He spoke for a long, long time, but let’s fact check some of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. Because facts matter.
As much as I’d like to, it’s impractical to do a really thorough job fisking Trump’s State of the Union speech line by line, because it is one hour, 47 minutes and 49 seconds long, which works out to 10,625 words, or 98 words per minute (which, incidentally, is unusually slow for a public speaker).
Now I obviously disagree with Trump’s politics. However, the vast majority of the factual claims in a public speech ought to be verifiable, even if the speaker uses them to brag, whip up fear, foment hatred, reach false economic conclusions or justify cruel policies.
If a significant number of facts turn out to be not just a little exaggerated, but demonstrably false, one can only conclude that the speaker either does not know the truth, which would make that speaker ignorant, or does not care about the truth, which would make the speaker manipulative, or knows the truth but deliberately lies about it, which would make the speaker malevolent.
None of these are traits one wishes to see in a leader.
So let’s examine just a few of the highlight statements, and see how truthful Trump really is. I’ll try to quote the full context, lest I be accused of being deranged for demanding at least a token effort at honesty from a sitting US president.
The economy and crime
00:01:30 – 00:02:26: …This is the golden age of America. When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home and wars and chaos all over the world.
The US economy grew 2.8% in 2024, the last year of the Joe Biden presidency, and inflation stood at 2.9%, sharply down from its pandemic-era spike. In 2025, the first year of Trump’s presidency, growth fell to 2.2%, which was lower than in any of Biden’s years in office. Inflation continued to come down to 2.6%.
Since 2.9% is not “record levels” for inflation, and 2.8% growth is not “stagnant”, Trump’s claims are false.
US violent crime rates peaked in the early 1990s, after 12 years of Republican presidents, and have halved since then. The crime rate was actually a little higher during Trump’s first term than the rate he inherited from Obama, and declined again during the Biden presidency. By no measure was crime “rampant”.
Granted, he closed borders, and recruited a great number of men with guns.
Income growth
00:02:26 – 00:03:22: But tonight, after just one year, I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before and a turnaround for the ages. It is indeed a turnaround for the ages. And we will never go back to where we were just a very short time ago. We’re not going back today.
As we’ve seen, it was not a “turnaround”. In fact, by most measures, the US economy is worse today than it was when Trump returned to office a year ago.
00:03:22 – 00:04:06: Today, our border is secure. [Audience chants “USA”] Thank you. Today our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before and our enemies are scared. Our military and police are stacked and America is respected again, perhaps like never before.
Incomes rose by 0.9% in 2025, which is very slow by historical standards, and slower than in 2023 and 2024. It barely outpaced population growth, and then only because population growth has slowed to 0.5% in 2025 due to lower immigration.
We’ve seen that the economy is not “roaring like never before”. In fact, it was more sluggish than in 19 of the last 30 years.
As for America’s enemies running scared, it is worth noting that Iran has not agreed to any of Trump’s demands, despite Trump having sent a massive fleet to the Middle East to intimidate it. On the contrary, all it has promised is to sink a lot of ships.
And despite the protesters and dissidents in Iran, who are risking their lives – and dying by the thousands – to stand up to the regime, “help is on its way” on 13 January, help is still only on its way. Who’s really scared here?
Inflation
00:05:57 – 00:06:17: …The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in the history of our country. But in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years.
Inflation under Biden peaked at 7%, because of policies – including lockdowns and quantitative easing – that began in 2020 under the first Trump administration.
Inflation was higher between 1917 and 1920, 1942, 1946 to 1948, 1951, 1974 and 1975, and 1978 to 1981.
As we’ve seen, inflation was brought down to 2.9% under Biden. Under the Trump administration it fell only a little more, to 2.6%. Notably, his five-year comparison takes us back to the pandemic peak. It was lower than 2.6% in every year between 2012 to 2020.
Gasoline prices
00:06:17 – 00:07:15: …Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states. Under my predecessor, it was quite honestly a disaster; it is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states and in some places $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.
The highest peak gasoline price recorded during the pandemic era was $5.016. So the $6 claim is factually incorrect.
On the day Trump was speaking, the average national price for regular gas was $2.951, down from only $3.140 a year ago. Again, Trump claims credit for a decline, most of which occurred under Biden.
No state has an average gasoline price below $2.37, so the $2.30 claim is patently false.
The average gasoline price in Iowa on the day that Trump was there was $2.57. When Trump made the same claim in Iowa, he was corrected by an attendee who yelled, “No, $2.63!”
Mortgage rates
00:07:15 – 00:07:44: Mortgage rates are the lowest in four years and falling fast, and the annual cost of a typical new mortgage is down almost $5,000 just since I took office, one year. And low interest rates will solve the Biden-created housing problem, while at the same time protecting the values of those people who already own a house that really feel rich for the first time in their lives.
Mortgage rates are actually the lowest since the end of 2022. Three and one quarter years does not equate to “the lowest in four years”. Interest rates as they stand will do absolutely nothing to solve any housing problem, which was in any case not created by Biden. The property values of people who already own a house declined 4% in the year Trump has been in office again, after rising 18% during the Biden administration.
00:07:44 – 00:08:10: We want to protect those values; we want to keep those values up. We’re going to do both. And we are going to keep it that way. The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year — boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and millions of Americans are all gaining.
Stock markets always set records. In 2025, the stock market also saw the deepest and sharpest crash since Covid hit in 2020.
Foreign investment
00:08:10 – 00:08:37: Everybody’s up, way up. In four long years, the last administration got less than $1 trillion in new investment in the United States. And when I say less, substantially less. In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe. Think of it, much less than $1 trillion for four years versus much more than $18 trillion for one year.
His own White House contradicts the $18 trillion claim. It says Trump, in his first 365 days, secured “$10 trillion in new domestic investment”.
The Cato Institute calls it an outright “hoax”, and notes that actual foreign direct investment during the first three quarters of 2025 came in at an annualised rate of $265.9 billion, while Biden-era FDI ran 23% hotter.
It says that it cannot find anyone who can substantiate the claim of $18 trillion: “Tariff extortion is the only way to plausibly attribute the fictional $18 trillion to his trade barriers. But the only figure the White House provided to back up his talk about incoming foreign investment was much smaller, $9.6 trillion, and only a fraction of that figure was foreign investment. Most of the investment was from US firms, and many of the foreign plans were not about investment at all.”
New businesses and jobs
00:08:37 – 00:09:01: What a difference a president makes. A short time ago we were a dead country, now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world, the hottest. As thousands of new businesses are forming and factories, plants and laboratories are being built, we have added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time.
Yes, thousands of new businesses are forming. In fact, it’s millions; 5.1 million, to be exact. That is less than or equal to every single year of Biden’s administration.
Between January 2025 and January 2026, 44,000 new construction jobs were created. So the 70,000 is a lie.
Those 44,000 jobs represent 0.53% growth. By comparison, the average annual growth rate in construction jobs between January 2021 and January 2025 was 2.95%. During 2024 alone, construction jobs grew by 1.74%, more than three times the rate under Trump.
00:09:01 – 00:09:38: It’s getting bigger and bigger and stronger. Nobody can believe what they’re watching. American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day and we just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil. American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill baby drill.
Six hundred thousand barrels per day is less than the increases under Biden in 2022 (693,000 mbpd) and 2023 (939,000 mbpd). It is also less than the average for the previous three years, of 641,333 mbpd. After a slump of over a million mbpd between 2019 and 2021 (for which Trump must claim at least partial responsibility), Biden drilled faster than Trump 2.0 did in 2025.
00:09:38 – 00:10:31: More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country. Think about that, any time in the history of our country, more working today and 100 percent of all jobs created under my administration have been in the private sector. We ended DEI in America. We cut a record number of job-killing regulations and, in one year, we have lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps.
That more Americans are working today than at any time in the history of the country is true for almost all years, simply by virtue of positive population growth. Trump is stating the bleeding obvious, and telling his audience to “think about that”, as if it is some great revelation.
What you’re really interested in is the unemployment rate, and the proportion of the population in employment. And both have gone in the wrong direction under Trump in 2025.
Unemployment is up from 4% to 4.3%, having reached a 50-year low in April 2023, in the wake of the Covid shock, under Biden.
And the proportion of Americans in employment is down from 60.1% to 59.8%. That number also peaked in April 2023, under Biden, at 60.4%.
Cringebag
00:10:31 – 00:10:47: And for all of these reasons, I say tonight, members of Congress, the state of our Union is strong. Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore.
As you can see by the timestamps, I left out very little of the first ten minutes of his speech. Those were ten minutes of almost uninterrupted lies and misdirections. Yet this is how he brags. Wow, what a cringebag.
I’m not going to go through the rest with a toothcomb. Just a few highlights will do.
More high… eh, lowlights
The eight foreign wars? Mostly false. Some weren’t even actual wars, and in the rest he had varying degrees of influence, and can’t really take credit.
The one war that he promised he would end “on day one”, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, rages on unabated.
I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.
Tariffs are not paid for by foreign countries. By now, this can only be a deliberate lie, because surely, someone must have told him that he sounds like an ignorant clown when he says this.
And no, it will not replace income tax any time soon. Before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s illegal tariffs, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that tariffs would bring in about $3 trillion over 10 years, or $300 billion per year.
That is one sixth of the annual budget deficit, which in 2025, under Trump, was $1.78 trillion. It is a mere 4% of the entire annual federal budget. For tariffs to replace income tax, tariff revenue would have to increase about 25-fold.
There is no way to do this, because the more you raise tariffs, the less people are going to import, until you kill the golden goose entirely. And once you’re entirely self-sufficient, you will still need to pay for a government that in 2025 spent more than ever before – more than Biden ever did – despite the grand promises of the Department of Government Efficiency, which only made government less efficient.
Trump claimed to have passed “the largest tax cuts in American history”. He did not. It isn’t anywhere near the largest.
He claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections”, but it is not. And the requirement for voter ID is premature in a country that does not require citizens to obtain government-issued identification documents in the first place.
Relying on driver’s licences excludes non-drivers. Social security cards are explicitly not identification documents.
Relying on birth certificates risks excluding anyone who has changed their name, including but not limited to married women. Requiring people to produce complete records of birth, and all subsequent marriages and divorces, just so election officials can verify that they are who they say they are, is entirely impractical. For many people that would require requesting formal documentation from multiple different government agencies, potentially in multiple different states.
America was never supposed to be a “papers, please” country. It was supposed to be free. I guess it isn’t, anymore.
At the end, Trump said, “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended.”
Well, besides the fact that it actually did end in 1783, which one might forgive as metaphorical licence, it didn’t begin in 1776. It began in April of 1775.
Look, I know a nepo baby turned real estate salesman turned convicted felon is likely to be a pathological liar, especially when he has a malignant narcissism complex, too. But this guy is something else.
When they build his gigantic gold-leafed Trumpal Arch, they must be sure to credit him as the most dishonest president in US history. He lies like a rug.
[Image: Only the most glorious leaders get to hang their portraits on government buildings. (All photographs used under Creative Commons licences.)
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