‘There Were So Many!’ CNN Fact Checker Daniel Dale Runs Out Of Time Counting False Claims In Trump’s RNC Speech

CNN fact checker Daniel Dale had a hard time counting the sheer number of “false claims” he’d noted in former President Donald Trump’s Thursday night speech at the Republican National Convention but offered his best in the two-minute time slot offered him.

Dale appeared during coverage to deliver his daily run down of corrections with a special focus on Trump, who closed the convention with a lengthy speech that began with reflections on the assassination attempt against him – “I had God on my side” – but strayed into familiar speech subject matter, his legal woes and attacks on the record of President Joe Biden .

During the segment, Dale complained to host Jake Tapper that he “could go on for a while” and said: “I don’t have time because there were so many.”

The fact checker opened his 2-minute rundown with a clip from Trump, in which he declared: “The world was at peace. Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war. We’re in a planet of war. The whole world was at peace, and now the world is blowing up around us.”

At this stage, Dale interrupted and began running through his notes.

This is false. Trump did not achieve world peace when he was president, certainly wasn’t at peace when he left office. There were active wars or armed conflicts in dozens of nations in 2020, 51 by one research institution’s count, and then 51 again in 2021. Trump handed President Biden ongoing civil wars in Yemen and Syria, of course, an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli-Iranian conflict, a war in Ethiopia. I could go on for a while, but I don’t have time because there were so many other false claims. So let’s address some of those, not even all of them.

He repeated his usual lie about Democrats having cheated in the 2020 election. It’s nonsense. He said crime is going up. The opposite is true. It’s gone sharply down in 2023 and early 2024. It’s now lower than it was under Trump in 2020.

He said we have the worst inflation we’ve ever had. Again, not even close. It is 3% right now. The U.S. record is 23.7%. He said there was no inflation under him. It was low, of course, but not nonexistent – it was 8% total for his presidency, 1.4% year over year in the month he left office.

He said the price of groceries is up 57% under Biden. It’s actually 21%. He said Democrats are proposing to quadruple people’s taxes. That is imaginary. He said his tax cut was the largest in American history, not even close again.

He said the Biden administration does nothing to stop migrants. Well, the administration tried to get Congress to pass a bill to tighten the border and after Trump himself helped to kill that bill, Biden took executive action to tighten the border. Trump said he stopped human trafficking. Again, not true. He said China stopped buying oil from Iran under him. Also did not happen. He said foreign governments are deliberately sending criminals and mental health patients to the US as migrants. His own campaign has been unable to provide proof for that. I certainly haven’t found any myself. He said we defeated ISIS, ‘100% of ISIS’, in a couple of months. In fact, the ISIS caliphate was declared fully liberated more than two years into his presidency. And there were other exaggerations about trade with China, about North Korean missile launches, about gas prices, about IRS agents.

So it just went on and on and on in terms of falsehood. just like the speech went on and on and on itself.

As Dale handed back to Tapper, the host thanked him and directed viewers to CNN’s website for a full list of fact checks.

“Quite a lot for Mr. Dale to handle there,” he remarked.

Watch above on CNN.