President Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address on record last night, in a speech that featured many false claims and touched on a wide range of topics.
If you weren’t able to watch the full 1 hour and 47 minute speech, catch up below on some of the president’s main talking points:
Trump opened his State of the Union address by hitting on a series of encouraging economic indicators as he tried to ease Americans’ pervasive cost-of-living concerns.
He claimed that he inherited a “stagnant economy” from the Biden administration which is now “roaring like never before.” Though there is no firm definition of “stagnant” or “roaring,” the facts don’t necessarily corroborate this suggestion. The US economy grew 2.2% in 2025, which was lower than in any year of the Biden presidency.
Trump said that he expects that revenue collected from his sweeping global tariffs will one day be sufficient to replace Americans’ income tax payments.
He has made that claim before. However, the federal government raises about $3 trillion a year from income taxes. The US also happens to import around $3 trillion worth of goods annually, which means that tariffs would have to be at least 100% on all imported goods for the levies to replace income taxes.
The president repeated his regular false claim that tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries,” and numerous times called last week’s Supreme Court’s ruling shutting down his tariffs “unfortunate” and “disappointing.”
Trump credited his immigration policies with sealing the southern border and rapidly deporting undocumented immigrants on multiple occasions, without mentioning the killings by federal immigration agents of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month.
At one point, he urged members to stand up and show support if they agreed with the statement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats remained seated.
Trump promised to always protect Medicaid, despite the fact that his sweeping domestic policy package last year enacted historic cuts to the key safety net program for low-income Americans.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law last summer, slashed more than $900 billion in federal funding over 10 years for Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Trump only briefly touched on foreign affairs in his speech. The president said that the reason the US is amassing military assets around Iran is to ensure that Tehran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
Iran has claimed it is not pursuing a nuclear bomb. Just yesterday, the country’s foreign minister said explicitly that Tehran was not pursuing this, posting to X: “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”
Turning to elsewhere in the Middle East, Trump extolled his administration’s efforts to ensure the return of the hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, claiming that “nobody thought it was possible.”
The president also touted his frequent, exaggerated assertion that he’s ended eight wars since taking office, before turning to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which he said the US is “working very hard to end.” Trump repeated that the conflict “would have never happened” if he were president in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
CNN’s Adam Cancryn, Daniel Dale, David Goldman, John Fritze, Adam Cancryn, Tami Luhby, Kevin Liptak, Kit Maher and Jeremy Herb contributed to this reporting.