Washington Post fact-checkers must have been thrilled by the end of Wednesday night as they wrapped up, the Democrats having given them less work than normal.
“The virtual convention seems to have really dialed down the rhetoric, as speakers feel less need to offer dubious claims to earn cheers,” they wrote about Night Three of the Democratic National Convention. “In 2020, only two statements merited a fact check, compared to 12 statements four years ago on the third night of the convention.”
Night Three included more than just two misstatements. However, the rhetorical gas went unchallenged because the fact-checkers more or less limit what they consider fact-checkable material to policy claims. “As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events,” the fact-checkers write. That is really convenient for Democrats. In a convention that has been incredibly light on policy, the fact-checkers give themselves few opportunities to check facts.
On Wednesday night, a series of falsehoods was thrown into a video montage of immigration-related footage. The falsehood was put forth in the framing, the implied meaning, of key parts of the video, and so it fell outside of the scope of the Washington Post’s aims. The video shows an immigrant child crying for his father, overdubbed by a young girl talking about her mother being deported, and President Trump cuts in. “These aren’t people,” he says in one clip. “I don’t want them in our country,” he says in another. “They’re animals,” he yells in a third.
Trump did say those things, but he wasn’t referring to crying immigrant children, as the video so clearly suggests. The “these aren’t people” comment was made in a meeting about the danger of “sanctuary city” laws, which Trump argued benefit MS-13 gang members. They, for their brutality, were the target of his language. The same is true for the “they’re animals” comment. It is wrong to imply that he was calling children animals.
In her speech, Hillary Clinton suggested that one answer to Trump’s rhetorical “What do you have to lose?” play from 2016 is the post office. It’s hard to know exactly in what sense she means that, but the post office talking point has been widely adopted in several forms during the last week. If Clinton meant what Joe Biden claimed during Monday’s convention, that Trump wants to “defund the post office,” then it makes no sense (the Washington Post didn’t fact-check Biden’s claim on Monday, either).
Trump’s administration just agreed to lend up to $10 billion to the Postal Service. Trump has suggested he would sign a bill including Democrats’ desired $25 billion for the post office if the bill were to include other provisions he wants. Granted, he then incompetently conflated that proposal with a separate $3.6 billion proposal specifically to help with mail-in voting and then suggested that he wouldn’t approve it so that mail-in voting would fail. Mail-in voting would go forward without the $3.6 billion. The USPS has been working with states since late May to ensure that it works.
Clinton may have meant that the post office is intentionally slowing down mail to tarnish the success of mail-in voting, as Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Ted Lieu argued in a letter to the FBI. “Multiple media investigations show that Postmaster DeJoy and the Board of Governors have retarded the passage of mail,” they wrote. “If their intent in doing so was to affect mail-in balloting or was motivated by personal financial reasons, then they likely committed crimes.” Similar claims and insinuations about deliberate disruption of mail for the president’s benefit have been debunked, including by USA Today.
When fact-checkers too selectively check facts, falsehoods stand. The narrowness of the Washington Post’s fact check criteria has left truth wanting during the convention.
