ANGELO LYNN

If you managed to watch President Trump’s address to Congress without blowing a gasket, that either means you fell asleep during the longest, chest-thumping, rambling rampage of narcissism the nation has ever witnessed or, like too many congressional Republicans, you’ve either drunk the Kool-Aid or are too afraid to challenge him.

If you blew a gasket, you had reason just based on the misinformation and exaggeration that’s typical of most Trump speeches.

Many media outlets provided fact-checks to the speech, of which the New York Times cited 26, or about one every three and a half minutes. Here are a few the Times recounted, in order of when he said them:

• He routinely exaggerates his victory over Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%, the smallest since 2000, and the fourth smallest since 1960. Biden beat Trump in the popular vote in 2020 by 4% and won the Electoral College 306-232. It’s important to keep correcting this as Trump’s strategy is to say it so often the public comes to believe it’s true. What’s true is he has a narrow mandate, just as the House and Senate have narrow mandates to govern (if they choose to.)
• Trump said he “withdrew from the unfair Paris Climate Accord, which was costing us trillions of dollars.” False. The Times accurately notes that each country sets its own commitments under the accord, so it’s imminently fair. Trump could have unilaterally changed the terms of agreement, as is allowed. Furthermore, the agreement is nonbinding; there is no mandate at a set cost. Trump uses inflated cost estimates from industry-reports that are against the agreement without considering any cost benefits or the tremendous expense to society from worsening storms, fires and other environmental consequences.
• Trump’s ire at Biden’s bold support and subsidies to help the nation’s automotive industries transition to electric vehicles makes little sense, so he lies about its impact by saying his decision to end the “EV mandate, sav(es) our autoworkers and companies from economic destruction.” False. The United Auto Workers Union, which endorsed Harris for president, praised Biden’s EPA for ensuring a “just transition” to electric vehicles, saying in a statement: “This rule does not require Ford, General Motors, Stellantis or any other domestic automaker to do anything beyond the commitments they made to shareholders to capitalize on the growing EV market. We reject the fearmongering that says tackling the climate crisis must come at the cost of union jobs.”
• Trump’s claim that he “inherited… an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare” is absurd. President Biden presided over a surprisingly robust economy during his four years and was able to bring high inflation down to 3% by the end of his term. In the final year of Biden’s presidency, the Economist called the U.S. economy “the envy of the world,” despite the fact that what Biden inherited from Trump was a true train wreck with the highest number of lost jobs since the Great Depression and the nation in shock due to Trump’s mishandling of the Covid pandemic.
• More importantly, when Trump suggests there is rampant waste in programs like Social Security, it’s to justify, through misinformation, his intentions to cut Social Security funding. Claims of funding millions of people over 100 years old are simply untrue. Several media outlets have explained the numbers Trump cites as a coding issue due to 70-year-old computer programming language. When a person’s birth date is not known, a default date is chosen, often May 20, 1875. An existing government report explains the default and why those names are in the system, but the Trump team didn’t bother to read it. The facts are that 98% of the people Trump cited “have not had earnings reported to the SSA in the past 50 years.” Again, Trump says things like this to justify the cuts he wants to make in Social Security so he can pay for tax cuts to the very rich.

And on and on, Trump’s misinformation rampage goes. If you believe it, you lose — and so does your neighbor.

Angelo Lynn