At an Oval Office event on Wednesday, a reporter asked Donald Trump why he never followed through on his threats to impose economic sanctions on Russia. The president never quite got around to answering the question, but he did seem eager to emphasize a completely unrelated point.

“I went to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and [the United Arab Emirates], and we brought back $5.1 trillion,” Trump claimed. “So, I made that money in about two hours, the money that we’re talking about.” After briefly suggesting — without a shred of evidence — that Ukraine has misused U.S. security aid, the Republican went on say, “I’m more interested because I picked up $5.1 trillion and, by the way, got a beautiful big, magnificent free airplane for the United States Air Force, OK? Very proud of that, too.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that the plane from Qatar wasn’t free, and it’s proving to be far more controversial than the White House cares to admit. Let’s instead consider that statistic the president is apparently quite excited about.

If the “$5.1 trillion” figure sounds at all familiar, that’s because Trump can’t seem to stop talking about it. He referenced it a week ago when unveiling the “Make America Healthy Again” report, which came two days after he pushed the same line during a visit to Capitol Hill, which came one day after he repeated the talking point at the White House.

For reasons unknown, the president went on to say last week that the figure might even be “$7 trillion” at some undetermined point in the future.

To be sure, the boast certainly sounds impressive. Americans are apparently supposed to believe that Trump went to the Middle East, met with some officials for “about two hours” and left with investments so enormous, they represent roughly a sixth of the United States’ GDP.

But that’s not what happened.

For one thing, as The Washington Post reported, Trump has started referring to Biden-era foreign investments as his own, pretending that they’re new and that he deserves credit for them. The Post’s report added:

The math behind the White House’s claim that Trump secured ‘trillions’ on this trip is fuzzy even including the contracts that predate his presidency. The sum of the deals is under $1 trillion, but the White House is also counting announcements it made months before the trip, including a vague plan that the UAE said would result in $1.4 trillion in investment in the United States over the next decade. The UAE and White House previously announced that deal in March. The White House did not explain why its announcements included deals that predate Trump’s presidency.

Around the same time, The New York Times took a closer look at the data and reported, “The list of some of the agreements published by the White House left many details vague. The value of the agreements appeared to total about $283 billion.”

If those investments happen, terrific. But they might not happen, and $283 billion is a small fraction of $5.1 trillion.

What’s more, as MSNBC’s Paul Waldman wrote in a piece for Public Notice, some of the money Trump referenced might materialize in future decades. It led Waldman to conclude that the presidential claims amounted to little more than “smoke and mirrors.”

The problem, however, is not just that Trump keeps talking up an investment figure that isn’t real. The problem is made worse by the way that the president appears to be making plans to spend some of the money that doesn’t exist.

At an Oval Office event last week, Trump was asked whether his wildly unrealistic “Golden Dome” idea might be prohibitively expensive. He responded, “We can afford to do it. You know, we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East, and when you think about it, this is a tiny fraction of that.”

But therein lies the point: Trump didn’t take in $5.1 trillion, so making plans to devote those imaginary resources to a missile shield project that won’t work is an enormous problem.