FactChecking Trump's Contentious 'Meet the Press' Interview

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

President Donald Trump walked out of a sit-down interview with Kristen Welker on NBC's "Meet the Press." That happened after he made, or repeated, a number of false and unsupported claims — some of which Welker pushed back on.

• Trump seized on the slow vote-counting procedures in California to claim, without evidence, that its recent primary election was "rigged."

• The president falsely claimed that he "didn't guarantee" that he'd keep the U.S. out of "new wars" in his second term. There are several examples of him making such a promise in 2024.

• He claimed that Iran was "very close to having a nuclear weapon" under a multilateral agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama's administration and wrongly said the country "got all of this uranium during Obama." Arms control experts say Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

• The president also said that if he didn't launch airstrikes against Iran in June 2025, the country would "right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already." That assessment is at odds with reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which said in March 2025 that "Iran is not building a nuclear weapon."

• He provided no support for his claim that Jan. 6 rioters were "ushered into" the Capitol by "FBI agents." A 2024 watchdog report said that FBI agents arrived to assist law enforcement after rioters had already broken into the Capitol.

• Trump repeated other claims we've written about before regarding gasoline prices, the economy under his presidencies and construction of factories.

The interview was recorded on June 5 and aired two days later.

No Evidence of 'Rigged' California Elections

Trump walked out of the interview after Welker repeatedly asked him to provide evidence for his claims that the California elections were "rigged."

The "evidence" Trump cited, however — that California had not finished counting votes several days after a June 2 primary election — is not evidence at all.

It does take California longer than other states to count ballots, but that's because the vast majority of votes are cast via mail-in ballots, which counties send to all active registered voters. Mail-in ballots are accepted so long as they are "postmarked on or before election day" and received "no later than seven days after election day," according to state law. That alone causes some delay.

"California has the largest number of registered voters in the nation—more than 23 million registered voters," according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber's website. "Ensuring that all valid votes cast by eligible voters are accurately processed and counted takes time."

California is also one of 32 states that require signature verification for mail-in ballots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But California also allows voters to "cure" their ballot if a problem arises in signature-matching.

"If a signature is missing or does not compare to the signature on file, state law requires county elections officials to reach out to voters to verify their signature to ensure that their ballot can be counted," the California secretary of state website states. "By law, and for most elections, voters are allowed to verify their signature up to eight days before the county certifies their results. These processes ensure that all valid votes cast by eligible voters can be counted."

On election night, California shares "semi-official" tallies of the votes cast in-person at the polls on Election Day, the early votes cast in person, and mail-in ballots received and processed prior to Election Day. But in close elections, that's often not enough for election prognosticators to "call" a race for the winners.

The top two vote-getters in the primary for both governor and Los Angeles mayor — regardless of party — square off in the general election. As of the morning of June 9, the Associated Press had projected Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra would advance to the general election, but it is yet to be determined whether he will face Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Tom Steyer. In the Los Angeles mayoral election, the Associated Press projected a day after the election that incumbent Karen Bass will be on the November general election ballot. But it wasn't until June 8 that the AP projected Nithya Raman, a city councilwoman, would grab the second spot over reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

In his "Meet the Press" interview, Trump revived his false and unproven claims that the 2020 election was "rigged" and "dirty."

Welker noted that "you've never presented evidence" that the 2020 election was "rigged."

"It's happening right now in California," Trump said. "Right now, it's, look at what's happening in California."

"Where's the evidence to that?" Welker asked, adding that "the Republicans are doing well in California."

"In California, it's, no they're not," Trump said. "They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up with the —"

Welker pushed back, saying, "That's how they count the votes in California."

"Do you know why they're doing that? Because they're cheating on the election," Trump said.

"Do you have evidence to support that?" Welker said.

"All I have to do is look," Trump responded.

"But that's not evidence," Welker said.

"And I listen. And I listen to people," Trump said.

"But sir, that's not evidence," Welker said.

"We're like a third world country," Trump said. "Your elections are crooked and you're crooked, and 'Meet the Press' is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You're a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time."

The unfounded claim about California was not new for Trump, who posted on Truth Social on June 4, two days after California's election, "There's BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???"

The following day, Bilal "Bill" Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, posted on X that his office "has multiple election fraud investigations underway" in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles. "We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent," Essayli wrote.

No further details about the investigations were provided.

Essayli also lambasted the state's "[u]niversal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements," which he said "creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence."

He added that the U.S. attorney's office would be working with the Department of Justice's civil rights division "to conduct a comprehensive audit of California's voter rolls."

A post from California Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office on June 4 warned, "There is a lot of misinformation floating around about California's election — including from the President." The post linked to a CNN explanation of why it takes California so long to count ballots.

"And yes, for the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too," the governor's press office post concluded.

'No New Wars'

During an exchange about the Iran conflict, Trump repeatedly denied — wrongly — that he ever promised there would be "no new wars" in a second Trump term.

"One of your consistent campaign promises was no new wars, going all the way back to 2015," Welker said, before asking the president, "Did you break that promise to the American people?" In response, Trump said, "No," then he added: "I had to stop a country, very powerful, very dangerous country, from having a nuclear weapon because they'd use it."

When Welker continued to press the issue, asking Trump "what changed" to make him go back on his promise to keep the U.S. out of "new wars," he said, "First of all, I didn't guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?"

Later in the interview, Trump again said that he had made no such guarantee. "When you say I promised, I didn't promise anything," he said. "I don't like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We've been doing this for three months."

Several times during his 2024 campaign, Trump was specific about wanting to "end" or keep the U.S. out of "endless" foreign wars. For example, during a Wisconsin campaign rally in September 2024, he said: "I will expel the warmongers from our national security state and carry out a much-needed cleanup of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America first. … So, we're going to end these endless wars, endless wars. They never stop. You ever see these wars? They're going for 14 years, 20 years."

However, to Welker's point, there also were many times when Trump said that there would be no U.S.-involved wars at all in a second Trump administration.

When accepting the GOP nomination for president in July 2024, Trump said, "With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don't have wars."

The following month, at an August 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, he told the audience, "Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all." A few days earlier, during a campaign speech in North Carolina, Trump said that "we will end the era of inflation, mayhem and misery" under the Biden administration by having "no more wars" and "no more disruptions."

Then, while giving his election victory speech in November 2024, Trump said that his political opponents were wrong to say that he would be the one to start a war. "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars," he said.

But it was the U.S. and Israel that launched the airstrikes that began the fighting with Iran.

Iran Nuclear Capabilities

The president made several disputed and unsupported claims about Iran's nuclear capabilities and the actions he and former President Barack Obama took.

Trump claimed that Iran was "very close to having a nuclear weapon twice." The first time, he said, was under a 2015 deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — and Germany. In 2018, in Trump's first term and two years after the JCPOA went into effect, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the deal.

In the "Meet the Press" interview, Trump said the JCPOA was a "horrible deal. It was a path to them getting a nuclear weapon. They were very close to having a nuclear weapon. I terminated the deal."

The deal put restrictions on Iran's enrichment of uranium and required international inspections of the country's nuclear facilities for 15 years. While there were critics of the agreement who said it didn't go far enough, experts we interviewed disputed Trump's claim that it was a "path" to Iran "getting a nuclear weapon." In fact, they said, Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us that the 2015 nuclear deal "established an array of limits on Iran's uranium enrichment and uranium stockpiling" and a rigorous monitoring and verification program. After the Trump administration's withdrawal, "Iran began to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities, including by deploying large numbers of advanced centrifuges and stockpiling" highly enriched uranium.

Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency for 28 years, told us: "Iran simply would not have been able to enrich to the point of possessing over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium had the JCPOA remained in place." That's a reference to the amount of 60% enriched uranium Iran had before June 2025 airstrikes on the country's nuclear program sites.

In July 2019, about a year after Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Obama-era deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had exceeded the deal's limits on Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and Iran's foreign minister said the country would begin to enrich uranium beyond the low level needed for civilian nuclear power.

In the NBC News interview, Trump wrongly claimed that Iran "got all of this uranium during Obama." When Welker said that Iran "escalated their development after the deal was ripped up," Trump said that "they didn't escalate anything." That's contrary to what arms control experts have said.

As we've explained before, to be weapons-grade, the 60% enriched uranium would need to be enriched to 90%.

The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that Trump's withdrawal from JCPOA shortened the so-called "breakout time," or the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb - if the country chose to do so. As of November 2024, the center estimated that the breakout time went from two to three months before the JCPOA to 12-plus months during the deal. After the U.S. withdrew from the agreement, the breakout time was reduced to just a couple of weeks.

To be clear, that doesn't mean that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in a couple of weeks. Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that once Iran had weapons-grade uranium, it "would then need to manufacture the rest of the weapon. This process would likely take much longer, perhaps months to a year."

Again, if Iran chose to do so. That brings us to another disputed claim by Trump. He said that Iran was close to having and potentially using a nuclear weapon before the June 2025 U.S. airstrikes. "If I didn't go in there with the B2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already," Trump said.

The president's view is at odds with the assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community — which is made up of 18 government intelligence agencies and departments — and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In late March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that "Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003." In a March 25 congressional hearing, then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated that finding in her opening statement. Gabbard also said, "Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons."

Similarly, a May 31, 2025, report from the IAEA said it "has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme" to develop nuclear weapons in Iran, but the group had concerns about "repeated statements by former high-level officials in Iran related to Iran having all capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons."

The agency said, "[T]he fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern, which has drawn international attention given the potential proliferation implications."

The Iranian nuclear program sites targeted by last June's U.S. airstrikes were damaged, but not "obliterated," as Trump put it, according to experts, who told us the bombings likely increased the so-called breakout time. The operation didn't "remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled," Kimball said.

Trump has said he wants Iran to turn over its stockpile of enriched uranium as part of a peace deal to end the current U.S. military operation in the country.

Finally, Trump said that Obama sent a plane to Iran loaded with "$1.7 billion in cash, "adding that the administration "emptied out the banks" in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., for this payment. As we've explained before, the $1.7 billion payment, made in 2016, settled a claim that Iran had filed against the U.S. in an international tribunal in The Hague. It concerned a decades-old dispute over Iran paying the U.S. $400 million for military equipment, and the U.S. refusing to provide the equipment after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

The $1.7 billion included the original $400 million and "a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest," according to a statement by John Kerry, the secretary of state at the time.

The $400 million came from a foreign military sales trust fund, and the $1.3 billion in interest came from Treasury's judgment fund, which pays lawsuit settlements or judgments against the government. That's according to a December 2016 Congressional Research Service report and September 2016 congressional testimony by the Treasury Department's assistant general counsel for enforcement and intelligence.

The Treasury counsel, Paul Ahern, said the money was sent to European banks, which changed it to foreign currency to be remitted to Iran. He acknowledged that cash was involved because U.S. and international sanctions on Iran "had effectively cut off Iran from the international financial system."

Jan. 6 Claims

Trump also claimed without evidence that some of the people who were arrested for entering the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, had been "ushered into the building" by "FBI agents."

After Welker asked Trump if people who attacked police officers that day should be compensated via a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund that the Justice Department announced and then halted due to bipartisan backlash, Trump said, "I wouldn't be inclined to say so, but I have to see it." He then argued that some of the roughly 1,400 people who were charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds had been victims of government weaponization.

When Welker told Trump that "172 people did plead guilty to assaulting police officers," he said: "They pled guilty because they were frightened. They went down. They were ushered into a building. Many of them were arrested without even going into the building." Earlier, he said that there were "FBI agents ushering them into the building."

But as Welker said, there is no evidence that FBI agents did that.

A December 2024 report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General said that "several hundred" FBI special agents and employees were deployed after the Capitol already had been breached by rioters who broke through windows and doors. The report also said that there were no undercover FBI employees at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

In addition, there were 26 FBI informants, or confidential human sources, in Washington, D.C., that day "in connection with the events planned" for Jan. 6, the report said. However, those individuals are not agents or employees.

During the riot, 17 of the 26 informants entered the Capitol or a "restricted area" outside of the building. But the report said that none was authorized to do so or "to encourage others to commit illegal acts." Only three informants were tasked with informing the FBI about suspects attending Jan. 6 events; other informants who went to the Capitol did so by choice.

As for Trump's claim that "many" people "were arrested without" entering the Capitol, that ignores some of the serious offenses — such as assault — committed by people who were outside of the building. As an example, NBC News published photos of David Dempsey assaulting officers with a pole and pepper-spray just outside of a tunnel leading inside the Capitol. He later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting or impeding officers with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Dempsey was one of the many rioters who pleaded guilty to using weapons to assault officers, who — according to police statements and media reports — suffered cuts, bruises, sprains, concussions, bone fractures and other injuries.

When Trump took office in January 2025, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of every person charged with committing an illegal act during the Capitol riot. His executive order also directed the attorney general to seek dismissal with prejudice of all pending indictments against individuals for conduct related to Jan. 6 events.

More Repeats

There were more claims in the interview that we've fact-checked before:

Gasoline prices. Trump said that gasoline prices would "drop like a rock" once the war in Iran was over, saying they were "going to go lower than they were before." Energy experts told us that prices will start to drop when the war ends, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to its pre-conflict level. The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.15 per gallon as of the week ending June 8, according to the Energy Information Administration, up about 41% from the week ending Feb. 23, five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes.

"For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year," Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy, told us, adding that there are "a lot of different potential" outcomes depending on what happens when the war ends.

Economy. He has said it over and over again — "I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever." This time, the president added: "And you know what? This one's blowing it away." By the measure favored by economists — growth of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product — the U.S. economy wasn't the greatest ever during Trump's first term.

Annual real GDP growth peaked in that term at 3% in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Dating back to Ronald Reagan's presidency, real economic growth has exceeded Trump's peak year 17 times.

As for this term "blowing … away" the first? Not so far. Real GDP growth was just 2.1% in 2025. The annual rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 1.6%, according to the BEA's second estimate released in late May.

Factory construction. Trump mentioned that "we're building more factories." But that's not what the Census Bureau's manufacturing construction spending data show — data that the White House cited earlier this year when Trump made claims about this issue.

The monthly figures show a nearly 20% decline in manufacturing construction spending, from January 2025, when Trump was sworn in, to April, the most recent data available. On a quarterly basis, construction spending went down 18%, from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of this year. And on a yearly basis, the drop was 6.6% from 2024 to 2025.

See our February story for more on what factors have affected this spending under the prior administration and under Trump.

Although there has been a slight uptick in manufacturing jobs this year of 23,000 jobs, overall manufacturing employment has declined during Trump's second term by 68,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That comes after a drop of 202,000 jobs in Biden's last year in office.

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