How to check any claim about a president in under an hour

Somebody in your family is about to announce what a president said, and nobody has checked it. That goes for every side. Most of the loudest claims about presidents, from the glowing to the poisonous, have never been checked by the person repeating them. Somebody saw it on a meme, heard it from a cousin, read it in a headline, and passed it on with total confidence. By the time it reaches your dinner table it has been through six mouths and lost every date and every footnote along the way.

I am not going to tell you to trust me. I am going to give you the tools to trust nobody, including me, in under an hour. Everything below is free, public, and written by the government itself or by libraries that preserve its records. You do not need a law degree, a subscription or a research assistant. You need a laptop, a cup of coffee and a willingness to be told you are wrong. That last one is the hard part, and it is the whole point.

The method at a glance

Seven steps, with a time budget for each. The budget adds up to 55 minutes: 5 plus 5 plus 10 plus 15 plus 10 plus 5 plus 5 equals 55. Most claims take half that.

1. State the claim in one sentence and split it into parts you can check. (5 minutes)
2. Sort the parts into facts and values. (5 minutes)
3. Choose the right primary source for each fact. (10 minutes)
4. Read the actual text. (15 minutes)
5. Check the context: dates, amendments, repeal, who really decided. (10 minutes)
6. Check every number at the agency that produced it. (5 minutes)
7. Write a one-line verdict with the citation. (5 minutes)

Now the details.

Step 1: State the claim and split it

Write the claim down as one plain sentence. "Lincoln freed the slaves." "Reagan tripled the debt." "Eisenhower built the interstate highways." "President X signed Y into law." Then break it into the parts that can be checked. Every claim has the same skeleton: who did what, when, and by how much, with what result.

Take the sentence "Eisenhower built the interstate highways." The checkable parts are: Did a law authorize the highways? Which law, and when? Who signed it? Who proposed it? Who paid? What does "built" mean, and who actually did the building? Already you can see why a one-line version is unreliable. It compresses a statute, a signature, a funding mechanism and decades of construction into one verb.

Spend five minutes on this and no more. The skill is turning a slogan into a list of questions.

Step 2: Separate facts from values

This is the step that saves the most arguments. A factual claim can be proved or disproved with a document: a date, a vote, a text, a figure. A value claim says whether something was good, wise or fair. "The law passed in 1964" is a fact. "The law was the best thing Congress ever did" is a value. You can check the first with a primary source. You can argue the second all night.

Mark each part of your list with an F or a V. Check the F items first. If the factual foundation is wrong, the value argument built on it collapses, and if the foundation is right, you can have an honest argument about the value. A conservative should be the first to insist on this distinction, because our case is strongest when the facts are straight and weakest when we defend a claim that does not hold up.

Step 3: Choose the right source

Different questions live in different places. Here is a map.

A note on the coverage. The Statutes at Large are the official bound record of every law passed by Congress. The Government Publishing Office's website carries the modern volumes, and the Library of Congress and other libraries have digitized the older ones. Congress.gov is easier to search but its depth for older material is thinner, so if you cannot find it there, go to the Statutes. For debates before 1873, look to the predecessors of the Congressional Record, which were the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates and the Congressional Globe. And for a recent president's papers, remember that the presidential library system, which runs under the National Archives, holds the records of each administration from Herbert Hoover onward. The Presidential Libraries Act of 1955 put that system on a formal footing. Lincoln, being earlier, is covered by the Library of Congress.

Ten minutes is enough to pick the source. If you do not know which to use, ask: who would have had to write this down? A claim about a law was written down by Congress. A claim about a regulation was written down by an agency. A claim about a speech was written down by a clerk or a stenographer.

Step 4: Read the actual text

Spend your longest block here, fifteen minutes, because this is where most claims fall apart. Do not read a summary of the law. Read the law. Read the operative sentence. Read the definitions section. Read the effective date. Then read the amendments if there are any.

A few rules of thumb:

• Titles lie. The name of a bill is a marketing choice. A law called an "Act to Protect" something may do something quite different. Read the text under the heading, not the heading.
• Look for "shall" and "may." "Shall" is a command. "May" is permission. Many claims turn on the difference.
• Look for the sunset. Many laws expire. A claim that a law "is still in effect" needs a date check.
• Quote only what you have read. If you cannot quote the sentence, you do not yet know what it says.

If the text is long, use the search function on the page and look for the key terms. If the text is a Supreme Court opinion, our guide How to Read a Supreme Court Opinion Without a Law Degree shows how to find the holding fast.

Step 5: Check the context

A true sentence can mislead if it is removed from its setting. Ask five questions.

1. When? Was this the date the bill passed, the date it was signed, or the date it took effect? These are often three different dates.
2. Who decided? Presidents sign laws. Congress writes them. Courts interpret them. Agencies write the rules. A claim that credits or blames "the President" for something often skips three other actors. A good example is how a bill becomes a law, explained in How a Bill Really Becomes Law, Including the Steps Schoolhouse Rock Skipped.
3. What came before and after? Was the law amended, repealed or struck down? Did a court read it narrowly?
4. Which party, which votes? Look at the roll call. Many landmark laws passed with votes from both parties, and the party labels of the 1860s, 1930s and 1960s are not the labels of today. Our piece The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows tests one popular story against the votes.
5. Who benefits from the claim? This is not a way to dismiss it. It is a reason to check it harder.

Step 6: Check the numbers at the source

Numbers travel worse than words. Three traps catch almost everyone.

• Nominal versus real dollars. A dollar in one decade buys a different amount than a dollar in another. Any comparison across years should say whether it is adjusted for inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the price index; our piece How the CPI is built and why it never matches your grocery receipt explains it.
• Totals versus shares. "Spending went up" and "spending as a share of the economy went up" are different statements. Check whether the claim uses dollars, percentages or percent of GDP.
• The cherry-picked year. Choose the starting year for a chart and you can make almost any trend look like almost anything. Look at the whole series, not the two years someone chose. Our guide How to Spot a Misleading Statistic Before It Spots You, With Worked Examples has five examples.

Go to the producing agency and pull the original table. If the number in the claim does not appear there, or appears with a different definition, you have found your answer.

Step 7: Write the verdict

Finish with one sentence, and put the source next to it. Use one of five labels: true, mostly true, misleading (true parts, false impression), mostly false or false. Then write the evidence: "Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment, ratified December 1865." If you can't write the citation, you haven't finished.

A worked example: "Lincoln freed all the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation"

Let me run the method on a famous claim, start to finish.

Step 1. The claim: "Lincoln freed all the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation." The checkable parts are: (a) What did the Proclamation say? (b) Whom did it cover? (c) Did it take effect everywhere? (d) What ended slavery for everyone?

Step 2. All four parts are facts. The sentence also carries an implied value (Lincoln deserves credit), which we will leave aside.

Step 3. For (a) to (c), the primary source is the text of the Proclamation itself, preserved by the National Archives and also printed in the Statutes at Large, where it appears in volume 12. For (d) the source is the 13th Amendment in the Constitution, and the debate over it is in the Congressional Globe.

Step 4. Read the Proclamation. It was issued on January 1, 1863, after a preliminary version on September 22, 1862. It declares free the people held as slaves in the states and parts of states that were then in rebellion against the United States. It then lists the states and parts of states in rebellion. It does not list the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, which had not left the Union. It also exempts Tennessee and certain counties of Virginia and parishes of Louisiana that were under Union control. Lincoln justified it as a war measure, an exercise of his power as commander in chief.

Step 5. Context. In practice the Proclamation applied where the Union Army did not yet hold control, and it was enforced as Union forces advanced. It did not end slavery in the loyal border states. Slavery as a legal institution ended nationwide with the 13th Amendment, which the Senate passed in April 1864 and the House in January 1865, and which was ratified in December 1865, after Lincoln's death. Secretary of State William Seward, whom we met in William Seward bought Alaska for about two cents an acre and got mocked, certified its ratification on December 18, 1865. Lincoln did push hard for the amendment in the last months of his life. Our history From the Emancipation Proclamation to the 13th Amendment in Dated Steps tells the whole story, and the votes in Congress belong to the Republican majority of the day.

Step 6. There is no figure to check here, apart from the dates.

Step 7. The verdict: Misleading. The Proclamation was a major step and a real declaration of freedom for people in the areas in rebellion, but it did not by its terms free everyone, and it did not reach the loyal border states. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States. Citations: Proclamation of January 1, 1863; Amendment XIII.

Notice what the method did. It did not diminish Lincoln. It put the credit where the documents put it, and it showed that the amendment, which took the votes of a Republican Congress and the states, finished the job. A true story beats a simplified one every time.

The bottom line

• Any claim about a president can be checked in under an hour if you follow seven steps: split the claim, sort facts from values, pick the right source, read the text, check the context, check the numbers, write the verdict.
• Go to primary sources: the Statutes at Large and Congress.gov for laws, the Federal Register for rules, the Public Papers and presidential libraries for what presidents said and did, and the producing agency for numbers.
• Read the text, not the title. Check the dates, the amendments and who actually decided.
• Be willing to be wrong. When the record contradicts a claim you like, drop the claim. Our side wins more arguments when we are the ones with the receipts.
• Before you share the next post about a president, spend ten minutes checking one sentence. Then tell your family where you checked it.