It never ends. The press still does not know how to handle the avalanche of lies that is MAGA’s chief contribution to our national life. I understand, sort of. It’s dull and time-consuming to bird-dog every false accusation, wild assertion or factual misstatement that comes out of Trumpland. “They’re controlling the weather” is just the latest crackpottery from a sitting member of Congress who is also one of the GOP caucus’s top fundraisers. But when there’s a forest fire, the firefighters don’t get to say, “Oh, this again? We put out a fire here last year.”
One particular tack some journalists have taken is particularly galling. In order to show fairness to both sides, they’ve picked up on a trivial lie by Tim Walz and hammered it. At the vice presidential debate, the moderators grilled Walz about a discrepancy unearthed by CNN in his account of a trip to Hong Kong in 1989. Yes, 1989. Apparently Walz told an interviewer that he had been in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in May. It turns out — hold onto your hats! — Walz didn’t arrive in Hong Kong until three months later.
This was considered important enough to raise at the debate 10 years after the remarks in question. Walz’s answer was nearly as bad as the question. He should have known it might be coming (the CNN report was recent), and yet he dodged and weaved and then called himself a “knucklehead.” Jeez, too much over too little. All he needed to say was, “I must have misremembered because when I was there, Tiananmen was all anyone was talking about. Next question.” (It was a good jibe when he said he wished Trump had gone on such trips, as it might have curbed his gushing about Xi Jinping.)
Not content with that, Bill Whitaker of “60 Minutes” raised it again in the interview that aired Monday, asking whether voters can trust him to tell the truth. This led to another “Aw, shucks, I can be a knucklehead, I should really watch what words I use mea culpa.” Please. This is utterly trivial. He should stop groveling.
It seems that Walz may have shaded the truth a few other times as well. He once slipped when speaking of the gun he carried as a member of the National Guard, saying he carried it “in war” when he never saw combat. Maybe I’m missing something, but this too seems a small matter to me. He was decrying the fact that pretty much anyone can get their hands on the kind of assault rifle that he was issued as a member of the military. He’s apologized for using the words “in war,” as he should. But let’s get a grip. This is hardly a case of stolen valor.
Walz also apparently tried to bury a DUI, and he said he and his wife used IVF to conceive their children when it turns out that they used a different form of assisted reproduction. This was enough to cause a prominent columnist to declare him a “habitual liar.”
Misspeaking vs. vicious lies
Walz’s lies fall into the category of misspeaking, padding one’s resume a bit or shading the truth. He doesn’t deserve a pass. CNN was right to report it. But it’s being elevated out of all proportion, especially when you consider that the team of Donald Trump and JD Vance daily and hourly tell the kind of vicious, inciting lies that are tearing our country apart.
Trump’s lies about COVID 19 — that it was milder than the flu, that it would go away when the weather warmed up, that it could be magically cured with hydroxychloroquine, that everyone who wanted a test would get one (and we now learn that Vladimir Putin did get some), that abiding by social distancing and mask guidelines was fascism — those lies arguably led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
Trump’s and Vance’s lies about “illegal” (read: legal) Haitian immigrants eating Springfield’s dogs and cats plunged a city into uproar, led to bomb threats and death threats to business owners, and terrorized schoolchildren.
Trump’s and Vance’s lies about the 2020 election have undermined the confidence of millions of Americans in the most sacred of democratic institutions, our election system, and caused the deaths of five people on Jan. 6.
Trump’s and Vance’s lies about FEMA — that funds had been diverted from disaster assistance in order to support illegal immigrants “who will vote Democrat” — aroused vicious hatred toward immigrants, Democrats and the federal government.
Not all lies are created equal. MAGA’s lies are designed to instill suspicion, to corrode tolerance and to shred our unity as a nation. The job of the press is not to give the same treatment to both sides; it is to present the truth, or as close an approximation of it as can be ascertained. When one side stretches the truth and the other side seeks to obliterate it, they should not be treated equally.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
Gene Lyons is off this week.
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