President Donald Trump claimed his predecessor took no action to reform police, but MSNBC's "Morning Joe" rolled video proving those claims are false.
Trump announced his own version of law enforcement reform in the wake of nationwide protests against police brutality, and took a shot at former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden -- his Democratic rival in November's election.
"President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn't try is they had no idea how to do it," Trump said Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden.
In fact, the nation's first Black president made multiple moves to reform police and reduce bias in policing, but Trump's administration has rolled most of those back.
"Obvious fact-check there on President Trump's claim about his predecessor's efforts to reform policing," said co-Mika Brzezinski. "In fact, the Trump administration has spent much of its time unraveling those Obama administration police reforms."
Host Joe Scarborough mocked the president's easily disproved lies.
"You know," he said, "it would be as if Donald Trump criticized his predecessor for not knowing how to properly walk down a ramp and drink a glass of water."
Co-host Willie Geist said the president's obvious lies were a form of abusive behavior, and listed evidence of those lies.
"I think the term gaslighting has been overused in the last few years, but that is explicit gaslighting, which is to say, telling us something is true that is demonstrably not true," Geist said. "Obviously, President Obama and his administration, they launched an initiative to allow the Justice Department to investigate police departments as they did in Ferguson, Missouri, for example. The Trump administration backpedaled on that, unrolled that. Shortly before that, as you heard there, President Obama announced an initiative to stop selling surplus military equipment to police departments. The Trump administration undid that, as well."
"There's a long list," Geist added. "He's just making things up, and he did it again yesterday."
