A well-known fact checker flunked Donald Trump in June for suggesting incorrectly that there are no Chevys in Japan, that the Islamic State has built a hotel in Syria, and that nuclear warheads in the United States are likely inoperable — and all of these fact checks came from a single speech.
Things have only gotten busier for fact-checkers, including FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, as Trump, the 2016 Republican presidential front-runner, has amplified the bluster and grandiose posturing.
“Donald Trump is definitely more free-wheeling in his public remarks than most of the other candidates we track. He doesn’t seem to use prepared remarks, and it often sounds as if he’s speaking off the cuff,” PolitiFact editor Angie Holan told the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
“We try to treat Donald Trump like anyone else we cover, in that we fact-check him when we hear him say things that make us go, ‘Hmmm, is that true?'” she added.
Since launching his campaign in June, Trump has claimed that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has “done nothing to help the [veterans],” that Florida housed five sanctuary cities while Jeb Bush was governor, and that Christian Syrian refugees are barred from entering the United States.
Each of these assertions earned a “false” tag from PolitiFact.
“He regularly makes statements that grab our attention. We do use our news judgment to select facts to check, so it’s not a random sample. At the same time, there are many candidates in the Republican field, and we like to fact-check a broad cross-section of candidates,” Holan told the Examiner.
FactCheck.org has awarded Trump recently with similarly poor marks, giving him low grades for statements on birthright citizenship, immigration policy and his claiming in the first televised GOP debate that he has never used derogatory language to criticize women.
“We went through his entire immigration plan. It got some things right and some things were wrong or misleading. Just like any other politician,” FactCheck.org director Eugene Kiely told the Examiner.
“One challenge with Trump, as is the case with others who have never run for office, is that he doesn’t have a record. And like most candidates at this stage of the campaign, he doesn’t have detailed policy plans. So it is hard to determine his positions on issues like health care and taxes, particularly if he makes seemingly contradictory statements,” he added.
Though the current GOP front-runner certainly provides them with ample material to double-check, Kiely maintains that the former reality TV star poses no unique fact-checking challenges.
“[Trump] is an unconventional politician and he gives far more off-the-cuff remarks than more scripted politicians, but we still go through the same process of separating fact-based statements from opinions and then conduct our research,” he said.
But it’s precisely Trump’s off-the-cuff style that has left at least a few critics feeling overwhelmed.
For RedState contributor Leon Wolf, the problem isn’t so much that Trump has a penchant for stretching the truth. It’s that he does it with such regularity, and that the volume of questionable comments is so great, that fact checking everything becomes a nearly impossible task.
“When a homing missile locks in on a target, one of the best ways to defeat it is to release a bunch of chaff so the missile gets confused and doesn’t know what to lock on to,” RedState contributor Leon Wolf wrote, marveling at Trump’s freewheeling oratory style.
“When a politician goofs once, it’s easy for that to get stuck in the feedback loop of the media and other candidates. Watching Donald Trump speak and answer questions, though, is like watching a billion targets appear in the sky all at once, for a political opponent. Each thing he says is so bizarre, or ill informed, or demonstrably false, or unpresidential in tone or character, that it becomes impossible to know which target to lock on to or focus on,” he added.
Wolf argued that Trump’s supposed policy proposals are so hopelessly vague and nonsensical that it’s practically impossible to fact check them.
“Donald Trump is the political equivalent of chaff, a billion shiny objects all floating through the sky at once, ephemeral, practically without substance,” he wrote, “serving almost exclusively to distract from more important things, yet nonetheless completely impossible to ignore.”
Though PolitiFact doesn’t take things as far as Wolf, the group nevertheless concedes that the 2016 Republican front-runner has provided their fact checking operation with a bevy of material of examine.
“[W]e stick to the facts. Under our system, anyone whose statement gets a false rating on Monday can come back and get a true rating on Wednesday, so we like to keep an open mind at all times,” she added.
To date, PolitiFact has awarded Trump three “Mostly True,” eight “Half True,” five “Mostly False”, 21 “False” and eight “Pants on Fire” ratings.
