Fact-checking Donald Trump was one of the big stories of the pre-debate weekend, but will it be one of the big stories of the debate itself? The Trump campaign is, unsurprisingly, agitating against any fact-checking by moderator Lester Holt. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on ABC’s This Week that:
“I really don’t appreciate the campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact-checkers and that these debate moderators should some how do their bidding.”
Yeah, media, enough with the fact-checking. Just report whatever Donald Trump says, as he says it, with no context or corrections. Literal stenography, that’s your job. And you, debate moderator Lester Holt. If Trump elects to claim during the debate that he has been campaigning as the pro-immigration candidate all along, you are not to do the bidding of the Clinton campaign by pointing out that this is a lie.
You have to wonder what effect it will have on Holt that Trump’s bluster in the lead-up to the debate has included the claim that he would be biased against Trump because he’s a Democrat—when Holt is in fact a Republican. But never fear. This wasn’t a lie, Conway explained, because Trump didn’t actually know Holt was a Republican when claiming he was a Democrat. If the Trump campaign is extending this logic—that you can say anything as long as you don’t definitively know it’s not true—to policy, that explains an awful lot. Willful ignorance is an affirmative defense!
For their part, the Clinton campaign is just hoping Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to spend the entire debate being a one-woman fact-checking team.
“We’re really focused on this opportunity that Hillary has to speak directly to the voters on the issues,” [campaign manager Robby] Mook said in an interview Monday morning. “But we are concerned that Donald Trump may lie, he may throw misinformation out there, and that Hillary will have to spend all of her time trying to correct the record rather than talking about the things she wants to accomplish.”
Among all the things we don’t know about this debate, one thing we do know is that if Trump realizes he won’t be fact-checked by the moderator, he will lie like a warehouse of rugs. It’s up to Lester Holt how that will go.
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