As they offer grudging agreement that the President has been handling more recent responses to the Coronavirus crisis well, the journalists at CNN don’t seem to quite know what to do with themselves. On Monday night, liberal host Don Lemon brought on network fact checker Daniel Dale for a response to Donald Trump.
Dale offered what seems to be CNN’s version of a compliment: The President is slightly less of a liar: “Don, this was a more factual Donald Trump. That's not to say he was a factual Donald Trump, but by his standards this was an improvement. Trump has been consistently dishonest until today in talking about the coronavirus pandemic.”
He added that Trump is now “in the ballpark” of truth:
[Trump] repeatedly assuring these kinds of rose-colored proclamations that are sharply at odds with what actual experts are saying. There was less of that today. His rhetoric was at least in the ballpark of what we're hearing from Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example. Now he still was inaccurate on occasion. He issues a false timeline of what people knew and thought about the crisis over the past month. He called the contagion record setting. That was the usual Trump hyperbole. But again, by Trump's own standards, Don, I think this was better.
The puzzlement continued on Tuesday as Dana Bash declared that Trump is “being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone.”
If you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the President of the United States. This is a non-partisan, this is an important thing to note and applaud from an American standpoint, from a human standpoint. He's being the kind of leader that people need at least in tone today and yesterday. In tone that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty.
Of course, CNN couldn’t let it be all positive. The network on Tuesday went for cheap political points by omitting a key quote from a Trump statement on the virus.
A partial transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
CNN Tonight
3/16/2020
11:10 PM ET
DON LEMON: I want to bring in now CNN White House Correspondent, Boris Sanchez and our resident fact-checker Daniel Dale. Good evening, gentlemen. Daniel, you fact-check every word from the president. How did Trump today compare to the Trump you usually see?
DANIEL DALE: Don, this was a more factual Donald Trump. That's not to say he was a factual Donald Trump, but by his standards this was an improvement. Trump has been consistently dishonest until today in talking about the coronavirus pandemic. Repeatedly assuring these kinds of rose-colored proclamations that are sharply at odds with what actual experts are saying. There was less of that today. His rhetoric was at least in the ballpark of what we're hearing from Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example. Now he still was inaccurate on occasion. He issues a false timeline of what people knew and thought about the crisis over the past month. He called the contagion record setting. That was the usual Trump hyperbole. But again, by Trump's own standards, Don, I think this was better.
...
DALE: So, he has been saying this over and over. It's clear that he has consistently misled the American public into thinking the virus itself is under control. Whatever he has to say about his comment yesterday that's the message he has consistently said.
LEMON: Here's the president, Daniel, his sound at the coronavirus pandemic today.
TRUMP: We have an invisible enemy. We have a problem that a month ago nobody ever thought about.
LEMON: OK, give us the facts.
DALE: That's not even close to true. Experts and public health people like Bill Gates who is involved in public health and the U.S. intelligence community had been warning Trump and others for years that the U.S. was at risk of and unprepared --
LEMON: Daniel, we've been reporting on this a month ago. I don't -- like I --
DALE: We've been, yes. So, he was wrong in general terms about the general warnings about a pandemic and wrong about this specific pandemic. The U.S. had its first confirmed case in January. That's well over a month ago and he keeps doing this. He keeps offering this time lines to suggest that no one could have known this was coming very recently. Well, we did know it was coming.
