Trump's First Presidential Address

Kelby Chichester

On March 4. 2025, President Donald Trump delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term spending over an hour and 40 minutes making it the longest address of its kind.  

The convicted felon focused on immigration crackdowns, executive orders and his ambitious legislative agenda. He also heaped praise on billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Musk-led task force slashing government spending with little transparency or verifiable success.  

As expected, Trump’s speech was a minefield of misinformation. One of his most absurd claims was that a vast number of people over 120 years old were fraudulently receiving Social Security benefits. He cited a misleading chart from Musk’s social media platform, X which laughably suggested there were 3.5 million Americans aged 140 to 149 and even one person between 360 and 369 years old in the Social Security database.

There is no American is older than 116 and while some fraud exists there is no evidence of a widespread scheme involving centenarians defrauding the system.  

Trump also touted DOGE’s so-called success claiming it had uncovered “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.” This too is false. The task force’s own data as of March 2025, only details $8.86 billion in canceled contracts far from the $105 billion in savings it brags about.

Investigations by CBS News have found numerous errors and overstatements in DOGE’s figures, and there is no specific evidence of fraud in the contracts it has canceled.  

Trump’s speech took an even more bizarre turn when he falsely claimed that autism rates had skyrocketed from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 children.  

While autism diagnoses have increased, experts attribute this largely to improved awareness and better diagnostic methods not a sudden epidemic. Trump cherry-picked data from the CDC but conveniently ignored decades of research on the subject.  

The lies didn’t stop there. Trump fear-mongered about immigration wildly asserting that 21 million people “poured into” the U.S. under Biden including murderers, human traffickers and gang members. The actual number of illegal border crossings recorded during Biden’s presidency was 10.4 million less than half of Trump’s exaggerated claim. And as usual he provided no evidence that most of those individuals were criminals.

On the economy, Trump falsely declared that inflation under Biden was the worst in 48 years," perhaps even in the history of our country.” While inflation peaked at around 9% in 2022, this was not the worst in U.S. history. The highest inflation spikes occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, reaching 12-15%, and in 1946, inflation surpassed 18% after World War II.  

Trump’s first major address of his second term was exactly what we’ve come to expect—an avalanche of misinformation, baseless fearmongering and self-congratulatory nonsense. If this speech is any indication of the next four years, fact-checkers are going to be very busy.