The 2016 Presidential Election caused the media to create a false balance when reporting on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. They give Trump much more leeway and don’t call him out on the huge amounts of hypocritical vomit that spews continuously from his campaign.

Why can’t the media just tell the public what’s true and what’s not? It’s their job to equally report on both.

But what do we do when we have a candidate that is astonishingly unqualified? Someone who has been proven to be a meticulous tax cheater, dictator loving, pathological liar, attorney general disgracer, narcissistic, con artist. What do you do?

Well, you go and you look at the facts.

Sept. 26 kicked off the first presidential debate. While watching, I decided to fact check what both candidates were saying.

Trump said he never supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But he did. He claimed he told Howard Stern “very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows?” Well actually Donald, we do know what you said. You said “I guess so, yeah.”

Trump said Clinton and her campaign started the “birther” movement. There is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with the fraudulent claims that President Barack Obama was not an American citizen and thus ineligible to run for President.  

Trump said that stop-and-frisk didn’t racially profile individuals. It did. CNN said that roughly 90 percent of innocent African Americans were stopped by police in New York. He also said that by ending stop-and-frisk made the city more dangerous. It didn’t.  The amount of burglaries did not change, the amount of shootings did not change. He also said murder is up in New York City. It’s not. In fact, according to Politico, New York has the lowest amount of homicides since at least 1963. And furthermore, in Aug. of 2013 a New York city judge found the practice to be unconstitutional, according to Politico.

He claims he “did not say” global warming is a hoax. He did. The original source of this claim was a tweet Trump sent on Nov. 6, 2012, saying “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump said “you will learn more” from financial disclosure than from tax returns. You won’t. He has been under a routine audit by the Internal Revenue Service which he claims to be the reason for not releasing his tax returns. Yet, Clinton has been releasing hers since 2000. The New York Times reported he filed a $916 million loss in 1995, and could have gone 18 years without paying federal income taxes. Without full transparency, we know little about his financial situation which could quite possibly carry over into his presidency.

He said “nobody knows” the DNC hack was from the Russians. U.S. intelligence say they are pretty sure it was. According to Politico, some of the leaked emails show that DNC employees clearly favored presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary despite claims of neutrality, and the controversy forced the DNC chair to resign.

Trump said ISIS controls “a lot of” oil in Libya. They don’t. According to CNDC, ISIS has attacked oil fields in the North African country, but a number of experts who follow the terror group have pointed out that it does not have the ability to operate the handful of refineries that exist there. Militants claiming loyalty to ISIS were focused on disrupting Libya’s oil operations, rather than trying to run them.

He said the U.S. should have taken Libya’s oil. Yet, that violates the Geneva Convention, which are a set of treaties regarding humanitarian issues of civilians and combatants in wartime.

Trump claims to be a self-made man but it was a silver spoon that got him started. He claims to have started his brand with a “very small loan.” (Let me just add, a small loan of $1 million) Clinton called him out on it saying that he received about $14 million from his father. She’s right. The Wall Street Journal tracked down a 1985 casino-license disclosure that showed Trump’s father lent him $14 million.

He said Clinton has been fighting ISIS her entire adult life. Well let’s see… the woman’s 68-years-old, that would mean she has been fighting ISIS for 50 years. Actually, ISIS was founded in 1999.

Trump said he “didn’t say” women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men. But last October, 2015 Trump told a young woman, who asked about equal pay, “you’re gonna make the same if you do as good a job.” On Nov. 19, 2015 Trump went on to say “Once you get where everybody gets the same, I mean you’re into a socialistic society.”

He even denied saying that pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers. But as is so often the case, Trump had in fact said exactly that during a 2004 interview with NBC’s Dateline TV news magazine program.

That’s 12 different fact checks for Trump. Now don’t get me wrong, Clinton had her slip ups too.

She denied that she said the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was the “gold standard” of trade deals. But she did, according to Townhall, in a 2012 trip to Australia, and championed the agreement in other venues around the world.

According to Politifact, Trump has a 4 percent complete truth rating as opposed to Clinton’s 65 percent.

See, if the media portrayed both candidates equally and treated the Trump campaign like every other campaign prior, Trump would have been out of the race in the primaries.

It’s only a short time before Nov. 8. Both candidates may not be the most wonderful options but we have to choose the lesser of two evils; one who lies consistently or one who is overly qualified for the highest job anyone in the U.S. can have. At this point, our future depends on it.