‘There’s a Lot to Fact-Check Here!’ CNN Roasts Trump Over Blizzard of Cabinet Meeting Falsehoods

CNN anchors Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar called out the large number of falsehoods from President Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting — and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale debunked them.

Trump held a 73-minute cabinet meeting Thursday afternoon on the heels of the chaos wrought by tariff policies that wrecked financial markets, after which Trump announced a 90-day “pause” on most of the tariffs that caused the markets to tank.

The meeting included all of the features that have become staples of these gatherings under Trump; the round-robin obsequiousness, the questioning from a press pool that now includes Trump-friendly outlets, and the claims that need to be fact-checked.

On Thursday’s edition of CNN News Central, Sanchez opened coverage following the meeting by noting there was “a lot to fact-check” as he introduced CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny.

Keilar made a similar notation as she introduced Dale, adding that it would be “hard to do it all.”

Dale hit several of the falsehoods on air, and added a few later online:

KEILAR: Let’s scoot on over to Daniel Dale, our resident fact-checker. And there’s a lot to fact-check here, maybe hard to do it all. I’ll let you take it away. I did just want to mention one thing, which was RFK Jr. talking about the measles outbreak because he seemed to say, Hey, we’re doing such a great job in the U.S. Look at Europe, there are so many more people who are sick with measles, who have died from measles. We just need to be clear. That is an issue that is being driven by measles illness in Romania and Kazakhstan, which obviously do not have as good of healthcare systems as the U.S. When you look at the places in the — in Europe that do, some places are doing better than the U.S. I just wanted to put that one out there. Daniel, what did you see?

DALE: Thank you. So, I’ll try to stick mostly to the big news of the day, which is on tariffs, trade and foreign affairs. President Trump keeps saying that the U.S. has $1 trillion trade deficit with China. That’s about quadrupled the actual figure, which was $263 billion last year. If you only count trade in goods and don’t count trade and services, it’s about $295 billion. So still nowhere close.

President Trump also said again that during his first term, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China through his tariffs. As many of our colleagues keep pointing out, because we have to, all that revenue was paid by U.S. importers. And we know from study after study and just from talking to people in this country, most of those costs were passed on to U.S. consumers.

He also repeated, Brianna, a bit of alternative history. He keeps using, saying that the European Union was formed for the purpose of taking advantage of the United States. I spoke this week to an expert on European integration. He said, not only is that wrong, it is completely detached from the actual history. European integration has long happened with the firm support of U.S. administrations from both parties. And he said that, talking about Japan, we defend them and spend billions of dollars. They don’t pay anything. In fact, Japan does share the costs of the U.S. military presence in that country, paying billions of dollars per year.

I want to briefly move on to two other subjects. He spoke again about autism and keeps kind of flirting with this debunk conspiracy theory that childhood vaccines cause autism, saying that something artificial had to have caused the increase in diagnoses over recent decades and said, maybe it’s a shot. That is debunked. It is not a shot. Experts tend to attribute this increase in diagnosis to increased awareness, increased screening. There may be some environmental factors, but it’s not childhood vaccines.

And he again, repeated near the end there, he returned to this old favorite that other countries around the world emptying jails and mental institutions under President Biden to somehow send criminals and people with mental health issues to United States as migrants. I have begged and pleaded with Trump’s team for any evidence, any corroboration of those claims. They haven’t provided any submission of it whatsoever.

SANCHEZ: Daniel Dale, thank you so much for walking us through that.

Watch above via CNN News Central.