PolitiFact's struggles in that department earn it our assessment as the worst of the mainstream fact checkers. In our latest example, PolitiFact reported that President Donald Trump had contradicted his claim that he had never said Mexico would pay for the border wall with a check.
We label that report PolitiFact's contradiction fiction. Fact checkers should know the difference between a contradiction and a non-contradiction.
PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):
"When during the campaign I would say ‘Mexico is going to pay for it,’ obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they're going to write out a check," Trump told reporters. "I said they're going to pay for it. They are."PolitiFact offers three links in evidence of its "found several instances" argument, but relies on the campaign material for proof of the claimed contradiction.
Later on the same day while visiting the border in Texas, Trump offered the same logic: "When I say Mexico is going to pay for the wall, that's what I said. Mexico is going to pay. I didn't say they're going to write me a check for $20 billion or $10 billion."
We’ve seen the president try to say he never said something that he very much said before, so we wondered about this case.
Spoiler: Trump has it wrong.
We found several instances over the last few years, and in campaign materials contradicting the president’s statement.
We'll cover all of PolitiFact evidence and show that none of it demonstrated that Mr. Trump contradicted himself on this point. Because we can.
Campaign Material
PolitiFact made two mistakes in trying to prove its case from a Trump Campaign description of how Trump would make Mexico pay for the border wall. First, it ignored context. Second, it applied spin to one of the quotations it used from the document.PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):
"It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year," the memo said.We placed bold emphasis on the part of the memo PolitiFact mentioned but ignored in its reasoning.
Trump proposed measures to compel Mexico to pay for the wall, such as cutting off remittances sent from undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. via wire transfers.
Then, the memo says, if and when the Mexican government protested, they would be told to pay a lump sum "to the United States to pay for the wall, the Trump Administration will not promulgate the final rule, and the regulation will not go into effect." The plan lists a few other methods if that didn’t work, like the trade deficit, canceling Mexican visas or increasing visa fees.
If the plan mentions methods to use if Mexico did not fork over the money directly, then how can the memo contradict Trump's claim he did not say Mexico would pay by check? Are fact checkers unable to distinguish between "would" and "could"? If Trump says Mexico could pay by check he does not contradict that claim by later saying he did not say Mexico would pay by check.
And what's so hard to understand about that? How can fact checkers not see it?
To help cinch its point, PolitiFact quotes from another section of the document, summarizing it as saying Mexico would pay for the wall with a lump sum payment: "(Mexico) would be told to pay a lump sum 'to the United States to pay for the wall'"). Except the term "lump sum" doesn't occur in the document.
There's reason for suspicion any time a journalist substitutes for the wording in the original document, using only a partial quotation and picking up mid-sentence. Here's the reading from the original:
On day 3 tell Mexico that if the Mexican government will contribute the funds needed to the United States to pay for the wall ...We see only one potential justification for embroidering the above to make it refer to a "lump sum." That's from interpreting "It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year" as specifying a lump sum payment. We think confirmation bias would best explain that interpretation. It's more reasonable to take the statement to mean that paying for the wall once and having it over with is an obvious choice when it helps preserve a greater amount of income for Mexico annually after that. And the line does not express an expectation of a lump-sum payment but instead the strength (rightly or wrongly) of the bargaining position of the United States.
In short, PolitiFact utterly failed to make its case with the example it chose to emphasize.
... And The Rest
(these are weak, so they occur after a page break)
