Out-of-date polls to wrong aid amounts: factchecking Trump’s Congress address

The United States has not given Ukraine $350bn since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022

The president repeated one of his new favorite lies: that the United States has given Ukraine $350bn since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and Europe has given just $100bn.

In fact, as Jakub Krupa and Pjotr Sauer reported for the Guardian last month, a running tally kept by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy shows that the US has spent about $120bn, while Europe – counted as the sum of the EU and individual member states – has allocated nearly $138bn in help for Ukraine. When the contributions from non EU countries, like the UK, are included, Europe’s share is even larger.

Last week, on three consecutive days, three visiting world leaders corrected Trump on this false statement while sitting next to him in the Oval Office: the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Trump did not stop ‘$45m for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma’

One in a litany of spending on foreign aid projects that Trump presented as ridiculous was “$45m for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma”.

There is no evidence that any such scholarships were planned. As the former representative Tom Malinowski pointed out, when this claim was first made by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, this appears to be a reference to a very different program, USAid’s Lincoln Scholarships, which helped educate young people struggling for freedom against Burma’s military dictatorship.

It is not clear why Trump or Musk wrongly thought that these were “diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships, but, as Malinowski noted, the USAid project description did specify that the scholars were Burmese students “from diverse backgrounds”. That seems like an important policy, given that the military dictatorship in Burma has exploited ethnic and religious divisions to stay in power.

Trump drew attention to the fact that a Social Security Administration database includes millions of people who would be over 110 years old.

But, as the Guardian has reported previously, when Musk claimed that “a cursory examination of social security,” showed that “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old”, this is a deeply misleading way of talking about about real flaw in the social security system which could enable fraud, but apparently does not.

That flaw was revealed in a 2015 report by the independent inspector general for the social security administration who discovered that the agency did not have death records for millions of people who had passed away. As of 2015, the inspector general found, there were “approximately 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older who did not have death information” on their files.

According to the report, social security payments were still being made to just 13 people who had reached the age of 112. At least one of those people was certainly still alive, and tweeting, at the time the report’s data was compiled in 2013.

When the report was issued in 2015, the oldest person with a social security number and no death record on their file was born in 1869, but there was no record of payments still being made to that person, who would have been nearly 150.

In fact, the social security administration already has in place a procedure to conduct interviews with anyone who reaches the age of 100, to verify that they are alive and their account is not being used by someone else to collect fraudulent payments.

Trump said that January Littlejohn, a mother from Tallahassee, Florida, had discovered that her 13-year-old child’s middle school had secretly socially transitioned her from female to non-binary without notifying the parents.

While Littlejohn made that case in a lawsuit, the suit was dismissed by a federal judge, and emails obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper showed that Littlejohn had written to the school in 2020 to notify a teacher that her child wanted to change pronouns.

The emails showed that Littlejohn worked with a teacher to determine how best to navigate the situation, and thanked the teacher for their help.

Trump cherry-picked an out-of-date poll to suggest that most American say the US is now going in the right direction

“Now, for the first time in modern history,” Trump proclaimed early in his address, “more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction”.

In fact, Trump appeared to be citing a single poll, published three weeks ago by the Republican-leaning polling firm Rasmussen, which showed a 47%-46% edge for the right direction over the wrong direction. However, that same polling firm’s most recent survey, this week, shows that 45% of Americans now say the country is on the right track, and 50% say it is on the wrong track.

As the polling expert Nate Silver noted last year, when it was revealed that Rasmussen was secretly showing its results to the Trump campaign, “this sort of explicit coordination with a campaign, coupled with ambiguity about funding sources, means that we’re going to label Rasmussen as an intrinsically partisan (R) pollster going forward”.

Other polling firms, not associated with the Republican party, show that more Americans say that the country is on the wrong track now than on the right track.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, in late February, shows that 49% of Americans say that the country is headed off on the wrong track, and just 34% say that the country is headed in the right direction.

An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 50% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, with just 38% saying it is on the right track.

The most recent Morning Consult poll, published on Sunday, shows that the current spread is 56% wrong to 44% right. In the final week of the first Trump administration in 2021, Morning Consult found that 81% of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, with just 19% saying it was on the right track.

Trump falsely claimed Musk’s cost-cutting has ‘found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud’

Since the start of its work, Musk’s “department of government efficiency” initiative has repeatedly claimed to have uncovered “fraud” only to have examples it cited turn out to be incorrect of invented. The most eye-catching example, that the government planned to spend $50m to send condoms to Gaza, turned out to be completely fictional.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, receipts posted online by Musk’s “department of government efficiency” document less than $9bn in savings from cancelled government contracts, none of which involved fraud.