‘I Don’t Want To Laugh But —’ CNN’s Abby Phillip and Daniel Dale Roast Trump Over New Rants

CNN anchor Abby Phillip and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale mocked ex-President Donald Trump’s recent rants, with Phillip telling Dale “I don’t want to laugh because it’s kind of, I dare I say, crazy!”

On an edition of CNN Primetime this week, Dale joined Phillip tp knock down a bunch of Trump’s recent claims, including one that Phillip joked was her “favorite” — a viral riff on killer windmills and “batty” whales:

PHILLIP: A fact check tonight on three claims by former President Trump on the campaign trail, including one on Truth Social saying that all Democratic senators should resign in the wake of Bob Menendez’s indictment and implying that they were paid to rig the 2020 election.

CNN Senior Correspondent Daniel Dale is here. Daniel that is obviously not true.

DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: It is obviously not true it’s a lie on top of a lie. So, the underlying lie we know, of course, the 2020 election was free and fair, not rigged and stolen. He said this over and over. We’ve debunked it over and over. And then the lie on top of that is this claim that somehow Democratic senators did the rigging and stealing.

This, Abby, transparently makes zero sense. Democratic senators were not even in charge of the Senate at the time of the election. It was a Republican-controlled Senate. And, second of all, the Senate has very little role in the conduct of presidential elections. All those pandemic policies Trump has complained about were set by states themselves, not by Congress.

The only thing one expert I talked to you could think of that the Senate actually did other than counting correctly the electoral votes was pass a package of pandemic-related election security assistance that was signed into law by President Trump himself.

PHILLIP: Right, an amazing fact that he seems to have forgotten. Daniel, he’s also talking about Comcast in this Truth Social post and he’s saying that the company should, quote, be investigated for its country threatening treason. What does that even mean?

DALE: Yes. Like this is barely — I’m a fact checker. This is barely a fact check. It is not treason to do news coverage that Donald Trump does not like.

PHILLIP: He’s talking about NBC.

DALE: He’s talking about it. Comcast is the parent company that owns NBC and MSNBC. It’s not treason. He might as well say like NBC, Comcast are committing grand theft auto. He’s throwing out words. It’s not a crime to do critical coverage in this country.

PHILLIP: So, this one is my personal favorite. Let me just play this for our audience.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: There has only been, listen to this, one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years. But on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up and show. I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. You wouldn’t see it once a year. Now, they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little baddie.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: I mean, I don’t want to laugh because it’s kind of, I dare I say, crazy, but the windmill story is almost like his “sir” story that he brings it up all the time. He hates windmills.

DALE: This man hates windmills, hates wind turbines. So, I looked into this. I’m not an expert on whales or what makes them crazy or not crazy, but I can read and I can tell you there is no evidence that offshore wind installations are killing whales or driving them baddie, as the former president says.

Now, there are some mysterious deaths. We know some are caused by things like them getting entangled in fishing gear, by striking vessels. Some of them remain mysterious, but the former president’s insistence, his confidence that the whales are being killed or being driven nuts or whatever by wind turbines is apparently based on nothing.

And I’ll remind people that although some of this remains mysterious, we’ll get answers later. This is the same man who insisted that wind turbines were causing cancer. So, not an authority on this subject.

PHILLIP: Absolutely not. He thinks he’s an authority on windmills, but I can tell you he is not.

DALE: He is not.

Watch above via CNN Primetime.