President Donald Trump gave the longest State of the Union address in history Tuesday night, and in it, he made plenty of claims about the state of the nation and what he considered to be major achievements.
In analysis from both NBC News and the Associated Press, some of those claims were exaggerated, misleading or false messages based on misinformation.
Here’s a fact check of the address:
THE ECONOMY
CLAIM: “When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy.”
THE FACTS: Voters were unhappy with high inflation in the 2024 election, but the U.S. economy was not considered stagnant. The U.S. gross domestic product rose 2.8% in 2024 after adjusting for inflation. That’s a stronger pace of growth than the 2.2% achieved last year during the start of Trump’s second term.
TRUMP: “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.”
THE FACTS: After-tax incomes, adjusted for inflation, rose just 0.9% in 2025, down from 2.2% in 2024, Biden’s last year in office. The annual gain in Trump’s first year is the smallest since 2022, when inflation soared and caused Americans’ inflation-adjusted income to drop.
Wages and salaries are the largest component of incomes, and their growth has slowed as companies have sharply slowed hiring. Workers typically command smaller wage gains in such an environment.
TRUMP: “The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in history of our country. But in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years, and in the last three months of 2025 it was down to 1.7%,” Trump said.
THE FACTS: Inflation is not typically measured in just three-month periods. The consumer-price index, the most cited inflation metric, includes food and energy. While energy prices have been dropping, food prices have been on the rise over the last year.
On an annual basis, inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%, which is not a record high level.
Inflation fell as low as 2.3% in April before it spiked again after his sweeping worldwide tariffs were introduced.
Recent record inflation was experienced in 2022 when it hit 8.9%. The highest inflation ever experienced happened in the 1980s, when it reached as high as around 14%.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota shouted in dissent at President Trump as he urged the House to prohibit sanctuary cities.
INVESTMENT
CLAIM: “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”
THE FACTS: Trump has presented no evidence that he’s secured this much domestic or foreign investment in the U.S. Based on statements from various companies, foreign countries and the White House’s own website, that figure appears to be exaggerated, highly speculative and far higher than the actual sum. The White House website offers a far lower number, $9.6 trillion, and that figure appears to include some investment commitments made during the Biden administration.
A study published in January raised doubts about whether more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by many of America’s biggest trading partners will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did.
JOBS
CLAIM: “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.”
THE FACTS: Yes, but the number of Americans with jobs always rises as the population grows. The relevant figure is the proportion of Americans with jobs, which has fallen significantly in the last quarter-century, partly because the workforce is aging and more people are retired. The proportion of Americans with jobs peaked at 64.7% in April 2000, and was 59.8% in January.
The unemployment rate is a low 4.3%, but was lower when Biden left office in January 2025, at 4%. During Biden’s presidency, the rate fell to a 50-year low of 3.4%.
Excluding recessions, 2025 was actually the worst year for job creation since 2003.
A total of 584,000 jobs were created last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down significantly from more than 2 million in both 2024 and 2023. In 2022, as the economy bounced back from the pandemic, more than 4.5 million jobs were created. The pace of job creation is also slower than it was in each of the first three years of Trump’s first term.
CLAIM: “We have added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time.”
THE FACTS: From January 2025 to January 2026, 44,000 construction jobs were added, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, far fewer than the 70,000 Trump touted.
FOREIGN WARS
CLAIM: “My first 10 months I ended eight wars.”
THE FACTS: There is no consensus about how many wars or potential wars Trump has ended. And where peace has prevailed, Trump’s impact as a mediator is up for debate.
Trump has claimed credit for ending conflicts between Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Thailand and Cambodia, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and India and Pakistan.
In some cases, fighting has resumed after declarations of peace or ceasefires, including between Thailand and Cambodia and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In at least two instances of peace he claims credit for achieving, there were no wars to end: no fighting between Serbia and Kosovo, and friction rather than fighting between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Trump has claimed that in his first term, a U.S.-brokered economic secured peace between Serbia and Kosovo. The two sides have not been in a shooting war since the 1990s, but deep political tensions persist, despite the deal agreed upon during Trump’s first term.
TARIFFS
CLAIM: Tariff revenues are “saving our country, the kind of money we’re taking in.”
THE FACTS: Though Trump has imposed massive tax hikes on imports, they’re not sizable enough to make a dent in the government’s annual budget deficits. Nor have the tariffs corresponded with manufacturing job gains.
Before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs based on an emergency declaration, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that his new taxes would raise $3 trillion over 10 years, or $300 billion annually.
That’s not enough to cover the cost of his $4.7 trillion in tax cuts, including additional interest cuts, that favored companies and the wealthy. Nor is it enough to pay down an annual budget deficit that last year was $1.78 trillion.
CLAIM: “Tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax.’’
THE FACTS: Under Trump, tariff revenues have swelled — to $195 billion in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 from $77 billion the year before. But the import taxes accounted for less than 4% of federal revenue. Income taxes and payroll taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare account for 84%.
MEDICINE
CLAIM: “I took prescription drugs, a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. That’s a big achievement. The result is price differences of 300, 400, 500, 600% and more.”
THE FACTS: This is impossible. Although the Trump administration has taken steps to lower drug prices, cutting them by more than 100% would theoretically mean that people are being paid to take medications.
Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center, said in August that this claim is “total fiction” by the president. He agreed that it would amount to drug companies paying customers, rather than the other way around.
TRUMP: “I am also ending the wildly inflated cost of prescription drugs. Other presidents tried to do it, but they never could. They didn’t even come close,” Trump said.
THE FACTS: In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, capping insulin at $35 a month for people on Medicare, placing a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug costs for people on Medicare and, for the first time, allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some of its most expensive medications. On Jan. 1, the first negotiated prices took effect, including for the blockbuster blood thinner Eliquis and the cancer drug Imbruvica. After the law capped insulin costs for Medicare patients, drugmakers also extended $35 monthly caps to privately insured patients.
By contrast, Trump has stuck voluntary deals with at least 16 drugmakers in exchange for tariff relief. He launched the self-pay platform TrumpRx, which so far offers cash prices on 43 medications. Most of those deals, however, don’t change what people with private insurance or Medicare pay at the pharmacy counter. Medicaid patients already tend to pay little or nothing for prescriptions. And many of the drugs listed on TrumpRx have generic versions that cost less than the advertised prices.
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump vowed to try to stop members of Congress from profiting off insider information.
CRIME
CLAIM: “Last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history. This is the biggest decline. Think of it in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years.”
THE FACTS: This is true, according to an analysis of crime data published last month by the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent, nonpartisan group.
The group’s January analysis predicted that “when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility” that the homicide level “would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
However, it’s important to note that crime did not suddenly begin falling when Trump returned to office in January 2025; it has been declining gradually for years. Several years of national data show that crime has consistently been falling in cities and towns across the U.S.
TRUMP: “[W]e have almost no crime anymore in Washington, D.C. How did that happen? In fact, crime in Washington is now at the lowest level ever recorded, and murders in D.C. this January were down close to 100% from a year ago,” Trump said.
THE FACTS: Crime in Washington has fallen in all but one category in 2026 so far, according to data published by the Metropolitan Police Department. (Assault with a dangerous weapon is the only category that has increased in 2026.) That data also showed declines in 2025 from 2024 in all violent crime and property crime categories.
But it is not accurate to say there is “almost no crime” in Washington.
Since Jan. 1, there have been nine homicides, 126 assaults with a dangerous weapon and 322 motor vehicle thefts in the city. Year-to-date, homicides are down 67%.
IMMIGRATION
CLAIM: “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country.”
THE FACTS: Trump has taken steps to restrict who can emigrate to the U.S., often in the name of protecting national security.
He suspended the refugee program on his first day in office and in October resumed the program but only in limited numbers for white South Africans.
Trump has also placed restrictions on who can travel or emigrate to the U.S. from nearly 40 countries around the world. Many of those countries are in Africa.
TAXES
CLAIM: “With the great big beautiful bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security.”
THE FACTS: Though the president frequently says his big tax cut bill means no tax on Social Security, that’s not true for everyone. Not all Social Security beneficiaries will be able to claim the deduction, which lasts until 2029.
Those who won’t be able to do so include the lowest-income seniors who already don’t pay taxes on Social Security, those who choose to claim their benefits before they reach age 65 and those above a defined income threshold. The deductions also phase out as income increases.
It’s true that Trump cut taxes for seniors and hourly workers with the bill he signed into law last year, but he didn’t eliminate all the taxes he mentioned. Some workers can now deduct overtime and tips, though there are income caps and maximum deduction limits.
ELECTIONS
CLAIM: “I’m asking you to approve the Save America Act to stop illegal aliens and other who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections. The cheating is rampant in our elections.”
THE FACTS: There is no evidence of widespread fraud in American elections. The conservative Heritage Foundation has collected only dozens of cases of fraud in key swing states amid tens of millions of ballots cast over decades.
1776
CLAIM: “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended. It still continues because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot.”
THE FACTS: The American Revolution started the previous year, on April 19, 1775. The colonies declared independence in 1776. It ended Sept. 3, 1783.
The Associated Press contributed to this reporting.
