MSNBC Guest: Trump Administration Doesn’t Want to Protect Anything Other Than White Supremacy

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is out of the office this week, and on Monday night All In was hosted instead by the network’s Ali Velshi, who dedicated the final six minutes or so of the show to the issue of lies, facts, and fact-checking with regard to President Trump.

But not, apparently, the show’s guests.

One of them, host of Woke AF on SiriusXM Danielle Moodie-Mills, made two claims of fact that … weren’t.

The framing of the segment was very specifically about facts, and the checking of facts, and the deleterious effect on the American psyche of the abundance of lies told by the Trump administration. It’s sort of a mirror-image of the frequent premise on the right that “fake news” has a uniquely damaging effect. You see that intro, as a tease of the segment, above.

After the break, Velshi reintroduced the segment, going into more detail about the breadth and frequency of Trump’s lies, framing his as more than an average politician-liar but a habitual and damaging one. No argument here.

He then turned to his guests, asking Moodie-Mills for her take.

“This president’s gaslighting is a strategy. He does it on purpose. It’s too keep us off-kilter. It’s to make us believe that there is nothing, there is nothing truthful.” she said. “So he tells you one lie after the other and you start to become numb to it. That’s what’s happening, and so we don’t question all the things that he says.”

“He starts his political career with birtherism, it turns into an entire movement,” she continued, “Now he retweets conspiracies about the Clintons and Epstein and it doesn’t even make front page news.”

So, as an issue of fact, in a segment about checking facts and telling untruths, this statement is remarkably wrong. Birtherism, for example, was not started by Trump, nor did he turn it into a movement. Instead he simply latched on to an existing conspiracy theory, one that began in Democratic primary politics and bled to its natural home among the right’s fever swamps, like Joseph Farah‘s WorldNetDaily.

Likewise, the notion Moodie-Mills floats about the lack of news attention on the Trump retweet of a Clinton conspiracy is nonsensical. It was huge news, hit all the cable networks, every blog and news website on the left and the right. It was everywhere. The idea that it wasn’t big news is passing into absurdity. It’s a completely unsupportable claim. As in, not a fact.

When Velshi came back to Moodie-Mills later in the segment, she made another claim of fact.

They discussed how and where media should focus with the President, and whether to check and recheck every lie or to turn attention to bad policy or backward government, with Moodie-Mills arguing that one has to do both things. The example Velshi used was the rollback on protection for endangered species, which Moodie-Mills referenced.

“This administration doesn’t want to protect anything or anyone other than white supremacy,” she said. “So that’s just a fact.”

Actually, that’s more of a characterization and opinion than a fact. It’s excluded from being a fact just by its own broadly exclusionary premise. You can’t say that the administration literally does no other things but white supremacy. What about protecting Trump’s bottom line? His hotel chain profits? Doesn’t he try to protect his golf club? Doesn’t he try to protect his family? Doesn’t the administration try to protect Republican majorities? Doesn’t he try to protect his trade war from interference?

If you think that’s nitpicking, that correcting this obvious overstatement, which Moodie-Mills said definitively is “just a fact”, is somehow pedantic, then you weren’t listening to the other thing that Moodie-Mills said about the danger of gaslighting. Or what the MSNBC host, who did not challenge her claims, said in his intro above.

“What does that do to this country, to society, and to truth itself?” he asked.

There is no running tally of lies, misleading statements, errors of fact, or untruths in the media. But there are many of those things. If the premise of this segment is that each lie told by the administration, each wrong fact presented or error made should be addressed and corrected, then that should be equally true of the fact-checkers themselves.

And on these claims made on Monday night on MSNBC, the verdict isn’t good.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.