“And our nation’s capital itself, where we have almost no crime anymore, Washington, D.C. How did that happen?” President Donald Trump said Tuesday evening as he kicked off the national-security portion of his State of the Union speech with a nod to various domestic National Guard deployments he launched in 2025.
It was one of several dubious claims the president made during the longest annual address in history, clocking in at nearly an hour and 48 minutes. Among those claims were ones he and other administration officials have often repeated, including that last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program and that the president’s intervention “ended eight wars” in 2025.
“It isn’t funny,” Trump responded to snickers from the audience as he began to list the countries whose conflicts he claimed to have brought to a close.
Among them are Thailand and Cambodia, which agreed to a ceasefire but are still contesting their shared border as of this month.
“The prime minister of Pakistan would have died if it weren’t for my involvement,” Trump went on to say, though India has denied that the U.S. president’s influence had anything to do with the end of its military operation against Pakistan last May.
Trump’s claims about crime in D.C.—the purported result of his deployment of the National Guard in August and later Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids—are demonstrably untrue. He claimed crime in the district is at its lowest-ever recorded level; homicides were lower in 2014, according to D.C. police statistics. He also said crime was down 100 percent in January 2026 compared to January 2025—which would have meant the city had experienced zero crime the entire month.
D.C. did see a 30-percent drop in crime in 2025, continuing a trend after a similar drop in 2024.
And while Metropolitan Police have credited the increased presence of federal law enforcement with some of that progress, they have also pointed to crime-reduction programs and an unusually cold winter.
On claims that June’s strikes hobbled Iran’s nuclear program, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East said as recently as Monday during a Fox News appearance that the country is “a week away” from obtaining “industry-grade bomb-making material.”
“We wiped it out and they want to start all over again,” Trump said Tuesday.
He added that it was U.S. policy to ensure that Iran never builds a nuclear bomb, and claimed that the Iranian government’s violence against protestors had been halted “with the threat of serious violence.”
Trump did not otherwise address his administration’s military buildup in the Middle East, including a second deployment extension for the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford.
The president went on to take credit for “approving” a $1 trillion defense budget, a sum that was proposed by the White House last year but that Congress has not voted on. The Defense Department, which would receive the vast majority of that funding, is operating on a second continuing resolution for this fiscal year, while the Homeland Security Department is in its second week of a second partial shutdown.
Most glaringly, the president outright lied that the $1,776 “warrior dividends” distributed to service members late last year were funded by tariff revenue. In reality, the checks were a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement paid for by the reconciliation bill, which a senior administration official first confirmed to Defense One in December.
