Now that President-elect Joe Biden has become President Joe Biden, many journalists are finding the courage to call out lies from public figures. Though, to be fair, with Biden, that just won’t be necessary as often as with Trump.
Fact checker Daniel Dale felt like the whole responsibility of calling out Trump’s lies fell on him, as he recalled the past four years, which have aged him and us more than Trump, for CNN.
Media coverage of Trump has improved since the inadequate 2016 coverage prompted me to embark on this project. By 2020, some traditional outlets would at least occasionally use the word "lie" in their Trump coverage; some would at least occasionally write stories focusing on the dishonesty. To be frank, though, I think the coverage of the lying remained inadequate to the end.
I agree. It was worse on TV, as news anchors read Trump’s lies with a straight face. Even just an eye roll would have gone a long way.
Too often, coverage of flagrantly dishonest Trump speeches still mentioned the dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, coverage still quoted the ... [Trump]'s lies without explaining that they were wrong.
Some armchair psychiatrists have already diagnosed Dale with post-traumatic stress disorder. Certainly the effort has had an effect on his psyche, and I doubt it’s been positive.
I fact checked every public word Donald Trump said or tweeted for just under four years. The job was unrelenting. The job was unrelentingly weird.
…
I started counting Trump's false claims in September 2016, late in his race against Hillary Clinton, when I was the Washington correspondent for my hometown newspaper, Canada's Toronto Star. I started because I was frustrated by a gap in most US media coverage. Trump's incessant dishonesty was barely being mentioned in news copy, let alone treated as what it was: a central story of that campaign.
So I thought I'd tweet out an
occasional list of the false stuff Trump was saying. Then Michael Moore, the filmmaker,
tweeted that I made a list "every single day." I suddenly got thousands of eager new Twitter followers. And I thought:
My God, I guess I need to do this every single day...
I thought Trump's deception was bad then. It got much worse. In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. What started as a side project I could handle in a few hours a week started requiring regular all-nighters. By the time I joined CNN in mid-2019, it required a second reporter,
Tara Subramaniam.
If I recall correctly, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of lying all the time, even when she didn’t need to. But doesn’t that actually describe Trump? A normal politician generally doesn’t lie about things that can be quickly and easily verified.
Remember Trump’s awkwardly inappropriate speech to the Boy Scouts of America? The one in which he almost confessed to sexual depravity on the high seas? Trump later claimed that the president of the Boy Scouts called him and told him it was the best speech he had ever heard.
And certainly neither Boy Scout President Randall Stephenson nor Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh called Trump, neither man called Trump “sir” twice while crying for the first time ever in his life.
Granted that either of them might lie about this. But why would you believe someone with a very public track record for dishonesty and fraud over a couple of guys you’d never heard of before?
Trump’s lies have had deadly consequences since 2015, or perhaps even earlier. Trump has emboldened white supremacists to commit hate crimes, to threaten journalists and intimidate victims and witnesses of Trump’s many crimes.
Every coronavirus death in America is Trump’s fault. Disbanding the pandemic response team was a mistake, but he could have recovered from that. Because Trump lied about the true extent of the danger of the virus, Republican governors were unwilling to take basic precautions.
Though Trump’s failure to invoke the Defense Production Act for protective equipment for health care workers hasn’t helped either, nor his failure to make a good deal for a sufficient number of doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Wasn’t Trump supposed to be a brilliant businessman who would use his fabulous deal-making skills to make America great again? Trump was going to be so busy making great deals for America that he wouldn’t have time to go golfing all the time like President Barack Obama. That was another bunch of lies.
Trump’s range of subjects to lie about was astounding. Of course he lied about Stormy Daniels, because supposedly evangelical voters care about the sanctity of marriage. But lie about the weather? Trump took it so far he committed the obscure federal crime of falsifying a weather report.
No matter how often Daniel Dale pointed out Trump’s lies, Trump kept on lying.
There was nothing to be done to stop him. Whether it was his consequential coronavirus lies or trivial lies like the Michigan Man of the Year fabrication, he kept lying no matter how many times fact checkers noted he was wrong. People kept asking me if the work felt pointless given his imperviousness to correction.
It never did. The point was never to change Trump's own behavior.
I had three aims. One, to get readers and viewers the facts they were not getting from their [person holding the title of] president. Two, to show other journalists when the … [Trump] was lying so they might incorporate that information into their own work. Three, to take a stand for truth -- to declare that there was still such a thing as verifiable reality, no matter how hard Trump tried to erase it, and that we weren't going to surrender, no matter how hard Trump tried to discredit us.
Of course Biden lies, too. Some thirty years ago, Biden lied about his educational credentials, and he was fact-checked the very next day by journalists like Sam Donaldson. I know this because there was an attack ad last year digging up that old incident.
Surely there are older as well as more recent examples of Biden lying. But such examples didn’t make it onto attack ads either because they require a lot more digging or because the Trump campaign had run out of funds to pay for the other attack ads. Not to put too fine a point on it, Trump has lied about his finances.
Though I’m also very inclined to believe the first explanation is quite correct, that we’d have to dig long and hard to find other Biden lies.
“Approximately accurate.” “Plausible.” “These figures were correct in December.” “Plausible figure that extrapolates from Census Bureau findings.” These are word combinations Dale probably never used with Trump.
No one expects the exact, precise truth from a politician. But I think we deserve a reasonable approximation to the pure, unvarnished truth.
Even if we strictly define “lying” to mean the deliberate statement of a falsehood by someone who knows the pertinent fact, Trump lied more than any of his predecessors in the White House.
Forgive Trump for not knowing that President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D, 1933 — 1945) did not serve all 16 years he was elected to. Also forgive Trump for not knowing that Frederick Douglass died in 1895, or at all.
But don’t let Trump off the hook for the Stormy Daniels hush money payments. And definitely don’t let him off the hook for his lies that incited the January 6 terrorist attack, and don’t let him off the hook for his lies about that terrorist attack after the fact.
Telling people what is true and what is false is a core responsibility of every news reporter and every outlet. Pointing out a lie is objective reporting, not bias. And as interesting as all of this has been for me, fact checking should not be left to the designated fact checker.
Hopefully Trump will never again make a public statement, instead speaking through competent lawyers who will filter out his more harmful lies. But there are still too many Republicans in Congress and in state government.
Republicans are often dishonest, and they’re better at lying than Trump. One important lie they’ve been telling: supposedly it’s unconstitutional to impeach a former president.
That’s a plausible lie, because the Constitution is written in a way that assumes all participants are interpreting it in good faith and there’s no need to spell out small details, whereas modern laws are written verbosely to avoid the kinds of ambiguities that can be exploited as loopholes.
We need only look at Article I, Section 3:
Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.
Clearly removal is no longer an option. But with Trump menacing to run again in 2024, disqualification is still very relevant.
And we should certainly want a liar like Trump to be permanently disqualified from ever again holding our democracy hostage. The Republicans who lie to protect that dreaded possibility must be called out as well.