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tv   CNN Special Report  CNN  November 29, 2019 5:00pm-6:00pm PST

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thanks so much for joining us tonight. a cnn special report "all the president's lies" starts now. >> announcer: the following is a cnn special report. this is a scam. it's a whole hoax. they've defeated isis. >> we all know he does it. >> the whistle-blower has been very inaccurate. >> he's the babe ruth of lies. >> windmill. they say the noise causes cancer. >> this is a drug for him. >> there is no president that lied as if it were a form of breathing except donald trump. s >> nobody's been more transparent than me. >> this isn't a partisan thing. he just empirically says a tremendous number of things that are just completely wrong.
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>> yes, exactly. >> in recent months, it's been about 22 a day. >> from the weather, the infamous sharpie. you can't make this stuff up. >> stronger, better, cheaper. >> to immigration and trade. >> we're not paying for the tariffs. china is paying for the tariffs. for the 100th time. >> so we wanted to know, what is the impact of all these lies? in the u.s. -- >> repetition increases the belief in false news. >> on capitol hill -- >> the president was a factor in my decision not to run again. >> in science -- >> what's at stake? >> lives. >> and the world -- >> the president stands up and basically says -- >> what a great outcome. congratulations. >> well, no, that's not the case. >> most of what he says should probably be presumed to be false until it's proven to be true. >> i am a conservative republican. never did i imagine i would be
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pointing out the gross flaws of a republican president. >> people say to me all the time, well, what am i supposed to believe? >> what should we believe? who can we trust? tonight, a cnn special report, "all the president's lies." >> okay. >> hi, i'm jake tapper in washington. most presidents tell lies, whether obama's "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" or bush's declaration that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the notion of white house falsehoods is not new. what is new, however, is the sheer volume and degree of false statements coming from this president, donald trump. and as he mounts his defense from the impeachment inquiry on a foundation of lies, i wondered what is the actual impact of this on our nation, and what happens if there is some major international crisis and he
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needs all of the american people to believe him, to trust him, to have faith in his words. i mean god forbid that ever happened, but if your word means nothing, what happens then? >> maybe i could just see that, kevin. >> it's really kind of mind-blowing to think we had a cat 5 hurricane that sat off the coast of florida for multiple days, and we weren't crazy evacuating, and it was because we had confidence in that forecast. and then the story became alabama. >> the alabama saga began september 1st when the president tweeted that along with other states, hurricane dorian was headed there. >> alabama is going to get a piece of it, it looks like. >> if you go back through all the forecasts, alabama had a minuscule chance, basically close to zero chance of any
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significant weather. >> alabama residents panicked by trump's tweet inundated the birmingham national weather service. >> they decided, well, we're going to put out a quick statement to warn people that this rumor is not true, not realizing that the president of the united states had caused the rumor in the first place. >> that was the original chart. >> even after national weather service officials tweeted the correction, president trump persisted. >> was going toward the gulf. that was what was originally projected. >> giving an oval office hurricane update with an obsolete weather map. >> somebody, possibly the president -- i don't know. somebody in the white house took a black magic marker and extended the cone, if you will, of warning into alabama. the infamous sharpie-gate, right? and it could have died there. it probably would have. >> yet sharpie-gate ignited into a political firestorm when two days later, noaa, which oversees
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the national weather service, released a statement publicly siding with the president. according to some media reports, trump's staff pressured noaa to declare his lies to be true. >> no, i never did that. i never did that. that's a whole hoax by the fake news media. >> you were with noaa for more than 30 years. you've seen a lot of presidents. have you ever seen anything like this? >> no, i haven't seen anything like this at all. i don't think i've ever seen such outrage. when you start to move the focus off of the national weather service to the white house, then you begin to politicize this. now you've blurred the source. if we see repetition of these type of things, then i think the public's confidence in the accuracy of our forecast is called into question because the question will be, was that the national weather service forecast or is that what the administration told them to do? >> so what's at stake? >> lives. i think what we're in danger of
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losing here is people won't take action when we need it, whether it's in hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods. and when they don't take action, people die. >> way before the alabama-sharpie stuff, trump was already lying about the weather. >> such as on his first day in office. >> but i have to say, the crowd was unbelievable today. you know, i looked at the rain, which never came. it's like god was looking down on us, i will tell you. >> meet daniel dale. >> if you were there, you know that it rained during his speech from literally the first week of his presidency, trump and his administration taught us that you just can't rely on what they're saying about even the most verifiable things that we can see with our own eyes. >> dale was hired as a sort of lie detector for cnn. >> reporters would sometimes fact-check him on twitter, but it would mostly stay on twitter. so i thought, i'm going to tweet a daily list of how many false
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things he said. and this is a quantifiable, empirical matter. if nancy pelosi was averaging 60 false claims a week, i'd probably do a tally too. but the fact is that no one else in american public life, at least in washington, is telling as many lies as the president donald trump. >> we asked the white house to participate in this documentary about the president and his relationship with facts, and they declined. >> the first hundred days, he averaged about five false or misleading claims a day. but in recent months, it's been about 22. >> glenn kessler heads up the fact-checking team at "the washington post." >> we have a pinocchio scale. four pinocchios is the worst. three pinocchios is mostly false. something that is really, really bad, what we came up with is the bottomless pinocchio because he repeats things over and over even though they've been deemed false. >> republicans in congress passed the biggest tax cut and reform in the history of our
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country. >> that's wrong. it actually ranks eighth. >> dale uses a spreadsheet to keep track of trump's false claims. >> they're all coded. >> these are all new lies? each one is a different lie? >> when he repeats it, i count it again. >> it's just incredible. it's like baseball statistics except if lying were like for hitters what an rbi is. >> listen to this one. >> trump lies about almost everything. every conceivable topic. over six weeks we tracked this summer, it was the economy and trade that had become the number one topic. >> you can't have a $500 billion a year trade deficit. >> the number is exaggerated. >> what is the effect of this barrage of lies? >> trump has created a situation where a lot of people who still trust him are not going to believe people who are trying to give them important, accurate information about their lives. whether that's doctors or
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scientists who are telling that climate change is a real problem. >> because president trump does not adhere to facts, he has no apparent regard for science for scientists. he's rolled back environmental policies and blocked progress fighting climate change. >> climate change is a hoax. everybody remembers that. it's wrong, but everybody remembers it. >> by the way, today we have the cleanest air. we have the cleanest water that we've ever had in the history of our country. >> we have more carbon dioxide in the air than we ever have in the history of human civilization. no, we don't have the cleanest air. he mocks things, and then you have people like me or other scientists, it's like, well, no, it's not like that. it's complicated. >> what this president has been doing is unfortunately numbing us to lies. >> christine todd whitman was a two-term republican governor and headed up the epa for president george w. bush.
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>> they have put a gag on scientists for instance. scientists know that if they find something as they do their basic science research, if it's contrary to what the administration wants, you don't bring it up. >> he's literally taking a half century of environmental protections that were put in place to protect our water, to protect our air, and to act on climate, and eliminating them over the course of a few years. >> as troublesome according to military brass, trump turning a blind eye to climate change poses a threat to our national security. >> it changes the very operating environment where our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines need to work and need to prevail. the arctic is kind of a poster child for that, how the ice is melting out. >> and although definitive lines between climate change and geopolitical impacts are hard to prove conclusively, climatologist michael mann has
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an even bigger concern. >> syria is suffering from the worst drought in at least 900 years, and that drought forced rural farmers into the cities like aleppo. it creates an environment where terrorist organizations can more easily recruit people, and that is the context in which isis formed. >> leading to catastrophe. up next, perhaps trump's biggest lie. >> the whistle-blower's been very inaccurate. the whistle-blower got it all wrong. >> it was a four-pinocchio claim. he said it 29 times. if you have moderate to severe psoriasis,
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you know, it's a whole scam. it's an impeachment scam. >> this "washington post" headline says it all. as the biggest scandal of his presidency blew up, trump made falsehoods his impeachment defense. fact checkers stayed busy. >> we've had false claim after false claim. we were surprised to see that even though we had only covered a couple weeks, it instantly grew to more than 250 claims. one of his statements about the whistle-blower, that the whistle-blower was very inaccurate, almost instantly became a bottomless pinocchio,
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which you get if you repeat 20 or more times. >> he's referring to remarks trump made about a whistle-blower complaint that stated that the president had tried to pressure ukraine and withheld aid while pushing for dirt on joe biden and his son, hunter. >> the whistle-blower's report was very wrong. >> i think with the ukraine scandal and the conspiracy theory that the president is depending on, we're seeing lying at a scale that is somewhat new and is very complex. he looks for hints from others. oh, ukraine was to blame for interfering in the 2016 election, not russia. this is all crazy talk, and all of it is a lie. >> the president, part of his lack of faith in facts is his belief in conspiracy theories. pushing the ukrainians to investigate this crazy theory of
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the dnc server is in ukraine -- >> it's head-shaking. what matters is he's saying things that are clearly not backed by facts, that is clearly at variance with reality, and that diminishes his credibility. >> more false claims were found in the transcript of the call between him and the ukrainian president. >> my phone call was perfecto. it was totally appropriate. >> he said that joe biden specifically pressured ukraine to take a prosecutor off that particular case. that's not what happened. >> if a republican ever said what joe biden said, they'd be getting the electric chair by right now. >> there is no president that lied as if it were a form of breathing except donald trump. in his mind, nixon thought he was doing what's best for the united states. donald trump is operating on what's best for himself. >> he weaponized himself to damage joe biden, and you know
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what? he may have been successful in that while at the same time blowing up his own presidency. >> republican congressman charlie dent resigned last year, partly out of frustration with president trump. >> i dealt with the president on health care. we had quite a celebrated dust-up. >> dent's talking about challenging trump in 2017 over the president's efforts to repeal and replace the affordable care act, widely nobody as obamacare. that republican bill collapsed, but trump has not given up. >> let me just tell you exactly what my message is. the republican party will soon be known as the party of health care. you watch. >> based on my reporting on this issue, president trump does not understand health care. and so when he dabbles in it, he often runs into falsehoods repeatedly. >> abby phillip is a cnn white house correspondent. >> the trump administration is in a lawsuit right now arguing that the affordable care act needs to be scrapped altogether, which would incredibly disrupt
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the health care system. but when you talk to president trump about health care, he claims that they're trying to preserve protections for pre-existing conditions. and all of those things are not true based on the administration's position that they're taking in court. >> we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. >> he wants to make the picture seem the best for him politically as possible even if it's not aligned with the truth. >> deals, that's what i do is deals. >> the president casts himself as a deal maker, but very few deals have actually been struck. in january 2018 during a surreal televised meeting, president trump shocked lawmakers from both parties when he appeared open to an immigration deal that would eventually grant millions of undocumented immigrants citizenship. >> you're not far away from comprehensive immigration reform, and if you want to take it that further step, i'll take the heat. i don't care. my whole life has been heat. >> donald trump has never taken
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the heat on anything. >> republican linda chavez served as the director of the office of public liaison for president ronald reagan. >> donald trump is not a great deal maker. immigration is one of his signature issues, and he's been unwilling to even consider that. he has not acted as if congress even has a role to play. >> trump never signed immigration reform. he later reversed himself, throwing his support behind a conservative republican immigration bill. >> i hope we gave you enough material. this should cover you for about two weeks. >> again, in february. >> i really see a lot of common ground. >> trump stunned republicans by embracing democrats on a comprehensive gun control law. >> i mean you can buy all these weapons. >> this is what you're going to have to discuss. joe and pat, you're going to have to discuss that. you'll sit down with dianne and everybody else. >> it made for great tv, but that proposed gun legislation never went anywhere. in the wake of several recent
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deadly shootings, trump has continued to flip-flop on gun control. >> frankly, we need intelligent background checks, okay? >> yet weeks after that statement, on fox he dialed back. >> going very slowly in one way because we want to make sure it's right. >> congress is in a virtual holding pattern on any gun legislation. >> i've said repeatedly that we need some guidance from the president about what kind of proposal that would make a difference he would actually sign into law. >> the white house blames the democrats and impeachment for the holdup, but trump has repeatedly blown up negotiations. >> donald trump has told me specifically he's not interested in making deals that people feel good about later. in fact, he doesn't want to go back and make a second deal with the same party. he's happy to take everything for himself and then move on. so we now have a paralyzed washington.
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>> it's very easy actually to work with me. you know why it's easy? because i make all the decisions. >> few decisions, few deals. perhaps that's one of the reasons why many house republicans are exiting. >> i didn't want to continue to deal with the circus, and there will be more. there will be more departures. >> coming up -- >> the one word that scares him the most is recession. she wanted to move someplace warm.
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the tariffs are not being paid for by our people. it's being paid for by china. china is paying for the tariffs for the 100th time. >> it's a demonstrably false statement. donald trump is a graduate of the university of pennsylvania. every time donald trump says the chinese are paying those tariffs, that sound you hear is the sound of heads exploding at the wharton school of business. >> that's because those billions of dollars in tariffs president trump placed on thousands of chinese items entering the u.s. is usually paid for by the u.s. importer, who often passes much of that cost to you. >> they're paid for by the americans that are buying chinese products. so rather than use the word "tariff," we should say this is a tax on americans. >> what americans are hurting because of the tariffs? >> well, consumers have to pay higher prices. farmers have been particularly hurt because of the retaliation.
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>> retaliation. china placed tariffs on hundreds of american products. >> it is a pretty typical plant. >> hurting farmers such as this man in western pennsylvania, who spoke with cnn's gary tuchman this summer. >> what percentage of your soybeans is exported? >> 100% of my beans. >> 100%? >> right. >> do you know how much of it goes to china before these tariffs? >> i would assume they all went to china. >> farmers, however, are feeling a little relief thanks to billions in u.s. government subsidies and a recent move from china to ease some agricultural tariffs. along the main coast, lobster dealers have no such relief. >> well, i used to sell about half of my lobsters to china, and now i can't sell any of my lobsters to china. so it's impacted about half of my business, 50% of my sales. >> so why did the president
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decide to tell this lie? >> the american taxpayer is not paying for it. >> his goal is headlines. headlines and provoking rage, polarization. but there's also part of the administration, that sort of "china is an evil empire" camp that really always wanted to see the u.s. separating from china, that would like to see us have a fundamentally different economic system. and i think to the extent it bolsters him with his base, trump is quite happy to go along with that. >> china was taking $500 billion a year out of the united states. >> once again, that's not factual. >> first of all, the number is exaggerated. it is not $500 billion. last year, the u.s. trade deficit with china was around $380 billion. >> and we lose for many years $500 billion a year with china, and many other countries lose billions. >> it's not a money-losing thing. it just means that we buy more products from china than the chinese buy from the united
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states, and it that's a good example of where it's hard to say it's a lie because i think he really believes we are losing that money. >> if the president says, oh, they're holding billions of dollars in our debt, that sounds really bad. and he has paved the way for this regime of lying by discrediting economic indicators in the past. >> discrediting economic indicators by exaggerating. >> republicans passed the biggest tax cut and reform in history with massive tax cuts for the middle class. >> misrepresenting. >> we have no inflation. that's a very big thing. >> and lying about economic data. president trump does this all the time. >> i talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. they may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now. >> then press secretary sean spicer may have sounded like he was joking, but he was talking about a serious issue, the
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president's willingness to discredit official government numbers but only when it suits him. >> he would say that he doesn't believe what the unemployment rate was announced to be during the obama administration. those numbers are cooked. >> i hear 5.3% unemployment. that is the biggest joke there is in this country. >> so now that he's president, he'll cite those numbers. >> so the unemployment numbers just came out, and they're the best numbers we've had in over 50 years. >> but he'll say, i'm the source now. when obama was the source, that was the discredited source. but trust me, trust me. >> one result of this misinformation from president trump, it may have helped juice the economy. that's according to robert schiller, a nobel prize winner in economics. his latest book looks at how stories or narratives influence economies.
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what is the impact of his lies on the economy? >> in the long run, i think it's not good to set up an atmosphere of lies and counterlies because i think it's hard to do business in that environment. but in the short run, it can boost business by creating some kind of confidence, some sort of false beliefs. >> such as exaggerating communications with china to make it seem as though a trade deal is imminent. >> china called last night on top trade people and said, let's get back to the table. >> there's no evidence that phone call was ever made. that was a monday in late august. the dow had dropped 623 points the friday before. two officials told cnn trump conflated some messages coming from china because he was eager to project optimism that might boost markets. it may have worked. the dow closed up 270 points that monday. and keep in mind a president's
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boasting can boost the market or the overall economy. it has happened before. >> calvin coolidge was accused of untruths in the 1920s in promoting the bull market of the roaring '20s. after the 1929 crash, coolidge became a subject of ridicule. >> fast forward to today where there is evidence that the u.s. economy is slowing down, but the president refuses to accept that fact. tweeting late august, the fake news lamestream media is doing everything possible to create a u.s. recession even though the numbers and facts are working totally in the opposite direction. >> the u.s. economy is slowing. trade has been flat or falling for a number of years now. >> the one word that scares him the most is "recession." he almost is like the witch melting in the wizard of oz when you say the word. he crosses himself, no, because
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that will doom him. >> he has run so much on i'm good for the markets, i'm good for the u.s. economy. well, if we're in a recession, it's not going to feel that way to a lot of people. >> in this area right here, there's probably 30,000 pounds of lobsters. >> it already doesn't feel that way to the business owners struggling because of the president's tariffs. >> we really developed the business in china starting in 2009. this was the focus of my business, and now the canadians have my customers, and i don't know if i can ever get them back. >> as for her future -- >> if he's re-elected and the tariffs stay in effect, i quit. and i won't be the only one. >> up next, what the president's lies say to america's allies. ♪ as a home instead caregiver, for everything that i give, i get so much in return.
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but what i have done is i've defeated isis. we have defeated isis essentially. we defeated isis. >> isis was never really defeated. >> when the u.s. president lies on the world stage, he is doing more than trampling truth. >> we captured many, many isis fighters. most of them came from europe. >> he's upending world order. >> the united states has essentially gone from what i
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would describe as the principal architect and the principal general contractor of the world, the preserver of the world, to now we've come the principal disruptor. >> trump's lies are a big part of that disrupting. richard haass was the director of policy planning for the state department under president george w. bush, and he's now the president of the council on foreign relations. he believes there are two kinds of trump lies. >> one is to only present one side of a story. >> such as hailing the end to the recent turkish assault on the kurds in northern syria. >> by getting that cease-fire to stick, we've done something that's very, very special. >> instead of explaining that he helps facilitate turkey's attack by withdrawing the u.s. troops who, as part of their duties, were protecting the kurds, a u.s. ally. >> and then you have situations like we saw more recently in the wake of his decision toward turkey and syria where the
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president stands up and basically says, this is a great success. >> and now people are saying, wow, what a great outcome. >> well, no, that's not the case. >> the case was kurds living near the turkish border were syria lost lives, homes, territory. >> we've done a good job. >> that's not what the president's lead adviser on syria and against isis testified on the hill just 90 minutes before president trump delivered that victory speech. >> the turkish incursion into northeast syria is a tragedy. it was long-standing u.s. government policy in two administrations to keep them from happening. >> we have been telling the kurds that we would try to make sure that they weren't murdered or tortured. >> but the president had also promised he would bring the troops home. >> i campaigned on bringing our
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soldiers back home, and that's what i'm doing. >> he sees an election coming with americans in syria, and he just pulls them out. he's trying to fulfill those campaign promises as an inoculation against the lies. >> he pulled them out of northern syria, but there remain u.s. troops in syria. >> those who remain will continue to execute counterterrorism operations while staying in close contact with the syrian democratic forces who have fought alongside us. additionally, the united states will retain control of oil fields in northeast syria. >> u.s. troops are still there. they're just not protecting kurds, who lost thousands of people while helping the u.s. fight isis. >> we certainly betrayed an ally in the kurds. >> and this amplified an ominous message that has been ricochetting around the globe ever since trump took office. >> we don't stand behind our
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deals. we're not honest, and the world doesn't trust us. >> what does that do to other allies of the united states when they see, oh, the word of the united states, the word of president trump is actually worthless? what effect does that have? >> you read the israeli press. it makes israel more uncomfortable about taking risks. the saudis increasingly believe they're on their own. >> he has made it so that now the japanese and the south koreans are looking at we're going to have to deal with kim jong-un because we can't trust the united states to be there for us. >> by definition, if you're an ally of the united states, you've made the consequential decision to place your fate in our hands. if it's determined what we are saying can't be taken at face value, they're going to basically say we can't depend on these americans. they don't speak consistently. they're not being honest with us, so we're going to maybe develop nuclear weapons of our own, or we're going to cut deals
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of our own. so i think that's the danger with our friends. >> and the enemies? >> i think our foes are going to be much more prone to testing us, whether it's an iran or a putin. >> on iran, the u.s. pulled out of the iran nuclear deal, trump saying he didn't like the deal and that iran was not complying with it. >> but they are not in compliance with the agreement. >> both u.s. allies and some of the president's own advisers said iran was in compliance. it's not anymore. the iranians are now enriching uranium beyond the allowed amount and using centrifuges banned under the deal. all of this is designed to pressure europe to change the terms of the deal to compensate for the u.s. withdrawal from it. >> just pulling out in some ways undercuts our standing in the world stage. any country that signs a deal with a democrat has to believe that if a republican comes in or vice versa, that that agreement is going to stand. >> that has added yet another
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reason for the global community to question mr. trump, who has threatened military action if iran steps out of line. he tweeted in may, quote, if iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of iran. >> why should the iranians worry over what we might do? they may just say, well, they didn't help the saudis after the saudis were attacked. >> and then there's russia. >> putin. what really worries me is how do we know that he won't basically say, well, i've gotten away with this on ukraine? >> he's talking about putin's illegal annexation of crimea, which happened during the obama administration. >> i've gotten away with this on syria. >> he's referring to putin's decision to move russian troops into the syrian territory recently abandoned by the u.s. >> maybe he's going to probe us with some nato country, maybe in montenegro, maybe in estonia. and my concern is that this inconstancy, this unwillingness
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to stand by what we say and be consistent with what we say, i'm worried it's going to lead to a lot of tests for the united states. >> more tests, haass believes, because the u.s. president has less credibility. >> and there's no person's credibility that matters more than the president of the united states. it is the person in whom billions of people around the world through their governments have placed their futures, their faith, their security, their confidence. >> up next, the impact of trump's lies on the human mind. >> as dishonesty gradually increases, the reaction of the public actually decreases. tremfya® helps adults with moderate to severe
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november 4th, in lexington, kentucky. >> you haven't heard about the whistle-blower after that, have you? >> as impeachment loomed, the president did not let up on false statements. >> the whistle-blower said lots of things that weren't so good, folks. you're going to find out. >> he believes that if he says it over and over again, it will
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somehow make it truer, and it doesn't. >> as you know -- >> trump lies are growing and getting bolder. >> one might have hoped that he would have slowed down, but instead he's actually gotten worse. >> some of his defenders will say, you know, he doesn't get every detail right. you guys in the media make too big a deal out of this. >> i did not have sexual relations with that woman. >> look, every politician sometimes lies, at least gets things wrong. trump isn't always intentional when he's getting things wrong. but after literally thousands of these, at some point i think those defenses just start to sound silly. with this frequency, this quantity, there is an intentional strategy. >> conservative analyst amanda carpenter believes that strategy is gaslighting. it's an abstract concept of manipulation, making people believe things that are not there. >> i wrote the book "gaslighting america" because i see what
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trump is doing is so much more than lying. it's bigger than that. he finds these narratives that are floating around the conspiracy theory blogs and picks up on them because there's an appetite for it. ukraine-scapade is classic gaslighting. >> where is hunter? >> he just doesn't tell a simple lie. he spins things out. look, he's doing government investigations to find things that weren't there. >> carpenter is talking about falsehoods spun by trump and his personal lawyer, rudy giuliani. conspiracy theories that joe biden pushed out a ukrainian prosecutor because he had been investigating his son, hunter. that's false according to mounting evidence including testimonies from top diplomats, who paint a vivid picture of giuliani's efforts to coax ukraine into launching a probe into joe biden ahead of the 2020 elections. >> take a look at biden, and
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you'll see tremendous corruption. >> the trouble comes when the public believes these false claims rather than the facts. >> he's excellent at spinning these things up. >> historian timothy snyder has another theory. >> he lies all the time but not out of conviction. he lies to make sure we're all confused. >> it's similar, he says, to another leader across the ocean. >> the single moeps sst sim la- similarity to mr. trump and mr. putin, you say it's actually the journalists who are the l lia lia liars. >> almost everything "the washington post" does is fake. >> then you say you have the
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best spectacle and the best platform because you're the president of the country. >> reporter: could trump's attacks influence other leaders and other countries? a libyan tv station in 2017 seized on a trump fake news tweet to discredit a cnn investigative report on slavery in libya. >> others around the world have gotten the message. they won't pay a price federal budget they behave badly in this realm and we're no longer setting an example that individuals around the world want to emulate. >> the president's weapon choice for spreading falsehoods is twitt twitter. >> the breadth and speed to which his comments travel is very different than anything we've ever seen in presidential history. when we analyze all of the true and false verified news that was spread on twitter, what we found was that false news diffused farther, faster, deeper and more
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broadly than the truth in every category of was in that we studied. >> his study shows lies stick. the more we hear them. >> veeresearch shows that repetition increases the belief in false news. even if i am repeating to you the false news headline in order to tell you that it's false news, hearing it again and again will make me believe that falsity. >> so how does all of this lying affect us? what happens when a lie hits your brain? >> repeated lying is like perfume. the first time you put it on, it really smells quite strongly. the next time you put it on, less so. and after a few weeks, you can't smell it anymore because you're desensitized. >> last year this scientist and her colleagues put her perfume
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theory to the test. >> we said we would see less reaction from the blackand inner circsir -- public and inner circle. the reaction of the public actually decreases. >> while most americans trust the news media over president trump when it comes to who is telling the truth about important issues, three quarters of republicans trust president trump over the news media. >> there is an echo chamber. folks who aren't necessarily wi willing to fact check this president, he --
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>> don't try to defend the unexplainable. >> i'm terrified this level of lying will become the new norm in politics. >> is this the new norm? the u.s. is still scarred by lies around watergate and vietnam. will president trump's falsehoods forever mark this era? how can we trust the next president? >> i think these are all challenges and they're totally normal and we have to remember that democracy is not given to us, democracy is something that we have to work really hard to create. >> part of that hard work these days is seeking out the facts and then agreeing to accept them as fact.
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>> tapes don't lie. >> the president lied. >> mr. president is not the fake news. >> you have to do your own research or go to an independent source to see if it's true. it's not my job to tell citizen voters how to behave. as a fact checker, i know there's nothing so small that i can trust that it's true from trump. every single thing has to be verified. >> it exhausts people. >> it's lying. don't do it. >> exhausting but necessary. >> president trump i think fairly deliberately missed the point there. (chime)
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welcome to this 360 special, the stephen colbert interview. he's been a familiar face for more than a decade, starting off in improve and becoming a regular correspondent on "the daily show." then came "the colbert report" where he played the role of an ultra conservative host. in 2015, he inherited the coveted late-night spot on cbs where david letterman had reigned for more than 20 years. all eyes and pressure were on colbert as he stopped playing a character and started being himself. after the 2016 election, stephen colbert really hit his stride as his show tried to make sense of the

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