You Watched the Debate… But Did You Fact-Check?

By TAYLOR FARNSWORTH
Staff Writer

On Monday Sept. 26, according to The Hollywood Reporter, more than 80 million people from around the world watched as Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, held their first debate with Lester Holt, NBC Nightly News Anchor, as the moderator, at Hofstra University in New York.

All attention was focused onto the television screen in hopes of hearing something of substantial value from either candidate, or reasons you can use to justify favoring one candidate over the other. You listened and watched attentively noticing every Trump sniffle, and smirk from Clinton. Every interruption, fifty-one by Trump and seventeen by Clinton according to Vox, and every accusation made out to be believable to the public by each candidate. But did you think to fact check their accusations and statements after? If you didn’t, you should have.

In a debate as heated as this one, there is no surprise that fact-checkers were kept busy, finding numerous fictional claims and accusations by each candidate.

One claim Trump continues to make is that he was not ever in favor of invading Iraq. He reiterated this claim during the debate on Monday night. NBC News did a timeline of Trumps support on the War in Iraq, called ‘A Timeline of Trump’s Statements on the Iraq War’, starting on September of 2002, when he was asked by Howard Stern if he was in favor of the idea of invading Iraq. According to NBC News, “Trump said he told Howard Stern ‘very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows?’ about the war in Iraq. Trump actually said ‘I guess so, yeah.’” Although Trump did change his mind the following year and told the Washington Post that the war was “a mess”, it would not be factual to claim he never supported it. Some could argue Trump’s answer to Stern was very vague, but then again so are his policies, so who really knows.

During the debate, Clinton mentioned Trump’s claim that global warming was a hoax carried out by the Chinese to hurt American trade. Of course Trump quickly denied ever making this claim, “I did not, I did not say that”. Back in 2012, Trump did in fact tweet “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” In January of 2014, he tweeted, “NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our Country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?” When Trump was interviewed by Fox News this past January, and asked about his tweets regarding climate change.

“Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money.” Trump said, “I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less.”

I don’t think it is appropriate to “joke” about a serious issue that threatens our planet, but then again there are a lot of things Trump has said and done that I would never do, like accusing our first black president of not being born in the United States.

With Trump having finally admitted on Sept 16th that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States, and not Kenya, it was no surprise that Holt asked Trump about his past claims that Obama was not born in the United States. Trump has said that back in 2008, Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s campaign manager at the time, was the one who started the whole issue over Obama’s birth certificate. This is false. In the article, ‘Clinton’s ’08 campaign chief: We didn’t start ‘birther’ movement’ on CNN, Solis Doyle spoke to Wolf Blitzer about this

“The campaign, nor Hillary, did not start the birther movement. Period. End of the story,” Doyle said, “There was a volunteer coordinator, I believe in late 2007, I think in December. One of our volunteer coordinators in one of the counties in Iowa, I don’t recall whether they were an actual a paid staffer, but they did forward an email that promoted the conspiracy.”

Solis Doyle goes on to say that Clinton decided immediately to “let that person go” and apologized to Obama’s campaign manager at the time, David Plouffe, saying that “this is not coming from us.”

Although Trump had numerous false claims and accusations, Clinton had a couple as well. One in particular was about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. Trump attacked Clinton on her support for the trade deal, claiming that she only thought it was a bad deal once she heard what he had to say about it. Clinton tried to defend herself by saying she “hoped” it would be a good deal, but according to USA Today, in 2012 Clinton wrote on the U.S. Department of State website about the deal.

“This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade,” Clinton wrote, “The kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.”

Once the deal was in effect, Clinton did come out and say in 2015 that she was no longer in support of it.

“I appreciate the hard work that President Obama and his team put into this process and recognize the strides they made,” she said to Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour, “But the bar here is very high and, based on what I have seen, I don’t believe this agreement has met it.”

So before you start using some of the claims and accusations you heard from each of the candidates during the debate last Monday, as facts in an argument to support one candidate over the other, make sure you double check and do your research.