President Donald Trump speaks at the Detroit Economic Club in Detroit, Michigan, on Jan. 13, 2026. In a speech the White House billed as focusing on the economy, President Donald Trump spent most of his hour on a Detroit stage on Tuesday repeating his various lies and grievances on just about everything else. Only two minutes and 34 seconds into his remarks to the Detroit Economic Club, Trump veered off and returned to one of his favourite lies: that Democrats cheat in elections and that he has been a repeat victim. “I won the popular vote all three times, too. But we’re not going to get into that,” he said, before doing exactly that ― notwithstanding the fact that he lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016 and 7 million in 2020. In his 64 minutes on stage, Trump also lied about having stopped eight wars, went on a familiar tangent about transgender athletes, personally insulted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, used a racist smear against Minnesota’s Somali community generally and congresswoman Ilhan Omar in particular, bragged about his extrajudicial killing of more than 100 suspected drug smugglers on the high seas and attacked the late President Jimmy Carter for turning over the Panama Canal to Panama, as a treaty required him to do. “Hydrogen, I don’t know about. I’m hearing it’s not testing so well. It’s fine, except when there’s an explosion. You’re a goner now. Have you heard that with hydrogen? One guy is trying to sell hydrogen?” he said on a detour about fuel-cell powered electric cars, apparently unaware of the explosive characteristics of gasoline vapour. And while describing his efforts to pressure the pharmaceutical industry to lower drug prices, Trump again adopted his nonsensical approach to arithmetic: “They’re going to be coming down thousands of percents. We’re standing up to special interests and slashing prescription drug prices by 300, 400, 500 and even 600% and more.” Trump did occasionally lie about the economy, as well, claiming falsely that grocery prices were coming down, that predecessor Joe Biden had overseen “stagflation” on his watch, that tariffs were not borne by American consumers, that he had given the largest tax cuts in history, and that the crude oil he coerced from Venezuela after attacking its capital to capture its dictator was worth $5 billion. In reality, grocery prices have not been coming down, and inflation numbers released on Tuesday showed that food prices increased last month at the fastest pace since 2022. While inflation was high under Biden in 2021 and 2022 as the economy rebounded from the pandemic, there was no stagflation, as steady growth continued throughout. Tariffs are taxes paid by American importers, as US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out in November, which means they are borne either by American business owners or American consumers, but in either case, by Americans. Trump’s trade war against the rest of the planet also brought on a dramatic slowdown in job growth compared to the Biden years, with the manufacturing sector actually losing jobs every month since he announced his tariffs in April. Trump’s tax cuts were smaller as a share of gross domestic product than either the ones passed under Ronald Reagan in 1981 or George W. Bush in 2001, and the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Venezuela has offered to the United States is likely worth about half of the $5 billion Trump claimed, given the extra cost to process it and the current market price. In one of his repeated attacks on Somali immigrants in the United States on Tuesday, Trump claimed that the fraud in that community and others against the US  government accounts for the entire annual US budget deficit — an assertion absurd on its face. “Another urgent priority for bringing down the cost of living is to stop the colossal fraud that is bleeding American taxpayers absolutely dry, the fraud being committed by the Somali population in Minnesota,” he said, claiming without evidence that similar fraud was taking place in other states with Democratic governors. “If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget.” In reality, the federal budget deficits today are close to $2 trillion a year, thanks largely to Bush and Trump’s rounds of tax cuts.