Coming out of Donald Trump’s contentious press conference on Tuesday, Politico chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush went on MSNBC and suggested Trump was such a unique liar – a liar for the ages, the biggest political liar “of our lifetimes” – that he needs a live fact-check on the TV screen. Like many reporters, Thrush is utterly blind to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s routine and relentless falsehoods, best demonstrated by months and months of denying the president’s affair with an intern.
Thrush proclaimed: “And I tell you something. What I would like to see is real-time fact-checking of Trump. I think this is the first candidate in our lifetimes that we need a chyron at the bottom of the screen where we have live fact-checking.”
Like other liberal reporters, Thrush somehow thinks liberal reporters haven’t been negative in their coverage of Trump. By this, they imply reporters haven’t been negative enough to ruin him in the polls. Right before his demand for live, on-screen “fact checks,” Thrush declared:
THRUSH: What I like, what I heard from Katy [Tur on MSNBC] and I’ve been hearing increasingly from the Trump press. For the first six months or so, the phenomenon of Trump overwhelmed the journalism, right? We’re starting to see a level of defiance and scrutiny in the Trump traveling press and among others that we haven’t seen up to this point in time. So he keeps, you know, taking the rubber chicken and going after the reporters but the reporters are less prone to cut him some slack.
When “MSNBC Republican” Susan Del Percio complained that “Donald Trump doesn't get judged like any other politician. He gets judged by the public,” and “his numbers are still good,” Thrush shot back “That is not an immutable law of political physics.” He insisted the media’s job is to hammer and hammer and hammer Trump as a liar, until the polling comes around:
THRUSH: And one of the things that needs to happen, I think – this is the thing that drives me crazy -- when I hear some of my fellow reporters talking about how everyone getting desensitized to the fact that this guy is a fact-free candidate. That's baloney!
You repeat a message over and over and over again, and he gets tagged with this, over time – Look, he has a core of people, we know where the electorate is. Forty percent of the voters at floor are going to vote for him anyway. But if you keep hammering him away on the truth about what he is saying and the falsehoods that he routinely peddles – I think we can, I think our responsibility is not to...
CATHERINE RAMPELL, WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST: But he barrels through. The things he says, he just lies again and again and he gets fact-checked on them, and he just repeats them.
THRUSH: But what are we going to do, crawl into a fetal ball? I think we just gotta go hit him.
Fill-in afternoon host Chris Hayes introduced Thrush by saying he "has a fantastic podcast I recommend you check out.”
