President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union address on Tuesday, where he boasted of helping to secure $18 trillion in investments into the US during his first year in office. However, that claim was quickly labeled as false on Wednesday by NBC News while pointing to the Trump administration’s own website as proof.
“I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, pouring in from all over the globe,” Trump claimed on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the official White House stream of SOTU queued up a graphic revealing the $18 trillion in real time.
However, a look at the official White House website displays a different number – $9.7 trillion. This makes Trump’s claim an overshoot by over $8 trillion. Meanwhile, as noted by NBC News, many of these investments into the US were not new investments, but were actually “in line with previous plans” made during the Biden administration. Alternatively, they were commitments carried over from the prior administration with “only slight increases.”
Additionally, many of the investments into the United States, as noted by NBC News, were not new investments at all, and were instead either “in line with previous plans” made during the Biden administration, or commitments carried over from the prior administration with “only slight increases.”
“More than $2.5 trillion of that isn’t investments, Bloomberg Economics found in November,” according to the NBC News report. According to that report around $3.5 trillion of that figure comes from “opaque sovereign pledges,” while another $3.5 trillion is reportedly corporate investments.
Meanwhile, of the corporate investments, $2.9 trillion is planned for data centers. Moreover, according to the report, many of the commitments are over the long term and likely to change. NBC News gave an example, that it took drug maker Fujifilm Biotechnologies five years to open a factory in North Carolina.
Moreover, this wasn’t the only incorrect claim as Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in history. The US President is known to exaggerate while giving speeches and this particular SOTU was full of false or not accurate information.
Besides his economic policies, the president also boasted of his immigration enforcement, while slamming Democrats and the Biden administration. His misleading, exaggerated and false claims during the event reportedly ranged from the economy to crime and elections.
In another claim, Trump boasted, “We have lifted 2.4 million Americans — a record — off of food stamps.”
Almost 42 million Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, informally known as food stamps. However, due to new work requirements passed in Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will see around 2.4 million people lose eligibility for the program.
Meanwhile, Trump claimed that there is almost no crime anymore in Washington DC, adding that crime is at its lowest level “ever recorded” and that murders in DC in January were down “close to 100 percent from a year ago.”
However, NBC reports that Trump’s claims are exaggerated and that since January 1, the city has seen nine homicides, 126 assaults with a dangerous weapon and 322 motor vehicle thefts in Washington DC. However, so far this year, homicides are down by 67 percent.
