The Donald Trump marathon was littered with false claims in his speech to a joint Congress session on Tuesday. Many of them were scattered across many of the falsehoods he had previously stated, corrected, and continued to be repeated without regard. Below are some of the main statements he made:
The US has not given Ukraine $3500 billion since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022
The president repeated one of his new favorite lies. The US has given Ukraine $3500 billion since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, and Europe has given it just $100 million.
In fact, as Jakub Krupa and Pjotr Sauer reported to the Guardian last month, the tally of the run held by the Kiel Institute for the global economy shows that the US spent around $120 billion, while Europe was counted as the total of the EU and individual member states. Includes contributions from non-EU countries like the UK, bringing a greater share in Europe.
Last week, for three consecutive days, three visiting world leaders revised Trump with this false statement while sitting next to an oval office. French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister, Kiel Star and Ukrainian President Volodymie Zelensky.
Trump “didn’t stop “$45 million” for Burma’s diversity, equity and comprehensive scholarships.
One of the spending on foreign aid projects that Trump presented as outrageous was “$45 million for Burma’s diversity, equity and comprehensive scholarships.”
There is no evidence that such a scholarship was planned. As former president Tom Marinowski pointed out, when the claim was first made by Elon Musk’s “government efficiency,” it appears to be a reference to the USAID’s Lincoln Scholarship.
It is not clear why Trump and Musk mistakenly considered these to be diversity, equity and inclusive scholarships, but as Marinowski pointed out, the USAID project description designated scholars as Burmese students “from a diverse background.” It seems like an important policy given the Burmese military dictatorship used ethnic and religious divisions to maintain power.
Trump falsely suggested that millions of deaths may be paid for Social Security
Trump has turned his attention to the fact that the Social Security Administration database contains millions of people from over 110 years ago.
But when Musk argued that, as the Guardian previously reported, “a rough survey of Social Security” showed that “we have 150-year-olds out there,” this is a very misleading way of making a real flaw in the social security system, but obviously not.
The flaws were revealed in a 2015 report by an independent inspector at the Social Security Agency, which found that the agency had no record of death for the millions of people who died. As of 2015, inspectors found in the file that “there were approximately 6.5 million figure holders over the age of 112 who had no death information.”
Social Security payments were made to only 13 people who were still 112 years old. At least one of them was certainly still alive, tweeting in 2013 when the report’s data was compiled.
When the report was published in 2015, the oldest person with no Social Security number and death record was born in 1869, but there was no record of payments for that person, which would have been nearly 150.
In fact, the Social Security Administration has already put in place procedures to conduct interviews with people who have reached the age of 100, making sure they are alive and that their accounts are not being used by someone else.
Trump falsely claimed that Florida middle schools have “socially transitioned” their 13-year-old child.
Trump said Little John, a mother from Tallahassee, Florida, in January, discovered that a 13-year-old child’s middle school secretly shifted from a woman to a non-binary social without notifying her parents.
Little John made that claim in the lawsuit, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge and an email obtained by a Tallahassee Democrat newspaper showed Little John had written to the school in 2020 to inform the teacher that the child wanted to change the pronoun.
The email showed Little John worked with the teacher to determine the best way to navigate the situation and thanked the teacher for his help.
Trump proposed an outdated poll to suggest that most Americans say the US is now moving in the right direction
“Now is the first time in modern history,” Trump declared early in his speech. “I believe our country is heading in the right direction rather than in the wrong direction.”
In fact, Trump appeared to be citing a single poll released three weeks ago by Republican-leaning voting company Rasmussen. But this week’s latest survey from the same voting company found that 45% of Americans say the country is on the right track, while 50% say it’s on the wrong track.
As voting expert Nate Silver pointed out last year, when it became clear that Rasmussen had secretly shown results for the Trump campaign, “coupled with explicit adjustments with this kind of explicit campaign and ambiguity about funding sources means essentially labeling Rasmussen in partisan (R) polls.”
Other voting companies that are not associated with the Republican Party show that more Americans say the country is now on the wrong track than the right track.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows in late February, 49% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track, with only 34% saying the country is heading in the right direction.
An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 50% of Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction, and only 38% say it’s on the right track.
The latest morning consultation poll, released Sunday, shows that the current spread is 56% wrong to the right of 44%. In the final week of the first Trump administration in 2021, Morning Advice discovered that 81% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track, while only 19% say it is on the right track.
Trump falsely claimed that masking costs “discovered hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud.”
Musk’s “Ministry of Government Efficiency” initiative has repeatedly claimed that since its launch its job it discovered “scam” simply by discovering “scams.” The most eye-catching example of the government planning to spend $50 million to send condoms to Gaza turns out to be completely fictional.
As reported by The New York Times on Monday, the receipts posted online by Musk’s “Government Efficiency Department” were documents with less than $9 billion in government contract savings, none of which were involved in fraud.
