Donald Trump’s UN speech fact-checked: Falsehoods on Biden, China’s wind farms, fuel prices and more

President Donald Trump, in an hour-long speech before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, attacked European allies, renewable energy and his predecessor.

“I’ve been right about everything,” the President said, making and repeating a slew of misleading and false claims.

Here’s a fact-check of some of his statements.

What was said

“In four years of President Biden, we had less than $1 trillion of new investment into the United States. In just eight months, since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion.”

This is misleading. Mr Trump is comparing apples and oranges and appears to be inflating the tally from his own administration.

The Biden administration in January tallied up nearly $800 billion ($A1211 billion) in manufacturing projects spurred by the passage of four laws. The vast majority of those announcements have details on the locations of specific facilities and investment amounts or are already underway. (Those include, for example, an $11 billion semiconductor plant in Utah and a $1 billion solar panel plant in Oklahoma.)

In contrast, Mr Trump’s $17 trillion figure is double that of what his own White House has tallied: $8.8 trillion.

But even that figure is not all “already paid,” as Mr Trump said. It includes broad pledges and previously announced projects. And more than half of that amount comes from informal pledges from foreign countries to invest in the United States that experts warn may be unrealistic. (A 2017 pledge from Saudi Arabia promoted by Mr Trump in his first term to buy $450 billion of US products, for example, did not fully materialise.)

What was said

“I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Shariah law.”

This lacks evidence. There is no evidence that London or its mayor, Sadiq Khan, has imposed or plans to impose Shariah, the legal and moral framework of Islam.

Khan, who is the first Muslim to be elected mayor of London, has long been the target of Islamophobic abuse and false accusations. In 2016, a spokesperson for Khan said that he had repeatedly said there is no place for Shariah law in Britain.

In 2020, social media posts circulated a fabricated quote purportedly from Khan about testing out Shariah law in three boroughs of London. (The posts misspelled Shariah.)

Recently, widely shared social media posts falsely accused Khan of banning alcohol sales and providing homes only for Muslims. (In fact, he has tried to bolster London’s nightlife, and his housing proposal was not exclusive to Muslims.)

Shariah councils, which have existed in Britain since the 1980s, are private organisations that “have no official legal or constitutional role,” according to a 2019 government report.

These councils primarily adjudicate religious divorces and other aspects of day-to-day life, such as religious compliance with diet and finances. The number of Shariah councils in Britain is unknown, with estimates ranging from 30 to 85.

Asked about Mr Trump’s comments, a spokesperson for Khan said, “We are not going to dignify his appalling and bigoted comments with a response.”

What was said

“I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what? They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.”

False. The opposite is true. China has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country, and is planning to build more wind farms than any other country.

The World Wind Energy Association, a nonprofit based in Germany, estimated that China accounted for nearly half of global wind power capacity, about 561,000 megawatts of the 1.2 million megawatts globally.

China also operated nearly a third of all wind farms around the world, 5,400 of 17,000 operational farms, according to the Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit in California. It also has the most prospective wind farms in the world, 2,800 out of 8,600 worldwide.

What was said

“Our bills are coming way down. You probably see that our gasoline prices are way down. You know, we have an expression, ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ and that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to be much lower in a year from now, but they’ve come way down over the last year.”

This is exaggerated. Electricity prices have, in fact, risen under Mr Trump, while gas prices have declined slightly.

The consumer price index for electricity has risen by 6.2 per cent in August, compared with a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States was $3.173 for the week ending September 22, according to the Energy Information Administration, compared with $3.185 for the same week last year and $3.109 for the week ending January 20, the day Mr Trump began his second term.

The price of regular gasoline as tracked by AAA was $3.171 on Tuesday, compared with $3.12 on Jan. 20 and $3.208 the same day last year.

Other claims

Mr Trump also repeated a number of claims that The New York Times has previously fact-checked:

• He claimed that millions of people “from prisons, from mental institutions” all over the world had crossed the US’ southern border. (There is no evidence for this.)
• He claimed to have “ended seven unending wars” since taking office in January. (His role in some of those conflicts is disputed.)
• He misleadingly claimed that the Biden administration “lost nearly 300,000 children” and many were trafficked or dead. (The figure is inflated, and there is no evidence that many had died.)
• He falsely claimed that 300,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses. (The number was about 80,000.)
• He falsely characterised Washington, DC, as “the crime capital of America” (it was not). But since the federal takeover, “everyone’s going out to dinner.” (Dining reservations were level).

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