CNN’s Daniel Dale Was Given An Epic Send-off On Twitter After Four Long Years Of Tirelessly Fact-Checking Trump

In the last few months, especially as Trump seemed to utter little but voter fraud lies, CNN’s tireless fact-checker Daniel Dale became something of a celebrity himself. He appeared on air after rallies to plow through a mere Greatest Hits of the president’s distortions and outright fibs. He wrote epic and exhaustive (and exhausting) pieces, dismantling his speeches, untruth by untruth. He also sometimes went after others in Trump’s circle. But Dale has been on the job the entire last four years, and on the last night of Trump’s presidency, he was given a huge online send-off for his heroic work.

Dale — who previously announced he’d have time to fact-check other people, including incoming president Joe Biden, who tend to bend the truth quite a lot less than the Donald — penned an essay for his home news network about the last four years of his life on the job. In fact, it was longer than four years; he started doing it in September of 2016:

I had to email the Boy Scouts to find out if the President had invented a nonexistent phone call from the head of the organization. (He had.)

I had to email a Babe Ruth museum to find out if the President had made a bunch of false claims about the baseball legend while awarding him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. (He had.)

I had to email some of Michigan’s most prominent organizations to find out if the President had actually received a state “Man of the Year” award he kept claiming he once got. (Nope.)

I fact checked every public word Donald Trump said or tweeted for just under four years. The job was unrelenting. The job was unrelentingly weird.

And on it went, Dale revealing that the gig “took over much of my own life.”

He walked readers through a day in his life:

I would roll over in bed, turn off my alarm, and open Twitter to see what lies the President of the United States might have told while I was sleeping. And then, because Trump lied about a staggering variety of topics, I would try to rapidly educate myself on stuff I had known nothing about — trade with China, or Obama-era veterans’ health care legislation, or hurricane forecasting.

The lying sometimes continued until I had gone to sleep. Every time I felt like I had caught up, Trump would lie about something new — while still keeping many of the old lies in regular rotation. When I started tweeting fact checks of Trump’s rally claims moments after he made them, admirers viewed this as a kind of magic trick. In truth, it was pretty easy. The President kept saying the same false stuff over and over.

Sounds exhausting! After Dale tweeted the article out on Twitter, a lot of people imagined how happy he must be to be done with an epic job well done.

Others thanked Canada, where Dale is from.

Some joked about where he could go next.

And many simply thanked him for his service.

You can enjoy one of his fact-checking marathons below. In the meantime, nice work, Mr. Dale.

(Via CNN)