In 1980, Rosie Ruiz began the Boston Marathon, then got on a subway. She rode to the stop about a mile from the finish line, got off, and finished with a great time. Her problem, however, was that the facts didn’t support her conclusions.

Tonight Donald Trump is going to do the same thing. He will brag about the finish without referencing where he started. And tonight he’s going to make me recall Robert Burton's line: a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself. However, this dwarf will insist that we not look at the giant, that maybe the giant was really only three feet tall.

In anticipation of Trump’s State of the Union address, I looked up some numbers. He will puff up his chest, declare his greatness, and make a bunch of claims. Some of the things he claims will be true, in the sense that Rosie Ruiz won the Boston Marathon. Some of them, as we might expect, are nonsense. Here is the backstory on four of the things Trump has been touting every time he could get someone to point a camera at him.

First, his record unemployment figures. It is true that unemployment is at a record low. It’s also true that the numbers have improved every year since the Great Recession. Under Obama, the unemployment rate went from 7.80% at the beginning of his administration to 4.10% at the end. This despite having to deal with an economy in freefall. (On January 1, 2010, the unemployment rate was 9.8%).  Under Trump, the rate has gone from 4.1% to 3.5%.

Yet Trump continues to talk about the disastrous Obama years.

An argument could be made that—because we were coming out of a recession—the unemployment rate drop should have been more rapid. However, if you compare the figures during Obama’s administration, beginning with the year we finally returned to pre-recession levels, the unemployment rate continued to improve; it dropped another .8%, still better than Trump’s .6%.

It is also true that under Trump, black unemployment dropped from 7.00% to 5.50%, mostly due to gains by black female workers. This compares with an improvement from 12.7% to 7.00% in the Obama administration.

Trump may, as he has in the past, talk about the GDP. During his campaign, he derided the GDP growth during the Obama administration and promised a return to the 4%-plus growth of the past, last seen during the Clinton administration. Obama’s last three years averaged GDP growth of 2.33%. Trump’s first three have averaged 2.53%, a slight improvement fueled by the tax cut that ballooned the deficit, but nowhere near his promised 4%.

He will also brag about the rising stock market, and here he might make a case, despite the fact that the Dow was lower at the end of the year than at the beginning for two of the three years he’s been in office. However, it is at a record high. I, for one, don’t believe that the stock market is the best measure of the nation’s financial health. According to Money Magazine, the top 10% of the population (in terms of wealth) own 84% of all stocks. That means that the rest of us—the 90%—enjoy only a small part of the market increases.

But there’s another worrisome thing about depending on the stock market as a measure of our financial health. In 1929, it reached record highs, growing between 20% and 30%  for several years. There was, to use a phrase coined a half-century later, a good deal of “irrational exuberance.” Then, it dropped by nearly three-quarters and didn’t return to its previous highs until 1954.

There is, if you simply take Trump’s remarks at face value, an argument to be made for his success in terms of these financial measures. The market is at a record high. Unemployment is at a record low. And the GDP growth doesn’t suck. However, if you believe in trend lines, you have to think that all he had to do was not screw up bigly to achieve all of these things. All of the heavy lifting was done in the Obama administration. However, there is one more area where his boasts are not simply lacking context; they’re outright lies: immigration.

Early on, to support his call for a border wall, Trump wanted to use illegal immigration to declare a national emergency. There were, according to him, rapists, murderers, and drug pushers pouring across the border. What he didn’t mention was that illegal immigration apprehensions were at a 21^st century low. At the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, more than 1.5 million were apprehended. That number fell year over year until it was 50% lower by the time Bush left office. It continued to drop under Obama, falling nearly another 50%. Then under Trump, it increased from about 311,000 annually to about 860,000. He has not solved the border problems. In fact, the apprehensions in 2019 were the highest since the George W. Bush administration.

I won’t watch the State of the Union address tonight. I have a blood pressure problem and Trump’s disregard for the truth exacerbates it. However, I wanted to take a stab—as hasty and dry as it might be—at providing a bit of context for those who don’t mind watching a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant.