I had to send an email to some of Michigan’s most prominent organizations to determine if the president had received an “Man of the Year” award that he kept claiming. (Nope.)
I checked every public word Donald Trump said or tweeted in just under four years. The work was relentless. The work was relentlessly strange.
Many politicians lie as a means to an end – to unwind from a scandal or to inflate their policy achievements. Trump was willing to lie about everything all the time, often for no apparent reason. It lies as a way of life.
And it took over a large part of my own life.
How it started
I started counting Trump’s false claims in September 2016, late in his race against Hillary Clinton, when I was the Washington correspondent for my hometown newspaper, Canada’s Toronto Star. I started because I was frustrated by a gap in most US media coverage. Trump’s relentless dishonesty is hardly mentioned in the news copy, which even treats it as it was: a central story of that campaign.
So I thought I’d shoot a tweet
occasionally a list of the false things Trump said. When Michael Moore, the filmmaker,
tweeted that I ‘made a list every day. I suddenly got thousands of eager new Twitter followers. And I thought:
My God, I think I should do this every day …I thought Trump’s deception was bad then. It got a lot worse. In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, that was 8.3 false claims per day. What started as a side project that I could handle within a few hours a week needed regular all-nighters. By the time I joined CNN in mid-2019, a second reporter, Tara Subramaniam, was needed.
Trump’s dishonesty in 2017 tended to be implemented. His dishonesty of 2018 was much more written; he uses serial lies as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. He then used serial lies as a deliberate strategy in his Ukraine scandal in 2019. He then used serial lies as a deliberate strategy in his response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 – and he kept daily ‘information sessions’ so wildly dishonest that CNN needed me to go on TV right away to dispel the nonsense that viewers had just heard.
Dark consequences
People are almost certain to die because of Trump’s Covid-19 lie. And people died at the Capitol as a result of Trump’s lying rush over the 2020 election. Although there was a steady absurdist comedy in the president’s dishonesty repertoire – I could not help but entertain him by his imaginary “sir” stories about brave blue-collar workers crying in his presence, there were always dark consequences.
One of them was anger over journalists. I have received hundreds of hateful emails, thousands of angry tweets, one graphic death threat that I feel compelled to report to the police. For all the Twitter moms
concerns about my mental healththough, the work was always far more tiring than traumatic. I typed in pajama pants at home and did not cover a war.
I only lost my composure once. While watching an earlier pandemic briefing in which Trump falsely assured Americans that the virus was under control, I paused for a moment and thought of all the people who would probably die from the president’s weakness.
Nothing had to be done to stop him. Whether it was the resulting lies of the coronavirus or trivial lies like the production of the Michigan Man of the Year, he kept lying, no matter how many times fact checkers noticed he was wrong. People kept asking me if the job felt useless as he was impenetrable for correction.
It never did. The point was never to change Trump’s own behavior.
I had three goals. One, to get readers and viewers the facts they did not get from their president. Two, to show other journalists when the president is lying, so they can incorporate the information into their own work. Three, to take a stand for the truth – to declare that there is still something like a verifiable reality, no matter how hard Trump tries to erase it, and that we are not going to give up, no matter how Trump tries to discredit us .
A daily routine
And so I stuck to a daily routine I could never have imagined before Trump launched his campaign.
I flipped over in bed, turned off my alarm, and opened Twitter to see what the President of the United States might have said while I slept. And then, because Trump lied about a staggering array of topics, I would try to educate myself quickly on things I knew nothing about –
trade with China, or veterans’ legislation on veterans in health care, or hurricane forecasting.
The lie sometimes continued until I went to sleep. Every time I felt I was being overtaken, Trump would lie about something new – while still keeping many of the old lies in regular exchange. When I started
tweet the fact-checking of Trump’s rally applications a few moments after he made it, fans consider it a kind of magic. In fact, it was pretty easy. The president kept saying the same false things.
That was, in total, a lot. In September 2020, I had to abandon my attempt to produce a comprehensive count of the false allegations: Trump made so many lies during the campaign that I could not physically keep up. Then, since September 2016, I have collected about 9,000 false claims.
Trump never knocked me out all the time. (He has
block me on Twitter in 2017.) And unlike other politicians I actually checked, Trump’s White House supporters never made contact to try to scold me or to me out of finding that he was inaccurate.
I thought that was telling.
Whatever the Trump officials said in public, they probably also knew that Trump lied a lot. They also knew that no matter what anyone wrote for a Canadian newspaper or on CNN, they could get his lies unchallenged through social media and friendly outlets like Fox News, One America News and Breitbart on his base.
To be honest with the audience
Perhaps my most disturbing experience on this mate was a trip to Trump-friendly towns in Ohio in 2017. I went to ask his supporters if they did not know he was lying. A lot of them did not. Worse, a bunch of them did it – and told me they liked the lie because it made Washington elite like me rebellious.
I never got a good idea of how many Trump supporters are really interested in the work of fact-checkers, although I noted with interest that some of the Trump 2016 voters who switched to Joe Biden in 2020 mentioned his lie as a factor in their disillusionment. These shards of the electorate aside, it has never been so obvious that a good portion of the president’s base followed him or preceded him in a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.
Honestly, I do not know how to reach this hard core. But we must remember that it is a minority of the country, and we must not allow its belief in lies to deter us from telling our truth. Whether we are discussing Trump or Biden or any other politician, we need to be straight with our readers and viewers.
The media coverage about Trump has improved since the insufficient coverage in 2016 led me to tackle this project. By 2020, some traditional stores would at least use the word “lie” in their Trump coverage; some at least occasionally write stories that focus on dishonesty. To be honest, though, I think the coverage of the lie remained inadequate until the end.
Too often, the coverage of blatantly dishonest Trump speeches still mentioned the dishonesty in passing or not at all. Too often, the president’s lies are quoted without explaining that they were wrong.
Telling people what is true and what is untrue is a core responsibility of every news reporter and every outlet. To point out a lie is objective reporting, not prejudice. And as interesting as it all was to me, fact checking should not be left to the designated fact checker.
