Fact check: Trump twice promotes phony claim that Walmart is closing 250 California stores
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump did another social media posting spree on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. As with Trump’s previous posting blitzes, this one was filled with wildly inaccurate and often conspiratorial claims about elections and other subjects.
Here’s a debunking of two of them.
No, Walmart isn’t shutting down 250 California stores
Trump twice shared a video titled “California Governor PANICS as Walmart Shuts Down 250+ Stores Across State.” The video, echoed by the text in one of the posts Trump shared, claimed that Walmart is preparing to shut down these stores because the retailer can’t afford California’s “$22” per hour minimum wage.
But California’s statewide minimum wage is $16.90 per hour, not $22 – and Walmart told CNN on Thursday morning that it isn’t conducting a massive store closure in California for any reason.
“This isn’t accurate information,” a Walmart spokesperson said. “In fact, we actually just recently opened a new store in California.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office posted on social media on Wednesday night expressing disbelief that Trump had promoted both the false claim about Walmart – “Walmart’s 303 stores in California are open,” Newsom’s office wrote – and an even wilder but equally fake anti-Newsom conspiracy theory the president also shared during the social media blitz.
Newsom’s office wrote: “We cannot believe we have to say any of this out loud. We cannot believe this is real life. And we truly cannot believe this man has the nuclear codes.”
The phony claim about Walmart shutting hundreds of California stores was previously posted on a YouTube account that appears to have been devoted to sensational but inaccurate videos attacking Newsom.
On Thursday, Newsom’s office provided CNN with a screenshot from the YouTube account, which an aide said was taken Wednesday night, that showed the account had posted numerous highly similar recent videos making sensational false claims about life in California under Newsom.
By Thursday morning, almost all of the anti-Newsom videos had been deleted from the account.
No, Wisconsin doesn’t have millions more registered voters than actual adults
Multiple posts from Trump on Wednesday night and Thursday morning made false claims about elections, including conspiracy theories about the 2020 election the president wrongly insists was stolen from him. One particularly preposterous post Trump shared outlined a (nonexistent) vote-flipping conspiracy involving former President Barack Obama, the FBI, the CIA, China and Italian officials.
Other posts made claims that were more straightforward, but no less false. For example, Trump twice shared posts claiming that Wisconsin has more than seven million registered voters, millions higher than its total number of adults; one of the posts said, “This is not a glitch; it is election fraud waiting to happen!”
But Wisconsin does not have anywhere close to seven million registered voters. The website of the Wisconsin Elections Commission says, “The State of Wisconsin had 3,602,958 active registered voters on January 1, 2026.”
The commission told CNN on Thursday that the state also has about 4.6 million inactive voters – people who died; moved away and registered in another state; were convicted of a felony; were adjudicated incompetent to vote; or were purged from the voter rolls due to inactivity – but that “inactive voters are not considered registered voters” and “would have to re-register before voting.”
The-CNN-Wire
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