Half an hour into the first presidential debate, it appeared that NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who is moderating the debate, wasn’t planning to call out false statements made by either candidate. In fact, he wasn’t saying much at all, letting Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton exchange verbal jabs for minutes-long stretches at a time. No major television networks, aside from Bloomberg, committed to doing real-time fact-check of the debate, either. (NPR is running a live blog with real-time fact-checks of both candidates’ statements.)
To fill the void, Twitter users immediately stepped up to fact-check the candidates in real time, focusing particularly on Trump, for whom facts tend to be secondary to his own post-fact narrative. Here’s just a few of the untruths, or lies as they are sometimes known, that Trump tried to sell the debate audience. Twitter wasn’t buying it.
Trump claimed that he didn’t say that global warming was created by China to make domestic manufacturing non-competitive. But a Trump tweet from 2012 says the opposite:
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Trump also asserted during the debate that Hillary Clinton had “been fighting ISIS your entire life,” and failing. Twitter quickly, and easily, disproved that claim:
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Trump falsely claimed that Ford planned to cut American jobs by relocating production jobs to Mexico, which Ford C.E.O. Mark Fields said was untrue.
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Trump stated China was devaluing its currency, which is not likely to happen:
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Trump claimed that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency endorsed him for president, which is not true:
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Trump says he voiced his opposition to the Iraq War in conversation with Sean Hannity. Hannity can’t confirm Trump's statements:
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And Trump attempted to fact-check Lester Holt’s own fact-check, claiming that “stop-and-frisk” was not actually ruled unconstitutional by a judge in New York (it was):
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Though Trump started strong early on in the debate, digging into Clinton on trade and outsourcing, he eventually lost the thread, reverting to type in the face of his more practiced, stoic Democratic rival on issues like race and President Barack Obama’s birthplace. As soon as the debate ended, CNN commentators immediately tore into Trump for what they described as his many fabrications. The post-debate conversation moving into Tuesday promised to be even rougher for Trump than for Clinton as legions of fact-checkers went to work parsing the G.O.P. nominee’s every word.
VIDEO: Fact-Checking Donald Trump’s Accusations Against Hillary Clinton
