Donald Trump gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and as has often been the case, he said a lot of things that weren’t true.
At least, that’s according to CNN’s long-suffering fact-checker, Daniel Dale, who put out his fact-checking report about the speech.
“President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night,” Dale wrote on CNN’s website. He also shared his report on CNN:
Daniel Dale fact-checks Trump’s SOTU lies.
– Tariffs are paid by importers & consumers
– Did not secure $18T in investments — White House website says $9T
– He inherited 3.0% inflation
– Did not inherit a stagnant economy. Growth in 2025 was 2.2%. It was 2.8% under Biden and… pic.twitter.com/9gFL0Of1gj— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) February 25, 2026
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“Many of them were long-debunked falsehoods familiar from his rallies, interviews, and social media posts. These include various lies disparaging the fairness of US elections, his false claim that he ended wars that were never actually wars or never actually ended, and his fictional ‘$18 trillion’ figure for supposed investment in the US over the past year.”
More than anything else, Trump shared false information about the economy.
“Among other things, Trump overstated the performance of the economy during this presidential term to date, overstated the inflation he inherited from the Biden administration, used highly misleading figures when discussing gasoline prices, and wrongly asserted, twice, that foreign countries are paying the tariffs that are actually being paid by US importers.”
Trump was also dishonest about the trajectory of gas prices.
Zero states have average #gasprices below $2.30/gal today according to live GasBuddy data. https://t.co/vrwk0CYsid
— Patrick De Haan (@GasBuddyGuy) February 25, 2026
“Trump claimed gas prices are ‘now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places, $1.99 a gallon,” Dale writes. “But no state had an average gas price on Tuesday below $2.37 per gallon, according to AAA; only two states had an average below $2.50 per gallon. And while there are some individual gas stations selling gas for below $2 per gallon, they are scarce; Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the firm GasBuddy, said during the speech that the firm found just four stations across the country below $2 (aside from special discounts) out of the roughly 150,000 stations the firm tracks, so about 0.003% of the total.”
And in the speech, Trump said something untrue about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a woman killed on a train in North Carolina last year.
“Trump added a false claim that the alleged killer had migrated to the US, saying Zarutska ‘had escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America – came in through open borders,” Dale wrote. In fact, the man charged with the killing was born in the United States.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
