Daniel Dale is a reporter for the Toronto Star. This article appeared in the New Zealand Herald. He is obsessed with fact-checking Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Trump said, “No one respects women more than me.” Recently he said, “No one is less racist than me.” He is a master at projecting his own faults on others. The classic example occcurred during one of the presidential debates when Hillary said, We don’t need a president who is a puppet of Putin,” and he immediately said, “you are the puppet,” and then they both again said, “you are the puppet,” like children in a schoolyard. Recently in Paris, at a meeting of European leaders, a photographer snapped a photograph of Putin approaching Trump, and Trump was uncharacteristically beaming. He usually scowls. For Putin, an unusual big smile.
Dale writes:
I’ve made it my mission to fact-check every word Donald Trump utters as president. That means trying to watch every speech, read every transcript, decipher every tweet. I’ve accidentally established a reputation for using Twitter to point out that he’s lying within seconds of him telling a lie.
People sometimes ask in response how I can blast out these corrections so quickly. But I have no special talent. My secret is that Trump tells the same lies over and over.
On his fifth day in office, Trump baselessly alleged widespread voter fraud. He did the same thing this past week. In his third month in office, Trump falsely claimed that the United States has a $500 billion trade deficit with China. He has said the same thing more than 80 times since.
Listen to this president long enough, and you can almost sense when a lie is coming. If Trump tells a story in which an unnamed person calls him “sir,” it’s probably invented. If Trump claims he has set a record, he probably hasn’t. If Trump cites any number at all, the real number is usually smaller.
Fact-checking Trump is kind of like fact-checking one of those talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except if none of those phrases were true. As any parent who owns a squealing Elmo can tell you, the phrases can get tiresome. I’m sure my Twitter followers get bored when I remind them that Trump wasn’t the president who got the Veterans Choice health-care program passed (Barack Obama signed it into law in 2014 ), that U.S. Steel is not building six, seven, eight or nine new plants (it has recently invested in two existing plants) and that foreign governments don’t force their unsavory citizens into the lottery for U.S. green cards (would-be immigrants enter of their own free will).
I keep saying that foreign governments don’t do this, though, because Trump keeps saying they do. I believe that journalists need to be just as tireless in combating the president’s lying as the president is in telling the lies, no matter how repetitive or pedantic it can sometimes make us seem.
I’m a Canadian reporter, the Washington bureau chief for the Toronto Star. I wasn’t sent here to cover the honesty beat. I do most of the fact-checking on my own time, spending weekday nights and painful Sundays staring at rally transcripts in my pajamas.
My American colleagues have done wonderful investigative and explanatory journalism on Trump. But with some notable exceptions, like The Washington Post’s terrific fact-checking team led by Glenn Kessler, I don’t think U.S. media outlets have been persistent enough in fighting a daily battle for truth itself.
I began making a comprehensive list of Trump’s false claims in September 2016, two years after a wild four years covering infamous Toronto Mayor Rob Ford . Having spent so much time contemplating a homegrown liar, it fast became clear to me that Trump’s serial dishonesty was a central feature of his campaign. But his avalanche of deception was being treated as a sideshow to the real news rather than as the news itself — relegated to reporters’ Twitter feeds rather than featured in the headlines where it belonged.
There has been some incremental improvement in the coverage. But I still see the same troubling failures two years later. Even the best of Trump’s interviewers seldom challenge him when he lies to their faces — despite the fact that almost all of the lies have been fact-checked before.
Trump regularly makes 20 to 30 false claims in his rally speeches. But if you watched a network news segment, read an Associated Press article or glanced at the front page of the newspaper in the city that hosted him, you’d typically have no idea that he was so wholly inaccurate.
If a car salesman told you 36 untrue things in 75 minutes, that would probably be the first thing you told your friends about your trip to the dealership. It should have been the first thing we all told our readers about Trump’s August rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
This issue is so urgent because Trump is getting worse and worse. In 2017, he averaged three false claims per day. In 2018, it is about nine per day. In the month leading up to the midterms: a staggering 26 per day. By my count, he’s now at 3,749 false claims since his inauguration. The Post, which tracks both false and misleading claims, has tallied up to 6,420.
Meanwhile, the press continues to blast out the lies unnoted. Two weeks ago, Axios and the AP uncritically tweeted his nonsense about the United States being the only nation to grant birthright citizenship. (They updated after they were criticized.) It happened again Monday, when Trump earned credulous tweets and headlines from ABC, NBC and others for his groundless assertion about “massively infected” ballots in Florida.
There’s nothing especially strategic about much of Trump’s lying; he does it because that is what he has always done. But the president also knows the lies will be broadcast unfiltered to tens of millions of people — by some of the very outlets he disparages as “fake news.”
Many of Trump’s false claims are so transparently wrong that I can fact-check them with a Google search. It’s the comically trivial ones that stand out. I’ll never forget when the Boy Scouts of America got back to me to say that the president of the United States had made up a nonexistent phone call in which the Scouts’ chief executive supposedly told him he had given “the greatest speech that was ever made” to a Scout Jamboree.
For reporting such things, I receive vitriolic emails from some of Trump’s fervent supporters. More interesting to me are the messages from well-meaning skeptics. Why waste your time, people ask, when facts obviously don’t matter anymore?
I disagree. There is a substantial constituency for accurate information about the claims of a president who is, polls suggest, seen as untrustworthy by two-thirds of voters. Even people who generally know that Trump isn’t honest might not know how he is misleading them, and they might want to. The media shouldn’t treat Trump’s devotees as America’s only relevant people.
We also shouldn’t write off every devotee. I’ve met Trump voters who insist that he’s honest, even Trump voters who say they like his lying because it bothers “elites” like me. But I’ve also spoken to Trump voters like Bruce Brown of rural Pennsylvania , who gets much of his information from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Soon after I interviewed Brown about last year’s Obamacare debate, he messaged to tell me he’d discovered my list of Trump’s false claims.
I braced for him to say I’d tricked him by sounding friendly, that I, too, was fake news. Instead, he wrote: “Wow . . . I kind of knew he wasn’t truthful much of the time, but not to the degree of hundreds of lies in such a short period of time. Thanks for opening my eyes.”
A bit off topic here but Betsy Devos is Trumps sec of education. It seems as though Betsy Devos takes off many days of work. American Oversight produced data showing that Devos is actually absent 35 percent of the time! ! https://www.americanoversight.org/unexcused-absences-devos
Also, it shows how Devos has partial days as well all adding up to a secretary of education who is absent from work more times than not!
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
When Trump opens his mouth, he lies. When Trump tweets, he lies. When Trump sleeps, his dreams are filled with lies. Read this post and discover more about Trump’s endless lies.
Trump is not the Commander-in-Chief. He is the Liar-in-Chief or should that be The Emperor of Lies?
LIAR-in-Chief is right.
But his avalanche of deception was being treated as a sideshow to the real news rather than as the news itself — relegated to reporters’ Twitter feeds rather than featured in the headlines where it belonged.
Twitter does not invite anything more than a sideshow.
The Twitter of birds
Of meaningless words
Is mainly for nerds
And makers of turds
Hey, don’t insult birds! 😂
I am with GregB here. As an avid birdwatcher, I know from bird twittering exactly what bird it is. If I can hear it (an if which grows worse daily) a kinglet does not sound at all like its chickadee neighbor.
Now that I think, the same is true of Trump.
It is a side show. The more Trump lies, the more you can be assured something really dangerous is going on. The more Trump is leading reporters around by the nose making them “fact check” his blatant lies, the less those same reporters are looking into the things that really affect us.
That Trump is lying should be the default assumption – why bother proving it? It’s like trying to prove the Pope is Catholic.
exactly! And who wrote that letter to WaPo (or NYT?)? That certainly wasn’t a lie, but it sure was a distraction.
That’s easy: Whenever his mouth is open or whenever the thumbs on his tiny hands are tweeting.
>
Meghan Trainor told us how to tell when he’s lying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDc_5zpBj7s
To be fair, though, that applies to most politicians.
Nice music reference.
And, yeah…Daniel Dale….my son put me on to following him. Amazing stuff. Great reporter.
Trump is truly the Limbaugh/Alex Jones/Hannity/Savage/Lionel/any generic right wing radio/media hate spewer president. These vampires are pulling the whole country into a far right wing libertarian nightmare.
Indeed. Scary that those people have been so successful in creating a base impervious to the truth about anything.
“Fact-checking Trump is kind of like fact-checking one of those talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except if none of those phrases were true.”
Well, I’ll give him props for admitting his obsession is pointless. Who would bother to fact check a programmed doll? Who does he think he’s convincing anyway? Trump’s supporters wouldn’t be convinced if God Himself appeared in the clouds and told them so. The rest of us don’t need convincing – we know that Trump lies like we know that fish live in water.
For the life of me I cannot understand why people allow Trump to jerk them around like this and control their lives. I mean, watching/listening to every word Trump says??? What kind of a masochist does that?
Anyway, a lot of what he’s talking about is not really even falsifiable, at least in the same way your garden variety playground boasts are not falsifiable. “No one is less racist than me”??? How do you even set about proving or disproving that? And why?
Sorry, Mr. Dale, but you need to get a life.
What would Trump’s supporters do if God repeated the Ten Biblical Plagues and He reached #10, the death of the first born for every Trump supporter after God warned to stop supporting Trump before that day came … and none of them did?
The answer is simple.
Trump would hold dozens of rallies for his followers where he’d blame it all on the Democrats and anyone else he doesn’t like, including God, and urge his surviving followers to punish all of people that did not suffer from the plagues, especially the news media he doesn’t listen to.
I disagree. It is important to have somebody– even if only this Canadian reporter– but preferably, every reputable news outlet–delivering a daily fact-check on this serially-lying President. Absent that, we’ll have the 30% deplorables believing him w/o counterpoint, & the other 70% w/ glazed-over eyes getting normalized to Fake News.
“Absent that, we’ll have the 30% deplorables believing him w/o counterpoint, & the other 70% w/ glazed-over eyes getting normalized to Fake News.”
The 30% are going to believe him no matter what. The other 70% know he’s lying. What’s gained by “proving” it? And, again, you can’t “prove” that most of his lies are lies because they’re “king of the hill” sorts of playground boasts.
Let’s be honest. One of the major reasons our Dear Leader’s lies are so egregious because the so-called liberal media cannot do its job and that leads to a collective ignorance, apathy and misdirected anger among the people. Two examples: Whenever he says things like “people say,” “they say,” “I heard,” etc., the first response should always be, “Who said?”, “Who are ‘they.'”, “From where did you hear?” Now those might be transcripts worth reading. And when he dismisses all opinions, views and facts stated by those he disagrees with, as he did with Adm. McRaven most recently, that his views didn’t matter because “he supported Hillary Clinton and Obama,” have to immediately follow up with, “Are they Americans who are entitled to an opinion or point-of-view or are they automatically traitors if they criticize your policies?”
I am reminded of passages from two early, somewhat obscure plays by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In “An Angel Comes to Babylon” an angel creates the most beautiful woman in the world and searches Babylon for the most talented beggar to be her husband. Her appearance causes chaos and political upheaval that almost topples the monarchy of Nebuchadnezzar. One of his ministers explains why:
“A state’s healthy authority is only possible if earth remains earth and heaven remains heaven, in which the earth presents a reality shaped by politicians and heaven is a quaint theory of theologians about which no one needs to be the wiser. But if heaven becomes a reality, as it does now with the appearance of an angel, then human order breaks down, because in the face of a visible heaven, the state is necessarily seen as a farce. And here we have the result of this cosmic mess: a people who rise up against us.” This was written almost 70 years ago and seems eerily prescient about modern politics.
In another play that has never received the attention it deserves, “Romulus the Great,” the last Roman emperor awaits the conquering Germans as his surroundings reflect the decay of twenty years of misrule. He is more interested in the egg production of the chickens that roam freely in his house than he is on defending the city. He seems to be the only one who is unconcerned about the impending end of his empire. His ambivalence begins to be explained in a conversation with his daughter Rea:
“REA Shouldn’t one love the fatherland more than anything in the world?
“ROMULUS No, one should love it less than one human being. Before all else, one should be skeptical about one’s fatherland. It is never easier to become a murderer as it is for a fatherland.”
Romulus’s incompetence is actually deliberately intended to undermine the empire, as he explains in a dialogue with his future son-in-law, a soldier who has spent three years as a German prisoner of war:
“ÄMALIEN You are charged with having betrayed the empire.
“ROMULUS I have not betrayed my empire. Rome betrayed itself. It understood the truth, but it chose violence, it understood humanity, but it chose tyranny. It debased itself doubly: before itself and before the other nations that were subject to its power.”
Much like the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire, it’s easy to blame it on political figures. But most of the blame rests with average people—I should, but hesitate to call them and us citizens—as Shakespeare observed. The fault is not in the stars.
We just have to convince the voting public not to vote for a liar and then remind them of the old joke; “How do you know when a politician [or lawyer] is lying?” Answer: “When his mouth is moving!”
In a disappointed electorate that expects political leaders to play hard and fast with the truth, it becomes almost impossible to get anyone to vote for someone who never lies. Can we say that all voters deserve respect? Can we get them to vote for us if we confront them with their own misdirected behavior? The recent election suggests that we cannot even divorce Trump supporters from the extremists in their midst. They will cling instead to the suggestion that there really are some nice people parading around playing Nazi.
Years ago, a reporter from Playboy asked Jimmy Carter if he ever thought about other women. Carter paused and then said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” He was roundly ridiculed in the press and on talk shows for this, but this was the sort of response that a man like him–one to whom lying was repugnant–might be expected to give. I’m with you, Roy. one would think that being a pathological liar would be an automatic disqualification for the job, even for those who like his stances on issues. One would also think that making nice with Nazis would be a disqualifier. After all, in in the middle of the last century, we fought a terrible war to stop such people. What have we come to that a man this repugnant would be allowed to continue to lead our country and to embarrass us before the world?
Daily fact-checking of a serially-lying president is an antidote to “a disappointed electorate that expects political leaders to play hard and fast with the truth.” It’s salutory. It may lead electorate to expect better. Even to elect truth-tellers.
On another note, I recently read a theory that Trump Sr is not afraid of Trump Jr being indicted because he’s a concerned parent, but because he’s afraid of what that will mean for HIMSELF. Makes a lot of sense, considering what a narcissist Sr is. Jr must know a hell of a lot, so Sr is probably afraid of Jr flipping on him.
Jr would have to be indicted in a state like NY so that Sr is not be able to pardon him. I wonder if they are crimes related to money laundering, such as for all the Russian oligarchs who bought apartments in Trump Tower. Remember, Jr said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” We don’t know all the details, since Sr has since repeatedly denied doing business with Russia, but I bet Jr has a YUGE trove of dirt on his dad. Can’t wait to see how this all plays out!
How to know Trump is lying:
1. He is speaking.
2. He is tweeting.
Almost forgot something. Congratulations to Ocasio on her election. Congratulations to Bernie on his reelection. And now, with another school board election coming in three months here in Eli’s Angeles, California, time for a holiday breather.
Trump keeps topping himself with his outrageous comments. The latest: Admiral McRaven has no credibility because he was a Hillary Clinton supporter (he was not). He was an Obama supporter (he was not). He should have captured Obama Bin Laden sooner. Well, there he goes again, Cadet BoneSpurs, knowing what the military should have done. A military expert who hasn’t worn a uniform since high school! But wait. That can’t top Trump’s nutty claim that the way to avoid forest fires is to rake leaves, which he claimed he learned from the prime minister of Finland (who emphatically denied he ever said any such thing!).
Please open these two Tweets.
I got a tweet yesterday from a woman in Finland showing us how to rake in the forest, which she labeled with the hashtag #RakingAmericaGreatAgain !
I thought it was Make America Rake Again.
MAGA is short for maggot, and I don’t mean that as an insult to future flies. At least flies have a purpose in life that does not include spreading hate and supporting racism.
Thanks for the links that made us laugh. “Canadians Roomba their forests”. “Raking the forest instead of draining the swamp”. “Finland has great rakes. The best rakes. Many people are saying that. Many people, good people. Believe me.”
Trump cannot help himself. He has to lie to keep his fragile ego from crashing and burning into ashes.
I sure hope there are many INDICTMENTS coming.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ivanka-trump-used-a-personal-email-account-to-send-hundreds-of-emails-about-government-business-last-year/2018/11/19/6515d1e0-e7a1-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html?utm_term=.35dfd83afa00
Make America Rake Again? (MARA)
Ha ha ha!
Now we know where the name for Trump’s retreat — MARA Lago — came from
MARA LAGO
Make America Rake Again
Laugh At Gaffe Of
Trump again
i’m sure that Trump also has a solution for keeping Florida above water as the oceans rise. I wonder if a rake is part of that solution. Rake the water back into the ocean.
Isn’t that why they call the barrier built-in aharbor to protect the houses on the beach from waves a rakewater?
Recently we have been inundated with editorials regarding the latest climate histrionics. Despite exhortations from the liberal blogosphere, the new report from the IPCC barely scratched the front pages. Yawn!
The groundbreaking of the largest mall in the United States in Miami is unbelievable based on a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning award winner, Albert Gore, predicted that all of Miami, due to man-made global warming, due to the rising of the sea levels 20 feet, would be underwater.”
What kind of developer would waste his money etc only to realize it’s going to be submerged in a few years? What kind of responsible planning commission would permit it?
The new climate change report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not destined to become the ONLY story covered by the mainstream media. In fact, a perusal of the news over the last week or so shows that the report could barely scratch and claw its way to the front pages. It fared little better on cable news, drowned out by the latest Trump doings, the Kavanaugh controversies, and the real-world climate tragedy that just hit the Florida Panhandle.
The media, being populated by nothing other than climate hysterics who love to tell readers and viewers that the world is ending, can’t even get up the energy to cover this latest doomsday report with any enthusiasm? That’s when you know America has had enough with this nonsense.
The fact is, polls show that few Americans believe that climate change is going to have any serious effect on the planet within their lifetimes. This, even though Al Gore & Friends have been sounding the alarm bell for going on twenty years. What is the climate community to do in such a situation? Why, the Americans just had the indecency to elect a president who says climate change is a Chinese hoax! He just yanked the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement! This calls for a REPORT!
And a report we got.
Indeed, the IPCC tells us breathlessly that we only have until 2030 to make drastic changes to our global economy. Without exorbitant carbon taxes – as much as $27,000 per ton on emissions – the world will fall victim to a catastrophic series of floods, fires, droughts, famines, and, we assume, pestilence.
And the world collectively yawns.
Or at least, Americans do. Why? Because these proposals are utterly ridiculous. We’re not going to throw away the world’s industrial economy because some eggheads sit behind a computer (that they wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the advances made possible by the very economy they want to destroy) and spin us a modern version of the Book of Revelation.
We’ll do what we can. We’ll frack. We’ll work with clean coal technology. And we’ll wait and watch as the private sector comes up with energy alternatives that actually make sense and are more efficient and inexpensive than fossil fuels. And when that happens, we’ll go with those.
In the meantime, 2030 will come and go, and the UN (if it still exists by then) will rush to tell us that doomsday is once again “just around the corner.”
And we’ll have ourselves another good yawn.
Technology, during the “space age,” has allowed us to look at earth from the satellite perspective and see and know the weather conditions and temperatures at any point on the globe at any time, almost instantaneously.
The notion that we can or should do anything about that information makes about as much sense as a forewarned person sitting out a category-five hurricane because it is about to kill them.The altruistic fact that weather is a universal, seasonal, atmospheric, regional, geographical and topographical phenomenon is something over which man has no control.
the climate in the area we call the Sahara Desert did one time change drastically over a 100 year period from wet to dry and the hypothesis is that it was due to the Sun’s spots not appearing for a long number of years.
Albert Gore, predicted that Miami would be underwater due to man-made global warming causing the rising of the sea levels 20 feet. Contrary to his warning Miami is roundbreaking the largest mall in the US. What kind of developer would waste his money only to realize it’s going to be submerged in a few years? What kind of responsible planning commission would permit it?
The world will fall victim to a catastrophic series of floods, fires, droughts, famines, and pestilence.
The report found that their analysis had some faulty calculations by the scientist that produced it!
I’m not going to fact check your claims. That would be a waste of time.
The world we need to survive as a species is in serious trouble due to climate change.
I’ll go back to my practice of deleting his MAGA comments and confining Scheidell only to education
The developers, inspectors,…of NYC’s leaning Millennial Tower didn’t get Jack’s memo about wasting money.
It’s a favor to scheidell to keep his views off of a public posting site. His easily disputed arguments indicate a person who can’t think his way out of a box. In person, we can presume eye rolls deter him.
Right wing ditto heads do the nation no good.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
So, if the “evil” continues while the “good” do their “something”…
Beyond “venting”, the “something” (defining,naming,measuring,damning…)
functions as nothing.
When good men do nothing, they get nothing good done
“you are the puppet,” and then they both again said, “you are the puppet”,
like children in a schoolyard hamster wheel.
Trump made a job forDan Dale – be happy!
Acosta gets his 15 minutes of fame.
cnn continues to exist and they can’t seem to thank Trump, even though the cooking shows have a higher viewership