After all these years, Media Research Center executive Tim Graham still has Obama Derangement Syndrome. He huffed in a Feb. 16 post:
Quiz: How many times has Barack Obama been “fact checked” by PolitiFact since he left office in 2017?
Answer: Seven — in nine years. Only one was a “Mostly False.” There was one “True,” two “Mostly Trues,” and three “Half Trues.”
By contrast, PolitiFact dumped eleven “fact checks” on Donald Trump in the first 45 days of 2026 — and eight of them are “Mostly False” or worse. Three are “Half True,” and nothing is True at all.
So when Obama granted an interview to leftist YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, he can be fairly confident that the “fact checkers” won’t be poised to pounce. So he can say nasty things about the Republicans, and nobody finds a falsehood.
Yet Graham identified no actual falsehoods in the interview excerpt he copied and pasted. Instead, he ranted that “The X account Western Lensman pulled out Obama spreading the hoax that ICE used a five-year-old as ‘bait’ to catch an immigrant. Zero fear of fact checkers!” Graham refused to identify “Western Lensman” as a fellow right-winger. But the only people calling the story a “hoax” are Graham and his fellow right-wingers, which are repeating ICE’s spin on the story; by contrast, neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. Neither Graham nor “Western Lensman” explained why observers shouldn’t be trusted and only ICE is to be believed.
Graham continued to whine about Trump getting fact-checked:
One can easily state that President Trump is prone to exaggerating the success of his policies. One can also easily state that Obama still calls his “signature achievement” the “Affordable Care Act,” which hasn’t turned out so well.
Overall at PolitiFact, Obama has 603 fact checks, and almost HALF of them — 48 percent — are “True” or “Mostly True.” Only 25 percent of them (151) are Mostly False or worse.
Trump is in a category all his own, with 1,143 fact checks — 888 of them (77.7 percent) are “Mostly False” or worse, with a staggering count of 221 “Pants on Fire” ratings. Only 122 of them (10.7 percent) are True or Mostly True, and PolitiFact probably puked a little each time.
It apparently has not occurred to Trump to stop lying so much, or for Graham to tell that to Trump.
The same day, Clay Waters was similarly eager to turn attention toward Obama and away from Trump:
A 3,000-word “news analysis” by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker on Trump’s supposed cult of personality was headlined cheekily: “A Superman, Jedi and Pope — Trump’s Relentless Bid to Mythologize Himself.”
The online version was more insulting: “Trump’s Relentless Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality— President Trump has engaged in a spree of self-aggrandizement unlike any of his predecessors, fostering a mythologized superhuman persona and making himself the inescapable force at home and around the world.”
The story included a photo of a gold-leaf copper statue of Trump, tilted on its side — a statute paid for by outside private sources selling crypto coins.
[…]As for fellow presidents, it would be hard to top Barack Obama hero worship from the entertainment community, like Black Eyed Peas musician will.i.am’s infamous celebrity video for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, “Yes We Can,” which the Times greeted favorably. The Obama worship often spread to the elitist media itself. It began with a Washington Post front-page story gawking at his “chiseled pectorals” and ended with Times columnist Frank Bruni gushing “We’re going to miss this man, America. Whatever his flaws, he’s been more than our president. Time and again, he’s been our national poet.”
Waters didn’t mention that the gold statue of Trump he insisted on describing as “not commissioned by the president” was placed at a Trump-owned golf club in Miami, or that it was dedicated by a spiritual adviser to Trump, Mark Burns, or that Trump himself called in and described the statue as “beautiful.”