From the Guardian. He is continually lying about SS and for some reason, people WANT TO BELIEVE the lies.
Explainer
Out-of-date polls to wrong aid amounts: factchecking Trump’s Congress address
The president’s marathon address to a joint session of Congress was littered with false claims he’s been corrected on but continued to repeat
Robert Mackey
Wed 5 Mar 2025 00.37 EST
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Donald Trump’s marathon address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday was littered with false claims, many of them falsehoods he has previously stated, been corrected on, and continued to repeat regardless. Here are some of the main statements he made that are just not true.
man wearing navy suit standing behind podium looks at rows of people looking at him
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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 wrongly suggested that millions of dead people might be getting social security payments
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.