January 9, 2017 --
Confirmation hearings kick off Tuesday
That would be today. Not any day prior to today.
Of course the hearing start today but you can bet the vetting and everything else that preceeds the hearing has been done.
Be that as it may, what Trump said was,
"Confirmation is going great,” Trump told reporters in an unexpected appearance Monday in the lobby of his New York building.
He didn't say "vetting and everything else that precedes the hearing" is going well, and he didn't say something like that. He didn't use the future tense of "to be," saying something like "confirmation
will go great." The man said "confirmation," not something other than "confirmation," and the reporter's question specifically asked about "confirmation hearings."
I can speculate on why he didn't say something that was 100% factually accurate, but I don't know precisely why. What I do know is Trump has a very long track record of saying things that are far from 100% factually accurate.
Of course, as Kellyann Conway has implied,
we should not focus on what Trump actually says. Or as Trump surrogate, Scottie Nell Hughes, said, "
There's no such thing...as facts."