FAILS: CNN said Biden made nine bogus claims!

TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2024

The challenger Trump made way, way more, CNN also said: As we noted yesterday, E. J. Dionne—to his credit—has copped to an "epic fail."

His confession may have been a but puckish, but he confessed nonetheless. 

As we noted yesterday, the epic fail to which he copped involved a column in the Washington Post. The column appeared on June 23, four days before the June 27 Biden-Trump debate.

In that column, Dionne made the prediction shown below. In his most recent column, he now calls this prediction an epic fail.

Below, you see the failed prediction from Dionne's June 23 column:

Forget conventional wisdom. Trump needs the debate more than Biden

[...]

Debates are not about everyone watching. Many will absorb it the way I took in the glorious Boston Celtics playoff run: as partisans rooting unreservedly for victory, cheering every great moment and worrying about every mistake.

To the extent that partisans matter at all, they are likely to be Democrats who need constant hand-holding and reassurance that Biden can prevail. This, along with the 78-year-old Trump’s months-long denigration of Biden’s capacities at age 81, sets a low bar for Biden’s performance. Given his success at other big moments, such as his State of the Union addresses, he is likely to meet or surpass it.

Dionne predicted that President Biden would likely meet or surpass expectations at the June 27 debate. Plainly, that didn't happen. 

Yesterday, he puckishly copped. His referred to that prediction as an "epic fail." 

Predicting the future is hard! That said, we also noted an important point in yesterday's report. We said that. as Dionne continued in that original column, he raised this important point:

...This, along with the 78-year-old Trump’s months-long denigration of Biden’s capacities at age 81, sets a low bar for Biden’s performance. Given his success at other big moments, such as his State of the Union addresses, he is likely to meet or surpass it.

But there is a trap here for Biden, too: Because the “age issue” has been raised relentlessly against him, the media have a tendency to overlook or downplay Trump’s many moments of incoherence and even lunacy. Biden and his lieutenants must turn this side-by-side performance into an opportunity to have the two men judged by the same standards.

Dionne may have offered a bungled prediction, but he also offered a somewhat prescient warning:

As the great debate approached, he said "the media" have a tendency to downplay the incoherence—indeed, to downplay the lunacy—of Candidate Donald J. Trump. He seemed to say that the two candidates, post-debate, wouldn't be judged by the same standards. 

That was a type of prediction too. In that case, did Dionne get it right?

For today, we're going to build a certain framework around that important question. We're going to look at what Daniel Dale said in the aftermath of that debate.

Daniel Dale is CNN's long-standing resident fact checker. Few people dispute the claim that President Biden's performance that night was extremely poor—but what about the performance of Candidate Donald J. Trump?

Dale and his team quickly swing into action. For starters, this is part of what Dale and his team reported that very night:

Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate—far more than Biden

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday—but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.

Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.

[...]

Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate...

So said the CNN team.  For the record, we compliment Dale and his team for eschewing the fraught term, "lies." (More on that journalistic / political issue as the week proceeds.)

So said Dale and the CNN team! There is, of course, no such thing as a perfect fact check. A different team of fact checkers might have generated a different census of the evening's bogus claims.

That said, Dale's team seemed to be saying that it hadn't even been close. Candidate Trump had murdered sleep in a way which dwarfed the bungles of President Biden. 

It hadn't even been close! To give you a better idea of what we mean, here's some of the text from the CNN team which we omitted above:

Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate—far more than Biden

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.

Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.

Trump’s repeat falsehoods included his assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth, that every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, that there were no terror attacks during his presidency, that Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency, that the US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators,” that Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries, that Europe accepts no American cars, that he is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and that fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.

Trump also added some new false claims, such as his assertions that the US currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China. Both records actually occurred under Trump.

Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. He used false numbers while describing two of his key Medicare policies, falsely claimed that no US troops had been killed on his watch, repeated his usual misleading figure about billionaires’ tax rates, baselessly claimed that Trump wants to eliminate Social Security, falsely said that the unemployment rate was 15% when he took office, inaccurately said that the Border Patrol union had endorsed him before clarifying that he was talking about agents’ support for the border bill he had backed, and exaggerated Trump’s 2020 comments about the possibility of treating Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant.

For the record, Dale's team failed to mention at least one additional claim by President Biden—a long-standing claim we would have included in that list.

Our assessment? Based on that presentation, President Biden couldn't be given a stellar grade with respect to this particular metric. That said, Candidate Trump had spent the evening in the dumpster, which starts with a capital D. 

At best, Candidate Trump could have been given a gentleman's D for his effort that evening. More likely, he should have been given an F—an F for epic fail.

Briefly, let's repeat:

Daniel Dale's team is not infallible. No collection of humans is.

A different journalistic team might have scored this matter differently. It's also true that this metric—How many false or misleading statements?—is only one way of scoring a presidential candidate's performance in a debate.

That said, Dale has been at this task a long time. In their report for CNN, his team includes links to a large number of previous fact checks—detailed fact checks about many of the claims which were scored as misleading or false.

In CNN's scorecard concerning this metric, the debate hadn't even been close. And yet, the vast preponderance of press corps attention has gone to President Biden's performance—to President Biden's "bad night."

Does this mean that E. J. Dionne actually called his shot? He has now described his one prediction as an "epic fail." Had his other prediction—his warning about a double standard within "the media"—possibly been right on the mark?

In this morning's New York Times, Paul Krugman starts his new column with an assessment which tends to validate Dionne's original warning. 

He also calls for President Biden to step aside as a candidate for re-election! Wisely or otherwise, headline included, his column starts like this:

Please, Mr. President, Do the Right Thing

Here are three true things about President Biden: He has done an excellent job as president. He has been ludicrously mistreated—his every verbal or physical stumble dissected and analyzed to a degree far beyond any scrutiny applied to the incoherent torrent of lies and vileness routinely issuing from Donald Trump. And he should step aside as his party’s nominee for president, probably in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris.

In his column, Krugman is calling for President Biden to step aside as a candidate. He also seems to be saying that a major double standard has been applied to the performances by these candidates at that disastrous debate.

Dionne copped to an epic fail. We'll add this unfortunate point:

Over at least the past thirty years, "epic fails" have been one of the distinguishing characteristics of our upper-end, mainstream press corps.

Dionne says that he himself staged an epic fail in his June 23 column. By almost everyone's account, so did President Biden at that fateful debate.

That said, Candidate Trump has been generating epic fails for a very long time now. As we'll start to note tomorrow, some of his fails are so bizarre that they're hard to categorize and critique. 

These fails by Trump have taken us well beyond the poor powers of our mainstream press. That said, the gentleman's fails have been general, and they've routinely been epic.

Epic fails are no longer unusual within our flailing culture. In our view, the first fifteen minutes of today's Fox & Friends was a pseudo-journalistic disgrace. Beyond that, the standard collection of useful idiots were screeching on Gutfeld! last night, with "the little chimp" screeching the loudest as he leaped about the stage,

Then too, there's the possible collection of fails which we ourselves have possibly authored over the past sixty years. We refer to those of us who live over here, inside the towering walls of the sacred Troy of our own Blue America.

We Americans! Our discourse has been full of fails. Some of those fails have been epic.

Tomorrow: A taxonomy of Candidate Trump's endless array of misstatements