President Donald Trump was at it once more.
On Monday evening, Trump launched into certainly one of his periodic late-night social media posting sprees. As usual, his dozens of posts and reposts have been littered with debunked conspiracy theories and different wildly inaccurate claims – lots of them about previous presidential elections and his Democratic foes, notably together with former President Barack Obama.
Trump’s posting continued on Tuesday morning. So did his wrongness.
Here’s a quick fact-check breakdown of simply a number of the content material to which readers of his Truth Social feed have been handled between about 10pm on Monday and about 8am on Tuesday.
The president shared a pro-Trump commentator’s social media publish that featured a supposed assault on Obama from Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. But the “Kennedy” quote is totally imaginary.
In the faux quote, “Kennedy” demanded that Obama return $120 million that the previous president supposedly earned (however truly didn’t) in connection with his Obamacare well being care regulation. The fact-check web site Lead Stories reported in February that the faux quote “originated with a satire web publisher who baits conservatives into re-posting fake stories” and that the confusingly worded accusation about Obama that the publish put in Kennedy’s mouth – “He allocated money under his own laws using taxpayer-generated prestige” – has additionally been baselessly attributed to varied different public figures, from FBI Director Kash Patel to singers Vince Gill and Madonna.
Kennedy told the publication NOTUS after Trump’s publish: “Somebody told me there was something floating around on the internet about me accusing President Obama of stealing $120 million or something. I didn’t say that. I don’t know the basis of it.”
False conspiracy theories about Obama have lengthy been a staple of Trump’s reposts on social media. This posting spree featured a bunch extra.
Trump shared a publish – from an account utilizing the identify and picture of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. – that stated, “Barack Hussein Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election was a million times worse than anything Nixon did during Watergate. It is time to arrest the Renegade.” (“Renegade” is Obama’s Secret Service codename.)
But there isn’t any proof anyone wiretapped Trump Tower throughout the 2016 election, not to mention that Obama himself did so. In 2017, throughout the first Trump presidency, the Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no data to assist Trump’s declare earlier that 12 months of Trump Tower having been wiretapped in 2016.
During this posting spree, Trump additionally shared one other false conspiracy publish that included a hyperlink to an internet web page stuffed with lies in regards to the Obama administration. These included false claims that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had used her personal electronic mail server to promote top-secret data to international entities, that Obama had ordered a coverup, and that 9 of 13 New York cops attempting to show the reality “committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances.” For good measure, the web page added a lie that Obama had a “Birth Certificate Scandal” proving he was by no means eligible to be president.
In addition, Trump shared a video through which Tulsi Gabbard, now his director of nationwide intelligence, baselessly claimed in 2024 that Obama and Clinton, amongst others, made choices for former President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump shared one other publish that baselessly alleged Obama had “commissioned the Intelligence Community to falsify intelligence” and baselessly prompt he’s responsible of treason. And Trump shared a video through which a conservative commentator baselessly claimed Obama was a “Trojan horse for the Marxists” and has made a deliberate try “to destroy America from within.”
No Trump conspiracy blitz could be full with out copious mendacity in regards to the 2020 presidential election that he misplaced.
Among different falsehood-filled posts this time, Trump shared one from his former nationwide safety adviser Michael Flynn through which Flynn falsely claimed “The 2020 Election was Stolen.” (Trump misplaced truthful and sq. to Biden.) Trump shared a publish that – citing a shoddy information report from right-wing community One America News – falsely claimed Dominion voting technology had “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. INCLUDING OVER 1 MILLION PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN.” (None of this occurred.) And he shared a publish that based mostly its false declare of a “stolen 2020 election” on pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s false claims about Dominion and different entities.
In a post criticizing a New York Times article about how the price of his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool mission is greater than seven instances larger than the “about $1.8 million” determine he cited final week, Trump baselessly claimed that the Times is shortly shedding subscribers: “The Failing New York Times, which is one of the worst newspapers anywhere in the World, and is losing subscribers on an hourly basis, is now at it again.”
Trump is entitled to his opinion on the Times’ high quality, but it surely’s a proven fact that the Times has been steadily gaining subscribers on a web foundation, not shedding them, although it definitely has some cancelations. The paper reported final week: “The Times has added an average of 330,000 total subscribers a quarter, including print, since the start of last year” and “now has 13.1 million subscribers…after adding about 310,000 digital-only subscribers in the first quarter of the year.”
We don’t have entry to hour-by-hour figures, however there’s no obtainable proof for Trump’s suggestion that the paper is quickly shedding prospects.