Before even arriving in Saudi Arabia, Donald Trump said he hoped to secure $1 trillion in investments from officials in Riyadh. As it happens, the president and his team couldn’t get nearly that much, but they did claim they were able to secure $600 billion in investments, which sounded pretty impressive.

At least, that is, until people read the fine print. The New York Times reported:

The White House on Tuesday said that President Trump, while in Saudi Arabia, had secured $600 billion in deals with the Saudi government and firms. But the details the White House provided were vague and totaled less than half that number. And a closer look at the projects the administration provided shows several were already in the works before Mr. Trump took office.

Even before the announcement, Trump’s ambitions in this area were hard to take seriously. The entire Saudi sovereign wealth fund is worth about $925 billion, and it has already largely been committed to domestic priorities. The idea that Riyadh would make $600 billion in investments in the United States was, at face value, unbelievable.

It was against this backdrop that the Times did the arithmetic and found that the deals announced by the White House “totaled around $283 billion,” not $600 billion, and some of the affected projects were from the Biden era.

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Making matters worse is the recent history: The Times’ report added that, around this time eight years ago, Trump claimed that he had secured $450 billion of Saudi investments in the United States, and the actual total proved to be $92 billion — less than half the total from Barack Obama’s second term in the White House.

All of this reminded a colleague of mine of a MaddowBlog post from 2018, when Trump kept ascribing incredible job totals to a $110 billion Saudi arms deal that didn’t appear to exist.

• Mar. 20, 2018: “We’re talking about over 40,000 jobs in the United States.”
• Oct. 13, 2018: “It’s 450,000 jobs.”
• Oct. 17, 2018: “It’s 500,000 jobs.”
• Oct. 19, 2018: “I’d prefer that we not cancel $110 billion worth of work, which means 600,000 jobs.”
• Oct. 19, 2018: (a few hours later): “600,000 jobs, maybe more than that.”
• Oct. 19, 2018: (a few hours after that): “So now if you’re talking about — that was $110 billion — you know, you’re talking about over a million jobs.”

The moral of the story is obvious: When Trump starts making over-the-top boasts about Saudi Arabia, it’s best not to take his claims at face value.