Liberals can be guilty of fake news, too

So Donald Trump thinks illegal immigrants are “animals”. That, according to major media outlets, is how the president characterised them during a meeting with California officials at the White House – a truly foul thing to say, had he actually said it. Except he didn’t, says Bret Stephens. It turns out, as the Associated Press has admitted, that he was referring not to illegal immigrants as a whole, but to members of MS-13 – a Salvadorean gang notorious for such psychotic violence that the description is, if anything, unfair to animals. In short, this was a clear example of fake news. That didn’t stop Democratic politicians from making hay out of it. “When all our great-great-grandparents came to America they weren’t ‘animals’,” tweeted an indignant Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. But misrepresenting what Trump says is precisely the wrong way to go about repudiating his “squalid thinking” on immigration. Trump does indeed like to stress that there’s a link between immigration and criminal gangs. And the blunt truth is there always has been. Think of the Dead Rabbits (Irish), Flying Dragons (Chinese), Undzer Shtik (Jewish) and, of course, the Cosa Nostra. But the truth is “we have far more to gain from immigrants than we have to lose from them”, and that to focus on gangs is just thinly veiled xenophobia. We win the argument by telling the truth, not by distorting it.