Fact Checkers Tear Apart Trump’s ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Rant-n-Rave Press Conference

Donald Trump has kept fact-checkers busy for some time now and yesterday’s rant-n-rave presser was no exception, as Morning Joe‘s Mashup shows. A note of caution: Mika Brzezinski said “We couldn’t even show half of it.”

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As Brzezinski said, we have a president who “spits out lie after lie.”

As anyone who has seen the press conference knows, when confronted with facts by NBC News’ Peter Alexander, Trump defended his electoral college lie by first claiming he was talking about Republicans and then that he was “given that information” and had “seen that information around.”

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Alexander explained that the “issue of trust goes to the heart of the credibility of this president.” And it most certainly does. This is a man who starts out by claiming the press lies about him as he launches into an outrageous series of lies of his own, and not for the first time.

This was Alexander’s point when he asked: “Why should Americans trust you on big things if they can’t even trust you on little things?” and the electoral college margin, he said, one of those little things.

Trump didn’t do better with other fact checkers. ABC News lists a lot of “not true’s” and “not quite’s” as well.

This should not have been an eye-opener but it is to be hoped it will be for some of those who still insist it is the “liberal press” which needs to be fact checked. And more, for those who think Trump’s administration should be the new normal.

Alexander called yesterday’s presser “A rare opportunity to fact check the president in real time,” perhaps because it’s one of the few times anyone in the press has stood up when it was his turn to ask a question and dared challenge Trump on his lies.

He related that as fellow journalist Mark Halperin did, that the experience “equal parts shocking and totally unsurprising if you saw the way Donald Trump conducted himself over the course of this campaign.”

Alexander called the 77-minute presser “jaw-dropping” and “the verbal equivalent of a tweet-storm.” It was that, and like his tweet-storms, as full of lies.

The good news is that Americans have had an opportunity to watch Trump the president not just indulge watch in his usual whimsy of lies and self-approbation, but to rant and rave live. There can no longer be any disguising Donald Trump’s complete divorce from the world of facts.

More critical yet, just as Trump’s ceaseless attacks on Muslims will only create more enemies for him in the Islamic World, his ceaseless attacks on the press are only going to encourage more Peter Alexanders, not fewer.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.