‘There Was A Lot Of Lying!’ CNN’s Daniel Dale Knocks Down Trump Claims From Wild Press Conference

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale torpedoed a raft of false claims from President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference — including a “dangerous” rant that “wasn’t really a claim.”

Trump spoke to reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son on Monday and took questions for almost an hour in a wild press conference chock full of provocative moments.

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, anchor Dana Bash asked Dale to run through some of Trump’s claims minutes after the presser ended — including a lengthy chunk about autism and vaccines that Dale described as dangerous:

BASH: OK, Daniel, I’m going to go to you now and talk about something so incredibly crucial, which is Robert Kennedy Jr.’s stance on vaccines and mandates, and by extension, more importantly, what the president- elect’s views and comments were on vaccines.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

DONALD TRUMP: I think everything should be looked at, but I’m a big believer in the polio vaccine.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?

TRUMP: I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person. So, you know, I was against mandates. Mostly Democrat governors did the mandates, and they did a very poor thing.

(END VIDEOCLIP) BASH: OK, so Daniel, there it seems like he was asked about all vaccines, and his answer appeared to be focused on COVID. But he also talked pretty extensively about other vaccines, the ones that have been in place for decades, particularly for young people, as a mandate to go to school.

He talked about polio, for example. So talk about what he said there and give us a bit of a fact check, which is so crucial.

DANIEL DALE: Sure. So there was a lot of lying from the president-elect at this press conference, but I think the most dangerous part was an equivocation. It wasn’t really a claim, but he was asked whether he thought there was a link between vaccines and autism, and he equivocated.

He said, well, we have some brilliant people looking at this, and he talked about the increased prevalence of autism diagnoses. Look, there is no link between vaccines and autism. This notion has been discredited by study after study over decades. The idea that there is some connection came from a thoroughly discredited, in fact, scandalous, fraudulently altered study in the 1990s that should just be ignored, dismissed again, because it was fraudulent.

And so the idea that, well, we’re just going to look into this, I think, is dangerous to consider, because the idea is simply wrong. I’ll pivot to some other topics. He talked, as usual, about tariffs, said under his first presidency, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China.

That money was paid by Americans. It is American importers who pay the tariffs, not Chinese exporters. And many of those importers pass along the cost to U.S. consumers. He said no previous president had tariffs on China. That’s wrong.

He said there was no inflation under his own presidency, despite the tariffs, certainly lower than during the Biden presidency. But there was 8 percent cumulative inflation during his presidency, so not nothing.

In talking about health, he also said, oh, Europe has lower mortality than us or better mortality, and they don’t use pesticides. Europe uses hundreds of thousands of tons of pesticides every year. So I’m not sure where he got that idea.

And earlier in the press conference, Dana, he said over and over, I think three times, that during his presidency there were no wars, like no wars, period, in the world. That is simply not true, a rewriting of history.

One research institution said there were active armed conflicts in about 50 states in 2020, including, of course, civil wars in Yemen, in Syria, in Somalia. We had an active Israeli-Palestinian conflict, U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. So the idea that this was a world at peace left by Donald Trump to Joe Biden, simply not true.

BASH: OK, well, thank you for all that. And I just want to underscore where you and I started our conversation, Daniel, which is on the suggestion that it is possible that autism is caused by vaccines. As you said, there was a 1998 study that has been completely discredited.

There have been rigorous peer-reviewed studies that have not — that are credible, including some that analyzed more than 1 million children that have shown there is no link between autism and vaccines.

Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.