Although a variety of congressional lawmakers issued written statements ahead of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, one of them, a press release from Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont, included a notable prediction. “The president will lie tonight — he cannot help himself,” the senator said.

To the surprise of no one, Welch’s comment soon proved prescient.

Trump and his speechwriters almost certainly knew that the address to a joint session of Congress would be thoroughly fact-checked by independent news organizations — it’s a standard move following every State of the Union — so they had an incentive to craft a speech that bore at least some passing resemblance to reality.

But over the course of 107 tedious minutes, the president threw caution to the wind and bombarded his audience with an avalanche of demonstrably false claims.

Trump said, “When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy [and] inflation at record levels.” That wasn’t even close to being true.

Trump said, “In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.” It would certainly be nice if that were true, but according to the Republican administration’s own tallies, it was not.

Trump said, “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” This, too, would be great if it were correct. It isn’t.

Trump said, “Last year, I urged this Congress to begin the mission by passing the largest tax cuts in American history, and our Republican majorities delivered so beautifully.” The tax breaks included in the GOP’s domestic policy megabill were enormous, but they clearly were not the largest in American history.

Trump said, “[A]s time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.” As the White House really ought to understand by now, tariffs are paid by Americans, not foreign countries, and the idea that tariff revenue could replace income tax revenue remains quite bonkers.

Trump said, “I’m also ending the wildly inflated costs of prescription drugs like has never happened before. Other presidents tried to do it, but they never could. They tried. Most didn’t try, actually. But they tried. They said they tried. They couldn’t do it. They didn’t even come close. They were all talk and no action. But I got it done.” Actually, it was a different president who achieved the breakthrough policy that lowered the cost of many prescription drugs. Trump has probably heard of him: His name is Joe Biden.

Relatedly, Trump said, “I took prescription drugs, a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. That’s a big achievement. The result is price differences of 300, 400, 500, 600% and more — all available right now at a new website called TrumpRX.gov.” First, it’s still impossible to reduce the price of a product by more than 100%, and second, his claims related to TrumpRX.gov have consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny.

Trump said his administration can root out fraud in social insurance programs to such an extent that “we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.” That sounded great, right up until arithmetic got in the way: The president can’t erase a $1.8 trillion budget deficit “overnight” by eliminating fraudulent payments that represent a fraction of that total.

Trump said, “Under this administration, we will always protect Social Security and Medicare. They are not protecting it for our seniors. We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.” I can think of millions of struggling families who likely wish he was telling the truth, but he was not.

Trump said, “The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant.” The reason the White House has never been able to produce any evidence in support of this claim is because it’s plainly false.

Trump said, “My first 10 months I ended 8 wars.” In a piece for MS NOW, Glenn Kessler described this boast as “poppycock,” which is as good a label as any.

This isn’t even close to being a comprehensive list. Rather, it’s just a modest sampling to highlight the more outrageous and obvious deceptions.

But stepping back, the problem is not just that Trump lied repeatedly throughout his remarks. Those lies were made worse by the apparent fact that he thought he had to lie, likely aware of the unavoidable truth about his record and his vision: It simply isn’t good enough to stand on its own.

Indeed, for all of the president’s bravado and chest-thumping, his avalanche of lies gave away the game: If he’d earned the right to boast about his accomplishments, he wouldn’t have had to peddle quite so much nonsense.

White House officials may hope that the public won’t see the fact-check reports, and that many others will simply believe what they’re told to believe. Consider that one of Trump’s former press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2024 and explained, “He used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you.’”

But this doesn’t change the fact that a presidential vision built on a foundation of falsehoods will inevitably crumble.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.