If Rudy Giulliani were the Republican presidential nominee, he’d take his ball and go home. Right now. The former mayor of New York City and a Donald Trump advisor thinks that Lester Holt, the NBC anchor and moderator for the presidential debate on Monday, “should be ashamed of himself,” and that he was wrong, wrong, wrong, just as wrong can be, to fact-check a Trump statement.
“If I were Donald Trump I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker,” Giuliani said. “The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker and in two particular cases an enormously ignorant, completely misinformed fact checker.”
The problem, of course, is that Giuliani is wrong. Holt didn’t fact-check Trump. Trump fact-checked Holt, who was correct when he made the following statement about the stop-and-frisk policy in New York City.
Holt: ...Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.
TRUMP: No, you're wrong. It went before a judge, who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her. And our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case. They would have won an appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places where it's allowed.
HOLT: The argument is that it's a form of racial profiling.
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See that: Holt made a statement and Trump tried to fact-check him. And he was wrong, of course. But in the reality-challenged world of Trump and supporters like Giuliani, there is no statement, no policy, no fact that can’t but turned on its head if it might benefit the Republican’s campaign.
These are the facts:
Under stop-and-frisk, New York police officers were empowered to detain and search people for often-vague pretexts. (A Twitter account tweeted thousands of examples of the reasons for such stops.) If any illegal item or substance was found, an arrest resulted.
In 2013, a federal judge determined that the policy of stop-and-frisk in New York City was discriminatory and unconstitutional. The city challenged the ruling (under then Mayor Michael Bloomberg), but the transition to the new mayor (Bill de Blasio) in 2014 meant that the appeal was dropped. The practice is still viewed very negatively by communities of color in New York City.
And just how much does Trump love this unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy that got tossed in New York? So much that in an interview on Fox & Friends Tuesday, the Republican nominee says that should he become president he is going to export the practice to Chicago.
“Chicago needs stop-and-frisk. People are criticizing me for that. Or people can say whatever they want, but they asked me about Chicago and I think stop-and-frisk with good, strong, you know, good, strong, law and order. But you have to do something. It can’t continue the way it’s going.”