CNN’s lead fact-checking journalist said President Donald Trump was “marginally more careful with the facts” than usual in his address to Congress on Tuesday, but still gave “an extremely dishonest speech.”
“He was on script,” said Daniel Dale, speaking to the network’s Jake Tapper after Trump finished speaking. “This was not like one of the usual ad-libbing rally speeches or debates with like 30 false claims. But by the standard of any politician in Washington who is not Donald Trump, that was still an extremely dishonest speech.”
Dale went on to note a number of false or distorted claims Trump made during his address.
In particular, Trump wrongly asserted that there are 3.9 million people listed between the ages of 130 to 139 and 3.5 million people listed between the ages 140 to 149 who are receiving Social Security payments because they haven’t been recorded as deceased.
“That doesn’t mean people listed as being 150, 200, 300 are actually getting money, and that’s because Social Security already has a system in place to automatically cut off people who are listed as being 115 or older,” Dale said.
He added that an Inspector General report found two years ago that there were 19 million people not marked as deceased, but only 44,000 were receiving payments.
“One conservative expert told me, even those 44k are likely legit payments, since at the time, there were about 86,000 living Americans, age 100 or older,” Dale said.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, where Trump decided to freeze military aid to the war-torn country earlier this week, Dale said Trump was also dishonest.
The president claimed during his speech that the United States has sent more aid to Ukraine than Europe, which Dale noted is not true.
Trump suggested the U.S. has pitched in $350 billion to Ukraine’s efforts to fend off an unprovoked Russian invasion, and Europe just $100 billion.
However, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a think tank that tracks support for Ukraine, found that is not true.
Dale noted that, according to the data, the U.S. has committed roughly $126 billion and allocated $121 billion in support of Ukraine, far less than the $350 billion figure Trump claimed. Meanwhile, Europe has committed $263 billion in support and allocated $140 million, both more than the U.S. and well above the $100 billion figure Trump claimed.
“You can get different numbers with different counting methodologies, but nobody legitimate, even the U.S. government itself, has gotten anywhere close to that 350 billion figure that President Trump keeps using,” he told Tapper.
The journalist also blasted Trump for offering “wildly exaggerated figures on inflation and immigration under President Biden” and noted the president’s claim he terminated a “Green new scam” is false given the so-called “Green New Deal” Congressional resolution never passed.
“Trump has not repealed the big environmental law that President Biden did pass,” Dale added.
Overall, Dale said he heard Trump make at least 13 flat false claims, such as his repeated insistence that foreign countries pay tariffs (they don’t, Americans pay them on imports from those countries).
Like Dale, Mark Bowden, an English writer who studies body language, also noticed that the freewheeling Trump was unusually focused on the text in front of him, which he said produced an uninspired address.
“Reading from the teleprompter in a liturgical manner, his vocal delivery had a flat, sing-song, repetitive quality, resulting in him often sounding more like a priest than a charismatic president—a tedious read indeed," Bowden said, in remarks published after Trump’s address. “Most of his facial expressions and eye contact were focused on keeping his eyes on the text.”
