CNN’s Erica Hill: Trump Was ‘Very Low Energy,’ Repeating Things

Tuesday on CNN’s “News Central,” anchor Erica Hill said President Donald Trump was “very low energy” and “going back to things that he had already addressed” during his press conference.

Co-host Brianna Keilar said, “That was a very long press conference that President Trump just held, one year into his second term in the White House. Almost two hours, I think it was—almost two hours. And he kept coming back to the topic of immigration, but he was covering a lot of different things in his characteristic weave, although this was sort of a moment that I think stood out. He ended a little bit more energetically, but certainly the beginning, where he was not taking questions, not so much.”

Hill said, “No, it was—and we noticed it right away—it was very low energy in the beginning, sort of reading, sort of doing a weave. But it almost seemed at some points he was going back to things that he had already addressed, reading them off of the booklet, the book that he brought out with him. Not clear if he didn’t remember that he talked about them already or if he wanted to go back to them.

She added, “There is also, over the last nearly two hours, as you point out, there’s a lot that we need to fact-check here, because there was a lot of what the president said that was not true. Daniel Dale is joining us for some of that. You know, Daniel, as you’ve noted for us over the last couple of hours, some of these are things that we have heard from the president a number of times, certainly over the past year. What are the points that he continued to hammer home that are inaccurate? I mean, we picked up on gas prices—a little fudgy there—the price of goods, inflation. Walk us through.”

Dale said, ‘There are just so many. I’m struggling to keep track of it, you know. ‘$18 trillion investment in the U.S.’—that’s a fictional figure. 600% reduction in prescription drug prices—that is fictional. I ended eight unendable wars—eight is a fictional figure. We inherited inflation at a historic high—he inherited 3% inflation, just a little bit above where it is now, although it did hit about a 40-year high in June 2022, more than two years before he returned to office.”

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