Wednesday, February 25, 2026

The DNC's 2024 autopsy shows how Dems erred on Israel

The DNC reportedly found that Democrats erred on Israel policy in 2024. It still matters.Democrats will never learn how to win if they refuse to reckon with why they lost.

Kamala Harris speaking to reporters as she walks out of a meeting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 06, 2025.Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Feb. 25, 2026, 6:00 AM EST

By Zeeshan Aleem

In December, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin decided at the last second to block the publication of a long-promised autopsy of the Democrats’ losses in the 2024 elections. Martin said publishing the postmortem would only be a “distraction.” Now new reporting is providing some insight into what kinds of accountability — and possible battles within the party — the DNC chair might have been trying to dodge.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian activist group, told Axios that during a closed-door meeting with DNC aides preparing the party’s analysis of its 2024 loss, those aides made a striking confession about the political effects of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. According to Axios, Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, said that during that meeting, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that [Biden’s Israel] policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” The IMEU Policy Project has since accused the DNC of withholding its postmortem to avoid having to publicize that conclusion about Israel policy. (The DNC confirmed to Axios the meeting took place, but didn’t provide details of it, and denied that findings about Israel are why the 2024 autopsy was withheld.)

Harris’ reluctance to appear boldly progressive was a liability for the Democrats.

It matters that the DNC allegedly found that Biden’s Israel policy hurt Kamala Harris’ 2024 bid. It strengthens the argument that Harris’ reluctance to diverge from the Democrats’ unwavering support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza was an electoral liability. More broadly, it suggests that Harris’ reluctance to appear boldly progressive was a liability for the Democrats at a time when the party needed to mobilize young people and progressives in large numbers. It should be part of how we understand what went wrong in 2024.

But the DNC’s findings, whatever they are, aren’t just important for the historical record — they’re important for the future. In December, I wrote that the DNC’s suppression of its postmortem would shield party leaders from accountability, allow them to avoid self-reflection and incentivize them to keep pushing bad status quo policies. If the IMEU Policy Project’s characterization of its meeting DNC aides is accurate, then without the postmortem, the Democratic Party can more easily avoid a debate about its continued support of Israel — even if the policy is a vote dampener for significant swaths of the base.

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump

"Documents released by the Justice Department briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor. But several memos related to her account are not in the files.

Feb. 25, 2026
When the Justice Department made files public late last month, officials said it included all material sent by the public to the F.B.I.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.
The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.
The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.
The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.
It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.
The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”
A lawyer who previously represented the woman in a lawsuit against Mr. Epstein’s estate declined to comment.
The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, addressing reporters after the Justice Department released more Epstein files last month.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.
Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.
The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.
The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.
The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.
The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove.
“Documents that are listed, which should be included, which are referenced in other documents, are not in the files,” Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from a trove of unredacted files he reviewed on Monday.Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Mr. Garcia said the Justice Department had not provided a proper explanation for why the materials were missing. Democrats plan to open a separate investigation into why the documents are not available.
In the sole summary of the F.B.I. interview that was released, the woman told investigators that she did not know Mr. Epstein’s full identity until 2019, when a friend sent her a photograph of Mr. Epstein. She said she then recognized the person who she said had raped her.
The woman told the agents she still had the photo on her phone, and they noted that it was a widely distributed photo of Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump, according to the document. She gave the agents permission to take a photograph of the image but asked them to crop out Mr. Trump. When asked why, her lawyer interjected that the woman “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,” according to the F.B.I. memo.
It is unclear exactly what F.B.I. agents learned about her claims related to Mr. Trump in their three subsequent interviews.
The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.
The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.
Julie Tate and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.
Mike Baker is a national investigative reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight."

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

SOTU Snooze, Gavin Newsome Boos and BAFTA Makes Sinners Lose

Maddow: Trump 'OFFERED VERY LITTLE' despite speech's length

Fact-Checking Trump’s State of the Union Speech

By The New York Times

Feb. 25, 2026, 12:09 a.m.

President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night was the longest in history.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

“President Trump claimed in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to have ushered in a “turnaround for the ages” by citing a list of familiar falsehoods and inaccurate claims.

In nearly two hours of remarks, Mr. Trump sought to persuade voters unhappy with his handling of affordability and immigration enforcement that the economy was “roaring” and that deportations were focused on criminal migrants. And he again sowed doubt in the upcoming midterm elections by repeating falsehoods about “rampant cheating.”

Here are some fact checks of his speech.

Linda Qiu and Ashley Cai

“When I last spoke in the chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world. Tonight after just one year, I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before. A turnaround for the ages.”

— President Trump

False

Mr. Trump’s claims of a historic turnaround are not backed by the facts.

Inflation had fallen to 3 percent in January 2025, when Mr. Trump took office. Inflation did reach a four-decade high in the summer of 2022, at about 9 percent in June, but declined since then. That number was also not a record; inflation reached higher points in the 1910s, 1970s and 1980s.

Inflation has gone down, but it was declining before Trump took office

12-month percent change in consumer price index

March 1980

14.8%

+10%

1976

2026

June 2022

9.1%

TRUMP

BIDEN

+8%

Jan. 2026

2.4

3.0

June 2023

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

2026

Fact-Checking Trump's 2026 State of the Union Address - The New York Times

Crime, too, had been falling. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that the national homicide rate would probably fall to the lowest rate recorded in 2025, to 4.0 per 100,000 residents. (Official government estimates will be released later this year.) In comparison, the rate for 2024 was 5.0 per 100,000 residents, according to official F.B.I. data.

Homicides expected to hit a historic low, but were declining before Trump took office

Homicides per 100,000 people in the United States

1933

1980

9.7

10.2

1900

2025

TRUMP

BIDEN

TRUMP

6.7

2020

5.0

2024

4.0

2025

projection

2025

2017

Fact-Checking Trump's 2026 State of the Union Address - The New York Times

Though the military fell short of its recruitment goals in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, the Army, Air Force and Marines all exceeded their recruitment goals in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in September, more than a month before Mr. Trump’s election. At the time, the Pentagon celebrated its progress, with an official noting that the military had taken several steps to improve recruiting by implementing a pilot program allowing for medical waivers, connecting with youth through influencers and better explaining the educational and financial benefits.

Colby Smith

“The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in the history of our country. But in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years.”

— President Trump

This needs context.

Overall inflation has eased since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, according to some metrics, but measures of underlying inflation point to much stickier price pressures.

Moreover, inflation under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. rose to a multi-decade high, but not the highest on record.

The Federal Reserve pays closest attention to gauges like the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index once volatile food and energy prices are stripped out. This “core” metric recently accelerated in December, according to the latest data released by the Commerce Department. The core P.C.E. index rose 0.4 percent in December and is up 3 percent from the same time last year.

That is high enough to make the Fed reluctant to lower interest rates again after three quarter-point reductions it delivered late last year. Officials will likely lack the confidence to cut rates again until they have in hand much more concrete evidence that inflation is falling back toward their 2 percent target.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“In four long years, the last administration got less than $1 trillion in new investment in the United States. And when I say less, substantially less. In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”

— President Trump

False.

Mr. Trump’s stated $18 trillion is almost double what his own White House press office has tallied ($9.7 trillion). It also includes broad pledges and previously announced projects. And more than half of that amount comes from informal pledges from foreign countries to invest in the United States that experts warn may be unrealistic.

For example, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates each pledged more than $1 trillion in investments, which is more than their gross domestic products. A January analysis of the investment pledges from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, found that many were “framed in aspirational terms and lack clear enforcement mechanisms.”

The comparison to investments announced under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is also misleading. The Biden administration, last January, tallied nearly $800 billion in manufacturing projectsspurred by the passage of four laws. The vast majority of those announcements have details on specific facilities’ locations and investment amounts or are already underway (for example, a $11 billion semiconductor plant in Utah and a $1 billion solar panel plant in Oklahoma).

Alan Rappeport

Economics Reporter

“As thousands of new businesses are forming, factories, plants and laboratories are being built, we have added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

Mr. Trump promoted a large increase in construction jobs, but did not specify what period of time he was talking about.

According to Associated Builders and Contractors, the construction industry added just 14,000 jobs in 2025.

Builders have generally struggled over the last year because of high interest rates and the high cost of steel and aluminum. The cost of building components has been rising because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports of metals.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“In one year, we have lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps.”

— President Trump

This needs context.

The number of people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, did decline by 2.6 million from November 2024 to November 2025, according to the latest data from the Agriculture Department.

But that decrease does not correlate exactly to decreased need. The lower numbers in November 2025 came during a government shutdown, when food stamp benefits were severely disrupted. Mr. Trump’s signature tax and domestic policy law also reduced eligibility and cut federal spending on food stamps.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Ashley Cai

“After four years, in which millions and millions of illegal aliens poured across our borders totally unvetted and unchecked, we now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far. In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States. But we will always allow people to come in legally. People that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

President Trump is right that a record number of migrants — millions — crossed the border illegally during the Biden administration, although many were detained by border authorities and then released with a notice to appear in court. The Trump administration has also successfully driven illegal crossings down, to the lowest level seen in decades.

Illegal border crossings are sharply down under Trump

Monthly southwestern border apprehensions

BIDEN

TRUMP

Dec. 2023

250,000

200 thousand

100

Jan.

2026

6,070

2018

2020

2022

2024

2026

Fact-Checking Trump's 2026 State of the Union Address - The New York Times

But illegal crossings are not at zero. Border Patrol recorded just over 6,000 illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border in January, according to Customs and Border Protection data. That is a substantial drop from the roughly 29,000 illegal crossings during the same time last year. Mr. Trump has also directed his administration to stop releasing any migrants after they cross the border.

Crossings also began to decline during the tail end of the Biden administration. After a flurry of executive actions and collaboration with the Mexican authorities, illegal crossings remain at record lows.

Despite Mr. Trump’s positive comments about legal immigrants, he has taken steps to severely restrict lawful immigration. He has drastically cut the number of refugees the United States admits, to the lowest level in the history of the program. He has reserved a limited number of slots mostly for white Afrikaner South Africans. He has also made it harder for immigrants to get green cards if they are from nations subjected to his travel ban.

Colby Smith

“100 percent of all jobs created under my administration have been in the private sector.”

— President Trump

This needs context.

Private-sector jobs have increased, but overall job growth was relatively muted in Mr. Trump’s first year back in office.

Federal employment has declined since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, reflecting efforts spearheaded early on in the president’s second term by the billionaire Elon Musk to cut government spending. According to research from the Cato Institute, Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency did not reduce spending, but it did reduce federal employment by 9 percent in less than 10 months. That is the largest decline since the military demobilizations at the end of World War II.

The unemployment rate stayed relatively stable at around 4.3 percent. In 2025, U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs last year, according to revisions released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this month.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“Last year, I urged this Congress to begin the mission by passing the largest tax cuts in American history, and the Republican majority delivered so beautifully!”

— President Trump

False.

The tax cut and domestic policy package Mr. Trump signed into law last summer ranks as the sixth largest in history, as a share of the economy, according to the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank. (The 2017 tax cuts were the eighth largest.)

Julian E. Barnes

Domestic Correspondent

“I’ve never seen a goaltender play as well as goalie Connor Hellebuyck. Think of it. 46 shots on goal.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

OK, this is definitely a pedantic fact check.

Mr. Trump is probably correct that he has never seen a goaltending performance like Mr. Hellebuyck’s. Sportswriters praised the amazing game he played. However, the Canadian team had 42 shots on goal, and Mr. Hellebuyck stopped 41.

An amazing performance, but only 41, rather than 46, shots stopped.

Lisa Friedman

“American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill.”

— President Trump

This needs context.

Mr. Trump has indeed opened up millions of acres of public lands and waters to oil and gas production. And U.S. production hit new highs in 2025 and is continuing to rise, with forecasts expecting further growth in 2026.

But the Biden administration also oversaw record-setting U.S. oil and natural gas production, with 2024 seeing record highs at that time in both. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s decision to eliminate virtually all federal assistance for renewable energy has led to 354 clean-energy projects being canceled or delayed, or laying off workers, according to Climate Power, an advocacy group that tracks that data.

Alan Rappeport

Economics Reporter

“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.”

— President Trump

This is false.

Mr. Trump is asserting that foreign countries pay U.S. tariffs, but it is American importers that pay those levies.

The recent Supreme Court ruling that found Mr. Trump was using emergency tariffs illegally confirmed that U.S. businesses were paying the tariffs. The government is now expected to refund more than $100 billion in tariff revenue to businesses that paid them.

It is unlikely that tariff revenue will replace income taxes any time soon. In 2024, the federal government collected $2.4 trillion in federal income taxes. Tariff revenue was around $300 billion last year, and roughly half of that will have to be repaid due to the Supreme Court ruling.

Reid J. Epstein

“So in my first year of the second term — should be my third term.”

— President Trump

This is false.

Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged on supporters at a rally before they stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.

In the years since, Mr. Trump has continued to lie about details big and small related to the 2020 election. In his second term, the president has appointed aides and nominated federal judges who have by and large refused to acknowledge that Mr. Biden was the fair winner of the election. He has also used the power of the federal government to investigate the voting apparatuses in battleground states where Mr. Biden defeated him.

Margot Sanger-Katz

Health Policy Reporter

“Under my just-enacted most favored nation agreement, Americans who have for decades paid by far the highest prices of any nation anywhere in the world for prescription drugs will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs anywhere.”

— President Trump

This is misleading.

While Mr. Trump has announced some voluntary deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices they charge consumers who buy drugs directly, his policies so far have not lowered most drug prices for most people.

His most high-profile drug pricing venture, the website trumprx.gov, includes 43 discounted drugs, many of which were already available at lower prices as generics. The most meaningful discounts he has announced are for fertility drugs and obesity drugs, categories of medicine that health insurance is least likely to cover. But obesity drugs are even less expensive in some European countries.

The administration has continued to pursue a program passed by Democrats during the Biden administration to negotiate lower prices for a small number of medications used by Medicare beneficiaries. Mr. Trump’s health officials have proposed a policy that would pay drugmakers lower prices for many more drugs in Medicare, but that idea has not been finalized, and would likely face challenges in court if it is.

Mr. Trump is correct that prescription drug prices have long been unusually high in the United States. And drugmakers have recently increased the prices of hundreds of drugs this year.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“With the great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy law, which he signed last year, creates deductions for tips and overtime, but those breaks are temporary. And its tax reductions for Social Security benefits are even more limited.

The law allows workers to deduct tips and overtime pay from the tax years 2025 to 2028. The deductions are capped at $25,000 and decrease for couples making more than $300,000 or individuals making more than $150,000.

It also creates a deduction of $6,000 for seniors, phasing out for higher incomes and also expiring in 2028. That’s not quite eliminating all taxation on benefits. An analysis from the Council of Economic Advisers estimated that under the $6,000 deduction, 88 percent of Social Security beneficiaries over 65 would pay no taxes on their benefits. That is an increase from the 64 percent who previously paid no taxes, according to the same report, but still omits 12 percent, or more than seven million seniors over 65. Additionally, Social Security beneficiaries under 65 — millions of disabled people, young survivors and early retirees — would not qualify for the deduction.

Jazmine Ulloa

National Politics Reporter

“But when it comes to the corruption that is plundering America, there has been no more stunning example than Minnesota — where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.”

— President Trump

This lacks evidence.

President Trump has long made bigoted claims about Somali immigrants in the United States, and he turned the focus of his federal immigration crackdown on Minnesota after a right-wing influencer posted a viral video that purported to expose extensive fraud at the state’s Somali-run child care centers.

Federal prosecutors have described a sprawling and brazen fraud scandal involving suspicious billing practices in 14 Medicaid-funded programs intended to help low-income, vulnerable people in the state. The vast majority of the people charged in the fraud cases are of Somali origin. Most are United States citizens by birth or naturalization.

But proven fraud in the cases charged to date runs in the hundreds of millions. A preliminary assessment has suggested that more than half of the $18 billion in taxpayer funds spent on the programs since 2018 was most likely stolen, but that is not a conclusive estimate. Meanwhile, Somali and Somali American leaders in Minnesota have countered that the president is maligning an entire community over the bad actions of a few.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“If we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”

— President Trump

False.

It is implausible that all fraud in government programs would balance the federal budget. The federal deficit was $1.8 trillion in 2025. A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that the federal government lost $233 billion to $521 billion to fraud annually, including schemes that were undetected. Eliminating all fraud in government programs across the country would reduce the federal deficit by a third.

Colby Smith

“The cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, automobiles, rent is lower today than when I took office, by a lot. And even beef, which was very high, is starting to come down significantly.”

— President Trump

This needs context.

Inflation has eased for many grocery staples, including eggs, but food prices overall are still 2.9 percent higher compared with the same time last year, according to January data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For eggs specifically, the run-up in prices last year was largely a result of an avian flu outbreak. Prices have fallen roughly 30 percent on a year-over-year basis as of January.

Prices for other products like beef are still very elevated, however. Beef is 15 percent costlier over that same time period.

Jazmine Ulloa

National Politics Reporter

“Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the green new scam, open borders for everyone. They poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions. There were murderers, 11,088 murderers.”

— President Trump

This is false.

Mr. Trump is right that record numbers of migrants entered the United States under the Biden administration, particularly in the fiscal years 2022 and 2023. But his most repeated statements warning about the level of illegal immigration and characterizing unauthorized migrants as criminals taking advantage of government handouts are inaccurate. They also wrongly describe federal data.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that 11,088 convicted murderers have entered the United States. But he appears to be citing federal data about noncitizens who entered the country over multiple administrations, including his own first term.

Margot Sanger-Katz

Health Policy Reporter

“We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.”

— President Trump

False.

Mr. Trump has long promised to avoid major changes to Medicare and Social Security, and his record largely matches his rhetoric on those programs.

But Mr. Trump’s signature legislation, the major tax and domestic policy bill passed last summer, made more than $1 trillion in cuts to the Medicaid program over the next decade, the largest reduction in the program’s history. A substantial share of the savings is expected to come through pushing more than 10 million people out of the program through more stringent eligibility checks and a new requirement that childless adults without disabilities prove they worked or volunteered a minimum number of hours each month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office also projected this week that tax changes in the bill will harm Medicare’s long-term financing and speed up the exhaustion of the trust fund that pays for the program’s hospital care benefit.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Ashley Cai

“We are deporting illegal alien criminals from our country at record numbers and we’re getting them the hell out of here fast!”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

The majority of people detained by immigration officials do not have criminal convictions.

Most migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Mr. Trump’s first year had no criminal convictions. In late November, of the 68,000 people in detention, about 26 percent had a criminal conviction, 26 percent had pending charges and 47 percent had immigration violations, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data collection center at Syracuse University.

A New York Times analysis of ICE arrests and detentions from Jan. 20 to Oct. 15 last year found that just 7 percent of those arrested nationwide had a violent conviction. Thirty-seven percent had a past conviction, with driving under the influence and traffic violations as the most common offenses. A third had no criminal charges at all. And in major cities with high-profile actions, more than half had no charges at all.

And a Times analysis of deportations found that about 11 percent of those deported monthly by ICE had violent convictions. About 40 percent had a past conviction and 28 percent had pending charges. About 21 percent had no charges at all.

Deportations of immigrants with no criminal history rise under Trump

Monthly rate of deportations by ICE

Fact-Checking Trump's 2026 State of the Union Address - The New York Times

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Health Reporter

“I want to stop all payments to big insurance companies and instead give that money directly to the people so they can buy their own health care, which will be better health care at a much lower cost.”

— President Trump

This is misleading.

Mr. Trump has proposed redirecting insurance subsidies to individual health savings accounts, which people could use to purchase health care services directly, as a way to compensate for rising premiums following the expiration of certain tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. But his proposal does not offer specifics.

In recent months, congressional Republicans have offered variations of this idea, but their proposals differ from one another, and there is no evidence that people paying directly for care would directly lower prices.

An analysis by KFF, a nonprofit that conducts polling and research about health policy, concluded: “The president’s plan is vague, and without knowing more, it is impossible to say what the implications would be for people with pre-existing conditions who rely on the A.C.A. markets.”

Reid J. Epstein

“The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant. … They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat and we’re going to stop it.”

— President Trump

This is false.

By any definition, the number of ballots cast illegally and by noncitizens in American elections is infinitesimally small. A study conducted by Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security found that of 49.5 million voter registrations that were checked, about 10,000 cases were referred for additional investigation of noncitizenship — roughly .02 percent of the names processed.

In Georgia, a battleground state that Mr. Trump lost in 2020 and has been fixated on ever since, the secretary of state in 2024 found that 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were not U.S. citizens. Of those 20, just nine had voted in previous elections. Mr. Trump made his false claims in an effort to persuade Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, to push the Republican bill known as the Save America Act, which would overhaul the nation’s election laws, to a vote.

Near-solid Democratic opposition has stalled the bill, which requires 60 votes to clear the chamber’s filibuster threshold.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“I ended eight wars.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

Among the eight conflicts, Mr. Trump’s role is disputed in some, the fighting resumed in some, and the term “war” may be applied too loosely to others.

Despite the signing of a peace agreement at the White House in June, fighting broke out between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in July.

Similarly, despite a cease-fire reached in July after Mr. Trump’s trade threats, Thailand suspended peace talks with Cambodia in November and clashes resumed.

And while Mr. Trump’s peace plan paved the way for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that took effect in October, Israeli strikes have not ceased and have since killed about 600 Palestinians in Gaza.

India has disputed Mr. Trump’s role in ending its clashes with Pakistan that broke out last spring.

Serbia and Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, signed economic agreements in 2020, in Mr. Trump’s first term, but they have not signed a peace agreement.

The leaders of Ethiopia and Egypt have thanked Mr. Trump for offering to mediate a decades-long dispute over water rights and a dam. That dispute has yet to escalate into a military conflict, though there are fears it could. The dam also opened in September, despite Mr. Trump’s diplomacy.

The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia have both praised Mr. Trump for mediating an agreement that aims to end their long conflict. Similarly, neither Israel nor Iran has disputed Mr. Trump’s role in bringing about a cease-fire last year after 12 days of fighting. But the durability of those agreements also remains in question.

Julian E. Barnes

Domestic Correspondent

“In a breakthrough operation last June, the United States military obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

Since immediately after the strikes on Iran’s major nuclear sites, Mr. Trump has claimed he obliterated the program. In a letter introducing the White House’s national security strategy, publishedin November, Mr. Trump reiterated that the military campaign had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity. The main strategy document, however, is far more circumspect, declaring only that the strikes, called Operation Midnight Hammer, “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”

U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence have said that the strikes destroyed some underground facilities, but that other, deeper laboratories survived. Iranians have not restarted nuclear enrichment work at the sites, officials have said. The strikes undoubtedly set back Iran’s nuclear work. But they did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities. That is one reason Mr. Trump is considering renewed strikes on the country.

Linda Qiu and Ashley Cai

“We have more jobs, more people working today than ever before in the history of our country.”

— President Trump

This is misleading.

It is true that more people are employed now — about 159 million people in January — than any other point in U.S. history. But the population of the United States is also the biggest in history, at more than 342 million people. (President Joseph R. Biden Jr. could also have claimed to preside over the most people working during his term, as could most other presidents not in office during periods of economic downturns or recessions.)

But labor force participation — those who were employed or actively looking for a job — has held steady under Mr. Trump, changing little from 62.6 percent in January 2025 to 62.5 percent this January.

More people are in the work force, but the percent employed is flat under Trump

Total number of people employed

Jan. 2026

159 million

150 million

100

1960

1980

2000

2020

Percentage of labor force employed

Jan.

2026

62.5%

67.3

April

2000

64%

Jan.

2025

62.6

1960

1980

2000

2020

The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 4.3 percent from 4 percent. The economy added 359,000 jobs from February 2025 to January 2026, compared with more than 1.2 million in the previous year.

John Ismay

Pentagon Correspondent, Washington

“They’ve killed and maimed thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of people with what’s called roadside bombs, they were the kings of the roadside bomb. We took out Suleimani. I did that in my first term, it had a huge impact. He was the father of the roadside bomb.”

— President Trump

This is misleading.

The president was speaking of the Iranian regime and its proxies. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency report, bombs constructed by Iranian proxy groups killed 603 U.S. service members in Iraq from 2003 to 2011.

Roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices, long predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and Qassim Suleimani, who commanded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, did not invent them.

Julian E. Barnes

Domestic Correspondent

“With our new military campaign, we have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea — you probably noticed that.”

— President Trump

This lacks evidence.

Mr. Trump loves to claim that his monthslong campaign against drug traffickers has stopped or decimated maritime drug smuggling in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

His best evidence is that the pace of the maritime strikes has slowed, as the military has struggled to find small drug-smuggling boats, suggesting that the traffic has decreased.

But the White House has not been able to cite specific evidence that maritime smuggling has stopped completely.

Jeremy McDermott and Steven Dudley, co-founders of InSight Crime, a Latin America crime and security think tank, wrote in January that while the military strikes had most likely disrupted some drug routes, the campaign had not halted trafficking altogether.

“This has not stopped the flow of drugs; it simply forced traffickers to use different routes and modus operandi,” they wrote.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eileen Sullivan

“We have almost no crime anymore in Washington, D.C. How did that happen? In fact, crime in Washington is now at the lowest level ever recorded, and murders in D.C. this January were down close to 100 percent from a year ago.”

— President Trump

This is exaggerated.

The District of Columbia reported only two homicides in January, and the overall homicide rate dropped 40 percent from 2024 to 2025, the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent nonprofit, reported at the end of last year.

The drop in homicides “is consistent with what’s being reported in other large cities across the country,” the organization wrote in August 2025. But, it added, “the level of violence in Washington remains higher than the average in our sample.”

Washington is not one of the nation’s safest cities, however.

A 2025 analysis by SmartAsset, a financial services firm, ranked 50 of the largest U.S. cities to determine the safest based on violent crime, property crime, vehicular deaths, drug overdose deaths and excessive drinking. It listed Washington 40th out of 50 cities.

Linda Qiu

Fact-check Reporter

“His reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.”

— Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia

This is mostly true.

Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, a congressional body, estimated that President Trump’s tariffs had cost American families $1,700 each from February 2025 to January 2026. That is in line with an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab, but higher than the $1,000 estimate from the Tax Foundation and the $1,200 estimatefrom the Tax Policy Center.

John Ismay

Pentagon Correspondent, Washington

“That is our highest honor, congressional medal of honor — that’s a big thing”

— President Trump

This is misleading.

The U.S. military’s highest award for valor in combat is called the Medal of Honor. As an official Army history notes, it is awarded in the name of Congress but is not the “congressional medal of honor.”

Two men were presented the Medal of Honor at the State of the Union address — one to an Army helicopter pilot wounded in the mission to abduct President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, and the second to a retired Navy fighter pilot for his actions during the Korean War.

Since the Vietnam War, the medal is typically presented by a sitting president at the White House. The decision to do so at a political address is highly unusual.“

Contact Me By Email

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump

Summarize​

"Documents released by the Justice Department briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor. But several memos related to her account are not in the files.

False

This needs context.

False.

This is exaggerated.

This needs context.

This is exaggerated.

This needs context.

False.

This is exaggerated.

This needs context.

This is false.

This is false.

This is misleading.

This is exaggerated.

This lacks evidence.

False.

This needs context.

This is false.

False.

This is exaggerated.

This is misleading.

This is false.

This is exaggerated.

This is exaggerated.

This is misleading.

This is misleading.

This lacks evidence.

This is exaggerated.

This is mostly true.

This is misleading.