The Only Time Trump Makes News Is When He Tells the Truth |
She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.
—Donald Trump, speaking to New York Times reporters about ICE agent Jonathan E. Ross firing point-blank into the head of 37-year-old American citizen Renee Nicole Good, killing her. Trump then showed the reporters a video that revealed Good did not run over Ross or appear to be trying to.
President Donald Trump’s astonishing capacity to spout lies—even, as we saw last week, when documentary evidence like the video of Renee Good’s killing flatly contradicts him—is outpacing the press’s ability to correct them. I don’t fault the press for this state of affairs; it has expended considerable resources on the fact-checking project. But the job has gotten too big. We’ve never before seen a president flood the zone with whoppers on this scale, and it’s only gotten worse in Trump’s second term as his native mendaciousness is accelerated by encroaching dementia.
CNN’s Daniel Dale still bird-dogs Trump’s lies as well as any human could, but there are only so many hours in a day. Ditto for the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org, and parallel efforts by the Associated Press and Reuters. Glenn Kessler fact-checks Trump’s lies in his Substack newsletter, but after he retired last summer as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker columnist, the Post was too cowardly to replace him.
Indeed, as Kessler noted in his final Fact Check column, fact-checking is in retreat everywhere. Meta ended its fact-checking program shortly before Trump took office; Google threw in the towel six months later, and Trump’s dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development slashes funding for........