The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

I thought that I would follow up on this because it appears that Democrats and the mainstream media quoted Leavitt out of context.  I think a couple of questions are important.  Number one, how often does this happen where it goes unnoticed, possibly justifying the right's distrust of MSM and belief that they lie all the time.  The other is whether the fact that it was the MSM who noted the out of context quote and followed up on it, whether that doesn't in some sense rebut the notion that this is happening all the time, there's just no reporting on it.  In a sense it's similar to science skeptics who point out that science has been wrong in the past, but don't mention that it was scientists who caught the errors and corrected itself.  Maybe MSM does as well, it's basically impossible to know as it's largely an argument based on the absence of something rather than its presence.

Fact check: Democratic leaders misleadingly snip White House press secretary’s ‘main priority’ quote out of context

Top Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives have taken a Thursday quote from the White House press secretary out of context to deliver a misleading attack on President Donald Trump.

A reporter asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a Thursday briefing: “In addition to the ballroom and the Rose Garden patio, is the president looking at any other renovations or significant kind of projects here at the White House?”

Leavitt responded: “Not to my knowledge, no. But he’s a builder at heart, clearly. And so his heart and his mind is always churning about how to improve things here on the White House grounds. But at this moment in time, of course, the ballroom is really the president’s main priority.”

So Leavitt was clearly referring to the planned new ballroom as Trump’s main priority for White House renovations. But on social media, various Democratic members of Congress have cut out the first part of the exchange to make it sound like she was saying the ballroom was Trump’s overall main priority.

The House Democratic Caucus’s official account on the social media platform X posted a five-second clip of Leavitt saying only, “At this moment in time, of course, the ballroom is really the president’s main priority.” The Democrats wrote in the Thursday post: “So, Trump’s MAIN priority is a $300 MILLION ballroom? Not lowering costs. Not saving health care. Not reopening the government. Got it.”

By clipping out the question Leavitt was asked about White House renovations, the Democrats created a misleading impression about her response.