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.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”