Debunking misleading claims made by US President Donald Trump in first week in office

Trump has made several claims during his first week in office, especially surrounding issues like immigration, federal bodies like FEMA and state policies

President Donald Trump began his second term in office with a series of executive actions, press conferences and interviews, along with his inaugural address which outlined the aims of his presidency.

President Donald Trump made several tall claims during his presidency (AP)

However, along the way certain claims by President Trump didn't stand up to scrutiny. Here are some of Trump's claims that are either false or misleading.

FEMA and temporary housing

During a visit to North Carolina on Friday, Trump said, “The government wouldn’t do it any longer, which is ridiculous,” referencing temporary housing in hotels provided to survivors of Hurricane Helene by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

However, FEMA is still paying for survivors to stay temporarily in hotels through its Transitional Sheltering Assistance program.

“I want to be clear, this programme is not ending for Western North Carolina,” said Brett Howard, who is the agency's federal coordinating officer.

The agency has a review process to judge the eligibility of households in the program every two weeks to ensure they still meet the requirements for receiving temporary housing in hotels.

Election results

While delivering a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Donald Trump said he won by millions of votes in the 2024 election, which gave him “a massive mandate from the American people, like hasn’t been seen in many years.”

However, Trump’s margin of victory in the 2024 election was not quite as large.

Donald Trump won the electoral vote 312 to 226, including all seven swing states. The popular vote was a far closer race between Biden and Trump. He received 49.9% of the vote with 77,303,573 votes cast to Harris' 75,019,257 votes (48.4%), with a gap of over 2 million votes between them, according to AP Vote Cast.

For context, in 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes.

The youth vote

During an interview on Wednesday with Fox News, Trump said that he “won youth by 36 points." On the contrary it seems that former vice president Kamala Harris won over the 18 to 29 age group by 4 percentage points and the 30 to 44 age group 3 percentage points.

Trump was more popular than voters over 45 than Harris.

California water policies

Donald Trump criticised California governor Gavin Newsom regarding water policies in the state that he alleged were hindering the efforts against ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles.

“There is massive amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water that comes due with the snow, comes down when — it as it melts,” he continued, implying that there was a lack of water in the state due to bad governance.

While southern California reservoirs have limited the water they deliver this year, 40 per cent of the city's water comes from state projects. Further, fire hydrants which ran dry were due to maintenance work at a nearby reservoir that caused a shortage and not due to an ability to meet water needs.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has enough water in storage to meet roughly three years of water demand, said Deven Upadhyay, the agency’s interim general manager.

January 6

In an interview, after he pardoned those who participated in the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, Trump said, “They were treated like the worst criminals in history. And you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote because they knew the election was rigged and they were protesting the vote.” He also downplayed their engagement with the police.

Rioters at the Capitol were charged with severe acts of violence and vandalism, including pressing a stun gun against an officer's neck, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the police and firing guns. Two-thirds of them had been issued life imprisonment, with another getting smaller charges for assault or other misdemeanours.

Inflated immigration numbers

Donald Trump has claimed that it “was a gross miscarriage of common sense" to let 21 million illegal immigrants into the US. However, that figure is highly inflated.

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest available estimate, at least 11 million people were living illegally in the US as of January 2022.