Front Burner - BONUS: Daniel Dale’s epic 4-year Trump fact check

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

For four years, Daniel Dale, a CNN reporter and former Washington bureau chief for the Toronto Star, fact checked every single word that Donald Trump said publicly. Now, he looks back on some of the strangest and most significant lies of Trump’s presidency, and the lasting impact they had on both American politics and our shared sense of reality.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Trump again touted a, quote, record 9 million job gain over the past three months. He didn't mention, as usual, that that gain follows a record 22 million job loss over the previous two months. Daniel Dale may very well be the first person to become a celebrity for fact-checking. He's got as many Twitter followers as Bruce Springsteen. Videos of his fact-checks have gone viral.

And he's built this really ardent fan base by verifying every single word Donald Trump said publicly for four years. First, while he was the Toronto Star's Washington Bureau chief, and now as a reporter for CNN's fact-checking team. And he said that Biden's plan would eliminate America's borders. No, just no, it's wrong. Oh, that's it? There's more. Wow. How much time do you got, Anderson? This project kept Daniel busier and busier with each day of Trump's presidency.

In 2017, Trump made an average of 2.9 false claims a day. By 2018, that number had ballooned to 8.3 per day. By 2018, that number had ballooned to 8.3 per day. By September 2020, Daniel had to become more selective about which of Trump's lies he corrected because there were just too many of them. Why did you lie to the American people and why should we trust what you have to say now? That's a terrible question and the phraseology. I didn't lie. Take a look at West Virginia, mailmen selling the ballots. They're being sold. They're being dumped in rivers. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. Daniel's an old colleague of mine. We worked together at the Toronto Star for many years. And now that Trump's time in office

has ended, I wanted to hear his reflections on four years of fact-checking the president and what he sees as the lasting impact of Trump's lies, big and small. This is FrontBurner. Hey, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Jamie. It is such a pleasure. So I want to look back here at some of the specific lies that you've had to debunk over the last four years. I want to start with some of the smaller, maybe stranger ones. And what are some of Trump's claims you remember having to fact check where he

just maybe thought to yourself, like, how is this my life? How am I having to call this person to verify this very weird thing? The weird ones were kind of my favorite ones, because I think they really say something about this man, right? Like politicians often lie about big stuff, but it takes a special person to lie about some of the nonsense that Trump lied about. So some of the ones that stand out to me are when he lied about the Boy Scouts. Merry Christmas. So he gave this very bizarre, highly political, often inappropriate speech to the Boy Scout jamboree, which is a gathering of children, of course. And he went out and bought a big yacht and he had a very interesting life.

I won't go any more than that because you're Boy Scouts, so I'm not going to tell you what he did. Should I tell you? Should I tell you? Should I tell you? Oh, you're Boy Scouts, but you know life, you know life. And he was criticized for this. And when he was asked about it, he said something like, no, no, the head of the Boy Scouts called me and told me this was the greatest speech they had ever heard. And so I contacted the Boy Scouts and they made it clear no one had called him. No one had said that. The White House eventually had to admit that he

had essentially fabricated this phone call. Another one I talk about a lot is the Michigan Man of the Year lie. So he claimed more than 20 times that years ago he was named Michigan's Man of the Year, even though he has never lived in Michigan. He himself sometimes acknowledged, I don't know why they gave this to me. Anyway, he never got that award. It's completely fabricated. He gave a speech and he was given some thank you gifts in Michigan by a Michigan Republican group before his presidency. And somehow he turned those thank you plaques and ties and whatever else it was to the state man of the year award. So there was a lot of nonsense like that. Can you tell me the Alabama hurricane one?

Yeah. So people might remember he had tweeted at one point that Alabama was among several states that were now expected to be affected more severely by Hurricane Dorian than initially affected. President Trump is now on day five of insisting Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. That was the original. And then the Federal Weather Office in Birmingham, Alabama, then tweeted that actually Alabama would still be unaffected by the hurricane. So this is a pretty embarrassing and significant presidential mistake. But like you can fix that if you're the White House in one email, you know, you just send the press pool an email saying, you know, president was mistaken.

Alabama is going to be fine. Instead, though, he embarked on this very lengthy campaign to prove that he had actually been correct about this from the start, which he had not been. Alabama, can you explain how that came to make? No, I just know. Yeah, I know that Alabama was in the original forecast. They thought it would get it as a piece of it. It was supposed to go. Actually, we have a better map than that, which is going to be presented. And this culminated in him displaying now famously a hurricane forecast map that had been crudely altered with a Sharpie marker. That map that you showed today looked like it almost had a Sharpie.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. hard he worked to try to prove that a lie was the truth, but because many of his top White House officials leaped into action behind the scenes to pressure the weather authorities in the government to bend to his will. So he wasn't just some like lone liar out there on his own. It was this whole apparatus of lying that was trying to back him up and turn lies into truth. Right, right. I want to pick up on that because, look, like I laugh at these. These feel funny, except on the surface they feel funny. And I know that you don't see them that way. And tell me a little bit more about why not. Well, I think, you know, we have to laugh sometimes. So I'm not saying, you know, keep a dour face and never find the humor in any of these, because I certainly did. But I think they were very destructive. One, at the most basic level, they convinced millions of people that false things were true.

And so that affected how these people perceived politics, how they perceived policy debates, how they perceived the media, and then battles like this where the president would try to discredit the people who actually told the truth, whether it was scientific experts or journalists or government authorities, has a very corrosive effect on those people's reputations. You know, the president embarked on this kind of systematic effort to get people to stop believing the people who actually knew what they were talking about. I think this stuff has long-term damage. I think some of the damage will be quickly repaired once we have a president who is lying less frequently, although, of course, probably sometimes. But the reputational damage to authority, I think, is going to take a long time to heal.

How do you think some of these smaller lies, the Boy Scouts thing, the hurricane thing, may have also set the stage for some of the bigger lies that were to come? Well, I think the president tried to kind of soften up his supporters to believe him at all times and to not believe people with actual expertise at all times. And so at the beginning of his term, he made it kind of a matter of tribal allegiance for millions of people to believe that he had the biggest inauguration crowd size of all time or certainly bigger than Barack Obama's. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was, it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said Donald Trump did not draw well. I said, it was almost raining. The rain should have scared him away, but God looked down and he said, we're not going to let you in. Which was not even close to true. And got many of those people to join him in bashing the media for supposedly erroneously reporting.

That's when the media was accurate. And I turn on, and by mistake, I get this network. And it showed an empty field. And it said, we drew 250,000 people. Now, that's not bad. But it's a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around, you know, in the little ball that we

constructed. And you do that enough times, and then when you start telling, you know, really big lies like, I won the election, even though he lost, or the coronavirus is under control and it's like the flu, even though it was out of control and it was much deadlier than the flu. Those people were inclined, or more inclined to believe him

than maybe they would have been, you know, 10 years ago if such lies had been told by someone else. And, you know, when you're watching these big lies play out, let's take the coronavirus, for example, and people are dying. Does it ever get to you watching these lies continue to come out? Yeah, the only time I've gotten emotional doing this work was early in the pandemic. I was at home. It was early in the stay-at-home pandemic period. And Trump was at one of those briefings just lying about the severity of the crisis, basically trying to convince people that this was going to be OK quickly. It wasn't that bad.

As the heat comes in. Typically that will go away in April. We're in great shape though. We have 12 cases, 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now. And I just choked up for a minute or two just thinking people are going to die because of these lies. And so as much comedy or absurdity I managed to find in some of the other ones, some of them were just deadly serious with very dire consequences.

We don't turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn't call up the automobile companies and say, stop making cars. We don't want any cars anymore. And he talked before about the people who believe the lies. bill companies say, stop making cars. We don't want any cars anymore. We have to get back to work. And you talked before about the people who believe the lies, right? And, you know, as somebody who has spent four years trying to debunk these lies, I wonder, you know, what you think when you see some of this recent polling. So, for example, last week,

you see some of this recent polling? So for example, last week, a Washington Post ABC News poll found that 65% of Republican voters believe that there's solid evidence of election fraud. It doesn't make me think the work was useless at all, which is what people usually ask, you did not. I think it's a sign of a rot, of a real problem in American society that goes beyond Trump. We know that there are millions of people who have come to believe things that are just not true. This egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol. anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol. And some of them are Democrats and Democratic voters, but on the political stuff, certainly,

it seems like there's a bigger problem in the Republican base right now. And we know that the kind of ecosystem of lying that aided Trump is not going away, even as he does. So, you know, part of the reason so many millions of people believe this nonsense is because it was amplified by Fox News or amplified by OAN and Newsmax, two other TV networks. It was amplified on social media. And so those poll numbers are depressing, but I think it's nothing we didn't know. We know that there was a big societal problem that extends beyond this president. I know you have in the past spoken to some of Trump's supporters about his lying. And can you tell me about what those exchanges were like? So you always get a mix of people. So you have some people who know full well that he's lying, but will tell you, look, like, I know that he makes a lot of stuff up, but he cut our taxes and the economy is booming. This is pre-pandemic. You know, the economy is booming. And, you know, he's put Supreme Court justices I like on the bench and he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And so I'll put up with the lies, you know, which is fine. It's not my job to change those people's votes. There are some people who will tell you that I know he lies, but they all

lie. All politicians, you know, BS, make stuff up. And I, you know, I try to convey that Trump is different, both in frequency and magnitude, but it's hard to, you know, convince people who are cynical about politics, as many of us are. And then the real interesting group to me was the group that knows he's lying, but told me that they like that he's lying. I've had a bunch of these people say, oh, I know, you know, he makes this stuff up and it gets people like you and the Washington bureaucrats and all the elites. You're like running around like a chicken with your head cut off, you know, trying to deal with him. And so people who just kind of want the system to be rattled, to be blown up. I'd never heard that before.

It hadn't occurred to me that Trump's lies could delight people by, like, bothering other people. And I think that tells us something important about some of the Republican base, that they just want a president who bothers the people who these people in the base personally don't like. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. others, the people who these people in the base personally don't like. You mentioned before that you think there will be these long-lasting effects of the lies on sort of the erosion of these institutions, like the media, for example. I also wonder how you think it will impact our

shared sense of reality, because I do find myself now doubting so much of what I see, like so much more than a couple of years ago. Yeah, I hear you. I think it's hard to say. To some extent, I think about what happened in Toronto after Mayor Rob Ford, who I covered. You know, we got Mayor John Tory and you can like him or dislike him, but, you know, he's relatively boring, certainly relative to Rob Ford. He's relatively normal. And a lot about Toronto politics has returned to kind of boring and normal. politics has returned to kind of boring and normal. And so there, there, in some ways, you know, there, there were not permanent consequences to, to a mayor going around lying all the time. On the other hand, though, I think there is a real sense in the American public now that, that people do not inhabit the same kind of information or even reality space that

like, it's not, it's not like, oh, we just disagree on policy. It's like, we're not hearing or reading the same stuff. We can't even have a dialogue because we don't even understand what the other person is, is saying, you know, it's just completely separate. Trump certainly contributed to that. And I think that's another long-term problem for, for the fight for truth in the U.S. and certainly for the fight for unity. Biden gave an inaugural address focused on unity. Well, it's hard when people don't even have a sense of shared reality. I want to talk about the media with you for a moment.

And I remember that one of the reasons why you started doing this in the run-up to the 2016 election is because you didn't feel like enough journalists were calling out and correcting Trump's misinformation, that they weren't clearly labeling the lies, lies, the false information, false information. And do you think that that has changed over the last four years? Have you seen sort of a marked change in coverage? I've seen an improvement, but still not to the extent that I think the mainstream

media should have improved. Back in 2016, almost nobody would use the word lie. And I think more importantly than this vocabulary debate, you know, lie versus falsehood, et cetera, that gets people riled up, I think more important is whether the dishonesty is covered at all, whether it's treated as a story. It's not, my complaint wasn't that outlets weren't saying why, it was that outlets are covering these speeches where Trump says 30 things that aren't true and aren't even mentioning in their news story that the speech was filled with false claims. Like the speech is just like Trump attacks opponent in a new way, or Trump announces new plank and immigration platform and nowhere were people being told, you know, Trump said 30 things that weren't true. And so I think there has been some improvement. You know, the dishonesty will be at least passingly mentioned in stories. Sometimes it'll be a full story these days. But I still think

it should have been, you know, a daily core component of Trump coverage, the dishonesty of this candidate, of this president. And it just never rose to that level in most mainstream outlets. You know, the improvements that you have seen, do you worry that it's possible that they might even be eroded now as things get, as you said, like boring again, right? That people might forget about this. I don't know. It's a good question. But I hope that some of the lessons stick, you know, that if you can show that someone

is telling a falsehood deliberately, you can call it a lie in your news copy. a falsehood deliberately, you can call it a lie in your news copy. Or if a speech is filled with dishonesty, it's okay to write a new story focused on the dishonesty. Or even if you're going to, if you feel compelled to include a quote that's not true, even if you're a news reporter, you can quickly fact check that quote in the article. You don't have to leave it to the opinion columnist or to the designated fact checker, but that's part of your job too. So we didn't see enough of any of that, but I hope that for the people on that list that were doing it, that they keep doing it with Joe Biden and others. Right, right. That like when we're striving for balance, we don't forget the importance of getting to the truth. Finally, Daniel, now that Donald

Trump is no longer the president, I'm sure you absolutely will be getting at least a little bit more sleep. But tell me what's next for you. Well, yeah, I'll be sleeping at least a little more. Don't think I have to worry about, you know, 6am tweets filled with lies. But I'll still be on the beat. I'll be closely watching everything Joe Biden says and yes, tweets. And I know there'll be fact checking to be done with him. You know, he's he doesn't lie as much, but he has lied. He does make inadvertently false claims or sometimes like most politicians, he he spins the truth. He shades the truth, you know. And so I think, you know, people joking

about me being laid off or going on vacation. No, there's still presidential fact checking to be done. In addition, though, I think there'll be more time just for the simple fact that Biden lies less to delve more broadly and deeply into the world of political misinformation. And so with that, with those extra minutes and hours, I can look at some misinformation on social media or misinformation from people in Congress or even pundits, maybe. And so I think that the world of fact checking will get broader in the Biden era, although, again, we're still going to do Biden intensely. OK, Daniel Dale, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure. Thank you so much, Jamie.

That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson, and thank you so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and

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