Fact Checking Claims Made in Trump's 2023 CNN Town Hall
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Former President Donald Trump made false or misleading claims in his CNN (Lean Left bias) town hall event Wednesday night, and host Kaitlan Collins also made a misleading remark. Read a transcript here.
2020 Election: Trump didn't acknowledge his 2020 election loss when asked, and said Democrats were found "stuffing ballot boxes" in 2020 with "millions of votes" and it was caught "on government cameras." There's no evidence of that. He also denied asking Georgia's Secretary of State in 2020 to "find" him more votes.
Joe Biden: Trump claimed gas prices reached as high as $9 under President Biden. The highest recorded average price was $5.02, according to AAA. Trump appeared to exaggerate the number of classified documents Biden possessed, saying at one point he took "1,800 boxes." Biden donated 1,850 boxes of senatorial papers to the University of Delaware, and they've been stored on the campus since 2012.
Mass Shootings: Collins said "there have already been more than 200 mass shootings" in 2023. There are multiple active definitions of "mass shooting." Collins didn't mention her source, but appeared to cite the Gun Violence Archive, which counts a mass shooting as any event in which four people are shot, not including the shooter. Other trackers, such as one from USA TODAY (Lean Left), have much narrower criteria.
How the Media Covered It: Left- and center-rated sources concentrated on fact-checking Trump. Right-rated sources did less fact-checking; a Breitbart (Right) article highlighted Collins's shooting claim.
Featured Coverage of this Story
From the Right
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Claims ‘More Than 200 Mass Shootings in 2023’
CLAIM: During CNN’s Wednesday town hall with Donald Trump, moderator Kaitlan Collins claimed there have been “more than 200 mass shootings in 2023.”
VERDICT: False, as long as one adheres to the standard definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more individuals were killed by one attacker in one incident.
On May 7, 2023, Breitbart News noted that President Joe Biden made the same claim as Collins, and on May 8, 2023, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated it.
Such claims have become popular with the left because...
From the Left
FactChecking Trump’s CNN Town Hall
Former President Donald Trump’s town hall event felt like a lightning round of false and misleading claims — most of which we’ve heard before. Among them:
He claimed the conservative group True the Vote found Democrats “stuffing ballot boxes” with “millions of votes” and it was caught “on government cameras.” It did not.
Trump falsely claimed that he “didn’t ask” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” him more votes. In a Jan. 2, 2021, call, Trump told Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” which was one...
From the Left
Fact-checking Trump’s CNN town hall in New Hampshire
CNN hosted a town hall with 2024 Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on Wednesday night in New Hampshire.
Over the course of the night, Trump took questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the 2024 GOP presidential primary about a wide range of issues.
Trump made many false and unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election, violence on January 6, 2021, the economy and his handling of records after leaving the White House.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s other claims during the...
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