Editor’s Notes: In this video, Senator Bernie Sanders provides a sharp rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union address, challenging the administration’s narrative on economic prosperity and healthcare. Sanders highlights the growing divide between the billionaire class and the millions of Americans struggling with the costs of housing, education, and basic necessities. He further critiques claims regarding election integrity and immigration policies, arguing that current measures risk disenfranchising voters and undermining democratic values. Ultimately, the Senator calls for a collective effort to move the country toward a future built on the principles of justice and freedom for all. (Feb 26, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
BERNIE SANDERS: Thanks very much for joining me. Let me say a few words about some of the lies and distortions that President Trump made last night in his State of the Union speech. And do not worry. Unlike Trump, I’m not going to go on for an hour and forty-seven minutes. A lot shorter than that.
Trump’s Claims About the Economy
Last night, as you recall, President Trump stated, “Members of Congress and my fellow Americans, our nation is back, bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before.”
Well, I do have to admit that Trump got it half right. He and his billionaire friends are indeed richer than ever before. Since he has been president, as a result of an unprecedented level of kleptocracy, Trump’s family is now $4 billion wealthier than before he was elected. Not to mention the $400 million plane that he got as a gift from the royal family of Qatar.
Further, the billionaire class as a whole is doing unbelievably well under Trump. Since his election, billionaires have seen a $1.5 trillion increase in their wealth. That is rather extraordinary. The result — we now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the history of our nation.
The Reality for Ordinary Americans
But while the richest people are doing extraordinarily well, surprise, surprise, here is what Trump did not talk about.
Today in America, over sixty percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, with millions of Americans struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing, pay for health care, pay for child care, pay for education, and pay for the other basic necessities of life. Sixty percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck. Trump just forgot to talk about that.
In America today, over twenty million households are spending more than half of their limited incomes on housing, and nearly 800,000 are homeless. In America today, twenty-one percent of our seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year. Try doing that. Try surviving on $15,000 a year. And nearly half of older workers have nothing in retirement savings.
In America today, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and over forty million are struggling with outrageous levels of student debt. In America today, we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth.
Now, if that is the booming economy, the greatest economy in the history of humanity, if that’s what Trump is talking about, God help us.
Trump’s Claims About Election Integrity
Further, on another issue, Trump said last night that he wants to “stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections. That cheating is rampant.”
Before you start, I do find it interesting that Trump talks about our sacred elections. This is the same man who, after the 2020 election, was caught on the phone pressuring Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” so he could overturn the result. I guess that election in Georgia was not too sacred.
This is the same man who provoked a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, in order to overturn an election that he lost and to stay in power. And despite more than sixty court cases to the contrary, he continues to claim that he won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him.
This man who claims that our elections are sacred has still not said that he won’t run for a third term, despite the fact that it is blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution limits individuals to two terms.
The Truth About Election Fraud
But here is the truth about our elections. Despite 154 million Americans in fifty states voting in the last election, election fraud in our country is extremely rare. Even the conservative, pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s database of election crimes listed only twenty-four instances of noncitizens voting in US elections from 2003 to 2023. Hundreds of millions of voters in a twenty-one-year period — twenty-four instances of noncitizens voting. That is not exactly a crisis.
But that big lie — that millions and zillions of undocumented people are voting — that big lie is the foundation of the SAVE Act, legislation that would effectively require every American to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.
So I’ll stop a moment. Do you have a passport? Some of you do, many of you don’t. Do you have your birth certificate? Frankly, I don’t. How are you going to get that birth certificate? Well, if you don’t have a passport, you don’t have a birth certificate, you ain’t going to be registered to vote.
That would disenfranchise millions and millions of people. It would disenfranchise millions of women who changed their last names after marriage and whose documents no longer match, as well as millions of other Americans who simply do not have a passport or a birth certificate.
Trump’s Claims About Immigration
And then there is the issue of immigration that Trump talked about last night, where he bragged, “We are deporting illegal alien criminals from our country at record numbers, and we’re getting them the hell out of here fast.”
Well, not quite the truth. The reality is that less than fourteen percent of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year back in office had violent criminal records.