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Each December, PolitiFact — the fact-checking website created by the Tampa Bay Times and now owned Poynter Institute — designates a "Lie of the Year," which it defines as "the mendacious statement, or statements, that undermined the truth most significantly in the previous 12 calendar months."
Since PolitiFact, like Poynter, shares the conventional liberalism of mainstream news organizations, it is more apt to focus on falsehoods uttered by Republicans than by Democrats. That has especially been so since Donald Trump emerged as a political figure. In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021, PolitiFact's choice for Lie of the Year was something told by Trump and/or his surrogates. So it's not really a surprise that its pick for 2024 is once again one of Trump's untruths. On Dec. 17, PolitiFact unveiled what it called the "most outrageous political lie" of 2024:
With a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats.
With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level.
The claim apparently originated in unverified posts on social media and was unequivocally refuted by Springfield's mayor and police chief. Trump's exclamation during the debate — "They're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats!" — is one of the most surreal bits of lunacy ever uttered by a presidential candidate on national TV.
But was it the most outrageous political lie of 2024? The falsehood "that undermined the truth most significantly" during the year gone by? Not even close.
The most consequential lie of the year was the one peddled again and again by the Biden White House and the president's political and media allies: the lie that the 82-year-old president was as intellectually sharp and mentally focused as ever and that claims to the contrary — even video to the contrary — were nothing but "cheap fakes." Everyone with access to Biden knew better, yet most of them brazenly denied it. Some examples:
"I'm telling you, this guy is tough. He's smart. He's on his game." — Mitch Landrieu, senior Biden adviser and cochair of the Biden reelection campaign
"The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused." — Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas
"I undersold [Biden] when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, he's better than he's ever been." — Joe Scarborough, MSNBC program host and former US representative
"I've been with the president of the United States many times. He is on the ball. The man knows more than most of us have forgotten." — Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois
"I've seen the president twice in the last two weeks. I've had a conversation with him. He's completely mentally sharp." — US Representative Ro Khanna of California
"There are literally thousands of people alive in this nation today because Joe Biden is incredibly competent, and he's incredibly effective." — Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut
When Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden's mishandling of classified documents, issued a report describing the president as a "well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory," he was savaged by the White House and its loyalists. Vice President Kamala Harris condemned the report as "gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate." She insisted that "the way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous."
It was all a giant, willful deceit. Its goal was to preserve Biden's viability as a candidate and to override the widespread public unease about the president's mental competence that kept surfacing in opinion polls. And the whole time, as we now know, the White House was going to unheard-of lengths to hide the truth about Biden's advancing decrepitude. The Wall Street Journal last week published a shocking exposé of the myriad ways in which Biden's staff maneuvered to hide, downplay, and compensate for his declining mental health.
The elaborate edifice of pretense and denial disintegrated after Biden's excruciating appearance in a debate with Trump — "the worst performance of any general election presidential candidate in any debate in modern American history," in the words of veteran political analyst Jeff Greenfield. Biden was forced from the ticket, Harris was hastily installed as his replacement, and the Democrats proceeded to lose the White House.
American politics in 2024 featured plenty of whoppers, but the lie of the year — the one that altered the trajectory of the presidential campaign and will likely be studied by historians for generations to come — was about something far more consequential than mythical immigrants eating house pets. How did PolitiFact get that wrong?
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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