Fact checking columns have been around for some time but gained new popularity with the rise of Donald Trump as a way for news outlets to appear adversarial toward a politician whose rhetoric is consistently, thoroughly detached from reality, without doing the legwork.
Nine years after he first started running for office, though, fact checker pundits still have seemingly no idea how to handle Trump’s bluster and propensity to change positions on a dime. Throughout coverage of the Democratic National Conventions, the fact check columns have been in desperate want of critical thinking.
At the New York Times, a baffling fact check on President Joe Biden lacked some basic arithmetic. They quoted Biden on Trump: “He created the largest debt any president had in four years with his two trillion dollars tax cut for the wealthy.”
The Times decided this is “misleading.” They wrote that Trump’s administration “did rack up more debt than any other in raw dollars — about $7.9 trillion.” However, they wrote: “But the debt rose more under President Barack Obama’s eight years than under Mr. Trump’s four years.” So in other words, Biden was right, and eight is greater than four.
The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact reviewed Biden’s statement about Trump wanting to cut Medicare, and found it was “mostly false.” They pointed out that Trump has said Republicans should not cut Medicare, even though Trump proposed cutting Medicare four times during his presidency. The New York Times also called this claim “misleading.”
It’s worth noting that when Trump was asked in March about how to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, he responded, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”
This might have been helpful context to include. But given Trump’s perpetually changing position on protecting so-called entitlements, is this a topic that’s really worth trying to “well actually”?
PolitiFact’s journalists also fact checked a DNC video for including a clip of Trump saying “there has to be some form of punishment” for people who have abortions, rating it mostly false. Trump did say exactly this at an MSNBC town hall in 2016, they acknowledge. The same day, though, he issued a statement: “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.” Here on planet Earth, it’s not a false claim to include a real clip in a campaign video.
The post on X, formerly Twitter, even got a community note: “It is incorrect to say that showing an unedited video of Trump’s own words is ‘false.’”
Ironically, the Washington Post issued a fact check at the top of their own Tuesday fact check. They incorrectly said that the contents of Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were unknown. In reality, they now acknowledge, parts of the letters were published by their own associate editor Bob Woodward.
When they initially considered former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim that Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators,” they wrote: “There is no evidence that Trump sent such letters. Clinton is making a bit of a leap to suggest that Trump has written ‘love letters’ to dictators.” Now, they have cautiously changed their stance: “This is in the eye of the beholder.”
The Post also decided to fact check Biden’s claim that “Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.” The Post decided this is false: “Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
Sure, Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election results so hard he was criminally charged federally and in Georgia, and keeps claiming Democrats are going to cheat him out of a victory this year, too. But maybe he would handle a future loss differently.
There’s only one way to find out.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.