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Salon
Salon
Politics
Griffin Eckstein

CNN fact checker counts Trump's RNC lies

Donald Trump’s rambling 90+ minute remarks at the Republican National Convention were widely panned as a train wreck of divisive rhetoric, anti-immigrant smears, and self-aggrandizing drivel. Still, to nobody’s surprise, they were also full of lies.

CNN fact checker Daniel Dale couldn’t even get through all of the falsehoods from the “remarkably dishonest” address in the 2-minute time slot Jake Tapper gave him.

“I could go on for a while, but I don’t have time because there were so many,” Dale said, correcting Trump’s lies that he created world peace, that Democrats stole the 2020 election, that crime is going up, that the U.S. had the worst inflation its ever had, and other false statements.

Dale also drew attention to the newer MAGA lies, which come paired with a fascinatingly tone-deaf joke on the fictional Hannibal Lecter, that undocumented migrants are “coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

“His own campaign has been unable to provide proof for that. I certainly haven’t found any myself,” Dale said. “It just went on and on and on in terms of falsehood, just like the speech went on and on and on itself.”

Though mainstream media attempts to fact-check Trump have slowed since his first presidential campaign, he still drops falsehoods at a blistering pace, most recently amplifying the “Big Lie” on election integrity in his RNC speech. 

The network’s decision to check the former president’s lies is a departure from its decision to leave fact-checking behind during the first presidential debate, allowing Trump to spew at least 30 false claims without contest.

Watch Dale’s full attempt to parse through the dense stack of lies here:

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