Not long after last night’s “debate” ended, PolitiFact posted its “Fact Checking the First 2020 Debate” article.
What a waste of space.
Fact checking is not helpful in our current climate, especially the way PolitiFact presents it: an above-the-fray, both-sides-do-it look at how (in their words) “Many of the candidates’ [plural] claims needed a fact check.”
This decontextualized, business-as-usual evaluation of statements as “false,” “misleading,” “needs context,” etc. misses the whole point: that the president is willing to say anything. This makes fact-checking irrelevant — worse than irrelevant, actually, since holding fact-checking court normalizes the liar and con-man, putting him on the same rhetorical level as his opponent.
Worse, focusing on the technicalities of precisely how lying the liar was distracts from the real, frightening take-aways:
- Trump defined “law and order” as a function primarily of force: send the National Guard in and they’d “put out that fire in half an hour.”
- Trump refused to acknowledge that the climate crisis even exists.
- Trump called on his supporters to “watch closely” the polls, which sounds to me a lot like voter intimidation.
- Trump not only wouldn’t denounce white supremacists, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” — a phrase the Proud Boys are now gloating over.
That last one is worth emphasizing. Trump was lobbed a softball question: “But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.”
I don’t know if he meant to say what he said, or if he was just saying anything again — I guess deciding that would be anthropomorphizing him — but the effect is the same. He sees “antifa and the left” as the only problem. Someone has to deal with that. Might as well be white supremacists, right?
I hope that, someday, PolitiFact and its ilk will have a meaningful role in political discourse again. But fact-checking in this political climate is worse than a waste of time. We know that Trump lies. At some point we need to turn our attention from listing the false things he says, and turn our attention to the effects of his rhetoric — which include far more than a mere presentation of facts, whether true, false, misleading, “alternative,” or whatever.