Sorry, Mr. President, but everyone in the press actually did report that you said ‘racism is evil’

President Trump said he came to the Phoenix Convention Center to call out the media, more specifically “to show you how damned dishonest these people are.” But while that whipped up the crowd, what he said about the press is not exactly true. It was a freewheeling Trump, not the journalists present, dropping half-truths and outright falsehoods Tuesday night.

Trump claimed that the networks were cutting their live feeds of his speech (they didn’t). Trump insisted that he accomplished more in his first six months than any other president (his legislative agenda remains in limbo). And most glaringly, Trump accused the media of selectively censoring his remarks on Charlottesville (that’s nonsense).

Trump reread each of his Charlottesville statements, pausing occasionally to add commentary and dole out criticism. It was an effective though misleading moment until Trump completely played himself.

“Then I said, racism is evil,” Trump said referring to his August 14th statement. “Do they report that I said that racism is evil?” The answer, of course, is that yes, absolutely, they did.

Granted, the media haven’t done themselves many favors since they started covering Trump. The commentary pages and cable punditry in particular have been awful. But the whole who-what-when-where-why model of reporting hasn’t completely gone out of style. In fact, every major newspaper in the United States printed the president’s racism quote word-for-word.

The Washington Post headlined their story: “‘Racism is evil’, Trump says, condemning ‘white supremacists’ and hate groups.” Glenn Thrush used the quote in the third paragraph of his New York Times story, and the Wall Street Journal put it prominently in the second paragraph.

Beltway rags like Politico, the Hill, and our own Washington Examiner did the same. So did CNN, NPR, and an entire alphabet soup of networks. Both Breitbart and the Huffington Post headlined their coverage with the specific quote “racism is evil.” Anyone reading, listening, or watching the news inevitably came across that quote. Like the iconic red hats at a Trump rally, it was impossible to miss.

Also hard to miss: When Trump read off his statement from last Saturday about the violence in Charlottesville — the one for which he was criticized — he pointedly omitted the ad-libbed phrase that got him in trouble, “on many sides.” He was criticized because he seemed to be hinting that the left-wing counter-protesters were just as responsible for the death and the multiple injuries that occurred, even though they had been the result of a neo-Nazi plowing his car into a crowd. By omitting this from his read-back, Trump is trying to create confusion about what was said.

Desperate for a foil, Trump has made the media his boogeyman. After squandering his political capital, these attacks are the last play he has left. And it’s not a bad strategy to go after an industry with legitimate and systemic flaws. Like John Dickerson, host of Face the Nation, said in February, the press “ruined its reputation on its own.”

But if Trump is going to slam the press for lying, he should avoid doing the same thing himself.

Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

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