News Reporter: Fact Checker: No, Trump didn't kick out a baby from a rally. Welcome to the Election Silly Season.

Friday, 12 August 2016

Fact Checker: No, Trump didn't kick out a baby from a rally. Welcome to the Election Silly Season.

The truth behind the rhetoric

No, Trump didn’t kick out a baby from a rally. Welcome to the Election Silly Season.

We’ve officially entered the silly season of the election (87 days to go — but who’s counting?), where candidates seize on gaffes and media gets tangled up in stories that seem too good to be true. This week, we set the record straight on two matters that both campaigns used to attack each other.

First, you may have heard Trump kicked out a baby from his rally. From the video of the incident, it may seem true: A baby started crying at his rally in Virginia. Trump said he liked hearing babies cry. Then he said he was just joking: “You can get the baby out of here.”

Media ran with it, with headlines like: "Trump loves crying baby, then kicks the tot out of his rally." Other outlets reported Trump “booted a fussy baby,” showing “a total lack of empathy.” The Clinton campaign included this episode in an ad, saying Trump “picked a fight with a literal baby.”

Then Trump complained the media was being dishonest. This is almost a daily complaint by Trump, but this time we found that Trump was unfairly maligned.

We got in touch with the baby’s mother, who confirmed she left the rally on her own with her crying baby because “it’s the considerate thing to do,” and that “it was blatantly obvious” Trump was joking. "The media did in fact blow this entire situation out of proportion," she told us.

We awarded Trump the rare Geppetto Checkmark (his third!) for saying the media misrepresented this episode.

(Courtesy of giphy.com)

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No, Clinton didn’t say she “short-circuited.”

Trump has been spinning Clinton’s words out of context, too.

He first claimed she pledged to raise taxes on the middle class — even though it was clear from the context that she was pledging not to raise taxes. During a speech, Clinton sounded like she said “we are going to raise taxes on the middle class,” rather than “we aren’t.” PolitiFact consulted a linguistics professor who ran her comments through a phonetics computer program, and confirmed she said “we aren’t going to raise taxes on the middle class.”

Then, Trump claimed Clinton said she “short-circuited” when talking about the FBI investigation of her emails, and started spinning it into an attack of her mental health. The Trump campaign released a video portraying her as a malfunctioning robot.

We found Trump mischaracterized Clinton’s comments. Clinton was referring to her repeated, Four Pinocchio claim that her answers to the public about her emails were “truthful.” Clinton explained that she was trying to say her answers to the FBI were truthful, rather than saying her emails to the public were truthful. She said she “short-circuited it” — referring specifically to her answer — not generally that she was short-circuiting like a robot.

We’ll leave you with many more fact checks in the Pinocchio round-up below, and a #FlashbackFriday item: Fact Checker’s “gaffe checks” during the 2012 campaign untangling President Obama's "You didn't build that" and Mitt Romney's "I like to fire people."

Help us find ads, statements, speeches, quotes and figures that don’t quite pass muster. Send your fact-check suggestions: fill out this form, e-mail us or tweet us at @myhlee, @GlennKesslerWP or using #FactCheckThis. Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio round-up.

–Michelle Ye Hee Lee