Trump's SOTU Lies
Plus: Entitlement reform, gas prices, the Reason SOTU drinking game, robo-vac spies, and more...
Well, that was long.
President Donald Trump set a new record for the longest State of the Union address, with a speech that lasted nearly two hours. There was a time when the State of the Union was just a letter. This could have been an email, or, ahem, a newsletter. Can we get the president on Substack? They don't have editors there.
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Trump did his usual showman shtick. He called out the U.S. hockey team, which just won Olympic gold (and produced an AI-generated meme in which the president was battling on the ice with the team). He said, "Space Force is my baby." (How does Trump's son, Barron, feel about that?) He referred to Democrats as "pro-crime." He claimed to have ended eight wars in 10 months, producing a memorably pained look on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's face. (He nearly did the meme.) And he got Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren to stand and clap for a line about congressional insider trading, making for a little bit of real-life horseshoe theory.
But hey, at least we didn't bomb Iran. Yet.
Despite the length, Trump's speech was fundamentally designed to deliver two messages.
First, we're winning, and by we he means he.
And second, they're losing, and by they he means Democrats and haters. Minutes after the speech ended, the White House press secretary posted a list of things Democrats "refused to stand for." That's the takeaway, the big idea the White House wants people to focus on.
This was a movie-length assertion of success—and a series of attacks on Trump's political enemies.
We'll see whether voters buy it. Because so far they haven't. "Polls find that Americans are unhappy with Trump's handling of the economy," The Wall Street Journal reports. "In a Wall Street Journal survey last month, voters gave the president low marks when asked if he cares about 'people like you.'"
For the past year, Trump has presided over a "vibecession" in which voters dislike the economy, despite some reasonably good numbers. As a recent Echelon Insights newsletter notes, Democrats, especially, think Trump's economy is rotten, while Republicans think it's improving, an effect that was clearly visible as early as February 2025. Funny enough, voters had similar negative sentiment about Biden's economy, except that the partisan roles were reversed.
And voters have never approved of his signature economic policy, tariffs: The Echelon Insights newsletter calls Trump's tariffs "uniquely unpopular." Yet he spent part of the speech insisting that, despite a ruling from the Supreme Court last week, he would reinstate a tough tariff regime based on alternative (probably illegal) authority. (In a post-SOTU reaction video, Reason's Reem Ibrahim took on the president's tariff nonsense.)
Trump also suggested, for the umpteenth time, that tariffs would help relieve the national debt and deficit—and might even replace the income tax. Sorry, but, as Eric Boehm wrote last night, that is just not going to happen.
Trump said a lot of things that weren't true. As Jack Nicastro wrote in an economic fact-check last night, Trump said the Biden administration stuck Americans with the worst inflation in history; it was high, but not the worst ever. Trump also said that he'd secured $18 trillion in investments from foreign countries around the globe; even the White House's own website only claims $9.7 trillion worth of "major investment announcements." Trump also suggested he'd beaten inflation and replaced it with "tremendous" growth. Again, nope. Inflation is still elevated.
There were other falsehoods as well. A CNN fact check goes through a number of his SOTU claims and finds them lacking. One of the most notable was Trump's claim that gas prices are "now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places, $1.99 a gallon." It's like the president was trying to mimic GasBuddy.com, a website that tracks gas prices all over the country, but in human form. As it turns out, the head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy has thrown cold water on Trump's boasts of sub-$2 gas: He's only aware of four gas stations in the United States with sub-$2 gas. Meanwhile, CNN reports, the car-rescuers at AAA say no state had an average gas price below $2.37.
Fraud couple: Trump also claimed that in Minnesota, "members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. We have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that." I wrote about this for Reason's print edition recently. It's true that there's been a lot of welfare fraud in Minnesota, and many of those arrested were Somali.
It is, in fact, a scandal, and Democrats in the state let it happen on their watch. But when Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson announced in December that the state was suffering from "staggering industrial fraud," the initial number he provided was "half or more" of $18 billion in federal Medicaid funds. That's generally been taken to mean about $9 billion, and while or more leaves open the possibility of a much larger fraud, even if literally every single dollar were spent in an outright fraudulent manner—which isn't likely—that's still less than the $19 billion Trump claimed.
In any case, this is a good reason to reform Medicaid, a program that is funded jointly through state budgets and federal matching grants that drive up spending without commensurate improvements in health. But Trump has mostly used this scandal as an opportunity to pursue hardline immigration enforcement, not entitlement reform.
Forever entitled: Yet meaningful entitlement reform is exactly what Trump has taken off the table. Once again, Trump reiterated his promise to "always protect Social Security and Medicare," the two old-age entitlements that are primarily responsible for the long-term run-up of debt and deficits. Without change, both of those programs are set to see significant shortfalls within the next decade. The current trajectory is unsustainable for both the broader federal budget and the programs Trump is promising to preserve.
Eventually, they're going to run out of gas.
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: In some cities, people go to bars to watch sports. In Washington, D.C., people go to bars to watch the State of the Union. And bars offer specials to try to lure in customers.
For example, Penn Social, a bar in downtown D.C., offered free beer "until the first insult." No word on how long that lasted.
QUICK HITS
- In an unusual bipartisan display, GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California sat next to each other at last night's big speech. The way this worked is that Massie ended up sitting with the Democrats. I feel like this is begging for a riff on the anime butterfly meme: Is this…a buddy comedy?
- More seriously, Massie and Khanna have sponsored a war powers resolution that would force members of Congress to go on record about the attack on Iran that seems to be in the works.
- People can now bet on exactly what word Trump will say next. And they are betting…bigly.
- Speaking of Trump bets, someone anonymously placed a very large wager on the likelihood that the United States will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. Some suspect insider trading, which, if true, would make this a sort of preconfirmation. Prediction markets surface information!
- Your robot vacuum is probably spying on you. A Spanish engineer tried to hack his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner so he could control it with his PlayStation controller. He soon discovered that he was able to control 7,000 of the robo vacs worldwide, and see house plans and other data too.
- A new poll from Echelon Insights finds broad support for legalized marijuana…and strong opposition to vaping. Who is the pro-pot/anti-vaping voter?
- The Reason staff drinking game was to take a drink every time Trump said "like never before." Did that mean we were going to drink like never before? Look at our coverage, and I think you'll find it remarkably sober-minded. That said, this—in one drinking game, or perhaps one presidential speech—is the case for nonalcoholic Negronis.
