I had to send an email to some of Michigan’s most prominent organizations to find out if the president had really received the state’s “Man of the Year” award that he claimed to have received. (Not.)
In fact, I checked every public word that Donald Trump said or tweeted for just under four years. The work was relentless. The work was relentlessly strange.
Many politicians lie as a means to an end – to escape a scandal or to inflate their political achievements. Trump was willing to lie about everything, all the time, often for no obvious reason. That was lying as a way of life.
And it took over a large part of my life.
How it started
I started telling Trump’s false allegations in September 2016, at the end of his run against Hillary Clinton, when he was the correspondent in Washington for my Toronto local newspaper, Canada. I started because I was frustrated by a gap in most media coverage in the United States. Trump’s incessant dishonesty was barely mentioned in the newspaper, let alone treated as it was: the central story of that campaign.
So I thought about tweeting a
occasional list of the fake things that Trump was saying. Then Michael Moore, the filmmaker,
tweeted that I made a list “every day”. Suddenly, I gained thousands of new followers on Twitter. And I thought:
My God, I think I need to do this every day …I thought Trump’s mistake was bad then. It got much worse. In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false statements per day. In 2018, there were 8.3 false claims per day. What started as a side project that I could take care of a few hours a week, started to demand regular nights. When I joined CNN in mid-2019, a second reporter, Tara Subramaniam, was needed.
Trump’s dishonesty in 2017 tended to be improvised. His 2018 dishonesty was much more planned; he used serial lies as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his 2019 Ukraine scandal. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic – performing daily briefings as dishonest that CNN needed me to go to TV right away to unmask the absurdity that viewers just heard.
Dark consequences
People almost certainly died because of Trump’s Covid-19 lie. And people died on the Capitol because of Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. While there was some absurd and solid comedy mixed in with the president’s repertoire of dishonesty – I couldn’t help but amuse myself with his imaginary “sir” stories about burly crying workers in your presence – there were always dark consequences too.
One of them was the anger of journalists. I received hundreds of hateful emails, thousands of angry tweets, a graphic death threat that I felt compelled to report to the police. For all Twitter moms’
concerns about my mental healthhowever, work has always been much more tiring than traumatic. I was typing at home in pajama pants, without covering a war.
I lost my composure only once. Watching an initial pandemic briefing in which Trump falsely assured Americans that the virus was under control, I gasped for a minute thinking of all the people who were likely to die because of the president’s lie.
There was nothing to be done to stop him. Whether it was his consequent lies about the coronavirus or trivial lies like the Michigan Man of the Year invention, he continued to lie, no matter how many times the fact-checkers noticed he was wrong. People kept asking me if the job seemed useless, given its impermeability to correction.
This never happened. The goal was never to change Trump’s behavior.
I had three goals. One, to give readers and viewers the facts they were not getting from their president. Second, show other journalists when the president was lying, so that they could incorporate that information into their own work. Three, defending the truth – declaring that there was still something like verifiable reality, no matter how much Trump tried to erase it, and that we wouldn’t surrender, no matter how much Trump tried to discredit us.
A daily routine
And so, I maintained a daily routine that I could never have imagined before Trump launched his campaign.
I rolled over in bed, turned off the alarm, and opened Twitter to see what lies the President of the United States could have told me while I was sleeping. And then, because Trump lied about an impressive variety of topics, I would try to educate myself quickly about things I didn’t know anything about –
trade with China, or Obama-era veterans’ health legislation, or hurricane forecasting.
The lie sometimes continued until I fell asleep. Each time I felt I had achieved, Trump lied about something new – while keeping many of the old lies in regular rotation. When I started
tweeting Checking the facts of Trump’s claims in the rally moments after he made them, admirers saw this as a kind of magic trick. It was actually quite easy. The president repeated the same false things over and over.
In short, it was a lot. In September 2020, I had to abandon my effort to produce a comprehensive count of the false claims: Trump was lying so much during the campaign that I physically couldn’t keep up. Until then, I had accounted for about 9,000 false allegations since September 2016.
Trump never attacked me all this time. (He did
block me on Twitter in 2017.) And, unlike advisers to other politicians that I checked out, Trump’s underlings in the White House never contacted each other to try to scold me or deviate from a discovery that he had been inaccurate.
I thought that was revealing.
Whatever Trump officials have said publicly, they probably knew, too, that Trump lied a lot. They also knew that, regardless of what a guy wrote to a Canadian newspaper or said on CNN, they could spread their lies to their base without being challenged through social media and friendly media like Fox News, One America News and Breitbart.
Be honest with the public
Perhaps my most disturbing experience in this area was a trip to Trump-friendly cities in Ohio in 2017. I went to ask his supporters if they knew he was lying. A lot of them didn’t. Worse, a bunch of them liked it – and they told me they liked to lie because it stirred up Washington elites like me.
I never had a good sense of how many Trump supporters were genuinely interested in the work of fact-checkers, although I noted with interest that some of the Trump 2016 voters who moved to Joe Biden in 2020 mentioned his lie as a factor in his disenchantment. . Leaving that slice of the electorate aside, it has never been more obvious that a good portion of the president’s base followed or preceded him in a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
Frankly, I don’t know how to get to this hardcore bunch. But we must remember that it is a minority of the country and we must not allow its belief in lies to prevent us from our mission to tell the truth. Whether we’re covering Trump, Biden or any other politician, we need to be frank with our readers and viewers.
Media coverage of Trump has improved since inadequate coverage in 2016 led me to embark on this project. In 2020, some traditional vehicles would use, at least occasionally, the word “lie” in their coverage of Trump; some would write stories, at least occasionally, focusing on dishonesty. To be honest, though, I think the lie’s coverage remained inadequate until the end.
Often, coverage of Trump’s blatantly dishonest speeches still mentioned the passing dishonesty or didn’t mention anything. Often, the coverage still quoted the president’s lies without explaining that they were wrong.
Telling people what is true and what is false is a central responsibility of every news reporter and all media. Pointing out a lie is an objective report, not a prejudice. And as interesting as all of this has been for me, fact checking should not be left to the designated fact checker.
