WaPo’s Ashley Parker Warns Trump Could Enjoy ‘Perverse Political Advantage’ During Debates Because He Shamelessly Lies
Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker, previewing the upcoming presidential debates, warned that Democratic nominee Joe Biden may struggle to pull off his promise of real-time fact-checks of his opponent because President Donald Trump so shamelessly traffics in misinformation and lies.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Parker discussed Tuesday night’s ABC News town hall, where Trump repeatedly repeatedly offered misleading answers on his administration’s healthcare policy, directly contradicted his own, taped comments about the Covid-19 virus to Bob Woodward, and cast doubt on the public health efficacy of masks by citing “waiters” who have futzed with their face coverings while serving him.
“It’s jarring,” MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace noted, “when he turns the denial, the lies, the inability to understand the perspective of anyone questioning him on to an undecided voter at a town hall talk about those those deficiencies were revealed anew last night.”
“Well, you had a town hall where you can go answer by answer, but was incredibly misleading with just about everything he said, right? It required a sort of speed fact-check to keep up,” Parker said. “The president encountered a lot of Americans dealing with pain and was not particularly empathic last night. The flip side is when you have a president who repeatedly, as this one does, does so many false, misleading things, some of them downright lies, it is very, very, very hard to fact check him.”
“That’s going to be a challenge for Joe Biden during those debates for real-time fact checks,” Parker added, noting that social science research has found debunking a lie can often inadvertently amplify it. “When someone repeats a lie or a falsehood, it becomes true in these sort of Stephen Colbert ‘truthiness’-version of the word even if people know it’s false, on a gut level it kind of feels true and even people who know it’s false, morally, they feel more comfortable passing it along. So ff you are shameless like the president and willing to talk to everyday voters and misrepresent your record and misrepresent your opponent’s record and outright lie, that gives you perverse political advantage in certain ways.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
