Newsrooms Spend All of Thursday Fact-Checking Trump’s Wednesday Night Address

NEW YORK — Newsrooms across the country spent all of Thursday fact-checking President Donald Trump’s Wednesday night address to the nation, after editors quickly realized the speech contained too many false and exaggerated claims to process within a normal workday.

The address, billed as a sweeping update on the state of the country, featured confident declarations that inflation had “stopped,” border crossings were “essentially zero,” multiple wars had been “ended,” and trillions of dollars in new investment had already been secured—claims that immediately sent fact-check desks into triage mode.

By midmorning, several outlets had postponed unrelated coverage as fact-check desks worked sentence by sentence, often discovering that claims were either unsupported, mathematically impossible, or so loosely defined they required separate explainers.

“This isn’t a difference of opinion—it’s just a mess,” said an openly frustrated fact-checker at CNN. “We’re not nitpicking here. We’re explaining that you can’t end wars by saying you ended wars, and you can’t reduce prices by more than 100 percent without inventing new math.”

Among the most blatantly exaggerated claims were Trump’s statements that drug prices had dropped by “600 percent,” that the U.S. economy had gone from “dead to the hottest anywhere in the world,” and that multiple foreign leaders had personally told him America was now “respected again”—a detail none of those leaders have corroborated.

By Thursday evening, newsrooms confirmed the fact-checking effort was still ongoing, with several reporters requesting Friday off to recover from what one editor described as “a full shift spent dissociating from reality.”