“Good evening America. 11 months ago I received a mess and I’m fixing it.” With these words, he started on Wednesday evening to the American nation. In the 20 minutes that his speech lasted, he did not hesitate to announce extraordinary benefits ($1,776 bonus to Army personnel), make grandiose promises (“the country is ready for an economic boom like the world has never seen”) and attack his predecessor, Joe Biden, whom he mentioned six times, and the Democrats in general. Another element, which was not missing from his public appearance, was none other than the falsehood that accompanies him.
All wrong
The 79-year-old occupant of the White House showed that he is in great shape, right from the start. “We inherited the worst inflation in US history,” he said, adding that things had started to improve since he took office. This is a doubly baseless claim, since the worst data regarding the increase in prices go back to the two years 1917-1918 (in the middle of WW1), when an increase of 20.49% was recorded, while in this year’s August and September, an increase of 2.9% and 3% was recorded, exactly as in the same months of last year.
Incongruent with reality was also Trump’s statement about investments of the size of 14 trillion dollars, which flowed into the country, during 2025. The website FactCheck.org, charged with detecting, recording and highlighting disinformation in the field of politics, however, had a different opinion, since referring to published, official data of the White House, until December 10, it calculates the total of the new investments announced and realized, to 9.6 trillion. dollars.
The American president also declared war on … arithmetic, as he claimed that during his days, the prices of medicines fell by 600%(!). This is a mathematical paradox, which contradicts any concept of capitalist profit, since a possible 100% reduction in any product automatically makes it free. Which means that if Trump’s claims were true, pharmaceutical companies would be paying their customers five times the cost of production.
Counterattack
Already in his first term, Trump introduced the concept of “alternative facts” into the public debate. His latest speech took place in the midst of an intra-party mutiny in the House of Representatives and a few days after the strong shock caused by the publication of excerpts from a series of interviews given to VanityFair magazine by the White House chief of staff, Susan Wiles, not sparing cosmetic epithets and characterizations for the president himself and his staff. TheHill spoke of a “barrage of misleading claims” and quipped that Wednesday was one of those days when Trump made sure to keep the fact-checkers busy.
