President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on March 4.Win McNamee/The Associated Press
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President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday highlighted several of the action’s he’s taken in his first six weeks in office, but many of his comments included false and misleading information.
He overstated the numbers on his immigration crackdown
TRUMP: “Illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded. Ever.”
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday that Border Patrol apprehended 8,326 people on the U.S.-Mexico border last month. But U.S. government data show that Border Patrol routinely averaged below that number in the 1960s.
While February marked the lowest arrest total in decades, Border Patrol averaged less than February 2025 for the first seven years of 1960s. The government website does not track U.S.-Mexico border totals before 1960. Border Patrol’s monthly average was 1,752 arrests in 1961.
He inflated the number of people who entered the U.S. illegally under Biden
TRUMP: “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States. Many of them were murderers, human traffickers, gang members.”
That figure, which Trump cites regularly, is highly inflated. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 10.8 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through December 2024.
But that’s arrests, not people. Under asylum restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.
There is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or people with mental illness across the border, despite this frequent line from Trump.
U.S. President Donald Trump took a victory lap in an address to Congress on March 4, drawing catcalls and interruptions from some Democratic lawmakers who held up signs and walked out mid-speech in protest.
Reuters
Economists differ with Trump on tariffs
TRUMP: “Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again. And it’s happening. And it will happen rather quickly. There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that. It won’t be much.”
Trump is banking on the idea that taxing imports is the road to riches for the United States. Most economists say Trump’s tariffs would hurt the country, as they’re tax increases that could raise the costs of goods in ways that could also harm economic growth. Trump suggests that the impact on inflation would be minimal.
When the Yale University Budget Lab looked at the tariffs that Trump imposed Tuesday on Canada, Mexico and China, it found that inflation would increase a full percentage point, growth would fall by half a percentage point and the average household would lose about $1,600 in disposable income.
No evidence Social Security is being paid to many people over age 100
TRUMP: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. … 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.” The databases may list those people, but that does not mean they are getting paid benefits.
Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which doesn’t use a specific format for dates. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago. The news organization Wired first reported on the use of COBOL programming language at the Social Security Administration.
Additionally, a series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector-general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these people were receiving benefits.
The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9-million. As of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.
President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on March 4.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
Trump did not inherit an ‘economic catastrophe’
TRUMP: “Among my very highest priorities is to rescue our economy and get dramatic and immediate relief to working families. As you know, we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”
Inflation peaked at 9.1 per cent in 2022 under President Joe Biden, but Trump did not inherit a disastrous economy by any measure. The unemployment rate ticked down to a low 4 per cent in January, the month he took office, while the economy expanded a healthy 2.8 per cent in 2024. Inflation-adjusted incomes have grown steadily since mid-2023. And inflation, while showing signs of stickiness in recent months and still elevated at 3 per cent in January, is down from its 2022 peak.
Trump’s reference to an ‘EV mandate’ is inaccurate
TRUMP: “We ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.”
There was no federal mandate to force the purchase of EVs, as Trump has falsely claimed many times before.
Biden had set up a non-binding goal that EVs make up half of new cars sold by 2030. Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office revoking that goal.
Biden’s policies tightened restrictions on pollution from gas-powered cars and trucks in an effort to encourage Americans to buy EVs and car companies to shift from gas-powered vehicles to electric cars.