We live in the age of lies. Lies are so pervasive in our society that we rarely find them remarkable.
On September 10, 2024 Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump engaged in a televised 90 minute debate broadcast on the ABC television network. The debate was spectacular in many ways. One was in the number of lies that were told by one of the candidates. Guess which one?
CNN’s senior reporter Daniel Dale who reported on CNN immediately after the debate concluded said this:
“what stood out tonight was that this was a staggeringly dishonest debate performance by from former president Trump—just lie after lie after lie on subject after subject. By my preliminary count Trump made at least 33 false claims. By contrast again by a preliminary count, vice-president Kamala Harris made at least 1 false claim, though she added at least a few more misleading claims and a few more that lacked key context. I think that most Americans say ‘well all politicians lie, but no major political presidential candidate before Donald Trump has lied with this sort of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. And this wasn’t like little exaggeration or political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality. Like on abortion, saying “every Democrat wanted Roe v. Wade overturned” when actually more than 80% of Democrats supported Roe v. Wade. On crime, saying it was “through the roof” when actually it has come sharply down since 2023. It’s now lower than it was when Trump left office. On health care, saying he’s the one who saved Obama care, the law that he repeatedly tried to overturn. On Kamala Harris herself, saying that a Howard University grad, a black law students’ association president, had claimed that she wasn’t black at one point. Frankly, I don’t have enough time here to run through each false Trump claim. I urge people to go to our CNN website or our app to read our team’s detailed fact checks on this and a whole bunch more.”
CNN a year and half ago during a televised Town Hall broadcast by the same CNN news channel, had referred in a headline to Donald Trump saying he was spewing out “a firehose of lies.” That sums it up pretty well. Oliver Darcy said it this way:
It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.
Kaitlan Collins is as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come. She fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall. Over and over and over again, she told him that the election was not stolen. That it was not rigged. That there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.
“The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” Collins told Trump at one point during the event. “You cannot keep saying that all night long.”
Yet, he did. Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins throughout the evening as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe. A professional lie machine, Trump fired off falsehoods at a rapid clip while using his bluster to overwhelm Collins, stealing command of the stage at some points of the town hall.
Trump lied about the 2020 election. He took no responsibility for the January 6 insurrection that those very lies incited. And he mocked E. Jean Carroll’s allegations of sexual assault, which a jury found him liable for on Tuesday.”
This debate was another such night in front of millions of American television viewers seeing him disgorge lie after lie apparently without notice or shame or regret. Trump was indeed “A professional lie machine,” as Darcy said.
Dale said instead of trying to cover all those lies live on TV he would focus on one “egregious false claim.” This was the one about migrants supposedly eating people’s pets.
This is what he said,
“In Springfield they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets—eating the pets—of the people that live there.”
This was a crazy conspiracy theory that reminded me a lot of another crazy conspiracy theory spread a year or so ago about young people in schools transitioning to cats and demanding kitty litter in schools. I cannot blame Kamala Harris for laughing during the former president’s presentation of these absurd claims. Why does the MAGA crowd believe so much crazy stuff? As Dale said,
“This is not only false, I think it is fair to call this odious. For people who have not been online the last couple of days, this claim about Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio eating people’s pets originated with a Facebook post that attributed the claim to a “neighbour’s friend’s daughter.” A third hand broken telephone kind of thing. The city of Springfield and the Springfield police say there are no credible reports of this happening. And even J.D. Vance the vice-presidential candidate who himself had promoted these claims, acknowledged this morning that the “rumors” might prove out to be false though he still encouraged people to spread these cat memes. Trump himself added dogs ot the equation. They had not even been part of these viral nonsense rumours before.”
CNN also looked at the one false claim made by Harris during the debate. She said, “Let’s talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”
As Dale analyzed,
“So, the Biden Harris administration was not actually left the worst unemployment. They were left a 6.4% unemployment in January 2021. That was certainly elevated by recent standards. It was pretty high, but it was significantly down from the 14.8% a level it reached in early in the pandemic. So it was already improving at the time that Biden-Harris administration took office and that 14.8% was the highest since the Great Recession. So in the last 20 years not going back decades further.
Harris’s lie was a pipsqueak compared to Trump’s big fat lies!