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.

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.

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Taylor Swift's Candidates Lag in Polls--PolitiFact Hardest Hit?

We noted pop star Taylor Swift's election endorsement statement drew the selective attention of the fact checkers left-leaning bloggers at PolitiFact.

We've found it hilarious over the past several days that PolitiFact has mercilessly pimped its Swiftian fact check repeatedly on Twitter and Facebook.

Now with polls showing Swift's candidates badly trailing the Republican counterparts we can only wonder: Is PolitiFact the entity hardest hit by Swift's failure (so far) to make a critical difference in putting the Democrats over the top?

The Biggest Problem with PolitiFact's Fact Check of Taylor Swift

The Swift claim PolitiFact chose to check was the allegation that Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn voted against the Violence Against Women Act. We noted that PolitiFact's choice of topic, given the fact that Swift made at least four claims that might interest a fact checker, was likely the best choice from the liberal point of view.

Coincidentally(?), PolitiFact pulled the trigger on that choice. But as we pointed out in our earlier post, PolitiFact still ended up putting its finger on the scales to help its Democratic Party allies.

It's true Blackburn voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (PolitiFact ruled it "Mostly True").

But it's also true that Blackburn voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

Contradiction?

Not quite. VAWA came up for reauthorization in 2012.Blackburn co-sponsored a VAWA reauthorization bill and voted in favor. It passed the House with most Democrats voting in opposition.

And the amazing thing is that the non-partisan fact checkers liberal bloggers at PolitiFact didn't mention it. Not a peep. Instead, PolitiFact began its history of the reauthorization of the VAWA in 2013:

The 2013 controversy
The Violence Against Women Act was two decades old in 2013 when Congress wrestled with renewing the funds to support it. The law paid for programs to prevent domestic violence. It provided money to investigate and prosecute rape and other crimes against women. It supported counseling for victims.

The $630 million price tag was less the problem than some specific language on non-discrimination.

The Senate approved its bill first on Feb. 12, 2013, by a wide bipartisan margin of 78 to 22. That measure redefined underserved populations to include those who might be discriminated against based on religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Starting the history of VAWA reauthorization in 2013 trims away the bothersome fact that Blackburn voted for VAWA reauthorization in 2012. Keeping that information out of the fact check helps sustain the misleading narrative that Republicans like Blackburn are okay with violence against women.

As likely as not that was PolitiFact's purpose.