It would be nice to say you can think what you want about President Trump’s trip to Europe over the last week, but the national media is doing its damnedest to make sure you don’t by misrepresenting over and over again what exactly happened.
Just to take one explicit lie as an example, Trump did not call the European Union “a foe” to the extent that the public is led to believe.
In an interview with CBS News last Saturday, anchor Jeff Glor asked Trump, “Who’s your biggest competitor, your biggest foe, globally right now?”
Here is Trump’s full answer: “I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union but they’re a foe. Russia’s a foe in certain respects. China’s a foe economically, certainly they’re a foe, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they’re competitors. They want to do well and we want to do well.”
So, first you have Glor using “competitor” and “foe” as synonymous, and then you have Trump saying that the E.U. is a “foe” on trade, which he has said countless times. And then, he checks Russia and China also as opponents, with the caveat that all parties are not necessarily “bad.”
That’s a very nuanced answer, something the press generally approves of, but because it’s Trump, the entire comment was summed up as: Trump calls the E.U. a foe!
CBS’s own online write-up of the interview said Trump had “named the European Union — comprising some of America’s oldest allies — when asked to identify his ‘biggest foe globally right now.’”
[Also read: Trump calls media ‘hypocrites’ for saying he was ‘too nice’ to Putin]
The article didn’t mention that the network’s own anchor was the one to interchangeably use the words “foe” and “competitor” in his lead-up to Trump’s answer.
An Associated Press article began, “President Donald Trump named the European Union as a top adversary of the United States and denounced the news media as the ‘enemy of the people’ before arriving in Helsinki on Sunday on the eve of his high-stakes summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.”
Two paragraphs down the story said Trump “named the EU, a bloc of nations that includes many of America’s closest allies, at the top of his list of biggest global foes.”
Only when you read on do you get to the full quote where Trump explains that he was talking about trade, a hidden part of his agenda that he — wait, never mind, he actually talked about that during his entire 2016 campaign.
Another example of a complete miscast by the media of what actually happened during Trump’s press conference with Putin on Monday is the repeated claim that he “sided” with Russia over U.S. intelligence on the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote Monday that Trump “essentially sided with the enemy by attacking U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies regarding their solidly conclusive finding that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election.”
A CNN online headline said Trump “sides with Putin over US intelligence.”
NPR said the same.
But Trump did not “side” with Putin. He said that Putin denied the assessment that the Russian government got involved in the U.S. election.
“So, I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” he said.
Even Trump’s most scrutinized statement at the summit — “I don’t see why it would be Russia” — was not an endorsement of Putin’s denial, so much as it was a typical deflection of the suggestion that his election win comes with an asterisk. And Trump amended that one the next day anyway.
A lot happened during the president’s overseas trip, and the results would get a fair hearing with an honest news media. But we don’t have one.
