Trump’s speech on the border was such an incoherent, lie-filled disaster that CNN only carried a few minutes and had to cut it off to fact-check.
What Did Trump Lie About In His Border Speech?
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins broke into the Trump coverage and said, “As we do after every Trump speech, it seemed teams we have to have a series of fact checks because if multiple times and 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. This CNN’s Daniel Dale is here. Our resident fact-check reporter Daniel, obviously we’ve been listening to this just writing down several of the things that he said that weren’t true. First off is the one that he has claimed repeatedly that I know you personally tried to fact-check, which is 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 getting he’s still repeats it almost every time he talks about the border.
Fact checker Daniel 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. I also took some notes. He said that we see columns of fighting-age men. They look like warriors. There is zero basis, Kaitlin, for this idea, yeah, that unnamed foreign countries are surreptitiously using migrants to assemble some sort of anti-US 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, new migrant crime, look, some undocumented people have committed crimes under every president, under President Trump. Again, 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.”
Dale continued, “He also said that maybe these people are being led in because they presumably the Biden administration is looking for votes. I think you can make a convoluted case maybe one day people could be naturalized, turning to citizens, citizens then could vote. But I think it’s important to remind people that undocumented people, like other noncitizens, migrants cannot vote at present. And then finally, former president Trump, although repeated his frequent claim that he built 500 miles of wall. We have official figures on that it is 458 miles, much of which it’s important to note is replacement barrier replacing barriers that previously existed, not covering parts of the border that had no barriers in the past.”
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Trump’s Speech, Just Like Trump, Was A Mess
Trump’s speech was lie-filled incoherent nonsense that was indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News or Newsmax.
It was amazing that Trump came to the border knowing what Biden was going to talk about, and he offered no counter or defense. Trump’s speech was the same formula of falsehoods that he used in 2016 and 2020.
Contrary to what Republicans think, this is not a winning election strategy, as the wheels are getting closer to falling off for the GOP.
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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
