Trump’s border speech was such an incoherent, lie-filled mess that CNN spent only a few minutes and had to interrupt it to fact-check.
What did Trump lie about in his border speech?
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins chimed in on Trump coverage and said, “As we do after every Trump speech, it seemed like the teams had to do a bunch of fact checks because if multiple times and just those brief remarks there, he made several lies, he’s told several lies about the border and he’s also misrepresented his background on the border in what he did while in office. This Daniel Dale from CNN is here. Our resident reporter Daniel, obviously we’ve been listening to this, just noting a lot of of things that he said that were not true. The first is what he has stated several times and that I know that you personally have tried to verify, which is that there are people coming from prisons and mental institutions that are being emptied and those people are going through the border, something the Trump campaign has never been able to provide any evidence of achieving, he still repeats 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 their institutions, their prisons, sending people here as migrants, they couldn’t find anything. I also took some notes. He said we see columns of men of fighting age. They look like warriors. There is no basis, Kaitlin, for this idea, yes, that unnamed foreign countries are surreptitiously using migrants to assemble some sort of anti-American fighting force. You hear it from the far right, even if you think that many migrants are economic migrants rather than actual asylum seekers, that is not an army. It’s simply nonsense. He spoke of an alleged new form of crime under President Biden. He says: new migrant-related crimes, look, some undocumented people have committed crimes under every president, under President Trump. Again, under President Biden, we’ve had some recent high-profile tragic cases, but every data point, every good study, shows that undocumented people, like other immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. He told the story he’s told before, to Kaitlan, about people arriving speaking languages no one has ever heard. In a previous and recent speech he said that we didn’t even have a translator capable of understanding this language. This, I investigated, seems to have been conjured out of thin air. It does not make sense.”
Dale continued: “He also said that perhaps these people are being induced because supposedly the Biden administration is looking for votes. I think a convoluted case can be made, maybe one day people could be naturalized, turning to citizens, citizens could then vote. But I think it’s important to remind people that undocumented people, like other noncitizens, migrants can’t vote right now. And finally, former President Trump, even though he has often said that he built 500 miles of wall. We have official data that this is 458 miles, many of which it is important to note are replacement barriers that replace previously existing barriers, they do not cover parts of the border that previously had no barriers.
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Trump’s speech, just like Trump, was a disaster
Trump’s speech was an incoherent, lie-filled nonsense, indecipherable to anyone who didn’t watch Fox News or Newsmax.
It was astonishing that Trump arrived at the border knowing what Biden would talk about and offered no response 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 electoral strategy, as the wheels are ever closer to coming off for the GOP.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a member of the 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.
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