Former President Donald Trump has been ramping up his attacks on potential presidential rival Ron DeSantis, but CNN fact checker Daniel Dale has found a number of egregious whoppers in his attacks on the Florida governor.
One of the most egregious instances, writes Dale, comes from Trump telling a "story that cannot possibly be true" when discussing his decision to endorse DeSantis in 2018.
Specifically, Trump claimed that he decided to give DeSantis a chance after seeing the future Florida governor on television defending him against the "impeachment hoax," and Dale notes that this claim is completely out of sync with the actual timeline of when these events occurred.
"Trump issued his official endorsement of DeSantis in June 2018 – but his first impeachment battle, over his effort to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden, did not begin until the fall of 2019," writes Dale. "Trump might have been thinking of how DeSantis defended him over a special counsel investigation in 2017 into his campaign’s relationship with Russia, which he has also called a 'hoax,' but that probe did not lead to impeachment."
This wasn't the only false or misleading claim Trump made against DeSantis, Dale finds, as Trump also quoted crime statistics about Florida without putting them into the context of population size. Additionally, Trump's criticisms of DeSantis for closing beaches at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic came when Trump's own administration was calling for a nationwide shutdown to try to contain the virus that would go on to kill more than 1 million Americans.
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