CNN’s lead fact-checking journalist said President Donald Trump was “marginally more careful with the facts” than usual in his address to Congress on Tuesday, but still gave “an extremely dishonest speech.”
“He was on script,” said Daniel Dale, speaking to the network’s Jake Tapper after Trump finished speaking. “This was not like one of the usual ad-libbing rally speeches or debates with like 30 false claims. But by the standard of any politician in Washington who is not Donald Trump, that was still an extremely dishonest speech.”
Dale went on to note a number of false or distorted claims Trump made during his address.
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In particular, Trump wrongly asserted that there are 3.9 million people listed between the ages of 130 to 139 and 3.5 million people listed between the ages 140 to 149 who are receiving Social Security payments because they haven’t been recorded as deceased.
“That doesn’t mean people listed as being 150, 200, 300 are actually getting money, and that’s because Social Security already has a system in place to automatically cut off people who are listed as being 115 or older,” Dale said.
He added that an Inspector General report found two years ago that there were 19 million people not marked as deceased, but only 44,000 were receiving payments.
“One conservative expert told me, even those 44k are likely legit payments, since at the time, there were about 86,000 living Americans, age 100 or older,” Dale said.
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