If nothing else, you have to applaud their commitment to the bit. Broadly speaking, the British media responded to Donald Trump’s state visit with a series of cautious little inserts nestled within scheduled news programming. Then along came Channel 4, which decided to go big, junking off a full night’s schedule to deliver an unbroken almost three-hour, fact-based, point-by-point repudiation of almost every single thing that Trump has said since he retook office in January.
This sprawling extravaganza, entitled Trump v the Truth, formed the backbone of what effectively became Channel 4’s Trump Day on Wednesday. Preceding it was episode two of The Donald Trump Show, a weird hour that overlaid an arch Come Dine With Me narration over old Trump clips. And throughout the day, continuity announcers were replaced with a Trump impersonator who whined about the channel’s output. During Frasier at 10:40am, for instance, he complained about his intense dislike of tossed salads.
Still, Trump v the Truth was always the real pull; a monumental flex that few other broadcasters would have dared to attempt. Starting at 10pm and rolling on into the small hours, the show was billed as a rigorously sourced factcheck of more than 100 untruths that Trump has told during his second term so far, in speeches, interviews, statements and social media posts.
On paper, this is an admirable demonstration of public service journalism. We live in an age where Trump routinely attempts to silence the media – just this week, he filed a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times – so for a channel to call him out as comprehensively as this might set an example for the rest of the world to follow.
But sitting through it all was a different matter entirely. From its opening moments, the show chose to stick to an unwavering format: first we’d see a clip of Trump, and then white-on-black text would drily correct him. Footage of him announcing a 1400% reduction in drug prices was followed by text reading “It is impossible to reduce a price by more than 100% because a 100% reduction means the price is free”. Footage of him claiming that the US is the only country on Earth to have mail-in voting was followed by text pointing out that more than 30 other countries allow it.
On it went, flitting between small untruths about Trump claiming to have invented the word “equalise” and bigger untruths about Ukraine starting the war with Russia. Of these, you found yourself wishing that Channel 4 had made a shorter show that concentrated only on the latter. The anger you feel when confronted by a big destabilising distortion – like his repeated assertions that the majority of immigrants are violent criminals – is almost immediately deflated by more minor fare, such as a correction about the nationality of the first person to split the atom. When this happens, it feels like being trapped in a pub with the world’s most pedantic boor.
It’s hard to find a decent comparison for the numbing experience of watching Trump v the Truth. It was a bit like Slow TV, but with the nice long train journey replaced by a tangible threat to global democracy. It was a bit like the old Pop-Up Videos on VH1, but with fun trivia about Madonna replaced with statistics about the penalty for murdering bald eagles. It was, in its sheer unrelenting length, a little bit like being visited by a particularly terrifying sleep paralysis demon.
However, this deadening boredom was probably intentional. This was less a call to arms and more a grand filibustering designed to wear you down under the weight of Trump’s nonsense. And it worked. After sitting through it, I want nothing more than to spend the next three months in a sensory deprivation tank until my nervous system recovers.
The bigger question is who this was actually for. Trump supporters won’t be swayed by the fact that a foreign television channel spent hours drily rectifying his stance on where the Unabomber was educated. His opponents already know that he doesn’t tell the truth, and didn’t need to be kept awake all night to be reminded.
Maybe there’s a sliver of a possibility that Trump himself accidentally sat on a remote control before he crashed out at Windsor Castle last night, and this came on, and it caused him to see the error of his ways. If that’s the case, then Trump v the Truth will have been worth it. If not, perhaps it’s best that we write this off as a noble but flawed experiment.
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