WASHINGTON – I fact-check everything U.S. President Donald Trump says. Every week, the Star posts my updated list of Trump’s false claims.And then, every week, at least one Trump opponent scolds me for calling them false claims.“LIES!!!!! CALL THEM LIES, GOD DAMMIT!!!” one man, Devin Comiskey, tweeted to me in mid-May. “Why do people continue to whitewash what he does?” Comiskey’s call-them-lies plea gained momentum on Twitter this weekend. Hundreds of liberals, including celebrities like John Cusack and Chrissy Teigen, criticized a prominent New York Times reporter, Maggie Haberman, for calling two of Trump’s latest false claims “demonstrable falsehoods” rather than “lies.”I called those two claims “lies.” (One a “ridiculous lie,” one a “big lie.”) Over my 19 months of fact-checking almost every word out of Trump’s mouth or Twitter feed, I’ve used “lie” to describe dozens of other Trump claims. I’ve quoted a historian saying Trump is the biggest liar in the history of the presidency. I’ve said that I personally think the president is a serial liar.I also don’t think that “lie” should be the word we use for every one of his inaccurate statements. And I don’t think reporters should be blamed or shamed for choosing different words where appropriate.A lie is a false statement made intentionally. (Merriam-Webster: “Lie, verb: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”) In some cases, it’s safe to say Trump is intentionally trying to deceive. In other cases, it’s far less clear that he’s being wrong intentionally — because, with Donald Trump, you regularly can’t rule out the possibility that he is confused or ignorant.If we journalists are going to present ourselves as arbiters of truth, we have to stick to what we know is true. And that means not cal ...
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