Journalists missed a reference to a Biden gaffe Monday after the Trump campaign launched a new website titled “Truth Over Facts.”
President Donald Trump’s campaign launched what appears to be a joke website they described as “an investigative website aimed at uncovering the truth behind [former Vice President] Joe Biden’s never-ending, seemingly incomprehensible statements during his third, plodding campaign for president.”
The “Truth Over Facts” title is, in fact, a reference to one of Biden’s public gaffes, where he made the comment during a 2019 campaign speech in Iowa. This seemed to go over many journalists’ heads as they attacked the Trump campaign for the slogan.
“How very Orwellian,” The Daily Beast’s editor-at-large Molly Jong-Fast tweeted. She then stood by her comment in a later tweet when she was directed to a video of Biden coining the phrase.
How is that not Orwellian? https://t.co/rumuJkPHqw
— Molly Jong-Fast???? (@MollyJongFast) May 18, 2020
“This is remarkably similar in name to a leading Chinese Communist Party slogan, ‘Seeking Truth From Facts,'” Washington Post Global Opinions and CBSN contributor Isaac Stone Fish declared. CNBC’s Christina Wilkie tweeted “So I guess the war on facts has a name now.”
Wilkie eventually appeared to figure out the joke, noting that it was a Biden gaffe in 2019. She still tweeted that its satire was “unclear.”
“Truth over facts” was a Biden gaffe during his speech at the Iowa State Fair last year.
— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) May 18, 2020
Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large of Vox, was stumped too, first tweeting that “If you’d written a satire of the Trump administration where they launched a campaign called ‘Truth Over Facts’ it would’ve been dismissed as heavyhanded and unfair.”
Klein later noted that it was from a Biden gaffe, adding that it it is “amazingly audacious for the Trump campaign to try and weaponize” it. (RELATED: Trump Says ‘Joe Biden Has Lost His Fastball’)
The entire Trump justification is he doesn’t worry about facts, but he expresses some kind of guttural or emotional truth even so, while all these persnickety factual reporters are lying in a deeper, more directional way.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) May 18, 2020
Journalist Garrett M. Graff, Vox’s Aaron Rupar and competition analyst for the Washington Post Elliot Smilowitz were just a few more who seemed to forget Biden’s gaffe.
“I think the real freak out should be that the people whose job it is to ostensibly cover politics don’t know an obvious reference to a Biden gaffe,” The Hill’s Saager Enjeti noted.