It's Brian Larishow on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for keeping it up on those

sustaining memberships as we aim for 5,000 during this drive to help build a financial firewall

against the multiple attacks on our funding that they've launched in Washington.

We'll begin today with some observations on and fact-checking of the Trump speech to Congress

last night, basically a state of the union address, but they don't call it that in a new

president's

first year. As many others have noted, it was more like another campaign speech. I'll say it was

very much an us versus them speech, a good guys and bad guy's speech, atypical for a state

of the union address or something like it. And for a country that voted nearly 50-50 in the election,

how many Americans was he writing off as them? There was a little bit of news on Ukraine,

we'll talk about that, on certain additional tariffs that could be coming next month,

in addition to the ones that took effect yesterday that drove the Dow down

600 points. There was an interesting response from clearly a rising star in the Democratic Party,

Senator Alyssa Slutkin of Michigan, who won statewide even as Trump did in his race in Michigan.

We'll hear from her from that speech as well. She hit him hard

on prices, authoritarianism, and turning his back on the idea of American exceptionalism,

which is about this country as a model of democracy for the world. And there were some whoppers to fact check.

Facebook may have stopped hiring fact checkers this year, but we haven't.

Here's one of those whoppers that might even be setting the stage for cuts to social security.

Trump spent a long time on a list of people too old to be alive anymore, who he claimed the

government is sending Social Security checks to. Maybe you saw that part of the speech,

alleging a massive amount of fraud that the Social Security Administration itself and every

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