Over the weekend, former President Trump gave a campaign speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa during which he made a kind of convoluted argument about the corrupt political class was against him. The Biden-Harris campaign grabbed one sentence from the speech and framed it as a kind of confession by Trump.

Trump: We’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy pic.twitter.com/HubnEyJsyF

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 2, 2023

You may have noticed the tweet in question didn’t use any quotation marks. That wasn’t an accident. But others who followed their lead weren’t as careful.

TRUMP CONFESSES

“We’ve been waging an all out war on American democracy.”

Donald Trump’s cognitive decline led him to tell the truth to voters in Iowa. pic.twitter.com/HZFpS13H0M

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 2, 2023

Did Trump actually say that? It’s at this point in the story that something unusual happened. Snopes, the fact-checking site which has made a mockery of itself by fact-checking the Babylon Bee, pointed out that the Biden-Harris campaign got this wrong. Instead of the brief clip they pulled up the full video and transcript from C-Span [the bolded portion is what appears in the Biden campaign video].

For decades, you watched as a corrupt political class in our nation’s capitol looted your money, trampled on your dignity and pushed their radical agenda into every aspect of your lives. You know it very well. But in 2016, you voted to stand up to those liars, losers, crooks and creeps, and you elected an outsider as your president. And it was about America first. We want to put our country first. They haven’t done that in a long time, but we did it for four years and that’s why we did so well. That’s why it was one of the great presidencies, they say. Even the opponents sometimes say that he did very well, I have to say, “Take it back,” his people scream. His people say “Take it back.” From that day on our opponents, and we had a lot of opponents, but we’ve been waging an all-out war in American democracy. You look at what they’ve been doing, and becoming more and more extreme and repressive. They have just waged an all-out war with each passing day.

And based on that, Snopes concluded:

To our ears, Trump unambiguously said, “we’ve been waging all-out war in American democracy” (and CSPAN’s transcript reflects the same). We did not hear, nor does the context support the claim that he said, “We’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy.” It’s clear that Trump was out to accuse his political opponents of waging war, not himself. Given the context, Trump likely meant to say, “They’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy,” but those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.

Naturally, the people who were spreading this nonsense aren’t happy about having a fact-checking site that is reliably on their side undermining them.

This is very embarrassing for Snopes — and they should delete it. https://t.co/XoEY66QXLe

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 4, 2023

Aaron Rupar, who didn’t tweet out the initial claim, nevertheless accused Snopes of losing their credibility. The idea that Rupar is a judge of who has credibility amuses me as I hope it does you.

This is a joke and you just trashed whatever credibility you had

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 4, 2023

He also went with the fake but accurate approach in a subsequent tweet.

1. This is an absolutely absurd choice to make in terms of something to fact check

2. Regardless of what Trump said in this instance, the fact is he has been waging an all out war on American democracy https://t.co/xWQlDzp0WU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 4, 2023

Keith Olbermann also criticized Snopes having pretty clearly not read the article.

Your failure here is underscored by the simple word "in."

Even in Trump's dysfunctional mind, what was this sentence SUPPOSED to mean?

"we've been waging an all-out war IN American democracy"

"In" would render the sentence nonsensical. Even for him.

Delete, or fold

— Keith Olbermann's X Ghost⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) December 4, 2023

Olbermann is just one example. Snopes’ fact-check is being heavily ratioed by hundreds of progressives who liked the original interpretation and can’t let it go.

So the bottom line is that Trump gave a meandering speech that was confusing because he ran some sentences together and botched a few words that made it hard to parse. The Biden campaign took a bit of that and twisted it into a gotcha video. Snopes, for reasons that remain unclear, did its job and pointed out the Biden camp was wrong. But many on the left are now convinced that Snopes is compromised and that Trump said what the Biden campaign originally claimed he did. This is admittedly a tempest in a teapot but one that is illustrative of how media coverage of the right and reality are often at odds. What makes this surprising is that someone on the left (Snopes) noticed.