How To Fact Check Trump’s Lies About COVID Cases, And Obama “Spying” On His Campaign
This is how you debunk two of Trump’s most frequently repeated zombie lies once and for all.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- I get it. Donald Trump’s loyalists believe everything he says, and exposing them to factual reality is too often a pointless enterprise. However, there are quite a few Americans who aren’t necessarily Trump fanboys, but who’ve been worn down by Trump’s constant whoppers to a point where they begrudgingly accept his lies as fact without really thinking.
So, this week, for the record, I’d like to debunk two of Trump’s most frequently repeated zombie lies once and for all -- his disinformation, his agitprop, and so on. Let’s dig in.
1) Lie: America’s coronavirus cases are so high because of all the testing.
Tuesday night, during the second night of the Democratic National Convention, Trump tweeted: “Tell the Dems that we have more Cases because we do FAR more Testing than any other Country!”
Nope. Wrong.
Trump’s been desperately tethered to this old yarn for months now, hoping his disciples will blindly accept it. Weirdly, on the surface, it sounds like it could make sense, given how some experts during the early days of the pandemic made that same correlation. However, that was before tests were widely available, so once the tests were approved and distributed, there was an initial uptick in cases. That’s not the circumstance now.
Here’s why Trump is staggeringly wrong.
As I write this, American medical professionals have reported 218,579 tests per capita. Global rank in tests per one million residents: 17th. But the U.S. is also reporting 17,079 cases per capita. Global rank in cases per capita: 8th.
Contrary to Trump’s lies, the nation that’s done the most testing per capita is not the U.S. Again, we’re 17th in testing. The country that’s done the most testing per capita is a relatively small nation called the Faroe Islands (an archipelago north of the British isles), ranked number one in that category with 1,511,577 tests per capita so far. Now, if Trump’s logic were accurate -- more tests equals more cases -- Faroe should have the most cases per capita, too, right? Wrong.
The Faroe Islands are 30th worldwide in cases per capita, with 7,712. Again, the United States is reporting 17,079 cases, nearly 10,000 more cases per capita than Faroe, even though Faroe does more testing (cont. below).
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We could do this all damn day. Singapore reports 298,121 tests per capita (rank: 14). That’s more than the United States, yet Singapore also reports 9,567 cases per capita -- around 8,000 fewer than the U.S. per capita.
So, no, our testing isn’t creating our horrendous number of cases. Trump’s singular focus on re-election and the self-indulgence and entitlement of the shirkers -- these are the primary reasons for our unforgivable case load.
2) Lie: Obama and Biden spied on Trump’s campaign.
This one often goes completely unchallenged by the press, possibly because it’s difficult to explain in soundbyte form. And yes, it’s a little complicated, but I’ll try to simplify it as much as possible, especially given the math in the previous section.
This lie has everything to do with the FBI’s eavesdropping of Trump’s “coffee boy” Carter Page. Page was a low level adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign. He also spent quite a bit of time over the course of eight months chatting with a pair of Russia operatives. However, it’s illegal to eavesdrop on American citizens without a court-approved warrant. Many of us remember this detail from 2013 when Edward Snowden stole and leaked a massive tranche of NSA PowerPoint slides.
In order for the intelligence community to surveil “U.S. Persons,” a panel of judges has to approve the surveillance. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a post-Watergate piece of reform legislation authorized in the 1970s, established the FISA Court, tasked with authorizing warrants for surveillance. The law was revised in 2008 after it was discovered that the Bush administration was spying on Americans without warrants.
To be absolutely clear: neither Obama nor Biden authorized the FISA warrant against Page. The FISA Court, upon receiving four separate requests from the FBI, authorized the eavesdropping. At no point did the eavesdropping end up on the Resolute Desk inside the Oval Office. My hunch is that the probe into this matter by Bill Barr and U.S. attorney John Durham will tell us the same. Or at least it ought to.
Ultimately, there’s been no evidence or serious reporting indicating that Trump Tower or Trump himself, or even his campaign leadership, were surveilled by the Obama government.
That’s it. That’s the extent of what Trump is calling “treason.” I don’t think he understands what the word means. I don’t think he understands much of anything.
Keep this article handy, if you want, as you talk with family or friends who might still be snowed by Trump’s lies on these fronts. Feel free to copy and paste whatever you need to make the case. It’s time to behead the zombie lies now, while there’s still time to win some more votes against the first fascist tyrant to occupy the White House.
(image source: Pushing Rope)
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Clarification would help, since “per capita“ means the average per person and is often used in place of "per person" in statistical observances. It’s why, when dealing with things like murder rates or such, to keep from using a tiny little decimal, statisticians usually multiply the result by 100,000 and give the result as the number of murders per 100,000 people.
So “American medical professionals have reported 218,579 tests per capita. ... the U.S. is also reporting 17,079 cases per capita.” ? Wow, we have really got it bad.
Why is this more than just a pedantic nitpick? Because when talking to people who are slow to acknowledge Trump’s lies one of the things they will jump on to ignore what you’re saying is if you use a term they don’t really understand the meaning of (like “per capita“) or, if they do understand, can dismiss you for misusing.