CSI: American Carnage (Wednesday, January 1, 2020)
IMPORTANT NOTICE!
As the bright new year opens with fog and a chill wind, The Editors at CSI: American Carnage offer a month-by-month look back over a year of truth-telling, curated by veteran newsman and fact aficionado Daniel Dale. Please give Daniel a warm CSI welcome and feel free to offer your own selections for most important fact of the year, month, or day. Remember: another Benghazi is always around the corner and many say caravans may be massing at the southern border.
In January, Trump kept repeating those lurid “duct tape” stories about women being tied up and gagged and trafficked across the unwalled desert — because, he kept saying, it’s impossible for human trafficking to happen through legal ports. That is not even close to true.
In February, Trump, having portrayed himself as a crusader against election fraud, was asked about the actual case of apparent election fraud by Republicans in a North Carolina midterm race. He immediately pivoted to his imaginary mass election fraud in California.
In March, nearly 3 years after “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump claimed that…he had been joking when he said it, in an arena with 25,000 people, and everyone had laughed, and the media omitted this context. He’d actually said it at a news conference with a straight face.
In April, Trump said that “they say” the noise from wind turbines causes cancer.
In May, Trump told the most egregious version of his lie about being the one who got Veterans Choice passed: he said of the late John McCain, “He was never able to get Choice. I got Choice.” Unlike Trump, McCain had actually been a primary figure behind the Choice bill of 2014.
In June, Trump kept saying that North Korea was still finding and returning the remains of US soldiers — even after a reporter told him to his face that this was no longer happening. He told the reporter “that will start up again,” then kept pretending it never stopped.
In July, Trump delivered two egregious smears of Rep. Ilhan Omar, falsely claiming she said “al Qaeda makes you proud” and that she used the phrase “evil Jews.” Later in the year, he shared a video that falsely accused her of dancing in celebration on the anniversary of 9/11.
In August, as his trade war intensified, Trump said on 20 occasions that Americans are not paying his tariffs at all, that it’s solely China eating the cost. This was his most frequent lie between July 8 (when I started counting at CNN) and December 15 — 49 separate occurrences.
In September, Trump tweeted an erroneous tweet about Alabama being at unexpected risk from Hurricane Dorian, then told 11 more lies about this subject rather than just admit he’d made a mistake, and, also, displayed a Sharpie-altered map as evidence in his favor. A fiasco.
Every week of October, Ukraine and impeachment were the top subjects of his dishonesty. His most frequent lie on those subjects: that the highly accurate whistleblower, corroborated by his own rough transcript, was highly inaccurate. He said this on 30 occasions in October alone.
In November, he told a lie so egregious that Fox & Friends fact-checked him: he claimed he had pulled out of Syria. Brian Kilmeade responded, “You have 600 guys there, right?” Trump had withdrawn some troops to accommodate Turkey, but he’d sent others in. Hundreds remained.
This month, to justify his push to weaken efficiency standards, Trump claimed you have to push buttons on modern dishwashers 12 times to start them, and, also, that they use more water and electricity than old dishwashers. Tempting to laugh, but it’s dishonesty with a purpose.