News Reporter: Fact Checker: Trump’s falsehood-laden speech to Congress

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday was vintage Trump: long, rambling and chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures. Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them. We examined 26 statements by the president that were untrue, misleading or lacked context, including:

"Illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded." (False — the numbers were lower in 1960s and most years before World War II.)
"We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare." (Absurd — weeks before the election, the Economist newspaper published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was "the envy of the world.")
"We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud." (Unproven — most administration claims fall apart on inspection.)
"We have had $1.7 trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks." (A dubious figure that includes investments started under President Joe Biden.)
"But it was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal." (False — the estimate is fewer than 6,000, and most were not American.)

To read the full fact check, click the link below.

Read the full fact check

Trump's claim that Stacey Abrams headed a group that got $1.9 billion

While we checked many claims in Trump's speech on Tuesday night, one alleged "scam" required more research to nail down: "$1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of homes committee, headed up, and we know she's involved, just at the last moment the money was passed over, by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her?"

From Trump's phrasing, it sounds as though Stacey Abrams somehow got her hands on nearly $2 billion at the "last moment." Abrams, of course, helped ensure Trump's 2020 election loss in Georgia by registering more than 800,000 voters, including many people of color, so he has a particular animus toward the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives. The president mentioned her as he read a long list of (mostly bogus) claims of government "scams."

Is Trump's claim true? No, not at all. A Biden green-energy program has been the subject of feverish reporting in the right-wing media, spurred by Trump's Environmental Protection Agency. But Abrams's role has been vastly overblown.

To read the full fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating, click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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About the cats: It's a Friday and sometimes our fact checks deal with heavy subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face.