Donald Trump Has A Massive PolitiFact Problem, And (Surprise) His Fans Don’t Mind
September 2, 2015Toni Matthews Politics
Donald Trump talks a lot, mainly about himself, but apparently he has a fibbing problem. Fact-checking website PolitiFact took a look at the 28 separate times Trump made claims while campaigning (as far back as the 2012 presidential campaign). How many times was Donald determined to have told the whole truth?
Exactly zero times.
Yeah, you read that right. Apparently out of all 28 occasions, the closest Donald Trump came to honesty was in the form of half-truths. Much of the research performed by PolitiFact seemed to prove that “The Donald” was either mostly dishonest with his adoring followers or out-and-out “pants on fire” lying. This led the site to rank him as the least truthful out of all the 2016 GOP Presidential candidates.
Why is it that Donald Trump can get away with being more dishonest than honest? How can he fib his way into having a bunch of far-right GOP supporters go on about how he’s the most honest, tell-it-like-it-is politician out there? The answer doesn’t reflect well on his would-be voters to say the least.
The biggest fibs that Donald Trump has told seem to center on confirming the far-right’s fear of the (non-white) other. Let’s look at this quote from August 6, where Donald claims that the Latino immigrants coming to America are the “bad ones” sent by Mexico.
“The Mexican government … they send the bad ones over.”
I give kudos to the folks over at PolitiFact for taking a look at a blatantly racist statement like that and deciding to do actual research to determine if it wasn’t just something said to stir up his white supremacist fans. They actually gave Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt and went to work fact-checking. The site determined (in what is of no surprise to anyone) that there was NO evidence to support a supposed policy in Mexico of keeping the “good Latinos” for themselves and shipping the trouble-makers across the border.
When Donald isn’t stirring up his white supporters fear of being overrun by brown people from Mexico, he assaults their imaginations with images of brown Muslims arriving by the boatload. An added “bonus”? Implying that good foreign Christians are being left in the hands of terrorists to suffer by that godless President Obama.
“If you’re from Syria, and you’re a Christian, you cannot come into this country, and they’re the ones that are being decimated. If you are Islamic, [you] can come in so easily.”
Once again, PolitiFact did some digging and found that since August 2014, less than a 1,000 Syrian immigrants have made their way to the United States. While most of that number is indeed of Islamic-faith, there were Christians who immigrated as well. And a couple of atheists.
Of course, the Syrian refugee situation and their religious identities weren’t the points of this statement. Instead, we see the “conservative Christian persecution complex” side by side with blatant “Islamophobia.” In Syria, Christians are facing real persecution. Some American Christians consider themselves persecuted because they can’t use their religion (or the Constitution) to justify their bigotry. Meanwhile, Syrian Christians have been threatened with taxation, exile, and death.
It doesn’t seem to matter if Donald Trump fudges the truth about immigration, Obamacare, or the status of our nuclear weapons. What seems to matter most is having a candidate who justifies their fear and bigotry.
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