Trump said: “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world.”
This is exaggerated. Trump, heralding a deal he struck with Venezuela that allowed the United States to take control of a significant portion of its oil, overstated the scale of that agreement.
Trump has said that Venezuela will give the United States more than 65 billion barrels of its proven oil reserves based on geological and engineering data. Venezuela has about 303 billion barrels in proven oil reserves, while the United States has about 46 billion barrels, according to the Energy Information Administration. Together, that is about 22 percent of the nearly 1.6 trillion barrels of global reserves.
The president repeated a number of claims that The New York Times has previously fact-checked:
He falsely claimed to have ushered in $21 trillion in foreign investments. (This is almost double the White House’s own tally, which includes broad pledges and previously announced investments.)
He falsely claimed to have signed the largest tax cuts in American history. (The tax cuts signed into law last summer rank sixth.)
He claimed that there are “more Americans working today by far than ever before.” (This is a meaningless statistic, given population growth. The unemployment rate in August was currently a low 4.1 percent, which is slightly higher than in January 2025, when he took office.)