“This is a new word that I came up with, that is probably the best word,” President Donald Trump said at a press conference about the cost of medicine in May. The word he had come up with was “equalise”, even though the earliest known use of it was in the 1500s.
Channel 4’s Trump v the Truth documentary plays the clip of Trump from the briefing, then text on screen reminds us that “Denzel Washington starred in the 2014 Hollywood blockbuster, The Equalizer”. As the show debunks more and more claims, upbeat music plays in the background.
If ever there were a sign of how exasperated the ‘mainstream media’ are with Trump’s misinformation, it would be the Herculean effort that is Trump v the Truth. Lasting nearly three hours last night to coincide with the president’s visit to the UK, the documentary claims to debunk 100 of his “falsehoods, distortions and inaccuracies.” They range from the serious to the silly, tackling the US election, mail-in voting, Brexit, the splitting of the atom and the price of eggs.
Trump v the Truth is a weird programme for an even weirder time. It is barely a television programme, more like a YouTube video, as someone on X rightly noted, literally a series of clips of Trump juxtaposed with text on screen against a black background debunking claim after claim. It’s most effective when it’s light-hearted, pairing jovial music with ridiculous claims about made up words. It’s downright miserycore when it gets to the deeper stuff.
Think of it more as a good piece of televisual activism, the type of thing that exists so that news pieces can be written about it. The show claims to present the “longest uninterrupted reel of untruths” to have ever been published, and there’s no denying the gravitas of the exercise. Kudos to Channel 4’s researchers, even if as a viewing experience it’s fairly dull after fifteen minutes or so.
There are claims about rigged elections debunked by senior election security officials; suggestions that US banks aren’t able to do business in America and then lists of ones that do; suggestions the windows in the White House don’t open when there is evidence to the contrary, and plenty more about inflation, autism, and border crossings.
Ironically, Channel 4’s fact checking could occasionally be more extensive. When it comes to Trump’s claim that the splitting of the atom was a US achievement, we learn that a student called Earnest from Manchester is “generally regarded” to have been the first person to split it, although that hardly feels like the firmest of factual grounding.
All the while, Elon Musk-run X was overrun with conspiracists and pro-Trump users demanding the same exercise be played out on the likes of Starmer and Biden, although a few progressive comments made it onto my feed. One user called the show “one of the best critical explorations of Trump's regular untruths I have seen for a very long time.”
This is important work, even if as a televisual experience it comes across as slightly try-hard. The reality is we all know he talks a lot of **** so we don’t need to spend an evening raising our blood pressure by watching dozens of examples of it. The broadcaster promoted the programme on social media with capped-up, shouty X posts in the style of Trump, demanding viewers “DO NOT WATCH” the show on “SOME BACKWATER BRITISH TV CHANNEL CALLED CHANNEL 4”. They went softly viral without breaking the internet. Everyone’s tired, including, I assume, Channel 4’s lawyers and researchers. Well done to them, I hope they get some good rest. I know I’m exhausted.