'Relentless lying': CNN fact checker delivers damning summation of Trump's campaign
CNN fact checker Daniel Dale has written a lengthy summation of Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which he says is marked by "relentless lying" whose only recent precedent has been the former president's own past campaigns for the White House.
In his latest piece, Dale outlined some of Trump's most egregious lies in the closing weeks of the campaign.
"Schools secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent," Dale began. "Towns and even cities conquered by illegal immigrants. Pervasive election fraud. The highest inflation of all time. Presiding over it all: an illegitimate president who stole the job from the rightful winner. None of this is true. Trump keeps telling his crowds that it is."
Dale goes on to note that Trump doesn't just lie in a particular way, but rather runs the gamut by "wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponent’s record and his own, regularly just plain making stuff up."
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He also spoke to Columbia University presidential historian Tim Naftali who told him that the sheer scope of Trump's lying is completely unprecedented in American history.
"“Donald Trump is the first president to consistently seek to create a separate reality,” he told Dale. "He’s found that the big lie is more powerful than the little lie, and if you’re going to get away with a lie, you might as well go with the big lie.”
Later in the piece, Dale emphasizes that both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past have either made false claims or, in Biden's case, flat-out lied about biographical details.
Neither of their transgressions, however, approach anything near what Trump has done.
"I have to carefully inspect the transcripts of Harris speeches to see if there might be a claim or two that might be inaccurate," he writes. "Trump tends to make dozens of obvious false claims in each speech. In other words, Trump habitually tells more public lies in a single public appearance than Harris tells over the course of a month or more."