Thursday, September 19, 2024

Orange man fact checks David

Orange man fact checks David


As you may remember. David Muir of "The Ambush," a new ABC TV series about presidential debates, confronted Pres. Trump over crime statistics. It was one of the "fact checks" during the hour.

A few days later, it's Muir who is getting fact checked. Let's see:

Muir interrupted Trump, something he never did to Vice President Kamala Harris, retorting, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

To which Trump responded, “The FBI -- they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

Muir is right that FBI data show violent crime is down. However, Trump is also right that there are major problems with the FBI’s data. The comparison with problematic jobs data from the Department of Labor is a good one. The agency was forced to lower the number of jobs created during the Biden administration by almost a million, which showed that its previous figures were consistently misleading.

Trump said he would target migrants who committed crimes, noting that “crime here is up and through the roof.”

So the fact checker got fact checked! I like that.

Common sense confirms that crime is up. I don't need a manicured report. All I need to do is talk to someone who lives in Washington, D.C. or Chicago. Or watch the local newscast and see for yourself. The killings have not stopped. It's the reporting that is misrepresenting the crime numbers.

So a double win in this post. Down goes the dishonest fact checker. Up goes the truth, a reality that anybody living in the world can confirm without reading any statistics. 

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