It’s going to be relevant quite often in the next four years, so say it with me, media: “Donald Trump lied.” That’s L-I-E-D. As in, knowingly told a falsehood. Today’s edition: Donald Trump lied about keeping Ford from closing a plant in Kentucky and moving it to Mexico. “Just got a call from my friend Bill Ford, Chairman of Ford,” Trump tweeted, continuing that Ford “advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky—no Mexico.” That is seriously misleading but not yet a lie. This is:
Ford is keeping its Kentucky plant. But there’s a reason we know Trump had nothing to do with that decision—that’s because Ford never planned to close the plant, and had announced what its real plans were last year:
Ford has never announced plans to move to Mexico either its Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, which produces the Lincoln Navigator, or the Louisville Assembly Plant, which produces the Lincoln MKC and the Ford Escape.
In a statement on Thursday night, following Trump's tweet, the company said it had told Trump it would cancel a plan to shift production of a single model — the MKC — from Kentucky to Mexico. The company last year indicated it would be moving MKC production out of Louisville, though it did not announce where it was going. At the time, union leaders said the shift would not cost any jobs in Kentucky, because Escape production would replace lost MKC production.
So let’s ditch the euphemisms. Once you’ve laid out the facts, established that Trump was wrong about said facts, and established that Trump had every opportunity to know what the facts were, call a lie a lie. A misstatement is when he says that November 28 is Election Day. This is not a misstatement:
This isn't the first time Trump has misstated facts about a Ford move. In October 2015, he tweeted that the company had halted plans to build a factory in Mexico and would locate in Ohio instead, and he claimed credit for the decision. The company said he was wrong, and that it was continuing to build its plant in Mexico.
That’s a lie. It’s a lie told for an obvious purpose—to make it look like Donald Trump is keeping jobs in the U.S. And if he lies about enough jobs being kept in the U.S. because of him, he could fool some people into believing that he is better for the economy than he is.
It’s a short word. It’s not hard to spell. It has a clear meaning. L-I-E.
