Meet Daniel Dale

I've been following the career of reporter, Daniel Dale, since his days covering the late mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. He's spent the last few years as the Toronto Star's Washington correspondent, where he started fact checking Donald Trump and recently turned what started out as a sideline into a full-time position fact checking Trump for CNN.

I can't imagine how he does it, but this profile in the LA Times gives some insight into how and why.

When you started this in September 2016, during the presidential race, you could have had no idea what this would end up involving, the tracking of every single lie that the man who would become President Trump would tell.

No. I did not know. At first I did not think I was going to do every single claim or every single lie. I thought I would just do it occasionally, on days where it seemed like he was being especially dishonest.

And then Michael Moore, of all people, the filmmaker, tweeted maybe five days into me doing it, saying something like, “Every single day, this Canadian journalist shames the U.S. media by pointing out every lie Trump tells.”

And I got thousands of followers from that, and I seriously thought, “Oh gosh, I have to do it every day now to satisfy these people.”

And then I thought I would probably be done with Trump, because I thought he was going to lose the election. Then, one of my first thoughts sitting there at Hillary Clinton’s so-called victory party in November 2016, election night, was, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to have to keep doing it for years now.”

I have been trying to cut down on the amount of political reporting that I read (especially from the US and the UK) to preserve my sanity, but I will keep following Daniel Dale for as long as he keeps writing.