THE WEEKLY STANDARD editor at large Bill Kristol joined The Lead with Jake Tapper on Tuesday afternoon to discuss President Donald Trump, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and the administration’s relationship with the truth.
“The media has made more mistakes than usual in the last couple of months, maybe out of an exaggerated outrage that [Trump] was going to be president and now is president. But still, and you made this point kind of quickly, the media’s the media: It makes mistakes, people in media criticize the media, we all deserve to be criticized when we make mistakes. There’s only one president of the United States,” Kristol said. “He has the entire United States government at his disposal to fact-check things that he’s going to say.”
Continued Kristol, “I’ve served in a White House: You know how much trouble normal presidents go to, and normal presidential staffs go to, to try to make sure that the president doesn’t make an error, or if he does, that they correct it pretty quickly. And it matters. He’s the president of the United States. It doesn’t matter if one website somewhere misquotes Kellyanne or, even, frankly, if CNN gets something wrong for an hour before they correct it. It matters if the president does it.”
