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CNN Fact-Checker Reflects On Weirdest Moments Of His 4 Years Debunking Trump
CNN’s fact-check reporter Daniel Dale has had a wild ride interpreting and debunking President Donald Trump’s lies over the past four years.
On the eve of Trump’s Jan. 20 departure from office, Dale, a Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C., shared his reflections on the rollercoaster presidency, during which Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims.
“I had to email the Boy Scouts to find out if the President had invented a nonexistent phone call from the head of the organization. (He had.),” Dale wrote in an article published on CNN.
“I had to email a Babe Ruth museum to find out if the President had made a bunch of false claims about the baseball legend while awarding him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. (He had.)
“I had to email some of Michigan’s most prominent organizations to find out if the President had actually received a state “Man of the Year” award he kept claiming he once got. (Nope.)”
I wrote a personal piece about what it was like to spend four years fact checking every word from Donald Trump: https://t.co/kdG8koHAuY
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 19, 2021
According to Dale, Trump’s ever-present lies transcended the usual motives politicians have for being untruthful ― dodging scandals, inflating achievements ― and often appeared to exist for no obvious reason.
“This was lying as a way of life,” he said. “And it took over much of my own life.”
Dale also dove into the evolution of Trump’s dishonesty, which he said worsened dramatically with each passing year. What started out as a side project as the Washington correspondent for his hometown newspaper, the Toronto Star, progressed to a job at CNN for two reporters.
And while some of Trump’s bizarre claims were occasionally amusing in an “absurdist comedy” way, Dale noted, there were dark consequences for many of them.
“People almost certainly died because of Trump’s Covid-19 lying. And people died at the...
