From the desk of the most delusional person to ever occupy the Oval Office, Donald Trump wants you to know that what you saw, heard, and read about the sworn testimony Tuesday of his handpicked intelligence chiefs is actually not what you saw, heard, and read.
Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday that the media had "totally misquoted" the assessments of his top intelligence officials regarding ISIS, Iran, and North Korea. On Thursday, Trump met with some of those officials, including Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel, and later told reporters the intelligence officials claimed the media coverage of their testimony before the Senate earlier in the week was "fake news."
"They said that they were totally misquoted, and they were totally — it was taken out of context. I’d suggest that you call them," Trump said. "They said it was fake news.”
Naturally, Trump was trying to downplay the fact that during their sworn testimony, his intelligence chiefs had entirely bucked his own view that ISIS has been "defeated" and Iran is aggressively seeking to build nuclear missiles, while North Korea's nuclear program has waned.
Trump was so incensed by coverage of their testimony the following day that he rage-tweeted, "Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!" CNN later reported that Trump blew a gasket as he actually watched some of the testimony coverage, meaning he was fully aware of the public nature of their remarks.
But by Thursday, Trump was acting as if the testimony never happened in public—as if the directors’ assessments weren't memorialized for all to see, hear, and read for themselves. It's frightening, like a switch flipped from one day to the next, turning out the lights on the input Trump's addled brain found inconvenient while illuminating a whole new alternative reality.
Not to worry: We’re only talking about critical national security issues here, and narratives of such topics are apparently both fungible and inconsequential in Trumplandia.
