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What Trump Said Yesterday

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
22

On the blog called “Public Notice,” Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky wrote about Trump’s unhinged speech yesterday. He is angry and incoherent every time he speaks, so the media doesn’t find his rants to be newsworthy. As the authors point out, the media would jump all over Biden for the factual errors that Trump commits (yesterday, he confused the dictator of North Korea with the president of Iran); but Trump gets a pass because his errors, lies, and hatred are routine.

Rupar and Berlatsky write:

The vice presidential debate will be a main topic of political conversation today, but far more important (and disturbing) things happened before it took place.

This isn’t to say the debate wasn’t memorable. There were at least a couple exchanges that stood out. One came when JD Vance got upset about a moderator interjecting to fact-check racist lies he used to smear his own constituents….

But these moments pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.

Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.

Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term.

Trump spews and spews some more

Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.

His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.” 

The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)

Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) 

Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.” (Watch below.)

But all of this was just warning up to a scene during the Milwaukee event that would’ve ended anyone else’s presidential campaign.

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Trump mocks troops injured in the line of duty

That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.” 

After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran. (Watch below.)

Somehow, it got worse. Trump went on to characterize the Iranian attack as “a very nice thing” because Iran didn’t escalate further, which he suggested was the result of his toughness. Again, Trump praised Iran for a “nice” attack which seriously injured more than 100 US soldiers. (Walz highlighted these remarks from Trump during Tuesday’s debate, saying “when Iranian missiles did fall near US troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”)

Trump’s self-aggrandizing, confused, pompous, cynical, cruel, insulting lies are not surprising. Again, he has even pushed this particular lie before. He’s also made misleading statements to erase or distract from the fact that soldiers died in Afghanistan during his presidency. He’s called soldiers who die in combat “suckers” and “losers.”

It’s manifestly clear that Trump thinks that soldiers killed or injured on his watch are an inconvenience. He mocks their sacrifice, mocks their injuries, and praises regimes that target them.

This post at Public Notice was followed by this one, written by Stephen Robinson. It sums up a vivid portrait of Trump as an addled old man.


Trump’s ignorance, callousness, and lies are not new. But what is novel is the way they all seem to have been slowed down these days so that he seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego. He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.
The remarks Trump gave in Milwaukee before he took questions from reporters were remarkably low energy by his standards. Check out the below clip of Trump praising his catastrophic covid response in a horse rasp, continually looking down to check his notes, repeating the same phrases of self-praise, getting stuck in a loop on pet words or slogans (“Wuhan … Wuhan … ”), telling subdued and meandering lies with no rhythm or applause lines. And indeed, there is no applause; the MAGA faithful are silent, wooed into a tedious fascist stupor.

It would be nice to think that such displays of grotesque ignorance, hatred, authoritarianism, and contempt for the country, for injured service members, and indeed for his own voters, would lead everyone to conclude, en masse, that Trump is disgustingly, massively, inarguably unfit to hold any office of public trust, much less president. But as we know, partisanship, racism, and institutional failures, from the media to the courts to the Justice Department, may allow Trump to win in November.

If he does, he will sit in the Oval Office. But his decrepit campaign performances suggest he will be even less capable of pretending to be anything other than a declining bigot than he was the first time around. And who’s likely to pick up the slack?

Well, as historian Kevin Kruse says, if Trump succumbs to ill health, or just sinks into his natural state of sloth and indifference, the president, de jure or de facto, would be JD Vance, “a deeply unpopular weirdo with virtually no experience, someone who won his first election less than two years ago and even then only because he’s the puppet of an insane billionaire.”

Yesterday was yet another reminder that the Republican ticket is a hideous and embarrassing blight on the American experiment and the American character. Yet, Trump continues to slump towards power, with Vance smirking and smugly lying alongside him. We’ve got about a month before we as a country either rebuke them or follow them into derp, hate, and despair.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Politics, Trump

Dana Milbank: “You Weren’t Supposed to Fact-Check Me!”

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
5

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reacted quickly last night to the Vice-Presidential debate:

Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance lodged a whiny protest.


“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check!”


It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.


There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”


There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.

From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.

The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”


It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”


For three decades beginning in the mid-1950s, the Captain, along with Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and other friends, regaled children with fantastic stories, a Magic Drawing Board, and cartoons featuring the likes of Tom Terrific, a shape-shifting boy who lived in a tree house and could transform himself into anything he wanted by using the funnel-shaped hat that sat on his head.


But Captain Kangaroo never conjured a figure quite so outlandish as JD Vance.

This shape-shifting boy has gone from being a never-Trump author who in 2016 compared the “reprehensible” Trump to Adolf Hitler, to a venture capitalist who in 2020 said Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver,” to the junior senator from Ohio who, as Trump’s running mate in 2024, worships the ground the former president walks on.


Vance has used his own Magic Drawing Board to create a whimsical portrait of reality in this election season. He has embraced the fiction that Trump won the 2020 election. He has falsely claimed that Democrats were responsible for two assassination attempts against Trump. He has seconded Trump’s routine lies about crime, jobs, tariffs and the border. He has slandered his vice-presidential opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of “stolen valor” after Walz’s 24 years of honorable military service. And he has led the vile demonization of the Haitians in Springfield.


“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he admitted last month on CNN.


And that’s just what he did during the debate. Walz wasn’t a particularly skilled debater; he tripped over words and at one point said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters” when he was referring to the families of school-shooting victims. But even if Walz had been quicker on his feet, there wouldn’t have been a way to keep up with the fictions Vance submitted.

The senator said Harris “became the appointed border czar.” She received no such appointment.
He said “over $100 billion” of Iranian assets were unfrozen “thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.” Not so.


On abortion, he said he “never supported a national ban.” When running for the Senate two years ago, he said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”


On health care, he served up the howler of the night when he said that Trump “saved” the “collapsing” Affordable Care Act. Instead of destroying Obamacare, Vance said, “Donald Trump worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans have access to affordable care.”
In reality, of course, Trump tried his best to kill Obamacare. (John McCain famously thwarted the effort in the Senate.)


Vance capped the night by saying that Trump “peacefully” surrendered power four years ago. When Walz asked him point-blank whether Trump had lost that election, Vance would not answer.


Throughout the debate, Vance pretended that Harris was the president, referring to “Kamala Harris’s open border” and “Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.” He claimed that “Kamala Harris let in fentanyl” and “enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country.”


And on Truth Social, Trump added still zanier claims. “Tim Walz wants to abolish ICE. … I SAVED our Country from the China Virus. … CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election.” And best of all: “JD Vance just CRUSHED Tampon Tim with the FACTS.”


Fact check: Half true. JD Vance just crushed the facts.

In addition:

NPR fact-checked the debate in real time.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Lies, Vance, J.D.

The Vice-Presidential Debate: A Wash

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
56

The great debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz did not change any votes.

JD is a skilled debater, more so than Tim Walz. Both seemed to go out of their way to be civil. Neither of them attacked the other with teeth bared. They occasionally seemed to be searching for common ground.

You would need a fair amount of background knowledge to know how frequently and coolly Vance lied. He said that Trump saved Obamacare. That was a lie. In fact, Trump tried to repeal Obamacare; the party slogan was “repeal and replace.” The GOP never had a plan to put in its place. They still don’t.

Vance denied that he ever supported a national ban on abortion. That was a lie. He is on video saying just that.

Vance said for the umpteenth time that the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were there illegally; a few days ago, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that the Haitians in Springfield were legally introduced to this country.

When asked directly about January 6, he dodged the question and said that on January 20, there was a peaceful transfer of power. He didn’t mention Trump’s refusal to concede or to attend Biden’s inauguration.

When asked whether Trump lost the 2020 election, he dodged the question and claimed that Kamala Harris had engaged in censoring people during the height of COVID (I’m not sure but I think he referred to the government’s efforts to combat COVID misinformation.)

CNN released a fact-checker’s report on the debate. According to CNN, Vance was fact-checked 15 times on his claims, while Walz was fact-checked only twice.

NPR had the best of the fact checks of the debate.

Tim Walz was flustered and failed to answer crisply when questioned about claims he made over the years about being in Hong Kong at the time of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. He answered awkwardly, then said he “misspoke.”

No one is likely to change their mind after the VP debate.

Categories Elections, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Washington Post: Elon Musk’s False Tweets Are Misleading the Public about Elections

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2024 //
5

The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk has used Twitter to spread lies about our elections. He owns Twitter and is accountable to no one. Musk has 197 million followers on Twitter, he says. He has repeatedly posted lies and conspiracy theories about our elections that have been debunked by independent experts.

I follow Musk’s tweets, and I can attest that he regularly repeats lies about the election. He posts incendiary comments about non-citizens voting in large number. He seems to get his ideas straight from Donald’s mouth. He posted that some 2 million noncitizens had registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arizona. He has used his personal account to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the integrity of elections.

Musk’s online utterances don’t stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests to purge voter rolls and heighten their worry over violent threats. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of misinformation because his digital following stretches well beyond the political realm and into the technology and investment sectors, where his business achievements have earned him credibility.

After Musk bought Twitter, he made deep cuts in staff responsible for maintaining standards on the site, courted major conservative figures, and reoriented the platform to boost the reach of his account, which frequently spreads false statements without being subject to the kinds of fact checks that previously existed on the site. He reinstated accounts previously banned for violating the platform’s rules, including Donald Trump’s, and promised to usher in a less restrictive era…

Musk, who bought Twitter in November 2022, has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Democrats are “importing” undocumented people to vote in the coming election, a popular 2024 iteration of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that a global elite is replacing European-descended populations with non-White people. He has falsely asserted that electronic voting machines are unreliable and that the country should return to hand-counting ballots. And he has promoted deepfakes and other deceptive images aimed at undermining politicians he doesn’t support.

Between his purchase of Twitter and Thursday, Musk’s 52 posts or reposts about noncitizen voting — one of the main topics of false or misleading election claims he made in that time period — drew almost 700 million views, according to a Post analysis.

A separate analysis found that 50 of Musk’s false or misleading claims about the U.S. election between Jan. 1 and July 31 were debunked by independent fact-checkers and still generated almost 1.2 billion views, according to a recent study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. None displayed community notes, X’s term for user-generated fact checks that Musk has promised serve as an “immediate way to refute anything false” that is posted on the platform…

His frequent amplification of election untruths has spurred typically low-profile election officials to publicly fact-check him. His immense reach far outstrips theirs, so they say they attempt to blunt the damage of his false posts by piggybacking on them with truthful fact checks of their own.

But in their effort to spread accurate election information, they are up against a formidable adversary. “The great risk in a privatized public sphere,” said Sophia Rosenfeld, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Democracy and Truth: A Short History,” is that the owner, in this case, Musk, “can control both the flow of information and the content of that information to suit their own needs, whether financial, ideological, or both.”
Musk’s control of X and his large following mean a single post from him can effectively take fringe election-denial falsehoods mainstream, experts say.

In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said her office tracked a direct correlation between Musk’s inaccurate tweets about elections and subsequent waves of harassment of local and state election administrators.

Musk is an enthusiastic supporter of Trump. They share hostility to the most basic activity in our democracy: voting for our leaders. Discredit elections, and the ground is set for authoritarianism.

Categories Billionaires, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Who Will Republicans in Springfield, Ohio, Vote For?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2024 //
8

Jonathan V. Last is the lead editor of The Bulwark, the Never Trumper blog and one of the best political blogs.

He wondered whether Republicans in Springfield will vote for Trump after the venom he and Vance have directed at their town.He quotes from a Wall Street Journal article that dashed all of the spurious claims about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Yet Trump and Vance continue to spew their hateful lies about Haitians. On Twitter,

Jonathan Last wrote:

1. Cats and Dogs

Springfield, Ohio, is Trump country. In 2020, Clark County—of which Springfield is the major population center—went for Trump 61 percent to 37 percent.

The mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, is a Republican.

And today the Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary piece of reporting about the town’s interactions with the Trump campaign.

These bits include revelations that:

(1) The Trump campaign contacted the Springfield government on September 10 to ask if the cat/dog eating stories were true. The campaign was told, point blank, that they were not. That night, Donald Trump asserted them on the debate stage anyway.

(2) This entire conflagration began with neo-Nazis deciding to make Springfield a cause célèbre. Meaning that JD Vance is literally following a playbook put together for him by white supremacists:

On Aug. 10, a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield. The ADL identified them as Blood Tribe, which it describes as a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada.

On Aug. 27, during the routine public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting, a man identifying himself as a Blood Tribe member said: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

(3) Vance produced the name of one person he said had experienced a kidnapped pet cat. The WSJ decided to check the story out:

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

(4) The part of Vance’s assertion that “disease” was on the rise in Springfield? Also false:

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.

Read the whole thing.

Springfield’s Republican mayor said this to the Journal:

“We have told those at the national level that they are speaking these things that are untrue,” added Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a registered Republican. But he said claims have been “repeated and doubled down on.” 

Here’s my question: How is Rue going to vote in November? 

And the same question goes for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.

These guys are on the ground. They see what’s happening. They know the truth. And they understand that Trump’s and Vance’s lies—which are approaching the status of blood libel—are hurting their constituents. Not in some theoretical, possible-future-case way. But in a real way. Right now. Today.

Are they going to vote for Trump and Vance? I feel like someone should probably ask them. 

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I think we know what Anna Kilgore’s answer will be. The WSJ shows a picture of this nice cat lady. In her Trump shirt. And her Trump hat. In front of her Trump flag. It seems not to bother her at all that the Trump campaign used her to lie about the people she felt the need to apologize to.

How does that work? What’s the psychology?

No, really. Give me your most charitable explanation. Because what gets me here is that Ms. Kilgore felt bad enough about have accused her neighbors of stealing her cat that she apologized to them. So she knows the difference between right and wrong. 

Talk about this in the comments, please. And be kind. This is an exercise in understanding, not condemnation.

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2. Immigrants: They Get the Job Done

I keep pointing you to Radley Balko because he’s wonderful and you should subscribe to his newsletter. He has a piece up about what immigration has done to Springfield.

First there’s the Haitian immigrant supply part of the story:

The sole claim Trump and Vance have made about Springfield that’s actually true is that since 2021, about 12,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to the city. But no one — not the Biden administration, not George Soros, and not Kamala Harris — “sent” them there. . . .

After the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Obama administration allowed displaced people from that country to come to the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a policy created during the George H.W. Bush administration for refugees from countries in crisis. Thousands of Haitians took advantage of the opportunity.

Donald Trump revoked that status in 2019, infamously calling Haiti one of those “shithole countries” from which the U.S. should never accept immigrants. Trump would later add that all Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS,” and lament that the U.S. doesn’t get more immigrants from better countries like Norway.

Trump’s TPS revocation threatened the immigration status of tens of thousands of Haitians who came after the earthquake, many of whom by then had children who were U.S. citizens. The Biden administration then reinstated TPS protection in 2021. This is why Trump and Vance blame Biden and Harris for Springfield.

Then there’s the Springfield demand side:

[L]ike much of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing plants began to close in the 1980s and 1990s, and Springfield atrophied. The ornate Victorian homes that lined the city’s main streets fell into disrepair as those with means moved away. The city has lost about 25 percent of its population since 1970.

So in the mid-2010s, city officials embarked on a campaign to lure new businesses to the area, citing Springfield’s low cost of living and ideal geographical position for shipping and manufacturing. The plan worked. Factories started opening up. Other businesses followed.

But there was a problem: The population that remained in Springfield and surrounding Clark County was aging. There weren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs. So the companies looked to immigrants. This happened to be right about the time Haitians were coming to the U.S. under TPS. Word quickly spread in the Haitian immigrant community that there was a town in Ohio with a low cost of living and lots of well-paying jobs. So that’s where they went.

The companies did not turn to undocumented immigrants to pay “slave wages,” as some immigration opponents have claimed. They were documented immigrants with taxpayer ID numbers paid at a market rate (as noted below, wages have increased in Springfield since the Haitians arrived).

Haitians with TPS can live where they like. A large number settled in Springfield because that’s where they found jobs. . . .

This is a recurring pattern with immigration in the U.S. Immigrants settle in geographic clusters, close to other immigrants from the same country. This allows them to establish networks, find housing, and open and patronize restaurants and businesses that offer the comforts of home. This is why Patterson, New Jersey, has a “Little Lima.” In the mid-20th century, Peruvian immigrants settled in the city after taking jobs in area textile mills. It’s why Nashville has the country’s largest Kurdish community, and Minneapolis to large Somali and Hmong populations. Terre Heute, Indiana once had a thriving Syrian population; Lowell, Massachusetts has the country’s second largest Cambodian population. Rochester; New York has a large Turkish community; and Russian immigrants settled in places like Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

This is how immigration works.

When you put supply and demand together, good things can happen:

Income has gone up. In 2020, the median annual household income in the city was $39,344. Two years later — and the last year for which the U.S. Census has data — it was at $45,113.

Immigration opponents also claim that immigrants depress wages. But again contra Vance, that hasn’t happened in Springfield. The mean hourly wage jumped 18 percent between 2020 and 2023, from $21.33 to $25.16. That’s well above the 13 percent that wages increased nationally over the same period. . . .

Haitians have grown Springfield’s tax base. Because of TPS, they have Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, so they pay all the same taxes any other resident pays. Those who have made enough money to buy a home now pay property taxes. Those who don’t own a home pay rent, which their landlords then use to pay property taxes. . . .

In a recent interview with CNBC, Vance said, “If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”

As with much of what Vance has said since his abrupt MAGA conversion, almost nothing in that quote is correct. There are nowhere near 25 million undocumented people in the U.S. in total. Kamala Harris doesn’t set the Biden administration’s immigration policy. And all the data suggest immigrants have made Springfield more prosperous, not less.

Read the whole thing.

3. One More Springfield

Kevin Williamson went to Springfield and wrote a fantastic piece.

Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19thcentury to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands. 

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This asshole who is running for vice president, on the other hand . . .

I fuel up and have the big 6.7L diesel spooled out and growling happily as I speed by the exit for Possum Hollow Road—honest to God, that’s the name of the place; you can’t make up details like that—way out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is 40-odd degrees early in the morning in the last days of summer. The Appalachian Highlands are gorgeous this time of year, with all sunshine and sapphire skies and cool breezes, good green hills and splendid rivers, and pretty good asphalt that is, barring the occasional construction backup, wide open for RPMs. If you like to drive, it doesn’t get much better in the eastern half of these United States. There’s a lot of that gross, weird old leg-tattoo America out there, too, of course, including a guy with a leg tattoo of the Monster Energy logo, along with the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox along the highways and backroads from the fine vistas of southwestern Virginia to the alpine rivers of West Virginia to the literal amber waves of grain in Ohio’s cornfields.

It makes you wonder why they ever left—the Vances and the rest of those Appalachian folk who followed Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway” up to Detroit or down to Houston or wherever else the Scots-Irish diaspora ended up. And then you remember why: need and desperation. There weren’t a lot of Dairy Queens or Walmarts out here, and even if there had been, there were no jobs to earn money to spend in them. It was a world—and a life—of subsistence agriculture and hustling, with very little in the way of rule of law or decent public administration, where the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and poisonously backward—you know: Haiti, but with white people.

Read the whole thing.

Categories Elections, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Racism, Trump, Vance, J.D.

The New Republic: Where Trump Goes, Chaos Follows

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
9

Alex Shepherd of The New Republic wrote an outstanding article about the linkage between Trump and violence. He threatens it, he encourages it, he revels in his threats. He likes to play the role of the tough guy. I recall a clip from one of his campaigns where he was portrayed at a wrestling match beating up a cartoon figure labeled CNN. I recall him at one of his rallies encouraging the crowd to beat up any infiltrators and he would pay the court costs. I remember the cruel taunts that he directed at others, including Paul Pelosi. He is a bully and he wants to be feared.

Yet when yet another gunman was captured before shooting at him, Trump was quick to blame Harris and Walz, who have repeatedly called for unity.

Shepherd writes:

Three hours before a would-be assassin was spotted hiding in the bushes of his golf course in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump posted, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social, his wildly unprofitable social network. At roughly the same time, his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, was touring the Sunday shows to proudly admit that he and Trump were knowingly spreading racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, in service of an even bigger lie—that immigrants pose an existential threat to the country itself.

It was a banner day for the Trump campaign: a feud with the country’s most popular pop star, a vile lie about a vulnerable population, yet another close call with an attempted assassin. But it also felt oddly familiar, bordering on routine—especially given how the former president and his allies reacted to the golf course scare. There were no fleeting calls for “unity” or hollow promises to turn down the temperature; instead, they were quick to blame their political opponents.

In a speech on Monday, Vance noted that the two attempts on Trump’s life were “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.” He further argued on X that the captured suspect, Ryan Routh, was inspired by the Harris campaign’s insistence that Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump, meanwhile, said his opponents’ inflammatory rhetoric was endangering him, and that “these are people who want to destroy this country.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” Trump continued. “They are the real threat.” If that wasn’t subtle enough, his campaign then released a lengthy list of people it blamed, without evidence, for inspiring Routh, including Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, as well as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Representative Adam Schiff, and even Walz’s wife, Gwen.

It would be foolish to blame any politician for either assassination attempt; both Routh and Thomas Crooks, the deceased Pennsylvania shooter, were mentally troubled and politically confused. But it’s important to acknowledge a simple and obvious truth: No one in this country has done more to sow division, create chaos, and, yes, encourage violence over the past decade than Trump. It was only a matter of time before that boomeranged on him.

Criticisms of Trump that rightfully note that he is a threat to the future of American democracy are hardly incitement to violence. They are recognition of the fact that Trump has used and will continue to use any means at his disposal to gain and hold onto power. His own paranoia and deluded ravings about his political enemies, meanwhile, have created a combustible climate—one made more dangerous by the lax gun laws that Trump and his allies have embraced.

These are people who egg on violence against their enemies at every turn. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker put it on Monday, Trump has “long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.” Let’s not forget that he also directed his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and allegedly expressed support for hanging his vice president, Mike Pence.

And then, Trump cries victim when he finds himself in the crosshairs. But increasingly, it seems, Americans aren’t buying it. For the last two months, the Trump campaign has whined incessantly about the fact that the country quickly moved on following the first attempt on his life, in mid-July. They’re right about that; his near-death experience was out of the news within a few days, and Trump received no noticeable bump in the polls. The incident is now an afterthought in the election—it’s almost as if it never happened at all. The second assassination plot, meanwhile, barely registered on NFL Sunday.

The country has moved on because it has grown accustomed to the chaos that Trump effortlessly generates. It has moved on because Trump himself moved on almost immediately. The Trump that stood onstage at the Republican National Convention, rambling about his grievances for almost two hours, was not changed by his recent brush with death in the slightest. He was, if anything, even morederanged and vengeful. And since then, he has said that Kamala Harris is a “fascist,” Walz wants to force young children to have gender reassignment surgeries, and that Haitian immigrants who are in the country legally are pet-eating criminals intent on murdering downtrodden Rust Belt whites.

Years before Trump’s political career began, the British photographer Platon found himself shooting Trump in the boardroom where he fired people on The Apprentice, the show where he played an idealized version of himself—wealthy, important, competent. Platon tried to connect with his subject. “Let’s be human together,” he said to Trump. “There’s always an air of tension and controversy about the things you say and do in public. I’m sure it’s intentional on your part but it feels to me like you’re in the middle of an emotional storm. I can’t live with that anxiety all the time. As a fellow human being, I’d like to know how you weather the storm.”

Trump calmly looked back at him and responded: “I am the storm.”

Trump is one of the least self-aware people in American political history—maybe in history, period. But this was an eerily prophetic statement. For eight years, Trump has been the storm. He unleashed dark forces in our society—making America more violent, more menacing, more chaotic—and rode them to the height of power. Now, he’s trying to do it all over again. But that’s the thing about storms, no matter their origin. Sometimes there’s no escaping them.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Trump Spoke in Nassau County, New York, Tonight. More Lies

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
13

New York is considered a Democratic state but Trump came to speak at a rally at the Nassau Colisum in suburban Nassau County. Whether he helped his campaign remains to be seen, but he hopes to bolster Republicans trying to retain their seats in the House. Although Trump accused Harris and Walz for campaign rhetoric that unleashed violence against him, his statements about them were far more inflammatory than anything they said about him.

The local newspaper, The Patch, reported:

UNIONDALE, NY — A confident Donald Trump took to the stage at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum Wednesday before a sea of red — supporters that met him with cheers, including chants of “USA, USA.”

It was his first presidential campaign rally since an assassination attempt was foiled by the Secret Service at a golf course in West Palm Beach in Florida on Sunday.

Trump had been playing a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club, when a man poked a rifle through the bushes. He was not injured in the attempt.

“We have got to get our media back here,” he told cheering supporters before attacking his team’s Democratic opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, saying that the lies have to stop and that they would turn America into a dictatorship. 

“They’re doing things in politics that have never been done before in the history of our country, and worst of all, with their open borders and bad elections, they have made us into a Third World nation, something which nobody thought was even possible,” he said. “Americans deserve a campaign based on the issues.”

Trump quickly moved into addressing the apparent attempt on his life over the weekend, saying that “God has spared his life,” not once but twice.

The first attempt on Trump’s life was over the summer.

“And there are those that say he did it because Trump is going to turn this state around,” he said of his alleged assailant. “He’s going to turn this country around. He’s going to make America great again, and we are going to bring religion back to our country.”

Less than a few minutes into his speech, he claimed the Teamsters gave him their endorsement. 

Hours before, the union’s leadership said it would not issue any endorsements, according to a statement on it’s website. In a statement, the union said it was due to strong political divides and few comments from candidates.

“These encounters with death have not broken my will,” he said. “They have really given me a much bigger and stronger mission. They’ve only hardened by resolve to use my time on earth to make America great again for all Americans to put America first and to put America first.”

Questions for readers:

Is it not an inflammatory lie to say that Harris and Walz would turn the U.S. into a “dictatorship”? What does he mean? It is he, not they, who has pledged to fire civil servants by the thousands and replace them with political loyalists. It is he, not they, who promised to prosecute anyone who opposed him and jail them. That is the definition of a dictatorship.

What are Harris and Walz doing “that have never been done before in the history of our country”?

When did Harris or Walz say they favored “open borders” other than never?

What does it mean to say they support “bad elections”? Like elections where every registered voter gets to cast a ballot? It is Republican officials who want to kick people off the voting rolls; that would be a “bad election.”

How can Trump “bring back religion” when he has none?

Trump spewed a Gish gallop, where the lies came out like a fire hose.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, New York, Trump, Walz, Tim

No Sanewashing of Trump at The Washington Post!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
37

The mainstream media has grappled with the dilemma of how to write about Trump ever since he became a candidate for the Presidency in 2015. He lies nonstop; he never admits his errors. He boasts nonstop; he insults his political adversaries. His vulgarities and crudeness are openly displayed at his rallies.

Most reporting about him simply ignores his lies, especially his insistence that he won the election in 2020, despite losing some 60 court cases in which his lawyers presented no credible evidence of voter fraud.

His lies have undermined public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system, which is the central mechanism of democracy. Demonizing a small and powerless group encourages hatred and even vigilantism.

Ignoring his lies is called “sanewashing.”

Dan Balz, the chief correspondent for The Washington Post, wrote the following article today, in which he truthfully describes Trump’s nonstop lying.

Former president Donald Trump has long inhabited a bizarre world of his own creation. He rewrites history — or makes it up entirely — to aggrandize himself, denigrate others and spread the basest of lies.

It keeps getting worse.

Since Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he’s spiraled ever deeper into conspiracy theories, falsehoods and grievances. He insists he is not a loser. He never lost the 2020 election, he says falsely, and he certainly didn’t lose that debate in Philadelphia. He claims victory in an event in which he spent 90 minutes chasing Harris’s barbs down every possible rabbit hole. He rarely managed to get off the defensive long enough to make a case against her — and when he did, he was barely coherent.

Trump can’t accept the widely held verdict that Harris outdid him, just like he couldn’t accept that President Joe Biden defeated him four years ago. On Friday night, during a rally in Las Vegas that was replete with baseless claims about a variety of topics, he spun up the tale that Harris was receiving the questions during the debate.

Elevating a conspiracy theory that popped up on social media, he falsely claimed she had hearing devices in her earrings, that she was being coached on what to say in real time. He did it in classic Trump style, citing unspecified hearsay as proof.

“I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in her ear,” he said. ABC News, which hosted the debate, denied these false claims, but Trump cares little for the truth. He prefers to spread lies to excuse his own poor performance and to stir up his supporters to think the game was somehow rigged. All that does is further divide the country.

He used a similar technique during the debate, notably about immigration. That night he repeated a claim that had spread on social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of local residents. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said.

When David Muir, one of the two ABC moderators, pointed out that the city manager in Springfield had told the network there were “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Trump replied, “Well, I’ve seen people on television.”

As Muir tried to interject, Trump continued. “The people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” he said. Muir responded, “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.”

Trump tried again, saying, “But, the people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” Muir countered once more. “Again, the Springfield city manager says there is no evidence of that,” he said. “We’ll find out,” an unrepentant Trump said.

In the past few years, Springfield has experienced a large influx of Haitian immigrants, who are in the United States legally. They have filled jobs in local businesses but they also have put a strain on the city’s services and caused an uproar among some local citizens. Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), seeking to highlight the issue of immigration in the campaign, helped put the town in the spotlight after an 11-year-old boy was killed in a traffic accident caused by a Haitian migrant.

Nathan Clark, the boy’s father recently denounced those who have invoked the death of his son to score political points, calling it “reprehensible.” “To clear the air,” he said last week, “my son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.” He criticized Trump, Vance and other politicians for using the tragedy to advance their own interests. “They have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain,” he said. “This needs to stop now.”

The repeated false claims about the Haitian community have brought threats to the city. On Friday, two elementary schools in Springfield were evacuated because of bomb threats and a middle school closed. It was the second day in a row that schools were closed due to such threats. The Columbus Dispatch reported that one of the threats included the same debunked claims about the migrant community that have circulated on social media.

Trump continues to fuel anti-immigrant outrage. He has previously said that if elected he would order the deportation of all undocumented immigrants living in the United States, a proposal judged by experts as both impractical and legally questionable. During a Friday news conference with reporters in California, Trump said, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado].”

Aurora is another city Trump cites as being destroyed by illegal migration, saying that it has been overrun by Venezuelan gangs. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican U.S. House member, said last week that such claims are “grossly exaggerated,” that the problem is limited to specific housing properties and is being dealt with by law enforcement.

That Trump has lost focus on the messages his campaign wants to highlight has been evident for weeks. There are issues that could put Harris on the defensive, if he were capable of a sustained and effective message based on facts and not falsehoods. He’s proving that he isn’t able to do that.

Most polls show that voters believe he is better able to handle the economy and inflation, issues at the top of voters’ lists of concerns. He has an advantage on immigration. Beyond that, Harris is still trying to fill out her profile for voters. In a Friday interview with Brian Taff of WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, she offered mostly general answers to some specific questions about how she would lower prices and where she differs with Biden.

In the debate, Trump tried repeatedly to put immigration front and center, but he was ineffective, in large part because of exaggerations or, as with the Springfield example, outright lies. Many Republicans who support Trump for president fear he is neither talking about what matters most to voters nor heeding the counsel of his campaign’s senior advisers.

Meanwhile, the question of who has his ear has come to the fore. Laura Loomer is an attention-seeking purveyor of racist and homophobic comments and a spreader of conspiracy theories. Recently she posted on X that if Harris, who is Black and Indian American, is elected, the White House will “smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Last week, Loomer accompanied Trump to the debate in Philadelphia and joined him the next day at ceremonies commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A year ago, she had posted on X that those attacks were “an inside job,” a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.

Her presence at Trump’s side has alarmed many Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) recently posted on X: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning reelection. Enough.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told a reporter for HuffPost that her history “is just really toxic.” Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a committed acolyte of Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and herself a purveyor of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, called Loomer’s comment about Harris “appalling and extremely racist,” adding, “This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”

Trump, who has praised Loomer over the years, on Friday tried to duck from the criticism about her. He first claimed that he didn’t really know what she has said. Later he posted on Truth Social that he disagrees with the statements she’s made, a classic dodge on his part.

He went on to suggest that she is justified because she is “tired of watching the Radical Left Marxists and Fascists violently attack and smear me.” Apparently, no one can be too extreme if they support him — or at least they can be forgiven.

This has been Trump’s pattern from the time he first became a candidate nine years ago. If anything, he has become even less disciplined and more conspiratorial than he was back then. Few people likely to vote this fall do not already have an opinion about him, pro or con. Because the country is so closely divided and questions about Harris exist, he remains in a position to possibly win the election.

******************************************

Our nation needs a sane and reasonable immigration policy. No one favors open borders. Trump’s brand of divisiveness makes it hard to envision that he will be able to achieve bipartisan consensus on any legislation. Meanwhile Trump unleashes and politicizes racism and hatred. What grows in such a climate is violence against the targets, either by lone wolves or by mobs.

A question for political scientists and historians: how did this race-baiting, misogynist con man manage to take control of a once-great political party? Mitch McConnell could have impeached Trump after the attack on the U.S., but he assumed that Trump had disgraced himself. The U.S. Supreme Court had the opportunity to remove him from the ballot for having incited an insurrection, but dodged the decision, betraying their alleged commitment to textualism and originalism. In an article in the Atlantic, Mark Leibovich attributes the subjugation of the GOP to the spinelessness of its leaders.

What Dan Balz demonstrates is that journalists have a moral obligation to their readers to tell the truth. That’s a good start.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: JD Vance Should Resign in Shame!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
9

Despite the debunking of the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, despite the story becoming a national joke, JD Vance continues to peddle it. Vance is a senator from Ohio, meaning that he is hurling insults at people he supposedly represents.

Jamelle Bouie is a regular columnist for the New York Times.

If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.

As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.

The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.

On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.

“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”

This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”

The “humanitarian crisis,” it should be said, is the revitalization of Springfield after years of decline. Haitian immigrants have filled jobs, bought homes and filled city coffers with property and sales taxes. And while there are growing pains from the sudden influx of new residents, the charge that Haitian immigrants have, in Vance’s words, brought a “massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates and crime” is false. He is lying about people, the very people he swore an oath to represent, in ways that will inspire additional threats of violence and may well bring physical harm to the community.

Categories Elections, Fake, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Vance, J.D.

Margaret Sullivan on “Sanewashing” Trump

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2024 //
119

Margaret Sullivan is an experienced journalist who previously served as the Public Editor (ombudsman) of The New York Times. She now has a blog, where she writes about the media.

In this post, she explains the phenomenon called “sanewashing.” What is this term? It’s recently invented, presumably in reaction to current events. It refers to framing a news story to describe an incoherent rant as a thoughtful policy discussion.

She writes:

Like whitewashing a fence, sanewashing a speech covers a multitude of problems. The Urban Dictionary definition: Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public … a portmanteau of “sane” plus “whitewashing.”

Here, as an example, is a Politico news alert that summarizes a recent Trump speech: “Trump laid out a sweeping vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in a speech to top Wall Streets execs today.” As writer Thor Benson quipped on Twitter: “I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not.”

Trump has become more incoherent as he has aged, but you wouldn’t know it from most of the press coverage, which treats his utterances as essentially logical policy statements — a “sweeping vision,” even.

After the intense media focus on Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, you would think Trump’s apparent decline would be a preoccupation. He is 78, after all, and often incoherent. But with rare exceptions, that hasn’t happened.

I will give the Washington Post some credit here for the way it covered the speech mentioned above, specifically his answer to a question about how he would fund child care.

“Trump offers confusing plan to pay for U.S. child care with foreign tariffs,” the headline said. But many others, including the New York Times, sanewashed what he said, which went like this:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, who was so impactful on that issue … But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’ve talking about because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

And then he went on to say that his idea of tariffs on China will take care of the cost of pretty much everything, which might remind you of how he claims deporting immigrants will pay for affordable housing.

Sweeping vision, you say?

But why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Fake, Language, Lies, Trump
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