Donald Trump told the lies we knew he would tell in his State of the Union address. He portrayed a tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest people as a benefit for working families, and called it the “biggest tax cuts and reform in American history” when it was not and when he has been repeatedly fact-checked on that lie. He took credit for economic trends that are simply a continuation of President Barack Obama’s years. He claimed that Obamacare’s individual mandate was “now gone” when in reality it remains in effect in 2018. And he demonized immigrants in viciously false terms. But that’s not all. Let’s turn to the fact-checkers.
Trump didn’t just lie about immigrants, he lied about the U.S. immigration system, claiming that “Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.” In reality:
There is currently no wait for U.S. citizens to bring spouses, children under 21 and parents. But citizens must petition for siblings and adult children, and green-card card holders must do the same for spouses and children.
On the economy:
"After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages," he said Tuesday.
Last year, wages grew an average of 2.6% -- the same rate as 2016. And it's still considered weak improvement: The Federal Reserve hopes to see wages increase about 3.5% annually.
The same rate as 2016, huh? Trump’s claims about the auto industry were similarly false:
“Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we have not seen for decades.”
THE FACTS: He’s wrong about recent decades. The auto industry has regularly been opening and expanding factories since before [he] became president. Toyota opened its Mississippi factory in 2011. Hyundai’s plant in Alabama dates to 2005. In 2010, Tesla fully acquired and updated an old factory to produce its electric vehicles.
Additionally, “the auto industry's recovery began years ago. If anything, the comeback has lasted so long that it's starting to level off: US car sales fell in 2017 for the first time since 2009, coming in at 17.2 million vehicles. They had set a record in 2016 of 17.6 million cars sold.”
Back to immigration, Trump also worked hard to paint immigrants as gang members:
"What the Border Patrol and ICE have done, we have sent thousands, and thousands, and thousands of MS-13, horrible people out of this country or into our prisons."
But Trump's claim is not borne out by the statistics released by his administration.
According to the administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 796 MS-13-related arrests and Customs and Border Protection made 228 MS-13 arrests in the fiscal year that ended at the end of September 2017.
If you count MS-13-related arrests in Central America, the “thousands and thousands” number may possibly be true. But that’s not “out of this country or into our prisons.”
A line-by-line fact-check of Trump’s speech would fill a book—the implication that the opioid epidemic stems from Mexican immigration and not substantially from major pharmaceutical companies, the implication that Donald Trump has done anything significant to combat the opioid epidemic. “Beautiful clean coal,” which is not a thing that exists. Just about every single thing he said about the Republican tax scam.
Donald Trump may have stayed mostly on script on Tuesday night. He may not have ranted and raved. But that doesn’t mean he told the truth.