President Donald Trump made numerous false claims in a rambling Tuesday speech to hundreds of generals and admirals who were summoned to a military base in Virginia to listen to addresses by the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Some of Trump’s false claims were about the military itself.

Here is a fact check of some of the president’s remarks, many of which have been debunked before. This article will be updated with additional items.

Trump noted that he brags that “we have the strongest military anywhere in the world,” then falsely added, “You never heard Biden say that. You never heard him say anything, but you never heard him say – did we ever hear him say, ‘We have the strongest military.’ He doesn’t say that.” In fact, Biden repeatedly said the US has the world’s strongest military.

To cite just one example, Biden said in a 2023 speech about democracy: “Our US military – and this is not hyperbole; I’ve said it for the last two years – is the strongest military in the history of the world. Not just the strongest in the world – in the history of the world.”

Biden sometimes made the same point using slightly different language. In the last week of his presidency, in January 2025, he told a Defense Department audience, “You are simply the greatest fighting force in the history of the world – in the history of the world. That’s a fact. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”

Biden and the Space Force

Trump falsely claimed that Biden said he thought he could get rid of Space Force, the military branch created during Trump’s first term, before backing down.

“When Biden came into office, he wanted to terminate it – he said, ‘And this thing called Space Force, so we can get rid of that.’ And he got hammered by the people in this room for even suggesting it,” Trump said. But Biden never said anything like that.

In the first month of Biden’s presidency, in 2021, there was a contr