108 Minutes
108 Minutes
108 Minutes
Trump finishes his speech and both sides of the chamber stand and the Republicans cheer and the Democrats turn and walk out and do not look back. He spoke for 108 minutes. It was the longest State of the Union address in history and when it was done, two of the most trusted news organisations in the United States sat down and checked what he said against the public record.
The New York Times and the Associated Press checked 31 of his claims. Not one was fully true as stated.
These were not fringe claims or throwaway lines. They were the central arguments of the speech — the economy, jobs, tax cuts, tariffs, immigration, crime, drug prices, elections, and war. The claims a president makes when he wants the country to know what he has done and where things stand. Thirty-one of them were checked and thirty-one of them failed.
Twelve were outright false. Nine were exaggerated beyond what the facts support. Seven needed serious context to not mislead. Three had no evidence behind them at all — not a number, not a report, not a finding from any government body or independent source. Nothing.
Some of the false claims are simple. Trump said he inherited a stagnant economy. US GDP grew 2.8% in 2024. In his first year back it grew 2.2%. The economy he inherited was growing faster than the one he is now running. He said his tax bill was the largest in American history and the Tax Foundation — a conservative think tank — ranked it sixth. He said tariffs are paid by foreign countries and American importers pay tariffs and the costs are passed to American businesses and American consumers and this is not a matter of debate. It is how tariffs work and how they have always worked.
Some of the false claims are harder to look at. He said it should be his third term. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and that loss was confirmed by courts and by his own Justice Department and by his own Vice President and on January 6, 2021, he urged a crowd to march on the Capitol to stop the count. He stood in that same building last night and said it should have been his all along.
And then there are the three claims with nothing behind them. He said members of the Somali community had pillaged $19 billion from the American taxpayer. No federal audit, no government report, no independent body has put the figure anywhere near $19 billion. The claim appears to have started with a viral social media video. He said his military campaign had virtually stopped drug smuggling by sea and no data and no official source has confirmed this. And he said cheating is rampant in American elections and his own Department of Homeland Security reviewed 49.5 million voter registrations and referred around 10,000 for further investigation and that is 0.02% and a Michigan review found 15 apparent noncitizen voters out of 5.7 million ballots cast. He has never produced evidence of rampant cheating. His own government has looked and not found it.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. These 31 claims are only the ones the fact-checkers had time to examine before they went to print. A 108-minute speech contains hundreds of individual factual claims and assertions and numbers. The teams at the Times and the AP picked the ones that mattered most and were most checkable and checked them, and every single one failed. We do not know what the full count would look like if every claim in the speech were checked with the same care. We only know that the sample, across two independent newsrooms that do not share an editorial line, came out the same way.
What is worth noting too is the maths on the drug price claim, because it does not even reach the level of a policy argument. Trump said he brought drug prices down by 300, 400, 500, 600 percent. A price cut of more than 100% is not possible. It would mean drug companies paying patients to take the drugs. A health policy expert at the University of Southern California called it "total fiction." Some drug prices have come down under Trump. None have come down by 300% and the claim fails basic arithmetic before anything else.
Thirty-one claims. Not one clean. Twelve flat-out false. Three with nothing behind them at all.
The speech ran for 108 minutes and the chamber was full and the cameras were rolling and the numbers were wrong and the facts were wrong and in three cases there were no facts at all and the men and women in that room stood and cheered and the Democrats walked out and did not look back and outside it was a cold night in Washington and none of that changes what the record shows.
All facts and figures in this piece are drawn directly from the New York Times fact-check by Linda Qiu and Ashley Cai, and the Associated Press fact-check by Melissa Goldin and Calvin Woodward, both published February 25, 2026.