Donald Trump is the master of being on all sides of every issue and the media keeps falling for it, gaslighting Americans pretending that Trump doesn’t utilize verbal trickery to avoid accountability.
For nine long years, the legacy media has failed Americans but this year, they’re doing it in such a spectacularly obvious way that it’s actually fascinating. Two such instances came up in the last 24 hours, the first being Washington Post and the second PolitiFact, both going to bat for ex-president Republican Donald Trump.
The Washington Post fact-check of the DNC has raised eyebrows, with Rachel Vindman writing above the below tweet, “Dear @washingtonpost weâre done. Itâs not me, itâs you. I wish I could continue to support the few journalists you employ who I still admire and respect but you have made that impossible. Bye forever.”
Wow.
The Washington Post âfact checkâ
of night 1 of the DNC is embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/MOSxN8aXpPâ Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) August 20, 2024
The fact-checker claimed that it was an exaggeration to say that Trump told people to inject bleach into our bodies because, actually, Trump told people to inject a disinfectant inside the lungs. And hey, he later said he was being sarcastic, which suggests that the Post is telling us Trump is a reliable narrator, so given his long history of ::checks my notes:: lying, we must take him at his word.
The “fact-checker” also said Clinton was wrong to suggest that Trump wrote “love letters to dictators” when she said V.P. Kamala Harris would not be doing such a thing. They then quoted Trump talking about falling in love with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un and the beautiful letters he wrote Trump, finished off by “We fell in love.”
Additionally, in September of 2020, CNN reported that Bob Woodward obtained 27 Trump-Kim letters for his 2020 book, and CNN published two of them as they were recorded by Woodward.
Bob Woodward obtained the 27 âlove lettersâ President Donald Trump exchanged with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, 25 of which have not been reported publicly. The letters, filled with flowery language, provide a fascinating window into their relationship. Kim flatters Trump by repeatedly calling him âYour Excellency,â and writes in one letter that meeting again would be âreminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.â In another, Kim writes that the âdeep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.â CNN has obtained the transcripts of two of the letters.
Trump just fell in love with a dictator, but do not say he sent love letters to said dictator. Rather than marking that the convicted felon running for president with a published plan on his behalf to become a dictator and a stated desire to become a dictator “for a day” (there are no dictators for a day, though) had a love affair with a dictator, the fact-checker wants us to know that there is no evidence that Trump sent love letters to Kim and we don’t know what was in his letters. We are to assume that Trump was much more reserved in private letters than he was in public when he said, “We fell in love.”
Phew.
The Post then mentions that while Trump said there had to be some kind of form of punishment for a woman getting an abortion, he walked that back later, so… it’s not accurate to say he supports that, even though he brags about installing the three Supreme Court justices who overturned “settled law” of Roe V Wade and has supported a national abortion ban and they’ve got all kinds of funky tracking women’s health stuff being batted around and even ten years ago Republicans were pushing getting neighbors and family to report on women who pregnant, but don’t worry! He walked it back.
PolitiFact got in on it, too. “A DNC video showed a 2016 clip of Trump saying ‘there has to be some form of punishment’ for women who have abortions. He walked back the comment the same day. We found no evidence that he currently supports legal penalties for women who have abortions.”
Lawyer Brad Moss, who specializes in litigation on matters relating to national security, federal employment and security clearances, shot back: “‘he walked back the comment the same day’ Are you fricking kidding me? He said it. You can note that he walked it back but that doesn’t make what he said any less accurate. He absolutely said it. It’s true, that’s what he said he wanted.”
“he walked back the comment the same day”
Are you fricking kidding me? He said it. You can note that he walked it back but that doesn’t make what he said any less accurate. He absolutely said it. It’s true, that’s what he said he wanted. https://t.co/OD5zwvZSTP
â Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) August 20, 2024
It’s seriously not accurate to suggest that Trump doesn’t support punishment for women who get abortions, and in this matter, the Washington Post and PolitiFact are putting women and girls in danger.
Then the Post moves on to President Biden’s comment about Trump calling brave service members who died “suckers and losers,” claiming that this is not accurate because Trump’s then Chief of Staff John Kelly did not say Trump said “suckers,” just “losers.”
Don’t you feel great about the state of our democracy? Everyone, relax! The then Commander-in-Chief only called dead heroes who gave their lives for global democracy “losers.”
But wait. That’s not the whole truth, either.
Donald Trump was accused by his own Chief of Staff General John Kelly of refusing to visit the graves of American heroes who gave their lives for our defense and calling them “losers.” The the “suckers and losers” quote that was attributed to four people with knowledge of the event at the time it happened has support of senior staff members who were present:
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, âWhy should I go to that cemetery? Itâs filled with losers.â In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as âsuckersâ for getting killed.
So they’re quibbling about attributing “suckers and losers” to Kelly, who might have just said “losers.” But he might have also said “suckers and losers” at a different time because the Post is only quoting what Kelly recalled in a statement to CNN. We also had four people who were there saying that Trump said both.
What is more important as a journalist: Imparting the character of someone running for president showing blatant disregard for the troops over which he would have authority or assuming that he didn’t say “suckers” even though people who were there said he did, and deciding that someone needed to be fact-checked for maybe attributing one of those insults to the wrong person. Which fact-check serves the people better?
The bottom line is that Donald Trump has always taken every side of an issue (warning language is not safe for work). Using his deliberate manipulation tactic to do what he intends it to do, which is mislead people about issues that matter in their lives and on the issue of abortion could be their very life, is unacceptable.
Here he is, in all of his glory, taking all sides of issues, something this media refuses to contextualize for their readers, instead preferring to fall for it and gaslighting the people who pay them for their services:
The way to properly deal with a prolific liar who manipulates through his language is to look at what he does and the trends of his behavior. Often enough, Donald Trump has done the very thing he says he will do and then walks back later. It is absolutely fair to be concerned about it and to raise it as a concern.
It’s not that accuracy should suffer because Donald Trump is a habitual liar. It’s that a proper fact-check would put Trump’s history of lying and walking statements back in context.
It’s not a fact-check if it serves the opposite purpose of informing people. A fact-check shouldn’t repeatedly benefit someone who knows how to take advantage of a system that gives credit to this specific person when he walks something back or denies it because it allows someone to not be held easily to account. In spirit, this is the opposite of a fact-check.
Certainly, these fact-checks have failed the American people. The backlash is evidence of how tired people are of the press making excuses for Donald Trump’s savage and treacherous behavior.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.