Trump's address to Congress will be full of lies. Here's what to watch for. | Opinion
Trump will likely talk about grocery prices, DOGE and his own popularity during Tuesday's congressional address. We can also expect him to lie about all of them.
President Donald Trump savors the attention of a televised spectacle and exploits those moments to tell America a story about himself that is predictably brimming with boastful bunk.
His address Tuesday evening to a joint session of Congress is, in theory, an opportunity to talk about his policies and plans for the next four years. But Trump, after a disjointed first six weeks back in office, will inevitably start trying to rewrite that short history as some sort of swift and sweeping victory.
Trump will be speaking to a nervous bunch of politicians. Republicans and Democrats have watched as Trump's opening salvos completely ignore the power the U.S. Constitution gives to Congress.
Republicans are feeling the heat back home from voters angry about immediate impacts from Trump's war on government agencies and federal employees. Democrats face growing disdain for the party's insufficient resistance to all that.
Expect lies. Lots of them. Distortions, too. Republicans cheering. And so much gaslighting.
We know Trump is going to lie about the economy. Many times.
Trump won back the presidency last fall with a campaign focused largely on the American economy. He pinned everything from inflation to prices for gasoline and eggs on President Joe Biden's administration.
In a December victory lap on NBC News' "Meet The Press," Trump declared "I won on groceries." On Monday, he announced at the White House an economic policy that will be a loser for the rest of us – 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
Trump has an obsession with tariffs, as if making other countries pay more to import their products to America is some sort of economic cure-all. So while inflation has increased since he took office, he refuses to acknowledge what economists know and predict – importers pass along the increased costs from tariffs to Americans buying those products.
Polling showed voters were unhappy with Biden's economic policy. They're not too keen on Trump's approach, either.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll released Monday found that 57% of Americans expect the cost of groceries to increase in the next six months. Trump's popularity was predictably underwater in that poll, with 49% disapproving of how he is doing his job and 45% approving.
Trump will likely lie about Elon Musk and DOGE
Let's start with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump created as a pet project for Elon Musk, the billionaire who spent more than $250 million to help him get reelected. The only thing DOGE has been efficient about is misleading us about what is being accomplished.
It's a simple formula. Musk makes a claim about DOGE saving huge sums of money. Trump then amplifies Musk's messaging, dismissing any federal spending he doesn't like as "fraud" and "corruption." Math being math, journalists and others examine and debunk those claims.
Yet Trump keeps on claiming big wins, even as Musk's crew of coder bros quietly delete the bogus numbers from the DOGE website.
Trump won't tell you the stories of federal employees, many of them veterans, suddenly fired from their jobs on the whims of Musk, the world's richest man.
Instead, he'll claim to be saving the government he is destroying.
Trump will lie about how effective he's been on foreign policy
In Trump's telling, he's a strongman who makes America admired again around the world. Expect plenty of bluster Tuesday evening about his foreign policy, especially about war-weary places like Gaza and Ukraine.
Trump used a televised tag-team tantrum with Vice President JD Vance on Friday to assail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a White House meeting. Zelenskyy's offense? Pointing out that Russian President Vladimir Putin is unreliable in diplomatic negotiations.
Trump and Vance want you to believe that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia's invasion. The Kremlin cheered in response, saying Trump's foreign policy now "largely coincides with our vision." The rest of Europe? Not so much.
In Gaza, Trump has repeatedly floated the outlandishly foolish notion of America taking control and creating from the rubble a luxurious seaside resort, complete with a golden statue of himself.
And what of the 2 million Palestinians who call Gaza home? Trump just shrugs and says, let them move to Egypt and Jordan.
One problem there: The Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians don't want that to happen. Trump won't let that truth dissuade him from claiming to have solved the problem, while campaigning for a Nobel Peace prize.
Most of all, expect Trump to lie about how popular he is
Trump has a fix for sagging poll numbers, too. He lies about them.
Consider what he told a cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference 10 day ago: "We must be doing something right because we've got the highest poll numbers that I've ever had and that any Republican president has ever had."
Again, math being math, this is easily disproven.
Trump told that lie at CPAC after he had made the same claim a day earlier at the White House, only to see it quickly debunked.
Keep that in mind while Trump is speaking Tuesday night. He needs to be the center of any story, cast as the hero saving the day and the country. He doesn't care if the story is true. He only cares about you believing it.
Follow Paste BN columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan