CNN had no patience Monday for Donald Trump’s two-hour-long Conservative Political Action Committee speech, as the network found many lies while fact-checking it.
As he continues another presidential race, Trump told CPAC attendees, “I am your retribution.” But according to CNN’s fact-check, the speech was brimming with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, crime, elections, and employment, just to name a few subjects.
“As is often the case with the former president, the speech was full of half truths, lies, and absolute whoppers,” said host Jim Acosta, before handing it over to Daniel Dale who sifting through the entire speech, fact-checking it for mistruths.
First, Trump touched on job creation, saying, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever,” a claim that Dale called “absolute fiction.”
“Mr. Trump has single worst net jobs record of any presidential term those four years, losing 2.7 million jobs,” Dale said. “I think you can fairly say, ‘Well, we had a COVID-19 pandemic,’ but even if you just got to the three and a bit years before the pandemic, Mr. Trump’s record is middling.”
There were about 6.7 million jobs gained, which is “no where even close to the actual record for a term,” which is 11.5 million, set by Democratic president Bill Clinton’s first term.
Trump also discussed the Nord Stream 2, the natural gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany, claiming he was the one that ended the pipeline, going as far as to say that Putin told him, “If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.”
Dale, again, rejected this claim: “He didn’t end it, it was not dead. He did impose sanctions on companies working on this pipeline, but that didn’t come until nearly three yaers into his presidency.”
While those sanctions slowed down the project, Russia announced with about a month and a half left in Trump’s presidency that they were going to resume construction. Then, with a few days left in Trump’s presidency, Germany announced that it was granting another permit for construction in its waters.
Then of course, it’s not a Trump speech without a mention of “The Wall. “I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised and then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”
But the wall was not finished. In fact, according to an official report from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, two days after Trump left office, 458 miles of wall had been completed under his term, but about 280 more miles that were meant for wall construction were not.
Trump touched on George Floyd’s murder, too, claiming, “We saved Minneapolis.” He also said that because the governor didn’t do anything, he was forced to step in.
“Trump has been saying this since 2020, and it is a reversal of reality,” Dale said. “In fact, it was Democratic Governor Tim Walz who himself activated the Minnesota National Guard amid this unrest.”
While Trump did demand that Minnesota activate the National Guard, Walz had already done so seven hours earlier.
Watch the full segment in the embed above.
