CNN Cuts Away from Trump Speech After He Tells ‘Several Lies,’ Gets Brutally Fact-Checked

CNN’s self-described “fact check man” Daniel Dale got to work right after CNN dumped out of former President Donald Trump’s speech in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Trump and President Joe Biden made dueling visits to the southern border Thursday to monitor the migrant crisis, although Biden was criticized for visiting Brownsville, where migrant traffic has been relatively sparse.

Trump spoke for about 10 minutes before the CNN fact-checking got underway.

Kaitlan Collins began, “As we do after every Trump speech, it seems, we have to have a series of fact checks, because multiple times in just those brief remarks there, he made several lies, told several lies, about the border, also misrepresented his own past on the border in what he did while he was in office.”

Collins then addressed Dale about Trump’s claim that “there are people from jails and mental institutions that are being emptied and those people are coming across the border, something that the Trump campaign has never been able to provide any evidence of, yet he still repeats it almost every time he talks about the border.”

“He does, Kaitlan, Dale said. “I asked the Trump campaign, what is the evidence that unnamed foreign leaders are emptying out their institutions, their jails, sending people here as migrants? They couldn’t come up with anything.” He continued:

He said that we see columns of fighting-age men. They look like warriors. There’s zero basis, Kaitlan, for this idea that unnamed foreign countries are surreptitiously using migrants to assemble some sort of anti-U.S. fighting force. You hear this on the far right. Even if you think that many migrants are economic migrants rather than true asylum claimants, that’s not an army. It’s just nonsense.

He talked about a supposed new form of crime under President Biden. He says, you know, new “migrant crime.” Look, some undocumented people have committed crimes under every president. Under President Trump, and under President Biden, we have had some high-profile recent tragic cases, but every piece of data, all good studies show that undocumented people, like other immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

He told the story that he’s told before, Kaitlan, about people arriving, speaking languages that no one’s ever heard. He said in a previous, recent speech, “We didn’t even have one translator who could understand this language.” This, I’ve looked into this, seems to be just conjured out of thin air. It’s nonsense.

He also said that maybe these people are being let in because “they,” presumably the Biden administration, is looking for votes. I think you can make a convoluted case that, you know, one day people could be naturalized, turned into citizens, citizens that could then vote. But I think it’s important to remind people that undocumented people, like other non-citizens, cannot vote at present.

And then, finally, former President Trump, also repeated, his frequent claim that he built 571 miles of wall. We have official figures on that it is 458 miles, much of which, it’s important to note, is replacing barriers that previously existed, not covering parts of the border that had no barriers in the past.

Watch the clip above via CNN.