[ad_1]
Claims about deportations, the Department of Government Efficiency, and someone fainting in the White House were among the mistruths that kept PolitiFact busy in 2025 — and they featured in some of our most popular stories this year.
Here are our 10 most-read fact-checks, from a tenuous gang connection to fears over voter eligibility.
10. President Donald Trump says Kilmar Abrego Garcia has “‘MS-13’ on his knuckles.”
President Donald Trump said Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man the U.S. government deported to El Salvador in March, had MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles — illustrating a purported affiliation with the MS-13 gang founded by El Salvadoran immigrants.
Trump made the claim during an April interview, referring to an image he posted on Truth Social of a left hand bearing four tattoos. Each finger in the picture displayed a different image — a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with an X for eyes, a cross and a skull — and an M, an S, a 1 and a 3 above these images.
But we found that the M, S, 1 and 3 don’t appear in other photos of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including one that Salvadoran government officials took when Abrego Garcia met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on April 17 in El Salvador. (Abrego Garcia is now back in the U.S awaiting a criminal trial.)
The tattoos also do not appear in an Abrego Garcia family photo immigration advocates shared. The photograph Trump shared appears to have been altered to include “MS-13” above the other symbols. And MS-13 experts told PolitiFact that none of those symbols are known signifiers of the gang.
We rated this claim Pants on Fire!
9. Novo Nordisk’s Gordon Findlay didn’t faint Nov. 6, 2025, in the Oval Office. He wasn’t even there
Dave Ricks, chair and chief executive officer of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., was speaking in the Oval Office on Nov. 6 when a man standing behind him fainted.
Multiple social media posts claimed the man who became ill was “Novo Nordisk Executive Gordon Findlay.” They included a post from X’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Grok.
But Gordon Findlay, a Novo Nordisk manager based in Switzerland, wasn’t at the White House that day.
The man who fainted doesn’t work for Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly; he was an Eli Lilly GLP-1 patient and attended a drug pricing announcement at the White House as the company’s guest.
We rated this claim False.
8. Did Bill Clinton create a fast-track deportation process exempt from due process? No.
As the Trump administration drew criticism over aggressive deportations, some social media users pointed to a law enacted under former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. The posts said an immigration law Clinton signed showed immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally are not entitled to due process.
The 1996 law established a fast-track deportation process called expedited removal that allows people to be deported without first going to immigration court. Although immigrants going through that process have fewer protections, they are not exempt from due process. People are screened, notified of deportation and can contest the deportation if they have a well-founded fear of persecution. Legal experts say there are no exceptions to due process rights, regardless of immigrants’ legal status or how they entered the country.
We rated this claim False.
7. Is it ‘official’ that Trump approved a $5,000 ‘DOGE dividend’ stimulus? No.
As the Department of Government Efficiency touted billions in canceled government contracts, rumors spread that the reclaimed money would wind up in taxpayers’ pockets.
A Feb. 23 Facebook post, for example, said Trump was going to sign an order giving some taxpayers a stimulus check for $5,000.
We found no White House announcements or news reports reflecting this.
James Fishback, CEO of the investment firm Azoria Partners, proposed giving American taxpayers a $5,000 “DOGE dividend” with money the Department of Government Efficiency aimed to save, and Trump mentioned the idea to reporters.
But DOGE didn’t cut the necessary $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget to make this proposed plan feasible.
We rated this claim False.
6. El gobernador de Texas Greg Abbott no dijo que deportaría a Dios si ‘fuera ilegal’
A Spanish-language TikTok video appeared to show a journalist reporting that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would have deported God if the higher power were in the U.S. illegally.
But the July video manipulated TelevisaUnivision journalist Enrique Acevedo’s voice to present the misleading news. PolitiFact en Español submitted the audio from the video to an AI detector, which said the audio was fake.
We rated this claim False.
5. X post exaggerates wealth of Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren
A Feb. 11 X post called out the significant wealth of prominent Democratic and Republican members of Congress. The account wrote about the supposed annual salaries and net worths of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Members of Congress are required to file annual financial disclosure reports detailing their assets and liabilities. Lawmakers also publicly report their annual salaries. But the lawmakers’ net worths weren’t driven by their government salaries; instead, their wealth mostly came from investments, such as stocks and real estate.
PolitiFact analyzed these four congressional members’ 2023 financial disclosure reports — the most recent ones available at the time — and found that this post exaggerated their wealth.
We rated this claim Mostly False.
4. Zelenskyy’s statement about Ukraine aid didn’t reveal money laundering operation
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his military had received only a portion of the U.S. aid earmarked for the country’s war against Russia, critics floated that the funding was misused through money laundering.
But Zelenskyy’s Feb. 1 statements aren’t proof of money laundering; they align with public data on the U.S. funding packages.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had received about $75 billion in military assistance of the $175 billion the U.S. has dedicated to Ukraine aid. That was in line with what researchers monitoring funding to Ukraine observed at the time.
A large portion of the money stayed in the U.S. and a smaller portion went to other countries in the region.
We rated these claims False.
3. No, Trump didn’t post that the president should be impeached if the Dow drops 1,000 points
As Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect March 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 1,300 points in two days.
Some X users — including former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., — shared a screenshot of what looked like a 2012 X post from Trump.
The screenshot made it look like Trump wrote, “If the Dow drops 1,000 points in two days the President should be impeached immediately.”
But this was a fake post that had been circulating for at least six years. There’s no record of Trump making such a statement.
We rated this claim Pants on Fire!
2. Trump had hand in temporary ceasefires around the world but evidence is scant he stopped ‘six wars’
Trump has repeatedly said he’s ended several wars, but there’s a lot of uncertainty around Trump’s role in these conflicts.
“I’ve stopped six wars — I’m averaging about a war a month,” Trump said July 28 in Scotland.
Experts said in August that although he deserves some credit for deals that eased various conflicts, some leaders dispute his role in such negotiations.
The U.S. was involved in a temporary peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda that experts said is significant albeit shaky, for example. But Trump also wrongly said he ended a conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia, and there’s little evidence he thwarted an escalation between Kosovo and Serbia.
We fact-checked other similar statements from the president this year, including one that he ended “seven unendable wars.”
We rated that and this claim Mostly False.
1. SAVE Act would make it harder, not impossible, for married people to register to vote
Congressional Republicans want to pass a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. This worried voting rights advocates who say it would hinder registration among eligible citizens.
The SAVE Act, would require people registering to vote or updating their voter registrations to use certain identifying documents, including military IDs, enhanced IDs showing citizenship, birth certificates or passports to prove citizenship. The bill passed in the House in April and is awaiting debate in the Senate.
“If you are a woman that has changed your name from your birth certificate, let’s say through marriage and you took your husband’s name, you are no longer eligible to vote if this bill passes the Senate,” a Feb. 10 TikTok video said.
That’s not quite accurate. The bill would make voter registration more difficult for married people who change their last names, and anyone whose name does not match the name on a birth certificate. But it would not prohibit it outright.
We rated this claim Mostly False.
[ad_2]
