Lies, Damn Lies, and Presidential Debates

by James A. Bacon

Virginia played prominently in the disinformation spewed by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in their first 2024 presidential debate last week. Biden brought up the seemingly unkillable canard that Trump referred to the White supremacists in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as “good people.” Meanwhile, Trump asserted that former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said it was OK to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.”

Predictably, conservative news sources called out Biden for his false claim, liberal sources criticized Trump for his, and both sides ignored the failings of their preferred candidate.

One would think that with video, transcripts, and Google searches, bad information would have a short life span. But it is a perverse characteristic of human nature to repeat a meme that confirms one’s worldview and reject evidence of its inaccuracy. This foible is a trait not only of the great unwashed but highly educated elites who presume that they know more than the hoi polloi.

Let’s look first at the “good people on both sides” untruth, which I have blogged about before and watched with dismay as it has proven as indestructible as the Terminator.

Here’s what Biden mumbled during the debate (according to CNN’s debate transcript):

What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died, I decided – in Iraq – because of Iraq. I said, I wasn’t going to run again, until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches and singing the same anti-Semitic bile they sang back in Germany.

What American president would ever say, Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people?

Let’s set aside the fact that the White supremacists in Charlottesville didn’t “come out of the woods” bearing swastikas on torches — they marched through the Grounds of the University of Virginia bearing tiki torches — and focus on the inaccuracy of what Biden said that Trump said.

This comes from the left-leaning Snopes fact-checking organization, which published a finding just a week ago:

In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be “condemned totally.”

Trump was talking about the Robert E. Lee statue controversy, not the White supremacist rally. Case closed.

While Trump was innocent of that particular calumny, he engaged in indefensible hyperbole in re-stating Northam’s remarks regarding abortions up to the moment of birth:

The problem [Democrats] have is they’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth – after birth.

If you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, we’ll put the baby aside and we’ll determine what we do with the baby. Meaning, we’ll kill the baby. …

So that means he can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states – Democrat-run – take it after birth. Again, the governor – former governor of Virginia: put the baby down, then we decide what to do with it.

So he’s in – he’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.

Northam clearly was discussing the fate of a severely deformed, “non-viable” infant immediately after delivery — not a “baby ripped out of the womb.” Here’s what he said (according to Snopes):

There are — you know when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. 

One might argue that Trump’s misrepresentation was a less of a distortion than Biden’s “good people” comments: Biden was flat-out wrong while Trump was correct to say that many Democrats do defend late-term abortions and that Northam did imply that a non-viable infant might be euthanized. But Trumpian hyperbole stripped the context of Northam’s hypothetical statement.

One might hope that Virginia’s incredible shrinking mainstream media would set the facts right. WAVY-TV stepped up with an article this morning criticizing Trump’s characterization of Northam’s remarks. The station had nothing to say, however, about Biden’s “good people” untruth, which feeds a larger Democratic narrative of Trump as a bigoted, quasi-fascist, aspiring dictator.

The lesson for all readers is to understand how the new media ecosystem works. With occasional exceptions, the still-dominant liberal media fact-checks Republicans and conservatives, and the insurgent conservative media fact-checks Democrats, liberals and lefties. To be fully informed, readers need to familiarize themselves with the competing narratives.