Donald Trump lashed out Tuesday at a fact-checking website after it assigned the GOP front-runner and his entire campaign the 2015 “Lie of the Year” award.
PolitiFact is “a totally left-wing group. They are bad news, I mean as far as checking,” the casino tycoon said Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”
The media fact-checker did something a little different this year, and instead of designating one falsehood in particular for the “Lie of the Year” award, it gave the award to Trump and his entire presidential campaign.
“It’s the trope on Trump: He’s authentic, a straight-talker, less scripted than traditional politicians. That’s because Donald Trump doesn’t let facts slow him down. Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy he has followed for years,” PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan and Linda Qiu wrote Monday.
“PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial,” they added.
They explained that because Trump’s misstatements were so numerous, and because their list of the biggest lies of the years all belonged to the casino tycoon, they decided to roll them all together into “one big trophy.”
The GOP front-runner was not thrilled.
“I’ve been proven right,” Trump continued, citing articles from various right-leaning websites, including Breitbart. “I said [Muslims] were dancing on the rooftops, dancing in the streets, I’m right about that … there are many articles that say that’s true.”
Trump claimed originally that he watched as “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. He said later that he saw these “thousands and thousands” of Muslims celebrating on television.
To date, there is no broadcast footage from any news station to back Trump’s claim. Many have pointed to a CNN news segment, titled “Homegrown Terror,” which explored radical Islam’s influence in the United States, as proof of Trump’s assertion.
However, the referenced CNN segment is from 2009.
Tweets about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5BtQgTGOI4
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Trump’s PolitiFact criticism was prompted Tuesday by a question from Fox News’ Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
“You could tell something 100 percent and they will make it out to a lie if you’re a certain person,” he added. “So PolitiFact didn’t like the idea that I said dancing on rooftops, dancing on streets, but that’s been confirmed by hundreds of people.”
