Diamond Member Pelican Press 0 Posted March 5, 2025 Diamond Member Share Posted March 5, 2025 This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Fact-checking Donald Trump’s speech to Congress Lucy Gilder, Jake Horton & Ben Chu BBC Verfiy This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up In his address to Congress, which ran for more than an hour and a half, President Donald Trump made a series of claims about the state of the US under his predecessor Joe Biden and the achievements of his first weeks in office. He returned to key campaign themes including ******** immigration, rising prices and what he called “appalling waste” in government spending. BBC Verify has looked into the facts behind some of his key claims. Did Trump inherit an economic catastrophe? Trump said he inherited an “economic catastrophe” from Biden. This is misleading. The US economy was growing at an annual rate of 2.3% in the final quarter of 2024 under the previous administration. It expanded by 2.8% over 2024 as a whole This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up The This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up that the US growth rate in 2024 was faster than any other nation in the G7. On rising prices, Trump added “we suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country”. Inflation under Biden peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 – the highest level since 1981 – so not quite as far back as Trump claimed. The 2022 peak was in the context of high inflation in the rest of the world in the wake of the Covid pandemic and a global energy shock. The inflation rate had dropped to 3% by the time Trump took office. Inflation has also been much higher than 9% at several other points in US history, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up /applications/core/interface/js/spacer.png"> Did Biden let egg prices get out of control? Trump went on to blame Biden for egg prices, claiming he “let the price of eggs get out of control”. Prices are high, but this has been linked to a bird flu outbreak in the US. Egg prices rose under Biden in 2023, and in January a dozen eggs averaged over $5, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). That is 53% above the average for the whole of 2024. The USDA has said a bird flu outbreak has led to US farmers having to kill millions of chickens, creating egg shortages, and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up The outbreak started in February 2022 and last year the Biden administration allocated more than $800m to tackle it. The Trump administration recently fired a number of USDA officials who worked on the government’s response to bird flu as part of cost-cutting measures by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). They are now This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Has Doge found hundreds of billions in fraud? Trump praised Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and claimed the advisory body had found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” in federal government spending. No evidence has been provided for this figure. On its official website, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , from fraud detection, contract and grant cancellations, real estate lease terminations, asset sales, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings. However, that figure cannot be independently verified as, so far, Doge has only published “receipts” for contract, grant and real estate lease cancellations on the website. These add up to about $18.6bn. We have asked the White House for evidence of the remaining $86bn of savings. US media outlets have also highlighted some accounting errors. For example, Doge initially listed its largest saving of $8bn from scrapping an immigration agency contract – it later corrected this to $8m. Was February the lowest ever month for border crossings? Speaking about his actions to tackle ******** immigration, Trump said that “as a result, ******** border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded”. This is true. In February 2025, there were 8,326 encounters at the southwest border with Mexico – This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . This is the lowest level since monthly records began in 2000. By comparison, there were about 140,000 encounters by US border patrol at this border in February last year under Biden. Numbers fell for the rest of the year This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Trump has ordered US troops to patrol the southern border with Mexico Did 21 million migrants enter US under Biden? Continuing with ******** migration, Trump claimed: “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States”. There is no evidence for a figure this high. Encounters with migrants at the borders – a measure of ******** migration – reached 10 million under Biden but this does not mean this many people stayed in the US. It is impossible to know exactly how many ******** immigrants have come to the US, as many will have evaded law enforcement agencies, but several estimates put the number at around half what Trump stated. A report This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up last year estimated the number of ******** immigrants living in the US, as of January 2022, at 11 million. It says about a fifth of them arrived in 2010 or later but the majority arrived before this time, some as early as the 1980s. Has the US spent $350bn on Ukraine? On US aid to Ukraine, Trump claimed: “We’ve spent perhaps $350bn… and they [Europe] have spent $100bn. What a difference that is.” BBC Verify is unable to find any evidence for Trump’s $350bn claim and some figures suggest Europe has spent more as whole when all aid to Ukraine is included. The US is, by some margin, the largest single donor to Ukraine. But Europe combined has spent more money than the US, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . It calculates that between 24 January 2022 and the end of 2024, Europe as a whole spent $138.7bn on Ukraine, while the US spent $119.7bn. The US Department of Defense has a higher figure of $182.8bn – taking into account a broader range of US military activity in Europe – but this is still considerably less than Trump’s figure. We have asked the White House where it comes from. BBC Verify is looking at other claims from Trump’s speech. Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh & Anthony Reuben. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up /applications/core/interface/js/spacer.png"> This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up #Factchecking #Donald #Trumps #speech #Congress This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up 0 Quote Link to comment https://hopzone.eu/forums/topic/234486-fact-checking-donald-trump%E2%80%99s-speech-to-congress/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.