Daniel Wolfram
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reveals the classic poker tells that expose when Trump is bending the truth.
Donald Trump has dominated the news stream ever since he rolled down the escalator at Trump Tower in New York 10 years ago.
Trump’s comments, quotes, and statements make headline news every day. He often spreads falsehoods and floods the zone with outlandish statements.
A CNN journalist has spent the last 10 years fact-checking most of Trump’s speeches and comments. Here are five things he has learned in the last decade of covering the president.
There is no liar like Trump
Canadian Daniel Dale was hired by CNN in 2016 after he had made it his niche side project at the Toronto Star to fact-check Donald Trump after every speech. That has made Dale an expert on Trump, and he states that he has found 8,500 false claims since September 2016.
That is also the first lesson from Dale on Trump: Even if people claim that Trump is just another politician because they all “lie,” he claims that Trump is a “rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.”
That also means the bigger the scandal or the crisis is, the more Trump lies. Dale cites the 2020 election as Trump’s biggest lie as he continues to reject the results in which he lost to Joe Biden.
Daniel Dale has learned to tell when Trump lies
When a journalist rigorously covers a subject for a decade, there is a parasocial element involved in it. Daniel Dale is no different, as he has become an expert in knowing when Trump is lying.
“Like a bad poker player, Trump has tells that indicate he is likely lying. If he delivers a story featuring an unnamed person calling him ‘sir,’ it’s often fiction. So are many of his stories about burly working-class men crying in his presence and a good portion of his stories involving one of his critics supposedly having come to him begging.”
Trump’s lies are perpetrated so that he is projected as this strongman who is the nation’s savior.
None of Trump’s numbers are ever correct
Dale also claims that every time Trump mentions poll, inflation, investment, gas-price, or crowd-size numbers, he is always lying about and exaggerating them.
“A staggering percentage of the figures Trump uses are incorrect. Even when an accurate statistic would make him look good, the businessman who used to inflate his reality-show ratings and the size of his buildings tends to choose an inaccurate statistic that would make him look a little better. If ‘sir’ is one of the best indications he is not telling the truth, so is his simply using a figure, any figure.”
The mainstream media still has no idea how to cover Trump’s lies
While pro-Trump media like Fox News and Newsmax are helping Trump by reinforcing his lies, the centrist or more left-leaning news outlets also fail at covering his falsehoods.
Dale wrote back in 2021 that “too often, coverage of flagrantly dishonest Trump speeches still mentioned the dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, coverage still quoted the president’s lies without explaining that they were wrong.”
The Trump expert argues that five years later, the mainstream media is still helping the president amplify his lies.
Trump’s lies are extremely dangerous
We have all caught ourselves laughing or shrugging at some of Trump’s innocuous or bizarre lies that do not matter in the grand scheme of things. The ‘sir’ lies come to mind.
However, Daniel Dale argues that many of Trump’s biggest lies have caused a lot of harm and death in America.
“People died because of the Capitol riot prompted by his lies about the 2020 election. His lies downplaying Covid-19 almost certainly led to deaths, too. Specific people targeted by his lies, including journalists, judges and election workers, have faced threats and harassment.”
In the end, American democracy is much worse off because of Trump’s lying, and the democratic foundations and principles upon which the country was founded are wobbly and in danger of rotting.
