FACT FOCUS: A look at Trump’s false and misleading claims ahead of the State of the Union
Feb 23, 2026, 9:10 PM | Updated: Feb 24, 2026, 8:54 pm
FILE - President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House, April 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
President Donald Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term on Tuesday. Priorities for the Republican’s administration have centered largely on the economy, immigration, crime, energy and national security.
Trump has spent the last year touting his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. But much of this bluster is based on false and misleading claims — many of which are likely to be a part of the president’s address to the nation.
Here’s a look at some of the false and misleading statements Trump has made at recent public appearances.
Trump often says the U.S. is now “the hottest country anywhere in the world” after years as a “dead country.” The U.S. economy was hardly “dead’’ when Trump returned to office last year. But in his second term, it’s generally performed strongly — after getting off to a bumpy start.
In 2024, the last year of Biden’s presidency, U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.8%, adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023.
GDP shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter of 2025. Growth rebounded in the second half of the year, but slowed again in the fourth quarter. Annual GDP growth in 2025 was 2.2%.
A key measure of inflation fell to nearly a five-year low in January. However, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, it remains elevated as the cost of goods such as furniture, clothes and groceries increase.
Companies have also sharply reduced hiring. Employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, the fewest — outside a recession — since 2002. Economists blame a range of factors: Uncertainty created by tariffs and artificial intelligence likely caused many firms to hold back on adding workers. And many companies hired like gangbusters in the aftermath of the pandemic and have since decided to forgo creating any new positions.
The U.S. stock market did well last year and yet it underperformed many foreign stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 17% — a nice gain but short of a 71% surge in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the United Kingdom.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has secured up to $18 trillion in investments, but has presented no evidence of such a high number. The figure appears to be exaggerated, highly speculative or both.
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.
A key aspect of the Trump administration’s agenda is curbing illegal immigration, though the president often uses falsehoods to support his arguments.
For example, Trump has repeatedly claimed that an influx of immigrants has led to a massive increase in crime. While FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.
The president also frequently references upward of 300,000 migrant children who are allegedly missing. This misrepresents information in an August 2024 report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.
Trump consistently lauds coal as the ideal energy source, calling it “beautiful, clean coal.” The production of coal is cleaner now than it has been historically, but that doesn’t mean it’s clean.
Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the coal industry have decreased over the past 30 years, has found that coal production worldwide still needs to be reduced sharply to address climate change.
Along with carbon dioxide, burning coal emits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illnesses, according to the EIA.
The president also regularly denigrates wind power, claiming that it is expensive and that windmills kill birds.
Onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity generation, with new wind farms expected to produce energy costing around $30 per megawatt hour, according to July estimates from the Energy Information Administration.
Wind turbines, like all infrastructure, can pose a risk to birds. However, the National Audubon Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of birds, thinks developers can manage these risks and climate change is a greater threat.
In the lead-up to the 2026 midterms, Trump has taken to repeating the claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.
This is a blatant falsehood that has been disproven many times over — the 2020 election was not stolen.
Biden’s win has been affirmed through recounts, audits and reviews in the battleground states where Trump disputed his 2020 loss. He and his allies lost dozens of court challenges related to the election, and his own attorney general at the time said there was no widespread fraud that would have altered the results.
Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. He also won over 7 million more popular votes than Trump.
Additionally, the president brags that his 2024 win was a “landslide.” But Trump’s margin of victory was not as large as he makes it seem.
He won the electoral vote 312 to 226, including all seven swing states, according to the Federal Election Commission. The popular vote, however, was far closer, with Trump receiving 49.8% of the vote with 77,302,580 votes cast to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 75,017,613 votes (48.32%).
Trump takes credit for a significant decrease in violent crime during 2025, claiming the murder rate in the U.S. dropped to its lowest in 125 years. But this is misleading. Crime had already been trending down in recent years.
A study released in January by the Independent Council on Criminal Justice, which collected data from 35 U.S. cities on homicides, showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025.
The report noted that when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.
FBI reports for 2023 and 2024 show significant reductions in violent crimes.
Crime surged during the coronavirus pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year, the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records. But violent crime dropped to near pre-pandemic levels around 2022 when Biden was president.
The increase in violent crime during the pandemic defied easy explanation, and experts similarly said the historic drop in violence last year defies easy explanation despite elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — rushing to claim credit.
One of Trump’s most frequent talking points is he has “solved” eight wars, a statistic that is highly exaggerated. Although he has helped mediate relations among many nations, his impact isn’t as clear-cut as he makes it seem.
The conflicts Trump counts among those that he has solved are between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.
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Associated Press writers Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia and Josh Boak and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.
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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
