A CNN fact-checker exposed Donald Trump’s fanciful tale about South Korea on Monday, saying “every single part” of it was simply “wrong.”
On The Lead, Daniel Dale responded to the president’s false history of U.S. relations with the Asian country under his first administration and that of Joe Biden.
Trump, 80, told reporters in the Oval Office that during his first term, South Korea “agreed to pay close to $3 billion a year for protection, because, you know, they essentially weren’t paying.”
“And I asked them to do that, at my request. They weren’t happy about it, but they agreed. I asked for $10 billion, and, uh, they were very unhappy, but we agreed for a short term there would be $3 billion and next year it would go up, and the next year it would go up — so they start paying for their protection,” he continued.
After throwing in some election denialism, Trump claimed he saw Biden “rescind that $3 billion, for whatever reason.”
Dale, who wrote on X that “every single part” of Trump’s story “was wrong,” explained why, first in an article and then to anchor Jake Tapper.
“Without exaggeration, every single part of the president’s story was wrong,” Dale began. “Trump said that before he took office the first time, South Korea essentially wasn’t paying anything to share the cost of the U.S. military presence. In fact, under the Obama administration—before Trump took office—South Korea was paying more than $800 million per year. Those cost-sharing agreements date back to 1991, so decades.”
Congressional records confirmed those and other figures Dale later cited.
“Now, Trump said that after he took office, he got South Korea to agree to pay $3 billion a year, and then subsequent increases the year after that and the year after that. In fact, he did secure a one-year increase of 8.2 percent, but that only brought the total to less than $1 billion—nowhere close to $3 billion—and there were no increases agreed to in the two subsequent years,” Dale said.
“And then, he told a story about South Korea calling up President Joe Biden and telling him that Trump was probably a bad person, and getting Biden to agree to immediately rescind the $3 billion payment that South Korea supposedly agreed to,” Dale concluded. “Biden did not rescind any Trump-era cost-sharing deal. In fact, there was no cost-sharing deal in place under Biden because negotiations on a new one had stalled amid Trump’s exorbitant demands in 2020.”
Biden got South Korea to agree to two increases, Dale explained: a 13.9 percent increase in a 2021 deal, and an 8.3 percent increase in a 2024 agreement.
“So, just wrongness upon wrongness, upon wrongness, Jake.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
Dale, a CNN journalist since 2019, called out another one of the president’s “completely made-up stories” a few weeks ago: how people couldn’t watch his debate with Joe Biden in June 2024 because “the wind wasn’t blowing,” causing television blackouts in wind-powered areas.
“The president is making stuff up again,” Dale said.
Last October, Dale also noted “a lot of lies” in Trump’s address to an auditorium full of generals at Quantico.
