A GOP senator’s attempt at kissing up to President Donald Trump backfired after he was called out for spreading fake information.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno posted a Trump “scorecard” on X Tuesday, listing out what he alleged were Trump victories.
It read: “Egg prices down 55%, Inflation at 5 year low, Gas prices down 20%, $6 trillion+ in new US investment, Consumer confidence highest in 4 yrs.”
“That’s all in 4 months. Now Republicans in the Senate have to step up!” he concluded.
But users were quick to point out the obvious inaccuracies in Moreno’s numbers, like financial journalist James Surowiecki, who is currently a contributing writer for Fast Company and The Atlantic.
He responded to the post, fact checking the senator, writing: “The stock market is down 1.37%, not up 10%, since Trump took office. The price of gas is up 2.6%, not down 20%. Consumer confidence is lower than it was at any point in 2023 or 2024.”
“Just baffling that a U.S. senator goes on Twitter to tell obvious, easily checkable lies,” he added.
One user commented under Surowiecki’s response that “they have no problem destroying their credibility because they know their base is not going to fact-check them and even if they did, they still choose to believe the lie over the truth.”
Under Moreno’s post, a user asked Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to “please fact check this lying loser,” who helped call out Moreno’s false claims.
Grok replied: “The claim of a 10% stock market rise is false; the S&P 500 dropped ~1.37% from Jan 20 to May 27, 2025.”
“Egg prices may have fallen, but a 55% drop lacks confirmation. Inflation, gas prices, investment, and consumer confidence claims need more data to verify,” it continued. “Current evidence suggests some inaccuracies.”
And Grok was right. Egg prices have slightly dropped since a record high in February, but are still 79 percent higher than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in May of last year.
The stock market has also been suffering ever since Trump’s disastrous “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement in April. The S&P 500 dropped by 4.8 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled by over 1,600 points, or 4 percent, only a day after the announcement.
When he imposed 10 percent tariffs on all exports to the U.S. a few days later, the market experienced its worst drop since the peak of the 2020 COVID pandemic.
Although the stock market is slowly picking itself back up, on Wednesday, the S&P 500 went down 0.1 percent and the Dow Jones fell by 106 points, or 0.3 percent.
Consumer confidence recently hit an all time low two weeks ago, while the fear of inflation continues to rise.
The only stat Moreno shared that could be positively fact checked was the “$6 trillion+ in new US investment,” with Yahoo Finance reporting last week that “foreign governments and corporations have pledged over $6 trillion in U.S. investments.”
But even then, Goldman Sachs found that only $135 billion in new annual investment, meaning only a fraction of it, will actually be used for GDP projects.
