Why Can’t Fact Checkers Handle Donald Trump?

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.