WHEN POLITICOS AND VOTERS IGNORE FACTS
Donald Trump is not the only one repeating inflammatory, incorrect statements
The Senate sage Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he famously observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Clearly Moynihan hadn’t seen Donald Trump in action on the hustings.
Day after day, the boisterous billionaire and Republican presidential front-runner makes it evident that he will cling tightly to the “facts” he loves even when they are widely discredited and have no basis in reality.
His fondness for faux facts seems to be hurting his candidacy not at all. And he is hardly alone on the trail when it comes to a propensity for promulgating fantasy without a qualm.
Take the debunked claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey rejoiced publicly after the 9/11 attacks. Rumors of such celebrations were investigated at the time by the government and news outlets. They came up empty. The celebrations were an urban myth.
After Trump started making the claim during the campaign, the “celebrations” were investigated by, among others, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. All concluded that the allegation was totally off-base.
And that had absolutely no effect on Trump. There he was Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, still embracing and defending his nonsense. There he was Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, still hanging tough. As the Politico headline put it: “Trump quadruples down.”
“I have hundreds of people that agree with me,” the mogul told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. In Trumpworld, the opinions of his supporters trump investigations of what actually happened, or didn’t happen.
Or take another flight of fancy, the notion that President Obama plans to accept as many as 250,000 Syrian refugees. The actual number is 10,000. The larger number is pure gossamer.
After Trump first alleged that Obama was going to allow in 200,000 Syrians, the claim, like the one about the celebrating Muslims of New Jersey, was quickly invalidated. But that didn’t prevent Trump from raising the number to 250,000, or similar claims from GOP contenders Ben Carson (200,000 from the Middle East) or Carly Fiorina (100,000 from Syria).
No surprise: Both Carson and Fiorina have track records of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story. (Fiorina refused to back off on incorrect statements as to what was in videos of Planned Parenthood, and Carson has clung to a number of curious pronouncements, among them that the pyramids were for storing grain.)
In waving off criticism of his Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11 meme, Trump has darkly alluded to the “agenda” of the factcheckers. He is not alone in using this tactic. But it’s just silly. The fact-checkers are equal-opportunity sleuths.
To take just one example, top fact-checking operations were very tough on Obama for his blatantly false declaration that all Americans could keep their health care policies under the Affordable Care Act if they wanted to. In fact, PoltiFact named it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.”
As that example shows, no party or politician has a monop- oly when it comes to bogus claims and misleading statements. But what is distinctive about Trump is that he is utterly unfazed when his inaccuracies are brought to light. There’s no walking things back, no hedging or qualifying. He simply continues to wallow.
As The Atlantic’s Molly Ball said on Meet the Press, “He creates an entire alternate reality. And he does not back down. It is seductive to people because the world they want to live in is not the real world.”
I asked Brooks Jackson, the godfather of the fact-checking movement, if dealing with candidates who refuse to accept the truth was a special challenge.
“A special challenge? I would call these incorrigibles a special opportunity,” responded Jackson, now director emeritus of FactCheck.org. “For us, Trump is great copy. We live to debunk false claims, whether the candidate making them will admit error or not.”
There’s no doubt that the current GOP campaign with its wild assertions is a full employment act for fact-checkers. And there’s never been any guarantee that politicians will accept the truth about their falsehoods.
FactCheck’s current director, Eugene Kiely, says “that’s out of our control. We see ourselves primarily as consumer advocates for voters. Our job is to give voters the facts they need to identify false and misleading claims when the candidates repeat them.”
But what if large blocs of voters won’t accept the truth? It’s tough enough for democracy when voters are deeply polarized in their politics as they are now.
It’s a lot tougher if voters are living in separate realities.
Take the debunked claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey rejoiced publicly after the 9/11 attacks. ... The celebrations were an urban myth.