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'Do you regret all your lying?' White House reporter's question startles Trump
Donald Trump
SV Dáte takes the president to task for repeated untruths but is quickly cut off
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Reporter asks Trump: ‘Do you regret all your lying?’ – video
SV Dáte had waited five long years to ask Donald Trump one question: “Mr President, after three and a half years [of Trump’s presidency], do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”
Confronted with Dáte’s question at Thursday’s White House briefing, Trump responded with a question of his own. “All the what?” he said.
Dáte: “All the lying, all the dishonesties.”
Trump: “That who has done?”
“You have done,” said Dáte, who is the Huffington Post’s White House correspondent. “Tens of thousan–”, he began to say, before Trump cut him off and called on another journalist, who asked a question about payroll tax.
In July, the Washington Post reported that Trump had told more than 20,000 “false or misleading claims” over the course of his presidency.Aaron Rupar
(@atrupar)
Wow. A reporter (I’m not sure who he is) asks Trump, “after three and a half years, do you regret all the lying you’ve done to the American people?” Trump quickly moves on to the next question. pic.twitter.com/DHn3UvXHnNAugust 13, 2020
Speaking to the Guardian, Dáte said that he asked the question because it was the first time that he had had the chance.
“I don’t know why he called on me, because I’ve tried to ask him before [in March] and he’s cut me off mid-question. Maybe he didn’t recognise me this time,” he said. “You know, he has this group of folks that he normally asks questions of.”
It was Dáte’s turn on White House in press pool, and so he had a prominent seat. “I had always thought that if he ever did call on me, this is the one thing that is really central to his presidency,” he said.S.V. Dáte
(@svdate)
For five years I’ve been wanting to ask him that.August 13, 2020
Trump’s lying was the “singular piece of his presidency that will be remembered in 10 years”.
Dáte wasn’t surprised by Trump’s response to the question – ignoring it was always going to be the most likely reaction, he thought.
Asked whether he thought he would be allowed in next time, Dáte said, “Yes, absolutely.”
With the burning question posed, what would he ask if he had another chance?
Given that Trump had failed to respond, it would be: “‘Mr President, you didn’t answer last time. Could you address why you’ve told …’ whatever the number will be by then,” said Dáte.Topics
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Facebook adds labels to US posts about voting ahead of presidential election
Beginning Thursday, US Facebook users who post about voting may start seeing an addendum to their messages – labels directing readers to authoritative information about the upcoming presidential election.It’s the social network’s latest step to combat election-related misinformation on its platform as the presidential election nears, one in which many voters may be submitting ballots by mail for the first time. Facebook began adding similar links to posts about in-person and mail-in balloting by federal politicians, including Donald Trump, in July.These labels will link to a new voter information hub similar to one about Covid-19 that Facebook says has been seen by billions of users around the world. The labels will read, “Visit the Voting Information Center for election resources and official updates.”Despite such efforts, Facebook continues to face widespread criticism about how it handles misinformation around elections and other matters. The company has generally refused to factcheck ads by politicians, for instance, and a two-year audit of its civil rights practices faulted the company for leaving US elections “exposed to interference by the president and others who seek to use misinformation to sow confusion and suppress voting”.The effectiveness of such labels will depend on how well Facebook’s artificial intelligence system identifies the posts that really need them, said Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. If every post containing the word “vote” or “voting” gets an informational link, he said, “people will start ignoring those links”.Facebook expects the voter hub to reach at least 160 million people in the US, said Emily Dalton Smith, who serves as head of social impact at the company. The primary focus is registering people to vote, she said, but the information people see will evolve throughout the election season.“This is a unique election and a unique election season,“ she said. “Certainly we have never gone through an election during a global pandemic.“Other tech companies, Twitter and Google, which owns YouTube, have undertaken similar efforts around the November election. Twitter said it is working on expanding its policies to address “new and unique challenges” related to this year’s elections, including misinformation around mail-in voting.Looking ahead to November, Facebook said it was “actively speaking with election officials about the potential of misinformation around election results as an emerging threat”.The company did not give details on the potential threats, but said that a prolonged ballot process where results are not immediately clear “has the potential to be exploited in order to sow distrust in the election outcome”.“One way we plan to fight this is by using the Voting Information Center and the US Elections digest in Facebook News to make sure people have easy access to the latest, authoritative information and news on and after Election Night,“ Naomi Gleit, the vice-president of product management and social impact, wrote in a blogpost. More
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Bob Woodward obtains letters between Trump and Kim Jong-un for new book Rage
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Publisher announces details of successor to bestseller Fear
North Korean leader describes bond out of a ‘fantasy film’
Interview: ‘Too many people are emotionally unhinged’ More - in US Politics
Why Donald Trump failed his TV interviews
Opinion
Donald Trump
Why Donald Trump failed his TV interviews
The president selects his media appearances carefully – but has been skewered twice recently
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‘You can’t do that’: Trump argues with reporter over Covid-19 death figures – video
What is remarkable about an interview with Donald Trump that went viral last week is how much it has been remarked upon, given that – on the face of it – it is so unremarkable. Interviewer sits down with politician and asks questions; politician is evasive and makes baseless assertions, so the reporter, Jonathan Swan from Axios, asks him questions like “What do you mean?”, “What’s your basis for saying that?”, “Why?”.
Isn’t that what we do in interviews?
But it was exceptional because that is not how Trump is normally interviewed.
The American president is highly selective about who he allows himself to be interviewed by (declaration of interest: despite repeated efforts, and coming very close once, he has not done an interview with me – although has answered a lot of my questions at news conferences). I would say that he gives 90%-95% of his interviews to the Murdoch-owned Fox News network – and he always knows his interviewer well.
He knows Swan, too. The charming Australian is fabulously well connected and, though an outsider, has cultivated the White House key players like an insider. Trump thought he knew what he was getting when the two men sat down together. More - in US Politics
'They're dying … it is what it is': key takeaways from Trump's shocking interview
Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president.It’s been just over two weeks since the president made a series of shocking statements in a one-on-one interview with Fox News, but he packed another host of extraordinary claims into a 37-minute interview released on Monday night by Axios.Here are the eight most glaring things Trump said to reporter Jonathan Swan.‘It is what it is’In a lengthy discussion about the US’s poor response to coronavirus, Trump described the pandemic as “under control”.Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”‘You can’t do that’The president then appeared unable to distinguish between different measurements of coronavirus deaths.Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts.“United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”“In what?” Swan asked. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of confirmed Covid-19 cases, Swan said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”Trump responded: “You can’t do that.”‘He didn’t come to my inauguration’Trump downplayed the work of the congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, whose funeral was held last week in Atlanta, Georgia. Instead of Lewis’s legacy, Trump focused on Lewis in relation to himself.“I never met John Lewis, actually,” Trump said. “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK. That’s his right.”Lewis’s fight for racial equality includes having his skull broken by state troopers during the 1965 Bloody Sunday march in Alabama. As a congressman he worked across the aisle.‘I did more for the black community than anybody’Swan pressed for an analysis of systemic racism. Trump said: “I have seen where there is a difference and I don’t want there to be a difference.”When asked why black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police, the president spoke about how many white people are killed by the police.Then said: “I did more for the black community than anybody with a possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not.”When asked whether he did more than Lyndon B Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights Act in 1964 (and the Voting Rights Act in 1965), Trump didn’t really answer the question.‘I do wish her well’Trump stood by a 21 July comment where he said “I wish her well” of Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein who faces federal charges for allegedly enabling the disgraced financier’s sex trafficking of minor girls.Asked for his thoughts on Maxwell, Trump said, “Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well. I wish a lot of people well.”Promotes Epstein conspiracy theoryHe also promoted the conspiracy theory that Epstein was murdered when he died in a New York jail last August. This has been disputed by the attorney general, William Barr.“Her boyfriend died in jail and people are still trying to figure out how did it happen, was it suicide, was he killed?” Trump said. “I do wish her well. I’m not looking for anything bad for her.”‘Lots of things can happen’Trump again attacked mail-in voting, which is expected to occur at higher rates in the November election because of the pandemic.“It could be decided many months later,” Trump said. “Do you know why? Because lots of things will happen during that period of time. Especially when you have tight margins, lots of things can happen. There’s never been anything like this … Now, of course, right now we have to live with it, but we’re challenging it.”‘I have heard that, but it has never reached my desk’Trump said reports that Russia had been offering bounties to the Taliban for attacks on US forces in Afghanistan were “fake news”. When Swan asked whether Trump had ever discussed the bounties with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump said he had not.When Swan asked Trump about Russia supplying weapons to the Taliban, the president asserted: “I have heard that, but it has never reached my desk.” More
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'It’s a massive joy': the programme-makers bringing back quality British kids' TV
While the BBC’s dollops of Bitesize Daily has reminded the country of the value of children’s television, there is another public-service initiative quietly climbing the charts. It is the awkwardly named Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF), which was launched in 2019 to reverse a collapse in the number of original British children’s programmes, where funding has fallen by 40% in 10 years.No one knew if devoting £60m to a three-year-long experiment to subsidise programmes for four- to 18-year-olds could revive a creative sector that was dying on its feet or reintroduce variety beyond bought-in cartoons. But as the YACF enters year two, it is judged to have had a good start despite the pause in most TV production. Floella Benjamin, who championed it, says: “It is a success – it has opened the door to people whose voices have not been heard. The BBC can only do so much.”It is also delivering a lockdown dividend, after it improvised by inviting children and teenagers to become involved in short, quality programmes for broadcast, after only a quarter of children polled said television reflected their lives.If you want to see the output for yourself, try sampling the six-part Letters in Lockdown, available on All 4. One that touched me was made in three weeks, with Soham, a 16-year-old boy from Coventry, who writes to his absentee father in the Middle East: “I never felt I had a father figure; you drifted away,” he says, remarking he would have liked tips on shaving. As they share the letter, his father has teary moments and they reconcile.An experiment in May called See Yourself on Screen challenged children to compete to make a short TV show (with mentors) resulting in 15 that made it to broadcast. I loved one from a young girl, Betsy – called Squeaks and Wheeks – about her guinea pigs. “My best friends in lockdown … they can sometimes get a bit smelly,” she says. So she gussies them up with a shampoo and groom in preparation for a guinea-pig tea party. This was all mentored by Jessica Hynes. More
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The Swamp: inside a revealing look into Washington corruption
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A new documentary finds bipartisan common ground as it follows Republican lawmakers to examine the corrosive influence of money in US democracy More
