'Utter nonsense': Trump’s latest fake history lesson debunked in brutal CNN fact-check

President Donald Trump delved into history during a 4th of July speech as well as a conversation with a reporter on Monday, July 6. And according to CNN's Daniel Dale, he got key facts wrong both times.

Trump brought up George Washington, the United States' first president, during his conversation with a reporter — who asked about his cryptocurrency ventures. Many Trump critics are arguing that he is improperly using his position as president to profit from digital currencies, and Trump brought up Washington in an effort to show that he is doing nothing wrong.

Trump told the reporter that Washington "had two desks in his pre-White House," adding, "And they were right next to each other. One was for business, and one was for the presidency. He had two desks in the same room. And so, you're allowed to. But I choose not to. I don't talk to my kids about, you know, this stuff."

But according to Dale, that's a "fictional story" about the first U.S. president.

Dale, in his fact-check for CNN, explains, "Washington did conduct some personal business while he was president, but he didn't have separate desks for business matters and official matters. Historians debunked the two-desks tale when Trump delivered it more than six years ago; one historian told CNN it was 'utter nonsense,' one said it was 'an absurd allegation,' and one said, 'I don't know what he's talking about.'"

Dale continues, "This might be considered a matter of trivia rather than current importance. But Trump told the story to try to fend off pressing concerns about his wealth-building while in office — if the revered first president could have a whole separate desk devoted to business affairs while serving, why can't this president do big business while serving? And it wasn't a one-time slip. Rather, it's part of Trump's long history of fake history. For years now, for a variety of tactical reasons, he has deployed imaginary stories about U.S. history, world history and his own history."

Trump, according to Dale, was also distorting history when he talked about the Panama Canal on Independence Day 2026.

"During his July 4 speech marking the nation's 250th birthday," Dale explains, "Trump spoke of Americans' role in building the Panama Canal — the vital waterway he has previously said the U.S. should not have ceded to Panama last century. 'And by the way,' Trump added, '38,000 Americans died to give us one of the greatest engineering feats of all time: Panama Canal.' That number is not close to true."

The CNN fact-checker elaborates, "While the century-old records are imprecise, they show about 5600 people died during the Canal's American construction phase between 1903 and 1914 — and 'of those, the vast majority were Afro-Caribbeans,' such as workers from Barbados and Jamaica, Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book 'The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal,' told CNN after Trump made a similar claim in his inaugural address last year. The late historian David McCullough, author of another book on the building of the Canal, found that 'the number of white Americans who died was about 350.' Thousands of additional workers, perhaps around 22,000, died during the French construction phase that preceded the American phase. But Trump said, as he has before, that he was talking about American deaths in particular."

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