Trump’s 2-hour diatribe doesn’t address America’s true status 

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the president shall “give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union” from time to time. Last week, President Trump did so in a speech that lasted one hour, 48 minutes — the longest on record.  

Filled with glitzy entrances and exits, awards, tear jerks and interactive sits to stands, the speech was long on vituperation but short on reliable information. It was a variety show worthy of P.T. Barnum, a harangue worthy of Cicero’s attacks on Cataline — and it was riddled with lies.

Seething with anger, Trump demonized the Democrats “These people are crazy,” he declared.  “Democrats are destroying our country.” Really?

Trump called Chief Justice Roberts’s decision invalidating Trump’s illegal tariffs “unfortunate,” as Roberts grimly glared at him, stone-faced. The rebuke was mild compared with the White House presser following the decision when he said he was “ashamed” of those justices who had ruled against him, calling them a “disgrace to our nation.” 

Sinking in the polls, even before his unpopular and risky strikes in Iran, Trump addressed the two issues of greatest concern to Americans, immigration and the economy. His moves in both areas have been largely unpopular. Having no proposed solutions, he prevaricated, bookending the fairness of U.S. elections and his false claim that he ended eight wars. Some were never wars; others never actually ended.  

On immigration, his basic theme was xenophobic. Migrants living in the U.S. illegally have “poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions, they were murderers.” Data show, however, that U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely as undocumented immigrants to be arrested for violent crimes. 

Murder should evoke in all of us sympathy for the victim and condemnation of the killer. Trump had expressed no such sentiments about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife in Brentwood, California. But he was quick to parade families of victims of violent crime supposedly committed by those living illegally in the U.S.  

When Trump introduced the mother of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian woman killed on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last year, he falsely claimed the man who stabbed Zarutska “came in through open borders.” Not so — DeCarlos Brown Jr., the alleged killer, was a U.S. citizen born in Charlotte.

Trump might have better presented to the nation families of the U.S. citizen victims of masked federal immigration officials: 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez of San Antonio, shot multiple times, or those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed on the streets of Minneapolis. Trump might have said a word about the status of the government investigation of the killings, if one is even seriously underway. But the silence on this was deafening.

Trump was at his most inaccurate when discussing the economy. He exaggerated economic performance, misrepresented the inflation inherited from Biden, used misleading gasoline price data and falsely claimed that foreign countries, not importers, pay tariffs. There was also his fictional “$18 trillion” figure for supposed investment in the U.S. over the last year.

Trump bragged, “we have more jobs, more people working today than ever before in the history of our country.” However, revised Bureau of Labor Statistics data released last month show the U.S. gained only 181,000 jobs in 2025. That’s “well below the 1.5 million to 2.5 million typical under both Trump during his first term and former President Joe Biden,” according to PolitiFact. Unemployment has remained low — just 4.3 percent in January — but that’s up from 4 percent a year ago, when Trump returned to the White House. 

The U.S. economy was in solid shape before Trump returned to the White House. The Economist labeled it “the envy of the world” in October 2024, because it had bounced back robustly from the pandemic recession. But costs have continued to climb over the last year, and that dissatisfaction is now weighing on Trump’s own approval rating. Six in 10 Americans say the country is worse off now than it was a year ago.

Trump said Americans will now pay the “lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs, ” claiming he has slashed prescription drug prices as high as “600 percent.” This doesn’t even make sense — you can’t reduce anything by more than 100 percent. Or does he mean drug companies will now pay you five times over to buy their product? Is he innumerate, or is he just lying? 

Americans still pay several times more for prescription drugs than people in peer countries. This is because many of those countries regulate drug prices, a course of action that Republicans have always rejected.

A Harvard mathematician argues that Trump’s exaggerated claims are not a “minor abuse of statistics but a failure of epistemic responsibility, one that undermines the possibility of public reasoning itself.”

The speech was too long, too garish, too exploitative, too vulgar and mostly uninformative. The American people will have to decide at the polls how “strong” the state of the union is. 

James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and a published legal analyst.

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