It’s time for our roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.

President-elect Donald Trump featured on this list for the 10th straight year. As usual with Trump, it’s hard to isolate a particular falsehood, but we focused on four — two having to do with immigration, one on tariffs and another on the unemployment rate. His running-mate, JD Vance, also landed on the list (not for the first time) for an immigration-related claim that Trump echoed in a presidential debate.

In fact, five of the 12 claims below relate to illegal immigration — showing it was a potent issue in the election season. President Joe Biden merited two spots, for a false claim on the inflation rate and for a roundup of his unverified claims about his life (this is a perennial). Biden’s flip-flop on pardoning his son Hunter earned a bonus award.

This list has no particular order.

“The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money [for hurricane relief]. … They spent it all on illegal migrants. … They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”

— President-elect Donald Trump, Oct. 3

Trump sought to weaponize Hurricane Helene relief efforts, accusing the Biden administration of failing to provide adequate assistance. As part of his critique, he claimed there was no money available for hurricane relief because it was spent already to handle the surge of migrants at the southern border.

This was false: Money was not running short, and the Biden administration did not spend FEMA disaster money on migrants. What’s even richer is that when Trump was president, he did exactly what he claimed Biden did — funding migrant programs with FEMA disaster aid. In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who had been forced to wait in Mexico.

Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama). Melina Mara/The Washington Post“I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12 …. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama), March 7

In the centerpiece of the Republican response to State of the Union, Britt told a long story about a victim of sex trafficking who she suggested was recently abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies. But Biden had nothing to do with the travails of Karla Jacinto Romero, later identified as the person Britt referenced in the speech. In fact, Jacinto was never trafficked to the United States; she worked in Mexican brothels during the George W. Bush administration.

“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

— Vice President-elect JD Vance, Sept. 9

Vance sparked one of the oddest controversies of the campaign season by falsely claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets — a tweet inspired by a false rumor on a Facebook post about migrants eating cats. His running-mate piled on during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Soon after, bomb threats repeatedly forced the evacuation of schools and government offices in the city. Amid the backlash, Vance doubled down, insisting he had raised legitimate issues that were ignored or belittled by the media. But Ohio officials said the claims of pet-eating migrants were not true.

Inflation “was at 9 percent when I came in and it’s now down around 3 percent.”

— President Joe Biden, May 14

Inflation was an albatross for Democrats in this election year. After decades of stable prices — inflation of about 2 percent a year — the sudden increase early in President Joe Biden’s term was a shock, both for consumers and policymakers. Inflation, as measured by the year-over-year percentage change in the consumer price index, spiked to a 9 percent annual rate in June 2022 — the highest level in 43 years. By Election Day, it had fallen below 3 percent, but that was not good enough for many Americans. Biden tried to explain that inflation was largely the fault of the coronavirus pandemic, not his policies, and that his administration has made strides in reducing it. But in doing so, he was sloppy in his phrasing. He flatly has said inflation was 9 percent when he became president — when it was actually 1.4 percent.

“Over 13,000, the exact number’s 13,099, convicted illegal, alien murderers are now on the loose.”

— Trump, Oct. 1

Illegal immigration surged during the Biden administration, and Trump made many false claims about the issue during his campaign. This statement — which became a standard line in his speeches — was especially egregious. Trump twisted a report on the number of noncitizens with criminal convictions that were not detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make it sound like they had been released under Biden. But the data went back 40 years. Most of these killers are in some sort of detention (just not ICE), and have been since before Trump was president.

Biden Tall Tales

Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories — stories in which he tries to connect his own life with his audiences’, and that make up an essential part of his persona. But throughout his career, Biden’s propensity to exaggerate or embellish tales about his life have led to doubts about his truthfulness. That hasn’t changed in his last year as president. He claimed “I used to drive an 18-wheeler” — not true, but an amalgam of driving a school bus in college and being a passenger on a 47,000-pound cargo truck. He said he was a list of 10 most eligible bachelors; no such list can be found. He said he was the first in his family to go to college — but evidence suggests his father did. And he claimed he was the state runner-up in scoring in high school football; he was in fifth place.

“Tyson Foods has its eyes on a different class of workers. The company is now offering new jobs to asylum seekers in other states …. They’re firing Americans and offering perks to illegals.”

— Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters, March 14

Watters put Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest meat-packer, in the spotlight. With his platform on Fox News, he generated a firestorm on the right by claiming that Tyson was firing workers in Perry, Iowa, “one of the great American suburbs,” and hiring undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the country. An investment fund that claims it invests only in companies with conservative values earned headlines by announcing it had divested its Tyson stock. But Watters misleadingly connected two unrelated events — in a textbook example of how events taken out of context can be weaponized for political purposes.

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs. And it’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.”

— Trump, Aug. 17

Trump has said he will impose an across-the-board tariff on all imported products. But in making the case for his policy, he repeated the false claim he made often during his first term as president — that the entire tariff is paid by a foreign country. Economists do not debate this fact; they agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products. Even an economist recommended by the Trump campaign said a 10 percent tariff would increase prices for consumers.

The Alexander Smirnov affair

When House Republicans prepared to impeach President Biden (remember that?), the star witness was supposed to be a confidential FBI source who alleged that Biden and his son Hunter Biden had each been paid $5 million to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and protect a Ukrainian energy company that placed Hunter on its board. The source’s allegations were discovered because of a project launched by then-Attorney General William P. Barr soon after Trump was impeached for the first time. The FBI, however, decided the claims were not worth pursuing. Then-Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) publicly released the FBI’s 2017 interview with the source, forcing the reevaluation. Investigators determined he had lied, even when given a chance to recant, and Alexander Smirnov was arrested in February when he landed in Las Vegas. The Biden impeachment effort quickly collapsed.

“We had the best unemployment rates ever. And they were real unemployment, not like you have today where nobody’s working and they consider it to be.”

— Trump, Jan. 21

Trump rode to victory in 2024 in part because of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the economy, especially inflation. The unemployment rate, however, was a bright spot — the lowest numbers in 70 years. So Trump reached back to the playbook he used in the 2016 election, when the economy was also on an upswing — suggesting the unemployment numbers are fake. That was false. And naturally he falsely claimed that he had the best unemployment rate ever — when in fact Biden beat him.

“McCormick’s promised the richest people in America a massive tax break. To pay for it, he’s made clear he’ll slash your Medicare and Social Security and cut Medicaid for nursing home care.”

— Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), Oct. 10

The Senate race between Casey, the incumbent, and former hedge fund manager Dave McCormick was one of the closest in the nation. In an ad, Casey walked out of a bank vault as he complained that McCormick’s “billionaire buddies” have spent $150 million attacking him. Then he did something unusual — he directly attacked McCormick as having “made clear he’ll slash your Medicare and Social Security and cut Medicaid for nursing home care.” Usually, negative ads use voice-overs or text to make incendiary claims as a way to shield the candidate from possible fact checks. McCormick had said no such thing, and Casey’s campaign had no evidence to back up the claim. The ad did not seem to help Casey, who lost the race by about 15,000 votes out of 7 million cast.

“Something I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be being covered are the Epstein files. These files were released. And, like, Donald Trump is sort of all over this.”

— Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California), July 9

Florida Circuit Judge Luis Delgado unsealed nearly 200 pages of grand jury testimony related to the 2006 Florida case involving disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was alleged to have raped teenage girls. Trump’s name was not mentioned in any of the transcripts, but that did not stop Lieu from relying on dubious social media posts to claim that there was something about Trump in the documents. “One of the highest trending hashtags on Twitter right now is about Trump and Epstein,” he told reporters. But when we explored what was available in the public record, we found no credible allegation had emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein’s crimes.

Bonus Award: Flip-Flop of the Year

On June 13, Biden was emphatic: “I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter … I’m not going to do anything. I said I’d abide by the jury decision, and I will do that. And I will not pardon him.” Less than six months later, there was the flip-flop: The president not only pardoned his son for his conviction on three felony gun charges, three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses — he issued a sweeping pardon that absolved Hunter Biden of any possible federal crimes he might have committed between 2014 and 2024. As we reported, the arguments he marshaled in defense of a pardon could have been made back when he firmly stated that he would not pardon his son. He also never addressed the fact that he once pledged not to pardon his son — a clear but unacknowledged “flip-flop” from a previously held position.