President Donald Trump held an event in the Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon to praise his administration's lifting of hundreds of environmental, technological, and commercial regulations.
Similar to his bizarre press conference in the Rose Garden on Tuesday, Trump spent a significant portion of the event lambasting former President Barack Obama and 2020 presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Trump credited himself with a low pre-pandemic unemployment rate and claimed the economic and banking regulations instituted by President Barack Obama had catastrophic effects.
That's when Neil Cavuto of Fox News cut into the President's speech to give the network's viewers something they may not be used to: a fact check.
Watch below.
Fox News cuts coverage of the President's speech and Cavuto fact checks the President's speech pic.twitter.com/pjzETXWJtx
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) July 16, 2020
Cavuto reminded viewers that Obama's banking regulations were in response to the economic crisis of 2008, in which reckless investments by banks led to an abysmal financial market, widespread unemployment, and ubiquitous home foreclosures. The U.S. housing market took years to recover and, were it not for government bailouts, numerous financial institutions would have collapsed.
Cavuto pointed to this context when fact checking Trump, saying Obama's regulations
"were geared to preventing banks from ever investing in things like risky mortgage securities, pooling and selling them all. That tended to be really the scourge of that entire period. So more than half the regulations the Obama administration added were of that bent, post-the meltdown."
He then corrected Trump on the results of the regulations.
"When the President referred to the...disappointing results of the prior administration for adding of those regulations, be that as it may, the unemployment rate did—under Barack Obama—go down from a high of 10 percent to around 4.7 percent. President Trump of course sent that even lower, eventually getting us down to a three and a half percent unemployment rate."
He brought it around to a broader point about Trump's characterization of the Obama era.
"I didn't want to leave you with the impression that during those eight years when Obama first came into office and we were bleeding about a million jobs a month, that that was a standard there and that characterized the whole eight years...Both presidents can certainly crow about the growth that they saw, but it was not a disaster under Barack Obama."
People were stunned to see one of the most conservative media outlets in the United States fact check Trump in defense of Obama.
Cavuto's fact check came just days after Trump issued a tweet criticizing the network—something he's made a habit of doing when it doesn't cover him as favorably as he likes.
People may not have taken Fox's side in the matter, but they certainly didn't take Trump's either.
The President has yet to tweet about Neil Cavuto.
