CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale recently made quick work of former President Donald Trump’s courthouse rant after Trump’s first in-person encounter with Stormy Daniels in many years via Mediaite.
It has been noted that Trump spoke to reporters Tuesday following the wrap-up of hush money election interference trial in the middle of hours of bombshell testimony from Daniels and a failed motion for a mistrial.
On Tuesday’s edition of The Lead, anchor Jake Tapper noted to Dale for a fact-check minutes after what he described as “a rather not safe for work day in court where Stormy Daniels was testifying about her rendezvous with Donald Trump”:
TAPPER: Let’s bring in CNN’s Daniel Dale, who fact checks what we just heard from Donald Trump. He started off criticizing the case, what happened on the case? Daniel, then he turned to protests on college campuses, then he turned to inflation then back to the case.
What’s — what caught your notice?
DANIEL DALE: There was a lot there!
Some of it was subjective opinion. I won’t try to fact check, but a few things to fact check.
One, he claimed again that he’s leading in all the polls. No, he’s slightly leading in national polling averages, but he’s trailing in a good number of polls, especially those that have come out in the last week or so. There are at least a few.
He refers frequently to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor behind this case, as a Soros-backed district attorney. Now, I’d say there’s some arguable basis for that, but I think it’s important to clarify the facts.
So Mr. Soros, who’s a liberal billionaire philanthropists, also a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, did not make any direct contributions to Mr. Bragg’s election campaign. He also says he’s never spoken once to Mr. Bragg.
What did happen was he donated to a liberal PAC that then in turn donated to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, as well as other reform minded prosecutors. So this is at best a one-step or move relationship.
And lastly, Jake, I think its important Mr. Trump keeps invoking Germany before World War II as an example of what inflation can do to a country — well, we had March inflation in this country of 3.5 percent, certainly higher than its been in recent years. But when we talk about, you know, pre-World War II Germany in the 1920s, we’re talking about 500, 700 percent.
So there’s certainly no real comparison between what we have now, what Germany had been.
TAPPER: All right. Daniel Dale, thanks so much.
