MSNBC Just Destroyed Trump’s CPAC Speech With A Devastating Fact Check

MSNBC’s Velshi and Ruhle starting fact checking Trump and destroyed the biggest lies in his speech seconds after he stopped speaking at CPAC.

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He keeps talking about NAFTA, which he talked about in the election. They also still haven’t done anything about that. Remarkable. This was a remarkable speech.

Just touching on voter fraud there. We know the president’s voter fraud commission that was put together was, of course, disbanded. When talking about the stock market, he said he liked the fact there was the correction. He’d been saying, hey, isn’t it going to go down? Absurd across the board. He continued to say nothing has ever been done like this historically. The amount of lies the president has told and this administration over the last year, that is unprecedented.

There were a lot of lies in the speech, including the stuff you mentioned about trade, but talking about the fact that wages are finally going up. They hadn’t gone up before his administration. Wages started going up — it was stagnated after the recession. 2015 was the year that wages started to go up. They went up in ’15, ’16 and ’17, and we think they’re going up. It was a remarkable speech. It was lie to new topic to another lie. It was very strange speech.

Also, keep in mind, when he talked about unemployment, whether Latino or African-American or unemployment as it relates to the numbers being so low, you’re right. These are extraordinarily low numbers. We are not coming off a year when they were high. What the numbers are doing are continuing to trend down.

Right. If you already had really low unemployment and then you continue an existing trend, you’ll have lower unemployment the next year, the next week, lower employment the next month. When you come off a stock market setting record highs and it goes up again, even by a point, you get a brand-new record. I don’t understand how the audience continues to fall for this.

The picture that the president is painting, that a year ago, when we took office, we were in dire economic straits, and now the good times are rolling, is 100% a lie. When he says that Pennsylvania and West Virginia are doing extraordinarily well again, we know a coal factory, a mine, opened in Pennsylvania in the last year. It was under President Obama that the plans were underway.

MSNBC immediate fact check of Trump CPAC was a public service

Velshi and Ruhle could have stayed on the air all afternoon debunking Trump’s CPAC lies. The President turned his CPAC speech into a greatest hits collection of his lies. Trump repeats statements that are false as a political strategy because his voters no longer believe in facts. What MSNBC did with their fact check was both journalistically responsible and a public service, because authoritarian dreamers can’t spread their propaganda if a free press is there to knock it down.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association