The Claims Keep Coming

The Canal That Wasn’t

In late August, social media filled with a screenshot that looked like a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump. It announced the construction of the Melania Canal, a much bigger, deeper, wider bypass connecting straight into Lake America, and promised every American could enter from both the front end and the back side for a minimal fee.

The post spread across Facebook and Threads after Trump announced he would rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Readers who sent the image to fact-checkers found the tells were in the image itself. The post was labeled satire under the spot where likes appear on Truth Social and a watermark ran across it. The watermark traced back to a Facebook account called Mrs. Putin, which describes itself as Satire/Parody. The account first shared the post on Aug. 29.

The satire markers were deliberate. Likes were changed to disLikes. Trump’s social media handle was misspelled as @realDotardTurmp and his last name as Turmp. A search of the president’s social media archives showed no declaration of a Melania Canal. He did post on Sept. 2 about floating the renaming of the Strait of Hormuz to Trump Strait.

The episode illustrates how a policy announcement about renaming a body of water can become a story about a canal that never existed, and how quickly a fabricated Truth Social post can acquire the texture of a real one when it borrows the language of the moment.

Cherry Trees and the Golf Course

On June 28, President Trump posted on Truth Social that renovations to Washington, D.C.’s East Potomac Golf Links would begin Sept. 1 to build one of the greatest golf courses anywhere in the world that could host major tournaments. The announcement came with renderings that did not appear to show several of the park’s best-known amenities, including the riverside bicycle trail, the miniature golf course and Washington’s oldest grove of cherry trees.

By late August, the Washington Post reported that more than 60 trees had been removed in recent weeks in the area surrounding the links. The article mentioned only one cherry tree that was removed and two sycamores. The rest of the removals were not detailed.

Social media posts distorted the report, claiming Trump had illegally chopped down sixty historic cherry trees without court approval to renovate a golf course. One reader asked a fact-checker to validate a post that said Trump had gone ahead and chopped down dozens and dozens of beloved cherry and sycamore trees at the historic East Potomac Golf Links.

Alex Rosen, a spokesman for the advocacy group Save East Po, said the online claims were false. He said he could tell for certain that one cherry tree was cut down, and he thought there might have been one other, but was not certain. Save East Po describes itself as an independent, grassroots coalition of neighbors, runners, cyclists, picnickers, fishers and golfers who want East Potomac Park to remain public, accessible and affordable.

The Department of the Interior said arborists were doing routine maintenance at East Potomac Park with selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees and declining and dying trees that cannot be brought back to good health. A company contracted for the work, RTEC Treecare, said it had not removed any cherry trees and that its work was limited to trees identified by the National Park Service as hazardous, non-native or invasive.

Tee times remained available for booking on the course’s website in early September for all three courses, with the 18-hole course starting at $42 for non-seniors. The renovation project is subject to a lawsuit filed by a preservation group and two D.C.-area golfers, and the exact plans remain unclear.

The Price Tag on Medicine

In mid-August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released consumer price data showing prescription drug prices falling 3.1 percent over the past year, the largest one-year decrease since 1963. Prices had not changed much in the second half of 2025 but had dropped 3.3 percent since the start of the year, the steepest six-month drop since the BLS began tracking prescription drug costs in 1947.

President Trump said during an Aug. 14 speech on Long Island that under his most-favored-nation policy on drug prices, the country was delivering the largest prescription drug price cuts in history. He repeated the claim on Aug. 31 at an event announcing deals with additional companies.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz attributed the drop to the administration’s dealmaking and the launch of TrumpRx, an online direct-to-consumer platform that lists discounts on certain drugs for consumers paying cash prices. In an interview on Aug. 23, he said the savings were seismic in nature.

Drug pricing experts told a fact-checker that the reasons for the decline are more complicated than the administration suggests. They cited market pressures driving down the cost of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, more generics entering the market and a Biden-era policy that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. The agreements announced since November with 17 large drug companies and nine midsize biotech companies apply limited most-favored-nation pricing to drugs sold to state Medicaid programs, direct-to-consumer sales through TrumpRx and certain other circumstances.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said President Trump’s most-favored-nation deals cover hundreds of drugs, including GLP-1s and fertility drugs that are enormously popular and not typically covered by insurance. He said TrumpRx.gov had already saved real patients over $700 million and that the MFN policies were set to save America over $500 billion in the next ten years. The administration referred other questions to the White House.

The CPI tracks prescription drug prices based on what individuals and insurers, including Medicare drug plans, pay to pharmacies. The claim of historic cuts sits alongside the assessment that market forces and prior policy are likely playing larger roles than the new deals.

Measles, Vaccines and Blame

As of Aug. 30, the United States had recorded 2,903 confirmed measles cases in 2026, already breaking the 2,289 cases recorded in 2025, the highest number since 1991. The country had eliminated measles in 2000, meaning there were no sustained outbreaks lasting more than a year.

Republican Representative Byron Donalds, running for governor in Florida, told CBS News’ Face the Nation on Aug. 23 that the reason for outbreaks was rampant illegal immigration into the United States from the previous administration. He referred to outbreaks in El Paso, Texas, in Southwest Florida and many other parts where people entering the country illegally have not had that vaccination schedule.

Infectious disease experts said there is no evidence that illegal immigration under President Joe Biden caused the recent uptick. The U.S. measles problem is due to gradually dropping rates of measles vaccination among children, and most current cases are from domestic transmission. A sizable but much smaller portion of cases are from international travel, and most of those are related to U.S. residents traveling outside the country and then returning.

The CDC does not track immigration status of individuals diagnosed with measles, and public health data shows the vast majority of U.S. measles cases stem from unvaccinated domestic residents. Settings like detention facilities and prisons are known to accelerate the spread of infectious diseases. Even if all individuals infected in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and U.S. Marshals Service detention centers were undocumented, they would make up less than 6 percent of total cases so far this year.

Vaccination remains the main driver. Receiving two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine reduces a person’s risk of getting the disease by 97 percent if exposed. After the second dose was incorporated into the schedule in 1989, cases fell further, and by 2000 the U.S. had met the criteria for measles elimination as a direct result of high two-dose childhood coverage.

Mail Ballots in Court

A federal judge in Boston said the U.S. Postal Service had told her nothing about how it would implement a plan to regulate mail ballots for the midterms as she considered whether to let the plan proceed in the weeks before Election Day. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani told Justice Department lawyer Michael Velchik that she was 70 days from the election and had nothing from USPS about how this will happen.

The case concerns an effort undertaken as part of an executive order by President Trump to regulate mail ballots. Talwani had imposed a 14-day temporary restraining order to keep it from being used, an order that expires the week before more states begin sending out mail ballots. North Carolina starts shipping mail ballots to voters who requested them on Friday, and some municipalities in Wisconsin had already sent ballots earlier in the week.

The administration contends the changes are relatively minor and legal. The Postal Service would have to approve the design of envelopes containing ballots and have the state upload a list of voters receiving them to an online portal. Election officials say there is simply no way they can comply with the Postal Service directives, which could require a complete overhaul of their operations. The portal was not active the week before the hearing, and most election offices have already printed their envelopes and ballots.

A whistleblower report made public this week warned that postal requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent. The new rule requires all ballots to be physically brought to post offices before being mailed to voters, but if a single barcode registers an error, the whole batch gets thrown out, even if it contains tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.

The Supreme Court had ruled earlier that Talwani’s order was premature because the Postal Service had not yet published regulations governing how it would apply the president’s order. The agency did so just before the high court ruling, prompting Democrats and voting rights groups to re-file lawsuits, arguing the president has no authority to set election rules, which is a power designated to the states and in some cases Congress.

Rules, Exemptions and the Cost of Words

On Thursday, the Treasury Department published proposed regulations that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the IRS finds to be racially discriminatory.

The rules would take effect after May 31 and apply to as many as 18,000 schools, the Treasury said. The threat of losing tax-exempt status would tighten the financial squeeze the administration has applied to higher education by withholding federal research funding. Schools may still not owe much in federal income taxes even if they lost their tax-exempt status, but the exemption is valuable because it allows donors to deduct donations they make directly to the school.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the group will oppose the rule during the Treasury Department’s public comment period. The rule is likely to face a legal challenge from the American Association of University Professors.

In the same week, Vice President JD Vance held a press briefing about the war with Iran. He pushed back on reports that U.S. strikes hit a wedding party, saying the United States never targets civilians in combat and never will, though sometimes things happen. He said the country’s state-run media has not been a very good scribe about covering the conflict and that the reports were being investigated.

The week also brought a public disagreement over casualty numbers. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CNBC that there had not been American deaths in the conflict. President Trump posted on Truth Social that Secretary Lutnick had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed, and that 18 people were killed in Iran.

Iran’s health ministry said Tuesday night’s strikes killed 18 people and wounded 108. The Red Crescent said four people were killed and 67 wounded when a U.S. strike hit a wedding ceremony near the coast of the Strait of Hormuz, which also killed a child. Reuters said it was able to verify the location of the damaged building using satellite imagery. U.S. Central Command said the strikes hit Iranian air defense systems, radar installations, maritime assets, mine-laying equipment and communications sites near the Strait of Hormuz.

The episode exposes a wider tension in how the White House presents the conflict, officials seeking to characterize the campaign in economic terms even as it produces U.S. military deaths, mounting Iranian civilian casualties and rising oil prices.

Claims travel fast. The fact-checks, court filings and public records that follow them move more slowly, but they accumulate, and they define the gap between what is said and what can be shown.