Fact-Check Results Of Trump’s RNC Speech Are Worse Than Anticipated

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On Thursday night, standing in front of the White House, President Donald Trump delivered his speech accepting the presidential nomination of the Republican Party for the 2020 election. The speech, which dragged on for quite awhile and was only topped in length among nomination acceptance speeches by his own 2016 address, was chock-full of lies. In a memorable CNN segment that aired after the speech, the network’s fact-checker Daniel Dale rapidly talked through some of the major lies that stuck out to him. Altogether, Dale said that he counted over 20 false or misleading claims across the president’s speech.

As Dale put it:

‘This president is a serial liar, and he serially lied tonight. I counted, preliminarily, more than 20 false or misleading claims.’

Dale subsequently discussed some of what he was talking about. For instance, Trump claimed that Biden is plotting to remove the border wall along the southern boundary of the United States, but Biden has “specifically and explicitly rejected that idea,” Dale noted. (Trump’s so-called “wall,” it’s worth noting, is mostly just replacing old physical barriers that were already present to begin with.)

Some of Trump’s Thursday night lies were extra ridiculous — Trump claimed, for instance, that he “has done more for the African American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” As Dale pointed out, that outlandish claim ignores accomplishments like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, both of which were signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Another ridiculous lie was his claim that his administration opened an Embassy in Jerusalem for under half a million dollars, but Dale noted that “early documents” reveal that the cost was at least $21 million — a huge difference!

The lies go on from there. Trump claimed, for instance, that he and Republicans were on the side of people with pre-existing conditions. In reality, his administration has backed efforts to throw out the entirety of Obamacare, pre-existing condition protections included, with no replacement plan to fill the gap. Trump also claimed that a Biden administration would seize Americans’ firearms, but Biden explicitly opposes this idea. Neither does Biden support the idea to “defund the police,” although Trump raised that issue during his speech too.

Check out Dale’s fact-check below:

Trump’s lie-riddled speech followed days of other lies from speakers at the RNC, many of whom seemed to be speaking as though they were in an alternate universe of sorts, as some observers noted