CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale dropped a blistering fact-check on President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday, claiming there were “at least 15 false claims,” and that the speech consisted of “just a lot of lying.”

“Jake, there was just a lot of lying tonight,” Dale said on CNN’s The State of the Union with Jake Tapper:

I counted at least 15 false claims, plus a bunch more misleading claims. A lot of them were the greatest hits you hear at President Trump’s rallies. Things like, “U.S. elections are rife with cheating.” They’re not. “The Democrats can’t win without cheating.” That’s nonsense. “The mail-in ballots are crooked.” More nonsense. That he has ended wars that never actually started, or that clearly have not ended. But what I thought was most notable from a fact-checkers perspective was that by far the single subject with the most false and misleading claims was the economy, that key subject on which he’s struggling in the polls.

So he claimed, for example, explicitly that his tariffs are paid for by foreign countries. That is simply false. The tariff payments are made by U.S. importers, and we know from study after study, and just from living, that they often pass on some or all of those costs to consumers. Average Americans. He claimed he secured 18 trillion in investment in just a year. Jake, that number is total fiction. The White House’s own website at this moment, or at least earlier tonight, used a 9.7 trillion figure, way lower. Even...

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