CNN calls out NBC for letting Trump get away with 'rapid-fire dishonesty'

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump sat down with NBC News reporter Tony Llamas for a wide-ranging interview on multiple subjects. However, Llamas often let the president lie without pushing back. Now, CNN is taking Llamas to task for not doing his job — while debunking Trump's lies.

In a Thursday article, CNN's Daniel Dale did a point-by-point fact-check of Trump's biggest lies, and admonished Llamas for doing little to counter what he called Trump's "rapid-fire dishonesty." The CNN fact-checker observed that while NBC published a fact-check of Trump's claims after the interview, Llamas himself frequently responded to Trump's outright falsehoods with "right" or "yeah," and sometimes "didn’t acknowledge them at all."

"Llamas’ hands-off approach to the president’s falsehoods left people watching the interview on television and through social media clips without immediate corrective information on a variety of pressing subjects," Dale wrote. "An exchange about inflation, for example, was littered with a bunch of inaccurate Trump figures and assertions that Llamas let pass by with the word 'right.' And in one case, when Trump claimed it’s only 'very few' product prices that have stubbornly refused to fall during this presidency, Llamas initially responded with a comment that made it sound like he was endorsing the false claim: 'Yeah, very few. I get it.'"

When it came to Trump's insistence about presiding over an increase in prices of consumer goods, Trump insisted to Llamas that the increases are limited to "very few" items. But Dale wrote that the Consumer Price Index was actually 2.7 percent higher in December 2025 compared to December 2024, and many more products have become more expensive since Trump's second term began than have become cheaper.

Dale also disputed Trump's claim to Llamas that he "inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country." The all-time highest inflation rate of 23.7 percent was actually set in 1920. And while former President Joe Biden saw the inflation rate jump as high as 9.1 percent under his watch in 2022, that was a 48-year high. Dale credited Llamas for telling Trump that Biden had to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic, which was the chief cause of high inflation rates.

Trump also told the NBC reporter that gas prices were "$1.99 a gallon" in 2026, though Dale found that the average price for a gallon of gas was $2.89 per gallon according to data published by AAA. GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan told CNN that out of more than 150,000 gas stations, only 18 to 34 offered gas prices under $2 per gallon. Dale reminded readers that Llamas' only response to Trump's claim was "yeah."

"An average over those dates would be 28 stations over the course of the week, or 0.018% of all U.S. stations. I think I’d rather find the needle in the haystack at that point," De Haan said.

• george conway
• noam chomsky
• civil war
• Kayleigh mcenany
• Melania trump
• drudge report
• paul krugman
• Lindsey graham
• Lincoln project
• al franken bill maher
• People of praise
• Ivanka trump
• eric trump