Here’s How Many Times Trump Lied During His Weird RNC Speech

Donald Trump unleashed so many falsehoods during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that it seemed to overwhelm CNN’s on-air fact checker. 

After Trump’s appearance Thursday night, CNN’s Daniel Dale ran through a lengthy list of Trump’s lies, having to brush past several on his list because he was running out of time to dispute each baseless claim. 

During his speech, Trump had claimed that his opponents inherited a world “at peace.”

“Trump did not achieve world peace when he was president; certainly wasn’t at peace when he left office,” Dale explained. “There were active wars or armed conflicts in dozens of nations in 2020: 51 by one research institution’s count, and then 51 again in 2021.”

“Trump handed President Biden ongoing civil wars in Yemen and Syria, of course, an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli-Iranian conflict, a war in Ethiopia,” Dale explained. There were also the U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil war in Somalia, insurgents fighting Africa’s Sahel region, violent clashes between drug cartels in Mexico, to name a few others, according to CNN.  

“I could go on for a while, but I don’t have time because there were so many other false claims. So let’s address some of those, not even all of them,” said Dale. He later noted that Trump falsely claimed to have defeated “100 percent of ISIS.” 

“In fact, the ISIS caliphate was declared fully liberated more than two years into his presidency,” Dale said. 

Trump “repeated his usual lie about Democrats having cheated in the 2020 election. It’s nonsense,” Dale said. During his speech, Trump offhandedly claimed that Democrats had somehow managed to use the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat in the 2020 election. 

“He said crime is going up. The opposite is true. It’s gone sharply down in 2023 and early 2024. It’s now lower than it was under Trump in 2020,” Dale said. Trump has repeatedly made claims about an increase in violent crime and tried to blame it on undocumented immigrants. 

Not only has Trump’s campaign failed to provide any evidence of a surge in crime committed by migrants, there has been no increase in violent crime to speak of. More importantly, U.S. citizens are proven to commit crimes at a higher rate than undocumented immigrants. Still, Trump falsely claimed that other countries were releasing people from prisons and mental institutions into the United States. 

Trump also “said we have the worst inflation we’ve ever had. Again, not even close. It is 3 percent right now. The U.S. record is 23.7 percent. He said there was no inflation under him. It was low, of course, but not nonexistent—it was 8 percent total for his presidency, 1.4 percent year over year in the month he left office,” Dale said.

Trump also lied about the price of groceries, according to Dale: “He said the price of groceries is up 57 percent under Biden. It’s actually 21 percent.”

Apparently, plenty of Trump’s numbers were all over the place. The former president “said Democrats are proposing to quadruple people’s taxes. That is imaginary. He said his tax cut was the largest in American history, not even close again,” Dale explained. A report from the Congressional Budget Office found that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama had each facilitated larger tax cuts than Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 

Much like Trump’s speech, which seemed to go on and on into eternity (it was a whopping 92 minutes), his lies continued to stack up. 

Trump claimed that the government had recently hired 88,000 IRS agents, but that number appears to be from a projection from a 2021 Treasury Department report, which predicted the agency could bring in roughly 87,000 new hires in the next decade, thanks to $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Trump “said the Biden administration does nothing to stop migrants. Well, the administration tried to get Congress to pass a bill to tighten the border, and after Trump himself helped to kill that bill, Biden took executive action to tighten the border.” Dale said. “Trump said he stopped human trafficking. Again, not true.”

Trump made plenty of false claims about his business dealings with China, claiming that the country had “stopped buying oil from Iran under him,” Dale said. “Also did not happen.”

On Thursday night, Donald Trump took the stage to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in a speech anticipated to be the grand finale of the four-day long event in Milwaukee. Instead, he put his own fan base to sleep.

Trump began his speech around 9 p.m. Central time, recounting the details of his recent near-death experience to an—initially—rapt audience. But according to some present at the convention, the energy evacuated the room as the 93-minute speech, “the longest nomination acceptance speech at a convention” per NBC News, stretched languorously into the evening.

At 10:46 p.m., Financial Times journalist Edward Luce tweeted from the convention, “People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena. Trump is boring the audience.” A few minutes later, from a “sea of [Trump] diehards” just some paces from the stage, Atlantic reporter Tim Alberta posted, “some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over.”

One X user observed, “People are visibly falling asleep,” clipping a wide shot of the audience from CBS News’s broadcast, in which more than one attendee can be seen being lulled to sleep—slumped in their chairs, with heads bowed and eyelids heavy—as Trump droned on.

As the speech finally came to a close and balloons fell on the convention, a rendition of the operatic aria “Nessun dorma” rang through the hall. The song’s title and opening lines are Italian for “Nobody shall sleep,” but, apparently, some shall.

Unverified reporting from Newsmax commentator Mark Halperin set the far-right network ablaze Thursday night with word that President Joe Biden would step aside before the weekend, but would not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris while doing so.

In a bid to understand just how this would be received, Newsmax turned to a curious person to speak on behalf of the Black community: Don Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

“And I mean, recent polling shows, I mean, we have Kamala looking worse than Joe Biden in these swing states,” prompted Newsmax host Rob Schmidt. “If they do that, how are Black women going to respond when you try to subvert the woman on the screen?”

“Well, they’re going to be very unhappy,” Guilfoyle said, completely speculating. “I mean, Joe Biden chose her because he said she was the best person to serve as vice president of the United States.”

“But to pass over her is going to be a huge problem, probably with African-American Black voters, Black women voters, all of the above.”

It wasn’t Guilfoyle’s only flub of the convention. Speaking before the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Guilfoyle blatantly lied about the quality of the jobs market when Donald Trump left office. She also suggested that she recently spoke to the centenarian veterans who fought in World War II about the unrecognizable nature of the U.S. while conveniently forgetting that it was fascism—not communism—that America fought in the war.

The soon-to-be Trump was also caught in an unfortunate visual gaffe just inches behind Trump’s head on Thursday night when she was caught aggressively grabbing her crotch on live television.

Before Donald Trump capped off the Republican National Convention with his speech accepting the party’s nomination for president, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan took the stage.

Trump seemed to really appreciate Hogan’s speech, delivered in the wrestler’s over-the-top passionate style. During the speech, the Hulkster even did his trademark T-shirt rip, discarding a black “Real Americans” muscle shirt to reveal a red Trump-Vance T-shirt underneath.

“They tried to kill the next president of the United States. Enough was enough, and I said, let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again!” Hogan shouted, pointing at the crowd, who responded with chants of “USA, USA!”

Trump appreciated Hogan’s theatrics so much that he pumped his fist and blew kisses at the former wrestler.

Why Hogan was at the RNC to begin with isn’t known, although it may have had something to do with his relationship with right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded his lawsuit against Gawker Media over the leak of a sex tape. Or it might have been because of Trump’s long relationship with World Wrestling Entertainment. Either way, Hogan’s job was to hype up the RNC crowd of “Real Americans,” and he succeeded, only for Trump to deliver a speech that went on way too long.

It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fearmongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.

Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record.

“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.

Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”

“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh … what’s happening,’” he said.

While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.