What’s it like covering Trump’s government?
We asked the Star’s Daniel Dale six questions about his work as our Washington bureau chief
Daniel Dale, the Star’s Washington bureau chief and the fact-checker behind the paper’s Donald Trump false claims tracker, will be participating in a panel discussion of politics in Trump’s America on Monday.
The panel “Hothouse: Politics in Trump’s America” features Dale as a speaker, alongside Vivian Salama, the White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Irene Gentle, the Star editor, will serve as moderator.
Dale has been the Washington bureau chief since 2015. He became known for fact-checking Trump’s false claims in real time through his Twitter account, where he has more than 500,000 followers. The count on Trump’s false claims is now more than 4,000, and the U.S. president has personally blocked Dale on Twitter.
Vivian Salama has been covering the White House for the Wall Street Journal since 2018. Before that, she covered the White House and national politics for NBC News. Earlier in her career, she worked as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, including as the Baghdad bureau chief for The Associated Press from 2014 to 2016.
In preparation for the event, we asked Dale six questions about what it’s like covering America’s 45th president.
How has your approach to covering Trump changed since you started?
Late in the 2016 campaign, I realized that Trump’s dishonesty was a central story of his candidacy and needed to be covered like a story in itself rather than something to be occasionally mentioned. As time has gone on, I’ve made his lying and his deceiving a central focus in my coverage. It’s a kind of niche in covering Trump that wasn’t always being filled. I saw a possible role for myself there, and I’ve made that a focus throughout.
What is the hardest part of your job?
The sheer quantity of false and dubious claims that he makes. You can’t really complain about doing this because our journalistic colleagues are in war zones and reporting on disasters and actually doing footwork, and I’m sitting here at
my desk reading transcripts. But just as a matter of time, it takes a while to go through this many false claims. It’s also difficult at times because you often can’t fact-check him like you fact-check other politicians, because a significant percentage of his claims are simply made up. You can’t say, “The real number is 100, he said 130, so that’s incorrect.” Often it’s like trying to prove a negative, when he claims there are unknown Middle Easterners in the migrant caravan, or someone called him to give him a dramatic compliment, or people crying as they speak to him backstage. It’s hard to prove that these things didn’t happen even when they seem like they’re very possibly inaccurate. That’s a constant challenge with him.
How have readers been responding to your fact-checking efforts? Readers have been mostly appreciative. I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback about it. I think Canadians but also American readers are appreciative that this is being done. They appreciate information. They want to know whether what the president is telling them is true.
Even if they know he’s generally a liar, they may not know how he’s deceiving them on a particular topic, and so they appreciate the info. I also get a lot of criticism, much of it very angry, some of it fair.
People have various questions and criticisms about it, so it’s definitely not all positives, and certainly a lot of Trump supporters are unhappy with it, but it’s been mostly good.
Do you think you’ve convinced any Trump supporters to look at him more critically? There have been a couple, and by that I mean literally a couple. (There are) two who have told me that my fact-checking has prompted them to see him in a new light.
But what I emphasize to people is that my job isn’t to convert Trump supporters. It’s not my role as a journalist to get people not to vote for him. I’m just trying to provide facts and accurate information to as many people as are interested.
So if most Trump supporters are not interested or they’re not reading the Toronto Star or they think it’s nitpicky or pedantic or whatever, that’s OK with me. It’s not my job to sell this to them.
Are there any advantages — or disadvantages — to being a Canadian covering American politics? I have more leeway to point out that he’s lying, to use the word “lie” (or) “liar” working for a Canadian outlet and particularly the Toronto Star. The editors have understood what I’m doing. They see it as a worthwhile mission and they’re not shy as many U.S. publications are about using these terms that are objectively accurate but that many outlets are afraid of using. Being foreign and being at the Star in particular has been helpful.
What would you most like readers to know about what you’re doing? This is a unique project because Trump is a unique president. People ask, “Why didn’t you do this for Obama, why didn’t anyone do this for others?” Part of it is … I only got to the Washington bureau in 2015, but also, no one thought of comprehensively tracking lies because we’ve just never seen this quantity before. I think it would be a worthwhile effort to do for future presidents if I’m still on this beat. I think it would be a good thing to do for whoever is after Trump. But for people who say, “Why this politician in particular?” it’s because we’ve never seen a politician like this.
Daniel Dale and Vivian Salama of The Wall Street Journal will be speaking at the Hothouse: Politics in Trump’s America panel, moderated by Irene Gentle, at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Monday.