After the Supremes released their decision overturning the Colorado Ballot Case ruling, Trump gave a speech and the cable nets were beside themselves in anticipation. If you have a spare 15 minutes to watch it all, I urge you to do it. I wish everyone would see it because they need to be reminded of what he is.
This wasn’t a rally where you can possibly chalk up his lunacy to the fever of the crowd. This was him speaking extemporaneously before a camera, just riffing on what he cares about.
If you don’t have time (or can’t bring yourself to watch him) here are just a few of the highlights.
He says this will bring out country together. Because the country will only come together if Trump wins everything, That’s how this works.
Aaaaand….
I think that gives you the gist. And I would hope it will be on the evening news and in prime time so that people who are working can see it too. Maybe some will think he’s making a good point and that presidents should be given blanket immunity and its perfectly fine for a presidential candidate to trash judges and prosecutors and call them names in a formal setting like this (or at least not a political rally.) Maybe it’s a mistake to remind people that Donald Trump whines like a 5 year old even when he’s being given a gift by the Supreme Court. It’s possible that most voters really love that in a leader, I don’t know. But they should see it and make up their own minds if they want to sign on for four more years of that insufferable pity-party.
By the way, here’s a quick fact check:
DANA BASH: We have been hearing him first and foremost, talk about the fact that he is obviously very pleased about the Supreme Court decision to keep him on the ballot, or prevent Colorado from taking him off the ballot, and therefore other states as well, because of the actions that he was involved with in and around January 6th.
Then he veered into lots of other areas where we definitely have to fact check.
Daniel, I want to first just say the last thing he was talking about immigration, which of course has nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision today. He said a number of things that I hope that you get into. One of which was 20 million people he believes are in this country.
We don’t have any evidence to back that up.
And going on about the need for the president to use his executive, authorities to, quote unquote, “close the border.”.
There is an antiquated immigration system. Congress, in a bipartisan way in the U.S. Senate, tried to update it at least a little bit, and it was killed because, the president did not want to give Joe Biden that political win.
But let’s start by talking, if you will, Daniel, about, the allegations, with absolutely no evidence that he was making against President Biden, that he is behind all of the prosecutions that we are seeing both on a federal and state level.
There is absolutely no evidence to back that up. In fact, there are, there is a special counsel to to provide not one but two layers of distance between the president and these investigations. And that’s just on a federal level.
DANIEL DALE: That’s correct. So the claim is false even in terms of those federal cases. There’s no evidence that President Biden, you know, ordered or was behind these prosecutions.
But the claim is is is especially nonsensical when it comes to, you know, state and local cases. A civil lawsuit from the New York attorney general, a case is brought in Georgia and New York by local district attorneys.
There is zero evidence whatsoever that President Biden has somehow orchestrated these. So it’s just conjured out of thin air.
I think this, as many Trump speeches are, was kind of a where do you start kind of speech from a fact check perspective. You talked about immigration. He said, you know, I didn’t need to go to Congress. I just, he suggested that he just shut the border with his own executive authority.
In fact, he tried in 2019 to impose essentially an asylum ban on people crossing between ports of entry, from Mexico. And it was blocked by the courts. It was blocked by the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court declined to lift that block.
So the idea that he just did it so Biden can do it is not true.
He talked about a new, supposedly new category of crime called migrant crime. That, this is basically propaganda. There has always been some crime by immigrants. All of the data suggests that immigrants tend to commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. And I think, Dana, it’s worth noting that in 2023, preliminary data published by the FBI shows that the US is either at or around the lowest violent crime rate nationally since 1970. So this idea of a crime wave is nonsense.
And then I’ll just add quickly, he went through a bunch of his his old favorites. So I defeated ISIS in four months. In fact, the caliphate, so-called caliphate was liberated about two years into his tenure. He said he passed the largest tax cut in history. In fact, on a percentage basis, it’s nowhere close to the Ronald Reagan tax cut. He said there are people from insane asylums, all over the world coming across the border. He’s provided zero evidence for this, even when I’ve directly asked his campaign.
So false claim after false claim, as per usual.
DANA BASH: Daniel, thank you so much for being here. To to provide that kind of fact checking that only you can appreciate it.