The State of the Union is ... factually challenged
President Trump often flies off-script and ends up with a bunch of Pinocchios. But even when he reads scrupulously from the teleprompter, the false and misleading claims quickly add up. The State of the Union speech this week is a prime example. We found 31 false and misleading claims. Most of them were easy pickings for us, since Trump appears to have converted his campaign-rally stump speech into a congressional address. Take Trump’s claim that the United States is now energy-independent (millions of barrels of oil are imported daily), the claim that he’s presiding over the best U.S. economy in history (GDP growth was higher at some points in the 1950s and ’60s) or that he’s approved record defense spending (adjusted for inflation, the Obama administration approved more funding in 2010). Take Trump’s claim about a “blue-collar boom” happening due to his policies. The manufacturing sector is in a technical recession, and only 9,000 manufacturing jobs had been gained since June, compared with the 460,000 in the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency. Job growth has slowed in many “blue-collar” sectors such as transportation, construction and mining. Take his oft-repeated claim that prescription drug prices declined for the first time in 51 years under his watch. (The CPI for these drugs had last declined in the 12-month period ended July 2013, and the consensus among experts is that prices for generics may be falling while branded drugs continue to become more expensive.) Health care is a key issue for voters, and Trump keeps trying to deceive them by falsely claiming he will protect insurance guarantees for patients with preexisting conditions. His administration is supporting a lawsuit to unwind the entire Affordable Care Act, including its preexisting-conditions guarantee, and Trump has presented no plans to cover the gaps in case the court challenge is successful. These are all easily disprovable talking points — and indeed, many of them have been fact-checked repeatedly in our Trump database — yet there they are, in Trump's prepared remarks and in his delivery. For the full fact check, click here. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. And some more SOTU spin ...
There was one talking point in Trump’s speech that made our ears perk up, since it appears to be new. Trump used it in a speech to the World Economic Forum, and then in the State of the Union. “In eight years under the last administration, over 300,000 working-age people dropped out of the workforce,” the president said. “In just three years of my administration, 3.5 million people, working-age people, have joined the workforce. It took a lot of unwinding, and we found that Trump was goosing the numbers to make the workforce numbers during President Barack Obama's term look worse. The White House's calculations included January 2009 as Obama's starting point, even though he took office on Jan. 20. That makes Obama's numbers look artificially worse (and Trump's artificially better) due to the ravages of the Great Recession, which was still in full swing in January 2009. An economist who worked for the Obama administration suggested a better measure would be to compare the last three years of Obama with the first three years of Trump. That yields 2.3 million for Obama and 3 million for Trump, using February as our starting month. That's still an edge for Trump, but not nearly as dramatic as he suggested in his speech. We gave Two Pinocchios to Trump. For the full fact check, click here. | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Sarah Cahlan ● Read more » | | | | 
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