President Donald Trump is a creature of habit. One of those habits is uttering misleading, exaggerated or completely made-up statements.
When I ran The Washington Post Fact Checker, I compiled scores of prewritten fact checks, totaling 30,000 words, based on my familiarity with things Trump would say. When he uttered a particular claim, I would often pluck it out of my document and post the fact check on the Post’s website. Even when Trump made remarks for which there was prepared text, such as a State of the Union address, he often ad-libbed his favorite fibs. Last year, for instance, I documented 26 suspect claims.
I fact checked Trump’s addresses to Congress by drawing on this repository of pre-checked assertions.
Here, then, is a guide to the lies most likely to be uttered by the president on Tuesday night, arranged by category.
Tariffs
Last year, Trump jacked up tariff rates on products from virtually every nation (Russia got a pass). The president has frequently and falsely said foreign countries pay the tariffs when, in fact, economists have agreed that this is a tax that mainly falls on consumers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently confirmed that close to 90% of the tariffs were paid by Americans — and Trump’s top economist responded by saying the researchers should be fired.
Trump has also said the United States has earned trillions of dollars from tariffs — it’s actually less than $300 billion, according to Treasury Department reports — and that he’s reduced the budget deficit by 27% because of tariffs. The 27% figure is cherry-picked and not reliable. In reality, the tariff money raised so far will barely make a dent in the deficit — and the deficit will soar because of Trump’s tax cut, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Trump has also said he slashed the trade deficit by 77% or 78%, depending on his mood. In reality, the trade deficit fell only 0.2% in 2025. (Trump gets his figure from cherry-picking monthly numbers that quickly went out of date.)
Economy
Polling has indicated that Americans aren’t happy about the state of the economy, but Trump will almost certainly repeat his claim, which was stated 493 times in his first term, that he’s presided over the best economy in American history. (Not so, by any measure.)
He might say, as he did last week, that the affordability crisis is over. He will buttress that refrain with faux facts, such as that he reduced prescription drug prices by 800%, 900%, even 1,000%. That’s mathematically impossible; a 100% cut would bring prices to zero. And his drug plan has barely gotten started, so any impact so far is minimal. He often asserts that gasoline is $1.99 a gallon, compared to $5 a gallon when he took office. Both numbers were invented. The national average on gasoline prices is about $2.93, compared to $3.12 in January a year ago, according to AAA.
Trump is likely to falsely say that there is almost no inflation (it’s 2.4%), and he has frequently said he inherited the worst inflation in U.S. history. It was 3.0% in January 2025 — and even the inflation peak of nearly 9% in 2022 was lower than during many other periods in Trump’s lifetime.
Trump will brag that he’s secured nearly $20 trillion in new investments in the U.S. — a laughable number. One clue this is bogus: Trump’s number is two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product of the U.S. He will say that U.S. stocks have soared since “Liberation Day,” when he announced his tariffs last April, but many foreign stock markets had better returns in the same period. Another favorite line is that factory construction is up 41%. But there he’s taking credit for a spike that started in October 2021 under former President Joe Biden. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, spending on manufacturing construction has fallen 7% under Trump.
Trump also likes to say he passed the biggest tax cut in history, but the 2025 bill ranks sixth as a percentage of the U.S. economy. (His 2017 tax cut ranked eighth at the time.) For many Americans, tariffs have eaten up a chunk of any tax savings.
While many Americans have recoiled at the administration’s harsh deportation program, Trump will likely say encounters with undocumented immigrants at the southern border are at record lows. That’s not quite right — monthly migrant apprehensions were lower in the 1960s and before World War II. But certainly the numbers are much lower than under Biden. But Trump being Trump, he can’t resist gilding the lily. He likes to say Biden let in 20 million or even 25 million undocumented migrants; a more credible estimate, via the CBO, is 5 million to 6 million, so Trump is quadrupling the number. He has frequently falsely said other countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions and sent the inmates to the border; that’s a fantasy. And he will assert that Biden released 11,888 (or a similar figure) undocumented, immigrant murderers into American society. This is an especially pernicious lie. The data only refers to people not being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most are serving in federal or state prisons — and the “undetained docket” was roughly the same in Trump’s first term. Trump has lusted after a Nobel Peace Prize, so he will surely again say he ended eight wars. This is poppycock. Few of these were wars, Trump’s role was often tangential and the resolution of the conflicts will likely be temporary. Trump will also crow that every alleged Venezuelan drug boat blown up by the Defense Department saved “on average” 25,000 lives. This is another invented number. By Trump’s math, more than 500,000 American lives were supposedly saved, though the total number of U.S. overdose deaths was about 72,000 in the 12 months ending in September (the most recent period for which data is available). Finally, no Trump speech would be complete without lies about the 2020 election that he lost. Trump likes to say he won the presidential election three times, which of course is false. He’s terrified that Republicans will lose control of the House or Senate in this year’s midterm elections, so he has tried to tilt the playing field. In January, the FBI seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, citing claims that election deniers have pushed for years — but that have been rejected through recounts, audits and legal proceedings. The risk is that Trump is hoping to create a pretext for seizing control of voting in key states — something advocated by election deniers he has placed in administration positions. The absurdity of Trump’s claims is sometimes amusing — but ultimately these lies can have consequences for American democracy. Former President George W. Bush’s time in office was rocked when he made a statement in his 2003 State of the Union address — “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” — that officials had flagged before the speech as highly suspicious. The notion that a president would lie in a speech to Congress was so shocking at the time that it led to a criminal investigation. In the age of Trump, the president has lied dozens of times in the State of the Union without consequence. Many Trump claims have been debunked, but he says them anyway. Now you’ll know what to watch out for.
Glenn Kessler was a journalist at The Washington Post for nearly 28 years, most recently writing The Fact Checker column. He is chief content officer at Sourcebase.ai and writes at https://glennkessler.substack.com. 
Immigration
Foreign Policy
