Fact check: Trump makes false claims about the Iran war and his foreign policy record

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump made a series of false claims at his Monday press conference about the war with Iran, during which his remarks strayed into other foreign policy issues.

Trump also made multiple uncorroborated claims that can’t be definitively fact-checked, such as an assertion that every living former president is now saying “to their friends” that the US should have attacked Iran long ago. Here’s a rundown on some of his checkable remarks.

Trump’s book and Osama bin Laden: Trump repeated his long-debunked lie that he wrote in a 2000 book that the authorities needed to kill Osama bin Laden.

After Trump correctly noted that the US killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani on his orders in 2020, Trump added, “I did one other, but this one was not picked up: Osama bin Laden. If you read my book, I said, ‘You got to take him out’ – one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book.”

In reality, the book did not offer any advice about how to deal with bin Laden, let alone do anything about bin Laden; it mentioned bin Laden just once in passing. The terrorist was killed by US forces in a 2011 raid ordered by then-President Barack Obama more than five years before Trump took office.

Iran and US planes: After noting that US ally Kuwait accidentally shot down three US planes earlier in the Iran war, Trump said, “The only planes, really, that we lost were – friendly fire, they call it.” But the focus of this very press conference was the rescue of two airmen whose F-15 fighter plane was shot down by Iran last week, as Trump said himself in his remarks. In addition, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine confirmed during the press conference that, during the rescue effort, the US also lost an A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support plane after it was hit by Iranian fire and the pilot ejected. And Iran destroyed a US E-3 Sentry early warning and control (AWACS) plane in a strike on a base in Saudi Arabia. (This is not intended as a comprehensive list of planes lost during the war for reasons other than friendly fire.)

Trump and wars: Trump repeated his familiar false claim that “I’ve ended eight wars.” As we’ve repeatedly noted, his list includes two situations that were never actually wars (a diplomatic dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia and a mystery situation between Serbia and Kosovo) and at least one war that didn’t actually end (involving Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Maduro and prisoners: Trump claimed, as he has on numerous previous occasions, that ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had “released hundreds of thousands of people from jails into our country” during his tenure as leader. Trump and his aides have never substantiated this claim, and experts on Venezuela previously told CNN and other outlets that they knew of no basis for it.

The US military in South Korea: Trump again exaggerated the US military presence in South Korea, saying that “we have 45,000 soldiers in South Korea” and then repeating the “45,000” figure shortly after. According to public Defense Department data, there were 26,722 US military personnel in South Korea as of December 31, 2025, including 23,495 on active duty. There is no indication that roughly 20,000 additional troops have been sent to the country in early 2026.

Harris and the border: Trump repeated his false claim that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “a border czar who never went to the border.” Harris visited the border twice as vice president, once in 2021 and once in 2024, and the Biden White House repeatedly said she was never the “border czar” – noting she had been given a narrower “root causes” mission of leading diplomacy with Central American countries in an attempt to address the reasons for their citizens’ migration to the US.

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