Hillary Clinton's impossible challenge: Fact-checking Donald Trump at the debate

Trump will lie like crazy at Monday's debate. How can Clinton possibly respond?

It's not a question of if Trump will lie, but how much.
(Image credit: All images courtesy Getty Images)

When Donald Trump came out last Friday and finally gave up his long effort to convince people of the lie that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than the United States — and in the process told two more brazen lies, that Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the birther controversy, and "I finished it" — some news organizations had plainly had enough.

They described the event using blunt terms of a kind they ordinarily shy away from, saying not merely that Trump "strayed from the truth" or "made a claim at odds with the facts" but simply that he "lied." As New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet later told Quartz, "we have decided to be more direct in calling things out when a candidate actually lies." Many of his colleagues are feeling the same way.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.