President Donald Trump routinely points to trillion-dollar figures as proof that his “America First” economic agenda is delivering, but experts say those numbers bear little relation to reality — and, according to NBC News, some of those experts work for Trump.

Trump's current fixation is $21 trillion, the sum he says he has drawn into the U.S. economy through his policies and deal-making. He invokes the repeatedly ahead of the midterm elections as an achievement without precedent. Just weeks into his second term, he put the total at $1.7 trillion, according to NBC, and last month he predicted it could climb as high as $25 trillion.

The sums are of a scale that is “unfathomable to many,” Trump wrote in a January op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. “And for good reason, economists say: They aren't real,” NBC reports.

“Trump's claim is clearly inaccurate,” former treasury secretary Janet Yellen told NBC News. “It matches no meaningful measure of foreign investment in official statistics.”

NBC did not need to turn to former Biden-era officials to challenge the figure. The White House's own website carries a page titled “The Trump Effect”, which tallies the U.S. and foreign investments “made possible by President Trump's leadership.” The total it claims: $11.2 trillion. Because that tally is published by the administration itself, it serves as a self-sourced benchmark: whatever total Trump cites in speeches can be measured directly against the smaller figure on the White House's own page.

“That's just over half the figure Trump has been mentioning of late, most recently in a speech Tuesday,” NBC News reports. Announcing a new Baltimore shipyard project, Trump said: “The big thing is $21 trillion being invested by others into our country. There's never been a country that's even close to that.”

When NBC News asked the White House to cite the specific investments backing the $21 trillion figure, it did not do so. Instead, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers offered a broad statement: “President Trump's America First trade agenda has ushered in a re-industrialization and manufacturing renaissance, drawing tens of trillions of dollars in private and foreign investment into the United States. In less than two years, President Trump has already attracted more than Joe Biden did in all four years—many times over.”

According to NBC, Trump's self-described “American economic miracle” has grown with each retelling. In June, he claimed “we have $18 [trillion] to $19 trillion being poured into our country.” By July, the figure had risen to “$19.2 trillion … going toward building factories, plants, AI, automobile.” In August, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he put it at “almost $20 trillion now of money coming into the United States that we would never have had.” And at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September, he told the crowd: “Think of it, $22 trillion coming into this country …” Each of those statements was delivered in a public setting, so the figure's steady climb is traceable through dated remarks rather than through any single official statistic.

“The whole list and the whole sum and the whole score is delusional and not rooted in reality at all,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan, of Trump's investment figures. “Investment in the U.S. economy today largely tracks what you would have extrapolated from the past. That's a fancy way of saying it looks the same as recent history.” For readers weighing the claim, the checkable reference points are the White House's own $11.2 trillion tally and the official statistics Yellen cited, which she said contain no meaningful measure matching the figure.

Meanwhile, NBC News reports that if the incoming money has produced record-breaking investment in new factories, technology and infrastructure, Americans are apparently not feeling it — and even Fox News has struggled to present the figures as good news. With the midterms approaching, the published $11.2 trillion tally stands as the administration's on-the-record number, making any future revision to page an observable reference point against the larger totals repeated on the campaign trail.