Trump’s Staff Literally Give Him Fake News To Read
The President of the United States is reading internet hoaxes handed to him from his senior staff.
Donald Trump regularly reads fake news and internet hoaxes, a new report reveals.
According to Politico, Trump’s deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland handed the president a fake news story claiming global temperatures were going down rather than up.
“Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it. The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life,” according to the Politico report.
The report goes on to note just how bad the situation has gotten with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus stepping in to prevent staff from putting any news stories on Trump’s desk our of fear that he will believe the false information and potentially tweet about it.
The episode is emblematic of Donald Trump’s own shortcomings as a leader. It’s impossible to imagine someone slipping an internet hoax onto the desk of previous presidents. However, Trump seems incapable of establishing a traditional White House organization structure, opting instead for a chaotic unstructured White House that resembles the Trump Organization.
Another example noted in the Politico piece cites the firing of former Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh after someone slipped “a printed copy of an article from GotNews.com, the website of Internet provocateur Charles C. Johnson, which accused deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh of being “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House.”
After reading the article Trump grew angry and began asking staff about Walsh.
Another section of the report illustrated just how bad the problem is. “When Trump bellows about this or that story, his aides often scramble in a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out who alerted the president to the piece in the first place given that he rarely browses the Internet on his own. Some in the White House describe getting angry calls from the president and then hustling over to Trump’s personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, to ferret who exactly had just paid a visit to the Oval Office and possibly set Trump off,” Politico noted.
This collateral waste of time that the White House is engaging in is a serious concern for the country.
