Dale: Reflections on four weird years checking Donald Trump’s every word



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I had to email a Babe Ruth museum to find out if the president had made a bunch of false claims about the baseball legend by awarding him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. (He had.)
I had to email some of Michigan’s top organizations to find out if the president actually received a state “Man of the Year” award that he kept calling for. (Nope.)

I have checked every public word Donald Trump has said or tweeted in just under four years. The work was incessant. The work was incredibly bizarre.

Many politicians lie as a means to an end – to get out of a scandal or to inflate their political achievements. Trump was willing to lie about everything, all the time, often for no obvious reason. It was lying as a way of life.

And it took a big chunk of my own life.

How it started

I started counting Trump’s false claims in September 2016, at the end of his run against Hillary Clinton, when I was the Washington correspondent for my hometown newspaper, the Toronto Star of Canada. I started because I was frustrated with a gap in most of the American media. Trump’s relentless dishonesty was barely mentioned in the papers, let alone treated for what it was: a central story of this campaign.

So I thought I would tweet a occasional list false things Trump was saying. Then Michael Moore, the filmmaker, tweeted that I made an “everyday” list. I suddenly had thousands of impatient new Twitter followers. And I thought: My God, I guess I have to do this everyday …
I thought Trump’s deception was bad at the time. It was much worse. In 2017, Trump recorded an average of 2.9 false statements per day. In 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. What started out as a side project that I could handle in a few hours a week started requiring regular nights. By the time I joined CNN in mid-2019, I needed a second reporter, Tara Subramaniam.
Trump’s dishonesty in 2017 tended to be improvised improvised. His 2018 dishonesty was much more scripted; he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his Ukraine scandal of 2019. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic – holding so many daily “briefings” dishonest that CNN needed me on TV right after to debunk the nonsense viewers had just heard.

Dark consequences

People are almost certainly dead because of Trump’s lie about Covid-19. And people have died on Capitol Hill because of Trump’s frenzy of lies about the 2020 election. While there was some solid absurd comedy mixed in with the president’s dishonesty repertoire – I couldn’t help but to be entertained by his imaginary “sir” tales of beefy blue-collar workers crying in his presence – there were always dark consequences, too.
One of them was anger at journalists. I received hundreds of hate emails, thousands of angry tweets, a graphic death threat that I felt compelled to report to the police. For all Twitter moms worries about my mental healthhowever, the work was always more tiring than traumatic. I was banging home in my pajama pants, not covering up a war.

I lost my temper once. Watching an early pandemic briefing in which Trump falsely assured Americans the virus was under control, I choked for a minute thinking about all the people who would likely die because of the president’s lie.

There was nothing to be done to stop it. Whether it was his back-to-back coronavirus lies or trivial lies like the making of Michigan’s man of the year, he kept lying no matter how many times the fact checkers noted. that he was wrong. People kept asking me if the work seemed pointless to me given its impermeability to correction.

It never has been. The goal was never to change Trump’s behavior.

I had three goals. First, to get the facts from readers and viewers that they weren’t getting from their president. Second, show other journalists when the president was lying so they can incorporate that information into their own work. Third, take a stand for the truth – declare that there was still a verifiable reality no matter how much Trump tried to erase it, and that we were not going to surrender no matter how hard Trump tried. discredit us.

A daily routine

And so I stuck with a daily routine that I could never have imagined before Trump launched his campaign.

I rolled over in my bed, turned off my alarm clock, and opened Twitter to see what the President of the United States might have said while I was asleep. And then, because Trump lied on a staggering variety of subjects, I would try to quickly educate myself on things I knew nothing about – trade with China, or the Obama-era veterans health care legislation, or hurricane forecasting.
The lie sometimes continued until I fell asleep. Whenever I felt like I was catching up, Trump was lying about something new – while keeping most of the old lies in regular rotation. When I started Tweeter Fact-checks on Trump’s rally claims moments after making them, admirers saw it as some sort of magic trick. In truth, it was quite easy. The president kept repeating the same false things over and over again.
It was, in short, a lot. In September 2020, I had to give up my efforts to produce a full tally of false allegations: Trump was lying so much during the campaign that I physically couldn’t keep up. By that time, I had counted around 9,000 false statements since September 2016.
Trump never criticized me all this time. (He did block me on twitter in 2017.) And unlike assistants to other politicians I have audited, Trump’s subordinates in the White House never came in contact to try to scold me or make me forget that he had been inaccurate.

I thought it was revealing.

Whatever Trump officials said publicly, they probably also knew that Trump had lied a lot. They also knew that no matter what a guy wrote for a Canadian newspaper or said on CNN, they could convey his lies to his base unchallenged through social media and friendly media like Fox News, One America News and Breitbart.

Be honest with the public

Perhaps my most disturbing experience on this beat was a trip to Trump-friendly towns in Ohio in 2017. I went to ask his supporters if they knew he was lying. A bunch of them didn’t. Worse yet, several of them did – and told me they liked lying because it annoyed Washington elites like me.
I never got a good idea of ​​how many Trump supporters genuinely interested in the work of fact checkers, although I noted with interest that some of the 2016 Trump voters who switched to Joe Biden in 2020 mentioned his lie as a factor in their disenchantment. That part of the electorate aside, it has never been more evident that a good chunk of the president’s base has followed or preceded him into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

Frankly, I don’t know how to reach this hardcore band. But we must remember that this is a minority of the country, and we must not let its belief in lies deter us from our mission of telling the truth. Whether we’re covering Trump or Biden or any other politician, we need to be frank with our readers and viewers.

Trump’s media coverage has improved since the insufficient coverage in 2016 prompted me to embark on this project. By 2020, some mainstream media would at least occasionally use the word “lie” in their coverage of Trump; some at least occasionally wrote stories emphasizing dishonesty. To be frank, however, I think the coverage of the lie was insufficient until the end.

Too often, coverage of clearly dishonest Trump speeches still mentions dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, the cover still cited the president’s lies without explaining that they were wrong.

Telling people what is true and what is false is a fundamental responsibility of every journalist and every medium. Highlighting a lie is an objective report, not a bias. And as interesting as it all has been to me, fact-checking shouldn’t be left to the appointed fact-checker.



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