Politics
Trump's untruths pile up. Biden gets facts wrong too. Do voters care?
Former President Trump was on another one of his screeds about how Democratic prosecutors were persecuting him, saying he’d been “investigated by the Democrats more than Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Al Capone combined.”
The crowd at a 2022 rally in North Carolina seemed to eat if up, having a hearty laugh when Trump concluded: “I think I’m perhaps the most honest human being that God ever created.” The crowd broke into applause.
As Trump campaigns to retake the White House, polls suggest Republicans have become increasingly willing to accept his pronouncements, even as a cottage industry of fact-checkers suggests reality lies elsewhere. That’s because his grievances and complaints about an America under siege feel true in the guts of a “vast segment of the population,” who therefore view Trump as a truth-teller, said Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican political consultant.
“So Trump is two things at once,” said Schmidt, who writes a blog on national politics that portrays the 45th president as a demagogue and a threat to democracy. “He is simultaneously the most prolific liar in the history of American politics, and he is the most honest president we have ever had.”
Donald Trump ‘is simultaneously the most prolific liar in the history of American politics, and he is the most honest president we have ever had.’
— Steve Schmidt, Republican political consultant
Several major media outlets had created fact-checking teams before Trump rose to prominence. In 2016, the New York Times made what then was depicted as a momentous step when it called then-candidate Trump’s claim that President Obama was not born in America “a lie.”
But once the former reality show host won the presidency, fact-check outfits went into overdrive.
The Washington Post counted 30,573 “false or misleading claims” by Trump during his presidency. Many were repeat offenses, such as the more than 800 claims about election fraud, which were roundly rejected in the courts. After its 1,000th fact-checking of Trump this year, PolitiFact reported he was entirely or mostly wrong more than three-quarters of the time.
“It’s not unusual for politicians of both parties to mislead, exaggerate or make stuff up,” reported PolitiFact, which did not let President Biden off the hook — finding 41% of nearly 300 of his statements entirely or mostly wrong. “But American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy.”
Trump’s core supporters show no sign of being put off.
A case in point came this month, when Trump used a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Mich., to renew his long-running crusade against undocumented migrants.
Trump told the story of Ruby Garcia, whose alleged killer was in the country illegally. Trump called her a “beautiful … incredible young woman.” He said he “spoke to some of her family” about her tragic death.
But Garcia’s sister soon told Ken Kolker of the local NBC News affiliate that Trump hadn’t spoken to anyone in the Garcia family. And Mavi Garcia didn’t appreciate the former president turning her 25-year-old sister’s death into a political talking point.
“He did not speak with any of us,” Mavi Garcia told Target 8.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests from The Times and other news outlets to discuss the discrepancy.
The episode once might have been a showstopper in American politics, a former — and perhaps future — president called out by an everyday American. But no signs emerged of supporters objecting to the error, and the Garcia incident quickly became part of the ambient noise of a campaign that promises to get louder and uglier.
A recent Washington Post survey found Republicans less likely than they were in the midst of Trump’s presidency to acknowledge his untruths.
Asked whether Trump regularly makes misleading statements, the share of Republicans who say he does dipped by 10 percentage points, to 38%, compared to 2018. And the percentage of Republicans who say Trump usually makes flat-out false claims dipped down to 8% from 14%.
The coverage of Trump’s Ruby Garcia claims also pointed out other dubious comments by him that day.
PolitiFact, run by a Florida-based journalism education outfit, the Poynter Institute, focused on Trump’s inflammatory, and untrue, claim that Venezuela was emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the United States. It also noted that, “overall, violent crime and homicides have declined under Joe Biden’s presidency.”
FactCheck.org, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on how Trump’s statements about immigration were misleading, noting that “apprehensions at the [S]outhwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.” Apprehensions hit a record high at the end of 2023, during Biden’s tenure.
On Fox News, anchor Bret Baier asked about Trump’s claim being rejected by Garcia’s sister. But commentator Charles Hurt never addressed the apparent falsehood, justifying Trump’s remarks as being about “something that matters deeply to people.” Hurt shifted the subject to another family whose daughter was killed in an accidental shooting committed by a man who migrated illegally from Mexico.
Contrast the sharply divergent news coverage given to Trump and Ruby Garcia to reports of an earlier Biden misstatement — about where he was the day after 9/11.
In September of last year, it was President Biden being called out for a falsehood, when he said — on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America — that he had visited Ground Zero the day after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed in 2001. In fact, he had joined a congressional delegation there nine days later.
Many outlets, including MSNBC, NBC, CNN, and PolitiFact mentioned Biden’s misstatement. A Wall Street Journey story asked, “Was that a gaffe born out of fatigue, an honest mistake or an exaggeration from a president with a penchant for dropping himself in the middle of the action?”
The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times did not report the episode, though the Post cited a critic who attacked Biden for marking the anniversary in Alaska.
Fox devoted a good portion of its prime time to roasting Biden for “lying” about being at Ground Zero on Sept. 12, with Sean Hannity inviting several guests to trash the president for commemorating 9/11 at a locale other than New York City, the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pa. Though Biden spoke from a U.S. airbase that responded to the attacks, the Fox commentators called his behavior shameful.
Generally, Biden has been less prone to the sort of unscripted moments that fact-checkers feast on, said PolitiFact Editor in Chief Katie Sanders, explaining, in part, why so many of Trump’s statements have been scrutinized.
“When a politician is speaking off-the-cuff, without carefully prepared remarks in front of them, they tend to be less accurate,” Sanders said.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar on political communication and co-founder of FactCheck.org, said the reactions to misstatements tend to fit into well-worn narratives. Biden’s critics belittle the 81-year-old’s memory and mental capabilities. Trump’s critics note his history of lying.
Trump himself boasted in his 1987 memoir that he had mastered the art of “hyperbole.”
“People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole,” Trump wrote. “It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
Whether any of the campaign’s untruths make a lasting impression on voters depends on many factors, including whether they become the subject of ads, a memorable debate moment or a campaign trail meme, Jamieson said.
“Joe the Plumber” became a recurring character in the 2008 presidential campaign when Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of Ohio pressed then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama about whether his tax plan would hurt small businesses. Arizona Sen. John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, brought Wurzelbacher to future campaign events and made sure his view was featured in the final debate between the candidates.
Jamieson said “confirmation bias” always has been a hallmark of political true believers, but it has only intensified in the Trump era, on both sides.
“It’s a way of understanding virtually everything,” Jamieson said, explaining how people sometimes process unfavorable messages. “They are already inside their tribe, so if there is a dissonant message, the way to reduce the dissonance is to say it doesn’t matter, or it doesn’t change that candidate’s fidelity on a core issue.”
Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
Former President Trump slammed the anti-Israel “radical left lunatics” creating chaos at colleges nationwide, highlighting that the antisemitism on campuses is promoted by the left, not conservatives.
“This is a movement from the left. These are radical left lunatics, and they’ve got to be stopped now because it’s going to go on and on. And it’s going to get worse, and worse,” Trump said Thursday morning outside of a Manhattan courtroom where he is standing trial.
“And, you know, they take over countries, and we’re not letting them take over the USA. We’re not letting the radical left morons take over this country.”
Student agitators have infiltrated college campuses nationwide in recent weeks, including radicals on Columbia University’s campus taking over the campus’ Hamilton Hall building, while schools such as UCLA, Harvard and Yale are working to clear student encampments where protesters demand their elite schools completely divest from Israel.
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Former President Trump speaks to the media as he leaves Manhattan Criminal Court on April 22, 2024, in New York City. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first of his criminal cases to go to trial. (Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty Images)
The protests are associated with groups tied to far-left organizations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros, Fox News Digital previously reported. Namely, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) has had a large presence amid the protests on Columbia University’s campus, as well as on the campuses of UCLA, Tufts and the University of Texas at Austin.
In his remarks Thursday, Trump praised law enforcement officers in New York City and Los Angeles for working to clear encampments and Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, and make arrests amid the chaos.
An anti-Israel demonstrator holds a Palestinian flag on the rooftop of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York, on Tuesday, April 30, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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“I’m so proud of the New York’s finest… I know so many of them. They’re incredible. They did a good job at Columbia and likewise in Los Angeles. They did a really good job at UCLA. It was very much embedded,” Trump continued.
“And just so you understand, this is the radical left. This is a movement from the left, not from the right. The right is not your problem. Despite what law enforcement likes to say, the FBI director said that he worries about the right.”
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NYPD officers line up outside Columbia University, Monday, April 29, 2024. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)
The NY v. Trump case focuses on Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, paying former pornographic actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to allegedly quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with the then-real estate tycoon in 2006. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.
Former President Trump leaves Trump Tower on his way to Manhattan Criminal Court, April 15, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen and fraudulently logged the payments as legal expenses. Prosecutors are working to prove that Trump falsified records with the intent to commit or conceal a second crime, which is a felony, in violation of a New York law called “conspiracy to promote or prevent election.”
Politics
Opinion: Kristi Noem executed her dog. That's not the main reason she'd be a lousy vice president
People think I’m a cat lady, but that’s only because dogs are high-maintenance and for years I traveled often. I’m that person dog walkers dread: the dog lover who stops them so that I, a stranger, can give their hound some love.
Naturally, I was among the millions of people sickened on learning that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem once executed her puppy, Cricket, in a gravel pit, apparently for being puppy-like. And save some tears for the pet goat she next dragged to the killing field and shot, simply for being rambunctious and “rancid.”
Noem’s account in a coming memoir, apparently intended to show her guts, grit and gunplay as she auditions to be Donald Trump’s running mate, instead had the rare effect of bringing Americans of all political persuasions together — in revulsion at her.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
“Kristi Noem manages to unify the left and right, the woke and Q-anon, the trans and homophobes unanimously around the proposition that she is a monster,” right-wing pundit Ann Coulter posted on X.
Trump hasn’t weighed in on Puppygate. (He did, however, provide a blurb for Noem’s book: “You’ve got to read it!” Did he?) Perhaps he’s been distracted because he’s penned up in a Manhattan criminal court. Or maybe because he’s that rare breed that doesn’t seem to like dogs; Trump is the only president in a century who hasn’t owned one. He does have dogs on his mind a lot, but always when he’s barking pejoratively about women, terrorists and political enemies (“choked like a dog,” “dumped liked a dog,” looks like “a dog,” “died like a dog”).
Yet Trump aides, hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, have been quick to confirm the conventional wisdom: Noem is almost certainly disqualified as Trump’s choice for vice president. As the pun-intended headline in the Murdochs’ New York Post put it this week, “Kristi Noem has ‘no shot’ as Trump’s VP pick after puppy-killing controversy: sources.”
And that’s what sickens me now: There is so much that should disqualify Noem from being first in line for the presidency — starting with the fact that she questions Joe Biden’s election and supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the result and resist the peaceful transfer of power — yet it took a puppy’s killing to actually disqualify her.
What a testament to our warped politics.
Every other Republican said to be on Trump’s shortlist similarly seconds his false, antidemocratic grievances about 2020. And yes, I understand that when the man at the top of the ticket is the election-denier and insurrection-inciter in chief, it follows that he’ll want as his No. 2 a candidate who echoes his utterances and snaps to his commands — like a dog, right?
Or, like Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida and J.D. Vance of Ohio; Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Byron Donalds of Florida; North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, and Trump rival-cum-sycophant Vivek Ramaswamy, among other would-be lapdogs eager for his nod.
During the 2016 campaign, then-rival Rubio snarled about Trump: “For years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump.” Now — after Trump’s impeachments, an insurrection and four indictments — it’s Rubio who’s fully entrapped. This week he was tweeting against the “Biden supporter democrat ‘judge’” in Trump’s New York hush-money trial. Just like his master.
Vance is another aspirant who has rolled over for Trump. “I’m a Never Trump guy,” he said in 2016, and he suggested to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” But on ABC’s “This Week” in February, Vance lashed out at host George Stephanopoulos for even asking about the events surrounding Jan. 6, and then admitted he’d have refused to certify Biden’s election had he been vice president.
As Vance and the rest of the veep wannabes know, Trump demands complete loyalty. (So why doesn’t he have a dog?)
Noem was relatively early to endorse Trump for reelection, at a September rally in South Dakota. Back then she said she’d be his veep nominee “in a heartbeat,” adding, “Trump needs a strong partner if he’s going to take back the White House.”
And just how does a woman demonstrate she’s got such strength, at least to Trump and MAGA world? Noem decided one way was to write her self-promoting book, “No Going Back,” and include anecdotes like the multipage account of shooting Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, and a family goat.
In her telling, first disclosed by the Guardian, the puppy had an “aggressive personality” and, “out of her mind with excitement,” disrupted a pheasant hunt — and attacked a neighbor’s chickens like “a trained assassin.” Noem grabbed a gun and took Cricket to the pit: “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.” Then she figured she might as well dispatch the “nasty and mean” goat, too. It required two shots.
What strength. Amid days of denunciations, the supposedly strong Noem stuck to her guns, posting online about how the episode underscored her ability to make “tough decisions” and her knack for “real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories.”
As fed up as Secret Service agents must be with Biden’s bite-happy German shepherd, Commander, it’s hard to believe any of them want to draw their guns on him like Noem did with poor Cricket.
I hope she did kill her veep prospects. I’m just sorry it’s not for the right reasons.
Politics
The White House has a new curator. Donna Hayashi Smith is the first Asian American to hold the post
The White House has a new curator and Donna Hayashi Smith is the first Asian American to hold the post.
The White House announced her appointment Wednesday, the start of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
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Originally from Wahiawa, Hawaii, Hayashi Smith joined the White House curator’s office in 1995 and has now served under five presidents. She had been serving in an acting capacity since last year after the retirement of her predecessor, Lydia Tederick.
The White House is photographed from Lafayette Park on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, in Washington. The White House has a new curator and Donna Hayashi Smith is the first Asian American to hold the post. Hayashi Smith had been serving in an acting capacity since last year. She will oversee the care of thousands of artifacts in the White House collection, cataloging and preserving everything from presidential portraits to furniture to the china place settings. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
As curator, Hayashi Smith will oversee the care of thousands of artifacts in the White House collection, cataloguing and preserving everything from presidential portraits to furniture and more.
Hayashi Smith led the curator’s office through a process in 2022 to ensure that the White House continues to be recognized nationally as an accredited museum.
First lady Jill Biden cited Hayashi Smith’s service under five presidential administrations and said she looked forward to working with her to preserve the White House’s “living history.”
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The White House has a new curator. Donna Hayashi Smith is the first Asian American to hold the post
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