Trump's 100th Day Spin

April 29 marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump's second term. He spoke that day at a rally in Michigan, and he was interviewed by ABC News. Days earlier, Time published its "100 Days" interview of the president. Our staff reviewed all of those remarks, and documented several false, misleading and questionable claims. 

For instance:

• The president insisted that an immigrant who was deported to El Salvador has tattoos on his knuckles that say “M-S-one-three,” but the actual letters and numbers in a photo Trump shared are an “obvious digital manipulation,” an expert told us.
• Trump said the FBI had confirmed that “gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela” to the U.S. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.
• Trump took credit for recent increases in military recruiting, but those gains began under his predecessor and before he won reelection in November.
• He misleadingly said that a House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion in Medicaid spending over a decade would “look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” adding that “nobody minds that.” One expert told us the cuts are “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.”
• The president claimed that since January, “job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers … for the first time in nobody even knows when.” But there were several two-month periods in 2024 when native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment, which includes U.S. citizens born abroad.

For more on these claims and others (on business investments, food dye bans, right/wrong track surveys, tourism, inflation, trade deficits and more), read the full story: “Trump's 100th Day Spin.”

We are honored to have won a 2025 National Headliner Award for online beat reporting of government and political coverage. Our work fact-checking Trump on immigration issues won the first-place award in that category.

Staffers Robert Farley, Catalina Jaramillo, D’Angelo Gore and Lori Robertson were the authors of the three articles that made up our entry. They explained a bipartisan immigration bill and the misinformation about it, interviewed experts in the U.S. and Venezuela about Trump's repeated claim that the country was emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the U.S., and debunked several other immigration claims Trump made on the campaign trail in southwestern swing states. 

The judges wrote: "Factcheck.org performed a valuable service for voters by combing through Donald Trump’s claims about America’s immigration problems — false or unsubstantiated claims that would form the basis of his policies — and providing correct information. The reporting is thorough, fair and helpful and deserves commendation."

We thank the judges and the National Headliner Awards, which were founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City.