The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser got walloped by Community Notes on Wednesday — and despite a direct challenge from the Trump campaign, has thus far declined to make any corrections.
Glasser wrote a response piece for The New Yorker after Tuesday’s ABC debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — the latter of whom got a series of fact-checking assists from moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis — and among other things, she suggested that Trump had gone off the rails when he claimed Harris was in favor of tax-payer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in detention.
Harris’s bet was that Trump would say a lot of crazy and unhinged stuff if she got him going. It was a safe bet. I’ve watched every Presidential debate for the past two decades, and I can’t think of anything that ranks higher in pure stupidity than Trump ranting and raving to a national audience about immigrants supposedly eating people’s cats and dogs. His line about how the Vice-President “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.
Glasser even highlighted the sentiment of that particular passage in her X post promoting the article: “Trump made history last night for sure. Who will ever forget him ranting on stage about immigrants eating people’s dogs? Or insisting that the Vice President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail’?”
But other X users quickly slapped Glasser with a Community Note, saying that according to an ACLU questionnaire — which Harris filled out in 2019 during her first failed bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination — she did, in fact, support exactly that.
“I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained,” the questionnaire read, and Harris marked “yes.”
Harris is also on video claiming that she herself was instrumental in changing the policy in California to ensure that trans-identifying inmates within the prison system “would have access to the medical care that they desired and need.”
Following the debate, after several pundits and media outlets suggested that Trump was crazy for suggesting Harris might support such a policy, that video and the 2019 ACLU questionnaire began to resurface on X — prompting at least TIME Magazine to issue a correction.
“The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatments for detained immigrants,” the correction read.
Still, even when pressed to do so by a Trump campaign official, The New Yorker opted to let Glasser’s piece ride.
Glasser, according to The Washington Free Beacon, informed the official that she was standing 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.” Her goal, she explained further, was simply to ask about “the political advisability of bringing up these things in a national debate.”
“Despite this back and forth I still have no idea what the heck the former president was talking about. Kind of like claiming she is a Marxist. Or saying she supports abortions of babies—after they are born,” Glasser continued. “Are you retracting those claims and correcting the record on them? Thanks.”
But Glasser was wrong on those claims as well: During the debate, Harris refused to answer whether she would ever support any restrictions on abortion. Her running mate, Governor Tim Walz (D-MN), recently signed legislation granting broader access to abortion, and stripped away language that required doctors to take lifesaving action in the event that a baby survived an attempted abortion.
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