CNN Fact-Checks ‘Staggeringly Dishonest’ Trump Debate Circus
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale appeared on TV screens soon after the Trump-Harris debate ended Tuesday night to give his preliminary verdict—and declared that Donald Trump had lied at least 33 times during the 90-minute face-off.
“This was a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former President Trump,” Dale told host Jake Tapper. “Just lie after lie on subject after subject. By my preliminary count, Jake, Trump made at least 33 false claims. Thirty-three!
“By contrast, by—again—a preliminary count, Vice President Harris made at least one false claim, though she added at least a few misleading claims and a few more that lacked key context.”
Dale, who has been fact-checking Trump for years, explained that the former president’s firehose of untruths was totally unprecedented in American political history.
“I think a lot of Americans say, ‘Well, all politicians lie,’” he said. “No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true.”
The dishonesty totted up by CNN was not just small white lies, either.
“This wasn’t like little exaggeration, political spin,” Dale said. “A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality: on abortion, saying every Democrat wanted Roe v. Wade overturned though actually more than 80 percent of Democrats supported Roe; on crime, saying it’s through the roof, though it’s actually sharply down since early 2023, it’s now lower than it was since Trump left office; on health care, saying he’s the one who saved Obamacare, the law he actually repeatedly tried to overturn; on Kamala Harris herself, saying that a Howard University grad, Black Law Students Association president had claimed that she wasn’t Black at one point.”
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The most obvious example of Trump’s inventions was the pet-eating moment that became the viral clip of the night.
“Frankly, I don’t have enough time here to run through each specific Trump false claim,” Dale said. “For now, though, let’s dive into one false claim. Trump made an egregious claim about migrants supposedly eating people’s pets in Springfield.
“This is not only false, I think it’s fair to call this odious. For people who have not been online in the last couple of days, this claim about migrants—Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—eating people’s pets originated with a Facebook post that attributed the claim to a neighbor’s friend’s daughter. So, you know, a third-hand, broken-telephone kind of thing. The city of Springfield and the Springfield police say there are no credible reports of this happening, and even JD Vance, the vice-presidential candidate who himself had promoted these claims, acknowledged this morning that the ‘rumors’ might turn out to be false—although he still encouraged people to spread these cat memes.
“Now, I’ll note that Trump himself added dogs to the equation. They had not even been part of these viral-nonsense rumors before.”
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