A look at the affirmations around Trump’s initiatives as he prepares to address the congress

By Melissa Goldin

President Donald Trump will address a joint congress session on Tuesday evening to highlight the changes he has made since he came into office six weeks ago. Among the areas he can cover are negotiations to put an end to the Russian-Ukraine war, cuts to the American agency for international development, a meticulous examination of social security beneficiaries and repression of border security. But some of the Republican President’s recent statements on these subjects, among others, have been false and misleading.

Here is an overview of the facts:

Russia-Ukraine War

Trump reprimanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a meeting of the oval office on Friday for being “disrespectful”. He suddenly canceled the signing of a mineral agreement which, according to him, would have brought Ukraine closer to the end of his war with Russia. The relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy has changed considerably since February 19, when Trump made a number of false statements on Zelenskky, including calling “a dictator”.

Trump, speaking in his field Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, February 18, suggested that Ukraine began war.

The facts: the Russian army crossed the border on February 24, 2022, in a total invasion that Russian president Vladimir Putin sought to justify by wrongly saying that he was necessary to protect Russian civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO. This decision followed the illegal annexation of Putin of Putin of the Crimean Peninsula and the armed assault in the eastern Ukrainian region of donbas which has become a long -standing conflict that has left thousands of deaths.

This conflict simmered until 2022, when Putin ordered what he called military exercises along the borders of Ukraine. He told the world that the approximately 150,000 soldiers he had raised would not be used to invade Ukraine. But in the early hours of February 24, 2022, Russia launched generalized air strikes and the soldiers began to flow on the border.

Vice-president JD Vance, speaking at a meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday, suggested that Zelenskyy did not say thank you in the United States for his support.

The facts: this is false. Zelenskyy has publicly thanked the United States several times since 2022.

After Trump and Vance accused Zelenskyy of doing otherwise at their meeting on Friday, the Ukrainian president posted on X: “Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you @potus, the Congress and the American people. »»

Zelenskyy also recently thanked Trump in a video of February 12, saying that he was “grateful to the president of his real interest in our shared opportunities”.

Government cuts

USAID was one of the largest targets of a large Trump campaign and the government’s efficiency department of Councilor Elon Musk to reduce the size of the federal government. The workers erased their office at the headquarters of Washington, now closed in Usaid on Thursday.

Also in the reticle: Social Security Administration, which is preparing for significant reductions in labor.

The two agencies faced false claims on their expenses of the Trump administration in the midst of these changes.

The white house press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, addressing journalists on February 7: USAID spent 1.5 million dollars to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, or Dei, “in the workplace of Serbia; $ 70,000 for the production of a Musical Dei in Ireland; $ 47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $ 32,000 for a transgender comic strip in Peru. »»

The facts: only the subsidy to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji was awarded by the USAID. Its declared objective is to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplaces and the business communities of Serbia”.

The others were awarded by the office of the State Department of the Subsecretaire to public diplomacy and public affairs. In 2022, he granted $ 70,884 to an Irish company for “a live musical event to promote the American and Irish shared values ​​of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility”. A subsidy for $ 25,000 was granted in 2021 to a University of Colombia “to raise awareness and increase transgender performance” thanks to the production of an opera, with additional $ 2,020 from non -federal funding. And $ 32,000 awarded in 2022 to a Peruvian organization funded “a tailor -made comic strip, with an LGBTQ + hero to solve social and mental health problems”.

Trump and Musk said online and during press points that tens of millions of people over 100 years old receive social security payments.

The facts: It is true that inappropriate payments have been made, including some to the dead. But the figures thrown by Musk and the White House are overestimated and distort social security data.

Part of the confusion comes from the Social Security software system based on the Cobol programming language, which does not use a specific format for dates. This means that certain entries with missing or incomplete birth dates will be definitively at a point of reference over 150 years ago. The press organization was wired for the first time on the use of the Cobol programming language at the Social Security Administration.

In addition, a series of reports from the Inspector General of Social Security Administration in March 2023 and July 2024 indicates that the agency did not establish a new system to properly annotate death in its database, which included around 18.9 million social security numbers of people born in 1920 or previously, but were not marked as deceased. However, this does not mean that these people received services.

The agency has decided not to update the database due to the cost of doing so, which would increase more than $ 9 million.

A report on Social Security in July 2023 stipulates that “almost none of the numbers discussed in the report currently receives payments in SSA”. And, in September 2015, the agency automatically stopped payments for people over 1155.

War of Israel-Hamas

Trump has promised to transform Gaza into a “Middle East riviera” and empty Gaza permanently by his more than 2 million Palestinians, despite the fact that the Palestinians refused the idea of ​​leaving. He has also made complaints, baselessly based on American aid in the conflict.

Trump, during a bill of the bill on January 29, said that his administration had “identified and arrested $ 50 million sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas”.

The facts: Trump seemed to refer to a subsidy or a subsidy that USAID awarded to the international medical profession to provide medical and traumatized services to Gaza.

But according to the BMI, “no funding from the US government has been used to obtain or distribute condoms”.

The BMI said that it had received $ 68,078,508 from the USAID to support its operations in Gaza since October 7, 2023. He declared that the resources had been used to operate two major field hospitals currently located in the center of Gaza – one in Deir Al Balah and one in Al Zawaida – offering a combined capacity of more than 250 beds, including 20 in the emergency room. These establishments provided medical care 24 hours a day to around 33,000 civilians per month.

USAID’s 2023 report on the USAID 2023 of contraceptives and condoms, the most recent data available, notes that one country in the Middle East, Jordan, has received a small shipping of injectables and oral contraceptives valued at $ 45,680 for government programs. It was the first sending of the USAID to the Middle East since the 2019 financial year.

USAID reports from the first three quarters of 2024 show that the only family planning programs financed by the Middle East agency were in Jordan and Yemen.

The writers of the Associated Press Justin Spike in Budapest and Fatima Hussein in Washington contributed to this story.

Find de facto verifications AP here: https://apnews.com/apfactcheck.

Originally published: March 4, 2025 at 10:43 PST