On Thursday, PolitiFact published its 1,000th fact check of a claim made by Donald Trump. The publication, which usually refrains from wading into political discussions or weighing in on a politician’s overall character, took the opportunity to release an analysis of those years of work. Its finding? Trump lies a lot.
“American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” the authors wrote. “Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a firehose of claims.”
The analysis found in particular that Trump’s immigration-related claims tended toward inflammatory falsehoods and that more than 70 percent of PolitiFact’s checks on immigration, foreign policy, crime, COVID, and health care were largely false. It concluded, also, that “Trump’s falsehoods have fueled threats to democracy.”
And yet, the article made it clear PolitiFact’s ambitions are limited. “Readers sometimes ask us what our endgame is with a politician like Trump. They say our fact-checks don’t keep Trump from repeating his false claims, including lies about the 2020 election,” the authors wrote. “It’s not our job to silence Trump or force him to change his rhetoric.”
But we at Slate were interested not just in what PolitiFact found; we wanted to know, for a team so diligently committed to the cause of fighting misinformation with data and passionless expertise, how it feels to operate in a world where objective truth...
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