When a statement is technically true, but actually false

Tulsi Gabbard did not say that Iran has no nuclear weapons

The story was all over the place last week: A reporter confronted President Trump with the claim that Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s Director of National Intelligence, said that Iran has no nuclear weapons, to which the president replied, “She’s wrong.”

Imagine a president not believing his own top spy! What’s going on here?

What’s going on is the usual duplicity of the press. The reporter paraphrased Gabbard as saying Iran has no nuclear weapons, when in fact she did not say that. Gabbard said that Iran was “within weeks or months of having nuclear capability.” That is not at all the same statement.

If I told you that Joe Jones will start a new job in two months, would your takeaway be, “Joe Jones doesn't have a job”? Of course not. Technically it is true, because at the time of my saying “Joe will soon start a new job,” Joe was unemployed. But the conclusion, “Joe doesn’t have a job” is a distortion of what I said. The information I’ve conveyed is that Joe will soon have a job. The fact of his currently not having one is incidental.

The statement, “Iran is within weeks or months of having nuclear capability” is not the same as saying that Iran currently doesn’t have nuclear weapons. The information conveyed in the statement is not that they don’t have them, but that they soon may have the ability to make them. The current lack of nukes, while technically accurate, is mere background to the statement.

The reporter who threw this distortion in the president’s face was manifesting yet another weird, ideologically driven attack on Trump and his administration. The ploy apparently worked, as Gabbard and the president were reportedly (temporarily, one hopes) alienated from each other.

It is not my place to criticize President Trump. I cannot even imagine the stress that man is under. But if the president made an error here, it was believing the mainstream media. His response might have been, “I’d like to hear that from her own mouth,” but instead he trusted the reporter and contradicted what the reporter claimed Gabbard had said. I fell for the same deception. I assumed the accuracy of the reporter’s claim and found it outrageous that the president would reject out of hand a statement from his own national intelligence chief. Both the president and I should’ve known better.

So let us all remind ourselves of the following:

Never, ever, assume that a mainstream reporter is telling the truth about anything. Research sources, and draw your own conclusions.

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