President Donald Trump says he still wants to travel to Fort Knox, peer inside its secure vaults and verify that the gold is still there — because, he said: “They steal a lot.”
In a Sunday interview with journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the 79-year-old billionaire was asked about his February 2025 pledge to inspect the Kentucky military installation, which houses a large share of the country’s bullion reserves.
“Well, we wanted to go and knock on their door — Fort Knox, very thick door — and to see whether or not we have any gold in there,” Trump said, after being reminded about his earlier promise.
“It’s a very interesting question. We played with that. I wondered if they left the gold in Fort Knox because they steal a lot,” he added, though who exactly he was referring to was not clarified.
When asked if he still intends to follow through, the Republican president responded: “I do want to go to Fort Knox sometime. I want to see if the gold is there, which I’m sure it will be.”
It’s not clear if Trump has any immediate plans to visit the Army fort, located near Louisville. Representatives for the White House and Fort Knox did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Independent.
The president first signaled his desire to conduct a presidential audit in February 2025, shortly after his inauguration, during the period when Elon Musk was scrutinizing government spending in his role at the Department of Government Efficiency.
“We have found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud so far, and we’ve just started,” Trump said at the time. “We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold. Tons of gold.”
Musk had promoted longstanding, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that someone may have pilfered the nation’s gold reserves, according to NBC News. Some GOP lawmakers also called for an examination of the reserves at Fort Knox, including Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul — both of Kentucky.
Fort Knox is home to the United States Bullion Depository, a vast underground vault built in 1936 to hold the nation’s gold reserves.
The “impenetrable fortress” is home to “a significant portion of the nation’s gold reserves, making it one of the most secure and iconic facilities in the world,” according to the installation’s museum. Currently, it houses 147,341,858.382 fine troy ounces of gold, according to the U.S. Mint.
More than 26,000 soldiers, their relatives and civilian employees live and work at the fort. No visitors are allowed inside the bullion depository.
Despite the president’s skepticism, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in 2025 that the site is audited every year and that “all the gold is present and accounted for.”