Fact checking President Trump’s State of the Union
President Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address on record final night time, in a speech that featured many false claims and touched on a wide selection of matters.
If you weren’t capable of watch the full 1 hour and 47 minute speech, catch up beneath on some of the president’s essential speaking factors:
Trump opened his State of the Union handle by hitting on a series of encouraging economic indicators as he tried to ease Americans’ pervasive cost-of-living considerations.
He claimed that he inherited a “stagnant economy” from the Biden administration which is now “roaring like never before.” Though there is no agency definition of “stagnant” or “roaring,” the info don’t essentially corroborate this suggestion. The US economy grew 2.2% in 2025, which was decrease than in any 12 months of the Biden presidency.
Trump stated that he expects that income collected from his sweeping international tariffs will at some point be enough to interchange Americans’ revenue tax funds.
He has made that claim before. However, the federal authorities raises about $3 trillion a 12 months from revenue taxes. The US additionally occurs to import round $3 trillion value of items yearly, which implies that tariffs would have to be at least 100% on all imported items for the levies to interchange revenue taxes.
The president repeated his regular false claim that tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries,” and quite a few instances referred to as final week’s Supreme Court’s ruling shutting down his tariffs “unfortunate” and “disappointing.”
Trump credited his immigration policies with sealing the southern border and quickly deporting undocumented immigrants on a number of events, without mentioning the killings by federal immigration brokers of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti final month.
At one level, he urged members to face up and present help in the event that they agreed with the assertion that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats remained seated.
Trump promised to always protect Medicaid, regardless of the proven fact that his sweeping home coverage bundle final 12 months enacted historic cuts to the key security web program for low-income Americans.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into legislation final summer season, slashed greater than $900 billion in federal funding over 10 years for Medicaid, in response to the Congressional Budget Office.
Trump solely briefly touched on overseas affairs in his speech. The president stated that the purpose the US is amassing military assets round Iran is to make sure that Tehran doesn’t get hold of a nuclear weapon.
Iran has claimed it is not pursuing a nuclear bomb. Just yesterday, the nation’s overseas minister stated explicitly that Tehran was not pursuing this, posting to X: “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”
Turning to elsewhere in the Middle East, Trump extolled his administration’s efforts to make sure the return of the hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 assault on Israel, claiming that “nobody thought it was possible.”
The president additionally touted his frequent, exaggerated assertion that he’s ended eight wars since taking workplace, earlier than turning to Russia’s warfare in Ukraine, which he stated the US is “working very hard to end.” Trump repeated that the battle “would have never happened” if he have been president in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
NCS’s Adam Cancryn, Daniel Dale, David Goldman, John Fritze, Adam Cancryn, Tami Luhby, Kevin Liptak, Kit Maher and Jeremy Herb contributed to this reporting.