FACT CHECK: Serial Liar Trump Unleashed a Fury of Flagrant Falsehoods (aka Lies) on 60 Minutes

It is a rare occurrence when Donald Trump allows himself to be interviewed by anyone other than one of the slobbering sycophants who populate the MAGA media outlets like Fox News or Newsmax or One America News Network. It is evidence of his innate cowardice, insecurity, and fear of being asked a question that is more difficult than “How did you become so handsome and brilliant?”

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Trump Lies

Which may have sparked some curiosity when it was announced that Trump would be interviewed on “60 Minutes” by Norah O’Donnell. Although it shouldn’t have for reasons that will be dealt with in more detail below. On the surface, it seemed peculiar that Trump would appear on the network and program that he recently sued for alleged “election interference.”

SEE THIS: Paramount Caves to Trump’s Extortion, Disgraces CBS, Pays a $16M Bribe to Settle a Bogus Lawsuit

True to form, Trump delivered a performance that was rife with deflection and dishonesty. When he wasn’t making up fantastical diversions from reality, he was swerving off into unrelated responses to questions he either didn’t know the answers to, or was too afraid to reply with anything resembling the truth.

Fortunately, CNN’s designated fact-checker, Daniel Dale, was on the job. He posted a pretty comprehensive summation of the many lies that Trump tried to pass off as coherent replies to inquiries on some serious matters. What follows are some of the more egregiously truthless Trumpisms itemized in Dale’s article…

  • It’s not true grocery prices “are down”; Trump told this lie even after O’Donnell told him they’re up
  • It’s not true “$17 trillion” is being invested in the US “right now” (this fictional figure is nearly double the White House’s own wildly inflated “announcements” figure)
  • It’s not true some recent former presidents invoked the Insurrection Act “28 times” (Ulysses S. Grant has the record because he invoked it on six occasions)
  • It’s not true Trump has ended “eight wars” (among other issues, his list includes two situations that weren’t wars at all
  • It’s not true foreign countries pay his tariffs (US importers make the payments and often pass on costs to consumers)
  • It’s not true Trump inherited the worst inflation of all time (it was 3% the month he took office, same as now, and even the 9.1% Biden-era peak in 2022 was not close to the all-time record)
  • It’s not true the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen” (his usual lie)
  • It’s not true the Presidential Records Act says he was allowed to have classified documents at his home post-presidency (it says all presidential records are to be in government custody the moment a president leaves office)
  • It’s not true Trump never instructed the Justice Department to go after Comey and James (he explicitly pressured the head of the department to do so in a social media post we all saw)
  • It’s not true Democrats are trying to give $1.5 trillion to illegal immigrants in the shutdown battle
  • It’s not true foreign leaders have emptied their prisons to somehow insert criminals into the US as migrants

It’s ironic that Trump is lying so profusely during a “60 Minutes” interview. He sued CBS over an interview they conducted with Kamala Harris that he said was election interference and probably illegal.” CBS settled the lawsuit without apologizing or conceding any wrongdoing. But they still shelled out $16 million dollars for his presidential library, if there is ever is one.

That settlement was a more of a bribe that CBS was paying to insure that mob boss Trump wouldn’t block the merger that CBS’ parent corporation, Paramount, was trying to complete with Skydance Media, a company run by Trump pals, Larry and David Ellison. There was no legal reason to settle. The case had no merit whatsoever. Trump was alleging that “60 Minutes” had improperly edited the interview to favor Harris politically. They didn’t.

What’s more, Trump acknowledged that he knew that CBS would be editing his interview. Which they did. It was whittled down from 90 minutes to about 28, in much the same way that he complained about for the Harris interview. And while it was in progress, Trump revealed that, not only was he aware of the editing, but he gave CBS permission to edit out specific parts that exposed the bias of the network’s new owners in his favor…

“You don’t have to put this on, because I don’t want to embarrass you. […] I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s – the young woman [Bari Weiss] that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great, from what I know – I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person. But ’60 Minutes’ was forced to pay me a lot of money because they took her [Kamala Harris] answer out that was so bad it was election-changing.”

So Trump sued CBS for what they did with the Harris interview, which is also precisely what he was now conspiring with CBS to do for his own interview. And the rest of the time he was lying. Of course, most of America – and the world – is already aware that Trump lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. But the reputation of CBS is now pretty much shot to hell. And unless the honest journalists who haven’t quit yet rise up to defend the free press, CBS can take their place in the MAGA Media Hall of Shame.

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Trump Gets Brutally Fact-Checked Following His Fawning Fox News Town Hall with Laura Ingraham

The frequency with which Donald Trump has been found to have deliberately lied has exceeded every standard for measurement. He simply does it too often, and too flagrantly, to keep up with. At this point it would be easier to document the extremely rare instances of Trump saying something that is even marginally true.

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Donald Trump, Fox News, Lies

On Tuesday night Fox News Senior Trump-Fluffer, Laura Ingraham, hosted yet another town hall for the former reality TV game show host. And true to form, throughout the event Trump awkwardly avoided any answers that resembled reality. It’s an achievement that would impress modern history’s most accomplished political prevaricators, from Richard Nixon to George Santos. And naturally, Fox News provided the platform for Trump’s puerile duplicity.

SEE ALSO: Trump-Fluffing Fox News Host Doesn’t Get It: You Have to Hate Trump to Love America

Following the free airtime that Fox News gifted to Trump’s reelection campaign, CNN’s Daniel Dale delved into the answers Trump gave and, to no one’s surprise, found that they were almost entirely bullpucky. In an abbreviated segment that only touched the surface of Trump’s dishonesty, Dale disclosed the following failures of the fact-challenged Trump and his facilitators on Fox News (video below)

On U.S. aid to Ukraine vs aid from the E.U.:
Trump: We’re in for over $200 billion. They’re in for $35 billion.
Dale: Those numbers appear pulled out of thin air. They’re not even close to true. According to one reputable tracker of aid to Ukraine, the Kiel Institute, which is based in Germany, is actually E.U. countries and E.U. institutions that are far outpacing the U.S. when it comes to aid commitments to Ukraine, $156 billion for the E.U. starting in 2022 around when the war began, to $73 billion to the U.S.

On allegedly stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline:
Trump: I stopped it. I told Germany you’re not having it. I told all of Europe you’re not having it…I ended it.
Dale: What Trump actually did was approve sanctions on some of the companies working on the project. But here’s the critical thing. He only did that about three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already about 90 percent completed. And even after he imposed those sanctions, the Russian state-owned company behind the pipeline said, okay, fine, we’ll just complete it ourselves.

On his illegal possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago:
Trump: Everybody took them out. It only became a big subject when I took things out…The difference is I had what’s called the Presidential Records Act. I was allowed to do what I did.
Dale: Reagan and Bush did not take classified documents home. In fact, the National Archives debunked this claim last year when Trump made it then. He was not allowed to take these documents. It is in black and white in the Presidential Records Act that all official records belong to the government after a president leaves office.

On the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago:
Trump: We were talking, and then all of a sudden they raided Mar-a-Lago.
Dale: In fact, the FBI search in Mar-a-Lago came more than a year after the National Archives started its polite asking to try to get these documents back.

And that was just for starters. Some of the other lies and ludicrous claims that Trump unleashed, but that Dale didn’t have time to cover, included…

“If you have mail-in voting you automatically have fraud.”
Not only is there no evidence of that, but Trump routinely votes by mail.

First thing he’ll do on the border if reelected: “Drill baby, drill”
That, of course, has nothing to do with the border, Also, The U.S. is currently producing more oil than ever, and more than any other country.

“We have a new category of crime called migrant crime.”
Another crisis that Trump has made up. What’s more, crime is down nationally during the Biden administration.

On his $355 million judgment: “It’s a form of Navalny” (and communism and fascism).
This hardly requires a response. However… Alexey Navalny was a courageous advocate of democracy. Trump is a notorious coward and crybaby. and he clearly doesn’t know what the words communism or fascism mean.

It’s too bad that Trump’s cult followers aren’t going to hear the truth about his incessant lies. Although, even when they do they don’t believe it. That’s the nature of a cult. But it is still necessary to have honest rebuttals to the falsehoods spread by Trump, Fox News, and most of the MAGA-infected Republican Party. We can’t allow them to control the narrative in the media.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality:
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Debased Debate: Trump’s Petulant Interruptions Were Filled with More and Bigger Lies

What happened on Tuesday night was not a debate. It was an unprecedented and disgraceful debasement of the proud tradition of American political discourse. Donald Trump managed to embarrass himself (and the nation) to a degree that exceeds every other incidence of his doing so. And that’s really saying something. He’s validating a recent poll wherein a majority of voters said that Trump doesn’t have the mental soundness to serve.

Donald Trump Baby at Podium

Prior to the debate, Trump was laying the groundwork to make excuses for what he apparently believed was his inevitable loss. Those excuses consisted primarily of bizarre conspiracy theories. Trump also made the preposterous accusation that the debate moderator, Chris Wallace, was “controlled by the radical left.” And Trump’s GOP confederates were convinced that Biden would be cheating by being smarter than Trump. How devious.

Among the rhetorical atrocities uttered by Trump was his abject failure to call on his white supremacist supporters to refrain from violence in the event of his electoral loss. Trump was incapable of making a simple statement condemning all violence, as Joe Biden did. Instead, Trump gave a shout out to the racist Proud Boys, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” It was as if he was issuing orders as their commander. And that’s precisely how Trump’s racist militias interpreted it.

However, the most pronounced departure from civility during the debate was Trump’s repeated and incessant interruptions of both Biden and Wallace. And he made these interruptions in order to squeeze in as many flagrant lies as possible in the limited time available. CNN’s fact checker, Daniel Dale, documented the avalanche of untruths throughout the debate. What follows are some of the most blatant and shameless examples of deliberate dishonesty ever recorded in a presidential debate (as enumerated by Dale in his live tweeting). Or as Dale describes it…

“This president is a serial liar who keeps serially lying. This is just so much dishonesty on the biggest stage by the President of the United States. […] This is always what it’s like with Donald Trump. This is what it’s been like for five years. Basically any unscripted event featuring Donald Trump will feature a huge quantity of false claims. […] Trump is an unprecedented liar in the Oval Office. […] You’re be hard pressed to find literally any subject on which the American people can, right now and over the last five years, have been able to take Donald Trump at his word.”

TRUMP’S DEBASED DEBATE LIES:

It’s not true Biden would “extinguish” the private insurance of 180 million people. He opposed the Sanders-style “Medicare for All”

Trump didn’t “ban” travel from China or Europe. He imposed travel restrictions with numerous exemptions — for US citizens, green card holders, many of their family members — and the Europe restrictions exempted entire countries.

There’s no evidence Trump’s executive order will reduce drug prices 80% or 90%.

Trump lies that he was talking “sarcastically” when he mused about injecting disinfectant to fight the virus.

Biden has not proposed a shutdown or put forward a shutdown plan. He said in an August interview that he’d shut things down *if scientists said that was necessary in a virus crisis.*

No basis for Trump to claim that there have been no problems from his big pandemic-era rallies. [Just ask Herman Cain]

Trump claims he paid “millions of dollars” in federal income tax despite the NYT having obtained his tax returns, which show he paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 & 2017

Trump falsely claims he’s brought back 700,000 manufacturing jobs.

There’s no evidence Biden acted corruptly or improperly re the Ukrainian prosecutor.

It’s false that Biden does not have “any” law enforcement support [via Fox News].

Biden has not said that riots are peaceful protest. He’s called peaceful protest peaceful protest.

Our suburbs would not be “gone” if Biden was elected.

Biden is not talking about defunding the police. He just said he opposes defunding the police.

Kellyanne Conway DID say more violence was good for Trump’s prospects; she said on Fox that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better news for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

“Unsolicited” ballots are not fraud prone.

It’s not true that 30% and 40% of ballots are being “lost.”

Trump has gotten insulin prices so low, it’s “like water.” – insulin still retails for roughly $300 a vial.

A post-debate poll of debate watchers by CNN is an early indicator that Trump’s rudely Neanderthal behavior has succeeded only in sabotaging his own already floundering campaign. Biden was judged by a solid majority to have won the debate (60-28%). He was seen as being more truthful (65-29%). A majority of voters said that they trusted Biden more than Trump on critical national issues like racial inequality (66%), health care (66%), the coronavirus outbreak (64%), and Supreme Court nominations (54%). And while most respondents (57%) said they were unlikely to change their vote, those who were moved were three times as likely to have moved into Biden’s camp than Trump’s (33-11%). And overall favorability was strongly on Biden’s side (62-35%).

This is more bad news for Trump who was already lagging in every national poll, as well as most of the crucial battleground state polls. What this says for the future of the debate schedule is hard to predict. Biden would have justification for not participating in any more of these Trump-induced psyche ward rumbles. But the next debate has a town hall format and it would be interesting to see if Trump would insult the voters to their faces. Either way, expect to Trump to become even more despicable and deranged. Because, as Biden said with regard to Trump’s negligent and and incompetent mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, “It is what it is, because you are who you are.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.