Trump Analysis – Fact Check the Fact Checkers

Trump is facing not one adversary but also most of the members of the press, debate moderators, members of the Republican and Democratic establishment, “fact checkers” cited by most of the members of the press

Trump Analysis – Fact Check the Fact Checkers

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Donald Trump would win by a landslide if only honest fact checkers would prevail over the dishonest fact checkers, or, to be charitable, if only the honest fact checkers would prevail over the naïve and/or incompetent fact checkers. The miracle of Trump is to be competitive despite being openly opposed by, above all,

1. Most members of the media,
2. Most of the fact checkers selected by most members of the media,
3. Most of the debate moderators, as well as, to a lesser extent,
4. Trump’s actual opponent, and
5. Members of the establishments in the Republican and Democratic parties.

Related: Proposed Strategy for Trump Even If the Ironies Will Go Over People’s Heads
There are two categories of misrepresentations of the facts – those who misrepresent the facts, and those who only cite Trump’s original positions before he refined them or corrected them, keeping in mind that Trump is not a politician, so he tends to speak spontaneously and authentically,  and only after that to refine or correct his gut responses to issues as to which he may not have had occasion to form policies as a businessman.

This article lists examples from both categories, and then provides references to more information about them.

One of the most recent misrepresentations is that in the third debate, Trump allegedly undermined the political process by not pledging to support the winner of the election. This misrepresentation might be plausible, were it not for the fact that it ignores

1. what Trump actually said,
2. what he did not say, and
3. what others have routinely said and done, notably Democrats. 

Trump simply said he would have to wait until after the election to answer the question intelligently because:

1. it is impossible to know now whether the election results will be close enough to render a challenge worthwhile, and
2. whether there will be election fraud that must be exposed and contested.
3. “Fact checkers” have reported that there has been virtually no election fraud in the recent past, despite overwhelming evidence of election fraud in the recent past, unless you discount, as have these fact checkers, instances of thousands of dead people voting, and instances of more people voting than residing in a given district, but these examples somehow slip the minds of the fact checkers who ignore the tactics of a banana republic when it suits them to do so.

Al Gore contested the presidential election of George W. Bush, and many Democrats to this day refuse to concede that George Bush did not steal that election. But even if there was no proven evidence of voter fraud in recent times, there still might be in the future, so what Trump did at the debate was to finally give an honest answer to an improper question. It is impossible to know in advance whether there will be fraud in the election, especially:

1. now that a record number of people vote before election day, the chances of fraud or simple errors in recordkeeping are enhanced, and
2. in an atmosphere where the IRS was proven to have perverted the election process by denying or deferring exempt status to conservative political organizations, and by punishing Dinesh D’ Souza (a Republican movie maker who made a movie exposing Obama in the last election cycle) by causing him to be imprisoned for a relatively minor infraction with a sentence not imposed against any other people who made comparably minor infractions (so he was literally put in jail during the Obama administration for an infraction infinitely less serious than Hillary’s multiple infractions, yet Hillary has the nerve to lecture Trump about not imprisoning people), and
3. where the FBI refused to indict Hillary for email infractions for which people who did much less were indicted, and
4. a majority of Americans believe Hillary should have been indicted or a grand jury should have been convened to consider her breaches of national security and her lies about these breaches under oath.

So the bottom line is that since fraud in the electoral process is more likely to affect the current election than ever before, Trump’s reservation of judgment in this instance is designed to guarantee that justice will be served, so he is not undermining the democratic process but reserving the right of Americans to see that the votes are counted fairly.

Any honest fact checker would have to acknowledge that

1. Trump is not a misogynist; although Trump may talk and even act like a male chauvinist at times, he has treated virtually all his female employees to pay, promotions, and benefits comparable to other employers in his industry, if not better, while Hillary has clearly been accused by credible women of having intimidated them for their accusations against her husband’s sexual advances while holding public office, one of which resulted in a settlement of $850,000;
Trump is not known to humiliate people with disabilities; the one example that the press and Hillary focus on is Trump’s hand motions supposedly making fun of a journalist Trump was accusing of lying, when honest investigators later ascertained that
1. the journalist had a disability that would not manifest itself in Trump’s hand motions, and
2. Trump had used those hand motions to ridicule healthy people like Ted Cruz and even like Trump himself in a self-deprecating context;
2. Trump generally was opposed to the Iraq war, from the outset, as witnessed repeatedly by Sean Hannity, one of the most outspoken talk-show hosts on the planet, who recalled Trump’s forceful anti-war position in many conversations off camera, but when the pro-war atmosphere was at a fever pitch, Trump once told one non-mainstream talk show host that he was for the war, but he said it in such an unenthusiastic and reluctant and low key way that it was obvious his heart was not in this expression of support, especially considering that Trump almost never expresses an opinion on any subject in a low-key manner.
3. Trump was not advocating putting Hillary in jail if she would simply lose the election, as stated by Hillary and the press, and as abetted by the fact checkers, but rather Trump has said he would appoint a special prosecutor to ascertain whether there was cause for an indictment,  considering that most Americans believe she should have at least been indicted or a grand jury convened to consider her breaches of national security information; the head of the FBI said she was extremely careless in handling extremely important and confidential material, and implied Hillary would have been indicted had prosecutors said she should have been indicted, after which Rudolph Giuliani and many other prosecutors said she should have been indicted and they have indicted many people for far less egregious offenses.
4. “Stop and frisk” was not ruled unconstitutional but was actually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Only the manner of its application in New York was ruled unconstitutional on one occasion, and then the judge who made this ruling was removed from this case and the appellate court signaled it would have overturned even this ruling had the appeal continued, but the “progressive” Mayor DiBlasio simply decided not to proceed with the appeal. Yet the moderator of the first Trump-Hillary debate incorrectly fact-checked this matter and publicly stated that Trump was wrong when in fact Trump was correct about the status of stop and frisk under the law. Furthermore, far more African-Americans are killed by fellow African-Americans than by white police officers shooting unarmed African-Americans who do not take provocative aggressive actions against the police.  Again, you would never know it from reading the anti-Trump accusations allowed to stand by the fact checkers.
5. Trump is blamed for not paying his taxes for 18 years, when this is merely a theoretical possibility, and the press is not privy to Trump’s taxes for those 18 years, and Trump clearly did pay many taxes throughout these years, withholding taxes, real estate taxes, sales taxes, etc., for starters. Again, you would never realize this from reading what the fact checkers have allowed.
6. Trump’s rallies have been portrayed in the media as rowdy and violent, but recent disclosures by James O’ Keefe and the Project Veritas Action demonstrate on incontrovertible video that the Democratic National Committee paid people to go to Trump rallies and create violent scenes. One of the people involved in this scheme has been found to have gone to the White House over 342 times during the Obama administration and to have personally met with the president dozens of times. Have the fact checkers allowed this to be disclosed as fact?
7. The press repeatedly gives much coverage to every woman who makes an accusation against Trump for his alleged personal indiscretions of many years ago, but fails to give comparable coverage to each of the thousands of emails that have been uncovered, exposing Hillary and her campaign for far more serious offenses against ALL the American people, whether in terms of national security or anti-Latino and anti-Semitic positions, for example. According to the fact checkers, Trump has a virtual monopoly on positions against minorities in this election.
8. Trump originally proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country until a better system would be devised for vetting them, but then he modified his position by just advocating a temporary ban on people from countries with an extreme concentration of terrorism, but you would never know it by reading what the fact checkers have allowed, taking it for granted that Trump is anti-Muslim, when his policies to protect the homeland from Isis and other terrorists would save lives of innocent Muslims as well as the lives of people of other religions.
9. Trump is accused of being anti-Mexican (and by extension, anti-Latino) because Trump opposed a son of a Mexican as a judge in a case involving a Trump organization because the judge’s father came from Mexico. The context, however, is ignored by the fact checkers. Because Trump has been vilified as allegedly being anti-Mexican (having said that some Mexicans who came to America are criminals and some are not) when this is not the case, the perception people have that Trump is anti-Mexican made it appropriate for the judge to recuse himself (without needing a request by Trump), a routine practice demonstrating fairness rather than unfairness. Incidentally, when Judge Michael Mukasey was asked to be removed from the bench in a major case involving a Muslim because the judge was Jewish, there was no outcry and the lawyer who made the request, William Kunstler, continued to be lionized as a civil rights lawyer and a national hero, by many liberals, and not condemned.
10. Trump was falsely accused of insulting the son of the Khan who falsely accused Trump at the Democratic National Convention of being anti-Muslim, anti-women, etc. Trump called the son a hero and only made an offhand remark about the hero’s mother not having spoken up, which in context was only a dig at Muslims’ tendency to minimize the voices of women, compared to Trump’s tendency to give women good jobs, good pay, good benefits, and good opportunities to express themselves, whether in the workplace or on television (on the Apprentice). Trump was then accused of not having sacrificed for his country, when Trump made more sacrifices for his country than any other politician in American history, giving up a lifestyle of a billionaire who could have retired, but instead opting to run for office to try to save his country from a threat to capitalism and a threat to the freedom to say what is not politically correct (which is often actually and factually incorrect), and in the process Trump and his family have become targets of death threats, and Trump is spending millions of dollars of his own money and jeopardizing the Trump brand that had been worth millions or billions of dollars before the election campaign, but which will be worth much less if Trump loses, as will Trump’s businesses in general, which took Trump a lifetime to build, nurture, and develop.
11. Trump was accused of humiliating Senator John McCain for being captured, when Trump had merely indicated he has more respect for a person who does a heroic act than for somebody who was captured for being at the wrong place at the wrong time; Trump immediately clarified that he considers McCain to be a hero; yet you would never know it from reading what the fact checkers failed to acknowledge.

And the list goes on and on.

Most importantly, much has been made about the “fact” that fact checkers have found Trump to have made even more misstatements of fact than Hillary, but not only are most of these fact checkers beneath contempt in their dishonesty, but they also equate in this listing Trump’s many exaggerations and irrelevant or inconsequential obviously inadvertent mistakes of minor facts, with (instead of being contrasted with) Hillary’s intentional and repeated lies as to issues of national security regarding her emails, her knowledge of security issues (claiming not even to know that the letter “c” stands for “confidential,” and that her role was often to use this marking herself, let alone to be able to recognize it), what she said about the cause of the rioting at Benghazi, etc. (Incidentally, at a Romney-Obama debate four years ago, Candy Crowley famously and falsely fact-checked a statement at the debate by leading viewers to believe that Obama had not initially and for more than a week falsely blamed Benghazi on a movie just because at one point Obama used the word terrorism during this first week after the murder of the Americans there. This high-profile and highly improper and misleading fact-check may have helped swing the election to Obama.)

The bottom line is that Trump is facing not one adversary but also most of the members of the press, most of the debate moderators (except Fox’s Chris Wallace, who was tough on both debaters), most of the members of the Republican and Democratic establishment, but, most outrageously of all, most of the “fact checkers” cited by most of the members of the press.
On a balanced playing field, Trump would be ahead by a landslide. We will find out November 8th whether he can possibly overcome all of the obstacles he faces to win by even a small margin, and if the margin is razor thin in favor of his adversary, would justice really be served, would the American people really be fairly treated, by a failure to ascertain whether the victory will be fair and square?

Many of the issues touched on above are developed in more detail in a series of articles Mr. Rich has recently written, which can be found at Canada Free Press archives.

By Ron A. Y. Rich