Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was fact-checked by a close ally, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, while he tried to criticize Vice President Kamala Harris for her response to Hurricane Helene.
During a Saturday interview on The Ingraham Angle, ahead of his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump tried to accuse his Democratic opponent of attending fundraisers rather than spending time in North Carolina, which was devastated by flooding last week.
“She shouldn’t be at fundraisers. She’s at fundraisers, and her teleprompter went off, and she didn’t do well with the teleprompter off,” Trump said.
He added: “It happens to me a lot. When the teleprompter goes off, you have to be able to do it. She didn’t get through it. But she shouldn’t be there anyway. She should be—I would say that North Carolina is bad, is so bad.”
Ingraham then interjected, “She was there today for three hours, I believe,” before moving on to a question about whether Trump was politicizing the storm, which he denied doing.
Contrary to the former president’s claim, Harris was in North Carolina that day as part of the federal government’s emergency management response. Trump had previously visited a flood-damaged area in Georgia, but as a private citizen, he has no official role in the federal emergency response.
Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign and Fox News via email for comment.
Trump has faced heavy criticism in North Carolina after making false statements about the federal response to Hurricane Helene—with his critics accusing him of undermining the efforts of local officials, the Biden administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to benefit himself politically.
Ingraham, a staunch Trump ally, is an unlikely figure to fact-check him. Trump, his campaign and the wider MAGA movement have opposed live fact-checking during interviews.
Earlier this month, Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the campaign declined a 60 Minutes interview partly because of the program’s insistence on live fact-checking.
Alex Brandon/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Many leading Republicans, including Trump, were also deeply critical of the ABC News journalists who moderated the September 10 presidential debate between Trump and Harris. The moderators fact-checked Trump when he falsely accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the pets of the people that live there” and when he repeated the false claim that he won the 2020 election, but that his victory was stolen through widespread voter fraud.
Last week, during the vice presidential debate between Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vance falsely described the Haitians in Springfield as being “illegal immigrants.” When the moderator responded that Springfield had “a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” in the U.S., Vance responded, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.”
