Last week, President Donald Trump's annual financial disclosure showed he made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency ventures in 2025. On Monday, after a reporter asked him a question related to crypto, he eventually pivoted to a colorful anecdote about the nation's first president.

Trump said George Washington "had two desks in his pre-White House." He continued: "And they were right next to each other. One was for business and one was for the presidency. He had two desks, in the same room. And so you're allowed to. But I choose not to. I don't talk to my kids about, you know, this stuff."

An interesting story about Washington. Unfortunately, it's a fictional story about Washington.

Washington did conduct some personal business while he was president, but he didn't have separate desks for business matters and official matters. Historians debunked the two-desks tale when Trump delivered it more than six years ago; one historian told CNN it was "utter nonsense," one said it was "an absurd allegation," and one said, "I don't know what he's talking about."

This might be considered a matter of trivia rather than current importance. But Trump told the story to try to fend off pressing concerns about his wealth-building while in office – if the revered first president could have a whole separate desk devoted to business affairs while serving, why can't this president do big business while serving? And it wasn't a one-time slip.

Rather, it's part of Trump's long history of fake history. For years now, for a variety of tactical reasons, he has deployed imaginary stories about US history, world history and his own history. The story about Washington is one of at least four such false claims he has made in the past week alone.

He wildly overstated American deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal. He wrongly claimed nobody before him had donated the president's official salary. And, as usual, he lied that he won the 2020 election.

During his July 4 speech marking the nation's 250th birthday, Trump spoke of Americans' role in building the Panama Canal, the vital waterway he has previously said the US should not have ceded to Panama last century. "And by the way," Trump added, "38,000 Americans died to give us one of the greatest engineering feats of all time: Panama Canal."

That number is not close to true.

While the century-old records are imprecise, they show about 5,600 people died during the canal's American construction phase between 1903 and 1914 – and "of those, the vast majority were Afro-Caribbeans," such as  workers from Barbados and Jamaica, Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book "The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal," told CNN after Trump made a similar claim in his inaugural address last year.

The late historian David McCullough, author of another book on the building of the canal, found that "the number of white Americans who died was about 350."

Thousands of additional workers, perhaps around 22,000, died during the French construction phase that preceded the American phase. But Trump said, as he has before, that he was talking about American deaths in particular.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Trump said, "I'm the only president, they say, that's ever given up my salary. I gave up my salary."

We have no idea who "they" might be, but Trump's claim isn't true.  John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover donated their presidential salaries, as media outlets pointed out when Trump repeatedly made such claims during his first term. (Trump did it again – without the "they say" – earlier in this term.)

Also, while Trump provided proof that he donated his entire $400,000 annual presidential salary for most of his first term, the extent of his salary donations so far this term is not clear; the White House declined to comment in response to CNN's request for evidence of his second-term donations. The White House Historical Association, a nonprofit Trump said in August 2025 he had donated his "first 'Paycheck'" to, said in October 2025 that Trump had donated a total of $66,000 to the organization since January 2025.

Trump entered a White House luncheon on Monday to the patriotic song he walks out to at his campaign rallies, Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." As if reminiscing, Trump said, "That's been with me a long time, that song. We won three elections with that song."

He won two presidential elections with that song, in 2016 and 2024, and lost another, in 2020. But he has never shown any indication that he plans to abandon his fake history about that 2020 defeat.

The story has been updated with additional details.

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