While it’s true that the yearly deficit is a quarter of what it was in the president’s first year, the deficit was abnormally high in 2009. That was due to decisions by both Bush and Obama in response to the financial crash. Also, the national debt has about doubled under the Obama administration.

This line from Obama — that Middle East violence is “rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” — prompted a lot of online backlash from academics and wonks on Twitter. It's factually wrong, but The Monkey Cage blog also frames the main thread of criticism this way: “the ancient hatreds myth holds ethnicity to be unchanging and assumes that conflict is natural.” While Vox’s Max Fisher assumed the line, which contradicts what Obama officials have said before, must have “slipped through.”