New Yorker, Once Renowned for Fact-Checking Operation, Won’t Correct False Claim About Donald Trump

More than 24 hours have passed since the New Yorker published a post-debate column that states "no one knows" what Donald Trump meant when he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants.

The column from staff writer Susan Glasser led the magazine’s website after Tuesday evening’s debate. It argues that the president said a number of "crazy and unhinged" things during the 90-minute affair including that "the Vice-President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.’"

"What the hell was he talking about?" Glasser wrote. "No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point."

But, as CNN reported Monday, Harris explicitly endorsed using "executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care." Unlike some of her other left-wing positions, neither Harris nor her campaign has disavowed that view, which was first articulated in a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Users on X, where Glasser posted the column, added a community note to provide "context."

"Kamala Harris told the ACLU she supports this policy," the note states.

Pressed by a Trump campaign official who asked the New Yorker to correct the record, Glasser said she stood by the "view expressed in the column that this was a memorable line and also one that would be hard as heck for someone in the audience to understand what the former president meant by it." She maintained that she was not fact-checking the president's statements but rather "questioning the political advisability of bringing up these things in a national debate."

That same official noted that Time magazine had corrected a piece that included the same error.

"Despite this back and forth I still have no idea what the heck the former president was talking about," Glasser told the Trump official. "Kind of like claiming she is a Marxist. Or saying she supports abortions of babies—after they are born. Are you retracting those claims and correcting the record on them? Thanks."

The New Yorker’s fact-checking desk is considered world class for allegedly going to great lengths to verify all information in the magazine’s stories. A former editor there once described the process as "each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."

Glasser is a regular guest on CNN, which also aired a primetime segment on Harris’s answers to that ACLU questionnaire. Since then, however, some of the network’s anchors have appeared ignorant of the news. Jim Acosta pressed a former Trump official who referred to the report, asking, "Where is that coming from?" And after former president Donald Trump referred to the report at Tuesday night's debate, arguing that Harris "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison," CNN host Wolf Blitzer described it as one of Trump's "most outlandish claims."

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