Daniel Dale Shreds Trump’s ‘Numerous False Claims’ and ‘Long-Debunked Lies’ From Iran War Presser

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

President Donald Trump has been, objectively speaking, helping contribute to the job security of CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale for years, and Monday’s press conference was no exception.

The president spent some time on Monday afternoon answering reporters’ questions about the latest developments in Iran. One topic that got a lot of attention from the gathered press was Trump’s Truth Social post from Easter Sunday, a profanity-laced demand for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to strike Iran’s bridges and power plants if the strait stayed closed.

Numerous international legal experts have called out Trump’s post for threatening to strike civilian infrastructure, which would be a war crime, and the post was criticized by commentators across the political spectrum.

On Monday, Trump was asked about the expected timeline for the war, the recent rescue operation for two U.S. pilots whose plane was shot down, if he thought God supported the U.S. actions in the war, and about criticism of his Truth Social post. He also berated a reporter from The New York Times, made shocking and baseless allegations against Germany, and claimed Iranians were begging him to “keep bombing” their country.

Dale dutifully went through Trump’s comments during the meandering presser, chronicling them in an article on CNN’s website.

“President Trump uttered numerous false claims, including long-debunked lies, at his press conference today – in addition to several very-much-uncorroborated claims,” wrote Dale, “like the one about how every living former president is saying ‘to their friends’ that the US should’ve started this war long ago.”

Among the president’s claims that Dale smacked down were “his 11-year-old lie that his 2000 book advised the authorities to take out Osama bin Laden (the book “contained no advice about bin Laden at all, just one passing mention”), claims about the U.S. only losing planes due to friendly fire, and “his familiar lie that he’s ‘ended eight wars.'”

That list of eight wars, “among various other problems, includes two situations that weren’t actually wars and at least one war that didn’t actually end,” wrote Dale.

“Trump repeated his assertion that Venezuela’s Maduro ‘released hundreds of thousands of people from jails into our country,’ a claim he and his team have never substantiated even though he’s made it for years now,” and “greatly exaggerated” U.S. troop numbers in South Korea.

There was also another false claim tossed in which Trump accused former Vice President Kamala Harris was “a border czar who never went to the border,” Dale noted, but Harris went to the border twice when she was veep “and the Biden White House repeatedly said she was never the ‘border czar’ – noting she had been given a narrower ‘root causes’ mission of leading diplomacy with Central American countries in an attempt to address the reasons for their citizens’ migration to the US.”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!