Editorials: Lie Is No Longer a Good Enough Word for Trump’s Repeated Voter Fraud Claim | Ben Mathis-Lilley/Slate
The poor New York Times gets it from every direction. Conservatives think it’s an organ of the Democratic Party. Leftists think it’s stuffy and out of touch. Moderates … I don’t know, let’s say they circumvent the online paywall system by using multiple browsers. Freakin’ cheapskate moderates! But anyway. One of the media controversies of the Donald Trump era has been over how to describe the nonsense he says. The old journalistic convention of writing that a politician has made a “controversial” or “disputed” claim seems inadequate to the relentless, bad-faith assaults on empirical truth that Trump and his goons regularly conduct. (See: “alternative facts.”) A lot of Trump critics think that journalists, especially the influential ones at the Times, should be more willing to say that Trump or his administration lied about this or that. Last night the Times used the L-word in a headline on its report that Trump, in a meeting with congressional leaders, had repeated and embellished his earlier claim that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton last November. Many of Trump’s online haterz were pleased by this callout, including, to pick a random example, vampire expert Anne Rice. But, but, but. Was it really a lie? A lie, in the common definition, is an intentionally told untruth. For Trump’s statement to be a lie, it would have to be a “proven” “fact” both that millions of undocumented immigrants didn’t vote in 2016 and that Trump knows this.