In an eight-minute-plus segment on Newsmax on Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Senator John Fetterman said half a dozen times that he thought Vice President Kamala Harris would win the general election in Pennsylvania.
But elsewhere in the interview on the conservative news channel, Fetterman made a slip of the tongue when he used the word “he” instead of “she.”
And this 18-second clip, posted by a Republican National Committee account on X and then reposted by a right-wing social media strategist, has now been viewed more than a million times.
WE AGREE, FETTERMAN: “If you put Trump and Harris against each other… I think he will win Pennsylvania.” pic.twitter.com/OR4ImVXABA
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) 7 August 2024
“WE AGREE, FETTERMAN: ‘If you put Trump and Harris face to face… I think he will win Pennsylvania,'” RNC Research posted at 6:21 p.m. Wednesday.
Eleven minutes later, Chuck Callesto, who describes himself as a social media strategist, reposted the same video on X: “JUST IN: Fetterman makes bold prediction, says TRUMP will win Pennsylvania.”
Nowhere in any of the posts is the full original interview or a link to it provided. There is no context for Fetterman’s comment, which was notable for its dissonance.
Messages left with the RNC and Callesto were not immediately returned Thursday.
A spokesman for Fetterman declined to comment, pointing to the full video on YouTube, noting that the senator has repeatedly said Harris will win the state.
During the interview with Greta Van Susteren on Newsmax on Wednesday, Fetterman talked about the role Pennsylvania will play in the upcoming general election, as well as his belief that Erie is the indicator of the election outcome in the state.
He also said that whoever wins in Pennsylvania will become president.
About 3 minutes and 13 seconds into the interview, Fetterman made his first prediction about Harris.
“I fundamentally believe that Harris can win Pennsylvania, no matter who she chooses as her running mate,” Fetterman said.
He then continued, “I think if you put Trump and Harris against each other, and I think that’s really what it’s about, I think he’s going to win Pennsylvania.”
He continued: “Of course it will be close, but I always say it will be very close whether it’s Biden, Clinton or Vice President Harris, and I firmly believe she will prevail.”
As the interview continued, Fetterman explicitly stated four more times that Harris would win.
“It will be a close call, and I think Harris will win with her arguments and her performance,” he said. “In Pennsylvania, it will be a close call, and I am fundamentally convinced that Harris/Walz will prevail here.”
And he concluded: “Ultimately, I think the Harris/Walz message will prevail, and that is exactly what Pennsylvania is looking for. That is why I fundamentally believe Pennsylvania will elect the president, and that is why Harris will be our next president.”
But none of this can be seen in the 18-second video clip, which experts describe as a “cheap fake.”
This term, which was first coined by disinformation researchers in 2019, according to the nonprofit journalism organization PolitiFact, is a variation of the term deep fake.
A cheap fake is one in which a video or audio clip is deliberately edited or taken out of context in order to change its meaning, the experts said.
This is easy to do and can easily manipulate those who see or hear it, says Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor of information science at Syracuse University.
“What you saw in the clip of Fetterman – which was taken out of context and repackaged to say the opposite of what he had said – is nothing new,” she said.
Stromer-Galley was referring to an early version of the cheap fake that ran as a commercial during the 1988 Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign. In that ad, the Bush campaign used clips of Dukakis’ ride in a tank – part of his own campaign rally – and altered them to ridicule his attitude toward the American armed forces.
“The difference right now, however, is the social media metaverse we live in – anyone can take a 10-second video, take it out of context, repackage it and have it spread like wildfire through the stratosphere by a huge following,” Stromer-Galley said.
The fact that a coordinated group of people is spreading misinformation is a threat to democracy, she said.
“People need factually accurate information to make good decisions,” Stromer-Galley said. “There’s just so much of it. That’s really problematic.”
The social media platform X is a “breeding ground of factually incorrect information,” she said.
“It is worrying that so many people are increasingly getting their news from these ‘bite-sized’, unverified sources of information.”
To protect themselves from this misinformation, voters need to use a variety of news sources – not just the partisan echo chambers of social media, she continued.
They also need to do their own research and contact the original source of the information, said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact.
“If a narrative seems too surprising to be true, you should be suspicious,” Sanders said.
In this case, she said, that pattern fits a Democratic senator who shows so little confidence in the Democratic presidential candidate while the rest of the party seems enthusiastic.
“My first thought would be to find the interview and just watch it,” Sanders said. “Skip the tweet and do a Google search.”
When Sanders reviewed the tweet in question, she noticed that it was first posted by RNC Research, which says it is managed by TeamTrump and the RNC.
“People need to carefully check the source of suspicious videos,” she said.
PolitiFact published an article in June pointing out how frequently the Trump team and the RNC were known to spread cheap fabrications targeting President Joe Biden.
Stromer-Galley believes that more control is needed.
“We need stronger government enforcement to force the platforms to take responsibility,” she said.
There are no real ways to counteract the cheap counterfeits on the Internet, said Stromer-Galley.
“Fetterman has the power, at least to some extent, to counteract that narrative,” she said.
With 184,000 followers on X, he could post the entire video himself. But, Stromer-Galley continued, that would only allow him and the RNC Research account to talk past each other.
“We live in a society today where any embarrassing moment can be captured forever and taken out of context,” Sanders said. “People need to challenge their assumptions when they see short video clips like this. Period.”
Paula Reed Ward is a reporter for TribLive covering federal courts and the Allegheny County courts. She joined the Trib in 2019 after spending nearly 17 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. She is the author of “Death by Cyanide.” She can be reached at [email protected].
