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President Trump spent only 15 minutes of his nearly two-hour speech Tuesday night on foreign policy—but those minutes were as full of falsehoods, distortions, and personal insults as the rest of what must be the most angrily divisive presidential address to a joint session of Congress.

His first lie on the subject was that, because he and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had removed “wokeness” from our military, recruitment rates are higher than any time in the last 15 years. In fact, according to a headline in Fox News, of all places, “Army recruiting is up, but data show trend began before the election.”

According to that data, there were more recruits in August 2024, three months before the election, than there were in December, one month after the election (a lot more: 7,415 compared with 5,877). Nor did recruitment in January 2025 surpass the numbers of August 2024.

The reason is that, back in 2023, the military put 1,200 more recruiters in the field and set up a six-week pre-boot camp to help lower-performing recruits meet the required standards.

This highlights an ominous fact for the future: the nation is having a hard time recruiting physically and mentally fit men and women to join the military. However, steps to adjust for that were taken in the final year-and-a-half of the Biden administration—and higher numbers were met in that time than in the time since Trump was elected.

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