department. Statistics published by the police department for most of the first few weeks of 2026 show a continued year-to-year decline.

Minnesota fraud scandal

Trump also referred to the Justice Department’s yearslong fraud investigation that has involved some members of Minnesota’s Somali community, referring to “$19 billion in fraud that we know about.”

The $19 billion figure is inflated. In 2022, during the Biden administration, federal prosecutors announced initial indictments in what they called a $250 million scheme to defraud a federal child nutrition program. So far, prosecutors have charged 92 people, and dozens have been convicted. In recent months, conservative influencers have seized on the scandal and pushed unsubstantiated claims that have escalated the situation into Trump’s view.

Meanwhile, in December, federal prosecutors broadened their efforts and indicated that the total amount of federal taxpayer money that was misused could be as much as about $9 billion. That number stems from a federal prosecutor’s public statement that estimated that half of the $18 billion in federal funds paid out to 14 programs in the state may have been fraudulent.

Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz, have disputed that figure.

Elections

Trump made several false claims about elections, which he recently said he thinks should be nationalized in at least some areas, even though the U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to administer elections.

“I won three times,” Trump said. “Unfortunately for this country, I didn’t assume office the second time.”

While Trump won the 2016 and 2024 elections, his unfounded claims that he did not lose the 2020 election to Biden have been repeatedly debunked.

Along the same lines, Trump said in Wednesday’s interview: “There are some areas in our country that are extremely corrupt. They have very corrupt elections. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Philadelphia. Take a look at Atlanta. There are some areas that are unbelievably corrupt. I could give you plenty more, too.”

Trump has been singling out such places — Democratic-led cities in battleground states with significant populations of Black voters — for years. There is no evidence that substantive or outcome-determinative fraud occurred in those cities or elsewhere in the U.S.

Asked about the FBI’s raid last week of an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia (where Atlanta is located), Trump again repeated his false claims of 2020 election fraud.

“There should be nothing wrong with the fact that they went in, got ballots from a while ago, and they’re going to look at them. And now they’re going to find out the true winner of that state. And you know what? If there was cheating, which there was, but if there was cheating, it should be found, because we can’t let it happen again,” he said.

There is no evidence that the election was marred by fraud in 2020, in Fulton County or elsewhere in Georgia. A hand-count of all ballots confirmed the result shortly after the election.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who oversaw the election in the state, testified to Congress in 2022 that the results indicated that thousands of Georgians chose not to vote in the presidential race.

“Twenty-eight thousand Georgians skipped the presidential race, and yet they voted down-ballot in other races. The Republican congressmen ended up getting 33,000 more votes than President Trump, and that’s why President Trump came up short,” Raffensperger said at a hearing of the House’s select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Foreign policy

Speaking about the administration’s strikes on Iran last year, Trump said the U.S. “wiped out” the country’s nuclear program.

“Within one month, they were going to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Before the strike, Iran was not days or weeks away from having enough fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons, according to previous statements by U.S. officials. It could take Iran roughly a year or less to develop a warhead to deliver a nuclear weapon, U.S. officials have said.

In addition, Iran’s nuclear program was severely damaged but not necessarily “wiped out,” according to NBC News reporting and independent experts.

NBC News previously reported that one of the three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran the U.S. bombed in June was destroyed, the Fordo facility. Two other sites, at Isfahan and Natanz, were damaged, but uranium enrichment work could resume at those facilities within months if Iran made that decision.

The Israel Atomic Energy Commission has said the combined U.S. and Israeli strikes set Iran’s nuclear program back “many years.” And Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry has said some nuclear facilities were “badly damaged.”

Iran could revive its nuclear program at some sites that were not bombed, experts and Western officials say. Iran still has an estimated 400 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium, fissile material that could be used for nuclear weapons, but it remains entombed at sites damaged in the Israeli and U.S. air raids in June, according to International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Grossi.