On Monday night, President Trump took time out of his busy schedule of watching cable news and golfing to rage-tweet about Stephen Colbert.
At 8:39 p.m. EST, Trump retweeted a tweet from @BlacksForTrump5, a troll account almost certainly not run by a black person, that read: “It would be a shame if this video gets 10,000 retweets, and expose how much @StephenAtHome and his audience love Trump.” The video claimed that CBS and Stephen Colbert, whose Twitter handle was tagged, deleted the footage of Trump’s Sept. 2015 Late Show interview from its official website and YouTube. Trump’s retweet was accompanied by the message: “So revealing!”
Of course this was all nonsense. Trump’s interview with Colbert is still streaming on the CBS website and on YouTube in its entirety.
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Colbert called out the nonsense on Twitter later that night, writing, “I don’t know why the president would take time on a National Day of Mourning to retweet something weird like this, but the original clips have always been online. 16 million views.” He then provided multiple links to the interview on YouTube.
During his Late Show monologue Monday night, Colbert slammed the president for his comments in the wake of the massacre at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh—that the heavily-armed gunman would have been prevented from taking the lives of eleven worshippers if there had “been an armed guard inside” the synagogue.
And if that weren’t enough, on Saturday night—mere hours after the tragedy in Pittsburgh—Trump went forward with a rally. Explaining why he was delivering his stand-up routine instead of postponing or canceling it out of respect for the dead, Trump decided to invoke 9/11.
“Dick Grasso, a friend of mine, great guy, he headed up the New York Stock Exchange on September 11th, and the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day,” Trump told the crowd. “He said, ‘And what they had to do to open it, you wouldn’t believe.’”
Guess what? It’s a lie. “That is an inspiring story… if any of it was true,” explained Colbert. “Because the New York Stock Exchange was closed until September 17th. So, Trump’s instinct when addressing a tragedy was to lie about another tragedy. I think lying about anything associated with 9/11 is a disqualifier for the presidency—or really, having any job.”
Then again, this isn’t the first—or even the tenth—time Trump has lied about the September 11th tragedy, from claiming to have lost hundreds of friends in the attacks, to boasting about personally cleaning up rubble, to alleging he saw a news report that showed “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Towers fell. Oh, and the only charitable donation Trump made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was to a Scientology-affiliated foundation: $1,000 to the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, an initiative that employed Scientology’s “Purification Rundown” detox method.
