Fact Check: Trump Misstates Inflation Data and Birthright Citizenship Laws in CNBC Interview

President Donald Trump made false claims about inflation and birthright citizenship in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday morning.

Inflation

CNBC anchor Joe Kernen correctly informed Trump that while there were significant price increases during former President Joe Biden’s administration, the inflation rate “was down to about where it is now, about 3%,” by the time Biden was leaving office.

Trump responded with a false claim: “No it wasn’t. It was down to 5%, it wasn’t down to 3%.”

Kernen was right, Trump was wrong. The year-over-year inflation rate in the month of Trump’s inauguration, January 2025, was 3.0%. It was 2.9% in December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office. It hadn’t been close to 5% since early 2023.

Trump then elaborated by making another false claim. He said, “And the reason it was down was because I had won the election, and it started falling after I won the election. And I started getting prices down from right after November 5.”

But prices did not actually start falling right after his election in November 2024. In fact, even the inflation rate didn’t drop right after his election. The year-over-year inflation rate rose from 2.6% in pre-election October 2024 to 2.7% in November 2024. It then rose further, to 2.9%, in December 2024.

Birthright citizenship

Trump repeated his long-debunked lie that “no country in the world” offers birthright citizenship other than the United States. In reality, about three dozen countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including US neighbors Canada and Mexico and the majority of South American countries.

CNN and various other outlets previously debunked the claim when Trump made it during his presidential campaign in 2015 and during his first presidency in 2018.