 "Is London trying to impose Sharia law? Debunking Trump’s misleading claims in UN speech")
World leaders are given 15 minutes of time to address the United Nations General Assembly. But these rules don’t apply to Donald Trump, it seems. On Tuesday, the US president aggressively critiqued not only the UN itself but other nations too — at one point, he even ranted to Western countries: “Your countries are going to hell.”
The 79-year-old in his almost hour-long speech also made numerous false claims on various topics, including the UN itself, claiming that the world agency failed to help support his efforts in brokering peace amid warring nations. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up,” said Trump. “It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war.”
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks.
Trump and wars
“In a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars,” said Trump, adding, “I ended seven wars, and in all cases, they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda — a vicious, violent war that was — Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
This statement is mostly false. In the case of the Cambodia-Thailand hostilities, a truce began after phone calls from Trump, as well as mediation from Malaysia’s prime minister — chair of the ASEAN regional bloc — and a delegation of Chinese negotiators.
In the case of Serbia and Kosovo, the countries haven’t signed a final peace treaty. Moreover, Trump did not forge a peace between Kosovo and Serbia, his administration brokered an economic normalisation agreement between them during his first term.
Additionally, while a ceasefire brokered with the US and Qatari involvement ended 12 days of fighting between Israel and Iran in June, it followed Trump’s dramatic decision to bomb Iranian uranium-enrichment facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
Last but not the least, Trump claims he brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan following its hostilities in May. But Prime Minister Modi and his government have been emphatic that no world leader pushed the country to stop battling with Pakistan.
The government of Pakistan, however, has said it would recommend Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership” during the conflict.
Trump and the Russia-Ukraine war
In his long and aggressive address, Trump claimed that Russia and Ukraine are “killing anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 young soldiers mostly, mostly soldiers on both sides, every single week”.
However, these figures don’t match up. Since the war began in 2022, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has estimated that there have been nearly 250,000 Russian military deaths and another 1,000 civilian deaths.
On the Ukrainian side, there have been 80,000 military deaths. The UN Human Right Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported about 14,100 civilian deaths.
This brings the total to 345,100 deaths, which amounts to roughly 264 deaths per day or 1,848 deaths per week, thousands short of Trump’s figures.
Trump and immigration
The US president made a number of false claims on this topic — both on the domestic as well as on the international front.
Domestically, he claimed, “The Biden administration lost more than 300,000 children, little children, who were trafficked into the United States… They’re lost or they’re dead.”
This isn’t true. An August 2024 report published by the Department of Homeland Security revealed that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for immigration court dates. This is for the period of October 2018 to September 2023, which includes some of Trump’s first term.
However, the report did not say the children were missing. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN earlier: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. These kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the OIG are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”
On the international front, Trump stated, “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 Sharia law.”
This claim has no evidence backing it up. And when asked, the office of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is the city’s first Muslim mayor, told the New York Times that it would not “dignify his appalling and bigoted comments with a response”.
Trump and the American economy
Trump highly commended the American economy under his tenure and claimed to reverse the calamity it was under the previous administration. “We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration.”
But the data doesn’t support this. Firstly, inflation has been worsening since May — it was about 2.9 per cent in August, up from about 2.7 per cent in July.
Moreover, US President Trump claimed that under his leadership, “grocery prices are down.” Again, that’s incorrect as overall grocery prices are up 2.7 per cent compared with August 2024.
On new investment, Trump said, “In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion.” The US president has cited a long list of promised foreign investments, but there is no guarantee that the full amounts promised will come to fruition, and some of this investment would have occurred regardless of who was president, experts have been quoted as telling Politifact.
Trump and climate change
The US president has been a climate change denier and it was evident during his UNGA speech. He called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and he also referred to “the global warming hoax.”
But science doesn’t agree with Trump. There is scientific evidence that the earth has been heating up since the industrial revolution.
The US president further stated that renewable energy sources “don’t work” and are “too expensive”. The president called them a “joke” and said they are not powerful enough to handle modern infrastructure and are unreliable.
Notably, in 2024, 80 per cent of the growth in global electricity generation was from renewable and nuclear sources, contributing 40 per cent of the world’s total electricity generation for the first time, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
With inputs from agencies
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