Come on, under literally any reasonable interpretation of those words Trump's claim is simply false. That's a perfectly valid fact check, which you could only dispute if you aim to change the English language.

First, he never said "There is 'no system to vet' refugees from the Middle East." That's your paraphrasing of what he said. Your charging him for saying something false when more than half the words in the allegedly false statement are your own.

What he actually said was:

"Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children."

And it was in response to Clinton saying:

"Look, we’re facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II, and I think the United States has to do more, and I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in."

Second, he meant a "system" that both "vet[s] them" and "prevent[s] the radicalization of their children." The system described in PolitiFact's article only does the former, not the latter.

Third, "vetting" can mean lots of different things. When we "vet" Supreme Court justices, for example, we're not just checking to see if they have criminal records or are on terrorist watch lists. We're trying to see if they harbor secret desires to overturn Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity. Trump's reference to future radicalization confirms he's contemplating "vetting" to include digging into peoples' ideologies and motivations. Nothing in the process described in the PolitiFact piece gets into that.

Fourth, it makes total sense for Trump to have meant "vetting" to encompass more than just the checks performed today. He was responding to Clinton, who said that we would have to "begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in[.]" The obvious implication is that such "vetting" is not happening today.

Finally, by "no system," he meant "no effective system" or "no good system." It's common for people speaking extemporaneously to say the former when they mean the latter. Running checks on Syrians in U.S. databases isn't going to tell us much about what kind of people we're dealing with. Lots of very bad people won't be bad enough to show up on a foreign country's databases.

Sorry, not a reasonable interpretation. No single system can both vet current candidates and prevent the radicalization of progeny that may not yet even be born. No single system can even prevent the radicalization of existing progeny and simultaneously vet the parents. The very idea is simply absurd, ergo, not reasonable.

> Trump's reference to future radicalization confirms he's contemplating "vetting" to include digging into peoples' ideologies and motivations.

The fact that he stipulated radicalization of progeny as a separate clause requiring a second system does not support this charitable interpretation.

> Fourth, it makes total sense for Trump to have meant "vetting" to encompass more than just the checks performed today. He was responding to Clinton, who said that we would have to "begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in[.]" The obvious implication is that such "vetting" is not happening today.

This merely implies that they were both wrong in stating that no vetting exists. Agreeing with Clinton does not somehow entail Trump was correct.

> Finally, by "no system," he meant "no effective system" or "no good system." It's common for people speaking extemporaneously to say the former when they mean the latter.

So then you agree that what Trump said was literally false, even if some would like us to be more charitable in interpreting his words. If this were an isolated incident, that may even be a reasonable expectation.

But I can cite a plethora of evidence of Trump constantly making such literally false claims, with others executing ever more elaborate gymnastics to interpret him charitably. This past and continuing behaviour suggests your charitable interpretation does not reasonably reflect Trump's actual meaning.

Depends on what "prevent means." "Only you can prevent forest fires." Does that mean you can keep every forest fire from happening? Of course not. It means you can take measures directed at trying to reduce the number of forest fires. You can certainly take measures directed at trying to reduce radicalization (e.g. through ongoing contact).

> The fact that he stipulated radicalization of progeny as a separate clause requiring a second system does not support this charitable interpretation.

Grammatically, the function of preventing radicalization is ascribed to the "system" in the previous clause.

> This merely implies that they were both wrong in stating that no vetting exists. Agreeing with Clinton does not somehow entail Trump was correct.

Or it means that both are using the word "vetting" to mean something more than the process that exists now. That's a basic feature of human discussion: terms take on a meaning in context.

> So then you agree that what Trump said was literally false, even if some would like us to be more charitable in interpreting his words. If this were an isolated incident, that may even be a reasonable expectation.

You're the one who proposed the standard, which is literal falsity under any reasonable interpretation (which happens to be the criminal standard). In the context of an extemporaneous, spoken statement, "no good system" can be a reasonable interpretation of "no system." People regularly omit qualifiers when speaking. E.g. "nobody thinks that ketchup ice cream tastes good" or "everybody in the office hates the new guy."

> But I can cite a plethora of evidence of Trump constantly making such literally false claims, with others executing ever more elaborate gymnastics to interpret him charitably. This past and continuing behaviour suggests your charitable interpretation does not reasonably reflect Trump's actual meaning.

The purpose of this exercise is not to discern Trump's "actual meaning." (The legal standard for falsity of statements is objective, not subjective.) You can write a very good analysis of what Trump actually means and why you think he's wrong. But you'd call that "political analysis" not "fact checking." If you need to make assumptions and exclude charitable interpretations to falsify something, it's not a fact and the exercise you're engaged in cannot be called fact-checking.

My point did not depend upon the interpretation of "prevent", it depended on the absurdity of a single system covering both prevention and vetting. It's simply not logically possible. So if we're being charitable to Trump, we must grant him logical consistency no?

> Grammatically, the function of preventing radicalization is ascribed to the "system" in the previous clause.

Except this is clearly logically impossible, therefore there must be two systems as previously mentioned, therefore Trump's disjunction was either not referring to the same system, or he's so misinformed that we can't take anything he says to be true. Either way, there's no reason to interpret this more charitably.

> Or it means that both are using the word "vetting" to mean something more than the process that exists now. That's a basic feature of human discussion: terms take on a meaning in context.

So without further clarification, which is also required in basic human discussion, their statements are de facto false given the commonly understood meaning of the terms employed.

> You're the one who proposed the standard, which is literal falsity under any reasonable interpretation (which happens to be the criminal standard). In the context of an extemporaneous, spoken statement, "no good system" can be a reasonable interpretation of "no system." People regularly omit qualifiers when speaking. E.g. "nobody thinks that ketchup ice cream tastes good" or "everybody in the office hates the new guy."

Even if I were to grant that point, you now have to establish that "no good system" exists for Trump's statement to possibly be true. What expert witness will you cite to assert that no such "good vetting system" exists? Because no informed article I've read suggests that the existing vetting process is so deficient. In any case, this is quite clearly a factual question with a factual answer.

You still don't seem to understand anything he's been trying to teach you. You're still adding arbitrary qualifiers: "informed article", "expert witness". Whether an article is "informed" is wildly subjective, and whether a witness is an "expert" (which is orthogonal to the question of whether his testimony is reliable) is also wildly subjective.

You are holding onto your bias like a rock in a storm. What you don't realize is that the rock is not attached to the seafloor, and it's pulling you down.

Then a different person comes along at noon, and the temperature is now 76 degrees. The 2nd person then starts a social media campaign against the 1st -- and wins because they had pictures and more followers.

You have to understand that clunky little human minds can be easily swayed. The truth is absolute, but the human mind's comprehension of it is not.

In this context, the "dirty trick" is obvious to anyone who knows that coffee and bathwater change temps over time, and that the pool is warmer at noon. What about contexts in which specialized knowledge is necessary to fully understand what is going on? There is a reason why there is a 5th amendment.

Reality is logical and obeys the laws of physics. The social reality that exists across many people's minds is contradictory and treacherous. (If you are affluent enough and have never had extensive contact with the judicial system, it's hard to know this.)