When a military expert’s opinion is different than a politician’s, how are fact-checkers like PolitiFact supposed to adjudicate the politician’s claim? If a Friday article by Zoe Weyand is anything to go by, the answer is not at all, or at least if the politician is Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. However, Weyand's standard for giving Warren a “true” rating for a recent claim she made about President Trump is different than the one PolitiFact has traditionally applied to Republicans.
Warren claimed that Trump has dropped more bombs on more countries than any president in the modern era, which was defined as since 9/11. In the “If your time is short” summary, Weyand wrote, “From the start of his first term to now, Trump has authorized military strikes in 10 countries, more than any other president in the 21st century. He has also authorized a higher number of military strikes than any other modern president.”
However, she also observed how “An expert said the use of ground troops is a better way to analyze military activity. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush deployed a far greater number of American troops during their tenures.”
That expert was Mark Cancian, who Weyand described as “a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department.” Cancian’s opinion that ground forces are a better way to measure military activity did not dissuade Weyand from giving Warren a straight-up true rating, but historically, Republicans have not been given that benefit.
A few years ago during the Republican primary, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley lamented that the Chinese navy is bigger than the U.S. Navy, Louis Jacobson wrote in his “If your time is short” summary, “Numerically, Haley is on target with both countries’ ship counts.”
His experts told him that “counting ships says little about military capabilities” because "ship counts ignore overall tonnage, specific warfighting capabilities, and overall geographic reach, all of which are metrics where the United States maintains an edge over China.”
Jacobson isn’t alone. Fact-checkers across several different outlets across several years have made similar naval arguments against Republicans. The opinion that tonnage is still what matters most as if it were pre-1967 aside, the very idea that someone had a different opinion on what matters was enough for Jacobson to give Haley a “half-true” rating. PolitiFact's double standards on experts are not confined to military matters.
When PolitiFact ends up claiming Democrats are more truthful than Republicans, some like to defend that by saying that it is a simple fact that Democrats are more truthful. However, here we see the problem with that. A Democrat is given a true rating, while a Republican in the exact same situation was not.
