Early this morning, President Trump took to Twitter to blast “FAKE NEWS media” reports about Russian ties to administration and campaign officials as made-up and reliant on imaginary sources. But at the same time, he said that the leaks concerning the Russian connections contain real information and come from government officials, vowing that the leakers—who he also said are not real—will be “caught.”
Trump, who just a few months ago told campaign rallies, “I love WikiLeaks!,” is now deriding leaks as “illegal” and accusing the media of promoting “conspiracy theories,” comparing the situation to Nazi Germany.
The irony of Trump, a pathological liar who has pushed dozens of conspiracy theories, criticizing journalists as conspiracy theorists making up fake sources (sources whom he simultaneously insists are real government officials who are leaking real information) is hard to overstate.
For example, Trump, who has said that if journalists “don’t name [their] sources, the sources don’t exist,” once claimed that an “extremely credible source” gave him information showing that President Obama was likely not born in the U.S.:
An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama‘s birth certificate is a fraud.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012
An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office & told me that @BarackObama applied to Occidental as a foreign student–think about it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012
There’s also the time when Trump continued to cite a Fox News story about looming indictments stemming from the FBI’s inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails even after the network retracted its report and also pushed a bogus claim linking Clinton’s emails to the execution of an Iranian scientist with the qualification that “many people are saying that her “hacked emails” were to blame for the scientist’s death.
When not citing “extremely credible” anonymous sources or “many people,” Trump insists that he is just asking the question or that he only knows “what’s on the internet.”
With a president who trusts Alex Jones’ InfoWars, WorldNetDaily and the National Enquirer for his many conspiracy theories, it is entirely predictable to now see Trump wrongly accuse the media of doing the very thing he consistently does.
