For days now, the Left has been up in arms over Donald Trump’s tweet of a doctored video that makes Speaker Nancy Pelosi look drunk or feeble. Except that the video in question is a collection of actual clips, none of them manipulated. What’s more is that the internet is fairly teeming with videos of the speaker stammering, slurring her words, getting country names wrong, and more.
Some liberals have retaliated by reviving the claim that Trump is mentally unfit to remain in office, seemingly oblivious to the fact that such assertions are the verbal equivalent of the “fake” video that so rankles them.
On Sunday, the battle reached a new low when Time magazine columnist Ian Bremmer joined the fight by tweeting out this outrageous Trump quote:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Just one problem: Trump never said it. Although he did praise the North Korean dictator’s insult of the former vice president, whom he called “a low IQ individual,” Trump never said he thought Kim would make a better president than Biden.
So where did the quote come from? Bremmer invented it. He later admitted as much in a since-deleted correction, writing, “This is objectively a completely ludicrous quote. And yet kinda plausible.” (Apparently, Bremmer’s belief that it was something Trump might say was ground enough for publishing it.)
In the several hours before Bremmer deleted his tweet, conceding it was phony, the quote went viral. As Peter Hasson of the Daily Caller points out, CNN’s Ana Navarro weighed in:
So did Media Matters‘s deputy director of rapid response, Andrew Lawrence, who tweeted:
There are plenty more comments, all displaying the same level of shock and exasperation that someone as clueless or depraved or naïve as Donald Trump could still be president. Very few have had the cojones to admit that they were the one who was duped.
