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.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.