Eight years ago this month, Donald Trump announced that he had personally laid to rest the controversy about President Obama’s country of origin. He gave himself credit for clearing up any questions that may have arisen because of something, he claimed, Hillary Clinton had said years earlier.
Those familiar with the facts were stunned. They knew the so-called birther conspiracy had been hatched by various Obama opponents to suggest he was ineligible to be president because he had been born not in the U.S. but in Kenya or some other country. It had been kept alive and promoted for years by a variety of Obama critics, including, most prominently, Donald Trump.
It could even be said that Trump had facilitated his transition from TV reality show star (The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice) to bona fide political candidate by exploiting the birther myth.
What Trump was actually announcing in September 2016 was a decision to stop talking about a non-issue he himself had helped sustain for years. But in finally renouncing one falsehood, he insisted on substituting another — casting himself as a hero of the tale.
Nearly a decade after Trump began running for president we should all be accustomed to his reliance on falsehoods.
But back in 2016, the birther flip-flop seemed to deserve special recognition. It was not just blatant, it was preposterous.
Or so we thought. Surely it would diminish the man even in the eyes of his admirers. And it may have done so, in some cases. But it did not alter his trajectory. He stunned the world a few weeks later by winning the Electoral College vote for president.
It was said in the early Trump years that the media took him literally but not seriously. It’s hard to deny that many of us took him too literally and not seriously enough. At the same time, many of Trump’s “base” voters were said to take Trump seriously but not literally. That worked for him, and those attitudes surely persist in 2024 much as they did in his first two campaigns.
Ten years ago, the media were accustomed to politicians who could be shamed or at least embarrassed over errors of fact and even minor exposures of ignorance. Trump seemed then, and still seems now, quite impervious to either.
Still, the most egregious trait of Trump’s campaign was his willingness to state highly consequential claims that were entirely at odds with reality, standing by them when challenged and sailing on — dismissive or seemingly oblivious to all criticism.
Far from being disqualifying, this feature of the Trump persona presents itself as part and parcel of his appeal.
Giving truth the Trump treatment
This week, after a debate with Vice President Harris that he apparently did not take entirely seriously, Trump said he would not debate her again. He said there was no need for a “third debate” because he had clearly won the first two. He was including the June 27 debate he had with President Biden, who had been the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time.
Perhaps that was not surprising, as Trump kept Biden in his sights throughout his debate with Harris this week — name checking Biden repeatedly without naming Harris once.
But what was surprising was Trump’s claim to having won both debates. Few would question he won the June 27 meeting with Biden, who seemed so diminished as to be hard to recognize.
But quite the opposite impression prevailed after Trump’s match with Harris, who had swept to the Democratic nomination without opposition after Biden’s July 18 decision to withdraw.
The first CNN polls after Tuesday’s debate showed nearly two-thirds of those who watched thought Harris did better than Trump (even if they were not planning to vote for her). A sizable fraction of Republicans were not willing to say Trump had won the faceoff.
Yet here was Trump, on the afternoon after the debate, telling reporters he was not interested in a rematch with Harris because he had “won the debate according to every poll — every single poll, I think.”
In fact, the only polls where Trump won were online polls of self-selected website samples rather than the randomized scientific samples actual pollsters use. One poll Trump cited had him winning 98% to 2%, according to Trump.
Meanwhile, actual polling organizations such as Reuters and YouGov had done their soundings and found Harris the winner in the eyes of a clear majority — though not as large a majority as CNN’s poll. Trump came out on top for just 31% of the respondents in YouGov and 24% in Reuters.
This willingness or compulsion to present claims that are utterly counterfactual has set Trump apart from conventional candidates. It continues to pose a problem for the media and the political community alike — including conservative media such as Fox News and a sizable portion of the Republican Party itself.
Trump’s claims are often expressed in hyperbolic superlatives. Trump insists he had “the best economy” and Biden had “the worst inflation” ever — two statements that are easily disproven. The nation’s economic growth was stronger for longer under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, just to name two relatively recent presidents. Inflation was far higher and more sustained in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But Trump has never been troubled by making such outlandish statements. Moreover, he is rarely satisfied with telling his crowds that yellow is green. It has to be the greenest green there has ever been. It is not sufficient to say up is down, it must be down farther than down has ever been.
The escalating statement of the stupendous is also a specialty. Take, for example, his casual references to the number of immigrants present in the United States illegally. On Tuesday night he started referring to millions, mentioned 21 million, then said it was surely far more than the official government estimate of 11 million. Then he again said it was more like 21 million before adding he thought the figure was “a lot higher than” that.
And all this without a shred of actual evidence or even a hint at the source of these wildly disparate numbers.
In the June 27 debate against Biden, the incumbent’s stumbles overshadowed Trump’s own missteps. But Trump still had his share of howlers. At one point he said illegal immigrants had taken “110%” of all the jobs created during the Biden presidency.
That would mean they had taken more jobs than were created, strongly suggesting Trump was not paying much attention to what he was saying. Indeed, as a general rule when he starts spouting statistics, he seems far more interested in what shock they may cause than whether they add up.
There may have been a time this kind of behavior could be dismissed as ordinary political rhetoric, which most Americans expect will contain exaggerations and oversimplifications. It is clear from the polls that whatever Americans think of Trump‘s relationship to fact, something approaching half of them still plan to vote for him.
The challenge of fact-checking
Fact-checking has been around for more than a generation, giving newspapers and magazines a chance to offer something different and escape the “he said, she said” pattern. In the later decades of the 20th century, most newspapers and big broadcasters were steeped in the values of “middle of the road” reporting as media owners sought ever-larger and more diverse audiences.
Stories were considered balanced when different sides were presented with equal weight and respect. Deciding which side was right or more accurate or more worthy was left to the news consumer or voter.
That was never entirely satisfactory, either to the consumer-voter or to the journalists themselves. More and more news outlets turned to “fact-checks” or “fact-checking,” an effort to find and follow the facts on crime, unemployment, trade, health care, immigration and any other issues that drove the debate.
For some journalists this became a full-time assignment. The Washington Post has used veteran reporter Glenn Kessler as its official guru of fact for many years. The Poynter Institute in Florida, related to the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) pioneered Politifact several election cycles ago.
NPR and PBS have been fact-checking debates and other key moments in national campaigns for decades, online and on air. This week, the fact-checking operation in both shops had its hands full.
So when ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis made a few factual corrections during the debate about a particular claim or statement, they were carrying on a custom that has been increasingly common in broadcast journalism.
As they did not see a need to correct as much in what Harris said, their efforts struck many Trump supporters as unnecessary, unfair and evidence of Democratic bias. Trump himself said the debate had been “3 against 1.”
The anchors’ defense was that Harris said nothing to compare with Trump’s assertions about states allowing abortion after birth or Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio.
That’s a judgment call, of course, and just the kind that mainstream journalists were once trained to avoid. That they now feel compelled to make those calls has a lot to do with how Trump himself has changed the rules. But it should not be surprising that changes the media have made prompt protest from those who feel abused — particularly Trump himself.
This entails also the sea change over the use of the three-letter word we were trained as journalists to avoid: lie. We might say a politician was misstating facts or making inaccurate claims. But we could never make the leap of imputing motive. Maybe the pol was just mistaken and sincerely believed his opponent was guilty of this or that accusation. We could say he was wrong, but calling someone a liar was a big deal.
Trump has led to a change in that policy in much of the industry. Even in 2016, some TV anchors were using the word, at least on late-night TV. It has since become quite common for mainstream news organizations to refer to lies and lying.
With his latest portrayal of what happened in the Harris debate in front of 67 million TV viewers this week, Trump once again has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge the fact-checkers and the commentators alike.
Now, even the practice of fact-checking has become controversial, with Trump acolytes questioning what constitutes a fact. We have reached a point where the idea of fact-checking is regarded as polarizing.
And the more we talk about how polarized things have become, the more polarized they get.
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