‘I Don’t Have Time!’ CNN’s Daniel Dale Shreds Trump’s Holiday Speech Claims as ‘Total Fiction’

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale drilled through President Donald Trump’s holiday address Wednesday with a swift and brutal assessment, calling many of the president’s headline claims recycled, exaggerated, or even “total fiction.”

The speech itself, delivered at a breathless pace amid Christmas decorations in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room, saw Trump blame his Democratic predecessor, former President Joe Biden, for high prices, immigration, and crime, as well as insist his administration had already turned the economy around.

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” he told viewers, as Republicans brace for what is expected to be a difficult midterm cycle.

Speaking on The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Dale began by assert that the address “was a fact-check it half-asleep kind of presidential speech, so many of these claims have been debunked so many times.”

Dale dismantled the economic claims almost line by line. Trump’s assertion that inflation has “stopped” was wrong, he said, noting: “it’s 3%. In fact, September, that 3% rate, was the fifth consecutive month inflation had increased.”

Trump’s suggestion that he inherited the worst inflation “in the history of the country” also failed basic scrutiny. “Again, he inherited 3% inflation in January,” Dale said, adding that even the Biden-era peak was “about a 40-year high, not a 48-year high, nowhere close to the all time high of more than 23%.”

Some claims, Dale noted, were not just misleading but defied logic. Trump’s boast that his administration cut prescription drug prices by “400 to 600%” he said, was “mathematically impossible.”

“If you cut it by more than 100%, people would get paid to get their medications, which of course is not happening,” he quipped.

Trump acknowledged falling egg prices, but went further, insisting that prices broadly were “falling rapidly”. Dale pushed back: “Everything else is not falling rapidly. In fact, even our groceries in particular, far more products have increased in price this term than have decreased.”

Perhaps most striking was Trump’s claim to have secured $18 trillion in investment this year. Dale was blunt in his rebuttal: “That number is total fiction.” Even the White House, he noted, uses a much lower figure, which itself relies on “vague promises, vague, not even promises.”

On gas prices, Trump pointed to states supposedly hitting $1.99 a gallon.

“The lowest state average today is closer to $2.40,” Dale countered, noting that just “about 100 stations out of about 150,000 stations are below $2.”

Immigration and crime claims fared no better. Trump’s description of “an army of 25 million people” invading under Biden was wildly inflated, Dale said: “the number was not even close to 25 million. It was under 11 million and that counts millions of people who were rapidly expelled from the country.” Claims of record-high crime and of Trump having “settled eight wars” were similarly dismissed.

Dale eventually cut himself off: “I could go on. I don’t have time. So visit cnn.com and we’ll have a full list later.”

Watch above via CNN.

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