President Trump's ongoing feud with many traditional national news media outlets has dominated his first weeks in office. But now the feud has taken a strange turn, with one media outlet even declaring a factual statement by Trump to be "mostly false." It started last week, when The Gateway Pundit reported that the U.S. national debt had fallen by $12 billion in President Trump's first month in office, compared to a $200 billion increase in the debt during President Obama's first month back in 2009. President Trump promptly tweeted about the stat, noting "the media has not reported" on it.
That is when the website Politifact decided to "fact check" the Trump tweet and the underlying Gateway Pundit story. Amazingly, despite confirming the accuracy of the numbers, Politifact still rated the claim "mostly false."
So what gives? "(Politifact) said it was not accurate because Donald Trump did not actually pass any legislation that would affect the national debt in the first month...well, we didn't say that, and neither did Donald Trump," says Jim Hoft, co-founder of the Gateway Pundit. "We just noted that the numbers went down in his first month in office."
Hoft tells KTRH that stories like this prove Politifact is not the impartial arbiter of truth that it claims to be. "Here we have the accurate numbers, the accurate report, and yet we have a news outlet that leans left telling us that we have a fake news story," he says. "Again, it's the media playing with statistics, playing with facts, injecting their own opinion."
In a follow-up story to Politifact's piece, The Gateway Pundit called the Politifact writers "hacks" and ended with a rating of its own--"We rate Politifact --- False and Crazy!"