Donald Trump’s numerous false claims after winning the New Hampshire GOP primary Tuesday prompted cable networks to issue lengthy fact-checks of the notoriously truth-averse former president.
MSNBC, which had opted not to take Trump’s Iowa caucus victory speech live, this time went another route, with Rachel Maddow explaining: “This is a decision that we revisit constantly and that we will revisit constantly.”
After noting that Trump’s tone after Iowa seemed less charged than usual, she said that tuning into his comments in New Hampshire will allow viewers to “see how he uses this moment, at least at first.”
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“We’ll see how it goes. Again, this is a decision that is one that we consider to be an open-ended live decision,” she said.
Lo and behold, mere seconds after Trump began speaking, he described something that didn’t happen: his victories in New Hampshire in “the generals,” in addition to the GOP primaries.
Within the minute, Maddow broke back in to correct the record.
“This is part of the issue here,” she said with a chuckle. What Trump claimed “is not true,” she noted, because in 2016 he lost to Hillary Clinton by fewer than three thousand votes, and in 2020 did so to Joe Biden by a much wider margin.
“So, the former president has opened his remarks tonight once again by proclaiming falsehoods about previous elections. This is what makes it hard to take him—his pronouncements live. We’ll try again, though. Here we go,” Maddow said, before cutting back.
CNN, meanwhile, issued a fact-check several minutes later, once Trump had begun to give others on stage a turn at the podium.
“Completely untrue,” reporter Daniel Dale said of Trump’s alternate history. Additional comments of Trump’s were not accurate, he went on to explain.
“He also claimed something he has been saying in the lead-up to this primary, and that is that Democrats were able to vote. In fact, only registered Republicans and people registered as undeclared—New Hampshire independents—were permitted to cast ballots in the Republican primary,” Dale said.
“The deadline to switch your affiliation was more than three months ago, in early October. So no Democrats—registered Democrats—-were voting in the election.”
As for Fox News, which aired all of Trump’s comments, host and one-time Trump rally speaker Sean Hannity provided viewers with no fact-check at all.
