If nothing else, you have to admire their commitment. Generally, the British media responded to Donald Trump’s state visit with carefully inserted little nuggets of fact-checking within their scheduled programming. Then came Channel 4, which decided to go big, displacing its entire night’s schedule to deliver almost three hours of fact-based, punctiliously debunked rebuttal to almost every statement he has made since taking office again in January.
This sprawling extravaganza, called Trump v the Truth, became the spine of Channel 4’s Trump Day on Wednesday. It was preceded by the second episode of Donald Trump’s Show, a bizarre mash-up of old Trump clips over Come Dine With Me archive narration. And throughout the day, continuity announcers were replaced by a Trump impersonator complaining about Channel 4’s broadcasts. For example, at 10:40 during Frasier, he moaned about his intense dislike of discarded salads.
Nevertheless, Trump v the Truth was always the real draw; a monumental flex that few other broadcasters would have dared to make. Starting at 10pm and sliding into the small hours, the show was billed as a meticulously sourced fact-check of more than 100 lies Trump has told during his second term, in speeches, interviews, statements and social media posts.
On paper, this is a great demonstration of public service journalism. We live in an era when Trump regularly seeks to silence the media – he has just filed a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times, for example – so for Channel 4 to confront him so comprehensively might set an example for the rest of the world.
But sitting through it all was a different matter. From the outset, the show chose to adhere rigidly to its format: first we saw a clip of Trump, then white-on-black text dryly corrected it. Footage of him claiming a 1,400% reduction in drug prices was followed by text saying: “It is impossible to reduce a price by more than 100% because a 100% reduction means the price is free.” His claim that the US is the only country on Earth that has postal voting was followed by text pointing out that more than 30 other countries allow it.
Then it moved on to smaller lies, such as Trump claiming he invented the word “covfefe” and bigger lies, such as his repeated assertion that Ukraine started the war with Russia. On the latter, you would find that Channel 4 wanted to create a shorter show focusing solely on this. The anger you feel when confronted with a big destabilising distortion – such as his repeated claims that most immigrants are violent criminals – is almost immediately deflated by smaller goods, such as the correction of the nationality of the first atom splitter. When this happens, it’s like being stuck in a pub with the world’s most pedantic drunk.
It’s hard to find a decent comparison for the crushing experience of watching Trump v the Truth. It was a bit like slow TV, but with a long train journey to distract you from the global threat to democracy. It was a bit like pop-up videos on VH1, but with fun trivia about Madonna instead of statistics on the killing of eagles. In its relentless length, it was a bit like a particularly horrifying sleep paralysis demon.
But this crushing boredom was probably intentional. It was less a call to arms and more a Philabuster designed to weigh you down under the crushing weight of Trump’s stupidity. And it worked. After watching all of it, I want nothing more than to spend the next three months in a sensory deprivation tank while my nervous system recovers.
The bigger question is, who was this really for? Trump’s supporters are unlikely to be charmed by the fact that a foreign TV channel spent hours dryly correcting Trump’s position on where Unabomber was born. His opponents already know he doesn’t tell the truth and didn’t need to stay up all night to be reminded.
Perhaps there’s a tiny possibility that Trump accidentally pressed the remote while he was tumbling off the Windsor Castle bed last night and this was on, and it made him see the folly of his ways. If that’s the case, then Trump v the Truth was worth it. If not, perhaps the best thing to do is to write it off as a noble but flawed experiment.
