It was curious enough when Donald Trump’s re-election campaign launched a new “investigative” website yesterday, but the name of the venture is what really raised eyebrows.
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign announced Monday a new “investigative” website that prioritizes “truth over facts.” The site, in fact, is called TheTruthOverFacts.com. The goal of the site, according to a release, is to uncover “the truth behind Joe Biden’s never-ending, seemingly incomprehensible statements during his third, plodding campaign for president.” The release says the site will utilize “experts,” but puts the word in quotation marks.
One of these days, these guys will figure out how quotation marks work and it will be a glorious day for us all.
Regardless, observers immediately speculated as to why in the world the president’s campaign team would prioritize “truth over facts” — as if there were something suspect about facts. More than a few saw Orwellian undertones.
The origin of the name, it turns out, was quite a bit dumber.
Evidently, Joe Biden appeared at the Iowa State Fair last August. As part of an extended riff on how Democrats are different from Republicans, the former president meant to say, “We choose truth over lies.” Instead, Biden accidentally said, “We choose truth over facts.”
It was a harmless slip-up, which was quickly forgotten — except by assorted Trump followers, who treated this as an important blunder, even making t-shirts featuring the phrase. With this in mind, when Trump/Pence 2020 unveiled the new online project, the president’s campaign operatives were apparently confident that people would get the obscure anti-Biden reference from nine months ago. It was, in effect, an inside joke that Trump World assumed everyone would get. Those who live in a bubble are often surprised when others fail to relate to the bubble’s interior. Team Trump’s press release on the new website referenced hidden meanings in Biden rhetoric that “most normal people would miss.” It’s unclear whether that was deliberately ironic or not.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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