A CNN analyst says claims made by President Donald Trump would not stand up to fact-checking by a bunch of schoolchildren.
Trump touched on several of his usual talking points at a rally in Warren on Tuesday, going as far as to declare the first 100 days of his presidency the “most successful” in history. Jaw-droppingly bad polling would seem to contradict this assertion, but Trump doesn’t seem to care.
At one point in his hour-long address to celebrate Trump 2.0, he told the crowd that he had “won Michigan,” not twice, but three times. “We just had the biggest victory in Michigan,” Trump claimed. “We won it twice… We actually won it three times… But remember, I like the victories. I like the three victories, which we absolutely had.”
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This drew a huge cheer from the MAGA audience, but CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale was less than impressed.
Speaking on The Lead with Jake Tapper after the campaign-style event, he said: “I think there are actual schoolchildren who could fact-check some of this for us, Jake.”
“President Trump did not win three victories. He won in 2016 and 2024. He lost in 2020. He did not win Michigan three times. He, again, won in 2016 and 2024, lost in 2020 to Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes,” he continued.
“If anyone is surprised that he’s still lying about not only the election more than four years ago, but the election he won, as he did tonight, they haven’t been paying attention.”
Dale dubbed Trump’s claims “nonsense,” but added, “No amount of fact-checking appears to deter him on this subject.”
Trump and his closest loyalists have long claimed that, in 2020, widespread yet ambiguous fraud at the polls allowed Democrats to “steal” the election from Trump and hand it to Biden.
There’s no evidence to support that claim, all 50 governors having certified their states’ results in the weeks after the election was called.
Nonetheless, denial has thrived online, and Trump has continued to peddle the myth. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s supporters occupied Congress in a failed attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory
