President Donald Trump constantly berates America’s two best newspaper–The New York Times and The Washington Post–calling them “Fact News.” It’s because they work so hard at telling true facts, and Trump works so hard at distorting facts and telling outright lies. In fact, these two newspapers have fact-check departments that claim Donald Trump has told 10,000 lies or gross distortions of truth since he has been president, which is only 2.5 years. Does the president have any fact-checkers in his administration?
The Times says this revelation, in “How We Fact-Check Politicians,” is part of a series that will continue in the next few days in which it reveals its journalistic practices. This is just another concrete evidence indicating that The New York Times, which I’ve been reading for a long time, is one of the best newspapers, if not the best, in the world. And The Washington Post is close behind it.
Today and yesterday, The New York Times published this article revealing exactly how it fact-checks politicians, including President Donald Trump, and for how long it has seriously been doing so. It kinda started back in 2012 and really picked up speed when Trump started running for president. This article says that in the U.S., the main media fact-checkers of our politicians are Politifact, Factcheck.org, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. At The Times, Politifact veteran Linda Qiu now heads up this fact-checking effort.
Expert Ms. Qiu relates in this article: “Of course, Democratic politicians and the 2020 candidates also bend the truth and mislead, but Mr. Trump is unlike any other politician I’ve ever fact-checked. He is often unscripted, which lends itself to more mistakes. He also just doesn’t seem to care if he’s wrong. Sometimes, I’ve been bewildered by his tendency to escalate true claims into false ones or marveled at the sheer brazenness of, say, his denials of something that happened despite video evidence.”
Donald Trump surely has to be the most lying president the U.S. has ever had. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a celebrity who lies more than this guy. Why does he lie so much? It is surely because he tries to create his own reality and, by doing so, convince others of it. That is why I think people who believe Donald Trump are duped. It used to be that a man was only as good as his word. How things have changed.
Being an Evangelical Christian, I know how Evangelicals are always talking about “God and his word.” It’s like, for them, the most important thing about God is his word. That is, God’s word can be trusted. I agree. Yet Evangelicals have done a 180 degree flip about a person’s word regarding Donald Trump since the Pew Research Center’s poll showed that 81 percent of Evangelicals who voted in the past presidential election voted for Donald Trump. Thus, they had a lot to do with putting him in the White House. Yes, the choice was either him or Hilary Clinton. But no matter how much such voters hated Ms. Clinton, she never proved to be anywhere near the liar that Trump is.
President Donald Trump is making lying the new normal. It is prime evidence that our society is moving toward the Great Apostasy or rebellion of the latter times that will immediately precede the Second Coming of Christ (Gr. apostasia; 2 Thessalonians 2.1-3).
The Apostle Paul repeatedly predicted this. He wrote, “in the later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4.1-2 NRSV).
Paul also relates, “in the last days distressing times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3.1-5).
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