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As Donald Trump continues to threaten to send National Guard troops into Chicago, Nicolle Wallace called out the president for spreading lies about crime in the city, which she said are “designed to scare people.”
On Tuesday’s “Deadline: White House,” Wallace took Trump to task over his false claims. “I think if they were on solid ground, they wouldn’t be lying so much, would they?” Wallace asked, before offering a fact-check of some of the president’s recent statements in which he justified the use of federal force in the city.
Wallace addressed Trump’s assertion that Chicago is the “murder capital” of the world. “Fact-check: false,” Wallace said. Despite the president’s attempts to paint the Democratic-run city as a “hellhole,” Wallace pointed out the city with the highest crime rate in the U.S. is in the Republican-led state of Tennessee.
According to FBI data, Memphis has the highest violent crime rate of any U.S. city. “If you think Chicago is a ‘hellhole,’ you know it looks like, statistically, Memphis is underneath that. So I’m not sure what’s underneath the hole of hell, but it must be really sad for them,” Wallace said.
The “Deadline: White House” host suggested Trump’s false justifications could be an effort to distract the American people from the fact that his administration is “gutting” funding for law enforcement across the country. Trump and congressional Republicans have cut hundreds of millions in public safety and crime prevention grants.
Wallace said that although Trump’s lies were obvious to everyone on “Earth 1,” the same can’t be said for the president’s supporters. The MSNBC host criticized conservative media for going along with Trump’s false claims about crime in Democratic-run cities and feeding into the misinformation: “If you watch Fox, all you see is a loop.”
Watch Wallace’s full fact-check in the clip at the top of the page.