Donald Trump is famous for referring to people he doesn’t like as “fake”. When journalists publish stories that he doesn’t like, he refers to their entire newspaper or broadcast station as “fake news”. When a judge rules that one of his executive orders is unconstitutional, he refers to that judge as a “fake judge”.
But, who’s really the fake here?
The journalists and judges that he’s attacked as “fake” are actually people will long and distinguished careers. They are recognized in their fields as very accomplished professionals, but what about Trump? Is Trump as accomplished and respectable as the people that he labels as “fake”?
No, not really.
In point of fact, Trump is the one that comes off as fake. He’s more fake than a used-car salesman that rolls back the odometer on a used car to try and inflate the selling price.
Let’s take a look at some of Donald Trump’s fakeness.
TRUMP’S FAKE PLAN TO DEFEAT ISIS: For years, Trump told the American people that he knew more about ISIS than America’s generals do, and that he had a secret and foolproof plan to defeat them “very, very quickly”. His was a great plan, and far superior to anything America’s generals could ever come up with. However, after Trump was inaugurated, it turned out that Trump actually knew FAR LESS about ISIS than America’s generals do, and he ordered America’s generals to come up with a plan to defeat ISIS!
TRUMP’S FAKE UNIVERSITY: Attorney General Eric Schneiderman brought a suit against Trump University for fraud. Trump “university” was never actually a university. It never met the qualifications to be called a university. The fraud started with the name of the organization. It really was a fraud from beginning to end. Schneiderman said Trump “bilked people out of millions of dollars. Thousands of people paid millions of dollars believing that he would tell them his real estate secrets. And we know from his own sworn testimony … that he didn’t write the curriculum – none of them were his secrets.”
Former Trump University workers described the university as “a facade, a total lie” and a “fraudulent scheme” that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money”.
Trump eventually paid $25 Million to settle the lawsuit against Trump University…or about HALF of the money that he stole from his victims.
TRUMP’S FAKE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION: The Trump Foundation is supposed to be a charity. That’s the way Donald Trump set up his foundation. However, Trump rarely donates money from the Trump foundation to charitable causes. And he never contributes any of his own money.
And in two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases he spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself.
Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law. Back when Attorney General Pam Bondi was looking into investigating fraud at Trump University, Trump wrote a $25,000 check to Pam Bondi in an attempt to convince her stop the investigation. He paid her with funds from the Trump Foundation. So, he paid Pam Bondi a bribe, with funds that were supposed to be donated to charitable causes. This is extraordinarily illegal.
FAKE SUPPORTERS: When Trump spoke at the CIA headquarters back in 2017, multiple people in the audience clapped and cheered enthusiastically. What nobody knew at the time, was that the first three rows of the audience were NOT employees of the CIA, but rather people invited by Trump to clap and cheer and make him appear to be far more popular at the CIA than he truly is.
And that wasn’t the first time that Trump has engineered applause. When he first announced his candidacy, he got wild cheers — from actors who had been PAID to applaud him (Trump then stiffed the company that hired them for four months). When he gave his first news conference as president, he filled the back of the room with aides to cheer for him, and jeer at the journalists he was attacking.
FAKE TRUMP FANS ON TWITTER: Anyone can amass an exorbitant number of Twitter followers. You don't even have to be famous. All you have to do is pay for them. For $400, you can buy for yourself over one million followers. Because Donald Trump is the president of the United States and the most famous person on the planet, one wouldn't think he would need to employ a bot to boost his Twitter following. Nevertheless, Trump did just that.
If you browse through Trump’s followers you will find an unusual number of tweet-less, picture-less accounts that joined the service in May 2017. If you're still curious, you can enter Trump's handle, @realDonaldTrump, into Twitter Audit, a service that assesses the authenticity of one's followers, and find that only 51 percent of Trump's are real.
FAKE PHONE CALLS: Back in 2017, Trump bragged about a phone call he had received from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful. However, Trump never got any such call. His childish, offensive and highly political speech to the boys at their national jamboree later prompted Boy Scouts President Randall Stephenson and Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh to apologize to members of the scouting community who were offended by Trump’s rhetoric.
Trump also bragged about a phone call that he claimed he had received from the president of Mexico. He claims that the Mexican president praised Trump for Trump’s tough and belligerent talk about keeping Mexicans from crossing the border into the United States. Once again, Trump was lying. The president of Mexico never called Trump. Trump was just making stuff up again.
Just last month, Trump spun a tale in front of reporters that he was personally asked by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to mediate the Kashmir conflict with Pakistan.
Less than an hour later, Trump got busted for lying. A spokesman for India’s prime minister flatly contradicted Trump’s lie and said that no one in the Indian government ever asked Trump to mediate anything.
Just this month, Trump claimed that “the African-American community” has been calling the White House nonstop, thanking Trump for attacking Congressman Elijah Cummings and trashing Baltimore. He says that black people are “happy as hell” with the way Trump has behaved.
There are no audio recordings of any of these phone calls where Trump has been thanked, and Trump cannot give us the name of a single black person who has spoken with him. Add that to the fact that national polls show that Trump’s approval ratings with the black community are around 6% and his disapproval ratings with the black community are around 84%, and that 80% of black voters say that Trump is racist, it’s pretty safe to say Trump was lying about the many, many phone calls Trump received, thanking him for trashing the city of Baltimore.
And in the years before he ran for president, Trump would make phone calls to people in the media, where he would pretend to be a media spokesman named John Miller (or sometimes John Barron), where he would act as a vigorous advocate for Donald Trump, heaping himself with huge amounts of praise, while pretending to be an impartial party.
So, when Donald Trump accuses somebody else of being “fake”, is this some sort of Freudian slip, because deep down he knows that HE is truly the fake one?