Trump claims 'big victory' as GOP loses the House President George W. Bush called it a "thumping" when Democrats took the House in the 2006 midterms. President Barack Obama called...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Trump claims 'big victory' as GOP loses the House President George W. Bush called it a "thumping" when Democrats took the House in the 2006 midterms. President Barack Obama called it a "shellacking" when Republicans won the House back in the midterms in 2010. President Trump called it a "big victory" after his party lost the House in this week's midterm elections. In an after-action news conference, Trump gave a flurry of statistics about the Senate, which the GOP held, and patted himself on the back for campaigning in battleground states. His statistics were wrong or based on Senate results that are still up in the air. This was an 87-minute news conference, so there was plenty more to fact-check, including some of Trump's well-worn claims about how his tax returns wouldn't reveal much new information (false), how his support has soared among African Americans (nope), and how Obama allowed Russia to annex part of Ukraine (false). |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Magic numbers from DHS on criminals in the migrant caravan The Department of Homeland Security claims there are as many as 500 people with criminal records along the same route as the migrant caravan traveling from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border. How do they know? That's a great question that they can't answer at all. Not only has the total magically evolved — first it was 300, then DHS said in response to our questions that 200 more had been identified — the way they describe this figure is so vague it could include people who are not part of the caravan and are just passing through Mexico on their own. It wouldn't be the first time the administration comes up with fishy statistics to back up some eye-popping claim from President Trump. "We're getting a lot of heat because, I was saying, there were some bad people in that caravan. Right? So we checked, 300 people," Trump said at a recent rally. At another rally, he said, "They gave you 300 names yesterday." Actually, there were no names. There's just a vague news release issued Nov. 1 titled "Myth vs. Fact: Caravan." We gave it Three Pinocchios. | |  | | Sarah Sanders smears CNN reporter with a video doctored by conspiracy theorists The White House press secretary never had a stellar track record of telling the truth, but this is a new low. Here's a play-by-play: Trump holds a news conference and CNN's Jim Acosta asks his usual, combative questions. Trump calls him a "rude, terrible" person. A female White House intern tries once to take Acosta's microphone; he holds onto it. The intern tries again, forcefully reaching and tugging at the mic, but Acosta holds onto it and uses his free arm to block her reach. Acosta says, "Pardon me, ma'am," and keeps questioning Trump. An indignant Sanders later announced that Acosta's press pass had been yanked because the White House would "never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern." Gaslighting the public about an encounter everyone could see on video is nothing new for the Trump White House. But Sanders tweeted out a video that made Acosta look much worse — since it appears to have been edited for dramatic effect. A close look at the video shows someone sped up Acosta's arm movement and appears to have inserted duplicated frames at the moment of contact with the intern, which made Acosta's parry seem much more like a karate chop. The video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars. (Watson claims he made the video out of a GIF, which could achieve the same effect as duplicating frames.) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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