CNN reporter Jim Acosta attacked President Donald Trump following his Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday.
Acosta called the speech “hazardous to the truth.”
“That address probably should have come with a surgeon general’s warning — it was hazardous to the truth,” Acosta said.
“There were a number of claims that the president made in that speech that are just not going to stand up to the facts. You mentioned a couple of them, one of them being this thing that he’s said over and over again that the new trade deal with Mexico is going to somehow pay for the wall,” Acosta continued.
“Chris, this just goes back to what we were all anticipating before this address, and that is that this was primarily going to be recycled rhetoric from the president’s rallies and his immigration speeches and I think that’s pretty much what we got.”
Acosta also said that the president “continued to paint immigrants as criminals and killers and so on when they come across the border illegally.”
During his first Oval Office address Tuesday, Trump highlighted the negative effects of illegal immigration on the United States and calling the porous southern border a “humanitarian crisis – a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.”
The president also discussed his experiences meeting the families of Americans killed by illegal aliens, saying, “Over the last several years, I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible.”
“I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, or the sadness gripping their souls,” Trump said. “How much more American blood must be shed before Congress does its job?”
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