Good evening and welcome to politic and prose live, im grad graham, the coowner along with my wife. Thanks for joining us sures online where we have been able to move many of our event in response to the current pandemic, and continue to for social distancing. We crowdcast you can see us but we cant see you. You can still ask a question. To do so just click on the ask a question icon at the bottom of your screen, and there youll also see a green bar. To purchase this evenings featured book which is trump and is a assault on truth. The Fact Checkers path at the weapons. The fact check are column first appeared in the post in 2002, 2007. The column was a permanent feet noor 2011 by glen kessler, and became famous for rating falsehoods with pinocchios, one pin knownor for minor shading of the factsment for outright lies. But nothing has quite prepared the truth spotting effort for the sheer scale and brazenness of trumps mendacity over the past few years. By the posts latest count, trump has made more than 19,000 fallacious statements since take office. In the new book the team examines a number of the president oses most frequent distortions and most dangerous desings. Their book, like thick post reporting, provides an essential resource for all of us trying to keep our own eyes on the truth and avoid being blind by trumps blatant and repeated disregard for it. Today Glenn Kessler remains the fact checker editor and chief writer, his own journalism career has spained more than three decades including 11 years with newsday and 22 years with the post, during which he has covered Foreign Policy, economic policy, the white house, congress, politics, Airline Safety and wall street, a wide range of experience thats contributed to glenns ability to keep tabs on many subjects with the fact checker watched glen operate up close when he overlap he ted post and can attest to his great reporting stills, particularly key attention to detail and abiding sense of fairness. The fact checker long ago ceased to be a one man operation. Also here this evening with glen are two other members of the team. Salvador rizzo who joined the post a couple of year ago and spent time covering new jersey politician during stints at the star leak tour, the record and the new york observer, and meg kelly who is both a reporter and video editor for the fact checker and before joining the post several years ago, covered the 2016 election for npr as a visual producer. So, glenn, sal and meg, the screen is yours. All right, very good. Glenn, everyone is here. We this book, we have been living the presidency of donald trump since it began and we have spent every day going through and factcheck can his claims and also claims of democrats and other members of congress and advocacy groups. And we live it day by day. When we finished completing the book it was still a shock to us to see what we had actually written about. You forget about it. The president says so many things that are so often false, its averaging 22 claims a day, that its i think most people when they actually get through what we have written will be very surprised. The book is written as a way you can read it from cover to cover, you can also dip into sections that are of interest to you was we try to write so it each chapter stands on its own and each of us was responsible for different chapters. So what we are going to do in this presentation, well just take you through the book. Wrote the introduction, and describe that, and then well go through each chapter. Well give a little summary, highlight one or two or three of the particular claims that we find of interest in that chapter, and then well be really happy to take your questions. So, the thing about president s is that every president lies. At some point. Might do it for National Security reasons, might do it because theyre trying to cover up something of personal embarrassment, you think of the Monica Lewinski scandal. The lines temperature the falsehoods cher marketing fluff. You think of Barack Obamas if you want your plan you can keep your plan thing. And generally each president is known for one big lie. One of my favorite president ial statements is dwight eisenhower, regarded as one of pour better president s, who approved the series of statements to cover up the fact that we had the United States a had u2 flight of the soviet union because he assumed gary powers had been shot done and killed and he could cover it up. He wasnt. They found the pilot also well as his plane it and was a huge propaganda victory for the soviets. And eisenhower was asked what his greatest regret as president was and he answered forthrightly, that lie we told. We had so much damage from that lie. But its related in the book dish want no get this rightwe say and then theres donald trump, the most men additions president in u. S. History. He almost never express regret. He is not known for one big lie, just a constant stream of exaggerated invented,boatful, purposely outrageie, insightful, inconsistent, dubious and false claims and as brad mentioned were now up 19,000 and count offering the claims. The when we start the book it was the end of his third year and it was 16,241. And we actually had to scramble to add we wanted to end with january 20th but we had to scramble to add a coronavirus chapter for obvious reasons. But interesting thing about trump is that he says things that false for things that are big and small. He had a reasonably successful economy before the coronavirus hit, and yet amazingly he would exaggerate about that. He would routinely add 600,000 jobs when the talked about how many job head created. Theres no reason to do that. Also unusual in that he a lot of his falsehoods used to denigrate people. And to put himself in a better light. Ill just read one little item from the introduction which is maybe of interest. A social scientist at the university of california in santa barbara, she took our database did studied it, looking for patterns of lives lies liesd soardsly half of the lies that people tell are selfserving, and fired a quarter of them are told to advantage or protect someone else and only a tiny percentage of falsehoods are mean spirited. But turns out that donald trump, twothirds of his false idaho were selfserb serving and only 10 were meant to be kind. That means he tells seven times as men selfserving lies as kind ones. And then usually people who tell lies hurtful or disparaging lies are 1 to 2 of the total lies they tell. In terms of trump, it accounted for 50 . She said when she saw that she gasped when she looked at her computer screen. So, that is the state of or president and our presidency and now well take you through the book. The first chapter which is our cataloguing of trumps biggest whoppers was written by meg. Hi. So,s glenn just mentioned, President Trump made one of 16,000 claims by the time we started writing the book, and consequently, narrowing down what the most important ten claims were, the top claims, the biggest whoppers, became quite a challenge. Because we needed to draw from sort of speaks of his presidency, his main policy priorities, and we decided it sort of should represent his biggest things for the presidency. I wont walk you through all of it but what we sort of pulled out a few trends that really stuck out to me as i was writing the chapter so that the chapter is divided into the it wasnt me they did it reflects the way that the president deals with most topics. Either claiming credit for something that didnt happened or hasnt happened or didnt happen on his term or reflecting something that deflecting something that is completely obviously truly happened. And i think the most clear or disastrous example is the way he dealt with claims around Stormy Daniels and i think glenn the only time we have ever labeled something officially a lie because we could prove that he in fact knew that he was being deceitful at every step of the way. In the pages of the Washington Post. Only from the pages of the Washington Post. And so just to sort of jog everyones memory, basically trump said, when read this to make sure its contribute you have to ask Michael Cohen. A reporter asked him did Michael Cohen make the payment . If there was no truth, tell us why did Michael Cohen make the payments if there was no truth to her allegations . Referring to Stormy Daniels and trump said you have to ask Michael Cohen. He is my attorney. You have to ask michael. The reporter said, you know where he got the money to make that payment . And trump said, no, dont know. And essentially what we wrote about that every answer is fault. True. New but to the payment. New cow hen made the payment. He enough it was an effort to kill a damaging story. And he knew that cohen was reimbursed hard paying out the hush money. Each piece was demonstrably false and a clear example of all of the evidencing in and trump saying, i didnt know. Hough did i know that . So, im just going to good ahead and turn to the second chapter, which i also wrote, because i feel like its a good transition. Its all about trump on trump and essentially the thing that sort of unique about trump is that he exaggerated or makes false claims about almost every part of his life. It starts with where his parents are from, how well he did in college, and sort of moves through his business career, through how successful he was, and sort of his personality, what he case about, and straight to the presidency. His Approval Rating hour well people perceive him, who he has one political fights won political fights against in be past. Given what has been going on in the last few days i kind of want to highlight a couple of different pieces that are from the first section which is about trump the man. The first one is a personal favorite of mine and was not connected to what is happening in the news at all at the moment but trump has a habit of talking about cincinnati every time he is in cincinnati. And the first time i heard him say this i was like, trump synonymous with new york, developer, why is he talk about growing up in cincinnati . And so he often exaggerates saying that he worked there, he lived there for a long time, he spend a big summer there, and essential what happened is his father bought a development there while he was in high school and he would occasionally go with his father to do some menial tasks around that development. But his suggestion that he sort of like really knows the city and is a cincinnati guy, are just deeply misleading. The other thing i want to highlight and these go hand in hand is i think folks have seen the president say that he has been done more for throw Africanamerican Community than any other president in his term. Also has a habit of saying hes the least racist person ever, and one thing we did in the chapter is run through a series of events to sort of debunk that statement. And i ends with earlier, last year, when he invoked the go back home trope, spinning to four democratic minorities congressmen and marty darrins, who is our executive editor, came out and said, this isnt racist trope. But this is certainly not the first or the last time that trump has weighted in hot water when it comes to race and i think sal was the their chapter. Right, i wrote the third, fourth and the sixth chapter in the appendix and theres a common theme that runs through all 0 four of these pieces of the book and that is the psychology of donald trump when he is at his most combative. Because Chapter Three is all about the false idahos he tells about his perceived and real political enemies. People like robert muller, nancy pelosi, john mccain, jim comby, chapter four is the stuff that he tells people in his base, often during his very boisterous rallies where the number of false claims is just like any just like nothing you have ever seen before from a politician. We have measured the rallies and theyre a spectacle of politics like we have never seen and dont do well win you measure how truthful the president is being. Then its had chapter six which is immigration and that is the category that President Trump most often out of our 18,000, 19,000 claims di i havent recently but missioning this top category for false and misleading claims if people lying i went to the deepest, darkest part of the jungle here, and lived to tell but it so if i can do it, so can in the country and the become is a great Public Service as some have noted because like glenn said you forget a lot. You forget that donald trump has been smearing joe scar brought since 2017. I forgot about that until two weeks thing president start all over again and unfortunately that is just such a disgusting and sort of vicious lie that is based on absolutely nothing but we didnt think we didnt have the wherewithal to remember it because its not in the book its from 2017, ages nothing trumpland. [inaudible] nod he suggested once in 2017 and now all over the place on his twitter feed. He was just once fox news radow this manager. Theres nothing for the conspiracy their. This National Inquirer would not touch thatsoso that tells you something because theyll touch a lot of things at the National Inquirer. Melt give you an example of the kinds of fact check we would do for chapter 3 which is the chapter on his enemies and before impeachment, before coronavirus, before the riots, the Russian Investigation can do took up a lot of oxygen in d. C. , around the country in terms of News Coverage sin the campaign ended. We had a constant drip drip of stories, and now trump is very issue sends about it but he has said so many false and misleading thing about the russia investigation its hard to take any of these latter day complaints seriously when theyre spinning these documents coming out in court cases bo something theyre not and the record for trump is so checkered. So, for example, about Robert Mueller, marine veteran, you know, longtime director of the fbi, a guy who has been respected by both parties for a long time and done a lot of Public Service. Donald trump would hammer Robert Mueller daily, on twitter and public remarks with false and miss leaving claimeds, alleging he and Robert Mueller has a business consecutive spout and mueller had conflict of interest and that would disqualify him from investigating the Trump Campaign. What trump describes as a conflict of interest, i his own aides describe as petty and ridiculous. Robert mueller was once a member of the Trump Golf Club in virginia. Had not been using it for years because he was living and work neglect district and at one point he tried to get a refund from the club, and he and the club manager by all intents purposes looks like a very courtal back and forth between them and then i guess Robert Mueller gave up on the refund and thats its and trump spins this into some business dispute and a conflict of interest, claims about Robert Mueller he had a separate conflict Love Interest because he was interviewed to be the fbi director when trump just fired james comey the reason for the Russian Investigation. But actually what wow see in the mule are report and what we put in the book and we fact check social distance many times because the president says its constantly, Robert Mueller went to the white house to speak to trump and some aides to give them an institutional perspective of the fbi directors job. Wasnt applying for it and was clear fluff to the trumps aides and steve bannon, just not trump. Thats a very prominent example of trumps spreading disinformation but a political foe or antagonist. Nancy pelosi the speaker of the house gets on his radar very often and always when youre hearing trump may some outrageous or incredible claim but nancy pelosi theres not much there when you start scratching. So, theyve never we put in the book with trump he at one point made some comments early in his presidency it and wasnt clear whether he was talking about immigrants in general or the gang members from ms13. The way hey proceeded through his remarks there was ambiguities and moe people reason whether i would conclude he was talk about immigrant expose he called them animals and then later on he returns to the theme of ms13 and how the gang is very violent. So he called some group of people animals, the next day while its still ambiguous, nancy pelosi says, no human should be called an animal and everyone has a spark of divinity and he should realize that. And then trump clarifies after that, he was talking but m113 but for years and yearly had been trashing pelosill for criticizing him for supposedly send suring him on calling ms13 animal. She never did that. She was still in the mindset he was talking about owl immigrants as the rest of us were before he clarified. So theres a lot more. We couldnt include scarbrough but you get a chance. And im going to segway to chapter 4 which i wrote and that is we titled you religion find is that you look at the people who go to trump rallies and theyve been interviewed for some event at the white house, and theyre catered to the religious right and you have a lot of Trump Supporters there and what you fine that a lot of them are not very perturb evidence about the president s record with false and misleading statements. And in fact a lot of them, when you ask them point blank, theyll say things like, well, you know issue dont really take it seriously, or i know he is fibbing a bit. Its hard to tell how many of the president s supporters are actually believing every single word he says and how many have a more jaundice its book ask still support him for other reasons and have nothing to do with whether he tells the truth or not or whether he is misleading them on some issue or not. And so we spend a lot of economic and jobs claims into that chapter but three of them that really stand out and i religion go through them quickly one of. The is the claim that he quote unquote decimated obamacare or virtually eliminated obamacare. What actually happened is he and republicans in congress reduced one part of obamacare, the individual penalty, a tax on people who declined to buy Health Insurance and trump managed to reduce it to zero but the rest of the law is still there the exchanges are still there millions of people still have insurance through the exchange. The medicare expansion is still there a bunch of states get billions from the federal government for the method okayed programs. The guarantee for public for preexisting conditions is still there so, Trump Administration this court trying to get rids of it but its still part of the law. Secondly, ill go brief riff into not type of claim, the claim he repealed the Johnson Amendment. That forbids 501 c 4 charity organizations, from taking political stances in n support or opposition of candidates because their nonprofit and dont pay taxes and dont get to participate in supporting or opposing candidates. Thats the tradeoff. And importantly the state of new york sued the Trump Campaign and foundation for violation of the Johnson Amendment and now trump is making this four pinocchio claim he repealed evidence when in fact its still a law of the land, hat ah nothings been rerolled. Trump side a ive seen 0 halt love executive orders in my day and this was fluff and you doesnt have enough teeth and i mean, the Johnson Amendment may not be enforced very tough live by the irs but its still there and chapter five, back over to glenn. Yeah. Actually, five is meg. Sorry. We should we want to leave room for questions so probably look through this the last one a little more quickly. I religion be fast. Similar the to the first two chapters this is another case of spending time in trumps head and its a chapter about twitter which is the president s preferred communication platform. One thing that struck me was that a third of his false and misleading tweets were about impeachment or the russia investigation. During the focus on some things that were hurtful to him. If you look back to his time before being president it was very much like a punching bag of his thoughts that anybody political. So he would go after obama on a regular basis, which he still does. Amongst other topics. Also sort of like a catalogue of flipflops. So essentially almost in any situation you fog back and find a tweet where he criticize is someone else for doing something he has done, and one that is very straightforward and really stuck out to me was in 2012, he wrote, three pieces of staff inless then three years of being president. Part of the reason barack obama can pass the agenda temp end of demings 2018, trump was moving into this fourth chief of staff. To sum things up, glenn,ll hand it back to you. Well, this part of the book gets into the issue chapters. So, sal did the first one which was on his falsehoods about immigration. Right, so, i probably dont need to good through the background here. The president campaigned on immigration, he has been perhaps the most ate least in the modern era the toughest president with his rhetoric on immigration and what we see when he makes big claim holiday immigrants being southern with higher crime rate, i ascribing to members the Central American caravan, that theyre part of the drug trade, they have there are terrorists. One thing that he constantly is fearmongerring on and especially as election seems to approach we see this when his first election was approaching, when the congressional midterms were approaching, who knows if he will make a central part of this Reelection Campaign i want to talk about two issues we develop into in the immigration chapter and they are, we delve into a video variety but the first withs the idea that immigrants cause crime, higher crime lates, and first of all, its very hard to measure the proportion of undocumented immigrants who are doing anything because how the Census Bureau some people klain maybe not thorough enough but there has been a lot of Academic Studies and you fine theres no association between immigrants and higher crime rates or cities or counties or regions where immigrants tend to settle and higher crime rate in fact crime goes down where immigrants settle as a group and very tellingly, ive always found the statistic to be very telling and i dont see it out there often enough so i try to repeat it often and witness an over i first things things the e chapter, during the 30 year period between the late 80s and mid2000s, the number of undocumented immigrants tripled in the United States. And Violent Crime rates were cut by half. So property crime rates and Violent Crime rates. An issue that we have to fact check many, many times until it is finally caught on. All right. And then the rest of the issue chapters that i wrote, i will go through them quickly. First economics and trade. The issue for the president he used to have a pretty good economy. Growing going upward slope and, you know, when his most repeated claim ever that we have factcheck is now up almost 350 times i believe. He presided over the best economy in just history. Its not, no matter how you slice it or what data you look at, increase gross product. Bill clinton, johnson, eisenhower all had better booming economies tran trump. Now, of course, its not that same kind of situation in the wake of the pandemic. So trump has actually adjusted claim. He no longer says he has the best economy in history. He says he has the best economy in world history. Once he actually he said he had the best economy in universe, its [laughter] we also talk and i write in the chapter about trade falsehoods, many and the next chapter is about Foreign Policy. This is an area where the president feels hes i used to cover Foreign Policy and spent 9 years covering the state department for the Washington Post and, you know, theres a way to do diplomacy, the president is more like bull in china shop. I saw trump ad where he bragged he was bull on china shop, so i guess they cant get mad at me for using that line in the book. Hence, things about Foreign Policy. I go through a variety of different issues, north korea or iran, the middle east, theres one that i just think is delightful. The other ones are interesting and this one is delightful. He often says or he said more than a dozen times now that he came up with the idea to face the embassy of jerusalem, new embassy in jerusalem with jerusalem stone. He called the ambassador, why dont you cover with stone, itll make it look really good. Every since british mandate it has been law in jerusalem that you must cover buildings with stone, particularly nice stone with golden hue. Why does he say this, i dont know. The next issue chapter is about impeachment. Im particularly pleased with this chapter. I think if you want to understand exactly what happened in the impeachment inquiry, i take you through from his from the beginning to the end in a readable fashion and so impeachment seems maybe about 100 years ago. [laughter] when we were writing the book it was during impeachment trial so it seems awfully relevant the world has changed but i do think people will find that chapter of great interest. The one thing i wanted to highlight in there which is kind of from the beginning is his just comment that he made that, of course, now i cant find it. Favorite tv show fox friends and had to do with the server of the dnc and they gave a server, whatever its striked, Company Owned by wealthy ukrainian, why did they go to Ukrainian Company . And the strangest thing about the whole series of things which is something that he seems affirmly believe, he seems to believe, kind of a Conspiracy Theory, well, the server is not in ukraine, t at the dnc on display. The founder, he was born in russia, hes not ukrainian. Hes never been ukrainian and hes a u. S. Citizen and its not Ukrainian Company and traded in Nasdaq Stock Exchange and went public before month had call with ukrainian leader. 97 on its first day in trade, anyway, but because of his obsession with that, he led himself down a path that led to impeachment. The final issues in the chapter is about the coronavirus which we are all quite familiar with. We have to lead you through just the strange statements the president made such as people would think it would go away in april, you know, we only have 15 cases, pretty good job weve done. He said that at the end of february, end of march there were 2,500 deaths in the United States. Then, of course, he blamed, there she is, of course blamed barack obama for all sorts of things that werent true such as that he left behind bad tests, how could obama leave behind a test if thats covid19 which is a new disease caused by a new virus. Then obama did horrible job with swine flu pandemic when which actually obama was considered done pretty good job on that, and you know, he strangely referred to the statistics on flu, seasonal flu which he would twist out of context or use in way that is were not relevant this situation at hand. There are two other parts to have book. I end with a conclusion and appendix is a tour through one rally, trumps longers rally ever and we kind of combine all the various claims as well as others that we havent gotten to so you can see, you know, sal takes you through how many things are true and how many are false. And in the conclusion, i try to assess, what is the impact of donald trump on the presidency . Its a bit of a errand to figure it out, but, you know, part of it depends on whether hes reelected because if hes not reelected people might say that his style of truth telling or not truth telling doesnt succeed but i do think that there are some hope to be looking at this, the impact on the presidency because i dont think its necessarily worked for him. He has he has terrible ratings in terms of whether people find hes trust worthy. The Washington Post, we did pollsters to look at whether or not, you know, trumps biggest repeated falsehoods were actually believed by the American People and only 1 out of 3 people believed these falsehoods. They werent even believed by people who are Trump Supporters and we tested this by not identifying that trump said these things and identified if this was true, was this correct statement and most people, people picked the correct statement. So its, you know, like i said itll depend in part whether hes reelected but youve already every action in politics results in reaction and so if trump is not succeed, the next president might say consistently misleading the American Public is not a way to political success. And sal will talk briefly to appendix and i know we want to get to questions. I find that you summarized it well but i encourage everyone to read it if they have the fortitude for it because it takes a while. One of the longers chapters here because we go methodically through every single statement, claim of fact that trump makes during the rally, so he speaks for 2 hours, we, you know, we dont focus on the opinion, we take every claim that he makes and we assess whether its true, false or misleading or somewhere in there and we categorize them and just very briefly to give you guys a take, the analysis showed from a grand total of 179 statements, 120 were false, mostly false or unsupported by evidence so you can take that to mean that at a trump rally twothirds of what is president says is false or misleading and that was his best score. We have done this 3 times, twothirds is his best, little bit over than that. All right. I see we have lots of questions. Ive been scrolling through them. This is interesting one. Do you think trump is clueless or deliberate in comments and his actions . And thats a fascinating question because we struggle with this. This is why we dont often use the word lie, and the interesting thing about trump is he is situational, he doesnt feel any need to worry about whether or not hes contradicting something that he said literally 24 hours beforehand. Does that mean hes been technical or does he actually convince himself that what hes saying now is the truth and we noticed that in the ukraine investigation, the whole bit about crowd strike and fox friends is saying, are you sure about this and he just repeated it, he commits himself that it was Ukrainian Company and somehow was in ukraine and they caused the the interference in the 2016 election, so and he has a tendency to believe conspiracy theories, so we were talking about joe scarborough. Sounds like a total lie and how would anybody believe this and seems convinced that its true. Its a good question because you would imagine that this would be a huge liability for any president speaking reelection. Had to resell it to the public, but, you know, theres some evidence, we see reporting sometimes that his aides sometimes anonymously are saying that they try to steer him away from this falsehood or that Conspiracy Theory and they just couldnt convince the president to do it and we see it reflected sometimes in having to do with manufacturing jobs during the Obama Administration and and, people tweak the wording and gets them into territory, generally, no. Right, right. I saw one and now ive lost it but i was going to say about how often does he delete tweets and actually have that statistic for the first 3 years and i think its about 500 tweets that he deleted. He has a tendency to retweet people and requote people a lot and we dont factcheck tweets and something thats not him saying per se but we do factcheck when he retweets and that was one thing that caught my eye. What is trumps average pinocho score . Its not something that we calculated but a couple of things we can say which is generally a politician that we factcheck on a regular basis gets 4 pinochos about 15 to 20 of the time. I think barack obama was 18 . Hillary was in that same range. During the 2016 campaign which is what i did calculate this. Trump got 4 pinochos 65 of the time. The only person who had ever been close to that was Michelle Bauchman so trump was twice as bad as bauchmann and record at president has not been better and there was a point in october this year where i calculated he had already received more than a thousand pinochos and he he actually breaks the scale and has gotten more pinochos over the 9 years that ive been doing this. Someone take another one. I see a couple of questions and i just want to tell people that we are fine. The narrative, it is a little bit, you know, theres a little bit of element of fatigue, not so much the book, the book was a wonderful thing to be able to work on and collaborate on. You know, but when youre factchecking every single thing the president says, theres element of repetitiveness that gets to you but i dont really see, you know, it brings us down or, you know, we have, i mean, obviously, you know, we are humans and we process politics like everyone else. We just keep moving forward because the president never stops, so i would show everyone that we are all okay. I will add to that that the database, you know, we did not expect it to be such an allconsuming thing. It started out as a 100day project, working with sals predecessor who has originally suggested the idea of doing the database and we did it in part because we tried to learn a lot about policy indepth and the factchecks simply jumping off points to explain complex issues to people, we didnt want to be bogged down with trump who would say things that you could factcheck in a couple of lines and the and so we thought this is a way we can keep focus on important issues and just throw that trump tweet into the database and five claims a day and we will do it for the rest of the presidency and he effectively became his own press secretary, white house briefings and claims exploded, so the thing that has made you know, we just lost too many weekends and and weeknights, evenings to try to keep up with database. Theres a big difference between adding in 6 a day to 22 claims a day or if its a rally, you know, can be 100. 100. Yeah, i think that statistics through comparison between the first two years, on the third year of trumps first 3 years really sort of clarifies that, you know, he made more false misleading claims in third year than first two combined. There was a particular month in 2018 that sal and i both remember quite well. And trump casually decided to double his rate of claims and we just suddenly the world was falling in and we werent quite sure why and when the numbers came out it was really clear why we were scrambling so much. I should note the book the filled with between each chapter graphics that i think people will find of interest, so thats the page i was holding up. Its just intended to keep it somewhat light and using the book is grimly funny, so we try to have a light hand as we went through this. I see a question here. Its the most popular one, what is the most dangerous factchecker or false statement from trump, and i have two answers to that. I would say that recently and i would direct everyone to go to our website, a few of our colleagues did excellent video factcheck about trumps claims about hydroxychloroquine, the drug that the fda now says could cause heart disease, right, and trump for 2 months, you know, still occasionally now talks about it as possible remedy for the novel coronavirus. That one comes to mind, theres a chapter in the book as well and the answer to that i would like to give is with trump its not so much theres one theres not so much that they are one big false, one big lie, just constant wearing down of every, you know, segment of society he sort of speaks about that needs to be factchecking him. The constant misinformation about every single issue that comes across him. That does a lot to shake, you know, face and democracy which isnt so much dangerous like taking hydroxychloroquine with someone with poor heart but theres longterm implications of the latter. People wont trust the media, local post office, the schools, the sate government, that has longterm repercussions just the volume number of false claims. An excellent answer. You can see its rhetoric about how the media is the enemy of the people and just this past week you see supporters being attacked, sometimes brutally by either Law Enforcement or sometimes protestors and that i think thats a legacy of the kind of rhetoric that the president uses and i was recently asked in an interview, was there an issue in which trump spoke the truth ever and actually the answer is i cannot think of one, theres not one single issue where the president , you can say consistently is honest and thats a disturbing thing. Yeah, i mean, i think that when you start to think about the sort of scale and scope of the falsehoods that he says thats alarming and everything from issue detail and throw away thing but theres no reason essentially to make up two things that really have significant either Health Consequences for people or, you know, policy consequences or global Foreign Policy and thats where it start to feel like the ground is a bit uneven under all of it. Lets see, how does trump compare with reagan, bush 1, bush 2, they lied a lot about very big things. Maybe you can say they lied less on big things. Like i said every president lies at some point and definitely big things that come to mind, you know, in the case of reagan, affair, in the case of george w. Bush, the weapons of mass destruction but you can his sporters would argue he was mislead or allowed himself to be mislead by the intelligence, didnt look more carefully at it. Question is that a lie, hoping things to be the way they are, you know, the United States did go to war based on that intelligence, so but this i really trump is just in another realm truly and and one of the reason ways of the realm, compared to other president s, trump does not really rely on the expertise of the government. , you know, you may feel like george w. Bush took us to war on false pretenses but he did rely on intelligence that was developed by the cia, again, in trumps case there are things he says that are not dont come out of the intelligence agencies and in fact, in the case of the pandemic, the intelligence agencyies were telling it was a serious problem. He wasnt paying attention to what they were saying and he spent time, weeks telling the American Public it was going away even as Health Advisers were saying this was potentially a very Serious Public Health issue. 6 more minutes or so, 5 more minutes. What role should social media play in factchecking trump . What is someone want to take that . I think its an interesting question. We are seeing play out with twitter and facebook. Twitter has started appending what are the i mean, insufficient little lines at the bottom that are linked to a separate case that factchecks some of what the president is saying and the first time it was a claim and the president has saying false misleading vote by mails. Thats not certain, we dont know if vote by mail helps democrats more than republicans. The president thinks so and they attended a second warning, you know, to one of his tweets when he tweeted the line when the looting start, the shooting start. Theres been a lot of debate obviously are the social Media Company publicist and do they have responsibilities like to Washington Post has, you know, to avoid recklessly slandering people and to, you know, the pages or are they not public shareholder or tech company with platform and they have no responsibility over the third party and what they are saying on there. No matter what you do, no matter whether twitter hires independent factcheckers. The president has a huge mega phone and he bears responsibility and tackle a problem. Totally agree with that. How do we make sure this information is known by every voter, people seem to forget about it the next day or with the next lie . I think the answer is everyone should get a copy of this book for fathers day [laughter] give people information. We cant control, theres a lot of evidence, there have been studies shown that factchecks actually make Trump Supporters better informed. It doesnt change your opinion of the president. Data showing that while, you know, 5 years ago democrats and republicans, same percentage thought it was important for a president to always tell the truth when we readied that poll recently, it was still 70 for democrats and republicans. It was only 49 for republicans which indicates that they realize that the president is not telling the truth but they still support him for other political reasons. So, you know, thats thats the nature of our society, the country has gotten much more partisan. Trump has exacerbated that partnership. Another figure that i cite in the conclusion which i think is fascinating is in 1960, 5 of democrats and republicans said they would be upset if their child married someone from a different political study. That study done now shows that as much as 45 would be upset that their children married someone from a Different Political Party. They would be more upset if child married someone from Different Political Party and they would be upset if the child married someone from a different race, from a different religion or even if the child married someone of the same sex. And trump, i believe, unfortunately has really exacerbated that by simply painting the other side as enemy and someone to be defeated and hes using falsehoods to make those claims. Its supposed to bring the American Public together and to try to actually say, you know, we shouldnt be such a split society. I would say another thing that we do aside from sort of, you know, the columns youre familiar with and paper online, we have what covers bigger topics and we publish videos on facebook, public videos on post site and snapchat, instagram, really trying to sort of spread information to voters who are getting their information in all different areas. I say that more people watch factchecker video than written factchecks. This has been a huge success at the Washington Post. Im personally very proud of and these videos are really astonishing, there was a video we did having to do with where did the wuhan virus come from and where in wuhan did the virus come from and that video got 2 million views on youtube. I dont know where we are in the time here i think we are okay. [laughter] running close. Thanks for truly a great and illuminating discussion. The work is so exhausting but its so important and very assuring to hear that you are all still okay. One thing is is most definitely true, the 3 of you are going to stay very, very busy factchecking trump through at least the rest of this year. Again, the title of their book its donald trump and his assault on truth and you can get a copy or several by clicking on the green bar at the bottom of your screens and thanks again to everyone for tuneing in. From all of us here at politics and prose stay well read. More television for serious readers. Welcome to the Manhattan Institute broadcast on race, riots and the police. Thank you all for joining us for this important and timely conversation. May name is jason riley and i want the viewers to know that throughout the program please enter your questions on any of the platforms that youre watching us on and we will th
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