The Toronto Star identified twenty-five lies that President Trump told in a thirty minute softball interview with Michael Schmidt of the New York Times. Some of these lies are fairly innocuous, like claiming that Sen. Diane Feinstein heads a committee when she actually serves as the senior member for the minority, i.e., the Ranking Member. Some are more serious, like his claim that millions of Americans are joining health care associations that don’t yet exist. My favorite lie is somewhere in-between.
16) “I know more about the big bills. … (Inaudible.) … Than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes.”
There is no way to conclusively demonstrate that this false, but it’s so ridiculous that we are going to take a rare liberty and declare it false anyway. Trump has consistently misstated the details of major bills, spoken only in generalities about the health bill (“fantastic health-care”), and brushed off almost all specific questions. Whatever one thinks of Obamacare, Barack Obama demonstrated a vastly greater understanding of the nuances of his bill than Trump did about any version of the Republicans’ proposed replacement bills.
It bothers me when newspaper fact checkers contort themselves into pretzels in an effort to find any grain of truth in the president’s pronouncements, so it’s a relief to see an example where the benefit of the doubt is boldly abandoned. What Trump said here is a lie. It’s a giant, “ridiculous” lie. And there’s nothing wrong with saying so even though it’s obviously a subjective judgment. There’s really no need to try to explain how we know that Barack Obama “demonstrated a vastly greater understanding of the nuances of his [health] bill than Trump did about any version of [his own].” We just know.
Yes, it is generally better to be able to demonstrate how something is not factual by pointing to some statistics or a map or the historical record. But we don’t need some academic paper that tries to scientifically analyze the degree of understanding presidents have of their own legislation. There’s simply no effing way that Trump knows more about “the big bills” than Obama or Clinton or either of the two Bushes or even Ronald Reagan. Saying so is foolish and stupid.
And, frankly, we don’t write things in newspapers to convince every skeptic. We write for an informed audience that presumably cares about facts enough to spend part of their day seeking them out. They don’t deserve to be treated like infants. When Trump says something spit-out-your-drink false, the correct thing to do is to call it a lie.
As a Gish-gallopping propagandist who admits to speaking in “truthful hyperbole” (which in practice apparently means exaggerated nonsense), Der Trumper’s default procedure is to lie, by whatever definition one cares to use. Presumably there’s been polling on to what degree the citizenry thinks Trumper is truthful. Not that it is of much consequence.
The question is what is the duty of professional journalists when confronted with an American Prez who is obviously and without the slightest doubt a deluded grandiose narcissist? Perhaps do more than “fact check” the incessant vomit? In any event, it doesn’t appear that the NYT “journalist” on the spot did even that, ha-ha. Surely the theory cannot still be to give Trumper enough rope to hang himself!
The fucking press should have started calling Trump on his lies from Day One, starting with the easily disputed lies he told about the Inaugural crowds. They should have kept a running tote board of his Lies of the Week on national evening news. It should have been talked about all of the time.
But now we’ve made his discourse “normal” which means we accept his crap with a shrug and an eyeroll. This is not good or smart or normal and we can’t rewind and redo it.
Nothing is the same in politics here. We can’t wait for the pendulum to swing the other way…we have to push it.
It was many months before anyone in the media seemed able to use the words lie and liar. It’s his life pattern, for crying out loud. Becoming President made it worse, not better, and he should not have been given a scintilla of benefit of doubt.
The very upsetting thing about Schmidt’s treatment of Trump during yesterday’s interview is that he actively enabled a few of Trump’s incorrect views. The President’s downright dangerous statements about his claimed right to use the Justice Department as his McCarthyite goon squad was cued by this question by the reporter:
“SCHMIDT: You control the Justice Department. Should they reopen that (Clinton) email investigation?”
Previous Presidents have not exhibited such control of the Justice Department. Schmidt literally told a Trump-enabling lie there. Now, if/when the Times reports in the future that the President is going beyond his constitutional powers in this area, he will accurately say “Even your reporters agree with me, losers.”
The very, very upsetting thing is that a few of Schmidt’s colleagues are defending his work, setting a massive straw man on fire in the doing. “You can’t get Trump to respond if you conduct an argumentative interview” is a fucking despicable moving of the goalpoasts that have been in place for other Presidents and public servants. That straw man also mischaracterizes the requests by Times readers to simply demand that reporters ask a few appropriate follow-up questions.
The Times has been attempting to entice me all year with discounted subscription rates, and I have ignored those pitches – largely because of sorry reporting like this interview, and the question you highlight by the interviewer is but one example. The Times has been at best underwhelming. A political leader should not be coddled by the press, period. If Dolt 45 can’t take it, he can storm off, or just refuse to grant interviews (except to Faux and Breitbart). Just the snippets I saw this go around were awful. Dolt 45 is clearly unfit, but that was obvious without the incompetent interviewer to enable him. In the meantime, once more with feeling: there is nothing normal about this particular White House Occupant’s regime (let’s just call it what it is), and Dolt 45 lies so much he couldn’t tell what the truth was if it bit him on the ass.
I just heard Schmidt on TV, claiming the thing that surprised him about the interview was how “restrained” Trump was. The primary evidence Schmidt presented for this shameful mischaracterization of Trump’s responses in the interview was that “he said he felt Mueller would treat him fairly.”
I mean, look at the section of the interview he’s bringing as his prime evidence that Trump was “restrained”:
TRUMP: No, it doesn’t bother me because I hope that he’s going to be fair. I think that he’s going to be fair. And based on that [inaudible]. There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair. And if he’s fair — because everybody knows the answer already, Michael. I want you to treat me fairly. O.K.?
SCHMIDT: Believe me. This is —
TRUMP: Everybody knows the answer already. There was no collusion. None whatsoever.
The President is essentially saying here if Mueller’s team brings more charges against people in Trump’s orbit they will be treating Trump unfairly. This qualifies as “restrained”?
Who does Schmidt think he’s fooling here with this preposterous goalpost-moving nonsense?
Schmidt is really making an ass of himself at this point. Really, he should quit before he digs a deeper hole. I hope he gets called out time and again – if his colleagues won’t, I’m sure his social media feeds can be clogged with comments from irate readers who damn well know what goal post shifting looks like.
This terrific Twitter thread introduced me to another horrifying moment in yesterday’s Trump interview:
TRUMP: So, China on trade has ripped off this country more than any other element of the world in history has ripped off anything. But I can be different if they’re helping us with North Korea. If they don’t help us with North Korea, than I do what I’ve always said I want to do. China can help us much more, and they have to help us much mote. And they have to help us much more. We have a nuclear menace out there, which is no good for China, and it’s not good for Russia. It’s no good for anybody. Does that make sense?
SCHMIDT: Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
As Heidi says in response to this, “When a president can talk about getting into nuclear conflict and a journalist ASSENTS, things are bad.”
We’re way past simply counting Trump’s lies. Now is the time to recognize what his telling of the lies is telling us about him. This Esquire piece http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14516912/donald-trump-new-york-times-michael-schmidt/
that talks about the NYT interview in the context of Trump’s cognitive decline is where we need to focus.
The press and The NY Times are not falling down on the job by publishing this garbage. They are falling down on the job by not labeling what it is. My proposal to them is to create clear categories for content:
straight factual reporting – fires, murders, thefts, assaults, court reporting, etc.
Opinion: editorial page op eds
Analysis: putting context / trends around a subject,
Stenography: presented without fact checking, follow up questions, etc.
That way an article like this is easily defended. “The president wanted to vent and that is news worthy. We accepted his invitation to do so. It was not a fact finding or accountability event and it’s not presented as such. We make no representation that any of it or all of it has any factual content beyond the accuracy of recording the statements made and presenting the questions that prompted them. We refer you to the analysis and opinion related articles for more context regarding veracity, credibility, and quality of the statements recorded by our stenographer.”
Then instead of defending this as some other, traditional category of `journalism’ The NY Times can simply say, anything the president says/does is newsworthy so we published it with the clear disclaimer that it was not a fact finding or accountability exercise. And we labeled it as such.
In fact, you could label Bob Woodward’s whole post-Watergate career this way.
It’s amazing how adverse the press has become to the main role that the Founder’s thought they should be fulfilling – holding the government, institutions, and public figures accountable.
They operate more like the police do these days – preying on the subjects that the public gives them permission to attack. They manufacture lies about the Clintons and congratulate themselves. They cheerlead for wars and congratulate themselves. They give racists a platform and congratulate themselves. They brown nose successive incompetent, evil, increasingly nasty and stupid Republican administrations and congratulate themselves.
Since they can’t fulfill their mission on a daily basis, it’s no wonder they can’t hold themselves accountable, it’s an alien concept that’s been replaced by a void.
Really!!!???
I am sorry, but this is just more misedumacated bullshit. The “founding fathers?” Even the term founding fathers tells you what was up! The land-owning, middle-aged, white, male “founding fathers”…wanted a press that would effectively support their own consensus view. That view being that females, people of other races than Western European and religions other than mainstream Protestant Christian and those whose inborn sexual proclivities were other than heterosexual were to be totally disenfranchised.
Sure, there were independently printed disagreements with some of those tenets. In terms of general distribution, they most resembled the very few places on today’s internet where you might be able to scrape up a little truth amidst the morass of false news if you put sufficient effort and understanding into the search. But…just like the NY Times, CNN, etc…the officially accepted “news” was whatever the original controllers here wanted it to be. They don’t call the NY Times “the paper of record” for nothing, you know. Until this imperial structure collapses…and remember your history, they all eventually do collapse…what the mainstream official media say happened is what did happen.
So it goes.
But…the Times does offer some very good recipes.
So that goes as well.
AG
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Actually, LosGatos…the NY Times and the rest of the mainstream neocentrist media are not “falling down on their job(s).” The problem is that most people do not understand real content of those jobs.
The myth is that they are supposed to report “the truth.” The reality…and just for starters, take a look at the reporting of the assassination years, the Vietnam war, the financial excesses and crimes of the corporate/financial world, 9/11, the runup to the Iraq War and the surveillance state in all of its cyberglory…the reality is that they are tasked with creating a consensus reality amongst enough U.S.-ians to enable the controllers to do whatever it is that they want to do.
And, brother or sister…they have been doing that job extremely well for almost 70 years.
All of this empty neocentrist palaver on the leftiness blogs and in the leftiness media about how the media are falling down on the job? Just more smoke and mirrors.
Don’t fall for it.
AG
. . . with each new comment.
Don’t recall who first pointed that resemblance out here, but it just gets more and more striking with everything you shit out here. Like you’re his alter ego Pepe, and this is your Twitter feed.
If only his comments could be limited to 280 characters.