All the major publishers were ready for it. The Associated Press gave line-by-line updates as it tallied the lies against a pre-released transcript of the speech. The Washington Post counted more than 2000 falsehoods in speeches leading up to and including the address.

The morning after the factually dubious speech the President grabbed his iPhone and tweeted out another glaring falsification, claiming that the address, viewed by 45 million people, attracted more American eyeballs than any address from past presidents.

It just wasn’t true, and anyone with a basic internet connection — that is, anyone reading the tweet — could have easily found that out.

But Mr Trump just didn’t care.

It was the same story when the President was elected in late 2016 and claimed he’d won in the biggest landslide since the 1980s — a quick Google showed that close to 80 per cent of presidents before him had been installed in greater victories.

When his inauguration rolled around and side-by-side images showed obviously larger crowds at the same event for his predecessor, he didn’t care. He was happy with his version of the story — that the crowds at his ceremony were bigger that Barack Obama’s.

While commentators have come to expect Mr Trump to exaggerate the truth and often flat-out lie when he’s communicating to his constituents, his fibs aren’t being accepted.

Mr Trump keeps getting called on his BS, but still, he keeps on spinning new stories.

What’s perhaps even more shocking than his constant broadcast of mistruths, is that the President isn’t even really lying.

He’s indifferent to the truth.

WHY HE DOES IT

In his seminal work, American philosopher Harry Frankfurt laid out the nuanced distinction between lies and bulls***.

To lie, he claimed, one has to know what the truth is and know that what they’re presenting is not true.

Talking bulls***, on the other hand, requires no knowledge of the truth at all — just indifference.

While Prof Frankfurt’s academic pursuits were never intended to be political studies, his work is referenced now more than ever in relation to Mr Trump.

Speaking with news.com.au about the President’s wild imagination, Sydney University senior lecturer David Smith called on Prof Frankfurt’s bulls*** theory.

“Trump is a salesman who has a salesman’s indifference to facts and truths,” Mr Smith said.

“This is a pattern that we see with him — it’s about an image that he wants to create of himself. He’s all about winning and being the best.”

So when Mr Trump tries to convince voters or Twitter followers that his government has brought in “the biggest tax cuts in history” or that he’s “the least racist person you have ever met”, it’s not necessarily because he believes those things are true, it’s that they fit into his image of being the best. Truth doesn’t matter.

And these frequently outlandish and sometimes bizarre claims keep coming because they’ve been working for him for so long.

“What he’s basically been doing at the core of his business for decades is selling his own name,” Mr Smith said.

“He’s got this enormous amount of experience and success and a salesperson by doing that, and he’s managed to successfully bring some of that into politics, and it’s worked pretty well for him.

“In a sense he’s a very remarkable politician. For someone who’s come in as a complete political novice and in his first presidential election won the presidency, it’s an extraordinary feat.

“He has this remarkable achievement as a politician which he feels he doesn’t get credit for, so he discredits anything running against him — like the Russia probe — as an attempt to delegitimise what he’s achieved, and grips onto any tangible achievements he’s had.

“He doesn’t have a whole lot to show for his achievements in his presidency yet, but that doesn’t fit with his image at all, and so he changes the story to make it fit his image.”

TRUMP’S BIGGEST LIES

Biggest tax cuts ever

Mr Trump’s favourite issue to talk about at the moment is taxes. If you’ve been listening to any of his public appearances over the past few months, you would have heard the United States is one of the highest taxed nations in the world, and that the President’s tax reform plan would provide the biggest tax cut in US history.

Both of these points are untrue.

According to the Trump Government’s own Treasury Department data, Mr Trump’s reform would rank about eighth in a tally of the nation’s most aggressive tax cuts. And according to the Tax Policy Center — an independent think tank — total US tax revenue is “well below the 34 per cent average for developed countries”.

During Tuesday night’s speech alone, Mr Trump repeated these falsehoods 55 times.

He’s also repeatedly claimed that his tax reform plan would target billionaires and would personally “cost me a fortune”.

An NBC analysis of the plan found that the President stood to gain personally from the package, with one piece of passed legislation personally saving him $20 million, and his companies set to be taxed at a lower rate.

Immigrants are responsible for crime

The President’s doctored stats on immigrant crime rates are up there with his most dangerous mistruths.

In his SOTU speech he said: “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities.”

The term “open borders” is itself an exaggeration, as successive previous governments have doubled the presence of border patrol officers in the past decade, and have seen border arrests sharply drop.

But the dangerous claim that immigrants bring drugs and crime with them has repeatedly been proven false.

Studies over several years have found immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

Voter fraud cost him the popular vote

Losing the popular vote in the 2016 election didn’t gel with Mr Trump’s “winning” image, so he changed the narrative.

Pedalling a theory apparently plucked from thin air, the newly-elected President claimed his opponent Hillary Clinton garnered millions more votes because of “voter fraud”.

He repeated publicly, and in meetings with fellow politicians, that three to five million illegal votes cost him the popular vote.

Voter fraud is extremely rare, as even Mr Trump’s own lawyer have acknowledged.

“All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” his own lawyers wrote in a court filing.

Russia a ‘made-up story’

Another issue that has dogged Mr Trump’s presidency that doesn’t fit in with the image he wants to portray is Russian interference in the election.

Critics say he sees the probe as trying to discredit his win, so he tries to dismiss and downplay it as much as he can.

Even after asking for the resignation of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn over discussions with Russian officials, the President said: “I don’t think he did anything wrong.”

Online giants Facebook, Google and Twitter have all found some evidence of Russia using their platforms to attempt to influence the election, and government investigations are ongoing.

In an interview with NBC last year, Mr Trump said: “This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

US publication Politifact went on to declare this the 2017 “Lie of the Year”.

Inauguration crowd

This whopper came very early in the presidency and looking back, was a sign of things to come.

After his inauguration event — which took place on a dreary Washington day — the President claimed the overall audience for his swearing-in was “the biggest ever to watch an inauguration address, which is a great thing”.

But television ratings and pictures of the crowds who physically gathered to watch the event, showed Mr Obama’s 2009 inauguration attracted a far bigger audience than Mr Trump’s.

The President even contradicted the White House on this one. The White House estimated 720,000 attended the inauguration in person, while Mr Trump went with 1.5 million.

For Mr Obama’s inauguration, the official estimate was 1.8 million.

CONSEQUENCES

A lot of Mr Trump’s mistruths amount to little more than big-noting himself.

There’s very little consequence to inflating TV audiences or claiming false accolades, apart from that they are easily disproved — which we’ve already established — doesn’t bother the President.

But it’s in his claims about more serious matters that affect other people that things start to get serious.

“Where it does hurt is when he starts lying or telling untruths about really substantial things that actually hurt the country,” Mr Smith said. “If you want to look at Trump’s rhetoric on immigration you’d think that any murder in the US was committed by an illegal immigrant, ignoring that US born people commit crimes at a far higher rate.

“When he stays silent after a domestic mass shooting but tweets immediately if a Muslim kills someone in Europe, he creates this picture where Americans are threatened by Muslims or immigrants or outsiders of any kind, where really the biggest threat to Americans comes from Americans.”

Mr Smith says there are also long-term consequences to Mr Trump’s claims of “fake news” directed at media and other institutions.

“Mr Trump tells his supporter they can’t believe anyone other than him,” he says.

“Trump has really ramped that up and he’s really damaging trust in institutions that used to be fairly widely trusted.

“This constant telling his supporters that the only person they can believe is him and a few trusted media outlets, that is pretty damaging and that’s where it goes beyond salesmanship. It goes into this real tribalism where people think they can only believe their own tribe, and turn on others.”