Former President Donald Trump became PolitiFact’s most fact-checked person earlier this month after the outlet reached its 1,000th analysis about the 45th president.
According to a write-up about the milestone, the left-leaning website said their fact checks of Trump began in 2011 when he started talking about “birther” conspiracies related to Barack Obama.
“American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” they argued. “Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a fire hose of claims.”
Trump's election claims were the most fact-checked topic, followed by immigration, foreign policy, the economy, homeland security, crime, coronavirus, candidate biography, and healthcare.
“He has talked a lot about foreign policy, the economy, homeland security, crime, and so forth. But really, he’s been talking about the 2020 election during and after and has continued to, so that sort of bumped up his numbers there,” said Louis Jacobson, a senior correspondent at PolitiFact, according to the Texas Standard. “And certainly immigration has probably been his issue, arguably, that, you know, he’s had the biggest impact in shaping the political dialog and sort of changing how it’s discussed.”
The report noted that the top three politicians behind Trump are Barack Obama, who has 603 fact-checks, Hillary Clinton with 301, and President Biden at 286.
“Probably the most striking thing that stands out to me is that if you look at our six-point scale — which is true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, and pants on fire, going down to the least truthful in order — the sort of median fact check for Trump during his first thousand was a false rating," Jacobson noted. "Most other politicians who we fact checked significantly, including Republicans and Democrats, have been in a half true range for their median.”
While the site claims independence, transparency, and fairness are some of its core principles, Jacobson acknowledged the inherent bias in the process.
“We are not doing a randomly sampled look at everything said by every politician. So, we do check things that we find significant, notable, interesting to us,” he said.
By those standards, the site tends to find Trump "almost four times more 'interesting' than Biden," MRC's Tim Graham noted.
Biden can say the Republicans are "Jim Crow 2.0" segregationists, and PolitiFact naps. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas can pronounce "the border is secure," and it's crickets. MSNBC host Ali Velshi can say Trump and the Republicans "want to let fewer brown people in," they want immigration to be "the most painful process possible." Free pass! Nothing "notable" in these statements.
But when Elon Musk speculates Biden's border strategy is to "get as many illegals in the country as possible" and "legalize them to create a permanent majority," he gets flagged as "False."
PolitiFact's archives easily undermine their claims that they're just here to help give citizens the "information they need to govern themselves in a democracy." It's more like they dole out the information Democrats need to stay in charge of the government.
The site’s 1,000th fact-check of Trump was a comment made during a Jan. 23, 2024, speech in New Hampshire, in which the former president claimed Democrats “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election. PolitiFact gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating.