CNN Fact Checker Drops Exhaustive List of ‘Lies’ from Trump’s Military Speech: ‘Took Me About Five Seconds to Find on Google’
CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale had an abundant source of content Tuesday after President Donald Trump delivered a speech to senior military officials who were gathered in Quantico, Virginia, with the network’s resident fact checker commenting that one of the president’s “lies” was so egregious it only took him “about five seconds to find on Google” and debunk it.
Among the wide-ranging topics mentioned in Trump’s speech were nuclear weapons, his preference for gold stationery and decor, stairs, using U.S. cities as “training grounds for our military” — and several swipes at his predecessor, President Joe Biden.
Trump “repeatedly lied” to the generals and admirals gathered for his speech, wrote Dale in a tweet that summarized the president’s “numerous false claims” and linked to his article at CNN.com listing them out.
Dale joined CNN co-anchors Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown on The Situation Room to sort through Trump’s comments. Brown welcomed Dale to the show and asked him to share “what stood out to you.”
“There were just so many false claims,” Dale replied, which is something he said he says that “after essentially every speech” from Trump, “but I think this is notable because of the audience.”
Trump “was telling a lot of lies, saying a lot of other inaccurate things,” Dale continued, and cued up a clip of Trump claiming Biden had “never” said that the U.S. has “the strongest military.”
“President Biden said that over and over — this took me about five seconds to find on Google, one sample quote from 2023,” Dale said, reading a quote from Biden in 2023 saying the following quote:
Our U.S. Military — and this is not hyperbole, I’ve said it for the last two years — is the strongest military in the history of the world, not just the strongest in the world, in the history of the world.
“This is just one of many such quotes from President Biden,” said Dale, and then mentioned “another false claim” Trump made about Biden, inaccurately claiming Biden had said he wanted to get rid of the Space Force.
“President Biden never said that,” Dale emphasized. “President Biden never said that, that that did not happen.”
Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki had “offered what seemed to be a snarky or dismissive response to a question about what Biden planned to do about the future of Space Force, but that wasn’t Biden himself,” Dale explained, and “even Psaki never said he was going to get rid of it. And she said the very next day that they were not getting rid of Space Force, that they would preserve it.”
Those were “just two of a whole bunch of false claims from President Trump today,” said Dale, including repeating “his usual like that the 2020 election” was “rigged,” and “repeat[ing] this lie that he tells over and over that the Congo and Venezuela both emptied their prisons to somehow allow prisoners to come to the United States as migrants.”
“There was no evidence that any of that happened,” said Dale. “President Trump’s own team has never been able to offer any corroboration. And I’ve spoken to independent experts on both the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela who have seen who have said they have seen nothing to support any of that.”
Other false claims made by Trump included claiming that Biden let in “25 million migrants” (the “actual number is less than half of that”), claiming Biden “provided 350 billion worth of aid to Ukraine” (“also not even close, even generously — by independent expert estimates, the actual number is about half that”), and claiming that he “has settled seven wars,” which, as Dale said, “even the examples that President Trump cited cited himself show that that claim is not true.”
“All right, Daniel Dale always bringing the facts,” said Brown.
“He knows what he’s talking about,” said Blitzer.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
Read Dale’s full fact check here.
