In a stunning repeat of every other time Donald Trump opened his mouth to emit words, a great number of those words failed to match up with events in the real world. With the help of speechwriters, Trump managed to elevate his speech from the level of a third grader, to that of a third grader blandly mocking past presidential speeches. But even if the framing changed, the content was most the same.
For example, Trump once again bragged about the millions he’d saved on military programs … which is nothing but Trump taking credit for savings that were built into the program.
The next stage in the F-35 program’s low-rate initial production … comes out to a cost reduction of between $6.1 million and $7.1 million per plane, or between $549 million and $630 million for a full lot of 90 planes.
Taking credit for other’s work is a Donald Trump specialty, but then, so is distortion, misstatement, leading arguments, and every other variant of what people generally know as telling a big fat lie.
Trump said that “94 million Americans are out of the labor force” which is also truish … if you include every retiree, every college student, every stay-at-home parent, and everyone who simply chooses not to work. Of Donald Trump’s 94 million, fewer than 6 million actually represent someone looking for work. In similar statements, Trump also raised the number of Americans in poverty or using food stamps as if they were shocking highs, even though both numbers have been declining.
Trump spent some time blasting Obamacare, cherry picking the highest rate increases and mouthing the new Republican talking point that “Obamacare is collapsing,” which they’re hoping will act as a buffer when their hardliners drive them to destroy an increasingly popular law.
In sheer numeric terms, the biggest whopper may have been this one.
Trump said the U.S. has spent $6 trillion in the Middle East and “with this $6 trillion we could have rebuilt our country.” The amount spent so far is $1.7 trillion, according to the Defense Department.
But being over $4 trillion dollars off in his accounting isn’t the worst things that Donald Trump said. The worst things about Trump’s speech centered on one topic: immigrants.
Trump took a small snippet of a report and quoted it out of context.
“According to the National Academy of Sciences, our current immigration system costs American taxpayers many billions of dollars a year.”
Without revealing that the report showed that out current immigration system actually generates a huge net gain for the nation over the long term, with returns that eclipsed the initial cost of taking in immigrants that sometimes needed assistance.
And while Republicans made sure that Trump’s speech was studded with dozens, and dozens, and dozens of applause breaks, there was one moment that generated actual gasps of horror.
“I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims. The office is called Voice, Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.
It’s not that victims of crimes committed by immigrants have been ignored by the media.
The individuals killed by undocumented immigrants mentioned by President Trump in his speech received widespread coverage in local newspapers and on television. For example, the death of Jamiel Shaw Jr., who was shot and killed in 2008 in Los Angeles, was widely covered by The Los Angeles Times and local television stations.
Shaw was one of the people Trump used as an example of how these victims had generated no attention. For Trump, it’s not enough that these crimes haven’t gotten attention, it’s that they haven’t generated enormous, disproportionate attention to help fuel his anti-immigrant fervor.
No distortion was needed when Trump talked about the border.
"We've defended the borders of other nations, while leaving our own borders wide open for anyone to cross."
That’s simply an outright lie. The number of border agents was already at record highs before Trump took office.
Some media outlets were treating it as a surprise that Trump was calling for “immigration reform” but what Trump is actually calling for is a closure of the borders to poor people and a replacement of immigration with a system with “a merit-based system” in which Trump and the Republican Congress would be able to determine what constitutes “merit.” And if you think they can find a way to define that as white and Christian, look at the language of Trump’s Muslim ban.
Another target of Trumpaganda was environmental laws. He said that he would “promote clean air and clean water” in the same speech where he also claimed that he eliminated a regulation that threatened "the future and livelihoods of our great coal miners." That regulation allows coal companies to pollute streams. It both destroys clean water and doesn’t generate any jobs—a lie at both ends.
Overall Trump gave a speech that exaggerated his accomplishments, painted an economy seeing steady growth and the first improvements for the middle class in a decade into a hellscape, and painted immigrants a violent low-lives costing America in both crimes and dollars.
And the media is quick to tell you, it got good ratings.
President Donald Trump's first address to Congress received largely positive reviews from viewers, with 57% who tuned in saying they had a very positive reaction to the speech, according to a new CNN/ORC poll of speech-watchers.
Nearly 7-in-10 who watched said the President's proposed policies would move the country in the right direction and almost two-thirds said the president has the right priorities for the country. Overall, about 7-in-10 said the speech made them feel more optimistic about the direction of the country.
Which, considering the content of the speech, sounds horrifying. But there’s a key phrase in that first paragraph. It’s who tuned in.
Republicans did tune in to watch it in much greater numbers than Democrats (as a president’s party typically does) which bolstered those approval numbers.
Even so, Trump’s 57 percent approval for the speech could sound good until you note.
In 2009, 68% had a very positive reaction to Obama, while 66% gave Bush very positive reviews in 2001. Likewise, the 69% of speech-watchers who thought Trump's policies would move the nation in the right direction lagged behind the share who felt that way about Obama's or Bush's policies in the first year, and ranks around their low-marks on this score.