Politics
NEW: Trump Vindicated After CNN’s ‘Fact-Check’ Goes Down In Flames
A feeble attempt by CNN fact-checkers to call out lies in President Donald Trump’s speech before Congress fell flat after a White House spokesperson brought the receipts to prove that the network was being biased in its assessment.
One of the president’s most notable lines Tuesday night came when declaring that the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency had located $8 million spent by the Biden administration’s National Institutes of Health to “make mice transgender.” The line received a hearty laugh from lawmakers, but CNN immediately went to work seeking to debunk the finding.
Reporter Deidre McPhillips wrote a lengthy fact-check article that initially focused on three studies identified by DOGE. One grant for $299,940 from the National Cancer Institute aimed to “compare breast cancer rates among female mice and those receiving testosterone therapy.” Separately, two grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases totaling $455,120 focused on how “an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy.”
These studies, McPhillips wrote, prove that Trump “falsely claimed” transgender mice were being studied with federal funds. But it wasn’t long before the White House released a statement citing a total of six NIH studies that indeed appeared to study how certain medications would affect mice that had undergone hormone replacement.
“Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse funded by the American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration ‘for making mice transgender,’” the White House statement reads, according to the Daily Caller. “The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).”
In addition to the three studies first cited by CNN, administration officials pointed to six studies totaling $8.2 million, all of which involved hormonal replacement in mice. The network was forced to retract its statement that President Trump made a false statement and issued a correction, saying the report had “incorrectly characterized” his statement and that it needed context.
Among the Biden-era grants:
- $455,000 to study “gender-affirming hormone therapy on HIV-vaccine induced immune responses”;
- $2.5 million to study the reproductive consequences of hormone therapy;
- $299,940 to study testosterone therapy on breast cancer risk and treatment outcomes;
- $735,113 to study the effects of hormone therapy on mouse microbiomes;
- $1.2 million to study “androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis”; and,
- $3.1 million to study hormones as mediators of sex influences in asthma.
“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender,” McPhillips wrote later.
