CNN’s Daniel Dale Calls Out NBC Anchor Over Presidential Interview: ‘Kept Ignoring’ Trump’s ‘Long-Debunked’ Lies

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CNN chief fact checker Daniel Dale called out NBC News’s Tom Llamas for “ignoring” President Donald Trump’s “long-debunked lies” in his extensive interview that covered inflation, immigration, and election integrity that aired on Wednesday evening.

NBC News posted an extended streaming version of the sit-down to Top Story With Tom Llamas on YouTube.

“President Trump kept telling long-debunked lies. An NBC anchor kept ignoring them,” Dale wrote on X with a link to his  ” fact check of some of Trump’s many false claims.”

In the article, Dale credited Llamas for pushing back on Trump’s assertion that he was “starting to get great polls on the economy,” causing Trump to rephrase that his polling numbers “should be great.”

Dale called it “a textbook moment in political interviewing” but then added, “it was one of the only times in the interview that Llamas challenged one of Trump’s false claims.”

“Over and over, when the president repeated lies that were debunked months or years ago, Llamas responded simply ‘right’ or ‘yeah’ – or didn’t acknowledge them at all,” Dale wrote, continuing:

Trump’s rapid-fire dishonesty is difficult for any interviewer to handle, especially given the limited time they are given by the White House, and it’s not uncommon for them to largely ignore the serial inaccuracy in order to get to the topics they’ve planned to address. Llamas certainly asked the president various skeptical and important questions, including some sharp follow-ups. And NBC published a fact check of some of the false claims in a Wednesday article on its website.

But Llamas’ hands-off approach to the president’s falsehoods left people watching the interview on television and through social media clips without immediate corrective information on a variety of pressing subjects. An exchange about inflation, for example, was littered with a bunch of inaccurate Trump figures and assertions that Llamas let pass by with the word “right.” And in one case, when Trump claimed it’s only “very few” product prices that have stubbornly refused to fall during this presidency, Llamas initially responded with a comment that made it sound like he was endorsing the false claim: “Yeah, very few. I get it.”

Though CNN’s resident fact-checker may have taken umbrage with the interview, Llamas’s line of inquiry undoubtedly made news, as evidenced by the fact at least one clip from the interview was played on every live CNN show in the first 18 hours after it aired — with host Erin Burnett crediting Llamas with “pressing” Trump at one point in the blockbuster sitdown.

Read Dale’s article on CNN.com.

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