Fact checking President Trump’s State of the Union address

President Donald Trump is delivering his first State of the Union address of his second term.Trump is expected to focus on the economy, immigration and energy. The president also said that the speech will be lengthy.We’ll be fact-checking the State of the Union with Hearst Television’s National Investigative Unit and our partners at PolitiFact.Live updates will be posted below: Trump says US just received more than 80 million barrels of oil from VenezuelaThe federal Energy Information Administration has not released 2026 data on how much oil the U.S. has imported from Venezuela. Based on 2025 data, 80 million barrels of oil are equivalent to about six days of U.S. oil production.The Trump administration struck a deal with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez in January to export up to $2 billion of Venezuelan crude oil to the U.S.Before the deal, there were about 30 million to 50 million oil barrels in inventory in Venezuela as a result of the U.S. naval blockade on Venezuela, Alejandro Grisanti, a Venezuelan economist and director of the consulting firm Ecoanalítica, said.TankerTrackers, an online service that tracks and reports shipments of crude oil from multiple countries, recorded that 7.54 million barrels of crude oil departed Venezuela from Jan. 3 through Feb. 5 for the U.S. in tankers operated by Chevron. It reported Venezuela has exported half the amount of oil Trump said.Vitol and Trafigura, oil trading houses that the U.S. granted licenses to sell and market Venezuelan oil, exported some 12 million barrels in January, most of which went to storage terminals in the Caribbean, according to Reuters.Related video below: Trump asks oil giants for $100B to restart Venezuela’s oil industryTrump touts low gas pricesTrump said gasoline is “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places, $1.99 a gallon.”Looking at statewide averages, he’s wrong — not one state has an average below $2.30 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association.The state with the nation’s lowest average price on Feb. 24 is Oklahoma, at $2.37 a gallon, according to the. Arkansas, Kansas and Mississippi are the other states with average prices at or below $2.50 a gallon. Another nine states had gasoline between $2.50 and $2.60 a gallon.Those are statewide averages, so some individual stations will be lower. According to GasBuddy, a gasoline price app, Oklahoma had two stations on Feb. 23 that were charging $1.99 a gallon, as were three in Kansas and two in Texas. But that’s a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of stations nationally.In his address, Trump said, “When I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.” However, a woman attending the speech fact-checked him; it was $2.69 a gallon at the station outside the venue, the state average at the time was $2.57 a gallon, and GasBuddy found just four stations in the state selling for less than $2 a gallon.Gasoline prices have fallen during Trump’s second term, from $3.11 a gallon when he was inaugurated to $2.92 the week of Feb. 16, 2026. (Prices have risen for the past five weeks, but they remain lower than where they were for his second inauguration.)Trump blames Biden for housing woesTrump said that​ “low interest rates will solve the Biden-created housing problem.”The U.S. housing shortage predates Biden.The main factor affecting housing affordability is a home shortage caused by years of underbuilding and restrictive zoning. An interest rate surge exacerbated the problem.The number of new homes built has plunged since the 2008 recession, resulting in a shortage of about 4.7 million homes, we found in 2025.The construction slowdown never returned to pre-recession levels, Chloe East, a University of Colorado Boulder associate economics professor, previously told PolitiFact. During the pandemic, supply chain shortages and high interest rates caused people to refrain from selling their homes, stalling the market while remote work increased housing demand.Related video below: Get the Facts on mortgage rates”We ended DEI in America.”President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to revoke federal initiatives on diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s efforts to revoke diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives extended to universities and halted tens of billions of dollars in local transportation infrastructure funding. Some of his executive orders curtailing the government’s use of DEI have been reversed, modified or blocked in court. It remains unclear if his actions will have a lasting chilling effect on museums, historical sites and federal agencies.Trump says flow of fentanyl is down 56%This needs context.On average, U.S. Customs and Border Protection fentanyl seizures have dropped by about half during the first year of Trump’s second term in office compared with former President Joe Biden’s last year in office.However, fentanyl seizures only tell us how much fentanyl is stopped from entering the U.S. It doesn’t show how many drugs are being sent to the U.S. or how many are making it in. It’s impossible to know whether fentanyl in the U.S. has dropped by 56%, as Trump said.Declining murder rate“Last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history,” and is at “the lowest number in over 125 years,” Trump said.He’s right about the largest decline, but the lowest in 125 years is an exaggeration. Experts expect that when the final 2025 murder rate, as defined by the FBI, is released later this year, it likely will be the lowest in at least 65 years. The 2025 drop of about 20% is likely to become the largest one-year decline ever recorded, experts say.Whether it is the lowest in 125 years is less certain. That’s because the data collected between 1930 and 1960 is not comparable to later data, and the data from 1900 to 1930 includes all homicides, not just murders. (A killing in self-defense, for instance, is a homicide but not murder.) Closer look at inflation“I inherited … inflation at record levels,” Trump said.This is inaccurate.Under former President Joe Biden, year-over-year inflation peaked at about 9%, which was the highest in around 40 years, not of all time.But by the time Biden left office and Trump took over in 2025, inflation had cooled to 3%.Trump added that “inflation is plummeting.”While inflation has eased somewhat during Trump’s second term, “plummeting” would be an exaggeration.The year-over-year rise in prices for January 2026 was about 2.4%. That’s lower than the year-over-year rate when he took office, but it had already fallen from that 9% peak in the summer of 2022. The Federal Reserve aims to keep inflation about 2% year-over-year.Trump touts foreign investment”In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe,” Trump said.The $18 trillion figure is false. According to the White House’s “Major Investment Announcements” webpage, which tracks private and foreign investments in the U.S., the total is $9.7 trillion.