PolitiFact quote chops Trump down to a "False" rating

 It's weird to see one of the supposed great lights of contemporary journalism engage in conduct that wouldn't fly in an introductory journalism class.

That's PolitiFact, again and again.

This time it's yesterday's "False" rating from PolitiFact North Carolina no, kidding, it's Lou Jacobson and PolitiFact National sticking the "North Carolina" tag on a fact check mentioning a North Carolina politician,  Republican Sen. Thom Tillis.

PolitiFact frames the entire issue as whether Trump considers Tillis a current senator:

President Donald Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have been at odds over the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.

They can’t even agree on whether Tillis is still a senator.

And PolitiFact supposedly has the transcript to prove the point:

Trump insisted Tillis, who is not seeking reelection, is no longer in office, even after Bartiromo corrected him.

Bartiromo: "And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?"

Trump: "That's why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator."

Bartiromo: "OK. On the on the AI thing —"

Trump: "You know Thom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? He quit."

Bartiromo: "Well, he's on his way out."

Trump: "Well, no, he quit, but he quit."

Bartiromo is right.

Cut and dried, right? Why are we talking about this?

We're glad you asked! PolitiFact tampered with the evidence to try to put a respectable face on yet another case of "gotcha!" journalism.

Search the fact check over and you won't find any evidence Trump was aware Tillis retains his ability to vote on the Warsh nomination, except with the response from the White House (and wouldn't we like to see the wording of PolitiFact's outreach):

The White House referred PolitiFact to April 15 remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said, "Well, I'm sure Sen. Tillis wants to do the best thing for the Federal Reserve, for the American people. He has publicly said that Kevin Warsh is a great candidate for the chair. So let's get to the hearings and see where we are then."

PolitiFact encourages its audience to believe Trump thinks that because Tillis quit the Senate he'll no longer figure in on the Warsh nomination.

But that's completely at odds with the un-elided transcript (re-formatting to better fit our page design, PolitiFact omissions in bold):

Maria Bartiromo: "And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?

Donald Trump: "Well, we're going to have to find out. He might not, but that's why Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator.

Maria Bartiromo: "OK. On the on the AI thing --"

Donald Trump: "You know Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator, right? He quit."

Maria Bartiromo: "Well, he's on his way out."

Donald Trump "Well, no, he quit, but he quit. And I think he doesn't want the legacy of stopping a great -- a person who could be great. I think Kevin Warsh is going to be great. He doesn't want the legacy of having an incompetent guy stay there for longer than is necessary. I know Thom Tillis, he's a good man, I don't think he's going to hurt."

Mind you, we're using the transcript PolitiFact claimed to have used as its source. PolitiFact just cut away the parts that show Trump well aware that Tillis would have a vote on the Warsh nomination.

Given Trump's awareness of Tillis' continued role in that impending vote, how does PolitiFact's conclusion follow, that Trump and Tillis supposedly disagree on whether Tillis continues to serve in the Senate?

Spoiler: It doesn't follow. We're left to reconcile, if we can, Trump's statement that Tillis is no longer in the senate with Trump's acknowledgement that Tillis continues to serve in the senate. We figure it's most likely Trump was making the point that Tillis opposition to Trump is unpopular with his constituents, helping lead to the decision not to run for re-election.

Did Trump express that idea clearly and without ambiguity? Nah. And PolitiFact will likely never glom onto the fact that ambiguities and fuzzy language are poor environments for fact-checking. Or never will at least as long as Trump's in office and they can smell another "gotcha!" in the offing.

Afters:

We didn't emphasize the point above, but it's proper in professional journalism to note the omission of significant parts of a quotation with the use of an ellipsis or ellipses (...). PolitiFact may have fallen into the trap of thinking their method was okay because it's improper to begin a quotation with an ellipsis. But that's in the context of a simple quotation. The rule doesn't give journalists a license to lop off the entire sentences from a transcript as the proper observation of that rule. The journalist can follow the rule by taking just one quotation out of the transcript and starting the sentence without an ellipsis. The reader can infer that the quotation isn't necessarily complete and hopefully the journalist can be trusted not to omit anything essential. But a transcript isn't really a transcript when sentences are omitted without cuing the reader.

PolitiFact led its readers to falsely believe it was providing a real, full transcript of the relevant exchange.

Update April 16, 2026: Belatedly added the URL for the flawed PolitiFact fact check.

HoyStory: Trump's mostly right about Pope Leo XIV (PolitiFact wrong again)

 Fellow PolitiFact critic Matthew Hoy saved us some time by hitting a target we were fixing to home in on.

Hoy presses the point that Trump's point should be easy to understand. When the Pope won't endorse the steps need to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon it's tantamount to the Pope giving that eventuality his tacit okay.

Short version:

A shorter version of why @PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating for Trump should, at the very least, be "Mostly True." With bonus Swalwell analogy. pic.twitter.com/Fb55U9MPLt

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 14, 2026

Long version:

PolitiFact hands Trump a Pants on Fire that really should be a Mostly True.https://t.co/UCL5qsovDG

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 14, 2026

Also, buy Matthew's book about fact checker perfidy, featuring PolitiFact and a fair number of examples explored here at PolitiFact Bias.


Correction 10/17/2026: Holy Roman dyslexia, Batman! We put "Pope Leo IVX" in the title and tags of this post instead of "Pope Leo XIV." Both mistakes are corrected with this update.

Elizabeth Warren, PolitiFact, and the postmodern approach to the modern era

PolitiFact Bias completed a research project last year looking at PolitiFact's "True" and "Mostly True" ratings. And though it wasn't the original aim of the study we found that "True" and "Mostly True" count as dying breeds in the "Truth-O-Meter" universe. For example, in 2025 PolitiFact meted out only 10 "Truth-O-Meter" ratings to partisan political figures. There were over 60 in PolitiFact's first year.

Our experience from that study led us to track new "True" ratings a bit more closely this year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) cracked the ice with the initial "True" rating of 2026.

I thought the term "modern era" was the key to this fact check. I asked Grok AI to evaluate the fact check. Grok's been tweaked at some point in the past year to elevate its deference to "trusted sources" like PolitiFact, so Grok produced a very trusting evaluation, finding the fact check perfectly solid. I followed up asking whether Axios had defined "modern era" as PolitiFact claimed.

A March 2 Axios article with an opening that nearly matches Warren’s statement: "No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump." The Axios story defines "modern era" as presidents post-9/11: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden.

Short answer? No.

The Axios story mentions "modern era" in the lead, which was pretty much the same thing Warren said. And after that doesn't mention the term again. Axios backs the claim in the lead with 21st century examples Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. From there, PolitiFact infers that "modern era" was defined in terms of 21st century presidents.

But is that how the average reader understands "modern era"?

From a contemporary perspective, “the modern era” usually means the present day and the recent past, but historians often use it more specifically for the period from about the 1500s to 1945, with the time after 1945 often called the contemporary period.

I put the question to Perplexity AI. What is the "modern era" from a contemporary perspective?

Obviously the term carries some ambiguity. How many times have we seen PolitiFact appeal to a specialized definition backed by expert testimony to downgrade a similarly ambiguous claim uttered by a Republican? It's routine by now.

Well, the "modern era" as understood by historians runs up through 1945, encompassing the whole of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The number of nations receiving military strikes from that administration would outnumber those from the Trump administration.

Not only does PolitiFact use specialized definitions to downgrade "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, it also appeals to the impression a claim leaves on the audience irrespective of whether that understanding finds support in the context of a claim. Yet Sen. Warren's claim failed to raise that warning flag for PolitiFact.

PolitiFact even introduced its own complementary claim about Mr. Trump:

After reviewing these sources and additional reporting, we found that Trump has authorized the highest number of strikes and targeted the most countries compared with other 21st century presidents.

That's nice, but Warren didn't mention the 21st century and neither did Axios. Axios simply limited its comparisons to other 21st century presidents. How was Warren's audience supposed to know that?

Were PolitiFact a neutral and competent fact checker, it would find, at minimum, that Warren left out the 21st century context when that context determines the truth value of her claim. Sounds a bit like the way PolitiFact defines "Half True" or even "Mostly False" on its subjective "Truth-O-Meter":

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

The important detail is the operative definition of "modern era." And "modern era" is the ignored critical fact that would give a different impression (FDR, not DJT).

What might have been: "Experts told us the "modern era" runs from the 1500s through 1945. That span includes president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched attacks on more countries than has Donald Trump. We rate Warren's statement "Mostly False."

Instead, PolitiFact drew a target around Warren's point with her point at the center and declared it a bullseye. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

PolitiFact's first GOP "Pants on Fire" of 2025 is a stinker

Reminder: Just because we're pressed for time to publish at PolitiFact Bias doesn't mean PolitiFact has improved one iota.

PolitiFact took an unusually long time to publish a "Pants on Fire" targeting a partisan political figure in 2025. Unsurprisingly, it was a Republican and it was President Trump.

Also unsurprisingly, it's not a good fact check. As we have previously observed, the mere fact that a fact check has a "False" or "Pants on Fire" rating counts as a good sign that it's a bad fact check. That goes for bad ratings of Democrats as well as Republicans, though of course the latter get hit with more of the unfair ratings.

So, on to business. What have we got on Feb. 19, 2025?

Any time a fact-checked claim contains only one word quoted from the supposed claimant, it's worth looking into whether the fact checker distorted the claim.

PolitiFact does offer some context and a link to a video. Such links should indicate at what point in time the relevant words occur, by the way.

PolitiFact:

"I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well," Trump said [16:16 -ed] while answering reporters’ questions Feb. 18 at his Mar-a-Lago resort. "But today I heard (from Ukraine), ‘Oh well, we weren't invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it, you could have made a deal."

PolitiFact makes it easy to reconcile Trump's statement above with his later statement that Putin should not have gone into Ukraine by simply not introducing the latter as relevant context. In other words, if readers don't know Trump said that, then there's no need to reconcile the conflicting statements for their readers.

17:53 (transcript ours, bold emphasis added):

"Look, you have leadership--and I like him (Zelenskyy) personally--he's fine. But I don't care about personally, I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that's allowed a war to go on that should've never even happened. Even without the United States. Look, we had a president who was grossly incompetent. He had no idea what he was doing. He said some very stupid things, like going in for portions and all of the things he made a lot of bad statements. But, uh, he's grossly incompetent and I think everyone knew that. But this is something that should've never happened. Would've never happened. And I used to discuss it with Putin. President Putin and I would talk about Ukraine and it was the apple of his eye, I will tell you that, but he never, there was never a chance of him going in, and I told him you better not go in, don't go in. And he understood that, and he understood it fully. But I'm only interested, I want to see if I can save maybe millions of lives, this could even end up in a World War III, I mean to be honest with you. You've been hearing now Europe is saying "Well, I think we're going to go in" and we're going to go. All of a sudden you're going to end up in World War III. Over something that should've never happened."

PolitiFact should have looked for clues in the context to help explain Trump's statement about "you should have never started it." With the added context, it seems plain Trump faults all the leaders involved, including Presidents Biden and Putin. Putin did end up going into Ukraine despite Trump's warnings, after all.

But why let context get in the way of a fact check "Gotcha!" story?

This gotcha story featured two bylines, Louis Jacobson and newbie Claire Cranford. Cranford's another from the Bill Adair-fed Duke pipeline.

Apparently nobody told her to scrub her social media of partisan commentary?

This is what you get when Big Journalism thinks "nonpartisanship" means not explicitly telling people who gets your vote.

Speaking of Bill Adair, he didn't see bias at PolitiFact then or now.

They're partisans who allow partisanship to affect their fact-checking.

We love this gem from PolitiFact:

We asked the White House for evidence that Ukraine had started the war and received no response.

Tell me you asked a loaded question in the name of journalism by, uh, telling me you asked a loaded question. That's how you help kill trust in your brand among moderates/independents as well as conservatives.

Here's how an objective journalist might ask about the quotation: "What did you mean when you said "They started it" while talking about Ukraine wanting a place at the table? Were you saying they started the war?"

Objective journalists do not insert their own opinions into questions they ask of others. They ask questions that free the interviewee to expound.

In this case, Trump had already expounded, though perhaps we could wish for even greater specificity. PolitiFact either didn't look for it or chose to ignore it.

Afters

We also like how PolitiFact identifies "they" as "Ukraine" except in the title of the fact check, where "they" turns into "Volodymyr Zelenskyy."

It's as though Zelenskyy chose "they" as one of his pronouns.

More Afters

It's hilarious what you can find in PolitiFact's work when you dig even a little. PolitiFact has a history of finding distinctly partisan experts to weigh in on its fact checks. Expert Erik Herron didn't have any partisan campaign giving history, but twiX ratted him out for canvassing for Kamala Harris.

.

An out-of-context and prejudiced "In Context" feature from PolitiFact

PolitiFact advertises its "In Context" feature as a means of allowing readers decide, considering the surrounding context, the meaning of a politician's words.

The idea's fine in principle. But it takes principles to pull off an idea that's fine on principle and PolitiFact has a tough time with that. Consider PolitiFact's Nov. 1, 2024 feature about comments made by former President Donald Trump.

The third paragraph reminds readers of the ostensible purpose of the "In Context" feature:

With widespread interpretations of Trump’s remarks, we’re using our In Context feature to let voters review his comments in their original context and reach their own conclusions. 

We say this "In Context" passes better as a prejudiced anti-Trump editorial.

Why do we say that?

Even the part of the comment taken completely out of context puts PolitiFact's headline in question. 

Trump, appearing with Tucker Carlson (via PolitiFact's story):

Later, Trump added "I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."

What would support the conclusion that Trump describes a "firing squad"? Trump, after all, doesn't use that term in the out-of-context quote or elsewhere.

One element of the statement might reasonably support the "firing squad" idea: Trump describes a number of people (nine) aiming guns at Cheney's face.

What elements of the description fail to support the "firing squad" idea?

1. Cheney has a gun in Trump's description. What "firing squad" execution offers a gun to the target?
2. The guns are aimed at Cheney's face. Firing squads traditionally aim at the heart.
3. The alternative explanation, that Trump was talking about war hawks typically not needing to face battle themselves, has nothing that argues against it unless we count anti-Trump prejudice.

The text of PolitiFact's story links to an out-of-context version of Trump's comments. And though PolitiFact's source list includes a longer clip with the full context, PolitiFact left out what Trump said after "face":

"You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying 'Aw, gee, we'll, let's send, uh, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.' But she's a stupid person." (transcript ours, comments start at 7:36)

Obviously, Trump expressed a common theme among politicians, that war hawks are not the ones facing the bullets.

So, even though PolitiFact gathered no reasonable evidence showing Trump was referring to Cheney facing a "firing squad," the fact checkers (actually liberal bloggers) put their own biased interpretation right in the headline to prejudice their readers.

Headlines often aren't written by the person who wrote the story, but we can blame biased journalist Amy Sherman directly because her story pushes the same conclusion: "Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney and a firing squad drew the most public attention."

There's no solid evidence Trump was referring to a firing squad and plenty to suggest he wasn't.

PolitiFact's story contains obvious signs of liberal bias and fails the supposed objective of the "In Context" feature by pushing a conclusion on readers.

And, a farcical "Pants on Fire" for Donald J. Trump

 As our "Pants on Fire" bias study regularly points out, PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating counts as substantially if not wholly subjective. Surveying PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" ratings serves as one of the most direct routes for finding flawed fact checks. And that brings us to April 1, 2024 and Donald J. Trump.

We'll grant that Trump lost the state of Wisconsin to Joe Biden in 2020. That doesn't make PolitiFact's rating or its reasoning correct, however. PolitiFact spent considerable effort trying to lump in Trump's claim that his campaign "did much better" in 2020 than in 2016. 

PolitiFact:

Let’s tackle the first part of Trump’s claim: That he performed better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016. 

That is unequivocally false. And it’s something PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked on multiple occasions, including in 2021. 

Is it "unequivocally false" that Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016?  What's false is that PolitiFact debunked the claim with the article linked in the second sentence. The link leads to a fact check examining whether Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.

PolitiFact itself provides the evidence that Trump's claim is not unequivocally false (bold emphasis added):

We noted then, and we’ll repeat here, that President Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. Biden took 1,630,866 votes compared to Trump’s 1,610,184 in the state, so Trump lost by 20,682 votes. 

Trump did win the state in 2016, taking more than 22,000 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton. He netted 1,405,284 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.

So, according to PolitiFact, Trump received 1.4 million votes in Wisconsin in 2016 and 1.6 million votes in 2020 but he "unequivocally" did not do better in 2020 than in 2016.

That's 2+2=5 level logic.

Trump's vote total in Wisconsin was better in 2020 than in 2016. That means that in a real sense Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than in 2016 even if he lost the state in 2020. By analogy, it's like a sprinter winning the 100 meter dash at one meet with a time of 9.99 seconds but subsequently losing the event with a time of 9.97 seconds. The runner performed better in terms of time but worse in terms of the competition.

The runner did not "unequivocally" perform worse in the second meet.

If PolitiFact wanted to fairly call Trump's claim false, let alone "Pants on Fire," it should have stuck with the claim Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.

How does a fair and objective fact checker make an error like that?

We say it doesn't.

PolitiFact isn't fair and objective.

PolitiFact's "no spin" lie

 Apparently PolitiFact's hot new method for getting people to trust their work is to lie to them.

I see it at the top of every fact check these days. PolitiFact posts a summary of its fact check near the top of the story, and at the bottom of that summary lets readers know "No spin, just facts you can trust."

"No spin."

Really?

That howler accompanied a PolitiFact fact check I ran across today, published on Feb. 23, 2024.

PolitiFact's "no spin" approach added spin to the article deck, even before the assurance that PolitiFact has a "no spin" approach: "Do immigrants crossing the US southern border take union jobs? Fact-checking Donald Trump."

The deck claim doesn't match the headline quotation.

So, why the spin?

The second paragraph counts as the key to the fact check:

"The biggest threat to your unions is millions of people coming across the border, because you're not gonna have your jobs anymore," Trump said at the Feb. 17 rally, later adding "The truth is, though, when you have millions of people coming in, they're going to take your jobs."

PolitiFact cited a CSPAN video that clocks in at over an hour. PolitiFact is also the organization that claims it constructs its fact checks to make them replicable. Clue to PolitiFact: If you're trying to allow people to fact-check your work, you tell them where to find key quotations taken from a long video.

 

It's even possible at CSPAN to create a snippet of limited length to include both quotations. We did that.

Trump's making the common sense point that importing millions of low-skilled laborers makes it easy for employers to hire low-wage workers instead of high-wage union workers. PolitiFact turns that point into a straw man, visible at the top of PolitiFact's summary section "If Your Time is Short": "Economy and labor experts told PolitiFact immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border likely aren't taking Michigan's union jobs."

Did Trump say immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border were taking Michigan's union jobs? As though an immigrant can run up to Michigan, accept a union job and thereby displace the former holder of that union job? No, that's no what Trump's talking about. He's talking about the general depression of wages that undercuts the stability of an established high-wage union job. Low wages in Kentucky, for example, can eliminate union jobs in Michigan if the employer relocates to Kentucky and hires non-union workers.

If somebody thinks PolitiFact was actually treating Trump's claim exactly the way I suggested it should be taken, the corrective is no further away than the next bullet point in PolitiFact's summary: "(N)ewly arrived migrants are likelier to work in jobs Americans don’t want to do, such as day laborer positions. These aren’t union jobs."

PolitiFact missed Trump's point, whether intentionally or otherwise. The point is immigrants taking jobs Americans don't want to do depresses the value of labor. Cheap labor works its way through the economy, affecting jobs Americans do want to do by making labor cheaper for those jobs as well.

We see a hint of that point in PolitiFact's third bullet point: "There is a correlation between an increase in immigration and a drop in unionization. However, experts said that’s not evidence that immigrants are taking union jobs."

So, what do we do with this claim that an increase in immigration correlates with a drop in unionization in conjunction with the claim that it's not evidence immigrants are taking union jobs?

As noted above, there's ambiguity here. If immigration lowers unionization, that's certainly evidence, albeit not definitive proof, that lower wages from immigration cost the economy union jobs.

It looks like the fact check hinges on an equivocal phrase, "taking union jobs."

But taking Trump's point as we suggested, the fact check affirms Trump's accuracy. PolitiFact included this in its story summary:

(E)xperts agree immigration and union membership numbers move in concert: as immigration rises, unionization drops.

"As immigration rises, unionization drops." That's what earns Trump a "Mostly False" rating instead of "Pants on Fire," I suppose. It arguably makes Trump's claim "Mostly True." 

We consider it unforgivable for a fact checker to leave ambiguity around what is meant by "taking union jobs," and the problem is magnified when the fact checker opts for the interpretation most damaging to the person it is fact-checking.

It's yet another case of uncharitable interpretation, violating the basic interpretive principle of charitable interpretation.

PolitiFact's how-to primer on improperly fact-checking an analogy

There's so much wrong with this Feb. 22, 2024 PolitiFact fact check that I'm bound to go way beyond the scope of the title.

How To Wrongly Fact Check an Analogy

PolitiFact's summary/quotation of Trump's statement counts as reasonably accurate. He drew an analogy between the fine imposed in the New York fraud case to the political persecution of Alexei A. Navalny, who notably opposed Vladimir Putin in Russian.

At its most basic level, the analogy says Navalny and Trump were treated unfairly in court over politics. But PolitiFact affords nearly zero attention to the basic comparison. Instead, PolitiFact focused on differences as though differences can erase similarities.

Karl Malden's nose remains Karl Malden's nose even if you put it on Emma Stone. And Emma Stone with Karl Malden's nose is Emma Stone having a point of similarity with Karl Malden.

PolitiFact classed Trump's statement (wrongly, we think) as hyperbole, but then justified revoking Trump's license for hyperbole because "we determined there were enough factual elements at play to rate his statement on the Truth-O-Meter."

We're not sure how that's supposed to work. As we noted on X, PolitiFact could use a similar approach to find a vegetarian "Pants on Fire" for comparing vegetarian bacon to regular bacon. The bacon example came straight from a dictionary definition of "analog."

Here We Go Again: "Experts"

Part of PolitiFact's schtick comes from its interviews of experts. Typically the pool of experts leans left, and often has a record of giving politically to Democrats. For some reason PolitiFact doesn't see that as a mark against its own credibility.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Harley Balzer

Highly partisan political giving. One of the most partisan records we've encountered, and that's really saying something.

Erik Herron

We found no political giving under Herron's name. But we did find an X post by Herron that appears to acknowledge the legitimacy of analogies where the comparison may seem strained.

I have spent today being inspired by students. First by WVU students fighting for THEIR university at the BoG meeting. Later by Fulbright applications from Ukrainian students fighting for their country. Both face powerful forces trying to crush them and they refuse to surrender.

— Erik Herron (@erikherron) September 15, 2023

Ric Simmons 

Simmons (employed at The Ohio State University) has two political donations listed. One was to Democrat Joe Biden and the other to the anti-Trump group "The Lincoln Project."

Scott Gehlbach

Gehlbach's partisan political giving fails to challenge that of Balzer, but it's solidly behind Democrats with the exception of one nonpartisan figure, now a (liberal) judge in the Wisconsin court system.

Stephen Sestanovich

Sestanovich has six donations, minimum $250, all going to Democrats.

Kathryn Hendley

Hendley has only one political donation listed, with a Democrat listed as the recipient of the $200 gift.

Mark Osler

Osler has given exclusively to Democrats, with six donations in the range of $50-$250.

What are the chances a fact checker can find seven expert sources and six out of seven have given exclusively to Democrats? It's as though PolitiFact intentionally seeks out Democrats to serve as its experts.

Of course, the mere fact that the experts give to Democrats should not discredit their expertise. But PolitiFact simply uses the experts to underscore that the Navalny case is different than the Trump case. We don't need experts to prove that, and as we pointed out above, differences are irrelevant to the similarities, The former cannot erase the latter.

PolitiFingers on the Scale

As if distracting from the point of Trump's argument and using partisan experts wasn't enough, we have PolitiFingers on the scale of this fact check.

PolitiFact omits all mention of two significant aspects of the fraud case against Trump. Both aspects tend to support the Navalny analogy.

First, the trial judge found that Trump's fraud did not damage anyone financially. That makes the prosecution and the judgment unusual. The fine represents higher conjectured interest charges from lower valuations of Trump properties. We doubt such a basis has ever before been used in the United States to support a fraud penalty.

USAToday:

(Gregory) Germain, the Syracuse professor, said the government did a good job of showing Trump inflated the value of his properties, but noted that sophisticated financial institutions didn't require a third-party appraisal like they do for a typical mortgage on a home.

"There are no cases like it," Germain said.

An Associated Press story makes a related point:

And though the bank offered Trump lower interest rates because he had agreed to personally guarantee the loans with his own money, it’s not clear how much better the rates were because of the inflated figures. The bank never complained, and it’s unclear how much it lost, if anything. Bank officials called to testify couldn’t say for sure if Trump’s personal statement of worth had any impact on the rates.

“This sets a horrible precedent,” said Adam Leitman Bailey, a New York real estate lawyer who once successfully sued a Trump condo building for misrepresenting sales to lure buyers.

Second, PolitiFact's fact check misrepresents the ease of appealing the ruling. 

CNBC:

Former President Donald Trump is gearing up to fight a massive fine in the New York business fraud case that threatens to erase most of the cash he says he has on hand.

But first, he has to secure a bond — and that might not be so easy.

Why doesn't PolitiFact tell you any of that?

Because they're biased.

They make sure there are no observations from a conservative such as Andrew C. McCarthy:

Trump’s Appellate Prospects after Ruinous Civil Fraud Judgment - me @NRO Corner ... https://t.co/6PosPxf3Px

— Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) February 21, 2024

Afters:

PolitiFact is on a real tear against Trump early in 2024. It's almost like they're trying to retroactively make true their false claims about Trump's "Truth-O-Meter" record.

In fact it was Louis Jacobson, listed first on the byline of PolitiFact's fact check, who recently endured two corrections from Slate after it published an interview with him. Jacobson made two flatly false claims about Trump's record on the "Truth-O-Meter."

One wonders whether publicly making false claims about Trump should disqualify Jacobson from working on fact checks involving Trump.

Note: Huh--Looks like Slate botched its editor's note: "It has also been updated to clarify that among major politicians frequently fact-checked by PolitiFact, Trump has the highest percentage of Pants on Fire ratings." I gave them the example of Michele Bachmann, who has had 72 "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.

Hmm. Looks like it's time for another correction request, if there's no clear justification for that claim.

More PedantiFact: PolitiFact vs. Kevin McCarthy

 Fact checkers supposedly don't fact check opinions.

PolitiFact fact checks opinions. Real Clear Politics has kept a study going looking at how often a set of top fact checkers rate opinions or predictions (among other things). PolitiFact has paced the group.

We expect Real Clear Politics will get around to adding this Nov. 30, 2022 PolitiFact fact check to the list:

 

Why do we think McCarthy was expressing an opinion?

In other words, why do we have the opinion that McCarthy was expressing an opinion?

We're intentionally giving away the answer, of course. "I think" counts as one of the classic ways of marking one's statement as an opinion.

Why does PolitiFact ignore such an obvious clue?

We think it's likely PolitiFact was looking to build a narrative. By overlooking that McCarthy was expressing opinion and focusing on one part of his statement to the exclusion of another, PolitiFact was able to support that narrative under the guise of fact-checking.

PolitiFact supports the narrative that Donald Trump counts as a racist. Facts don't matter in pursuit of that narrative.

PolitiFact quotes McCarthy correctly, and we'll highlight the part that PolitiFact decided to omit from its fact-checking focus even though it's the only part that McCarthy stated as fact:

"I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn't know who he was," McCarthy said.

That drew real-time pushback from a reporter, who said, "He didn't condemn him or his ideology." McCarthy responded, "The president didn't know who he was."

For PolitiFact, it isn't important whether Trump knew who Nick Fuentes was. It's important that Fuentes is a white nationalist, and important to link Fuentes to Trump in a way that reinforces the narrative that Trump is a racist. Toward that end, PolitiFact ignores the claim Trump did not know who Fuentes was and focuses on the supposed lack of condemnation.

We would argue that Trump saying he did not know Fuentes counts as a condemnation, when we consider the context.

PolitiFact argues the opposite, albeit without any real argument in support:

A look at Trump’s statements during the week between the Nov. 22 dinner and McCarthy’s press availability Nov. 29 show that McCarthy was wrong. Specifically, Trump did not condemn Fuentes on four occasions; instead, Trump said in four statements that he did not know who Fuentes was.

PolitiFact implicitly says that it does not count as a condemnation to profess ignorance of Fuentes' identity.

Here's why that's wrong.

Trump was implying that if he had known who Fuentes was, he would not be welcome at dinner. Hardly anything could be more obvious, particularly given the context that Trump went on record condemning neo-Nazis and white nationalism.

We can even source Trump's quotation through PolitiFact, albeit the fact checkers do an excellent job of not drawing attention to it:

"And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay?"

So the fact checkers, though they have reason to know Trump condemned white nationalism, leave that out of a fact check focusing on whether Trump condemned white nationalism. That's context fit for suppression.

The facts don't matter when liberal bloggers posing as unbiased fact checkers want to promote a narrative.

PolitiFact has it both ways on 'vaccination'

 PolitiFact's July 30, 2021 fact check confirming as "Mostly True" that Gen. George Washington "mandated smallpox vaccines for the Continental Army" surprised us.

It surprised us because is was barely six months (Dec. 15, 2020) ago that PolitiFact effectively told us that immunity acquired from having COVID-19 did not count as any sort of vaccine.

In December 2020, President Donald J. Trump said (bold emphasis added):

I think that the vaccine was our goal. That was number one because that was the way — that was the way it ends. Plus, you do have an immunity. You develop immunity over a period of time, and I hear we’re close to 15 percent. I’m hearing that, and that is terrific. That’s a very powerful vaccine in itself."

For some reason, PolitiFact concluded Trump was saying 15 percent natural immunity could confer herd immunity. But Trump was obviously saying that immunity acquired via means other than the new vaccines would contribute toward herd immunity. PolitiFact gave the impression that claim was false, basically by suggesting natural immunity doesn't count as a vaccine:

Is 15% natural immunity among the American population anywhere close to a "powerful vaccine," as Trump alleges? 

No, said the experts. And there’s nothing "terrific" about that level of infection within the community.

We doubt the experts were primarily at fault for misinterpreting Trump's statement, by the way. PolitiFact likely insinuated its misleading narrative in the questions it posed to its chosen list of experts.

PolitiFact's July 2021 fact check reversed on viewing naturally acquired immunity as a vaccine.

The smallpox vaccine didn’t exist when Washington was commander in chief of the Continental Army, but the point remains: he ordered the inoculation of troops against smallpox by the means that was then available, variolation.

So, even though vaccines were not invented until after the Revolutionary War, PolitiFact found it "Mostly True" that Washington mandated vaccinations for the Continental Army.

Variolation, by the way, simply meant intentionally infecting people with smallpox. It was the same virus, but tended to cause less severe illness

It's just another reminder that PolitiFact "fact checks" largely count as subjective exercises.


Note: We also wrote about the fact check of Trump back in January 2021.

Note 2: We doubt scientists have a solid idea why variolation was effective.

PolitiFact's "In Context" deception (Updated)

In (a) perfect world, fact checkers would publish "In Context" features that simply offer surrounding context with objective explanatory notes.

This ain't no perfect world.

The PolitiFact "In Context" articles tend to serve as editorials, just like its fact checks. Two "In Context" articles from the past year (actually one from 2021 and one from 2019) will serve as our illustrative examples.

The Vaccine Supply

On Feb. 18, 2021 PolitiFact published "In Context: What Joe Biden said about the vaccine supply he found when he took office."

President Biden said "It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator; how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?"

Instead of using context to figure out what Mr. Biden meant or perhaps intended to say, PolitiFact offered that he was not saying there was no vaccine when he took office because elsewhere in the speech he said there were 50 million vaccine doses when he took office ("we came into office, there (were) only 50 million doses that were available"):

You can judge his meaning for yourself, but it’s clear to us that Biden didn’t mean there were no vaccines available before he took office.

So Mr. Biden could have meant anything except for there were no vaccines available when he took office? Oh thank you, Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checkers!

The fact checkers at CNN at least made a game attempt to make heads or tails out of Mr. Biden's words:

Biden made a series of claims about the Covid-19 vaccine situation upon his January inauguration. He said early at the town hall that when "we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." Moments later, he said, "We got into office and found out the supply -- there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available." Soon after that, he told Cooper, "But when you and I talked last, we talked about -- it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator -- how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?"

Facts First: Biden got at least one of these statistics wrong -- in a way that made Trump look better, not worse, so Biden's inaccuracy appeared accidental, but we're noting it anyway. A White House official said that Biden's claim about "10 million doses a day" being available when he took office was meant to be a reference to the 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden's term, up from 8.6 million a week when they took over.

CNN's "Facts First" went on to explain that the Trump administration released all vaccine reserves to the states instead of holding back the second doses recommended by the manufacturers. CNN also pointed out that the Biden administration continued that same policy.

The CNN account makes it appear Mr. Biden uttered an incoherent mixture of statistics. PolitiFact didn't even make an attempt in its article to figure out what Biden was talking about. PolitiFact simply discounted the statement Biden made that seemed to contradict his dubious claim about the availability of 50 million vaccine doses when he took office.

PolitiFact's "In Context" article looks like pro-Biden spin next to the CNN account. And we thought of another "In Context" article where PolitiFact used an entirely different approach.

Very Fine People

PolitiFact used Mr. Biden's statement about "50 million doses" to excuse any inaccuracy Biden may have communicated by later saying the vaccine cupboard was bare when he took office.

But PolitiFact's "In Context" article about the circumstances of President Trump's reference to "very fine people," published April 26, 2019, made no similar use of Mr. Trump's same-speech clarification "and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally."

With Biden, readers got PolitiFact's assurance that he wasn't saying there were no vaccine doses when he took office, even though he used words to that effect.

With Trump, readers were left with PolitiFact's curiosity as to what the context might show (bold emphasis added):

We wanted to look at Trump’s comments in their original context. Here is a transcript of the questions Trump answered that addressed the Charlottesville controversy in the days after it happened. (His specific remarks about "very fine people, on both sides" come in the final third of the transcript.)

Not only did PolitiFact fail to use the context to defend Trump from the charge that he was calling neo-Nazis "fine people," about a year later (July 27, 2020) PolitiFact made that charge itself, citing its own "In Context" article in support:

• As president in 2017, Trump said there were "very fine people, on both sides," in reference to neo-Nazis and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.

Making the situation that much more outrageous, PolitiFact declined to correct the latter article when we send a correction request. PolitiFact remained unmoved after we informed the International Fact-Checking Network about its behavior.

Is PolitiFact lucky or what that its owner, the Poynter Institute, also owns the International Fact-Checking Network?

This is how PolitiFact rolls. PolitiFact uses its "In Context" articles to editorially strengthen or weaken narratives, as it chooses.

It's not all about the facts.


Correction: We left out an "a" in the first sentence and also misstated the timing of the two articles our post talks about. Both errors are fixed using parenthetical comments (like this).

PolitiGnatStraining No. 573: Is natural immunity really a vaccination?

PolitiFact truly never ceases to amaze us with its forays into free interpretation of political claims. Perhaps President Trump deserves some of the credit for driving PolitiFact mad via Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Would you believe that Mr. Trump believes that immunity acquired through recovery from the coronavirus counts as a "vaccine"?

That's where PolitiFact went on Dec. 15, 2020:

This analysis will take some doing, because PolitiFact's fact check contains multiple layers of fact check lunacy.

First, we need to see what Trump actually said. PolitiFact covers that adequately in the fact check:

"You develop immunity over a period of time, and I hear we’re close to 15%. I’m hearing that, and that is terrific. That’s a very powerful vaccine in itself," said Trump, who was responding to a reporter’s question about what his message to the American people was as the holidays approach and levels of COVID cases in the U.S. continue to rise.

Immediately after, the fact check runs off the rails at about a 90 degree angle:

It wasn’t the first time Trump had given credence to the idea that if enough people in a population gain immunity to a disease by being exposed to it, the illness won’t be able to spread through the remainder of the population — a concept known as "herd immunity."

Assuming PolitiFact and fact checker Victoria Knight did not seek to deliberately mislead their readers, this looks like a likely case of confirmation bias. Knight and PolitiFact were looking for Trump to say something false and interpreted Trump's claim to create the falsehood they sought. Otherwise, it's a mystery how anyone could interpret Trump's claim as they did.

First, Trump is pretty obviously talking about natural immunity as a metaphorical vaccination. Natural immunity is not entirely unlike immunity acquired via a human-devised vaccination. We would hope that even liberal bloggers working as non-partisan fact-checking journalists would know about figures of speech such as metaphors.

Second, why take the 15 percent plateau as the notion Trump was comparing to a vaccine instead of the concept of naturally acquired immunity? We can't imagine a reason apart from either confirmation bias or premeditated deceit. Naturally acquired immunity has approximately the same role in achieving herd immunity as a vaccine. Both confer immunity, and both would contribute toward a population's potential for herd immunity. If that was Trump's point, as seems to reasonably be the case, he's right.

How does a mainstream fact checker get so far off course so quickly? And why isn't everybody blowing the whistle on this kind of fact-check shenanigan?

As for PolitiFact, it keeps chugging along on one of the sharpest tangents ever devised:

However, experts have warned that attempting to achieve herd immunity naturally, by allowing people to get sick with COVID-19, could result in more than a million deaths and potentially long-term health problems for many. A better way to achieve protection across the population, experts say, is through widespread vaccination.

Why do Knight and PolitiFact think this paragraph has any relevant relationship to Trump's claim? Do they suppose Trump calling natural immunity a "powerful vaccine in itself" represents an intent to change policy to forgo the use of man-made vaccines and seek to combat the virus with natural immunity alone?

This is fact-checking gone insane. The paragraph doesn't belong. PolitiFact could have talked about the role natural immunity plays in achieving herd immunity. Readers could benefit from that explanation. But they get hardly any of that explanation from PolitiFact. Instead, they get railroaded down PolitiFact's branching tree of tangent:

So, we thought it was important to check whether 15% is anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold, and whether this level of natural immunity could be considered "as powerful as a vaccine."

So PolitiFact fact checks whether Trump is right that 15 percent natural immunity could confer herd immunity, even though that really has nothing to do with what Trump said. And where does that "as powerful as a vaccine" line come from? PolitiFact puts it within quotation marks, as though it is quoting Mr. Trump. Is it supposed to be something Trump said?

It's not in the transcript of Trump's remarks that PolitiFact linked. And our Google search using "Trump" AND "as powerful as a vaccine" did nothing to encourage us to believe the quotation came from Trump.

Remember, a team of editors supposedly reviews each PolitiFact fact check. Apparently each of them gave some sort of okay to this dumpster fire of a fact check.

The PolitiFact team overlooked an obvious use of metaphor and then went circus clown on a balloon to turn Trump's claim into something it wanted to fact check.

TDS symptom: PolitiFact fact checks jokes

 Sure, President Trump says plenty of false things. He truly does.

But that's actually a trap for left-leaning fact checkers who pretend to be nonpartisan. They have a hard time judging when they go too far. Like when they fact check jokes:

PolitiFact's Nov. 1, 2020 item fact-checking President Trump found "Pants on Fire" Trump's claim that his supporters were protecting challenger Joe Biden's campaign bus.

How do we know it was a joke?

We watched video of the Trump appearance where he made the statement. The claim comes in the midst of a segment of a speech done in the style of a classic stand-up comedy routine. Certainly Trump mixed in serious political claims, but many of the lines were intended to provoke laughter, and the one about protecting Biden's bus unquestionably drew laughter. In context, Trump was making a point about the enthusiasm of his supporters, and his story about cars and trucks surrounding the bus emphasized the number of vehicles involved.

PolitiFact played it completely straight:

"You see the way our people, they, you know, they were protecting his bus yesterday," Trump said Nov. 1 during a rally in Michigan. "Because they are nice. They had hundreds of cars."

The FBI’s San Antonio office said Nov. 1 that it is "aware of the incident and investigating."

Trump’s benevolent explanation lacks evidence.

How does a fact checker overlook/omit those contextual clues?

The left-leaning Huffington Post figured it out (bold emphasis added):

President Donald Trump on Sunday mockingly claimed that his supporters were “protecting” a campaign bus belonging to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden when a caravan of vehicles dangerously surrounded it on a Texas highway, leading to a vehicular collision.

“They were protecting their bus yesterday because they’re nice,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan to cheers, laughter and applause.

If PolitiFact noticed the audience laughing and intentionally suppressed evidence Trump was joking, then PolitiFact deceived its audience by omission.

When PolitiFact catches politicians doing that sort of thing a "Half True" rating often results.

PolitiFact does not hold itself to the same standard it applies to Republican politicians.

Correction 12/13/2020: We misspelled "PolitiFact" on the title line, omitting the first of two i's.

Viva Frei: PolitiFact is Fake News

Rest assured, PFB readers, the recent lack of new content at PolitiFact Bias has nothing at all to do with improved work at PolitiFact. PolitiFact stinks as badly as ever. We just don't have the time right now to devote to publishing.

But it was worth taking a moment to highlight a video blog by Viva Frei, a Canadian neighbor who happened to notice some problems at PolitiFact.

Frei hits PolitiFact over a story on cash bail, and hits PolitiFact over a fact check of the claim Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.) broke the law when she tore up the copy of the State of the Union address Trump delivered to her before Congress.

Frei's certainly caught PolitiFact grading a different claim than it claimed to fact check on the bail issue. Only the United States and the Philippines have money bail systems dominated by private commercial bond companies. A good number of other countries have money bail systems, and the claimant, Gavin Newsom, did not bother with that kind of specificity. The "Mostly True" rating could not apply for that reason alone.

Enjoy the video! And hat tip to reader "Brian" for bringing the video to our attention.

Trump again tries using hyperbole without a license

President Donald Trump said nobody had heard of "Juneteenth," the name given to a day many use to commemorate the end of U.S. slavery, until he popularized it. So PolitiFact fact-checked whether it was true that nobody had heard of it.

The result was a "Pants on Fire" rating. PolitiFact said millions of people knew about Juneteenth before Trump scheduled a campaign rally for that day.

PolitiFact cited the Wall Street Journal for its quotation of Trump. Here's how PolitiFact presented it to readers:

President Donald Trump took credit for boosting awareness of Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery in America.

"I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous," Mr. Trump said, in a Wall Street Journal interview. "It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

PolitiFact claims in its statement of principles it recognizes the literary technique of hyperbole (bold emphasis added):

In deciding which statements to check, we consider these questions:

• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.

Hyperbole involves the use of exaggeration to make a particular point. Hyperbole works as hyperbole when the audience understands that the exaggeration was not meant literally.

It's as though PolitiFact has caught Mr. Trump red-handed, trying to use hyperbole without a license.

We think Trump's statement certainly bears the obvious signs of hyperbole. If literally nobody had heard of Juneteenth before Trump scheduled his campaign rally, then Trump did not merely make Juneteenth very famous. He helped create it by inspiring others. But Trump's words, in fact, suggest that Juneteenth existed as "an important event, an important time" before that. Those words from Trump cue the average reader that "nobody had ever heard of it" was not meant literally but instead meant that Juneteenth was not well known.

Vice President Joe Biden illustrated what Trump likely meant. A (user-created) video clip from C-SPAN shows Biden on June 11, 2020 apparently expressing the belief that "Juneteenth" was the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. The massacre happened on June 1, 1921. Trump's rally was originally scheduled on "Juneteenth,"--June 19, 2020--but was moved back one day to June 20, 2020. The rally took place in Tulsa, which of course was the location of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

If Biden did not know about it then perhaps others did not know about it as well.

Maybe the problem is that PolitiFact does not set partisanship aside when it issues hyperbole licenses.

(Note: we'll add the full complement of tags after publishing, thanks to Blogger's new interface that only remembers one assigned tag when first publishing)

Does PolitiFact deliberately try to cite biased experts? (Updated)

If there's one thing PolitiFact excels at, it's finding biased experts to quote in its fact checks.

Sometimes there's an identifiable conservative, but PolitiFact favors majority rule when it surveys a handful of experts. It seems to us that PolitiFact lately is suppressing the appearance of dissent by not bothering to find a representative sample of experts.

How about a new example?

For this fact check on President Trump's criticism of President Obama, PolitiFact cited three experts, in support of its "Truth-O-Meter" ruling.

Two out of the three were appointed to Mr. Obama's "Task Force on 21st Century Policing." All three have FEC records showing they donate politically to Democrats:

• Sean Smoot (Police Benevolent etc., task force)
• David Kennedy (CUNY + "John J")
• Laurie Robinson (George Mason University, task force)

The first two on the list, in fact, specifically donated to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign.  Thus making them perfect experts to comment on Mr. Trump's criticism of Mr. Obama?

Seriously, isn't this set of experts exactly the last sort of thing a nonpartisan fact-checking organization that declares itself "not biased" should do?

As bad as its selection of experts looks, the real problem with the fact check happens when PolitiFact arbitrarily decides that the thing Trump said President Obama did not try to do was "police reform" when Trump said "fix this." Plenty of things can fit under "police reform," and PolitiFact proves it by citing how "the Justice Department did overhaul its rules to address racial profiling."

Other evidence supposedly showing Trump wrong was the task force's (non-binding!) set of recommendations. The paucity of the evidence comes through in PolitiFact's summary:

The record shows that is not true. After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and related racial justice protests, Obama established a task force to examine better policing practices. The Obama administration also investigated patterns or practices of misconduct in police departments and entered into court-binding agreements that require departments to correct misconduct.

So putting together a task force to make recommendations on police reform is trying to "fix this."

And, for what it's worth, the fact check offered no clear support for its claim "The Obama administration also investigated patterns or practices of misconduct in police departments." PolitiFact included a paragraph describing what the administration supposedly did, but that paragraph did not reference any of its experts and did not cite either by link or by name any source backing the claim.

Mr. Trump was not specific about what he meant by "fix this." Rather than granting fact-checkers license for free interpretation, that type of ambiguity in a statement makes it nearly impossible to fairly fact check the statement. Put simply, a fact checker has to have a pretty clear idea of what a claim means in order to fact check it adequately. Trump may have had in mind his administration's move to create a record of police behavior that would make it hard for officers with poor records to move to a different police department after committing questionable conduct. It's hard to say.

Here's Mr. Trump's statement with some context:

Donald Trump: (11:32)
Under this executive order departments will also need a share of information about credible abuses so that offers with significant issues do not simply move from one police department to the next, that's a problem. And the heads of our police department said, "Whatever you can do about that please let us know." We're letting you know, we're doing a lot about it. In addition, my order will direct federal funding to support officers in dealing with homeless individuals and those who have mental illness and substance abuse problems. We will provide more resources for co-responders, such as social workers who can help officers manage these complex encounters. And this is what they've studied and worked on all their lives, they understand how to do it. We're going to get the best of them put in our police departments and working with our police.

Donald Trump: (12:33)
We will have reform without undermining our many great and extremely talented law enforcement officers. President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period.

We can apparently credit the Obama administration with talking about doing some of the things Trump directed via executive order.

In PolitiFact's estimation, that seems to fully count as trying to actually do them.

And PolitiFact's opinion was backed by experts who give money to Democratic Party politicians, so how could it be wrong?


Update June 21, 2020:

The International Fact-Checking Network Code of Principles

In 2020 the International Fact-Checking Network beefed up its statement of principles, listing more stringent requirements in order to achieve "verified" status in adhering to its Code of Principles.

The requirements are so stringent that we can't help but think that it portends lower standards for applying the standards.

Take this, for example, from the form explaining to organizations how to demonstrate their compliance (bold emphasis added):

3. The applicant discloses in its fact checks relevant interests of the sources it quotes
where the reader might reasonably conclude those interests could influence the
accuracy of the evidence provided. It also discloses in its fact checks any commercial
or other such relationships it has that a member of the public might reasonably
conclude could influence the findings of the fact-check.

Is there a way to read the requirement in bold that would relieve PolitiFact from the responsibility of disclosing that every one of the experts it chose for this fact check has an FEC record showing support for Democratic Party politics?

If there is, then we expect that IFCN verification will continue, as it has in the past, to serve as a deceitful fig leaf creating the appearance of adherence to standards fact checkers show little interest in following.

We doubt any number of code infractions could make the Poynter-owned IFCN suspend the verification status of Poynter-owned PolitiFact.

Note: Near the time of this update we also updated the list of story tags.



Edit 2050 PDT 6/21/20: Changed "a" "to" and "police" to "of" "for" and "officers" respectively for clarity in penultimate sentence of paragraph immediately preceding Trump 11:32 quote - Jeff