President Donald Trump recapped six weeks of aggressive efforts to cut the federal workforce, reorganise the economy and reorient foreign policy in his first address to a joint session of the United States Congress on Tuesday.
His speech was long by historical standards – about an hour and 40 minutes – and it inspired more opposition party pushback than any in recent memory.
House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson ejected Al Green, a representative from Texas and longtime Trump critic, after he disrupted the president a few minutes into his speech. Republicans cheered Green’s removal. As Trump mentioned law enforcement, some Democratic lawmakers shouted “January 6”, referring to the 2021 Capitol riot that led to numerous casualties among the Capitol Police force. Johnson banged his gavel and called for decorum.
Trump emphasised his commitment to following through on tariffs, including those that went into effect earlier in the day against Canada, Mexico and China.
“Tariffs – they’re about protecting the soul of our country,” Trump said. “There will be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that. It won’t be much.” To farmers, who have been worried about retaliatory tariffs against the crops they export, Trump said, “it may be a little bit of an adjustment”, but he urged them to “have a lot of fun – I love you, too”.
Here’s a rundown of some of his key claims, fact-checked.
“Mexican authorities, because of our tariff policies being imposed on them, think of this, handed it over to us, 29 of the biggest cartel leaders in their country. That has never happened before,” Trump said.
This needs context.
Mexico extradited 29 “leaders and managers of drug cartels” to the US on February 27, the Department of Justice said. The number of people extradited in one day was described as “unconventional” and “unprecedented” by InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas.
But Trump is incorrect to say that Mexico has never extradited drug cartel members to the US.
Mexico has extradited several drug cartel members to the US for years, including during Trump’s first term.
Trump touts Army recruitment increase, but it was already rising
He said, “I’m pleased to report that in January, the US Army had its single best recruiting month in 15 years, and that all armed services are having among the best recruiting results ever in the history of our services.” Before that, Trump said “wokeness is bad” and “gone”.
The military had one of the worst recruiting years in 2022 since the all-volunteer force began in 1973, we reported in September 2023.
But Pentagon policies criticised as being “woke” – such as diversity training, time off and travel allowances for abortion access and healthcare coverage for transgender members – were not the primary issue affecting recruitment. The biggest drivers included competition from the civilian labour market, the lingering effects of COVID-19 restrictions and the gradual decline in the number of young people who meet the standards.
Days before Trump took office, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told The Associated Press news agency that the Army was on pace to bring in 61,000 young people by the end of the fiscal year in September, the second straight year of meeting recruitment goals.
In fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 30, the Army recruited 55,150 people, slightly more than the goal. That was an improvement over 2023, when the Army achieved 76.6 percent of the goal of 65,500.
Taren Sylvester, who researches military recruitment at the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, DC, told NPR in February that a main reason for the recruitment increase is an Army programme for future soldiers that helped Americans get physically fit or academically up to speed so they could qualify to join.
Trump says autism rates have increased from one in 10,000 children to one in 36
Trump said there has been an increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism and noted that means there is “something wrong”.
This is partly true.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the current estimate is that one in 36 children in the US are diagnosed and that rates have increased, driven both by advances in diagnostic screening as well as an increase in prevalence of the condition. Researchers in the 1960s estimated that about two to four children in 10,000 were autistic.
The overall prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was one in 36 children aged eight years and was almost four times as prevalent in boys as among girls, according to a March 2023 report in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The increase comes in part because of a broadened definition of the condition, more parental awareness of autism, and improved screening. Other risk factors include premature birth and genetics.
Trump made the comment about autism rates after praising Robert F Kennedy Jr, his Health and Human Services secretary. Kennedy, who is heading up a task force to study childhood chronic diseases, has championed vaccine scepticism and baseless theories about autism.
Trump overstates US aid to Ukraine, again
Trump said, “We’ve spent perhaps $350bn” on Ukraine.
This is incorrect.
The amount the US has spent on Ukraine varies depending on what is being counted, but most estimates are in the $175bn to $185bn range, Mark Cancian, a senior defence and security adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies previously told PolitiFact.
Ukraine Oversight, the website of the special inspector general for Operation Atlantic Resolve, which the US government created in 2014 to coordinate its military aid to Ukraine, said as of September 30, 2024, the US had spent $183bn to help Ukraine.
Trump inflates savings by the Department of Government Efficiency
Trump said, “We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, and we’ve taken back the money.”
That’s wrong.
As of March 4, the DOGE website showed $105bn in savings. But its “wall of receipts”, where it claims to be tracking savings generated from DOGE’s cuts, showed less than $20bn. That “wall of receipts” has been riddled with errors.
The White House has pointed to projects it disagrees with ideologically, such as about diversity, equity and inclusion or climate change. But that doesn’t prove fraud which is determined by courts and requires a crime and intent to deceive.
The hunt for fraud is not new. For decades, inspectors general have searched for fraud in government agencies with some investigations leading to prosecutions.
Trump created DOGE by executive order on his first day in office.
Trump incorrectly claims Biden flew immigrants over US borders
A humanitarian parole programme started by President Joe Biden allowed 30,000 eligible immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela a month to enter the US. They could live and work in the US legally for two years. The Biden administration did not cover travel costs; beneficiaries had to book and fund their travel.
Trump ended the programme.
Trump says 21 million people illegally entered the US ‘over the past four years’
False.
Immigration officials encountered immigrants illegally crossing the US border about 10.4 million times from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, to January 2025, his last.
When accounting for congressional Republicans’ September 2024 “gotaways” estimate – people who border officials do not stop – the number rises to about 12.4 million.
But encounters are not the same as admissions. Encounters represent events. So one person who tries to cross the border twice counts as two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let into the country. The Homeland Security Department estimated that about 4.5 million encounters led to expulsions or removals from February 2021 through November 2024.
Trump misled about implausibly old people getting Social Security payments
Trump said Social Security databases show millions of people aged above 100 years and “money is being paid to many of them”.
This is wrong.
Trump recited numbers from a chart Elon Musk shared on X, which showed millions of people in a Social Security database over the age of 100, including one who was in the 360-369 age bracket.
The acting Social Security commissioner said people older than 100 who do not have a date of death associated with their Social Security record “are not necessarily receiving benefits”. Recent Social Security Administration data shows that about 89,000 people aged 99 and older receive Social Security payments.
Government databases may classify someone as 150 years old for reasons peculiar to the complex Social Security database or because of missing data, but that does not mean that millions of payments are delivered fraudulently to people with implausible ages.
Trump on historic inflation under Biden
Trump said, “We suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country, they’re not sure.”
This is partly correct.
The highest year-over-year inflation rate on Biden’s watch was about 9 percent in 2022.
The highest sustained, year-over-year US inflation rates were recorded in the 1970s and early 80s, when the price increase sometimes ranged from 12 percent to 15 percent. That was more than 40 years ago. (For one year – 1946, after the US won World War II – the overall year-over-year inflation rate exceeded 18 percent.)
But since numerous years had inflation higher than 9 percent, Trump is not correct that it is the highest in US history.
Paris climate agreement did not cost US ‘trillions’
Trump defended his decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, saying the pact was costing the US “trillions of dollars”.
That’s false.
The Trump administration defended the decision to withdraw from the climate agreement, in part based on projections by consultant NERA Economic Consulting. It concluded that restrictions on fossil fuel emissions would result in a higher cost of production, and a higher cost of production would translate into the closure of uncompetitive manufacturing businesses. Those closures, in turn, would mean fewer manufacturing jobs.
The consultant estimated that these losses and their knock-on effects beyond the manufacturing sector would amount to 1.1 million jobs lost by 2025 and 6.5 million by 2040. The loss of jobs results in a corresponding decline in gross domestic product (GDP), with a loss of $250bn by 2025 that accelerates to $3 trillion by 2040.
So the climate agreement was not costing the US trillions of dollars. It hypothetically could.
But even if it did, the study says the long-term projections did not factor in all of the offsetting job gains and GDP growth associated with a clean tech transition.
