Six key takeaways from Trump's speech to the nation, including 'transgender for everybody'

Donald Trump addressed the nation in prime time Wednesday night, and his speech, mercifully brief, was full of the usual lies and distortions, plus his typical unwarranted attack on transgender people. Here are five key takeaways.

" Transgender for everybody” — bingo!

If you had “men in women’s sports” and “transgender for everybody” on your bingo card, you win! Trump used both phrases in the first minutes of his speech, saying that before he took office, “We had men in women’s sports, transgender for everybody.” For the record, trans women are not men, and no one has proposed that everyone should transition their gender, but Trump has a beyond-odd obsession with that concept.

Related: 11 times Donald Trump has randomly brought up his ‘transgender for everybody’ obsession

Related: Donald Trump’s government declares that transgender and nonbinary people don’t exist

Everything bad is the fault of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Except it’s not.

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it,” Trump said. He claimed inflation was at a record high under Biden; it was not. It was about 9.1 percent in June 2022, but inflation was higher than that at several points in the country’s history. He touted job growth, but unemployment in November was 4.6 percent, the highest in four years. His claim that 100 percent of jobs created under his administration were in the private sector is likewise false.

Citing prices of consumer goods under the Biden administration, Trump said he is “bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.” However, prices remain high, and Trump gave false information about the price of gas being $1.99 in some places, which is not true, and said the price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33 percent from last year, also false.

Trump further alleged that crime was at a record high during the Biden administration, but the U.S. Department of Justice has reported that while there was an increase in violent crime in 2021, toward the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it declined significantly later in Biden’s tenure.

Trump continues to demonize immigrants.

Trump claimed that Biden had an “open borders” policy that led to an invasion of criminal immigrants, including drug dealers and murderers. But “immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born,” according to a 2024 report by the American Immigration Council. “This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime.” He also claimed that Somali immigrants have taken over Minnesota and trashed the state. While Minnesota has the largest concentration of people of Somali descent of any state, they make up only 2 percent of the population. Most are citizens, either by birth or naturalization, and most are doing no harm to the state.

Tariffs haven’t led to factory construction.

Because of his tariffs, companies are “building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen,” Trump said. But spending on factory construction, which rose during the Biden administration, has declined this year, according to the Federal Reserve.

He uses mathematically challenged figures.

Trump claimed his negotiations with drug companies would reduce prescription prices by “400, 500, even 600 percent.” But if prices decreased by 100 percent, the drugs would cost nothing.

One good thing about the speech: It was short.

Trump spoke at a rapid pace, and the address lasted only 18 minutes. But it “will keep fact checkers busy for hours,” New York Times White House reporter Katie Rogers wrote. Well, probably longer.