Fact Checker: A recap of Trump’s first State of the Union

The truth behind the rhetoric

A recap of Trump’s first State of the Union

President Trump gave one of the longest State of the Union addresses in history, which means The Fact Checker was busy this week. The president once again boasted that he signed the largest tax cuts in history — that’s a Four Pinocchio claim. We also found that Trump was off the mark talking about jobs, unemployment claims, energy exports, immigration, and assorted other issues. All told, we examined 18 claims made by the president.

We then turned our sights to four of the responses to Trump’s speech from Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Eight of their claims about health care, chief executive compensation, the Russia investigation and labor regulations didn’t quite add up. As is our practice, we didn’t hand out Pinocchio ratings for Trump’s address or these responses. Let’s just say that both fact-checks add up to 4,160 words and leave it at that.

A tour through Kevin McCarthy’s old deli

Kevin McCarthy has had a remarkable run in politics, rising to House majority leader after seven years in Congress. But he often tells audiences and interviewers that he was shaped by his experience as a small business owner in the years before he finished college. A Fact Checker reader who had been tracking and researching McCarthy’s statements about his deli — Kevin O’s — reached out to us and said the story didn’t quite add up.

We looked into it, researching what the sandwich scene looked like back then in McCarthy’s hometown of Bakersfield, Calif.; talking to people who were around at the time; and interviewing McCarthy himself about the deli, which he ran in his aunt and uncle’s yogurt shop. Readers can form their own conclusions about McCarthy’s origin story; we are not handing out Pinocchios for this episode far in the past.

Trump says solar tariff will create ‘a lot of jobs.’ But it could wipe out many more. We find a lot of daylight between the president's statements and the industry consensus. By Salvador Rizzo  •   Read more »    Kevin McCarthy’s stint as a small-business entrepreneur The House majority leader often tells the story of when he ran a deli as a young man. Here's what really happened. By Glenn Kessler  •   Read more »

Fact checking the Democratic responses to the State of the Union speech Here's a roundup of eight fishy claims made by the Democrats as they responded to President Trump's State of the Union address. By Salvador Rizzo  •   Read more »    Fact-checking the 2018 State of the Union address Here's a roundup of the president's most dubious claims during the State of the Union address. By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly  •   Read more »

President Trump’s 2017 proposals to Congress: What flopped and what succeeded Here's our annual review of which State of the Union proposals from the year before succeeded — and which failed. By Glenn Kessler  •   Read more »