Since the beginning of his life, Donald Trump has been a liar. He lies big and he lies small. Everything from his strange hair down to his shoes are false or misleading in some way or another. Since the beginning of his administration, Trump’s penchant for lying has increased. The Washington Post put his rate of lying or misleading claims at around 20 per day at the end of 2019. That was before the pandemic, before Trump completely dropped the ball and his racist, cruel, xenophobic, and incompetent administration’s sins came back to claim us all.
Trump’s lying and the need for fact-checking has become one of the few jobs created by the current administration, since the administration is made up of so many scam artists and general hoodwinkery. CNN has reporter Daniel Dale doing the fact-checking for those moments when Trump is allowed to really talk for a while. On Tuesday night, Trump decided his campaign could use the illusion that he was speaking to Americans outside of his white supremacist cultish base, and have him sit down with Pennsylvania voters in a town hall. As you can imagine, Trump lied for most of the hour and a half event. CNN’s Don Lemon had Daniel Dale on to point out some of the inconsistencies in Trump’s assertions.
At this point, we all know that Trump is a mediocre person, born into great power and wealth, buoyed by our rigged systems of inequality, and now failing on a global level. We all know Trump is a liar and that his lies are seemingly so transparent it is mind-numbing to watch millions of people continue to show their support for him. Daniel Dale has a great ability to really speak fast and thus perform the level of bullshit this current white supremacist in chief is shoveling out into the public sphere any chance he gets.
DANIEL DALE: There was just so much lying, Don. I'm going to go quickly, so literally just stop me if you need to. He said, again, Democrats won't protect people with pre-existing conditions. That is nonsense, as a voter told him, Democrats created those protections. He insisted he didn't praise China on the virus. He did so repeatedly. We know that. He claimed nobody knew at the time he was praising China that seniors were especially susceptible to the virus. That's one of the first things we learned out of China, Italy, and the U.S. He claimed Biden said in March, that the pandemic was, “totally overexaggerated.” I can find no evidence Biden ever said that. He said Winston Churchill was kind of like him playing down stuff because he went on rooftops in London, during the Nazi bombing and told people everything is going to be good. Churchill did not speak from the rooftops and did not say everything was going to be good, he warned of suffering and danger.
Trump said he fired James Mattis, Mattis resigned. He said that protesters took over 20% of Seattle. It was a six block area, nowhere close to 20%. He took credit again, for sending in the National Guard in Minneapolis, saying that this happened after a week and a half of violence there. It was not even close to a week and a half. It was days and the Democratic governor is the one who activated the Guard. He said he essentially repealed Obamacare by getting rid of the individual mandate. Not even close to true with the Medicaid expansion, pre-existing conditions protections, other stuff remains.
He said the cupboards were empty of ventilators, his administration admits he inherited about 16,000 from Obama. He did his usual false-boast about so-called bans on travel from China and Europe. They were not complete bans. He said stocks are owned by, quote, “everybody.” Just about half of Americans own stocks. He repeated his nonsense about testing causing cases, testing merely reveals and helps fight cases. He said that Biden has agreed to a Bernie Sanders style of socialized health care. He fought Sanders on that issue. He has very much not agreed to a Sanders-style plan. And, Don, this is a preliminary list. i have hours of fact-checking tonight to do because there's even more than this so this was just a firehose of lying, again, from the president.
Dale subsequently debunks the right-wing talking point lie that the boost in shooting crime in New York City (Trump exaggerates the uptick by about 200%) is misleading since even though there have been more violent shooting crimes in NYC this year, the numbers are still way below the numbers in Giuliani’s last year in office as mayor of New York.
Lemon asks Dale if he needs to take a sip of water after that two-minute tour de force.