CNN Anchors Roast Trump For Getting His Own ‘Made-Up’ Claim Wrong — Introduce New Word For Trump Lies

CNN co-anchors Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar roasted President Donald Trump for exaggerating a claim that was already “made-up” — and got fact-checker Daniel Dale to introduce a new word for the phenomenon.

Last week’s coverage of Trump’s spending freeze was dominated by the invention of a $50 million shipment of condoms for Hamas” — a claim that originated with Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Trump quickly adopted it, and doubled it as he talked to reporters Monday at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office.

On Monday’s edition of CNN News Central,

KEILAR: Let’s bring in Daniel Dale. You have a lot to fact check here, Daniel. I don’t know. I’ll take one off your plate, though, which is the condoms for Hamas. Not true. It’s kind of become the Haitians eating your pets because it’s been debunked. It’s not true. But it plays well with the base.

So he’s repeating it here. We should say worldwide, USAID didn’t provide $50 million in condoms, no condoms to the Middle East during that time period of the last few years in question. Take it away. What else? What else?

DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: So he said that 38,000 Americans died during the construction of the Panama Canal. In fact, during the American construction phase, that we’re talking early 20th century, it was roughly 6,000. But those people, even though 6,000 were not all Americans, they were mostly poorly paid Caribbean workers. The actual American number was in the hundreds. So a gross exaggeration. He said, when talking about Canada, they don’t take our agricultural products for the most part. In fact, Canada is the third largest export market for U.S. agriculture, about $28 billion in purchases in 2023. There is a dispute about milk exports that he referred to, but in terms of agriculture as a whole, it’s not true.

He said that the European Union doesn’t take our farm products. The European Union is the fourth largest export market, about $12 billion per year. He said we have about a 350 billion trade deficit with the EU, another gross exaggeration, it’s about 125 billion. And he repeated this claim about aid to Ukraine that he repeatedly — that he regularly makes. He said that the EU provides way less aid to Ukraine than the U.S. does.

They need to catch up and so on.

In fact, according to the latest numbers we have, the EU has committed about double the aid to Ukraine during this war than the U.S. has. About 250 billion to about 125 billion to the U.S. EU also leads in terms of the amount of aid actually allocated. So that’s not true as well.

SANCHEZ: I actually want to fact check something you said just now, Brianna, because I believe I wrote it down. Trump actually exaggerated his own made up exaggerated —

DALE: He doubled it.

SANCHEZ: — claim during this — he doubled it. He used to say that it was 50 million for condoms in Gaza.

KEILAR: What did he say?

SANCHEZ: He said 100 million —

KEILAR: Oh.

SANCHEZ: — this time.

DALE: Yeah.

SANCHEZ: Neither of which —

KEILAR: Thank you for fact checking me, Boris —

SANCHEZ: Neither of which —

KEILAR: — I do appreciate it.

SANCHEZ: — to be clear, Daniel, are correct.

KEILAR: But one is doubly incorrect.

DALE: There’s a — yeah, there’s a concept I think of as Trumpflation (ph) where he makes a false claim and then it keeps getting falser and falser over time. The numbers keep rising. So a good example there.

SANCHEZ: Daniel Dale, thank you so much.

Watch above via CNN News Central.